A Single Man

Grief doesn’t disappear, it only dulls. And in its persistent pull, we learn not to crush it but to hold it, transform it, cope with it in a cascading myriad of ways. Although it doesn’t always work we soon learn to live with it a little better each time it reappears as it captures us in its rough, clammy arms. Isherwood communicates a moving understanding of loss in A Single Man. Emptiness though subdued is very much felt in the novel where the monotony of the daily creeps on the life of someone who wakes up each day faced by his lover's eventual mortality. As memories enhance the aftermath of death and enduring through the comfort of books, the forgetfulness brought by a mind occupied by work doesn't seem to fill the void for the show more sake of filling it, there is an utter need to connect if only to make loneliness a bit bearable. Not only to connect again with the departed through objects they used to touch and people they used to know (even if this person was someone they cheated you on with) but to also pour one's self to someone new. But a kind of restraint traps because of how homosexuality can make the chance to completely mourn and share its agony difficult. Whilst the tenderness and affection that lingers from the space left by someone is heartbreakingly embraced by the prose of A Single Man, I find it dated; its depiction of female characters questionable. Rare times like this, I would be brave enough to say the film is better than the book which also includes this line in the script: "You know the only thing that has made the whole thing worthwhile has been those few times that I was able to truly connect with another person." show less

“What’s so phony nowadays is all this familiarity. Pretending there isn’t any difference between people —well, like you were saying about minorities, this morning. If you and I are no different, what do we have to give each other? How can we ever be friends?”

Set just after the Cuban missile crisis the book is about the final day in the life of George, an English professor of literature working in California. George is living alone after the recent death of his lover Jim in a car crash. He is lonely and his only company is literature (“These books have not made George nobler or better or more truly wise. It’s just that he likes listening to their voices, the one or the other, according to his mood”). He feels resentment show more towards a society that considers him, a gay man, to be a “monster”.

To those who believe that “Jim is the substitute I found for a real son, a real kid brother, a real husband, a real wife,” he says, “Jim wasn’t a substitute for anything. And there is no substitute for Jim.”

George at home is barely functioning but whilst teaching he seems to really come alive as he tries to share both his knowledge and passion for literature. However, he also challenges his students to question the social orthodoxies of the time (“a minority has its own kind of aggression. It absolutely dares the majority to attack it”).

As the day progresses,in an attempt to stave off his loneliness George visits an old English friend, similarly alone, going to the bar where he met Jim for the first time, and spending the night with one of his students.

George is up-lifted when he realises that he is in the minority 'the living' but there is a deeply felt pain running through George’s internal monologue and only when drunk does he truly open himself up to another person. “What I know is what I am.”

The novel has the big obsessions of its time in nuclear war and sexual revolution as well as more localised things like campus politics. But there is also a study of the minuscule as the book opens and ends with a pretty vivid description of the body's own functions of just waking up and living.

The prose is tight (my copy only runs to 142 pages) and well written giving a real insight into the meaning of loneliness. show less

In the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis and during the ongoing nuclear arms race, Isherwood wrote this exploration of death and loss. Like 9/11, the crisis of 1962 demarcated an old world from a new and frightening one. The complacency of the '50s in the U.S. was suddenly lost forever and replaced with the anxious realization of the fragility and transience of life itself. It's in this context that Isherwood's satire of California dreamin' finds its mark.

It's a complex book, rich with allusions. George navigates his day obsessed with death, thinking constantly of his dead partner, Jim, and lecturing his class about Tithonus, the Greek figure who was immortal but not ageless, and about Aldous Huxley's novel "After Many a Summer".

The show more reference to Huxley's novel is not casual, for "A Single Man" owes so much to it as to be in dialogue with it. "After Many a Summer" also exists at the border between two eras, 1939 definitively ending a fragile peace and beginning six years of horrific destruction. Its subject is death, and Huxley provides context for a contemplation that millions of people would soon be forced into.

Tennyson's poem "Tithonus" is a companion to his similar poem "Ulysses", the opening lines of which describe a person not unlike George. The patient, faithful Charlotte sufficiently resembles Penelope, while George's students – with the exception of Kenneth – neither appreciate nor understand him. Kenneth, by the end of the novel, stands in nicely for Telemachus, Odysseus' son.

