Isherwood--The Single Man. Why?

[Rod Hagen]

SPOILER ALERT! Don't read if you haven't read this book.SPOILER ALERT! Don't read if you haven't read this book.SPOILER ALERT! Don't read if you haven't read this book.SPOILER ALERT! Don't read if you haven't read this book.SPOILER ALERT! Don't read if you haven't read this book.

 

I love Isherwood. In addition to his books I also read his 850 page Diary (1939-1960). Yesterday afternoon I finished "The Single Man" (I'd thought I'd already read it, but hadn't), and up until the second to last page, I thought it truly was among the most magnificient books, and then I finished it. Why must Gay always equal Death in Media? The story would have been triumphant as it stood, why did Isherwood feel he needed to kill George off, and in the final 2 pages with no warning? Why?

 

Does anybody who has any insight into Isherwood, and who has read the book, think they know why? I feel so betrayed. I know from the Vidal Biography that Isherwood was critical of the cynicism of "City & The Pillar", and yet Ishwerwood kills off his main character for no, apparent, reason. I'm upset because it seems spiteful and disrespectful of the reader. Anybody?

 

After my viciousness in the Gene threads, I've been trying to stay away from here again, but I'm at a loss and wanted to see if I'd get any responses.

-Hagen

[Will]

Any friend of Isherwood's is a friend of mine. I can't answer for his decisions about plot, obviously, but I can offer a few thoughts.

 

I remember finishing A SINGLE MAN while sitting in the park at the summit of the Janiculum Hill in Rome, on a sunny afternoon about this time of year, over thirty years ago. Like you, I remember the shock and disappointment of its ending, because I had thought that -- for once -- it wouldn't happen. It did. But unlike you, I remember "learning" from the story that this is what happens to a certain kind of single man, the kind of single man that I was. For the whole period in which I was forming expectations, based on hopes, about what it would mean to be gay, literature that dealt with homosexuality in even the most oblique way always killed the gay man off, in one way or another, in the end.

 

I don't think that's because Isherwood hated gay men or thought they should die for their sins. I think it's because the whole point of anglophone gay fiction -- or one of the points, anyhow -- was that being gay is a death sentence, because you will never find love. Of course, Isherwood did find love, with Don Barcady. But few of his contemporaries did. W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman were a mess. Truman Capote, who was younger but of the same generation, James Baldwin. E.M. Forster. You name it. They all represented being gay as being condemned to a life of sex without love and love without sex.

 

They represented it that way because, for the most part, that's the way it really was for most men. Sure, there were exceptions. But nobody developed a literature about their lives in those days. Or if they did, I never found it. The exception, of course, was Jean Genet. But for him the telling metaphor was not so much loneliness as exclusion, outlawhood. That's why THE LORD WON'T MIND just blew everybody away -- all of a sudden, here was a gay novel in which the men not only had sex, but they loved each other as well. When LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN and Rechy's novels appeared, it was the beginning of a revolution. The world had begun to change.

[Guest fukamarine]

>Does anybody who has any insight into Isherwood, and who has

>read the book, think they know why?

 

Could it be that it was a sign of the times in which it was written. In those days Gay men weren't supposed to have happy endings. Isherwood might simply been trying to conform to what was then the norm.

 

fukamarine

[VaHawk]

Considering his bf whacked him, perhaps it was just intuition?

[bigguyinpasadena]

I agree with Will.Isherwood,even with his noble exporation of the spirit,was a product of his life and times.

But these themes still exist in Gay lit and cinematic charecters today.I was furious with the ending of L.I.E. We are still the frankenstein monster and must be destroyed.

Rod thank you for reminding me of this book.I am getting forgetful of the books I have read(I read Palmpiset(sp?)but I do not recall Gore Vidal writing about Isherwood-I am sure he must have)I wish I had the mind I used to,but no more.

Isn't there going to be a second set of letters published soon?Perhaps the answer lies in them.

[bigguyinpasadena]

exploration

[+ Charlie]

I haven't read the book for many many years, but as I remember it, his death is sudden but natural. Isherwood's stories never had sappy endings with everyone riding off into the sunset to live happily ever after.

[Luv2play]

I have read several of Isherwood's books but never really turned on to his work as a whole. The last book I just couldn't finish; "On a Vist Down There" (not sure if this is the exact title). Anyway, I was intrigued by his life story and when in Berlin a few years ago, went around to his flat which has not changed a bit since the twenties when he lived there (there is a plaque on the door). There is also a gay shop across the street which I am sure would have amused him. I also visited the bar where he hung out in the neighbourhood with people like Marlene Dietrich (it's still a gay bar).

