Christopher Isherwood

Isherwood’s short, poignant novel is a tender and wistful love story Celebrated as a masterpiece from its first publication, A Single Man is the story of George, an English professor in suburban California left heartbroken after the death of his lover, Jim. With devastating clarity and humour, Isherwood shows George's determination to carry on, evoking the unexpected pleasures of life as well as the soul's ability to triumph over loneliness and alienation.

A Single Man

A single man

Sarah Christine Gill

Already, the lights seem far, far behind. They are bright but they cast no beams; perhaps they are shining on a layer of high fog. The waves ahead are barely visible. Their blackness is immensely cold and wet. Kenny is tearing off his clothes with wild whooping cries. The last remaining minim of George's caution is aware of the lights and the possibility of cruise cars and cops, but he doesn't hesitate, he is no longer able to; this dash from the bar can only end in the water. He strips himself clumsily tripping over his pants. Kenny, stark naked now, has plunged and is wading straight in, like a fearless native warrior, to attack the waves. The undertow is very strong, George flounders for a while in a surge of stones. As he finally struggles through and feels sand under his feet, Kenny comes body-surfing out of the night and shoots past him without a glance; a water-creature absorbed in its element.

And then the War's end and the mad spree of driving up and down the highway on the instantly derationed gas, shedding great black chunks of your recaps all the way to Malibu. And then the beach-months of 1946. The magic squalor of those hot nights, when the whole shore was alive with tongues of flame, the watch-fires of a vast naked barbarian tribe - cach group or pair to itself and bothering no one, yet all a part of the life of the tribal encampment - swimming in the darkness, cooking fish, dancing to the radio, coupling without shame on the sand. George and Jim (who had just met) were out there among them evening after evening, yet not often enough to satisfy the sad fierce appetite of memory, as it looks back hungrily on that glorious Indian summer of lust.

We're getting maudlin, he says, trying to make his will choose between halibut, sea bass, chopped sirloin, steaks. He feels a nausea of distaste for them all; then sudden rage. Damn all food. Damn all life. He would like to abandon his shopping-cart, although it's already full of provisions. But that would make extra work for the clerks, and one of them is cute. The alternative, to put the whole lot back in the proper places himself, seems like a labour of Hercules; for the overpowering sloth of sadness is upon him. The sloth that ends in going to bed and staying there until you develop some disease. 

But, this afternoon, George can feel nothing of that long-ago excitement and awe; something is wrong, from the start. The steep winding road, which used to seem romantic, is merely awkward, now, and dangerous. He keeps meeting other cars on blind corners and having to swerve sharply; by the time he has reached the top, he has lost all sense of relaxation. Even up here, they are uncanny jumps. building dozens of new houses; the area is getting building suburban. True, there are still a few uninhabited canyons, but George can't rejoice in them; he is 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. Ir will die of over-extension. It will die because its tap- woOts have dried up; the brashness and greed which have been its only strength. And the desert, which is the natur condition of this country, will return.

'Oh, I can manage. Till she gets a job nearer in. Or I get her pregnant. He visibly enjoys this man-to-man stuff with George. (Does he know about me, George wonders; do any of them? Oh yes, probably. It wouldn't interest them. They don't want to know about my feelings or my glands or anything below my neck. I could just as well be a severed head, carried into the classroom to lecture to them from a dish.) 

George never enters the classroom with Dreyer, or any other student. A deeply-rooted dramatic instinct forbids him to do so. This is really all that he uses his office for; as a place to withdraw into before class, simply in order to re-emerge from it and make his entrance.  

The best prose writer in English' Gore Vidal Celebrated as a masterpiece from its first publication, A Single Man is the story of George Falconer, an English professor in suburban California left heartbroken after the death of his lover Jim. With devastating clarity and humour, Christopher Isherwood shows George's determination to carry on, evoking the unexpected pleasures of life as well as the soul's ability to triumph over loneliness and alienation. 'A virtuoso piece of work...courageous...powerful' Sunday Times

Kat Albanese

He pictures the evening he might have spent, snugly at home, fixing the food he has bought, then lying down on the couch beside the bookcase and reading himself slowly sleepy. At first glance, this is an absolutely convincing and charming scene of domestic contentment. Only after a few instances does George notice the omission which makes it meaningless. What is left out of the picture is Jim, lying opposite him at the other end of the couch, also reading; the two of them absorbed in their books yet so completely aware of each other’s presence.

