A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood

[Nikki]

What I found haunting, was Isherwood's depiction of his and Bachardy's brief separation which inspired ASM.  Jim was 'Bachardy' according to Bachardy, himself. How desolate must have Isherwood felt when he decided to write their story metaphorically killing Jim as a standin for his real life lover.   Bachardy writes so poignantly of their separation in the two links Michael posted above that I was really touched by how candid he was.

[michaelflanagansf]

I guess there's no doubt that Bachardy admires Ford and likes his version of ASM.

I think that Don Bachardy is keen on keeping Christopher Isherwood in the public eye.  He does seem to like the film but there was no addressing the issues of sexuality and the film that Tom Ford brought up in his interviews.

[janjo]

Thank you for posting those very interesting links, Michael.
It seems to me that Bachardy was happy for Tom Ford to make the film a little different from the book, to make it his own. Maybe that reflects Bachardy's own struggle to make his life artistic and otherwise, seperate but still a part of his life with Christopher.
The piece sprung from the same source, but was a work in its own right.

[canmark]

Re: the allusions to other directors in the film

I must admit I was reminded of the shot from Almodovar's All About My Mother (one of my favorite films) in A Single Man. I can't remember if I knew at the time that that picture was Janet Leigh in Psycho. It's a striking image. And, of course, the t-shirt and jeans and James Dean hairstyle on the rent by recall Rebel Without A Cause. But Ford, as a fashion designer, is a man who deals in image as his job. So it's not surprising that he would create a striking looking film; and perhaps not that surprising that he would allude to other films and filmmakers. If you're going to steal, steal from the best.

Here are the two:

[Ellen (tellyouwhat)]

Re: the allusions to other directors in the film

I must admit I was reminded of the shot from Almodovar's All About My Mother (one of my favorite films) in A Single Man. I can't remember if I knew at the time that that picture was Janet Leigh in Psycho. It's a striking image. And, of course, the t-shirt and jeans and James Dean hairstyle on the rent boy recall Rebel Without A Cause. But Ford, as a fashion designer, is a man who deals in image as his job. So it's not surprising that he would create a striking looking film; and perhaps not that surprising that he would allude to other films and filmmakers. If you're going to steal, steal from the best.

Thx for pix canmark--

As for references to 50s style, that belongs in the movie because it is set in the early 60s, pre-British invasion, pre JFK assassination.  When we think of the the 60s now -- especially we Americans -- we tend to think in terms of JFK and the Beatles as the earliest references.  So IMO it is legitimate to remind the audience that the early 60s were more attached to Elvis, James Dean, and the cold war as it related to the legacy of WWII and Eisenhower.

[michaelflanagansf]

Re: the allusions to other directors in the film

I must admit I was reminded of the shot from Almodovar's All About My Mother (one of my favorite films) in A Single Man. I can't remember if I knew at the time that that picture was Janet Leigh in Psycho. It's a striking image. And, of course, the t-shirt and jeans and James Dean hairstyle on the rent boy recall Rebel Without A Cause. But Ford, as a fashion designer, is a man who deals in image as his job. So it's not surprising that he would create a striking looking film; and perhaps not that surprising that he would allude to other films and filmmakers. If you're going to steal, steal from the best.

Thank you so much for clearing up the Almodovar mystery.  I couldn't figure out what the critic who referred to it was talking about.

Actually I believe that 'Carlos' says that people tell him he looks like James Dean in the film - and that George tells him he's more handsome than James Dean.  The rent boy's whole appearance reminds me of another photographer and director - Bruce Weber (and, of course, Mr. Weber has at least as complicated a relationship to homoeroticism as Mr. Ford does).

[michaelflanagansf]

In preparation for an appearance by a character from the Beat Generation who is coming to my library [Al Hinkle who is Ed Dunkel in Kerouac's 'On The Road'] I'm reading the book 'Queer Beats' (edited by Regina Marler).  In the introduction to the book there is a very good summary about the Beats in the context of homoerotic literature of the 40s and 50s and I will be posting it here later today (or tomorrow) as I think it has a great deal of relevance to the Edmund White pull quote on the back cover of 'A Single Man' about the place of the book in gay literature.

[Nikki]

... I think it has a great deal of relevance to the Edmund White pull quote on the back cover of 'A Single Man' about the place of the book in gay literature.

In 'Gay Fiction Speaks,' John Rechy commented: When I look at literature that's considered "pre-Stonewall," I find so much defiance and honest-to-God pride because there were real dangers then.  The dangers were jail, arrest, persecution.  Nevertheless, you have a book like Christopher Isherwood's 'A Single Man,' which is beautifully accepting and full of pride.

Isherwood was so admired -- I wonder how he would have felt, or was he humbled by their praise.

[michaelflanagansf]

Isherwood was so admired -- I wonder how he would have felt, or was he humbled by their praise.

