Christopher Isherwood: A Single Man

                       Christopher Isherwood’s “A Single Man” is set in Southern California during 1962 and exquisitely invites us in to one day of the life of George Falconer who is attempting to live life the best way he knows how after his “husband” Jim has been killed in an automobile accident even before our story begins.  From the opening lines we learn that George struggles with just being:

“Waking up begins with saying am and now.  That which has woken 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.

            I think many people who have suffered the loss of a husband, wife or partner know all to well
this feeling of not being anyone, and that within that loss we have lost who we are as well.  So many “couples” have become the inseparable “we”.  Yes, they have their own separate lives and activities but by so many are viewed as the “we” instead of the individual I.  I know my previous partner and I were like that.  When he died in 2002 I didn’t know who I was without the undeniable “we” that we had become.  It was like being a bicycle with only one wheel.  Yes you can ride the blasted thing but you have to learn all over again how to ride the bloody thing.

George can be best described when Isherwood says:

            “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 flashlamps, never more to be ignored, explained away… among many other kinds of monster, George says, they are afraid of little me” (p.27).

            I have to admit I saw the movie of the same name “A Single Man” directed by Tom Ford first and was riveted from the opening scene until the climatic ending where I was left weeping.  So I knew going into the book that George at the end of the narrative was going to die.  The narrative took on even more pain and turmoil for me knowing this fact about George and the story.  George however, I believe is afraid of what he is without Jim and he suffers from survival’s guilt as is evident in the following passage:

“In all those old crises of the twenties, the thirties, the war- each one of them has left traces upon George, like an illness… now we have with us a far more terrible fear, the fear of survival.  Survival into a Rubble Age, in which it will… become more dangerous and this is no time for sentiment” (pg. 87-88).

Granted this narrative is set in the “safe” 1960’s, way before the advent of AIDS but for me this story could have very easily bet set in the late 1980’s or even early 1990’s when AIDS was a killing demon who was slaughtering countless people.  AIDS left many of us suffering from survival’s guilt and many of us all of this time later still suffer from it as our survival becomes longer and longer with each passing day.  Many of us, on many different levels who are very similar to George, or at the very least I know I could very easily be George especially when Isherwood says:

“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 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” (pg. 29).

George is still madly, desperately in love with Jim and not even death can stop that love, and maybe in some ways death has intensified his love for Jim because he no longer physically has Jim

present, all George has left is his memories.  As the old spiritual says “Precious memories, how the linger”.   These memories of George linger somehow in every word Isherwood puts on the page.  Possibly those memories because in the text time is moving forward, slowly forward as the text only covers twenty-four hours.  But, time is moving forward and in each case George’s memories are the only thing that physically moves him forward, even if he doesn’t want to.  Maybe this is where the real pain of Isherwood’s text lies that despite everything that happens to us, good or bad it lingers with us as we move forward.  Some of it lingers longer than others, while other circumstances are just a short breeze that happens to blow through us.  And in many ways Isherwood speaks to this idea as well when saying: “Your exorcism has failed, dear Mrs. Strunk… the unspeakable is still here—right in your very midst” (pg. 29).  I am sure many could say George is speaking of himself as a gay man in Mrs. Strunk’s presence in the pre-Stonewall timeframe, but is George also speaking of his love for Jim?  That despite everything his love for Jim is still present, still visible and still lingers in the floorboards.  Or, is George speaking of his visible and tangible pain that Jim is dead and gone forever.  That now matter how many days pass, or months, or years pass George’s pain of losing Jim will never fully go away.  That, that pain will also linger in the floorboards of not only George’s home but also in the depths of heart. This pain I felt was as equally obvious in the film as the book, however it is in the ending of the film that the pain comes full circle. 

In the book the ending has a more brutish ending for George when Isherwood says:

“George has indeed been absent at this moment of terminal shock, away out there on the deep waters… for it can associate no longer with what lies here… this (George) is now cousin to the garbage in the container on the back porch.  Both will have to be carted away” (pg. 186).

            The ending in the literary text of “A Single Man” casts George aside as little more than garbage as referred to in the text.  For me this ending was so harsh, in that it played to the idea that George

wasn’t anything to anyone and would simply be forgotten as if he was never there in the first place.  While in the movie as George says:

“A few times in my life, I’ve had moments of absolute clarity.  When for a few, brief seconds…the silence drowns out the noise… and I can feel…rather than think. And things seem so sharp.  And the world seems so fresh. It’s as though it had all just come into existence” (2010 movie).

            It is within this clarity, this noiselessness, this sharpness and this freshness that George finally opens himself up to possibility.  I know this is a vague idea but I believe that it is within this realm that George can be open to what I consider the sacredness of the divine.

“I can never make these moments last. I cling to them, but like everything, they fade.  I’ve lived my life on those moments.  They pull me back to the present.  And I realize that everything… is exactly the way it’s meant to be” (2010 movie).

It is at this moment this moment (in the movie) that George suffers from his massive heart attack.  He falls to the floor in agony, gasping for air. All we hear is the ticking of a clock, the sounds of the rolling surf.  The clock stops and we see a foot from the corner of the right of the screen, then two and a hand.  It’s Jim; he leans down kisses George and recedes back into the darkness.

                        “And just like that… it came.”

            I believe to my core in “visitations” from the dead.  I’ve been fortunate enough to experience them, and each time my husband comes to me in my dreams or visions I “wake’ in a cold sweat shaking, crying and feeling lost over all and in the depths of my grief all over again.  My soul ripped from me, my heart having stopped beating and in those moments   … just like that… I am… the… single… man.