By Christopher Isherwood 1 страница

A Single Man

First published in 1964

 

This is an American novel in that it was written by Isherwood after he

had taken US nationality. American critics felt that it was a British novel.

One could spend many pages pondering what makes a book with an

American setting specifically British. The hero George? He has an English

background, but he is as much a naturalized American as his creator (whom

he much resembles). It must be something to do with the style--delicate,

elusive and allusive, unbrutal, not like Mailer. I do not like the division of

the novel in English into national entities. This is a fine brief novel in the

Anglophone tradition, whatever that means.

 

A Single Man has been termed a novel of the homosexual subculture.

George has known a long loving attachment to a man who is now dead. He

lives alone and we are given a day in his life. He is fifty-eight, a lecturer in a

Californian college (we see him teaching, very amusingly, Huxley's After

Many a Summer). He is charming, liberal, a not very vocal upholder of

minority rights. His own homosexuality is subsumed in other assailed

minority situations. He tells his students that "a minority is only thought of

as a minority when it constitutes some kind of threat to the majority, real or

imaginary. And no threat is ever quite imaginary... minorities are people;

people, not angels." But he seems a threat to nobody--withdrawn, refined,

out of sympathy with American philistinism and brashness, a man who has

lost his real reason for living. He belongs to that majority (or is it a

minority?) called the living, and living means getting through the day. His

day is absorbing to the reader, though nothing really happens. He ends up

drunk in bed, masturbating. He has a lively vision of death--remarkably

described: the silting up of the arteries, the tired heart, the lights of

consciousness starting to go out. He goes to sleep; the day is over. To make

us fascinated with the everyday non-events of an ordinary life was Joyce's

 

great achievement. But here there are no Joycean tricks to exalt mock-

epically the banal. It is a fine piece of plain writing which haunts the

memory.

 

--Anthony Burgess,

99 Novels: The Best in English Since 1939

 

 

To Gore Vidal

 

 

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

 

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.

 

BY the time it has gotten dressed, it has become he; has become already

more or less George--though still not the whole George they demand and are

prepared to recognize. Those who call him on the phone at this hour of the

morning would be bewildered, maybe even scared, if they could realize what

this three-quarters-human thing is what they are talking to. But, of course,

they never could--its voice's mimicry of their George is nearly perfect. Even

Charlotte is taken in by it. Only two or three times has she sensed something

uncanny and asked, "Geo--are you all right?"

 

He crosses the front room, which he calls his study, and comes down

the staircase. The stairs turn a corner; they are narrow and steep. You can

touch both handrails with your elbows, and you have to bend your head,

even if, like George, you are only five eight. This is a tightly planned little

house. He often feels protected by its smallness; there is hardly room enough

here to feel lonely.

 

Nevertheless...

 

 

Think of two people, living together day after day, year after year, in

this small space, standing elbow to elbow cooking at the same small stove,

squeezing past each other on the narrow stairs, shaving in front of the same

small bathroom mirror, constantly jogging, jostling, bumping against each

other's bodies by mistake or on purpose, sensually, aggressively, awkwardly,

impatiently, in rage or in love--think what deep though invisible tracks they

must leave, everywhere, behind them! The doorway into the kitchen has

been built too narrow. Two people in a hurry, with plates of food in their

hands, are apt to keep colliding here. And it is here, nearly every morning,

that George, having reached the bottom of the stairs, has this sensation of

suddenly finding himself on an abrupt, brutally broken off, jagged edge--as

though the track had disappeared down a landslide. It is here that he stops

short and knows, with a sick newness, almost as though it were for the first

time: Jim is dead. Is dead.

 

He stands quite still, silent, or at most uttering a brief animal grunt, as

he waits for the spasm to pass. Then he walks into the kitchen. These

morning spasms are too painful to be treated sentimentally. After them, he

feels relief, merely. It is like getting over a bad attack of cramp.

 

TODAY, there are more ants, winding in column across the floor, climbing

up over the sink and threatening the closet where he keeps the jams and the

honey. Doggedly he destroys them with a Flit gun and has a sudden glimpse

of himself doing this: an obstinate, malevolent old thing imposing his will

upon these instructive and admirable insects. Life destroying life before an

audience of objects--pots and pans, knives and forks, cans and bottles--that

have no part in the kingdom of evolution. Why? Why? Is it some cosmic

enemy, some arch-tyrant who tries to blind us to his very existence by

setting us against our natural allies, the fellow victims of his tyranny? But,

alas, by the time George has thought all this, the ants are already dead and

mopped up on a wet cloth and rinsed down the sink.

