On a Street Corner, Alive

“It will be quite a good Christmas, the merchants predict. Everyone can afford to spend at least something, except, maybe, some of the young hustlers (recognizable at once to experienced eyes like George’s) who stand scowling on the street corners or staring into shops with the maximum of peripheral vision.

“George is very far, right now, from sneering at any of these fellow creatures. They may be crude and mercenary and dull and low, but he is proud, is glad, is almost indecently gleeful to be able to stand up and be counted in their ranks — the ranks of that marvelous minority, The Living. They don’t know their luck, these people on the sidewalk, but George knows his — for a little while at least — because he is freshly returned from the icy presence of The Majority, which Doris is about to join. 

“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! 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, shirt and cowboy boots and take part — a naked, sullen young athlete — in the wrestling bout of his pleasure. But George doesn’t want the bought unwilling bodies of these boys. He wants to rejoice in his own body — the tough triumphant body of a survivor. The body that has outlived Jim and is going to outlive Doris.”

— Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man, 1964

Visiting an Art Guru

Very Alert, Very Still

“Life isn’t ‘about’ air raids, swamis, love affairs, places, deeds done or undone — those are only the shapes of the letters in which the message is written. To read the message, that’s all that matters. But how? By being very alert, very still. By holding your breath and listening, always, everywhere, in the midst of this earsplitting uproar.”

— Christopher Isherwood’s diary, Sept. 20, 1944

The Four Faces of a Single Man

 “I did get the conception clear which Gerald often speaks of — of looking over the Ego’s shoulder while it’s jumping about.

“Useful to think of that part of my will which wants this way of life as a research worker, fallible but serious-minded. The research worker has to share his study with Maggie, his lisping, cute little daughter; Grandfather Chips, his miserly, selfish old parent; and Libido, an immense gorilla who, when aroused, can be really dangerous, but who spends most of his time snarling, or bolting his food, or snoring, or nastily playing with himself. 

“The research worker tries to concentrate, while Maggie dances about, prattling of her exploits, and Grandfather Chips fusses over his money and plans to get more. Sometimes he has to intervene to restrain the gorilla, who is apt to smash up all the furniture, and overturn the work bench with his apparatus…”

“Remember, every word spoken to another human being is spoken in the presence of these four. They all hear it, and make a note of the information, privately planning to use it for their own purposes, when the opportunity offers.”

— Christopher Isherwood’s diary, July 16, 1941

Horror of the Fog Queens

Christopher Isherwood recalled a London cab ride with Bill Caskey and Tennessee Williams in 1948. 

“It is foggy, and Tennessee exclaims, ‘We are the dreaded fog queens!’ and utters his screaming laugh,” Isherwood wrote in his Lost Years memoir. 

“Whereupon all three of them begin to elaborate on the fantasy — how the respectable citizens shudder and slam their shutters and cross themselves as the dreaded fog queens ride by, and how one darling little boy disregards their warnings and looks out of the window and sees the fog queens and they are absolutely beautiful, so he shouts to them and begs them to take him with them, and they do, and he is never heard from again.”

Christopher Isherwood: The One Who Was

'Lost Youth' by Deng Chengwen

“And now, before I slip back into the convention of calling this young man ‘I,’ let me consider him as a separate being, a stranger almost, setting out on this adventure in a taxi to the docks. For, of course, he is almost a stranger to me. I have revised his opinions, changed his accent and his mannerisms, unlearned or exaggerated his prejudices and his habits. We still share the same skeleton, but its outer covering has altered so much I doubt if he would recognize me on the street. We have in common the label of our name, and a continuity of consciousness that I am I. But what I am has refashioned itself throughout the days and years, until now almost all that remains constant is the mere awareness of being conscious. And that awareness belongs to everybody; it isn’t a particular person.

“The Christopher who sat in that taxi is, practically speaking, dead; he only remains reflected in the fading memories of us who knew him. I can’t revitalize him now. I can only reconstruct him from his remembered acts and words and from the writings he has left us. He embarrasses me often, and so I’m tempted to sneer at him, but I will try not to. I’ll try not to apologize for him, either. After all, I owe him some respect. In a sense he is my father, and in another sense my son.”

