Reading Queer: Christopher Isherwood

Mr Gardner

'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 therefrom 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 whole day later than yesterday, one year later than last year. Every now is labeled with its date, rendering all past nows obsolete, until--later or sooner-- perhaps--no, not perhaps--quite certainly: it will come.
Fear tweaks the vagus nerve. A sickish shrinking from what waits, somewhere out there, dead ahead.

But meanwhile the cortex, that grim disciplinarian, has taken its place at the central controls and has been testing them, one after another: the legs stretch, the lower back is arched, the fingers clench and relax. And now, over the entire intercommunication system, is issued the first general order of the day: UP.

Obediently the body levers itself out of bed--wincing from twinges in the arthritic thumbs and the left knee, mildly nauseated by the pylorus in a state of spasm--and shambles naked into the bathroom, where its bladder is emptied and it is weighed: still a bit over 150 pounds, in spite of all that toiling at the gym! 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 4 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.

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.

It stares and stares. Its lips part. It starts to breathe through its mouth. Until the cortex orders it impatiently to wash, to shave, to brush its hair. Its nakedness has to be covered. It must be dressed up in clothes because it is going outside, into the world of the other people; and these others must be able to identify it. Its behavior must be acceptable to them.

Obediently, it washes, shaves, brushes its hair, for it accepts its responsibilities to the others. It is even glad that it has its place among them. It knows what is expected of it.

It knows its name. It is called George.'

So wakes George, and so opens Isherwood’s novella, A Single Man. The story follows a day in the life of George Falconer, a homosexual English academic who teaches literature at a West Coast university in the 1960s. Having recently lost his lover, Jim, in a car accident, the novella charts his attempt to navigate a life that is both habitually familiar but also painfully bereft of the value and pleasure it once held.

There are many things that are remarkable about this book: the extraordinary clarity with which it portrays grief and loneliness; its unflinching portrayal of the darkness and violence that underlies our waking thoughts; its uncompromising depiction of homosexual love and desire at a time when sex between two men was illegal in Britain and sodomy laws were enforced in all but one American state. But there is perhaps nothing more remarkable than the fact it is so little known, so little read.

Considering this, it is surprising that it was recently given the Hollywood treatment at the hands of director Tom Ford. The film is good, I suppose, in a kitschy, superficial kind of way—a sort of extravagant pageant of impossibly attractive young men posturing like sirens around the shipwrecked George—but it feels a bit like an advert, though one confused about what it is selling, and fails to capture the depths of feeling and psychological intensity that punctuate Isherwood’s text. The film’s rosy cinematography mirrors effectively the novella’s prose in conveying the vacuity of the Californian landscapes that provide the backdrop for the story. However, it fails to capture the suburban crassness and fatuous escapism that inhabits this landscape. It is this that Isherwood so clearly delights in uncovering through the withering, world-weary perspective of his Englishly down-to-earth protagonist.

George’s dragon is not, however, American culture. This is not a worthy opponent. Even 1960s counterculture—the psychedelic drug-taking, sexual liberation, civil disobedience and protest—appears glibly narcissistic in comparison with the way Isherwood presents George’s struggle. What George faces, in a confrontation that threatens to be a fight to the death, is something simpler and more profound. How can he come to terms with the death of a lover, a life-partner, a mate; someone whose identity has become entwined with his own, and whose loss is closer to an amputation than a separation?

With the possible exception of W. H Auden’s poetry, I know of no other modern writing that remains so unremittingly secular in approach whilst tackling the age-old problem of finding spiritual meaning in our lives, of coping with being the kind of creature that has both a body and a soul. As such, the novella is an intricate, and at times excruciating, attempt to answer the perennial question of what it is to be human, all foibles, follies, fantasies and fears laid bare. An attempt that manages, perhaps most remarkably of all, to be as uplifting as it is honest.