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This chapter examines what Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel A Single Man becomes for 2009, how it remembers gay identity in the early 1960s, and how it imagines the “epistemology of the closet” for its current moment’s sexual politics—a pivotal moment when gay and lesbian citizens live between cultural acknowledgment and acceptance. In particular, it analyzes fashion designer Tom Ford’s film adaptation of A Single Man and how it thinks back on the novel, how it reflects its own historical moment, and what the intersection of those coordinates locates. Before discussing how Ford takes up Isherwood’s meanings and transforms them in and for the cinema, the chapter considers how the movie was immediately understood, for its reception speaks to the persistence of stereotypes about gay men that the film seeks to undermine. It argues that the heart of the political matter in Ford’s film is the acknowledgment of love, not just the validation of sexual desire for “deviant” object choices.

This chapter examines how Christopher Isherwood worked through grief while writing multiple drafts of the novel that was to become A Single Man. Isherwood wrote the drafts during a particularly turbulent period in his relationship with his lover Don Bachardy, in which a breakup seemed imminent. In these drafts, he recounts a journey from shock to resignation, as he contemplates the loss of his beloved life partner. Engaging in an artistic process that parallels the psychoanalytic process Sigmund Freud alludes to in “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through,” Isherwood proceeds from pain and incomprehension through an increasing understanding of personal crisis and novelistic potential to ultimate insight and artistic realization. In contemplating the loss of love, Isherwood recalls and works through multiple previous losses—the loss of innocence, of homeland, of youth. Thus he comes to confront the ultimate loss, that of life itself.

This chapter examines the influence of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway on Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel A Single Man. In his diary in the early 1960s, Isherwood unquestionably praises Woolf’s novel as “one of the most truly beautiful novels or prose poems or whatever that I have ever read. It is prose written with absolute pitch, a perfect ear. You could perform it with instruments. Could I write a book like that and keep within the nature of my own style? I’d love to try.” That Isherwood was rereading Mrs. Dalloway while beginning to compose A Single Man suggests a more profound connection between his and Woolf’s work than his later remark indicates. In their efforts to speak the truth in their novels, Woolf and Isherwood convey a shared political aesthetic philosophy that literature can articulate a counterdiscourse to the social proscriptions against same-sex desire and public mourning when this love is lost.

This chapter reads Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel A Single Man and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway as well as James Doolin’s paintings of Los Angeles in order to show how aesthetics relates to social and political reality and the ethical relation between ourselves and the environment. Through the lens of a single man, Isherwood challenges his readers, in a manner that metaphysical systems of thought also do, to understand the relation of all of the parts to a larger whole—both the larger whole of the novel and the world it represents. Isherwood delineates difference in sexuality with difference in economies and their consequent temporalities. Both A Single Man and Mrs. Dalloway realistically represent the failure of a collective relation between the subjective and the social.

This chapter examines Christopher Isherwood’s treatment of the realities of multiculturalism and multiethnicity in his 1964 novel A Single Man. Isherwood’s novel takes place on the campus of San Tomas State College, the fictional locale of Los Angeles State College (now California State University at Los Angeles). Isherwood wrote A Single Man after having spent several terms teaching at various colleges and universities in Southern California. More than any other teaching experience, Isherwood drew on his year at Los Angeles State for his portrait of college life in A Single Man. His depiction of minorities in the novel is progressive; he calls for acknowledgment and discussion of diversity. Aside from showing the life two gay men such as Isherwood and Don Bachardy built together and what they endured in mid-century America, A Single Man teaches us an approach to diversity as an opportunity rather than a problem.

This chapter discusses how Christopher Isherwood used the metaphor of “secret agent” or “spy” to express his message to his gay or “queer” readers. The metaphor was presented in his novel A Single Man. This novel can be compared with Ian Fleming’s Bond series. Both depict a sense of “foreignness” and “anonymity.” Isherwood argued that his novels promote universal themes yet his use of the metaphor manifested his advocacy for the rights of homosexuals.

This chapter relates Christopher Isherwood’s novel A Single Man to E. M. Forster’s 1913 homosexual fiction Maurice. In the documentary film Chris & Don: A Love Story (2007), home movies show a young-looking Isherwood and a boyish Don Bachardy in swimsuits at Will Rogers State Beach in the early 1950s. That footage operates in the film as the locus of the pair’s trysting. Out of their surfside camaraderie on a sunny beach grew a friendship that turned amorous and lasted until Isherwood’s death in 1986. In a 1915 critique, Lytton Strachey expressed doubt about whether the relationship between the two lovers in Forster’s novel, Maurice Hall and Alec Scudder, would last half a year, much less a lifetime. This chapter argues that such a relationship could and did last.