A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood

Well, with this I've completed both of my Christmas books.  I'm a little unused to doing these awkward beginner paragraphs, so just bear with me as you always have.
First of all, for those of you who recognize the title--yes, this is the book that the movie starring Colin Firth was based on.  Correction, the amazing movie starring Colin Firth that was based on this book.  Not to let my personal biases creep in or anything... (Ahem).  Secondly, what the book is about--a single day in the life of one George, English professor in California in the early sixties.  His partner, Jim, has recently died.  George is a single man*.  In the fact that it is just an average day in the life of George (in the movie it is presented as his final twenty-four hours, as we see him over the day settling affairs before he intends to shoot himself) it is like James Joyce's Ulysses, but this realization came only after the first few pages of meeting George.  What I realized first is how much a Leopold Bloom George is.  We are privy to everything that goes through George's poor mind, we are immersed in the way George thinks, in his cynicism and his fantasies and, yes, his bathroom habits (though Christopher Isherwood treats it a little more tastefully than James Joyce).  The conclusion I've come to is that difference between Leopold Bloom and George is that Leopold Bloom is too human to be really human.  One can sympathize with him, but like I said when I originally wrote about Ulysses--he's more human than you or I.  He's almost too much.  Leopold you watch and you can enjoy and agree with (or be disgusted by) but George is just the right amount of human to really feel for him.  When he hurts, you hurt because you know how it hurts because you are him.  You want to comfort him and tell him it will be all right because you want to be told that too.  You aren't merely an observer connected by humanity, you are him, and you love him.

So, perhaps those are weak connections and comparisons, but let's get to where we want to be.  Unsurprisingly, the book starts with George waking up in the morning: "Waking up begins with saying am and now.  That which has awoken then lies for a while staring up at the ceiling and down into itself until it has recognized I, and therefore deduced I am, I am now.  Here comes next, and is at least negatively reassuring; because here, this morning, is where it has expected to find itself: what's called at home.  But now isn't simply now.  Now is also a cold reminder: one day later than yesterday, one year later than last year.  Even now is labeled with its date, rendering all past nows obsolete, until--later or sooner--perhaps--no, not perhaps--quite certainly: it will come" (9).  Already, unsurprisingly, I have fallen in love with Christopher Isherwood's style.  Though George (in the movie) does say a variant of the last line and not the rest, it starts out just as attractively: "It takes time in the morning for me to become George, time to adjust to what is expected of George and how he is to behave. By the time I have dressed and put the final layer of polish on the now slightly stiff but quite perfect George I know fully what part I'm suppose to play."  And: "Looking in the mirror staring back at me isn't so much a face as the expression of a predicament."  These may be out of order, by the way, I can't remember--I've collected the quotes from IMDB.


And, actually, now that I re-notice it, that second quote is taken almost directly from the book: "Then to the mirror.  What it sees there isn't so much a face as the expression of a predicament. Here's what it has done to itself, here's the mess it has somehow managed to get itself into during its fifty-eight years; expressed in terms of a dull, harassed stare, a coarsened nose, a mouth dragged down by the corners into a grimace as if at the sourness of its own toxins, cheeks sagging from their anchors of muscle, a throat hanging limp in tiny wrinkled folds.  The harassed look is that of a desperately tired swimmer or runner; yet there is no question of stopping.  The creature we are watching will struggle on and on until it drops.  Not because it is heroic.  It can imagine no alternative" (10).  Heroism out of lack of--dare I say, imagination?  Desperation?  Fear?  It's nothing new, but it is a curious thing.  JRR Tolkien had a theory--Marky Mark explained it to us, about 'Northern Courage'.  That is, pressing on even when all hope is lost.  Clearly George is doing so, but like Isherwood tells us, it is not out of heroism.  He is pressing on because he can out of quiet desperation... And yet, he is still following JRR Tolkien's theory, technically.  So I guess my point to this tangent is, what would Tolkien have had to say about this?  
Also, as for George's age, I forgot he was meant to be so old.  Almost immediately after I read that I must have forgotten about it, because I spent the book thinking he was fifty-one.  My best guess as to why I should have stuck to that is because it's closer to Colin Firth's age when he played George (forty-nine).  


"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" (10-11).  


