Was George Killed for His Sins?

By Russell Williams

"I am a camera with its shutter open" Christopher Isherwood wrote in "Goodbye to Berlin" in 1939. In his latest novel, A Single Man (Simon & Schuster, $4), Isherwood is still a camera with its shutter open. Then he was recording a

two pages.

ful awakening. It ends with him dead-maybe.

number of vignettes that More book reviews on next were interesting not because of his minimal involvement in them but because Germany with its overflowing political activity and mixedup nature was interesting in itself when photographically observed.

NOW ISHERWOOD has put down on his film only a single depressing day in the life of a homosexual English professor who lives and teaches in Southern California.

The book is thankfully short, a mere 186 pages. Isherwood has little to say, but he says it well: His unhero is George; George's single day starts with a pain-

If novelists can be said to have aims always in mind as they write, Isherwood's in this case must have been one of dedicating the book partly to his dead friend, partly to the future.

That is, he kills off George in the book, but he himself goes on living. Was George killed for his sins, which are slight? Not likely. More probably. Isherwood could figure no way out of the friendless dilemma without inviting the reader deeper into the psychic swamps.

One statement is wel1

made, but not well enough

made to justify the whole book: That man gets to run only one lap around the track of life, that what he has learned of a personal nature is generally of no use whatever in influencing the rest of his life and the lives of others.