As they walk back into the living room with their drinks, she tells him, "Fred called me—late last night." This is said in her flat, underplayed crisis-tone.

"Oh?" George manages to sound sufficiently surprised. "Where is he now?"

"Palo Alto." Charlotte sits down on the couch under the paper fish, with conscious drama, as though she had said, “Siberia.”

This bright place isn't really a sanctuary. For, ambushed among its bottles and cartons and cans, are shockingly vivid memories of meals shopped for, cooked, eaten with Jim. They stab out at George as he passes, pushing his shopping cart.

“The Europeans hate us because we've retired to live inside our advertisements, like hermits going into caves to contemplate. We sleep in symbolic bedrooms, eat symbolic meals, are symbolically entertained—and that terrifies them, that fills them with fury and loathing because they can never understand it. They keep yelling out, 'These people are zombies! …Essentially we're creatures of spirit. Our life is all in the mind.”

What was terrible was the fear of annihilation. Now we have with us a far more terrible fear, the fear of survival.

At first, as always, there is a blank silence. The class sits staring, as it were, at the semantically prodigious word. About. What is it about? Well, what does George want them to say it's about? They'll say about anything he likes, anything at all. For nearly all of them, despite their academic training, deep, deep down still regard this about business as a tiresomely sophisticated game. As for the minority who have cultivated the about approach until it has become second nature, who dream of writing an about book of the own one day, on Faulkner, James or Conrad, proving definitively that all previous about books on that subject are about nothing--they aren't going to say anything yet awhile.

He agrees, smiling and thinking what an absurd and universally accepted bit of nonsense it is that your best friends must necessarily be the ones who best understand you. As if there weren't far too much understanding in the world already; above all, that understanding between lovers, celebrated in song and story, which is actually such torture that no two of them can bear it without frequent separations or fights. Dear old Charley, he thinks, as he fixes their snorts in her cluttered, none-too- clean kitchen, how could I have gotten through these last years without your wonderful lack of perception? How many times, when Jim and I had been quarreling and came to visit you—sulking, avoiding each other's eyes, talking to each other only through you—did you somehow bring us together again by the sheer power of your unawareness that anything was wrong?

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 my saying so, anywhere.

Your exorcism has failed, dear Mrs. Strunk, says George, squatting on the toilet and peeping forth from his lair to watch her emptying the dust bag of her vacuum cleaner into the trash can. The unspeakable is still here—right in your very midst.

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…

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.

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.

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.

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.

ㅤrizki

George is an incredible character. This book is a dream sequence. 

felt quite plodding and uptight but picks up momentum, building to an electric crescendo tied together by incredible, poetic prose writing. wish the rest of the book had the same magnetic qualities.

Tom Lawlor

love a monotonous, aesthetic, thoughtful slice-of-life novel, especially when said novel involves a posh british gay brokenhearted melancholic and grumpy professor in the world of academia. ❤️

i can’t not be influenced by my love for tom ford’s film adaptation of the book. with those visuals, actors, scores in mind, there’s no way of knowing what my objective opinion of the book could have been.

love a monotonous, aesthetic, thoughtful slice-of-life novel, especially when said novel involves a posh british gay brokenhearted melancholic and grumpy professor in the world of academia. ❤️

i can’t not be influenced by my love for tom ford’s film adaptation of the book. with those visuals, actors, scores in mind, there’s no way of knowing what my objective opinion of the book could have been.

i love it dearly 🌹

Joana da Silva

The first book of 2022 and what a great way to start the year. I got this book as a blind date, which means that I knew nothing about it besides a very brief synopsis. I was expecting this book to be emotionally draining and a massive heartbreak and was very curious to see how the author would do so in only 150 pages. I'm glad it wasn't because this book gave me so much more than just the emotional catharsis I was hoping for. A great story, a fascinating group of characters, and such beautiful dialogue. Beware, friends, I'll be recommending this book forever.

Quoc Khanh

Outstanding and unexpected. Something really special.

Beatriz Aguiar

for the girls and the gays...

“The perfect evening...lying down on the couch beside the bookcase and reading himself sleepy...Jim lying opposite him at the other end of the couch, also reading; the two of them absorbed in their books yet so completely aware of each other's presence.”
loved the mc'c pov. the way isherwood expresses grief and the raging thoughts is superb, chef's kiss.