"[George and Jim] talked about everything that came into their heads--including death, of course, and is there survival, and if so, what exactly is it that survives.  They even discussed the relative advantages and disadvantages of getting killed instantly and of knowing you're about to die.  But now George can't for the life of him remember what Jim's views were on this.  Such questions are hard to take seriously.  They seem so academic" (15).  I originally marked this for those last two sentences--yes they are, that was the word no-one can ever seem to think of--but now I've noticed the use of "for the life of him".  I think that's an interesting phrase to choose to insert here, in the remembrance of discussions of death and afterlife.
The very next paragraph following: "Just suppose that the dead do revisit the living.  That something approximately to be described as Jim can return to see how George is making out.  Would this be at all satisfactory?  Would it even be worth while?" (15).  This is a question I myself struggled with, but very far in the past, to the point where I hardly remember anything more than that I did wonder about it once.  When my poppy died, I was six.  Now, he was Catholic, and Catholics believe (or at least are more vocal about it) that the dead watch those who they have left behind.  That idea shook me, as one can imagine.  My only memory regarding my wondering about this took place in my bathroom, standing in front of the full-length mirror, in attempt to see what my poppy was seeing.  What I do remember wondering is why he would want to watch.  Not out of some inferiority complex or something (at least, I don't think it was), but I just wasn't sure why he'd want to, surely there must be something better to do in heaven.  In fact, it was borderline creepy.  I was never big on praying, at least not real praying, I do beg, but I prayed right there that he wouldn't watch--that came from mostly embarrassment and again, that creepy feeling.  But yeah--the point is, I've been there, I've wondered the same--though curiously, I've never wondered that since.  It seems impossible to me now.


"And [George's neighbours] 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 nonetheless ready to purge and starve themselves for generations, in the hopeless hope of inheriting it.  Oh yes indeed, Mr Strunk and Mr Garfein are proud of their kingdom.  But why, then, are their voices like the voices of boys calling to each other as they explore a dark unknown cave, growing ever louder, bolder and bolder?  Do they know that they are afraid?  No.  But they are very afraid.  What are they afraid of?  They are afraid of what they know is somewhere in the darkness around them, of what may at any moment emerge into the undeniable light of their flashlamps, nevermore to be ignored, explained away.  The fiend that won't fit into their statistics, the Gorgon that refuses their plastic surgery, the vampire drinking blood with tactless uncultured sips, the bad-smelling beast that doesn't use their deodorants, the unspeakable that insists, despite all their shushing, on speaking its name" (27).  Death, of course.  Or, if you'd prefer, the future, which of course terminates in death. 


"There is nothing to fear, as long as you let yourself go with it; indeed, you discover, in the midst of its stream-speed, a sense of indolence and ease" (35).  I like it well enough on its own, lopped off at the semicolon, but that didn't seem fair to the rest of the sentence.  What Isherwood is actually talking about is driving, but I think it survives rather nicely even without that introduction.


"A veteran, calm and assured, [George] pauses for a well-measured moment in the doorway of the office and then, boldly, clearly... speaks his opening line: 'Good morning!'  And the three secretaries--each one of them a charming and accomplished actress in her own chosen style--recognize him instantly, without even a flicker of doubt, and reply 'Good morning!' to him.  (There is something religious here, like responses in church--a reaffirmation of faith in 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 un-thought of and made to vanish.  And therefore the morning can be made to be good.  Very well then, it is good)" (45).  


So, as you've gathered, George has made it to work.  On the way to class, he converses with a colleague and is distracted by a tennis match, rather, the members of the match:
"His opponent, the big blond boy, already knows this; there is a touching gallantry in his defense.  He is so sweet-naturedly beautiful, so nobly made; and yet his classical cream-marble body seems a handicap to him.  The rules of the game inhibit it from functioning.  He is fighting at a hopeless disadvantage.  He should throw away his useless racket, vault over the net, , and force the cruel little gold cat to submit to his marble strength.  No, on the contrary, the blond boy accepts the rules, binds himself by them, will suffer defeat and humiliation rather than break them... He will fight clean, a perfect sportsman, until he has lost the last game.  And won't this keep happening to him all through his life?  Won't he keep getting himself involved in the wrong kind of game, the kind of game he was never born to play, against an opponent who is quick and clever and merciless?" (53).  


"'And it's not much fun being beautiful for ever and ever, when you can't even wake up and look at yourself in a mirror'" (65).  He is teaching the class about Endymion.


What George was actually teaching the class about that led into Endymion was an Aldous Huxley novel by the name of After Many a Summer Dies the Swan.  Some of the students responded, and their responses are recorded, and on those alone I am very curious about the Huxley book, I think I should like to read it.  Here are some of their responses to the book: "The novel is arid and abstract mysticism.  What do we need eternity for, anyway? ...This novel... teaches us that we aren't meant to pry into the mysteries of life.  We mustn't tamper with eternity. Huxley is marvelously zany.  He wants to get rid of people and make the world safe for animals and spirits.  To say time is evil because evil happens in time is like saying the ocean is a fish because fish happen in the ocean... Pete was a good guy until Mr Propter brainwashed him and he had a failure of nerve and started to believe in God" (68-69).  


