Emy & Her Krishna

CANDLES IN THE SUN (196 pp.)--Lady Emily Lutyens--Lippincott ($3.95).

Women as a rule make devoted church workers, but they should not be entrusted with inventing their own churches. No exception is Lady Emily Lutyens, who was one of the muddled Marthas of the Theosophical Society, a cult that hoped to mix the occult traditions of Buddhism. Christianity, and the other great religions, and actually succeeded only in unloosing a great Ganges tidal bore of flumduddery and jiggerypook on the superstitious suburbs of the West. Author Lutyens' first book, A Blessed Girl (1954), evoked a pleasant nostalgia for a childhood spent as a member of an aristocratic family of great talent. This book is an equally engaging story evoking years spent in an odd spiritual adventure.

Lady Emily (Emy to her family) was a bright-eyed matron married to a distinguished architect (designer of New Delhi, London's Cenotaph and Liverpool Cathedral). She belonged to a famed English family: grandfather was Statesman-Novelist Bulwer-Lytton (Harold, Last of the Saxon Kings, Rienzi, The Last Days of Pompeii), and her father, first Earl of Lytton, was Viceroy of India (1876-80). There came a day in 1910 when Emy, then 36, no longer knew what to do with herself. Every male reader with an underemployed female relative will feel his heart sink at the news that "I read various works on sociology . . . This led to my joining an organization called the Moral Education League . . . and it also led to my becoming a visitor to [a] hospital for the treatment of venereal disease. I read to the patients and sang to them." Emy's distinguished husband was impatient with all this: "I wanted mental stimulus whereas he wanted fun and relaxation."

Emy finally found her stimulus in Theosophy. In the cult's early exciting days its devotees expected that a great spirit was about to be reincarnated. Mrs. Annie Besant--Socialist, organizer of the Theosophical Society, and pal of Bernard Shaw --undertook to conjure up the great spirit. He was an Indian named Krishnamurti. When Emy met him, it was a case of love at first sight--and of mistaken identity. She can write today: "I who am not in the least clairvoyant could see the face of the Lord through the face of Krishna."

The World Mother. Krishnamurti, then 14, seems to have been merely an amiable, moderately well-behaved schoolboy of the Indian middle class. He was a little slow in school, and for his slowness he was often caned, but he had a wonderful "aura"--the multicolored emanation that Theosophists saw gleaming about each other. Krishnamurti displayed big black eyes and a set of irrefutable (because unstatable) notions of a vaguely ethical tinge; e.g., "Truth being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized." He lived on vegetables, and on the front page, and the wonder is that he managed to preserve a sort of dignity amid the spiritual circus that Theosophists created about him.

By the time Emy ran away from home to join that circus, 1925, the Theosophy movement was sprouting in India and points West. Annie Besant, with "eyes like a tiger," recognized Emy's spiritual progress and devotion to someone called "World Mother"; Annie embraced Emy with the greeting, "Welcome, Brother" (a term Mrs. Besant regarded as a special accolade). Unlike other brothers, Emy never claimed to have visions or to be clairvoyant or to be in touch with Master Koot Hoomi, who was said to live on the side of a ravine in Tibet. She seems to have been happy, although her two daughters, whom she took with her all over the world--the Theosophists had meetings all the time--got bored and ran away to home life.

Triumphant Innocence. It is distressing that among prophetic souls, faction should flourish. After much infighting, things began to fall apart during a trip to Australia by Emy and Krishna. Later, homeward bound for India, Krishna found the boat "full of Australians, the scorning variety, who laughed at him to his face." In 1929 he accepted the Australian opinion, sensibly dissolved the "order" formed about him and decamped to private life.

In this book Emy emerges as a high-spirited woman with an innocence that triumphs over every absurdity. Not the least pleasant thing about her story is that the reader never quite knows--as in a novel--just how much the main character knows of what is really going on. From her home in London she still writes to Krishna (who moves between India, California, and other spiritual strongholds), but is reconciled to his repudiation of the quasi-divine role assigned to him by the Theosophists. Gravely she ends her book with the assertion that the once-weedy youth is "the perfect flower of humanity." At 83 Emy is a stubborn woman who, out of honesty, naivete and with an innocent eye, has inadvertently given a pleasant study of the religious temperament at work in an unworthy cause.

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