Christopher Isherwood - A Single Man

‘I didn’t notice you doing much talking. I don’t think you opened your mouth once.’

‘I was watching you. . . . No kidding, I think Lois is right! You let us ramble on, and then you straighten us out, and I’m not saying you don’t teach us a lot of interesting stuff – you do – but you never tell us all you know about something —’

George feels flattered and excited. Kenny has never talked to him like this before. He can’t resist slipping into the role Kenny so temptingly offers him.

‘Well – maybe that’s true; up to a point. . . . You see, Kenny, there are some things you don’t even know you know, until you’re asked.’

They have reached the tennis courts. The courts are all in use, now; dotted with moving figures. But George, with the lizard-quick glance of a veteran addict, has already noted that the morning’s pair has left, and that none of these players are physically attractive. On the nearest court, a fat middle-aged faculty member is playing to work up a sweat, against a girl with hair on her legs.

‘Someone has to ask you a question,’ George continues, meaningly, ‘before you can answer it. But it’s so seldom you find anyone who’ll ask the right questions. Most people aren’t that much interested —’

Kenny is silent. Is he thinking this over? Is he going to ask George something right now? George’s pulse quickens with anticipation.

‘It’s not that I want to be cagey,’ he says, keeping his eyes on the ground and making this as impersonal as he can. ‘You know, Kenny, so often I feel I want to tell things, discuss things, absolutely frankly. I don’t mean in class, of course – that wouldn’t work. Someone would be sure to misunderstand —’

Silence. George glances quickly up at Kenny and sees that he’s looking, though without any apparent interest, at the hirsute girl. Perhaps he hasn’t even been listening. It’s impossible to tell.

‘Maybe this friend of Lois’s didn’t see God, after all,’ says Kenny abruptly. ‘I mean, he might have been kidding himself. I mean, not too long after he took the stuff, he had a breakdown. He was locked up for three months in an institution. He told Lois that while he was having this breakdown he turned into a devil, and he could put out stars. I’m not kidding! He said he could put out seven of them at a time. He was scared of the police, though. He said the police had a machine for catching devils and liquidating them. It was called a MO-machine – MO, that’s OM – you know, Sir, that Indian word for God – spelled backwards.’

‘If the police liquidated devils, that would mean they were angels, wouldn’t it? Well, that, certainly makes sense. A place where the police are angels has to be an insane asylum.’

Kenny is still laughing loudly at this when they reach the bookshop. He wants to buy a pencil sharpener. They have them in plastic covers; red or green or blue or yellow. Kenny takes a red one.

‘What was it you wanted to get, Sir?’

‘Well, nothing, actually.’

‘You mean, you walked all the way down here just to keep me company?’

‘Sure. Why not?’

Kenny seems sincerely surprised and pleased. ‘Well, I think you deserve something for that! Here, Sir, take one of these. It’s on me.’

‘Oh, but – well, thank you!’ George is actually blushing a little. It’s as if he has been offered a rose. He chooses a yellow sharpener.

Kenny grins: ‘I kind of expected you’d pick blue.’

‘Why?’

‘Isn’t blue supposed to be spiritual?’

‘What makes you think I want to be spiritual? And how come you picked red?’

‘What’s red stand for?’

‘Rage and lust.’

‘No kidding?’

They remain silent, grinning almost intimately. George feels that, even if all this double talk hasn’t brought them any closer to understanding each other, the not-understanding, the readiness to remain at cross-purposes, is in itself a kind of intimacy. Then Kenny pays for the pencil sharpeners, and waves his hand with a gesture which implies casual undeferential dismissal, ‘I’ll see you around.’

He strolls away. George lingers on in the bookshop for a few minutes, lest he should seem to be following him.

If eating is regarded as a sacrament, then the faculty dining-room must be compared to the bleakest and barest of Quaker meeting-houses. No concession, here, to the ritualism of food served snugly and appetisingly in togetherness. This room is an anti-restaurant. It is much too clean, with its chromium and plastic tables; much too tidy, with its brown metal wastebaskets for soiled paper napkins and used paper cups; and, in contrast to the vast human rattle of the students’ dining-room, much too quiet. Its quietness is listless, embarrassed, selfconscious. And the room isn’t even made venerable or at least formidable, like an Oxford or Cambridge high table, by the age of its occupants. Most of these people are relatively young; George is one of the eldest.

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 corporation 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 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.

George goes through into the serving-room. On the counter are steaming casseroles from which the waitresses dish you out stew, vegetables or soup. Or you can have salad, or fruit pie, or a strange deadly-looking jelly which is semi-transparent, with veins of brilliant green. Gazing at one of these jellies, with a kind of unwilling fascination, as though it were something behind glass in a reptile house, is Grant Lefanu, the young physics professor who writes poetry. Grant is the very opposite of glum and he couldn’t be less defeated; George rather loves him. He is small and thin, and has glasses and large teeth and the maddish smile of genuine intellectual passion. You can easily imagine him as one of the terrorists back in Czarist Russia, a hundred years ago. Given the opportunity, he would be that kind of fanatic hero who follows an idea, without the least hesitation and as a matter of course, straight through to its expression in action. The talk of pale burning-eyed students, anarchists and Utopians all, over tea and cigarettes in a locked room long past midnight, is next morning translated, with the literalness of utter innocence, into the throwing of the bomb, the shouting of the proud slogan, the dragging away of the young dreamer-doer, still smiling, to the dungeon and the firing-squad. On Grant’s face you often see such a smile – of embarrassment, almost, at having had to express his meaning so crudely. He is like a shy mumbler who suddenly in desperation speaks much too loud.