"'The Nazis were not right to hate the Jews.  But their hating the Jews was not without a cause.  No one ever hates without a cause'" (70).  This comes from a student asking if Huxley was antisemitic.  Interesting, because they did have a cause, just not a correct one--WI Thomas's theory--the definition of the situation.  What you perceive is what is real to you.  I never quite put it together in this manner.  George goes on (a couple of paragraphs later) with another good point: 
"'A minority is only thought of as a minority when it constitutes some kind of a threat to the majority, real or imaginary'" (70).  Again, the definition of the situation.  This impresses me, I admit--Leopold and his wife think things here and there that make you breathe a sigh of relief and say "so it's not just me who thinks that, or can't stand that, et cetera"--and George has just turned a way of thinking on its belly.  Rather, it is like a stone turned over to reveal all the bugs and nasties of the truth open-faced to the world.  Even in this day and age where we'd like to think of ourselves as equal and friendly and perfect George's sentence is still correct and applicable, whether anyone would like to admit it or not.  
"'So, let's face it, minorities are people who probably look and act and think differently from us and have faults we don't have.  We may dislike the way they look and act, and we may hate their faults.  And it's better if we admit to disliking and hating them than if we try to smear our feelings over with pseudo-liberal sentimentality... We all keep trying to believe that if we ignore something long enough it'll just vanish'" (71).  Of course, George speaks well to what he knows, no dollar for guessing where this lecture comes from.
"'...Suppose this minority does get persecuted... political, economic, psychological reasons.  There always is a reason, no matter how wrong it is--that's my point.  And, of course, persecution is always wrong; I'm sure we all agree there.  But the worst of it is, we now run into another liberal heresy.  Because the persecuting majority is vile, says the liberal, therefore the persecuted minority must be stainlessly pure.  Can't you see what nonsense that is?  What's to prevent the bad from being persecuted by the worse?  Did all the Christian victims in the arena have to be saints?'" (71-72).


George talks about an experience where he takes mescaline--his student, Kenny, asks him if he ever has (outside of class, of course!).  George's answer is, compared with other reports of doing so, rather atypical.  The only thing is, he says people become rather like caricatures, and though some become beautiful, others seem to be decaying or dying right there.  Usually accounts focus on people, and how beautiful everything about them seemed, how beautiful everything suddenly seemed to be, the tangible and intangible and all of that.  Just a note there, I've never taken the stuff, so I wouldn't know.  (By the way--speaking of Aldous Huxley, one of said accounts was his.)


"'There are some things you don't even know you know, until you're asked... Someone has to ask you a question,' George continues meaningly, 'before you can answer it.  But it's so seldom you find anyone who'll ask the right questions.'" (79).


After conversing with Kenny, George goes to the cafeteria for food (of course).  Anyways, that section starts off with "If eating is regarded as a sacrament..." (82).  Why I bring that up is that as I've said, I often don't pay as much attention to the title or certain details of books and stories as I ought.  Marky Mark gave us a packet of common motifs, themes, symbols and more in literature--some of them are obvious, some of them make sense after some thought, and some shock you when you realize that they work.  One was exactly this, that eating is a sacrament.  It is communion.  If characters are eating together, that is incredibly important.  The scene is important.  It could be a turning point--but, I digress.  My point is that while I don't usually have this giant list in my mind at all times when reading, while I read this book my mind was constantly in harmony with both the book and the list.  I was picking thinks out instinctively, and by the time I got here, I almost laughed out loud: Why yes, it is sacrament!  Yes, yes!  ...I don't know, it just seemed so curious to be so instinctively in tune.  Interesting enough for me to feel the need to inform you of, anyway.  (I also tried to figure out why Isherwood would have chosen that particular book to have George teaching his class about, which is another like semi-singular occurrence.)


George, while in the cafeteria, reflects upon a book he read in Paris: he threw it away in disgust during the middle of a sex scene. "...Let them write about heterosexuality if they must, and let everyone read it who cares to.  Just the same, it is a deadly bore and, to be frank, a wee bit distasteful.  Why can't these modern writers stick to the old simple wholesome themes--such as, for example, boys?" (85).  To expect that some gay people wouldn't be offended by heterosexuality as some straight people are offended by homosexuality is ridiculous, yet it's not something that I've ever really considered before.  I imagine it's like how a white person tends to assume that Mexicans or black people or Asians aren't racist against them, racism only exudes from the white (going back up to what George lectured us on earlier).  