From Tennyson's "Ulysses", it is a short walk to Joyce's "Ulysses", the formal model for Isherwood's book. "A Single Man" occupies a single day as we follow George through his mundane schedule, revealing to us George's world along the way. The Socratic dialogue near the end of the novel explicitly imitates Joyce. Kenny's intimate visit is an exact parallel to the meeting of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom at the end of Bloom's long day, the transition from one generation to the next. Is Isherwood making an homage to Joyce? or, like Virginia Woolf in "Mrs Dalloway", is he demonstrating that you don't need 750 pages of verbal fireworks to evoke a whole life through the events of a single day? show less

What a delight this book is! What an unexpected discovery of a new author from the time and place well explored by this reader! How modern it appears despite being set in the 1950s!
The opening chapter alone justifies picking up this book - and once you do pick it up you cannot put it down until an equally brilliant closing chapter is finished.
In the space between these stellar brackets we follow a lonely man throughout his day. We learn of his disappointments and his pleasures. We look at the sprawling mess of L.A. through his critical eyes. We share in some of his laughs. He laughs at the world around him but he mostly laughs at himself and it is this self-directed irony that carries the book beautifully from the early morning and to show more the end of the night. show less

A Single Man, which follows one day in the life of a gay professor in 1960s California who's grieving the death of his -- well, partner, probably, though there isn't a term given for their exact relationship. It's beautifully written; I hadn't read Isherwood before, but the prose here flows so easily, eloquent without ever pausing to show off. Not a zippy read, because it takes its time when it needs to, but a quick one. I only didn't read this in one sitting because I kept getting interrupted every time I sat down.

It's short, but it packs a lot into 200 or so pages. It's about George, grieving, of course, but also about George having to grieve while living forcibly in the closet in most parts of his life, and about George having to show more navigate being out of the closet in a few parts of his life (and to differing degrees), and about George's life as a part of a minority who many people are prejudiced against, and about George being treated as a foreign being and George purposefully making himself remain foreign, and about George's life as someone who is prejudiced against others (and quite nastily, too), and it's about George as a person and George as this dehumanized sack of flesh and bones.

You feel for George as he struggles to get on without Jim, but he has moments where he is racist and profoundly misogynist, and also he can be obnoxious, rude, lonely, awkward, petty, brokenhearted, and self-righteous. Overall, I really enjoyed following him through the novel. For the most part, the narrative isn't interested in pat, easy answers, and I'm sure that when I inevitably pick it up for a reread, I'll get plenty out of it that I missed this time around. I'm glad I finally got to it. show less

Glorious. Published in 1964 and far superior to most things I have read published since. Rich and creative in so many ways. Important messages about human dignity, difference and community. And, nearly 60 years later, also politically relevant in so many ways - especially in its critiques of liberalism:

Here is my brother's liberal voice about my sexual orientation :
“Nothing here that is wilfully vicious. All is due to heredity, early environment (shame on those possessive mothers, those sex-segregated British schools!), arrested development at puberty, and/or glands. Here we have a misfit, debarred forever from the best things of life, to be pitied, not blamed.”

Here is my sister's liberal voice on the same:
“So let us be show more understanding, shall we, and remember that, after all, there were the Greeks (though that was a bit different, because they were pagans rather than neurotics). Let us even go so far as to say that this kind of relationship can sometimes be almost beautiful - particularly if one of the parties is already dead; or, better yet, both. How dearly Mrs. Strunk would enjoy being sad about Jim."

Here is my voice, trying to reason and explain with an 'ignorant'-liberal disguise for what is really only a choice to enjoy the pleasure keeping others below:
“…but your book is wrong, Mrs. Strunk, says George, when it tells you that Jim is the substitute I found for a real son, a real kid brother, a real husband, a real wife. Jim wasn’t a substitute for anything. And there is no substitute for Jim, if you’ll forgive me saying so, anywhere.”

Here is a progressive argument against the liberal politics of civility and for the right of the oppressed to express anger:
“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. Why, you wouldn’t recognise love if you met it!”

Here is Bernie Sanders' voice calling for a multi-racial working class coalition:
“Mexicans live here, so there are lots of flowers. Negroes live here, so it is cheerful. George would not care to live here, because they all blast all day long with their radios and television sets. But he would never find himself yelling at their children; because these people are not The Enemy. If they would ever accept George, they might even be allies.”

