11 SEPTEMBER 1964, Page 19

BOOKS

Poor Old Chap!

By SYBILLE BEDFORD

THE theme is mortality. A Single Man* is the tale of one poor player strutting and fretting his hours through one Californian day. It could be his last day. The odds are against it; sure enough though—tonight, next year, in the un- imaginable future—that day will come, the day when he, like the rest of us, will join (note the perennial Isherwood flavour of the term) the Majority—the dead. Mortality, then, and the consciousness in middle age of mortality, of what leads up to it, goes before, decrepitude, loss, disease, the gradual defection of the body.

This is the gate. George says to himself. [He is visiting someone in hospital; in the lift a male nurse has wheeled in a prone patient. She is for surgery.] Must I pass through here, too?

Ah, how the poor body recoils with every nerve from the sight, the smell, the feel of the place! Blindly it shies, rears, struggles to escape. That it should ever be brought here . . . what an unthinkable outrage to the flesh! Even if they were to cure it and release it, it could never forget, never forgive. Nothing would be the same anymore. It would have lost all faith in itself.

The book opens with a something, a living lump an it, stirring in a bed. Making up begins With saying am and,now. That which has awoken then lies for a while staring at the ceiling and down into itself until it has recognised / . .') / Presently gets up ('fear tweaking the vagus nerve'), shambles into the bathroom, empties its ' bladder (Mr. Isherwood is conscientious over matters which a less Anglo-Saxon, a less nanny- raised writer who has never had to make his escape from prudery, might more simply take or ' leave), weighs itself, stares into the looking glass. Gradually, identity is assembled. The poor player is fifty-eight years old. He is an English- man. He lives by himself in a little house by a . beach somewhere north of Los Angeles. He is highly educated, articulate, in fact he is a Prof. Lit, at a Californian university. By the time he is washed and clothed, he has a name. George. .1 And by the time George has got himself down- stairs, we also know that this single man is single in a material and specific sense. George is alone because he is bereaved. His love is dead; killed not so long ago in some senseless accident. His love's name was Jim. George, as he is apt to call himself, is a poor old thing, a silly old thing. George is a homosexual. This, indeed, sharpens the personal plight, perpetuates the aloneness (Jim's people just admit George's—the room- mate's—'right to a 'small honorary share in the sacred family grief'), points up the lateness in lime, the shrinking future. It is not so hard for a man to remarry at fifty-eight; it is hard for him to 'find another Jim.' The looking-glass holds less terror for the ageing family-man. Thus the author has chosen to introduce something of a side-issue.

* A SINGLE MAN. By Christopher Isherwood, (Methuen, 16s.) He implies that this was done because in one sense every human being can be said to belong to some minority within the minority (the living); yet he has loaded the dice against this novel by that particular form of pinning down. The pro- tagonist's homosexuality is, in my opinion, the book's main artistic flaw because it impairs what might have been the august universality of the theme. It is, of course, a question of degree, whatever makes a character in fiction appear at once symbolical and representative and an individual man—in Tolstoy, perhaps?—is a relative and elusive thing, and Mr. Isherwood, or another, might even have brought it off by some great sleight of desinvolture, some miracle of detached, unselfconscious treatment. The treat- ment here is truthful, sexy, partisan, often bril- liant, sometimes nearly giggly; it is not detached.

George's individual day gets under way. Memories, a spasm of grief; he 'fixes' himself a breakfast and sits down to eat it. He and Jim used to talk at that hour and had talked of course about death and the question of survival, but George for the life of him cannot now remember what Jim's views had been. Such talk at the time had seemed too academic. Presently, George has a call ('agreeably urgent'—here we go again) to the lavatory ('sitting on the john he can look out of the window') where he cracks a joke with Ruskin, 'intolerable old Ruskin, always abso- lutely in the right, and crazy and so cross, . . . and listens with a blend of phobia and lucidity to the morning activities of his neighbours, 'World War II vets swarmed out of the East in search of new and better breeding grounds,' and their brats. The telephone rings and George stands writhing on the line reacting to a demand of friendship with self-registered irritability, petty unkindness and petty guilt for all the world like a stock Huxley character.