— Christopher Isherwood, whose close observation of the man in the mirror evokes for me a Buddhist sense of the ephemerality of self.

In the Faculty Dining Room

In the Faculty Dining Room: “Christ, it is sad, sad to see on quite a few of these faces — young ones particularly — a glum, defeated look. Why do they feel this way about their lives? Sure, they are underpaid. Sure, they have no great prospects, in the commercial sense. Sure, they can’t enjoy the bliss of mingling with corporate executives. But isn’t it any consolation to be with students who are still three-quarters alive? Isn’t it some satisfaction to be of use, instead of helping to turn out useless consumer goods? Isn’t it something to know that you belong to one of the few professions in this country which isn’t hopelessly corrupt?

“For these glum ones, apparently not. They should like out, if they dared try. But they have prepared themselves for this job, and now they have got to go through with it. They have wasted the time in which they should have been learning to cheat and grab and lie. They have cut themselves off from the majority — the middlemen, the hucksters, the promoters —by laboriously acquiring all this dry, discredited knowledge — discredited, that is to say, by the middleman, because he can get along without it. All the middleman wants are its products, its practical applications. These professors are suckers, he says. What’s the use of knowing something if you don’t make money out of it? And the glum ones more than half agree with him and feel privately ashamed of not being smart and crooked.”

— Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man

Isherwood: Forget Success, Forget Failure

From a 1939 diary entry. Author Christopher Isherwood practiced Vedanta.

One Morning in the Faculty Dining Room

Painting by Cheryl Ratcliff

In the Faculty Dining Room: “Christ, it is sad, sad to see, on quite a few of these faces — young ones particularly — a glum defeated look. Why do they feel this way about their lives? Sure, they are underpaid. Sure, they have no great prospects, in the commercial sense. Sure, they can’t enjoy the bliss of mingling with corporate executives. But isn’t it any consolation to be with students who are still three-quarters alive? Isn’t it some tiny satisfaction to be of use, instead of helping to turn out useless consumer goods? Isn’t it something to know that you belong to one of the few professions in this country which isn’t hopelessly corrupt?

“For these glum ones, apparently not. They would like out, if they dared try. But they have prepared themselves for this job and now they have to go through with it. They have wasted the time in which they should have been learning to cheat and grab and lie. They have cut themselves off from the majority — the middlemen, the hucksters, the promoters — by laboriously acquiring all this dry, discredited knowledge; discredited, that is to say, by the middleman, because he can get along without it. All the middleman wants are its products, its practical applications. These professors are suckers, he says. What’s the use of knowing something if you don’t make money out of it? And the glum ones more than half agree with him, and fell privately ashamed of not being smart and crooked.”

— Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man

Yellow Star and Pink Triangle

Fighting homophobia in the 1980s, Gore Vidal cited author Christopher Isherwood’s encounter with a young Jewish Hollywood producer. “After all, Hitler killed 600,000 homosexuals,” Isherwood argued. Unimpressed, the producer snapped, “But Hitler killed six million Jews.”

“What are you?” replied Isherwood. “In real estate?”

Vidal’s editor Barbara Epstein told him, “The Jewish situation is in no way analogous to that of homosexuals.” Vidal replied, “Well, Hitler felt otherwise.”

Vidal’s point was that gays, Jews and blacks all suffered precisely the same kind of unprovoked persecution. “I would suggest that the three despised minorities join forces in order not to be destroyed,” Vidal said.

—   Source: “Gore Vidal: A Biography” by Fred Kaplan

The Art of Narcissism

A portrait by David Hockney

By Dan Hagen

Before Tuesday dawned I finally finished Peter Parker’s 729-page biography of Christopher Isherwood, the English novelist who turned narcissism into an art form. 

That sounds like an insult, but isn’t meant to be — merely an accurate description of what Isherwood did with this life, and quite a feat when you think about it.

