The Reality of Love
CURLEY, DANIEL
The Reality of Love A SINGLE MAN By Christopher Isherwood Simon and Schuster. 186 pp. $4.00. Reviewed by DANIEL CURLEY Author, "A Stone Man, Yes," "How Many Angels?" A SINGLE MAN is...
...Until she asks him the questions...
...The length of these scenes undoubtedly has something to do with their success in getting at George...
...Picture next, Edward Dahlberg standing before the same closed door...
...James was brought up to respect and pry gently into all of the more refined mysteries of human behavior: Dahlberg has earned, with painful under-standing, a knowledge of all the basic realities of the human condition...
...Reviewed by JAMES R. MELLOW Executive Editor, "Arts Magazine" PICTURE, IF you will, Henry James before the closed door of an apartment or a room, contemplating the activities of its occupants...
...The passage with the student is complicated by sexual overtones, but it, too, makes its own clear statement in its own complicated code...
...for Dahlberg is concerned, primarily, with the health of literature-for its sweet breath, its firm flesh, its clean bowels-just as his mother, equating good health with good fortune, examined herself in the mirror each day for a pink tongue and firm paps and, taking a cold bath, rubbed herself down with a rough towel...
...At one point George picks up a volume of Ruskin and thinks: "Intolerable old Ruskin, always absolutely in the right, and crazy, and so cross, with his whiskers, scolding the English...
...They communicate only their own artistic crudity...
...he doesn't know the answers...
...There is, to be sure, some of the usual criticism of women for feeling they have a sexual priority to the enjoyment of men, but this is certainly not central to the meaning of the book...
...234 pp...
...All the conversation about her trying to pick up her past revolves neatly around George's devotion to Jim's memory...
...There is a recurring image of a man standing on a street corner trying to sell a real diamond for a nickel...
...The parallel here is far more effective than the fully reported classroom lecture on the past in the first part of the novel...
...It is only through this conversation about the destructive power of the past that he is able to translate "Jim is dead" into "Jim is death...
...It is useless to point out in mitigation that this hatred is part of the lifeblood of the book, that it grows out of George's fear of the future and of death...
...It is in part another example of the silly kind of book about America by an Englishman, delivered in a prose that would be embarrassing in an under-graduate writing class...
...Fatherless, except for the stray welchers and sports who took his mother's heart, her hopes and-more often than not-her purse...
...The love which is the prime ex-ample of this possibility is a homo-sexual love, but it is one of the virtues of this novel that deviant love is made to stand for all love-for the need for love, for the belief in love, and for the achievement of love...
...In the first passage, Charley talks of giving up and going back to England...
...At the end of the evening, George finally accuses the student of simply flirting, not with him only but with love and with life: " all any of you ever do is flirt and miss the one thing that might really transform your entire life...
...and it is in part an extremely moving and beautifully presented account of the inner life of a man who has refused to give up his belief that love is a distinct possibility among human beings...
...There is no suggestion that George, the protagonist, at his best believes that heterosexuals, in William Burroughs' words, confuse their lousy condition with normality...
...It is the manner that is different...
...For once we are asked to believe only that homosexuals are as good as anyone else, not better...
...George has known love and is in a position to speak of love, but no one knows how to listen...
...A Hard Perdurable Life BECAUSE I WAS FLESH By Edward Dahlberg New Directions...
...squeamish to the point of fits of vomiting over his mother's slovenly habits-Dahlberg gives us the impression that the price for survival in his hard world was the death of a sensitivity as marked as Henry James's...
...itinerant, until his mother established herself as the proprietress of a barbershop in Kansas City...
...Each one has a different name, of the kind that realtors can always be relied on to invent: Sky Acres...
...Yet Dahlberg's quarrel with James is not mere literary jealousy...
...As a result, since there is no need for the reader to feel hostile, George can be considered sympathetically...
...5.00...
...This is really the same thing Isherwood is saying in the bad half of the book, and it is no more true in one part than in the other...
...This part of the book is unsatisfactory, perhaps because Isherwood is deal-ing with things he doesn't like, and apparently only affection makes him write well...
...There he stands, the master of refinements, guessing at the quality of the situation within and in his mind he conjures up a transatlantic fantasy, involving a radiant, but dying, heiress from New York and an ambitious young bounder from Lon-don...
...Seldom has the claim for experience against imagination been so sharply drawn...
...The tracts have their individuality, too...
...The book takes the shape of a single day in George's life from the moment of first consciousness to the moment of falling asleep-and per-haps dying...
...and his condition, which is lousy enough, can be accepted as that of any human being who is trying once more to find a way of life after having been bereaved...
...this is very tiresome, as are George's reveries in which he showers hate and destruction upon all their houses...
...Dahlberg has found James "an exquisite mediocrity" with "the vibrant soul of an upholsterer or a delicate seamstress...
...The Reality of Love A SINGLE MAN By Christopher Isherwood Simon and Schuster...
...The striking feature of Because I Was Flesh, Dahlberg's painfully candid autobiography, is the ex-ample it gives of the process of growing up by sheer grit...
...Perhaps the book is credible simply because it is more tolerant than most books on the same theme...
...A SINGLE MAN is a book sharply divided against itself...
...He can speak of the "gods of the 1. B. M." All...
...They are all caught up in the machinery for seeking happiness and none of them dares stop to believe in happiness itself...
...The level of irony to which he can rise here is exemplified by his comments on the new development houses he passes: "It is a slander to say they are identical...
...George, an Englishman long resident in the United States, wakes in the house in which he was for a long time happy with Jim, but Jim has been killed in an accident, and George is now again a single man...
...George knows that happiness is real, but no one can take the time to ask him the right question...
...Also during the day George drives on the Los Angeles freeways and teaches a class at his college...
...The fact re-mains that these passages do not communicate the crudity of an in-tense emotional state...
...As George talks with Charley he is leading himself the way he has to go...
...It is no secret that Dahlberg despises the work of Henry James and all that it has stood for in the course of American literature...
...Throughout the day his thoughts revert to Jim, and he even goes to the hospital to visit a woman who once had an affair with Jim: The hate George feels for her is one of his last links with Jim...
...who now becomes all the things the book has been saying he is...
...So, too, is Isherwood intolerable and right, but unlike Ruskin he is supposed to be writing a novel, not just scolding the Americans...
...The one thing is very clearly love...
...He can intend to devastate the in-habitants of these houses by calling them "Coke-drinking television watchers...
...Reviewed by DANIEL CURLEY Author, "A Stone Man, Yes," "How Many Angels...
...some have brown roofs, some green, and the tiles in their bathrooms come in several different colors...
...Yet never, in all this, does he stoop so low as the keyhole, grandly proffering itself...
...A very different matter is the second half of the book, made up of two long scenes involving in one an aging and lonely Englishwoman, Charley, and in the other a young man who is one of George's students...
...Viste Grande, Governor Heights...
...Fortunately for all of us he finally re-members that himself...
...Neither does he bend to the keyhole: He knows from brute experience that in a seedy room be-hind the door, a graying chippy with plump buttocks and a light step, is offering her services to a sweating bull-necked brakeman from the Burlington Railroad...
...At the age of 11, he was packed...
Vol. 48 • January 1965 • No. 2
