Published in 1964, this is by Christopher Isherwood (1904-86). My previous experience of this author consisted solely of Goodbye to Berlin, which I read in the early eighties (almost certainly while I was in Germany), and really liked.

Then he made an appearance, with W.H. Auden, in Colm Toibin's The Magician. I hated the flippant way (per Toibin, at least) he and Auden behaved towards the aging Thomas Mann...

Otherwise, nada.

It's a circadian novel (in which the action is set over the course of a single day), and I was inspired to read it by the list of such novels that Henry Eliot offered in celebration of Bloomsday last year. Isherwood's day in question is at the end of November, 1962 (we're told that it's a month since Khrushchev withdrew missiles from Cuba). So I decided to read it (it's quite short) at the end of November...

And, indeed, that was when it was started... But it wasn't finished until this week... And no, it wasn't the sort of slow reading by which you savour the text paragraph by paragraph. Rather, it was a reading experience marked by yawning hiatuses. So when I did resume in earnest the other week, I had to re-read the part I'd already covered. The least I could do, I felt.

The delay had nothing to do with the quality of the book. Andrew O'Hagan describes A Single Man as Isherwood's "best novel"; Robert McCrum includes it in his top 100; Isherwood himself said it was his favourite -- "the only book of mine where I did more or less what I wanted to do. It didn’t get out of control."

Partly, the delay was due to our ridiculously busy schedule over the last few months. But another obstacle presented itself in the shape of the format. I started out with an online version of the French translation (the only version I could access for free at that point). Unfortunately, not only did we get busy, but our internet access was iffy for a while. By that time, far from keeping in step with the novel's one-day progression, my reading had already stretched out over 2.5 months... And then I saw that O'Hagan was describing Isherwood as "the best prose writer in England"... Surely better to be reading this in English, then...?


For me, this is not a cover that accurately reflects the content...

Anyway, having arrived in our new home, we joined Douglas Library. Which had a copy of A Single Man. Allegedly available. But nobody could find it... In the meantime, I found an English version online, and covered a bit more text that way. Then, the next time I was in the Library, there was a little message for me, saying the book had been unearthed, and put aside for me. How lovely... How kind of someone to remember, and make contact. So, for the last third of the text, I switched to the "real" copy...

I note all this, because I don't want my blog to make it seem as though reading happens automatically, effortlessly, seamlessly. It often doesn't. And I hate it when book consumption gets hijacked by life, especially when the book in question is a quality item.

***

Isherwood does certain things brilliantly:

1. Aging...

George, our protagonist (British, living in California, teaching English literature at San Tomas State College), is 58. And he's feeling his years. Here's the opening:

"Waking up begins with saying am and now... But now isn’t simply now. Now is also a cold reminder; one whole day later than yesterday, one year later than last year. Every now is labelled with its date, rendering all past nows obsolete, until -- later or sooner -- perhaps -- no, not perhaps -- quite certainly: It will come."

For sure, by the time we reach our late fifties, we're seeing the damage we've done, spotting the signs of decay. George is tired. But there's no question of stopping, he thinks. We carry on. Not through heroism, but through failure to see any other solution.

Here the text reads as though he's disembodied (we'll come to why in a minute). He (the man) is looking at it (the body):

"Staring and staring into the mirror, it sees many faces within its face -- the face of the child, the boy, the young man, the not-so-young man -- all present still, preserved like fossils on superimposed layers, and, like fossils, dead. Their message to this live dying creature is: Look at us -- we have died -- what is there to be afraid of? It answers them: But that happened so gradually, so easily. I’m afraid of being rushed."

At the end of the book, George dies. It's all very sobering.


Christopher Isherwood

2. Not being great with change (or America)...

George is a bit of a conservative. He resents that his Californian neighbourhood is no longer the refuge of "defiantly bohemian" types who longed to escape the city, but has attracted former combatants, now seeking "better breeding-grounds" (in which aim they're obviously successful, producing "litter after litter after litter"). The kids are horrible, Benny Strunk (great name) in particular.

