Conventional Cortices

A Single Man

by Christopher Isherwood

1964, Simon & Schuster

A colleague at work who teaches drama suggested this book to me. I dislike very much reading books that are just about to or just have been adapted into films - it seems to cheapen the literary experience and invite inevitable unfavorable comparisons between the two media. (Worse yet is the embarrassment of reading a book with film stills on the cover accompanied by the phrase 'Now a Major Motion Picture!') I'm not sure at one point I will see the film adaptation of A Single Man (probably sooner rather than later, as it stars my former paramour Julianne Moore), but I am rather glad I read the book despite its coinciding with the film release.

A Single Man, by Christopher Isherwood, is an appropriately svelte novel. It details a day in the life of George, a middle aged professor of literature at a college in California. The novel is ascetic in scope; the action is confined to the professor's movements throughout the course of a single day (what will turn out to be his last). The prose is relatively spare and is quite intimate with its subject.

I say relatively spare because of a rather bombastic beginning in which Isherwood describes his subject's physicality in nearly cosmic turns. As though a camera beginning on a tight extreme close-up and gradually pulling back to reveal its contextualized subject and in doing so revealing also the inherent trickery in the distorting effect of such a close up, Isherwood introduces the novels' protagonist. "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," Isherwood begins.

This high abstraction of the process of regaining consciousness after sleep is just that - an abstraction. Putting into words such an inherently wordless process is difficult and while Isherwood would begin to look silly should he continue in such a manner, he eventually broadens his frame to establish character, and in some small way, theme:

It stares and stares. Its lips part. It starts to breathe through its mouth. Until the cortex orders it impatiently 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 other people; and these others must be able to identify it. Its behavior must be acceptable to them

...It knows its name. It is called George.

The emphasis here in the beginning of the novel is largely a fatalistic foreshadowing. George is established first as an almost mechanized entity, neurons and dendrites firing or what have you, emphasizing quite clearly the impermanent nature of such machines. Eventually, its gear wear down. Eventually, it will die.

And yet these mechanized neurological feats - brushing, dressing, shaving - are emphatically associated with social obligations and herein lies some of the essential thematic content of the book. George's physical death, the winding down of his gears, is symbolically synonymous with his spiritual death. George dresses because he must be made presentable to the world, and it is this need to be acceptable that has stifled his soul.

Isherwood's protagonist is a middle-aged gay man who is still in the process of grieving the untimely death of a long-term partner. George's relationship contributes largely to the fatalistic vibe of the novel; all things, especially good things, must end.

George's willingness to submit to society's demands (albeit rather sensible ones, like dressing) is a sign of his inner death, a death begun at the loss of his partner. George has become conventional, and is accepted by his neighbors and colleagues.

Initially, this acceptance was confusing - this novel was published after all in 1964, hardly a high-water mark in terms of gay rights (a half-decade before the Stonewall riots, for example). But thematically, George's neighbors are accepting because George has done nothing to challenge them. He has lead a tame, suburbanized lifestyle, attempted to "settle" into a house with a domestic partner and, having failed, has settled further into the complacency of middle age. He has given his neighbors nothing to be angered by except perhaps his own paltry imitation of their lives.

George is angered by his own inability for a less conventional life. He obsesses over books and academia, imagining his intellectual abilities a suitable substitute for the more "Howl"-like expressions of soul-searching for which he yearns and he flirts with sexually ambiguous students who exhilarate him with their freedom from societal constraint. But while George is invigorated by these dalliances with youthful abandon and is comforted by the sense of self-worth that his epistemological investigations through academia provide him, George's life is one ultimately filled with a quiet (read: restrained) anger towards himself for choosing to play by social rules.

In this regard, the book reads as a polemic towards complacent gays and is an interesting read in light of some of the more domestic ambitions of the contemporary gay rights movement: namely, marriage and children. The acceptance (I suppose a better word in this case would be tolerance) George is granted by his neighbors comes mainly from his desire to conform to their standards of expression (notably, of love). Isherwood seems to argue that surely an acceptance based on such a limp aspiration is not worthy of seeking.

George chafes at his own domesticity, snapping at close friends (a middle aged woman, for example, who asks George to move in as though his domesticity has negated his sexuality) and continually thinking a stream of occasionally vitriolic thoughts about colleagues and students. (Isherwood, too, chafes at the conventions and expectations of novel-writing with frequent scatological comments.)

George seizes an opportunity to loosen his shackles when he skinny dips with a significantly younger man (the aforementioned sexually ambiguous student) but this event thrills George for its novelty. He is not a truly adventurous man and is unable, after taking the youth home, to effectively seduce him.

This reprieve: the stripping in public, the bracing cold of the ocean, the drunken flirtations with a more liberated younger man - it all proves to come to naught. George's last grasp at authenticity is a desperate one and his body by the novel's end has caught up finally with his ruined soul.