Alan Hollinghurst, the prize-winning UK novelist, once said that, after reading hundreds of English novels that featured only straight characters, it occurred to him to write one in which almost all the male characters were gay. The result was The Swimming-Pool Library, published in 1988. It was an immediate and sensational success, and Hollinghurst has since followed it up with four more novels with a similar focus — The Folding Star (1994), The Spell (1998), The Line of Beauty (2004), winner of the UK’s Man Booker Prize, and most recently The Stranger’s Child (2011).
This last book has been perceived by some critics as an attempt by Hollinghurst to join the fictional mainstream — it certainly contains both more straight characters and more women. But, treating as it does a poem penned 100 years ago by Cecil Valance, an aristocratic young man of ambiguous sexuality, and then following his reputation, and the fortunes of his and other families, down into the 21st century, the gay theme remains crucial, if at times submerged.
Hollinghurst is currently on a tour of China, Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand.
Photo Courtesy of Pan Macmillan
Bradley Winterton: Do you construct the whole plot of a novel before you start writing it?
Alan Hollinghurst: Pretty much so, yes. I’ve always wanted to have a fairly clear idea of what’s going to happen. It would be deadly, of course, if every detail were fixed beforehand, but having a plot complete at least in outline gives me a welcome sense of security. Books grow, however. The Stranger’s Child ended up being twice as long as I’d originally envisaged.
BW: In his review of that novel in The New York Review of Books, Daniel Mendelsohn talked about the gay as an inevitable and permanent outsider, and wondered whether you were abandoning this perspective in favor of a cozier relationship with upper-class life. What do you think of that?
AH: Permanent outsiders — you mean we have to have sex out of doors? [Laughs]. Well, that wasn’t untrue in past times. Nick and Leo do it in The Line of Beauty and so do George and Cecil in The Stranger’s Child. I think my books tend to be critical of the upper-class world, which is often brutal, futile, and of course self-preserving. As for outsiders, they’re useful to the novelist as observers who, like Nick in The Line of Beauty, enter an unfamiliar milieu and register its characteristics for the first time.
As for changing my perspective, some readers no doubt want you to keep on writing the same sort of novels again and again. But every book’s a new beginning, and they accumulate in mysterious ways. The Stranger’s Child, for instance, could be said to begin by indulging the reader’s fantasy of a pre-Great War [World War I] world, and as the book goes on progressively dismantles it. Ambivalence is an important aspect of that book — I was nostalgic for past eras but at the same time glad not to be living in them. Mendelsohn is perceptive in many ways, but there’s something about fiction that eludes him, I think. He repeatedly describes my work as allegory and satire, which makes it unrecognizable to me. A good novel conveys the moral complexity of life as it is, and that’s something rather different.
BW: Sexual promiscuity and comedy seem to be related in your books. Are they?
AH: Well, there are often farcical aspects to the adventures of monomaniacal searchers after sex. Edward in The Folding Star is in the grip of the impulse, leading him into some absurd situations. It seemed to me from the start that comedy would be a necessary ingredient if you were going to write in any detail about the sexual life. It became less of a preoccupation later, and indeed in The Stranger’s Child much more is left to the reader’s imagination. Both readers and characters are involved in a degree of uncertainty — did Cecil and Daphne sleep together? No one’s ever quite sure.
(The Swimming-Pool Library was always going to be a hard act to follow. But Hollinghurst succeeded with The Folding Star, simultaneously a love story and an unraveling of Belgian history under Fascist occupation. After this came The Spell, a very different novel containing among other things material based on the London clubbing scene of the 1990s.)
BW: Did you ever work as a private tutor in Belgium, as Edward Manners does in The Folding Star?
AH: No. I went there on a short trip once, in the middle of winter, and was instantly fascinated by its atmosphere.
BW: Not many English writers have dealt with Belgium, have they?
AH: No. It’s just Charlotte Bronte and me really! But the fin de siecle was a fascinating time there, and it was an era when England and Belgium had a great deal of cultural contact. I don’t name the city I set the book in. It’s not entirely Bruges — some aspects of it are, but others not.
BW: I got the impression that the book’s middle section, set in England, was included because the Belgian material wasn’t long enough.
AH: Oh no. The English part was important to the book’s structure from the beginning. I’d always wanted a faster inner section to off-set the more contemplative Belgian chapters. But it all seems a long time ago now. Do you know, I haven’t re-read The Swimming-Pool Library, for example, for 20 years.
BW: Do you expect to set any more novels abroad?