He was kind of bemused by it, from all I've read, Nikki.  Gore Vidal wrote that bit about seeing him in Paris after 'City and the Pillar' was written - Isherwood apparently had the gay boys all crossing the street to visit with him.  Given that he moved to Berlin for that very reason I'm sure he was quite appreciative. 

[michaelflanagansf]

From the introduction to "Queer Beats: How the Beats Turned America On to Sex" edited by Regina Marier (ppg xxv-xxvii)

"The 1940s and 1950s in America were hardly a steady march toward enlightenment, but they were not as uniformly repressive as pop history suggests.  Many of the best-selling and most talked-about writers of the period were publishing gay-themed work: among them Truman Capote ('Other Voices, Other Rooms', 1948), Gore Vidal ('The City and the Pillar', 1948), Tennessee Williams (early plays and the story collection 'One Arm', 1948) and James Baldwin ('Giovanni's Room', 1956).  That mainstream publishers were willing to risk their reputations on gay-themed writing reflects the social changes brought about by the war--the beginnings of racial desegregation, geographic and social mobility, the educational benefits of the G.I. Bill, the expanded horizons of service men and women who'd been plucked from the soda fountain stools in Grand Rapids or Tucson to serve tours of duty in places like postwar Paris or Tokyo.

Despite the revelations of the Kinsey Report, the first volume of which, 'Sexual Behavior in the Human Male', was published in January 1948, conventional depictions of gay life remained censorious and stereotypical.  Even a close friend of Kerouac's, John Clellon Holmes, who wrote the first article on the Beat Generation, was incapable of seeing beneath the surface of what seemed a pathetic imitation of heterosexuality.  His novel 'Go' (1952) is the first fictional treatment of the Beats.  In it he described a visit to a Greenwich Village lesbian bar with all the lurid glow of a pulp novel:;;

'The lesbians were in couples, the 'men,' brutal, comradely, course: wearing badly cut business suits and loud ties.  The 'girls' were carbon copies, except for long hair and dresses.  The bar was filled with raucous jokes, back slapping and the suck of cigarettes.  A few graceful, shoulder swinging homosexuals glided in from the street, mincing, chirruping and trying to rub up against everyone. 'Christ, let's get out of here!' Ketchum explained with unusual heat. 'It's horrible.''

The butches are not even allowed good tailoring.

Many gay writers addressed the subject only obliquely.  Some, like Truman Capote, cultivated a camp voice and sensibility to tell stories that were not necessarily gay; some hid behind ambiguous pronouns (like early Frank O'Hara) or classical allusions.  Many wrote openly, but then edited the most overt gay content out of the published versions of their work, as James Baldwin did in 'Go Tell It on the Mountain' (1953).  And of course many relied on unthreatening stereotypes of pale, willowy men tormented with obsessive love, yet still able to identify a Meissen tea service at fifty paces.  Gore Vidal's 'The City and the Pillar' was groundbreaking in its matter-of-fact tome and manly central characters, but he did not ruin his political aspirations by actually coming out."

[michaelflanagansf]

From 'The Isherwood Century', 'The Wandering Stopped' an interview conducted by Carola M. Kaplan in 1973

Isherwood: I'm trying to contrast, for instance, the Christopher who entered that period in 1929, the Berlin period, with the Christopher who came to the United States ten years later--as far as I can judge, a considerably different person.

Kaplan: In what ways?

Isherwood: More hard-boiled, more cynical, more careerist, I think.  But then, on the other hand, luckily that didn't work out well--so all was well....That was the story of it.  But then, you see, the element that goes very, very deep in the material, which is never satisfactorily expressed in any of these books and which I am now expressing, is the homosexuality, not so much from the point of view of the question of sexual preference as the whole thing of belonging to a rather small minority, a tribe, which is sometimes overtly persecuted but always sort of subtly slighted.  And what this means, the boiling rage underneath the nicey-nice exterior.

Kaplan:  You do a marvelous job of bringing that out in 'A Single Man.'

Isherwood:  It was so funny, you know, S. N. Behrman wrote about that.  He found it so shocking, this feeling of oppression.  But really I was speaking to every minority.  How could he as a Jew say that one never feels mad at people who are non-Jewish?  I mean there's a certain moment when you thin, well fuck them, you know....That was absolutely said on behalf of every single minority, those passages.  In fact I wrote it more about being a minority than about being homosexual, really.  It was deeply involved in the psychology of minorities in general.

Kaplan:  One of the most moving things in 'A Single Man' is George's rage.  He says that it's the energy of middle age--but on the other hand it's a thing that wraps you up in your own ego, so it's hard for him to break out.

