“Lo specchio, più che un volto, riflette l’espressione di una difficoltà. […] Lo sguardo provato è quello di un nuotatore o di un podista stremati; eppure, di fermarsi non se ne parla. L’individuo che stiamo osservando lotterà senza tregua fino al crollo. E non per eroismo. Perché non sa immaginarsi un’alternativa.”Quand’ero verso la metà di questo libro, ho pensato che ad essere onesti lo si poteva riassumere con una frase sola, e non delle più complesse. Una frase minimale, quasi un inciso, tornata a frullarmi in mente dopo un po’ che l’avevo messa via. « Al cuore della vita c’era un vuoto, una soffitta », questo dice Virginia Woolf a proposito di Clarissa Dalloway nel suo celebre romanzo. E questo possiamo dire di George, protagonista di Un uomo solo, e anche dei piccoli pianeti che gli gravitano attorno. Quella mattina Clarissa disse che li avrebbe presi lei i fiori. Si preparava a un’altra giornata della sua vita di donna, nelle molteplici sfaccettature di moglie, di madre e di amante, di vecchia e di fanciulla, tra ricordo e prospettive nebulose, pensando alla festa che la aspettava quella sera. La sua giornata era una tensione verso il futuro con i piedi saldamente piantati nel passato, un viaggio dalla vita verso la morte e dalla morte verso la vita, uno scontro sulle rotaie del mondo con tanti altri treni quante sono le individualità altrui, un riappropriarsi di sé nell’incontrare il brivido del disfacimento. Ma questa mattina è diverso. Questa mattina guardiamo la faccia nello specchio e la faccia nello specchio è quella di George, professore cinquantottenne, britannico emigrato nell’impero delle stelle e strisce, che vive tutto solo in una casa piccina. Può capitare di vivere in una casa piccina e una mattina, svegliandosi, scoprire quanto sia enorme e vuota, quanto sia enorme e vuota solo perché nessuno siede al tavolo della colazione, nessuno ti urta il gomito mentre fai la barba, nessuno ti taglia la strada su per le scale. “L’ingresso della cucina è troppo stretto. Due persone di fretta, con i piatti in mano, sono perennemente destinate a scontrarsi. Ed è lì che quasi tutte le mattine, giunto in fondo alla scala, George prova la sensazione di trovarsi all’improvviso su un litorale scosceso, frastagliato, brutalmente interrotto – come se il sentiero fosse scomparso sotto una frana. È lì che si arresta di colpo, turbato dalla novità e, come la prima volta, capisce che Jim è morto. È morto.”Jim era l’altra metà del tavolo e l’altra metà del divano, l’altra metà del letto e l’altro sedile dell’auto. Era la voce che ti suggeriva la parola quando non riuscivi a finire un cruciverba. Jim non era il sostituto di niente, non era una perversione, non era una deviazione, la minaccia dell’omosessualità che grava sull’animo perbenista dell’America Anni Sessanta. Jim era l’uomo che avevi scelto per passarci la vita e lui aveva scelto di passarla con te. Ora che l’hai perduto il mondo è troppo grande e tu sei troppo vecchio e bisogna sforzarsi di trovare qualcosa per cui valga la pena di alzarsi e fare la barba e svuotare la vescica e indossare il costume da George, quello con cui tutti ti conoscono. È bello entrare in punta di piedi nella vita di George, stare ad osservarlo dalla porta del bagno, mentre seduto sul water osserva i vicini giù in strada, le loro faccette contrite e ipocrite, i loro bisbigli, le giustificazioni con cui dispensano se stessi dall’invitarlo a cena, i gesti del polso con cui liquidano il pericolo di un contagio. È bello seguirlo in auto, sedere al suo fianco mentre si destreggia sulle rampe autostradali, il suo sguardo che si appunta così duro sul grattacielo che stanno costruendo sulla baia, una parete d’acciaio e cemento armato che taglia fuori il panorama. È bello accompagnarlo in classe e appuntare l’occhio sui suoi ragazzi, alcuni molti promettenti, altri molto sbadiglianti, futuri poeti o pittori o spacciatori. È bello seguire la partita di tennis, vedere il sudore che cola lungo le tempie di due giovani aitanti, godere della loro bellezza e sentirsi potenti. È bello persino sedere in mensa, dove gente mediocre abbozza considerazioni mediocri sul disgustoso consumismo americano. E di qui all’ospedale, stringere la mano alla malattia e alla morte. In palestra, col corpo che pulsa e si compiace di sé. Al supermercato, dove c’è troppa roba da mangiare e nessuno con cui mangiarla. Da Charley, cara vecchia Charley, amica di vecchia data, anche lei una sopravissuta, una veterana di troppe perdite e troppi drink troppo alcolici, una nostalgica inguaribile, un’adorabile lunatica. Al vecchio bar sulla spiaggia, dove alla