AH: I don’t have any expectations really. Most of The Folding Star was set abroad, and The Swimming-Pool Library has an important colonial vignette, though in essence it’s very English. But embarking on The Folding Star I felt the need to get away from England. It would take a strong imaginative compulsion for me to set another novel abroad. But you never know.
BW: I used to think you had difficulty with your endings, but now I think they’re masterly. But they’re uniformly dark, albeit at the same time questioning.
AH: You’re right. I think the situation is that I tend to have a lot of plot resolution just before the end, and then the ending itself is a sort of coda, which leaves many things in the air — it opens the prescribed world of the book to the real world of infinite possibilities.
BW: Do you have a favorite among your books?
AH: Perhaps The Spell. It was the least successful critically and commercially, but it was written during a happy time in my life. Its particularly English ironical tone wasn’t picked up in the States at all. But I’d become unhappy about the plot element in my first two books — the past uncovered through the discovery of documents, and so on. So I wanted to write a novel without a plot, but with a design, as it were, and no large historical parallels to the present-day love-tangles.
(Hollinghurst didn’t publish The Swimming-Pool Library until 1988, when he was 34. But he’d long had an interest in gay writing, as his Oxford University MPhil degree, on three English novelists as viewed from a homosexual perspective, demonstrates.)
BW: You wrote a postgraduate thesis at Oxford on Ronald Firbank, E.M. Forster and L.P. Hartley as essentially gay novelists. Have you ever thought of publishing this?
AH: I did try long ago but nothing came of it. That approach to writers was quite novel in the mid-1970s, but today you see it everywhere, so perhaps the time for publication is past. I think the section dealing with Firbank was the most interesting.
BW: You included film of him being pursued by Italian street boys in The Swimming-Pool Library. Does such film really exist?
AH: Unfortunately not. A similar incident is related by Lord Berners, the only friend Firbank had in his last days in Rome, and I took it from that. Having the event captured on film was a sort of wish-fulfillment on my part.
BW: And E.M. Forster?
AH: I’ve brought some Forster with me as I’m about to review his never-before-seen diaries. I’ve just been re-reading A Passage to India — for the first time in 30 years. I was relieved to find it really is a masterpiece.
BW: John Bayley was your supervisor for that thesis, wasn’t he? I met him and Iris Murdoch in Bangkok in 1995.
AH: Yes. John was wonderfully stimulating, if rather vague on the technical requirements for writing a thesis. A friend and I were renting [UK poet] Andrew Motion’s Oxford house at that time, and Iris came without John to our housewarming party. She was the first person to arrive and both kind and intimidating. A.N. Wilson’s description of the party in Iris Murdoch as I Knew Her is impressionistic at best.
BW: I saw something online recently speculating on Tennyson’s gay relationship with Arthur Hallam [the subject of his long poem In Memoriam]. Do you think there are a lot of other classic English writers waiting to be “outed” like this?
AH: No, I think we’ve done the outing. Of course there’s always [Henry] James.
BW: What about T.S. Eliot?
AH: Well, there’s so much we don’t know about Eliot. Maybe one day we’ll find out.
(Hollinghurst’s novels contain the fruit of a great deal of research into gay life in the UK in past decades. Indeed, taken together they almost constitute a history of the British gay experience during the 20th century.)
BW: You’ve said that gays are more widely accepted in the UK today than when you started writing. Has there been a downside to this?
AH: Not really. In fact I find it hugely welcome. I’d so much rather live in the liberal present than in the periods I write about. But at every turn there are unexpected consequences, or developments. Take “Grindr” [a geosocial networking application that allows its gay members, wherever they happen to be, to see which other members are nearby] for instance. It alters social life at a stroke, by-passing bars and similar places we used to rely on to make contact. In London, gay bars are closing down as a result. It’s fascinating how much even the private life is being changed by machines.
BW: How about gays as natural pacifists? Alan Bennett wrote a play recently, The Habit of Art, about Benjamin Britten and W.H. Auden, who could fall into that category.
AH: Yes, I saw that. It had scenes like brilliant revue sketches, but I found it a muddle as a whole. Auden spent his whole life being quotable, whereas no one can particularly remember anything Britten said, and his dilemma is consequently much harder to dramatize.
BW: You mentioned in an interview once having had a long relationship with someone. Do you find yourself more creative in such a situation or when you’re alone?
AH: It’s hard to get on with a big project when you’re one of a couple. I wrote The Line of Beauty during a trans-Atlantic affair. We were often apart, and so times of frantic excitement alternated with long periods of solitude. In many ways this was the ideal writing situation for me. Solitude is something I need in order to work in any protracted way.
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