Not many people could win fame and fortune by writing about nothing but themselves, and he was able to do it only because he was a wonderful writer who could, through the medium of the personal, remind his readers with specificity what it’s like to be alive.

Isherwood was both endearing and, like most of us, strangely unfair and unsympathetic at times. His kindly mother Kathleen was a focal point for his resentment. He seemed to have some grievance against her that remained invisible to the rest of the world.

Isherwood finally found an enduring love with a much-younger companion, the American artist Don Bachardy. He’s gazing at Bachardy here in a portrait by the artist David Hockney. Life may have been a cabaret for them, after all (although Isherwood hated that musical based on his Berlin stories, if not the money and fame it brought him).

Now it’s on to a biography of Isherwood’s genial mentor, the English novelist E.M. Forster.

The Big Picture

Christopher Isherwood

Every time you desire, or fear, or hate; every time you boast or indulge your vanity; every time you struggle to get something for yourself, you are really asserting: “I am a separate, unique individual, I stand apart from everything else in this universe.” … Try to overcome this possessive attitude towards your actions. Stop taking credit for your successes. Stop bemoaning your failures, and making excuses for them. Stop worrying so much about results. Just do the best you can. Work for work’s sake.

— The English author Christopher Isherwood, from a 1939 diary entry quoted in Isherwood by Peter Parker

Supermarket at Night

Art by Andy Warhol

The supermarket is still open. It won’t close till midnight. It is brilliantly bright. Its brightness offers sanctuary from loneliness and the dark. You could spend hours of your life here, in a state of suspended insecurity, meditating on the multiplicity of things to eat. Oh dear, there is so much! So many brands in shiny boxes, all of them promising you good appetite. Every article on the shelves cries out to you, take me, take me; and the mere competition of their appeals can make you imagine yourself wanted, even loved. But beware — when you get back to your empty room, you’ll find that the false flattering self of the advertisement has eluded you; what remains is only cardboard, cellophane and food. And you have lost the heart to be hungry.

This bright place isn’t really a sanctuary. For, ambushed among its bottles and cartons and cans, are shockingly vivid memories of meals shopped for, cooked, eaten with Jim. They stab out at George as he passes, pushing his shopping-cart. Should we ever feel truly lonely if we never ate alone?

— Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man, 1964

Attention Must Be Paid (For)

By Dan Hagen 

Over the course of months, I’ve become increasingly convinced of the underrated existential importance of the simple act of shifting your attention.

For example, this morning I awoke before dawn, started the coffee and read a front page newspaper article about further cuts in higher education to be caused by the state’s terrible finances. I immediately began to worry, to feel threatened, even though nothing had objectively changed from my situation a few moments before.

Then I took my beagle and book to the sofa and found my place on page 97 in the biography of the British author Christopher Isherwood. Within mere moments, I was cheerfully absorbed.

Again, nothing had objectively changed for me, but now I was learning something — in this case, about life as another had lived it — and that alone made my clinging worries vanish like a mist in sunlight.

In our new century, we are trained by our tools to seek constant digital stimulation, a practice that shortens our attention spans and leaves us open — vulnerable — to millions of messages that may not do us any good at all.

We are under constant digital bombardment. The digital media seeks “eyeballs.” Our eyeballs. We shouldn’t sell them so cheaply.

Our attention colors the world, and yet we usually pay no attention to it. Start. Do. Shift your attention.

The Colors of the World

Painting by David Hockney

By Dan Hagen

At Barnes and Noble Saturday, I bought a biography of David Hockney by Christopher Simon Sykes. Shyly but firmly, from childhood on, Hockney recognized and defended his own unique vividness, polishing it into a mirror that reflected the full colors of the world of his times. 

Arriving in LA breathless as a virtually unknown British artist, he was almost immediately dining and conversing with the famous writer Christopher Isherwood and Jack Larson, TV’s Jimmy Olsen of the 1950s. I love finding out about that kind of pleasant strangeness in life.