 

He fixes himself a plate of poached eggs, with bacon and toast and

coffee, and sits down to eat them at the kitchen table. And meanwhile,

around and around in his head goes the nursery jingle his nanny taught him

when he was a child in England, all those years ago: Poached eggs on toast

are very nice (He sees her so plainly still, gray-haired with mouse-bright

eyes, a plump little body carrying in the nursery breakfast tray, short of

breath from climbing all those stairs. She used to grumble at their steepness

 

and call them "The Wooden Mountains"--one of the magic phrases of his

childhood.)

 

Poached eggs on toast are very nice,

 

If you try them once you'll want them twice!

 

Ah, the heartbreakingly insecure snugness of those nursery pleasures!

Master George enjoying his eggs; Nanny watching him and smiling

reassurance that all is safe in their dear tiny doomed world!

 

BREAKFAST with Jim used to be one of the best times of their day. It was

then, while they were drinking their second and third cups of coffee, that

they had their best talks. They 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.

 

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 worthwhile?

At best, surely, it would be like the brief visit of an observer from another

country who is permitted to peep in for a moment from the vast outdoors of

his freedom and see, at a distance, through glass, this figure who sits solitary

at the small table in the narrow room, eating his poached eggs humbly and

dully, a prisoner for life.

 

The living room is dark and low-ceilinged, with bookshelves all along

the wall opposite the windows. These books have not made George nobler or

better or more truly wise. It is just that he likes listening to their voices, the

one or the other, according to his mood. He misuses them quite ruthlessly--

despite the respectful way he has to talk about them in public--to put him to

sleep, to take his mind off the hands of the clock, to relax the nagging of his

pyloric spasm, to gossip him out of his melancholy, to trigger the

conditioned reflexes of his colon.

 

He takes one of them down now, and Ruskin says to him: "you liked

pop-guns when you were schoolboys, and rifles and Armstrongs are only the

same things better made: but then the worst of it is, that what was play to

you when boys, was not play to the sparrows; and what is play to you now,

 

is not play to the small birds of State neither; and for the black eagles, you

are somewhat shy of taking shots at them, if I mistake not."

 

Intolerable old Ruskin, always absolutely in the right, and crazy, and

so cross, with his whiskers, scolding the English--he is today's perfect

companion for five minutes on the toilet. George feels a bowel movement

coming on with agreeable urgency and climbs the stairs briskly to the

bathroom, book in hand.

 

SITTING on the john, he can look out of the window. (They can see his

head and shoulders from across the street, but not what he is doing.) It is a

gray lukewarm California winter morning; the sky is low and soft with

Pacific fog. Down at the shore, ocean and sky will be one soft, sad gray. The

palms stand unstirred and the oleander bushes drip moisture from their

leaves.

 

This street is called Camphor Tree Lane. Maybe camphor trees grew

here once; there are none now. More probably the name was chosen for its

picturesqueness by the pioneer escapists from dingy downtown Los Angeles

and stuffy-snobbish Pasadena who came out here and founded this colony

back in the early twenties. They referred to their stucco bungalows and

clapboard shacks as cottages, giving them cute names like "The Fo'c'sle" and

"Hi Nuff." They called their streets lanes, ways or trails, to go with the

woodsy atmosphere they wanted to create. Their utopian dream was of a

subtropical English village with Montmartre manners: a Little Good Place

where you could paint a bit, write a bit, and drink lots. They saw themselves

as rear-guard individualists, making a last-ditch stand against the twentieth

century. They gave thanks loudly from morn till eve that they had escaped

the soul-destroying commercialism of the city. They were tacky and cheerful

and defiantly bohemian, tirelessly inquisitive about each other's doings, and

boundlessly tolerant. When they fought, at least it was with fists and bottles

and furniture, not lawyers. Most of them were lucky enough to have died off

before the Great Change.

 

The Change began in the late forties, when the World War Two vets

came swarming out of the East with their just-married wives, in search of

new and better breeding grounds in the sunny Southland, which had been

their last nostalgic glimpse of home before they shipped out to the Pacific.

And what better breeding ground than a hillside neighborhood like this one,

only five minutes' walk from the beach and with no through traffic to

decimate the future tots? So, one by one, the cottages which used to reek of

 

bathtub gin and reverberate with the poetry of Hart Crane have fallen to the

occupying army of Coke-drinking television watchers.

 

The vets themselves, no doubt, would have adjusted pretty well to the

original bohemian utopia; maybe some of them would even have taken to

painting or writing between hangovers. But their wives explained to them,

right from the start and in the very clearest language, that breeding and

bohemianism do not mix. For breeding you need a steady job, you need a

mortgage, you need credit, you need insurance. And don't you dare die,

either, until the family's future is provided for.