And so out of the house and into his car and through the literary convention of the- single day. (Mr. Isherwood, possibly as a substitute device for his customary first person singular, dares use the historic present unwaveringly throughout the book, and in his hands it serves the book extremely well.) George goes through a hate fantasy, has a bout of driver's exhilaration. (George, the survivor, with his tragic and flippant sense of immanent decay, loves the murderous chariot race of the Los Angeles motorways, 'because he can still cope with them, because . . . [this] proves his claim to be a functioning member of society. He can still get by.) He arrives at the campus, has a thrill of pleasure— while there is sex there is life—passing two young tennis players in the sun, makes his pro- fessional entrance, delivers a lecture to his class of students—rather a good one. But the students, the American young, have their minds only on required reading and final exams and their eyes on the clock. He lunches off salad and coffee in the cafeteria that is the faculty dining-room, drives to the hospital where a Woman who once seduced Jim is dying now in hideous isolation, and escapes from it light-headed with relief CI am alive'). He has a strenuous work-out at a gymnasium, rejoicing in the easy-going physical camaraderie, 'nobody is bitchy here,' and leaves happy and relaxed. He drives into the hills, is beset by melancholy, flees to the supermarket and is assailed by loneliness ('Should we ever feel truly lonely if we never ate alone?'). He telephones again and decides to have dinner with a woman; maddening, endearing Charlotte, so English, another survivor, gallant, wrong-headed, doggedly Bohemian with her Mexican skirts and sandals with unmade-up toenails; later on in the night he walks off and encounters one of his young students in a waterfront bar. Through the hours he has swung between angst, elation, sad- ness, hope, he has been remorseful, at ease, elo- quent, sensually alive, deflated, charmed. All the time he has struggled to be liked, admired, accepted. At one point he has been simply and cosily happy. And at the end of the night George is very very.drunk indeed.

Some of these inner paces are made poignant; others are trite, weighed with psycho-jargon, adolescent even in their emphasis and refusal of the inevitable. Unlike the Berlin Isherwoods, unlike the recent Down There on a Visit, there is a curious streak of raw Aldous Huxley going through this book (George, for instance, comfort- ing a sobbing woman in one arm while extending the other for his drink). There is also at times a too impeccable up-to-dateness which by itself becomes tarnished, dated; and there is the slight but nagging unease produced by the narrator's going out of his way in using American idiom. Surely, by no means all contemporary US writers use the past participle gotten ('it has gotten dressed,' p.9)? Surely, this is odd on the part of an English writer writing a book in which the central character, and one out of the two main support- ing ones, is English, British he would say? Still all this is minor; -the book is bouncing with irrepressibly good passages. The physical settings, as one would have expected, are marvellously anchored : the habitat, Southern California, the neighbours, Mrs. Strunk's Benny, Mrs. Garfein's Joe, the college, the young—Kenny, the Japanese girl student, the Negress, the Swede, the nun, their clothes, their, cars, their skins, their speech. I am a tape-recorder. There is more to it than that though, much more than that. And towards the end there is one scene that touches greatness, it is a scene at the height of the night, on the sea- shore, a scene of drunkenness and ecstasy and towering dark waves and the stunning Pacific surf, and- it stirs Odysseyan memories. What follows is return to dry land, retreat to the house, to indoors and the ambiguities of talk between the generations. Soon, George is once more alone; soon he is an it again, snoring upon the bed.

And now for the last pages. There is still a cold, and fitting, shock to come. The end is right, indelible, masterly. And yet, and yet . . . The parts, some of the parts are more than the whole. What is it then that diminishes this book? It may be the conception of George, queer or not queer, poor old thing with his streak of meanness and his niggling faults. Through his single day, he remains fragmented, less than a symbol; not wholly a man, a succession of states, Perhaps that is what we are, perhaps that is what the author had wished to tell us. When all is said and done, A Single Man is at least a cadenza of no mean order by a virtuoso.