George visits a woman in the hospital--in the movie, Jim says that he has never had sex with a woman.  In the book, however, this woman, this Doris, is his one and only experience with a female.  Of course it happened many years ago, and clearly nothing came of it, and George has accepted it as a passed fact.  Anyways, Doris has a Stations of the Cross book on her bedside table (?) and George describes it with disdain, but amends: "Ah, but when the road narrows to the width of this bed, when there is nothing in front of you that is known, dare you disdain any guide?" (101).  
"Did she mean goodbye?  This could be, soon will be.  As George leaves the room, he looks at her once again over the top of the screen, trying to catch and fix some memory in his mind , to be aware of the occasion or at least of its possibility: the last time I saw her alive.  Nothing.  It means nothing.  He feels nothing" (102).  He can't possibly assign meaning to the moment until she has died and at that point--the likeliness of him even remembering?  This--though I've never been in this exact situation--is a familiar feeling for me, at least.  Being unable to assign meaning or remember that exact second--it applies to other things... Kissing someone, or waving goodbye to someone, in almost all situations I try to fix something in my mind that can't be fixed because I can't feel it.  Not in some cold evil uncaring way, but it gets removed, like a negative exponent or something.  There are exceptions, of course, but rarely are there.  


I feel the need to mention that in the book, George is invited to the funeral.  Of course, in the book, Jim's family just knew George as a 'roommate'.  In the movie, George's relationship with Jim is known for what it truly is, and although a cousin of Jim's informs him of the accident, he is not invited to the funeral.  Family only.


"'There isn't anyone who'd make me feel guilty about leaving them.... Now, Geo, be absolutely honest--is there anyone, anyone at all, I ought to feel guilty about leaving behind?'" (138).  George's friend, Charley.  She is in the midst of a divorce, and the two drink together.
"'The past is just something that's over.'  'Oh really--how can you be so tiresome!'  'No, Charley, I mean it.  The past is over.  People make believe that it isn't, and they show you things in museums.  But that's not the past.  You won't find the past in England.  Or anywhere else, for that matter'" (141).  
The two get very drunk.  In the movie, we are told that the two had a quasi-relationship once, many years ago, pre-Jim.  ("I have sex with women, but I fall in love with men", I believe is what Colin says to Charley's flirting.)  Well, we aren't told anything like that in the book, but Charley (of course she is drunk as a skunk) kisses him as they embrace goodbye and attempts to French kiss him.  "Do women ever stop trying?  No.  But, because they never stop, they learn to be good losers.  When, after a suitable pause, he begins to draw back, she doesn't attempt to cling to him.  And now she accepts his going with no resistance" (145).  Again, it works just as well with just those two first sentences, but to erase the last two sentences didn't seem quite right.


"'You don't need the past, yet.  You've got the present'" (156).  George runs into Kenny at the bar he goes to after leaving Charley's.


"'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?'" (158).


"'They keep telling you, when you're older, you'll have experience--and that's supposed to be so great.  What would you say about that, sir?  Is it really any use, would you say?'  'What kind of experience?'  'Well--places you've been to, people you've met.  Situations you've been through already, so you know how to handle them when they come up again.  All that stuff that's supposed to make you wise, in your later years.'  '...For other people, I can't speak--but personally, I haven't gotten wise on anything.  Certainly, I've been through this and that; and when it happens again, I say to myself, Here it is again.  But that doesn't seem to help me'... 'Then experience is no use at all?  You're saying it might just as well not have happened?'  'No.  I'm not saying that.  I only mean, you can't use it.  But if you don't try to--if you just realize it's there and you've got it--then it can be kind of marvelous'" (160).


The two end up going swimming--Kenny suggests it to test George.  George, to Kenny's surprise, agrees to, and they go to the ocean and skinny-dip.  Kenny starts walking from the beach still naked and George asks him if he's mad--Kenny laughs it off and asks him: "'We're invisible--didn't you know?'" (164).*


Anyways, the two of them go back to George's to dry off.  George of course now lives alone.  "'You know something, sir?  I believe you've discovered the secret of the perfect life!  ...You don't realize how many kids my age just dream about the setup you've got here.  I mean, what more can you want?  I mean, you don't have to take orders from anybody.  You can do any crazy thing that comes into your head.' 'And that's your idea of the perfect life?'  'Sure it is!'" (167).  


‎"'I want like hell to tell you. But I can't. I quite literally can't. Because, don't you see, what I know is what I am? And I can't tell you that. You have to find it out for yourself. I'm like a book you have to read. A book can't read itself to you. It doesn't even know what it's about. I don't know what I'm about'" (176).  Possibly my favourite quote from the book...