The prospect of Christmas in this environment gives George "a chill of desperation". He wonders about taking a plane to Mexico City, and getting drunk for a week. "You won't, and you never will, a voice says, coldly bored with him." (And here, by the way, is an example of where you miss things in the French translation: "But no, you'll never do it, a cold voice tells him." Not as good... And while we're on the subject, I'll point out one more example, where George -- revoltingly -- gets up prematurely from the toilet to answer the phone. "Nastily unwiped" and "increasing awareness of stickiness" in the original are just not matched by the more anodyne "without having wiped himself" and "more and more aware of his uncleanness". Similarly, a "lizard-quick" glance conveys much more than a "lightning-quick" one...)

But that's a digression. The point here is that the tone is perfect. You tut-tut a bit at George's snobbery, while retaining more than a sneaking sympathy...

Same with the Englishman's deprecating view of these Americans, whom he watches as they get drunk at neighbourhood barbecues: "Their business problems are forgotten, now. And they are proud and glad. For even the least among them is a co-owner of the American utopia, the kingdom of the good life upon earth -- crudely aped by the Russians, hated by the Chinese -- who are none the less ready to purge and starve themselves for generations, in the hopeless hope of inheriting it." And yet, George detects, in his neighbours' complacency, an emptiness and a fear. They're afraid of things that don't fit into the neat demarcations of respectability. "Among many other kinds of monster, George says, they are afraid of little me."

Which brings us to...

3. Being gay in the early 60s

He doesn't make a parade of it, but George is not straight. There's a certain level of tolerance in the community, but it's superficial and condescending. He imagines, for example, how Mrs Strunk sees him: As "a misfit, debarred forever from the best things of life, to be pitied, not blamed".

George has just lost his younger partner, Jim. But he hasn't told anyone in the neighbourhood. For them, Jim just moved away... So the book is dissecting not only the terrible grief we feel when we've lost the person closest to us, but also the additional layers of complication that have to be dealt with when that relationship is not socially recognized and validated.


A much better cover -- except surely this is Jim, not George...?



4. Grieving

Isherwood is totally convincing about the mood swings experienced by the grief-stricken. This is where the dissociation comes from. Often we find one bit of George surveying another bit of George. During the drive to work, for example, he can dissociate the bit that drives and the bit that's driven. But there's a rage within his core that may be the product of grief -- or may be residual. Skyscrapers usurping the view; newspaper editors campaigning against "sex deviates"; senators wanting to attack Cuba -- he imagines the kind of punishment he'd like to inflict on them all. "All are, in the last analysis, responsible for Jim’s death; their words, their thoughts, their whole way of life willed it, even though they never knew he existed. But, when George gets in as deep as this, Jim hardly matters any more. Jim is nothing, now, but an excuse for hating three quarters of the population of America... But does George really hate all these people? Aren’t they themselves merely an excuse for hating? What is George’s hate, then? A stimulant -- nothing more; though very bad for him, no doubt. Rage, resentment, spleen; of such is the vitality of middle age."

Throughout the day, he's up and down. The gym lifts him; the supermarket brings him down. Fearful of eating at home (miserable) and fearful of falling into a pattern of always eating out (is that the beginning of a spiral "to despair and sleeping-pills and the inevitable final overdose"), he accepts a dinner invitation from his old friend Charlotte (aka Charley). And then regrets that, too...

5. Teaching

George's resistance to change comes to the fore in his work environment. And again, I'm thinking, yes, I would want to be more philosophical, more resilient, less scathing -- but actually admitting (with some embarrassment) that I recognize a lot of these feelings...

Noisy construction work, for example. The college is still being built. The racket is such that professors strugge to make themselves heard. "When the factory is fully operational, it will be able to process twenty thousand graduates. But, in less than ten years, it will have to cope with forty or fifty thousand. So then everything will be torn down again and built up twice as tall." And the parking problem... Already the carparks are half as big as the campus itself.