Isherwood:  Oh, it's very bad, yes.  And, of course, that was where you might say, in a way, I was sort of, not cheating...but being alone has not been my life experience, I'm happy to say.  Therefore I was perhaps loading the dice a bit, but I just didn't feel up to juggling a domestic homosexual relationship on top of all the other factors in the book.  Just to sort of clear the decks a bit, I wanted to have George by himself.

Kaplan:  But at the same time you have suggested very well George's relationship with Jim throughout the book.

Isherwood:  Yes, I tried to.  I think perhaps it might have been strengthened a bit, perhaps that would have helped.  But the very last thing I wanted was to create a kind of pathos around this man, and yet of course there is some.  Another thing that was depriving for him was that he had no real kind of philosophical support.

Kaplan:  In some ways it seems to be waiting for him at points in the book, for example, in the classroom scene where he's teaching 'After Many a Summer Dies the Swan.'  On has no sense that it really means anything to George.

Isherwood:  Well, that's why one comes back to wanting to write nonfiction.  Take George -- I was always juggling a little bit.  There was George on the one hand, and there was me on the other.  When I start clowning like that in the classroom and carrying on, this is much more me than it would have been George.  My whole experience academically, of course, has been as a guest lecturer, and it's a very different thing if you're a known writer and you go to one of these places....

Kaplan:  If George's life were happier, or fuller, you wouldn't have the sense of his need for philosophical support--which is present no matter how happy one's life is.

Isherwood:  Oh, of course.  The more intense the happiness the more poignancy one feels in the fact that it can only be for a certain while, that things change, and that one is separated from people by death and circumstances.  All that is very true.

Kaplan:  Did you see George as avoiding understanding himself when such an understanding might have been possible?  For instance, when Kenny asks him if he's ever taken mescaline and speaks about his friend seeing God after having taken mescaline, he does not consider the possibility of seeing God under any circumstances.  It almost seems like an evasion, that it was possible for him to consider it and yet he wouldn't.

Isherwood:  I think there is an evasion there.  I agree with you.  I was trying to write a poem, you know; I mean it could be one of those days, like Virginia Woolf's 'Mrs. Dalloway.'

Kaplan:  I was wondering if you had 'Mrs. Dalloway' in mind as you wrote the book.

Isherwood:  That, and a thing you'd never imagine that there could be any connection with, but which made a tremendous impression on me: I was obsessed by Antonioni's 'La Notte' at that time.  I didn't take anything from it, but there was something about the feeling of 'La Notte.'  Those things are very individual, why one's turned on by something.  But that picture meant a great deal to me.

Kaplan:  I also thought there were certain things in 'A Single Man' that were reminiscent of 'Ulysses' as well.

Isherwood:  Everybody has been influenced by 'Ulysses.'  But it's a little dry emotionally for my taste.  It's too mental, it's not my scene.  But as an overall thing it's obviously a masterpiece.  There are amazing things in it, and the ending is tremendous.

Kaplan:  I saw the freeway scenes and details throughout of Los Angeles as being used to emphasize the isolation of life here.

Isherwood:  You know, the funny thing is I didn't mean to write that book at all.  I meant to write a book which is called 'An Englishwoman.'

Kaplan:  You wanted to focus on Charlotte?

Isherwood:  The whole book was about Charlotte, but I couldn't get at her properly somehow....

[michaelflanagansf]

So given that interview, two questions:

1.)  Do you think Isherwood was successful in avoiding pathos in writing George?

2.)  What do you make of the information that the book was initially supposed to be about Charlotte?  Does this surprise you?  Do you have any opinions as to why Isherwood was unable to make the book about her?

[michaelflanagansf]

The reason I posted the 'Queer Beats' bit was because I think it give a good notion as to why Edmund White thinks of the book as he does.

[tfferg]

So given that interview, two questions:

1.)  Do you think Isherwood was successful in avoiding pathos in writing George?

2.)  What do you make of the information that the book was initially supposed to be about Charlotte?  Does this surprise you?  Do you have any opinions as to why Isherwood was unable to make the book about her?

What an interesting interview, Michael!

1.As Isherwood himself says, there is some pathos. It is in George’s predicament and in the denouement, but George is not a pathetic character. Isherwood comments in the Paris Review interview that George is heroic, though in the text of A Single Man, he writes ‘The creature we are watching will struggle on and on until it drops. Not because it is heroic. It can imagine no alternative.”

I interpret the line to mean that George is not consciously heroic. Rather Isherwood describes him in the Paris Review as a stoic who fights like a badger in his gradually waning animal vitality.

2. I was surpised but I haven't any idea why he was unable to write the book about Charlotte.

[michaelflanagansf]

What an interesting interview, Michael!

Glad you enjoyed it, Tony!  I found it particularly interesting that he referred to himself as 'careerist' when he came to the U.S.  It gave me the feeling that (perhaps unconsciously) George was a reflection of Isherwood's own reaction to his materialistic attitude.