fine della guerra ci si abbordava con uno sguardo e dove invece adesso tengono un grosso e ipnotizzante televisore. Al tavolo nell’angolo, dove Kenny siede solo: è lo studente a cui sei più affezionato, così giovane, fresco, bello di una bellezza risparmiata dagli sfregi dell’esperienza, dalla stupidità della vecchia. Tra le onde dell’oceano, così grosse che in un attimo potrebbero accalappiarti e porre fine a tutto. A casa, di nuovo in cucina, dove Kenny ora è lì con te e ti chiede cose della vita a cui non sai bene come rispondere, perché non c’è risposta valida alle domande della vita se non vivere giorno per giorno, con coraggio e orgoglio, sprezzanti dell’odio altrui, cercando di riemergere sotto il peso del proprio livore e anche del proprio amore, come fieri guerrieri romani, veterani mai troppo acciaccati per un’altra battaglia. “Un uomo solo” è un romanzo che sa dare tanto parlando poco, un romanzo che non ha paura della rabbia, non ha paura delle etichette e del politicamente scorretto, un romanzo che non si censura perché censurarsi equivarrebbe a mentire. Un romanzo per questo sfacciatamente umano, che sa mettere piccole garze su piccole ferite e insegnare come si frena la commiserazione. « Al cuore della vita c’era un vuoto, una soffitta ». Si può sopravvivere e persino vivere bene con una soffitta nel cuore. L’importante è che resti un buchino, l’importante è che sappiamo confinarla. Perché se non riusciamo ad arginare la soffitta, quella finirà per ingabbiarci, ed è qui che sta la tragedia, è qui che comincia la discesa, quando non sappiamo più vedere che la soffitta ce l’hanno anche gli altri.
“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.I can never make these moments last. I cling to them, but like everything, they fade. I have lived my life on these moments. They pull me back to the present, and I realize that everything is exactly the way it was meant to be.” We all make plans, even sometimes we have moments when the future becomes crystal clear and we can feel brief contentment in the present. George is no different. He has made plans, many plans, beautiful plans, perfect plans that were scattered to the winds by seemingly random events. When we are with the right person our dreams can dovetail together and even the unachievable can seem so possible. An assembly of stars can be seen as mythological creatures and the future can be sketched outside the mind and achieve timbers, doors and windows. Those windows, if you peer out them from the corner of your eye, may even let you see further into your destiny. Jim died.Not some random Jim, not the Jim that was the friend of a friend or the Jim that sold newspapers at the local kiosk. He was the Jim of the past, the present, and the future. It was meant to be. Right?There are two Georges. The one that knows what to say, knows what to do, and the other George of the internal monologue. The truth embracer. The one brimming with hurt and pain. Sometimes he sneaks past the public persona and says exactly what he feels.“Do you think it makes people nasty to be loved? You know it doesn’t! Then why should it make them nice to be loathed? While you’re being persecuted, you hate what’s happening to you, you hate the people who are making it happen; you’re in a world of hate. Why, you wouldn’t recognize love if you met it! You’d suspect love! You’d think there was something behind it—some motive—some trick.” Most of the time it is concealed. It is only when he is teaching at the local college that sometimes the discussion will trip the right buttons and the real George rippling with a chainmail of indignation will throw his voice up at the universe. “George smiles to himself, with entire self-satisfaction. Yes, I am crazy, he thinks. That is my secret; my strength.” He’s not crazy. He’s just bruised and battered. He’s angry and lost. Haunted by memories of what was and what could have been. “The perfect evening...lying down on the couch beside the bookcase and reading himself sleepy...Jim lying opposite him at the other end of the couch, also reading; the two of them absorbed in their books yet so completely aware of each other's presence.”George has moments when the two personas rally together and optimism that is hard to deny comes bubbling to the surface giving him surge of hope that there is time to still formulate a new future. “I am alive, he says to himself, I am alive! And life energy surges hotly through him, and delight, and appetite. How good to be in a body - even this old beat-up carcass - that still has warm blood and live semen and rich marrow and wholesome flesh!” And