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410 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1945
Opposite me, in a big arm-chair, sat Arthur, with a thin, dark, sulky-looking girl on his lap. He had taken off his coat and waistcoat and looked most domestic. He wore gaudily-striped braces. His shirt-sleeves were looped up with elastic bands. Except for a little hair round the base of the skull, he was perfectly bald.
“What on earth have you done with it?” I exclaimed. “You’ll catch cold.”
“The idea was not mine, William. Rather a graceful tribute, don’t you think, to the Iron Chancellor?”
He seemed in much better spirits now than earlier in the evening, and, strangely enough, not at all drunk. He had a remarkably strong head. Looking up, I saw the wig perched rakishly on Bismarck’s helmet. It was too big for him.
She was wearing the same black dress today, but without the cape. Instead, she had a little white collar and white cuffs. They produced a kind of theatrically chaste effect, like a nun in grand opera.
ISHERWOOD
The man in A Single Man is a stoic, a very back-to-the-wall character . . .I really admire the sort of person that George is: It isn’t me at all. Here is somebody who really has nothing to support him except a kind of gradually waning animal vitality, and yet he fights, like a badger, and goes on demanding, fighting for happiness. That attitude I think rather magnificent. If I were in George’s place, I would think about killing myself because I’m less than George. George is heroic.
INTERVIEWER
Would you write more about homosexuality if you were starting out now as a writer?
ISHERWOOD
Yes, I’d write about it a great deal. It is an exceedingly interesting subject, and I couldn’t, or I thought I couldn’t, go into it. It’s interesting because it’s so much more than just “homosexuality”; it’s very precious in a way, however inconvenient it may be. You see things from a different angle, and you see how everything is changed thereby.
This morning, as I was walking down the Bülowstrasse, the Nazis were raiding the house of a small liberal pacifist publisher. They had brought a lorry and were piling it with the publisher's books. The driver of the lorry mockingly read out the titles of the books to the crowd: "
Nie Wieder Krieg! he shouted, holding up one of them by the corner of the cover, disgustedly, as though it were a nasty kind of reptile. Everybody roared with laughter.
"'No More War!'" echoed a fat, well-dressed woman, with a scornful, savage laugh. "What an idea!"
I will end here, with the sheer pleasure of reading Isherwood's prose.
His body became a tropical island on which they were snugly marooned in the midst of snowbound Berlin.