Queena Li

I saw Tom Ford's film adaptation before reading this. I was worried that, while reading, my mind would assume elements emphasized in the film and imagine intent where there was none. Fortunately, Isherwood is a master storyteller. "A Single Man" follows the story of a middle-aged, gay English professor named George as he grapples with the death of his long-time partner, Jim. Set against the backdrop of West Coast suburbia in the 1960s, Isherwood muses on the dynamics of love, loss, and loneliness. His poignant and haunting prose constructs this ever-mounting, anxious tension. You feel yourself approaching some inevitable climax-- some terrible, ordinary tragedy. It's a tension you can't explain, but you can feel it, you long for it. I loved Isherwood's take on the stream of consciousness narrative. It created an unbearably claustrophobic atmosphere full of distant but impending drumming, a wave of Southern California heat, thick like a man's grief. This book is a story of all the things about life and love that make it so un-originally sad.

The best prose writer in English' Gore Vidal Celebrated as a masterpiece from its first publication, A Single Man is the story of George Falconer, an English professor in suburban California left heartbroken after the death of his lover Jim.

Fraser Simons

The movie is one of my favourites. It is really interesting getting into the characters head, as I hoped, because there are so many nuances acting can get across only so much. The plot seemed, from what I remember, almost exactly the same as the movie; it’s been some time but I am pretty sure the dialogue is close to verbatim. 

I wonder what the impact would have been like had I read the book first though. You only get one ending, if they are the same. In this case the movie soaked up my emotional responses, mostly. Thoroughly enjoyable to read, especially for the prose.

Shelby Doherty

Likes:
- Enjoyed the voice of the main character a lot. I felt like through him the loneliness and disconnection were expressed well.
- I really enjoyed the scene with George and his neighbor Charley having drinks together and just talking about things.

Dislikes:
- I feel like things were maybe a bit too subtle for me. I don't feel like I got a whole bunch out of the book and the way the scenes changed was a bit confusing for me.

Katharina Hoffmann

“A Single Man“ deals with grief and loss on such a profound level that I am asking myself whether someone can fully understand the book if they have not yet lost someone as important to them as Jim was to George.

The books is about a day in the life of a middle-aged professor called George who has lost his long-term lover and partner of 28 years in a car accident. George wakes up and the only thing getting him out of bed in the morning is not his will to live but rather “the cortex, that grim disciplinarian” that “[takes] its place at the central controls” and makes the body – IT – “lever[…] itself out of bed.”

George seems to have a split identity. There is the George that everyone knows, that the one who drives to university, that who smiles and talks and then there’s the George no one sees, the George behind the mask, who drowns in his own grief. And one day in his life is all the reader needs to know about George. There is no deeper layer to that man. There is nothing of interest that would entice me to learn more about this character.

Isherwood’s language is prosaic and beautiful. Though However it doesn’t change the fact that due to George’s grief and the use of a stream of consciousness, the whole book feels very cynical. The cynicism, his grief and George’s distaste for his neighbours and their children seem to find their realization in the absurdness that is Charlotte: “Charley” - George’s lady-friend who has been deserted by both husband and son. She stands for “a George gone wrong”; a person who can’t hide their personal misfortunes; who drinks in the morning and all through the day; who is so lonely that she wants George to visit her, even though she knows that he doesn’t really feel like it.

The portrayal of the only female character of relevance reminded me a lot of the portrayal of Maggie in Tennessee William’s “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”. Both women are desperate and both characters haven’t been treated kindly by their respective authors. Isherwood’s portrayal of Charlotte is questionable at best.

This is one of those rare instances where I would recommend everyone who has read the book to watch the film adaption by Tom Ford. Whereas if you have seen the film and are interested in the book that inspired it, you might end up disappointed, for the film is ultimately better than the book (the fact that they cast Colin Firth and made him wear glasses doesn't hurt either).

Jade Flynn

We are all George in one way or another. I want to read everything Isherwood has ever published.

Frederik Van den Bril

Een boek over een dag in het leven van Georges, een homoseksuele universiteitsprofessor die rouwt om zijn overleden vriend Jim. We zitten in Californië in de jaren 60 en homoseksualiteit is nog altijd grotendeels taboe. Het maakt van Georges een weduwnaar die zijn verdriet grotendeels in stilte moet belijden. Het viel me op dat hoofdpersonage vaak nogal denigrerend doet over vrouwen. Het was interessant om een boek te lezen van Isherwood dat zich niet in het Berlijn van de jaren 30 afspeelt. Een soms melancholische, soms snedige roman over verlies en ontheemding.

A Single Man

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