he still has books even though his relationship with them has changed. They don’t give him the solace that they used to, but they are still living entities that talk to him allbeit usually while on the porcelain throne. “These books have not made George nobler or better or more truly wise. It is just that he likes listening to their voices, the one or the other, according to his mood. He misuses them quite ruthlessly - despite the respectful way he has to talk about them in public - to put him to bed, to take his mind off the hands of the clock, to relax the nagging of his pyloric spasm, to gossip him out of his melancholy, to trigger the conditioned reflexes of his colon.”George still notices the beautiful youths walking around his campus. He even has visions about the local toughs standing on the street corners. ”The scowling youths on the corners see him as a dodderer, no doubt, or at best as a potential score. Yet he still claims a distant kinship with the strength of their young arms and shoulders and loins. For a few bucks he could get any one of them to climb into the car, ride back with him to his house, strip off butch leather jacket, skin-tight levis, shirt and cowboy boots and take part, a naked, sullen young athlete, in the wrestling bout of his pleasure.”But that isn’t what he wants anymore. ”I demand Jim.”We are all really two people. There is the person who speaks for us and there is the person who says what we are really thinking, a constant echo in our head as we puzzle over what we see. We are sometime rather brutal with the outside world, with people. If we are lucky we can keep it contained behind the facade, just keep playing the movie for an audience of one. The horrible thoughts we have, mostly just a bit of catty nonsense, but sometimes vindictively pessimistic give us sardonic pleasure. We smile and we say thank you or aren’t you sweet or we need to do this more often. Sometimes we do mean it, but sometimes the bruised soul within says something quite different from the version of ourselves we present to the world. We are all George. I also read and reviewed Christopher Isherwood's novel Mr. Norris Changes Trains. Click the link My Review of Mr. Norris Changes Trains
What do You think about A Single Man (2001)?
I’d never came across Isherwood in literature (only when Tom Ford’s A Single Man amused me one night on TV did I seek out this particular novella), yet oddly enough I’ve a feeling reading about his life is an integral part of understanding his work. Poignant and humorous, genuine and gentle, Isherwood’s short seems to both intrigue and fascinate with thoughtful, abstract prose, interweaving the life of George; wonderful, broken - a poor soul teetering on the fringes of life after the death of his lover Jim, and his effort and fatigue unmistakably pervade each page with utter sincerity. I wholly enjoyed the movie, finding it both artistically harrowing and moving at times, but although I felt it cleverly translated onto film, I couldn’t help but picture George as two different people. I felt I was reading about a different George as opposed to the one Firth presents on screen (quite beautifully too, might I add). The written ‘Geo’ didn’t seem as sensitive (although equally as quaint) as Firth’s and came across less devastated or ‘torn’ by Jim’s death, and yet Isherwood still perfects the art of narrating a character lumbering through life merely for the sake of ‘being.’ Throughout it does truly seem as though George is using his tenuous relations to hang onto a fragment of life itself, if somewhat subconsciously, merely to grasp a fraction of what it means to ‘move on.’ It put a smile on my face to read and experience the later scenes with both George and Kenny in the water, as ‘water beasts,’ as although I did not feel as strong a feeling of sympathy towards the written George, I did care for him, and it was in these moments that he seemed truly alive; as if the raw flame of living – and life itself – had been rekindled for him once again, which makes the ending all the more poignant and unsettling. Despite initial doubts, I was oddly touched by this novella, and found it hard to let go of afterwards. I do find Isherwood’s prose to be hauntingly superb, and shall look for more of his work. Meanwhile, ‘A Single Man’ is awarded a firm four.“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.I can never make these moments last. I cling to them, but like everything, they fade. I have lived my life on these moments. They pull me back to the present, and I realize that everything is exactly the way it was meant to be.”