Here is an argument against liberal "color-blindness" in the USA, and against continental Europe's, and especially France's, refusal to collect race-based socio-economic data because under liberalism all citizens are supposedly equal:
“What’s so phoney nowadays is all this familiarity. Pretending there isn’t any difference between people - well, like you were saying about minorities, this morning. If you and I are no different, what do we have to give each other? How can we ever be friends?"

He writes on the intellectual bankruptcy and socially corrupting force of capitalism: “What’s the use of knowing something if you don’t make money out of it? And the glum ones more than half agree with him, and feel privately ashamed of not being smart and crooked.”

And on the boredom of American culture, as it channels everything through marketing mediums of symbolic value:
“We sleep in symbolic bedrooms, eat symbolic meals, are symbolically entertained.”

An English writer in America, writing a story set in America, he has all the same a very European sensibility: emphasising, as Europeans do, that what makes us human is our sensuality, our material physicality, our sexuality; as opposed to the American idea that “goodness” as symbolised through perfunctory care of cats or dogs is what makes us human (cf. Save The Cat).

Isherwood complains (in 1964!) about cookie-cutter houses sold a "homes" and "New Concept Living” - a trick developers are still using 60 years later! He complains about gentrification kicking all the Bohemians out and replacing them with rigid thinking families and rigid behavioural restrictions. He complains about IBM computers and ID cards - the power of technology to define and limit one's human identity.

Here he is about the Russians, but he could equally well be talking about the muslims:
"the basic American dogma, that it is, always, a Good Morning. Good, despite the Russians and their rockets, and all the ills and worries of the flesh. For, of course, we know, don't we, that the Russians and the worries are not really real? They can be unthought and made to vanish. And therefore the morning can be made to be good. Very well then, it is good."

Isherwood even, slyly, slips in a comment about Palestine, describing viewing California as “a sad Jewish prophet of doom” and being “oppressed by awareness of the city below. On both sides of the hills, to the north and to the south, it has spawned and spread itself over the entire plain. It has eaten up the wide pastures and ranchlands, and the last stretches of orange grove; it has sucked out the surrounding lakes and sapped the forests of the high mountains. Soon it will be drinking converted sea water. And yet it will die. No need for rockets to wreck it, or another ice age to freeze it, or a huge earthquake to crack it off and dump it in the [Pacific]. It will die of over-extension. It will die because its tap-roots have dried up; the brashness and greed which have been its only strength. And the desert, which is the natural condition of this country, will return.”

Chistopher Isherwood does so so very much with this tiny little novelette - and does it so pleasurably, so poignantly. No wonder it is a classic. show less

In which a European in exile in 1964 manages to accurately convey the inner workings of those of us Antipodeans in 2012.

I've not yet seen the (apparently wonderful) film based on this book, which was probably a blessing, as I was able to approach it uninitiated. In a scant 150 pages, Isherwood details one mundane-yet-important day in the life of an English professor in the U.S. Digging deftly to the root of George's mind, Isherwood captures his moments of intelligence and pain, of arrogance, lust, self-loathing, confusion, alienation, connection, nostalgia, heartbreak, discovery. It's a taut little character study, which approaches a variety of '60s counter-culture/neo-romantic issues (social alienation, the rise of that loathsome word show more 'tolerance', man-made boundaries preventing connection), yet - because his focus is so clearly on George's character - Isherwood avoids that painfully on-the-nose attitude that so dates other writers of the era (if I cough Kerouac's name out of the corner of my mouth, will a thousand hipsters descend upon my house with torches and pitchforks?).

A beautiful little work. It worries me somewhat that I feel Isherwood has here predicted my future. And if not, all the better: he has allowed me an insight into a genuine mind. A complete human being laid bare in 150 pages. Perhaps the moral is to invite your neighbours over to dinner more often. Perhaps it's simply to say "yes" when asked. Or perhaps it is that we cannot expect any more. It's not the dinner, or the asking, or what we say when we're there, or even what we mean. It's about washing ourselves free of the rituals in which we drape our lives, or at least of questioning the rituals before we abandon ourselves to them. It's how we remove the past from its pedestal without removing its meaning. It's going forward knowing that, in some ways, everything we have learned is important to us, yet in other ways, we have learned nothing at all. show less