 

So the tots appeared, litter after litter after litter. And the small old

schoolhouse became a group of big new airy buildings. And the shabby

market on the ocean front was enlarged into a super. And on Camphor Tree

Lane two signs were posted. One of them told you not to eat the watercress

which grew along the bed of the creek, because the water was polluted. (The

original colonists had been eating it for years; and George and Jim tried

some and it tasted delicious and nothing happened.) The other sign--those

sinister black silhouettes on a yellow ground--said CHILDREN AT PLAY.

 

GEORGE and Jim saw the yellow sign, of course, the first time they came

down here, house-hunting. But they ignored it, for they had already fallen in

love with the house. They loved it because you could only get to it by the

bridge across the creek; the surrounding trees and the steep bushy cliff

behind shut it in like a house in a forest clearing. "As good as being on our

own island," George said. They waded ankle-deep in dead leaves from the

sycamore (a chronic nuisance); determined, now, to like everything. Peering

into the low damp dark living room, they agreed how cozy it would be at

night with a fire. The garage was covered with a vast humped growth of ivy,

half dead, half alive, which made it twice as big as itself; inside it was tiny,

having been built in the days of the Model T Ford. Jim thought it would be

useful for keeping some of the animals in. Their cars were both too big for it,

anyway, but they could be parked on the bridge. The bridge was beginning

to sag a little, they noticed. "Oh well, I expect it'll last our time," said Jim.

 

No doubt the neighborhood children see the house very much as

George and Jim saw it that first afternoon. Shaggy with ivy and dark and

secret-looking, it is just the lair you'd choose for a mean old storybook

monster. This is the role George has found himself playing, with increasing

violence, since he started to live alone. It releases a part of his nature which

he hated to let Jim see. What would Jim say if he could see George waving

 

his arms and roaring like a madman from the window, as Mrs. Strunk's

Benny and Mrs. Garfein's Joe dash back and forth across the bridge on a

dare? (Jim always got along with them so easily. He would let them pet the

skunks and the raccoon and talk to the myna bird; and yet they never crossed

the bridge without being invited.)

 

Mrs. Strunk, who lives opposite, dutifully scolds her children from

time to time, telling them to leave him alone, explaining that he's a professor

and has to work so hard. But Mrs. Strunk, sweet-natured though she is--

grown wearily gentle from toiling around the house at her chores, gently

melancholy from regretting her singing days on radio; all given up in order

to bear Mr. Strunk five boys and two girls--even she can't refrain from

telling George, with a smile of motherly indulgence and just the faintest hint

of approval, that Benny (her youngest) now refers to him as "That Man,"

since George ran Benny clear out of the yard, across the bridge and down the

street; he had been beating on the door of the house with a hammer.

 

George is ashamed of his roarings because they aren't playacting. He

does genuinely lose his temper and feels humiliated and sick to his stomach

later. At the same time, he is quite well aware that the children want him to

behave in this way. They are actually willing him to do it. If he should

suddenly refuse to play the monster, and they could no longer provoke him,

they would have to look around for a substitute. The question Is this

playacting or does he really hate us? never occurs to them. They are utterly

indifferent to him ex-cept as a character in their myths. It is only George

who cares. Therefore he is all the more ashamed of his moment of weakness

about a month ago, when he bought some candy and offered it to a bunch of

them on the street. They took it without thanks, looking at him curiously and

uneasily; learning from him maybe at that moment their first lesson in

contempt.

 

MEANWHILE, Ruskin has completely lost his wig. "Taste is the ONLY

morality!" he yells, wagging his finger at George. He is getting tiresome, so

George cuts him off in midsentence by closing the book. Still sitting on the

john, George looks out of the window.

 

The morning is quiet. Nearly all the kids are in school; the Christmas

vacation is still a couple of weeks away. (At the thought of Christmas,

George feels a chill of desperation. Maybe he'll do something drastic, take a

plane to Mexico City and be drunk for a week and run wild around the bars.

You won't, and you never will, a voice says, coldly bored with him.)

 

 

Ah, here's Benny, hammer in hand. He hunts among the trash cans set

out ready for collection on the sidewalk and drags out a broken bathroom

scale. As George watches, Benny begins smashing it with his hammer,

uttering cries as he does so; he is making believe that the machine is

screaming with pain. And to think that Mrs. Strunk, the proud mother of this

creature, used to ask Jim, with shudders of disgust, how he could bear to

touch those harmless baby king snakes!