—April
I aspire. It's listed as being 192 pages long, but I swear it's because the edition I read had fifty words a page with three inch margins an every side.It's so economical it is more or less mind-blowing.If my desire to express whimsy came from Terry Pratchett and P.G. Wodehouse, and my inclination to be daring and irreverent came from David Foster Wallace and Stephen King—If my unruly imagination came from Bill Watterson, and my eye for alienation from Susan Cooper—If my lust for scale came from J.R.R. Tolkien, and James Clavell and Robert Jordan—And if my visions of other worlds came from Isaac Asimov, and Ray Bradbury, and Robert A. Heinlein—Then my taste for lyrical, emotive, yet still ecumenical prose came from Christopher Isherwood.Every line a honed blade. With every word the keen edge, effortlessly slicing, slicing, slicing, until the ribbons of you it leaves behind reveal the images and the feelings and the insight he'd woven into his words from the beginning.Oh, how I aspire.How I try so very hard to come close to what he's done in this novel. To how he's done it.An entire day in the life of a human man. A single man, during which his life and all that it means and all it has come to spreads open for you like a night bloom, a secret between you and the moon, to look upon it and see what's inside.He wrote it in something like two weeks. And it's wonderful, and heartbreaking, and now a passenger in my body—a lens over my eyes, the better for me to compare my labors against his.For me to remember how he created so much with so little.Probably the greatest influence on my writing, and the bar against which I measure all literature, not just LGBT lit.Flawless.(view spoiler)[As is the film by former chief designer of house Gucci, Tom Ford. It is transcendent, and its beauty is matched only by its grief. (hide spoiler)]
—julio
An astounding piece of work; a day in the life of novel. The day belongs to George Falconer; an English professor in his 50s (English by nationality as well) teaching in southern California. It is set in the early 1960s. George’s lover Jim has recently died suddenly and he is alone again. The novel takes us from waking to breakfast, to travelling to work and so on. This doesn’t have the grandiosity of Joyce; it is much more straightforward and focuses living each day because of life’s brevity. The novel is about loss, but it is also about being an outsider (in this case gay, a foreigner, middle-aged, alone); most of all it is about being human and we share George’s day, his hopes and fears. The interactions with Charlotte and Kenny are wonderfully poignant (and very funny). The prose is beautiful. Some stream of consciousness novels can be hard work, but this one just flows; it could so easily have become sentimental because of the focus on loss, but it does not. The everyday occurrences are well described; dinner with a friend, teaching class (George’s interior monologue is wonderful), a flirtation, swimming in the sea (admittedly only everyday if you live near it!) and the normal activities of all our lives; even driving a car.Isherwood is really asking “How do we live?” “How do we get through life?” There are no answers but the ending is truly great and you will you a long way to find a better one in literature. Isherwood not only describes being alone well, he also captures being in a relationship with another;“The perfect evening...lying down on the couch beside the bookcase and reading himself sleepy...Jim lying opposite him at the other end of the couch, also reading; the two of them absorbed in their books yet so completely aware of each other's presence.”The descriptions of the physical geography of the house, as it is lived in alone and the contrast with two people living in the same small space is just brilliant. This is just a great novel and I would urge everyone to read it. There is a certain level of melancholy, but there is warmth, hope and great humanity.
—Paul
