helen sandler |
journalism
Alan
Hollinghurst
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The Line
of Beauty The author of The
Swimming-Pool Library has returned to the 1980s for his fourth novel. Alan
Hollinghurst talks to Helen Sandler about Margaret Thatcher, al-fresco sex
and turning 50 In his neat north London
flat overlooking Hampstead Heath, Alan Hollinghurst is exhibiting discreet
signs of excitement. The cause is a shiny new hardback book, his first for
six years: The Line of Beauty, which has just been printed. He shows me the
jacket photograph – a curly wrought-iron railing that illustrates the
title – and we agree it is a fine cover. Then he puts it down on a low
antique chair and we agree it looks rather lovely against the blue upholstery
and should perhaps be exhibited there on a permanent basis. It is only afterwards that
I realise we agreed about everything. Hollinghurst is, at least on first
meeting, an agreeable kind of chap. But as his engrossing new book confirms
once again, he is also a sharp chronicler of English social mores, from the
gay blind date in a London pub to the silver wedding of a Tory MP. He has a deep, resonant
voice with a terribly nice accent and a modest authority but which, as I find
when I play back my recording, exactly matches the frequency of tape hiss.
Hollinghurst’s more emphatic phrases rise above the hiss and one of
them is: “Gay Times is essential to this book, it couldn’t happen
without it.” The reason is that the
book’s main character, Nick Guest, meets his first ever gay lay through
an ad in these hallowed pages in 1983. We find him lodging in the family home
of Conservative minister Gerald Fedden (having gone to Oxford University with
Fedden’s son Toby) and fucking his date, Leo, in the exclusive
keyholders’ park behind the house. “I wanted someone who started
out as an innocent, who could be corrupted by the circles in which he found
himself,” says the author. At home, Nick is sucked
into the hypocritical world of the Fedden family and their rich and greedy
friends. He dances with the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, at the
Feddens’ silver wedding, but is later annoyed by the suggestion that he
voted Conservative. He is open about being gay, yet both the relationships he
has in the course of the novel have to be kept secret for different reasons.
“He’s a classic character, morally ambiguous,” says his
creator. With Nick’s second boyfriend, Wani (son of a retail tycoon),
life is depressingly decadent: they snort coke, pick up strangers at the
Hampstead Heath Men’s Pond and avoid all talk of love. What was it like to write a
book in which no one is ever sincere, even when they want to be?
“Emotionally strange,” is the answer. “It was much more
difficult than writing the other books: because it has a cast of nasty
characters… but also because it is an alien social landscape.” The book opens where his
first, The Swimming-Pool Library, left off, in 1983, because Hollinghurst had
not touched on the politics of the Thatcher years and had unresolved feelings
about the decade. “They were such horrible
times in some respects,” he says. “I remember feeling terribly at
odds with things that were being done ‘in my name’ by the
government. But it was a very comfortable period for me – I suddenly
found I had a lot of money.” He laughs, at his good fortune or his own
bluntness. “I couldn’t possibly complain it had been a difficult
time for me personally, even though I was acutely aware that it was a
terrible time for millions of other people. There was that sense of society
being allowed to – being encouraged to – fall apart.” He also felt ready to write
about AIDS for the first time. But what are we to make of Nick, who sees his
old flame in the pub and fails to speak to him because he looks so ill?
“I’m terribly interested by this question,” says the author,
as if he isn’t sure himself. Some of his friends who read the book
before publication have loathed Nick from the start, others find him
sympathetic. Hollinghurst feels he has failed if the reader has no sympathy
with the character, as he has tried to show him from the inside, his
strengths as well as his weaknesses. “I like this idea of a kind of
Rake’s Progress,” he adds. The book contains some
highly charged erotic scenes, not least the first one, when Nick and Leo bonk
in the bushes. Hollinghurst has always included sex in his books and this has
had an odd effect on how he is seen by straight reviewers, who often seem to
think that a book which includes gay sex is a book about gay sex. “I’ve got so
fed up with that over the years,” he says. “Because my first book
had a lot of gay sex in it – which was unusual in this country for
literary fiction – that was all that people could see. There was such a
lot else going on in the book too, about art and class and colonialism, but
it’s a problem for them.” He has watched the reaction changing
over the years, from shock to hidden homophobia, as journalists reviewing The
Folding Star and then The Spell have realised that it is no longer acceptable
to just set down the truth: that they don’t want to read about gay
people. At the same time,
Hollinghurst’s writing has changed. It was groundbreaking to write
unquestioningly about gay lives in the 1980s in a way that it cannot be
twenty years later: now it is just what he does. But he is not tempted to get
around the homophobia by peopling his next book entirely with straight folk.
“I still don’t feel that gay life has become quite so
uninteresting,” he says sardonically, “and there are already
quite a lot of books about straight people.” The capital’s gay scene
is important to him and he likes to move in and out of it. “I love
going to Gloucestershire to visit my mother – I grew up in the country
and still have very keen feelings about it – but that sense of relief,
almost jubilation one has, coming back… I can’t imagine not
living in a city in which gay bars and clubs were a part.” Like Nick in The Line of
Beauty, Hollinghurst came out in his last year at Oxford, but unlike Nick he
went on to write a thesis about gay novelists. “I pinned my colours to
the mast in that way, but I did that thing that a lot of people do of being
completely out in one world but not at home. I sort of seeped out over a
longer period at home. My parents slowly put two and two together but there
was never a moment of declaration, and that seemed to suit us all fine
– it was easier.” His father died in 1991 and
as an only child he has become closer to his mother. “You sort of
become a couple with your other parent, in a way,” is how he puts it,
slightly alarmingly. She lives in a little village and doesn’t know any
gay people except her son and his friends, but has enjoyed meeting his
boyfriends. She hasn’t read his books since his first, put off by the
sexual content. “Of course I wish she would read them, in a way,
because she would find out all sorts of things about me, not to do with sex
but to do with other things. She loves the idea of me being a writer and is
totally supportive; she just doesn’t seem to want to read the end
product. But she’s not a huge reader anyway so that’s fine. And
she is 85.” And how old is he? About
50?, I ask, because I know he was born in 1954, but he rears back from my
tactlessness. “About is a very important – a small but important
word,” he says, sounding more and more like a character in a Noel Coward
play. “I’m 49. As it might say in a small ad: late 40s.” He insisted that the book had to come out
before the milestone of his birthday in May; and now this Gemini is
struggling with the idea of throwing a birthday party and longs for someone
else to do it for him. “But generally I’ve found my forties have
been much the most enjoyable part of my life so far. So I’m not
frightened of 50. But it’s got a different sort of feel to it, 50.
It’s not sexy.” At the word
“sexy”, I wave towards the window and ask if he makes use of
Hampstead Heath’s famous cruising grounds. “No, not for
years,” he replies. “I felt an obligation when I first moved
here, but not now.” Instead he goes for long walks, especially in the
summer or when he’s working. It is left to his characters to use parks
for other purposes. The Line of Beauty is
published in hardback by Picador, price £16.99 This piece first appeared in Gay Times, May 2004 © Helen Sandler 2004 |
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