 

Perhaps his formulaic ending of The Single Man was connected with the influence of Hollywood, as I recall he did work on screenplays and it was mandatory under the movie code of the time to "kill off" any deviant characters. I think this is what turned me off Hollywood films, quite frankly. And concerning E M Forster, doesn't Maurice have a somewhat happy ending? (Although I believe Forster re-wrote it in the "60's when the moral climate in England had changed.)

[Rod Hagen]

Isherwood did write screenplays, so he was familiar with the "Rule" about what must happen to deviants. However, the tone of "A Single Man' is that George is a well-adjusted queer man, not a deviant, so why kill him? I simply don't believe that he submitted the novella to his publisher without the final (extremely well-written) pages, and was told, Great, but you have to kill him before we put it out there, ok? I think it could have stood, would have been published, without the traveling blood clot. And from reading his diaries of the 20 years up until he wrote the book, he really seemed like he was finally ready to be honest about homosexuality and reveal it to be quite normal. The unsympathetic descriptions of George, made him all the more real. But then he died, and it was contrived, and big FUCK YOU READER. Still think it was unnecessary and reflects nothing but confusion on his part about what he wanted to the book to represent.

 

Rechy's "City Of Night" was published one year before "A Single Man" was, however we don't know if Isherwood read Rechy then or ever.

 

Biguy, the murder in LIE was fine with me because he was a child molester, not a homosexual. But I guess viewers probably saw him more as a fag (who got what he deserved) didn't they? Regarding Vidal, the Kaplan Biography, which I highly recommend no matter what you think of Gore, indicated that Isherwood, Vidal's friend (in the first 1/2 of the century, Vidal introduced himself to Isherwood and Auden while at a cafe in Italy) was dissapointed with the "Gays Get Theirs" theme of "CIty & The Pillar", and yet Isherwood gave the gay his in "A Single Man". Interestingly, if you read the dedication of "A Single Man", you see he made it out to "Gore Vidal".

 

VaHawk, who whacked who? What are you talking about?

 

Luv2play, regarding Forester (Isherwood's friend and mentor, though ultimately he was jealous of Isherwood, just as Maughm became very disappointed in what California did to Christopher), will was refering to Forster's personal life. He never embraced his homosexuality and chomped against that bit his whole life. The then-unpublished "Maurice" did have a reasonably happy ending, but Forster didn't.

-Hagen

[Luv2play]

Rod, Interesting you should mention Somerset Maugham, one of my favorite writers of fiction, since he also did not embrace his homosexuality, like E. M. Forster. I think the main reason was that "it was the love that dared not speak its name" in post Victorian England. Isherwood was the most "out" of the three, but then he lived in Germany and the USA most of his adult life.

 

I have also read Kaplan's biography of Gore Vidal, along with many of Vidal's books, and find Vidal's views on his own homosexuality a little diffident. His life-long obsession with "Jimmy", to the point where he has bought the cemetary plot next to Jimmy's so they can be "neighbours" in eternity, struck me as a case of arrested development. He also gives the impression he has never touched a cock other than his own in his entire life. Make no mistake, HE is the top.:+

[bigguyinpasadena]

Hi Luv,do you really get the impresiion that Videl is asexual(other than Jimmy)I have always pictured him rolling around with lots of Italian trade.He does cohabitate(sp?)with another man.He might not be leading a gay pride parade anytime soon(went to a peace rally where he spoke in feb. and he looks really old and kinda tired)but I think he still has a bit of lust in him.

[Luv2play]

Hi Big guy, well I didn't mean to imply that our favorite "liberal" author was asexual. In his autobiography, he gave the impression he wouldn't turn down someone's offer to blow him, but that was about it. Does this make him gay??? Well sorta, I guess, since he never mentioned any Monica's in his past.:+

[Guest AlecGriffin]

I was surprised to see this topic on the message boards after having a phone conversation with a client about The Single Man just a few minutes ago (I recently loaned it and several other books to him). He is part way through the book and has enjoyed the quality of the writing but has found it a bit depressing given that he is himself a "single man" in his late 60s. I had forgotten the ending, so I've sent him a follow up email warning him that it doesn't get any cheerier.

 

I remember feeling relieved and excited by the happy ending of Forster's Maurice. The author was ahead of his time to envision the main character finding love with another man... Although the ending is a bit like a fairy tale, as if gay love was something Forster fantasized about without being able to see how such a relationship would actually work in the real world. As Hagan pointed out, Forster was better equipped to write about struggling with sexual identity rather than a successful gay relationship... something for future writers to explore, I guess.