Here I must warn you, lie spoilers.
Instead of the monologue Colin Firth gives us at the end of the movie (which is beautiful), George's narrative turns to a different, un-George omniscient narrator.  This narrator ends it beautifully and sadly, yet without any really sadness--it hit me once I put the book down.  Again, George falls prey to a heart attack.  Though George wasn't planning on killing himself in the book, the night with Kenny still made him realize, you know, he could go on and he would--so it's the same reaction being sought for.  Even the way the book ends isn't heartless, never does it seem heartless--maybe out of context I will, but it ends with the same melancholy it began with: "' This [body] is now cousin to the garbage on the container on the back porch.  Both will have to be carted away and disposed of, before too long" (186).  It's not so much heartless as it is... fact, I suppose.  And George died happy, knowing he could persevere--true, he didn't have the chance to, but he died feeling optimistic, and that's better than nothing, right?  
Also... Let me go back to depressing you real quick: "He felt goose pimples clacking all over him as he gazed down despondently at the grim secret Snowden had spilled all over the messy floor. It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret. Drop him out a window and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden's secret"--Joseph Heller, Catch-22.  But look: even though they're saying the same thing, there is a beautiful melancholy about the way Isherwood does it.  Heller is being bitter--maybe not bitter, but he's being straightforward and painful about the whole fact.  Probably that he just says "Man is garbage" has something to do with that fact.  Isherwood is nicer about it by saying 'cousin', while in truth he is still saying essentially the same thing.  


Well, there you have it--my take on A Single Man.  It was great.  I'm not going to lie, having seen the movie first, I'm a little more affectionate towards the movie.  However, I clearly still have great affection for the book--if you'll note some changes in my little 'Top Books' sidebar, there... I mean, there are differences, but they're not huge.  When differences from the movie started occurring, I kind of got disconnected, but by the time Charley appears, things go right back on the same old track.  It kind of swells, you know, in the middle, but deep down I knew it would eventually end in the same line as it did before.  Despite differences, both ways get pretty much the same reaction, all in all--the end especially.  When I saw the movie, I sat for five or six minutes in absolute shock.  Finally when I got up and walked out I started crying.  Same with the book--it took me about the same time.  I stayed there just staring at the page, again, in shock, and after a few minutes I got up to put the book somewhere that wasn't my bed and to put my sonic screwdriver away (it was about 2 AM and my mom had told me to go to bed, so I was reading it under the covers by the light of the screwdriver, because I'm so cool) and that's when it hit me.  Actually, that caused a gigantic anxiety attack, which sounds bad but it actually ended up rather cathartic.  So... that was good in its own way.  (Better at the end, and after all of it completely, though!)  So... Where was I?  Oh yeah, the book is fantastic.  I love Christopher Isherwood's prose.  I think I'm going to rewatch this movie tomorrow... Eh... Later today.  But yeah, certainly a book well worth reading regardless of whether you saw the movie or not... And what part of the bookshelf will be this book's destination is practically a rhetorical question.


*Normally when I watch a movie, I don't think too deeply about it.  Normally when I read a book, I don't think too deeply about the title, unless if I must write about it and I'm that stuck for ideas.  However, this movie particularly struck me, and I've thought about the title many times in between first seeing it and while reading the book.  It has multiple meanings, clearly--George is now a single man in the sense of relationships.  He is also a single man in the terms of the population.  He is one single personal tiny man in the whole scheme of things.  As Kenny puts it--he's invisible.  They're both invisible.  Individually, and even coupled, they're invisible.  Maybe that seems rather obvious to you, reader, but I can't help but think about those things and their implications.  It drives me mad because even though I've worked it out to what seems like the end of the string, there still seems to be so much more that could be there that I'm missing, or I can't verbalize and therefore cannot really comprehend.

Isherwood, Christopher.  A Single Man.  University of Minnesota Press: Minnesota, 2001.

EDIT: I've realized that I've said Colin Firth's monologue at the end of the movie was beautiful, but I didn't even think to include it!  So here we go.  I love it: "A few times in my life I've had moments of absolute clarity, when for a few brief seconds the silence drowns out the noise and I can feel rather than think, and things seem so sharp and the world seems so fresh. I can never make these moments last. I cling to them, but like everything, they fade. I have lived my life on these moments. They pull me back to the present, and I realize that everything is exactly the way it was meant to be."


Answer to last post's cryptic song lyrics:  Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 by Bob Dylan
This post's cryptic song lyrics: If heaven and hell decide that they are both satisfied, illuminate the nos on their vacancy signs--if there's no-one beside you when your soul embarks, then I'll follow you into the dark