 

And now out comes Mrs. Strunk onto her porch, just as Benny

completes the murder of the scale and stands looking down at its scattered

insides. "Put them back!" she tells him. "Back in the can! Put them back,

now! Back! Put them back! Back in the can!" Her voice rises, falls, in a

consciously sweet singsong. She never yells at her children. She has read all

the psychology books. She knows that Benny is passing through his

Aggressive Phase, right on schedule; it just couldn't be more normal and

healthy. She is well aware that she can be heard clear down the street. It is

her right to be heard, for this is the Mothers' Hour. When Benny finally

drops some of the broken parts back into the trash can, she singsongs

"Attaboy!" and goes back smiling into the house.

 

So Benny wanders off to interfere with three much smaller tots, two

boys and a girl, who are trying to dig a hole on the vacant lot between the

Strunks and the Garfeins. (Their two houses face the street frontally, wide-

openly, in apt contrast to the sidewise privacy of George's lair.)

 

On the vacant lot, under the huge old eucalyptus tree, Benny has taken

over the digging. He strips off his windbreaker and tosses it to the little girl

to hold; then he spits on his hands and picks up the spade. He is someone or

other on TV, hunting for buried treasure. These tot-lives are nothing but a

medley of such imitations. And soon as they can speak, they start trying to

chant the singing commercials.

 

But now one of the boys--perhaps because Benny's digging bores him

in the same way that Mr. Strunk's scoutmasterish projects bore Benny--

strolls off by himself, firing a carbide cannon. George has been over to see

Mrs. Strunk about this cannon, pleading with her to please explain to the

boy's mother that it is driving him slowly crazy. But Mrs. Strunk has no

intention of interfering with the anarchy of nature. Smiling evasively, she

tells George, "I never hear the noise children make--just as long as it's a

happy noise."

 

Mrs. Strunk's hour and the power of motherhood will last until

midafternoon, when the big boys and girls return from school. They arrive in

mixed groups--from which nearly all of the boys break away at once,

however, to take part in the masculine hour of the ball-playing. They shout

 

loudly and harshly to each other, and kick and leap and catch with arrogant

grace. When the ball lands in a yard, they trample flowers, scramble over

rock gardens, burst into patios without even a thought of apology. If a car

ventures along the street, it must stop and wait until they are ready to let it

through; they know their rights. And now the mothers must keep their tots

indoors out of harm's way. The girls sit out on the porches, giggling

together. Their eyes are always on the boys, and they will do the weirdest

things to attract their attention: for example, the Cody daughters keep

fanning their ancient black poodle as though it were Cleopatra on the Nile.

They are disregarded, nevertheless, even by their own boy friends; for this is

not their hour. The only boys who will talk to them now are soft-spoken and

gentle, like the doctor's pretty sissy son, who ties ribbons to the poodle's

curls.

 

And then, at length, the men will come home from their jobs. And it is

their hour; and the ball-playing must stop. For Mr. Strunk's nerves have not

been improved by trying all day long to sell that piece of real estate to a

butterfly-brained rich widow, and Mr. Garfein's temper is uncertain after the

tensions of his swimming-pool installation company. They and their fellow

fathers can bear no more noise. (On Sundays Mr. Strunk will play ball with

his sons, but this is just another of his physical education projects, polite and

serious and no real fun.)

 

Every weekend there are parties. The teen-agers are encouraged to go

off and dance and pet with each other, even if they haven't finished their

homework; for the grownups need desperately to relax, unobserved. And

now Mrs. Strunk prepares salads with, Mrs. Garfein in the kitchen, and Mr.

Strunk gets the barbecue going on the patio, and Mr. Garfein, crossing the

vacant lot with a tray of bottles and a shaker, announces joyfully, in Marine

Corps tones, "Martoonies coming up!"

 

And two, three hours later, after the cocktails and the guffaws, the

quite astonishingly dirty stories, the more or less concealed pinching of other

wives' fannies, the steaks and the pie, while The Girls--as Mrs. Strunk and

the rest will continue to call themselves and each other if they live to be

ninety--are washing up, you will hear Mr. Strunk and his fellow husbands

laughing and talking on the porch, drinks in hand, with thickened speech.

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 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 and 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 flash-lamps, 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 slurps, the bad-

smelling beast that doesn't use their deodorants, the unspeakable that insists,

despite all their shushing, on speaking its name.

 

Among many other kinds of monster, George says, they are afraid of

little me.

 

Mr. Strunk, George supposes, tries to nail him down with a word.

Queer, he doubtless growls. But, since this is after all the year 1962, even he

may be expected to add, I don't give a damn what he does just as long as he

stays away from me. Even psychologists disagree as to the conclusions

which may be reached about the Mr. Strunks of this world, on the basis of