 

My escorting name of "Alec" comes from "Alec Scudder", the character who becomes Maurice's lover. For anyone who is curious, I've written more about this on my website... Go to http://www.alecgriffin.com, click on "Writings", and then click on "Alec Griffin: What's in a name?"

 

-Alec

[Will]

Scudder is a character whom Forster invented out of a real man, a working-class cop who was Edward Carpenter's lover for years. Forster and Carpenter were friends, of course; and Carpenter's remarkable relationship with this man, whose name I can't remember, actually inspired Forster to invent Scudder, and then to have Maurice walk off into the sunset with him. But don't forget that MAURICE was not published in Forster's lifetime, even though he wrote it very early in the twentieth century.

[Will]

I didn't know the relative chronology of A SINGLE MAN and CITY OF NIGHT, and find it telling as well as fascinating that they appeared within a year of each other. But there you have it, the Old World and the New. One the one hand, there is Isherwood: British, upper-middleclass, friend of Auden, Spender, and other really important men of letters, former resident of Berlin. On the other hand, there is Rechy: Mexican-American, working-class, lifelong resident of the American Southwest, hustler. Isherwood gives us a view of gay men developed before Stonewall, Rechy the "new" sensibility.

[Guest alanm]

I enjoy Isherwood's novels, including "A Single Man." How did you like his Diaries? I keep putting off reading them, because the paperback is so thick. I particularly liked the "real" version of Berlin (one of my favorite cities), "Christopher and His Kind."

 

As for Vidal, I had trouble buying the ideal relationship with "Jimmy." For me, Vidal's finest moments are his essays and, back in 1968, his commentaries with William Buckley at the political conventions, Vidal is the only person who truly got Buckley to completely lose his temper on TV. Vidal's novel are okay, just okay. He spent years on those novels detailing American history to what end? A less gifted writer could have just as easily written those novels.

 

I like Davis Leavitt's work. He's not in the same league as Isherwood and Vidal, but has little guilt or need to explain his sexuality. The

first stoey in "Arkansas" should appeal to people on this site. His

main character writes term papers for jocks in return for sex.

[Guest JustStarting]

Rod--

First of all--I'm so glad to read you're back on this site. I really did miss your posts. As a frequent lurker and only rare poster, let me beg you to overlook the viciousness and return to posting.

 

Secondly about Isherwood. You'll recall he was very interested in Hinduism and wrote/translated books about Hinduism as well as his novels. What little I know about Hinduism revolves around the concept of a cycle of birth, death, rebirth governed by Karma. Therefore, I would propose for Isherwood (and other Hindus) death is not seen as the final, devastating betrayal that you took it to be. The book, as I recall, was about 24 hours in the life of one man--the day was over and so the man was over--time for rebirth and the next cycle.

 

 

What do you think?

[Rod Hagen]

>Rod, Interesting you should mention Somerset Maugham, one of

>my favorite writers of fiction, since he also did not embrace

>his homosexuality, like E. M. Forster.

 

Intellectually, and I suppose personally, SM never dealt properly with his own homosexuality. And although much of his work has great meaning to me, I don't feel sorry for him, not really. He had too long time partners, Gerald Haxton and Alan Searle, and it's quite obvious within the Maugham Biography by Ted Morgan that SM loved them both quite a lot, particularly Gerald. Additionally, SM was always quite fond of hiring prostitutes and also purchased one for his nephew a couple of times (this backfired when his nephew discovered that his New Love was simply SM's employee). In fact, and I love this story, once while having dinner out with a young fop, who was gorging himself on Champagne and Foie Gras, Maugham said to him, "You certainly are extravagant; can you really be that hungry?" The boy looked up ( I imagine this occurring in the Palm Court at Maugham's fav, the Plaza Hotel), furrowed his brow, and then said, "Yes, I am hungry. But I'm going to get fucked for it." Although Morgan published the biography in 1981, long before words like Top and Bottom were seen in mainstream press, it is quite obvious that Searle, Haxton, and Maugham's many pieces of Trade, SM were probably receptive (though Haxton was most likely just as surly and uncooperative in the sheets as out). So, he had a VERY full sex life, you could even say that for most of his adult life, he was promiscuous. Additionally, he always had someone significant in his life, I imagine he even kissed. But, no, he never publicly fessed up to being a homo.

