CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD’S creative dilemma is an excruciating one. He wants to demonstrate that hell, like love, is not hereafter; it is a portable void that exists in time. But can a novelist properly deal with a state of alienation? His job is to record the multiplicity of the world and even perhaps seem to rejoice in it. Mr Isherwood’s solution is to see the multiplicity as a set of disguises; a viable fictional aim is the stripping off of these to show the one great tired face. Chrissie, Herr Issyvoo, Bradshaw – all these have been allomorphs of a recording eye, though the novelist’s trick – despite the ‘I am a camera’ disclaimer – was to flash the illusion of a genuine identity. In Down There on a Visit trickery becomes irony. ‘Down there’ is ‘down here’, and we cannot visit where we already are. The circumference is crammed with characters; sink a shaft from each, though, and you arrive at a common centre – the hell of isolation, universal and single.
In A Single Man Mr Isherwood concentrates openly on this hell and calls on the unities of time and space to help hold the lamp. The rich variety of the world shrinks to the freeway and the supermarket. Here is a day in the life of George, a middle-aged Englishman who lectures at a Californian university. He lives alone, since Jim, whom he loved, is dead. Jim meant the whole of life, symbolised in the small menagerie they had, now dispersed. The bridge that connects George with his two-car bar-and-barbeque neighbours is sagging. Mr Strunk, more charitable, a reader of popular psychology, says, in effect: ‘Here we have a misfit, debarred for ever from the best things of life, to be pitied, not blamed’.
But George’s aloneness doesn’t go far enough. Nor does the fact that he belongs (as the Jews and Negroes and Commies belong) to a minority necessarily ennoble him. At the end of his lecture on After Many a Summer he tells his students that persecution makes the minorities nastier, hating not only the majority but the other minorities. ‘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?’ The minorities put on protective, apotropaic clothing, and it is Mr Isherwood’s grimly humorous task to strip George naked. He sits on the john after breakfast and carries his bared buttocks to the ringing telephone. In the gym, where he goes for his daily work-out, he find comfort, a sense of community, in the common stripped condition: the pot belly and the athlete’s muscles enter a democracy rather than an agape. At night he swims naked with one of his students, Kenny. Kenny puts him to bed, drunk, in clean pyjamas, but he wakes to throw them off and, the alcohol itching in his groin, masturbate. He masturbates to the image of ‘the fierce hot animal play’ of two students he has seen earlier on the tennis court. ‘George hovers above them, watching; then he begins passing in and out of their writhing, panting bodies. He is either. He is both at once.’
Even know the nakedness is not complete. After the metaphorical death of the orgasm, the sham death of sleep, comes the true, hypothetical, death of the body. This trilogy of deaths is the final ritual of stripping. Isherwood has told his entire story in the present tense, which lends itself to hypothesis. The day itself is a ritual covering an emptiness. Jim is dead and cannot be replaced. Charlotte, another British expatriate, offers herself, but George doesn’t want a sister; Kenny, an Alcibiades with towel-chlamys slipping from his shoulder, flirts at offering himself, but George doesn’t want a son. The hell of isolation can accept no palliatives.
What sounds like an intense book is, as we must expect from Isherwood, tense only in its economy. The language makes no big gestures, and some of the most telling effects are produced by ellipses. But, as in The World in the Evening and Down There on a Visit, one sometimes has a feeling that one is being deliberately put at one’s ease: Quakerism may embarrass, and so may homosexuality; let us make no protestations; let us neither raise nor lower our voices. Not that I think the homosexuality of this novel is one of its main issues: the love for dead Jim is the love for dead anyone; the particular loneliness may serve as an emblem for the loneliness of all single men, those smallest of minorities. And yet, since much of Isherwood’s reputation rests on his skills at finding a shorthand for rendering the external world, and since no observer of that world can really be a camera, we sometimes find our taste assaulted. When Kenny’s blanket slips, we are told: ‘At this moment he is utterly, dangerously charming’. He is not. Isherwood sometimes forgets to suffer dully the wrongs of which all men are capable. His job is to probe at the cavity which sleeps, unsensed, in even the most comfortable member of the majority. In other words, we don’t want a limited hell. But that we so rarely stand outside and twitch our noses at a man who is George, and not a George who is a man, is a testimony to Isherwood’s undiminished brilliance as a novelist.
Listener, 1 October 1964
Review of A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood
(London: Methuen, 1964)