And, in the early 1960s already, computerization is upon us, in the shape of "an oblong card slotted and slitted and ciphered by an IBM machine, expressing some poor bastard of a student’s academic identity". If George, rather than sign it, were to tear it up, the student would no longer exist in the eyes of the university... "George signs the card, holding it steady with two fingertips. He dislikes even to touch these things, for they are the runes of an idiotic but nevertheless potent and evil magic; the magic of the think-machine gods, whose cult has one dogma, we cannot make a mistake. Their magic consists in this, that whenever they do make a mistake, which is quite often, it is perpetuated and thereby becomes a non-mistake... Carrying the card by its extreme corner, George brings it over to one of the secretaries, who will see that it gets back to Personnel. The secretary has a nail-file on her desk. George picks it up, saying, 'Let’s see if that old robot’ll know the difference' and pretends to be about to punch another slit in the card. The girl laughs, but only after a split-second look of sheer terror; and the laugh itself is forced. George has uttered blasphemy."


A more famous Californian bastion of education: UC Berkeley, 2001

We see, too, the beginnings of the commodification of higher education. George wonders what the students think they're doing here: "Well, there is the official answer; preparing themselves for life which means a job and security in which to raise children to prepare themselves for life which means a job and security in which." But he feels he ought to warn them: "Oh God, what will become of them all? What chance have they? Ought I to yell out to them, right now, here, that it’s hopeless?... When George eavesdrops on their conversation, it is nearly always about what they have failed to do, what they fear the professor will make them do, what they have risked not doing and gotten away with."

We can already see the way the education market has affected the student-lecturer relationship. George quickly rows back from a too honest comment ("I must say, I don’t see how anyone can pretend to be interested in a novel when he doesn’t even stop to ask himself what its title means"), and does his best to relax the atmosphere again, and make them laugh.

George is quick to note academic snobbery as well. His colleague, Dr Gottlieb, is overwhelmed to receive a book (about one Francis Quarles) written by a professor at OXFORD... "Gottlieb probably knows every bit as much about Quarles as the don does. But Oxford, towering up in all its majesty behind this don, its child, utterly overawes poor little Gottlieb, who was born in one of the wrong parts of Chicago."

Of course, these reactions are emerging through a patina of grief. But we suspect that much of this cynicism is basic-George rather than bereaved-George. And although -- like him -- we spot the talent in every cohort, we wonder how well the higher education system is serving our young people...

6. Feeling history

It's the early 60s. Cuba has simmered down, but talk of nuclear weapons is everywhere. A colleague talks about an article he's read about surviving a nuclear holocaust. If you're going to build a shelter consult three entrepreneurs, so that no-one knows what you're having built. If people think you've got the best shelter, they'll besiege you. Best to buy a submachine gun. It's no time for being sentimental. (Which sounds like Parable of the Sower.) George laughs, but he's distressed by this black humour: "In all those old crises of the twenties, the thirties, the war -- each one of them has left its traces upon George, like an illness -- what was terrible was the fear of annihilation. Now we have with us a far more terrible fear, the fear of survival. Survival into a Rubble Age, in which it will be quite natural for Mr Strunk to gun down Grant and his wife and three children, because Grant has neglected to lay in sufficient stores of food and they are starving and may therefore possibly become dangerous and this is no time for sentiment."


California, 2001. Further north than George's place, though

7. Dealing with Charley

Charley (British) is a bit of a character. Envied by her sister for being a GI bride, then deserted by the GI husband, and eventually abandoned by her son, Fred, she is prone to weepy crises, but has "the survivor's typical battered doggedness".

Her discussion with George about returning to England is fascinating. They both have romantic fantasies about the place (George and Jim had toyed with the idea of taking on a pub). And Charley has reached that point some of us reach: No-one needs her in America, she declares (George declines the opportunity to say that he does); there's no-one she need feel guilty at leaving behind. "At least when I'm there," she says, "I shall know WHERE I AM." But then she starts to think about the effort of moving, and remembers that Jim had told her that she and George should look out for each other: "I believe he said, TAKE CARE, because he KNEW --"

8. Dealing with Kenny

Kenny Potter is one of George's students. He's a slightly sinister meld of the pushy, the insinuating, the teasing, the obsequious, and the stalkerish. He totally knows how to flatter an aging man (George "can’t resist slipping into the role Kenny so temptingly offers him"). And you're constantly wanting to warn George away.

We witness a conversation on campus. And then at The Starboard Bar, to which watering-hole George diverts after already getting well drunk with Charley -- there, again, and not coincidentally -- is Kenny.