 

Vidal, on the other hand, in these modern times, still refuses to kiss his partner of 40 years, Howard. What a dickhead. But he's not A-sexual. There was one instance where Vidal took it up the ass, but it was so brief and so painful (from a sailor if I remember correctly) that he vowed it would never happen again. Also, I think he's so opposed to being gay that bottoming simply repulses him. Though not so much he won't pay other men to do it for him or at least perform frottage'. He and Tennessee Williams often cruised Rome for trade, and according to Him he nailed Kerouac in the Chelsea Hotel under a flashing Red YMCA sign. If you've been down 23rd, you know the sign. This blasphemous act so angered Norman Mailer that one night on Dick Cavett he screamed at Vidal, "You Killed Keota." To Mailer, getting fucked deflated Kerouac's cojones permanently.

 

Wonderful. On the Howard K. Smith show on ABC:

Gore: "As far as I'm concerned, the only pro or crypto-Nazi I can think of is yourself,"

Buckley: "Now, listen, you queer! Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I'll sock you in your goddamn face and you'll stay plastered."

They sued each other over this exchange. Buckley's such a queen.

 

Yes Will, Out with the Old, Isherwood, In with the new, Rechy. They couldn't be more different. I hope in the next Diary, Isherwood reacts to Rechy. maybe they even met? I doubt it, however. I think Isherwood would have found Rechy's work to be crude.

 

Oh how I yearned for a Scudder of my own to steal into my room in the middle of the night. To say he heard me calling. To fuck me, finally and completely, and thus pull me once and for all out of that closet. Imagine the hundreds of hidden men who feel the same way. Wonderful story, too bad Forster couldn't have been so self-identified.

 

Alan, I do recommend the diaries. It’s fun to read his own take on life in California, on being called a traitor, on writing. He’s also a fantastic gossip, and his best moments with Bachardy are quite touching. I am not a spiritual person, so I found the 8 or so years he was studying under the Swami to be quite tedious. Unfortunately, this period was when he wrote the most. Nevertheless, I think the Diaries offer very clear insight into a most dear man. I want to kiss his forehead, but he's dead.

-Hagen

[Rod Hagen]

oops.

 

>He had too long time partners, Gerald Haxton and Alan

 

TWO long time partners, not "too".

 

>Maugham's many pieces of Trade, SM were probably receptive

 

...Maugham's many pieces of Trade, were probably receptive.

 

>one night on Dick Cavett he screamed at Vidal, "You Killed

>Keota."

 

"You Killed Kerouac", not Keota.

 

-Hagen

[Rod Hagen]

>as I recall, was about 24 hours in the life of one man--the

>day was over and so the man was over--time for rebirth and the

>next cycle.

>

>

>What do you think?

 

Very astute. I suspect you are entirely correct. Yes, that is exactly it. Well done.

 

 

-Hagen

[Will]

I had forgotten the 24-hour business. Thus, the Aristotelean unity of time, and the suggestion of the connection with rebirth is ingenious. By George, I think you've got it!

[Guest JustStarting]

Thanks.

 

I was going to ask if that gets me a discount, but I won't be so crass as to bring a previously erudite discussion down to the level of the usual HooBoy chat room.

 

So instead, let me just repeat--Rod, welcome back and post here as often as before. I've always enjoyed reading your notes and thoughts.

[Luv2play]

I remember the incident of Gore getting gored by the sailor, it was a very brief and not to be repeated encounter. I didn't mean to imply he was asexual, just not an interactive gay, as the expression goes. At least that's my impression. Maybe it's a class thing, he sort of sees himself in those lofty echelons of Society.

 

I remember as a teenager viewing that debate between Buckley and Vidal, it was sensational. His autobiography or the Kaplan book details the lawsuits that ensued. It was not too edifying for Buckley, whom Vidal had the dirt on in terms of his family's pro-Nazi past. Buckley sort of faded from view after that.

[bigguyinpasadena]

Well!Can you imagine a big network doing anything like having a debate with two inteligent authors!Who wrote something besides childrens books!Would never happen today.Charlie Rose and Bill Moyer are the best we get.

[dick_nyc]

Part of the problem is who would you suggest to moderate it. There aren't any Howard K Smith type interviewers around any more. I wish there were. Cavett, Carson, Parr, Steve Allen, David Susskind, even that wonderful program Mike Dukakis had on PBS about law and politics. There were some good interviewers. Buckley was pretty good at it in his prime too. What authors would you like to see interviewed now? Any suggestions? It would be enough to get me to start watching TV again. MTV or Entertainment Tonight or the Survivor shows just don't seem the same thing.