They both end up really drunk. And we're made privy to another of these little internal dialogues: "(A voice inside George says, You could invite him to stay the night at your place. Tell him you’ll drive him back in the morning. What in hell do you think I am? George asks it. It was merely a suggestion, says the voice.)"

Kenny invites George to go swimming. Which they do. Naked. George becomes over-ambitious in the water, and is utterly overcome by a big wave. Kenny drags him out. For a short while, it's a "Nanny-relationship", as Kenny towels him down. They head for George's place. "As they start up the beach again, Kenny puts his arm around George’s shoulder. ‘You know something, Sir? They ought not to let you out on your own, ever. You’re liable to get into real trouble.’"

George senses Kenny's sexual curiosity, but also his reticence -- his inability to move on from flirtation to exploration.

But nothing "happens", because the professor passes out. He wakes up in bed, having been put into his pyjamas by Kenny, who has left a characteristically nannyish, slightly condescending note. George is philosophical: "Little teaser, his mind says, but without the least resentment. Just as well he didn’t stay."



9. Dealing with death

In an interview given in 1974, Isherwood comments: "I really admire the sort of person that George is: It isn’t me at all. Here is somebody who really has nothing to support him except a kind of gradually waning animal vitality, and yet he fights, like a badger, and goes on demanding, fighting for happiness. That attitude I think rather magnificent. If I were in George’s place, I would think about killing myself because I’m less than George. George is heroic."

And he is. Despite that very mixed day, he's still fighting. He found Jim here. He believes he will find another Jim. "Why does George believe he will find him? He only knows that he must find him. He believes he will because he must. But George is getting old. Won’t it very soon be too late? Never use those words to George. He won’t listen. He daren’t listen. Damn the Future. Let Kenny and the kids have it. Let Charley keep the Past. George clings only to Now. It is Now that he must find another Jim. Now that he must love. Now that he must live --"

But George doesn't live. He dies in his sleep as the result of a heart attack. As we watch, as it were. The tone is detached, clinical: "Had this blockage not been absolute, had the occlusion occurred in one of the smaller branches of the artery, the skeleton crew could have dealt with it; they are capable of engineering miracles. Given time, they could have rigged up bypasses, channelled out new collateral communications, sealed off the damaged area with a scar. But there is no time at all. They die without warning at their posts... Then, one by one, the lights go out and there is total blackness."


Isherwood and his much younger partner, Don Bachardy, immortalized by David Hockney in 1968. McCrum notes that Bachardy attributed the spark for A Single Man to Isherwood's "imagining what it would be like if we split up because... I was being very difficult and very tiresome"

***

This is tremendously good writing. Compact, and poignant, and wonderfully observed observant. The thing that jars, though, is the unmistakeable misogynistic edge that George takes no trouble to conceal.

The women characters are all somehow flaky. And he's very catty about a girl with hair on her legs (heavens, how awful...), or even about poor Charley, who doesn't "make up" her toenails. That's relatively minor, but then he's truly, unforgivably horrible about Doris, Jim's sometime love interest, now dying in hospital.

It's not just George, either. His attitudes apparently reflect Isherwood's own...

This blogger agrees that it's an attitude that's "deeply unpalatable", but recognizes the realism: "Gay men of George’s (and Isherwood’s) generation were thwarted and angry at heterosexuals for enjoying the social approval they were denied, and often women became targets for that anger because they were lower down the food chain and easier to abuse."

Hadassah Grace, on the other hand, deeply resents the way "older gay men hijacked a movement that should have represented people of all genders and sexualities... without examining the deep seated hatred for women that the patriarchy instills in them".

What George himself says about minorities is quite illuminating here: "A minority has its own kind of aggression. It absolutely dares the majority to attack it. It hates the majority -- not without a cause, I grant you. It even hates the other minorities -- because all minorities are in competition; each one proclaims that its sufferings are the worst and its wrongs are the blackest. And the more they all hate, and the more they’re all persecuted, the nastier they become! Do you think it makes people nasty to be loved? You know it doesn't! Then why should it make them nice to be loathed? While you’re being persecuted, you hate what's happening to you, you hate the people who are making it happen; you’re in a world of hate."

As so often when you look at stories depicting gay characters, you just wish society hadn't made life so difficult for them for so long.