Alan Hollinghurst speaks at Capital M on Sunday 26 February (5pm).
In 1988 Alan Hollinghurst, at the time in his early thirties and deputy editor of The Times Literary Supplement, published his debut novel The Swimming-Pool Library. The book – a hungry, erudite and erotically explicit novel about homosexuality, set in England during the last days before the Aids crisis came to the public’s attention – instantly thrust Hollinghurst from obscurity to public prominence.
The Swimming-Pool Library follows the sexual exploits of its aristocratic and aesthetic first-person narrator Will Beckwith. In what was a first for British literary fiction, Will describes his gay dalliances with unabashed bravado, from receiving blowjobs in the dark bowels of a London cinema to his affair with a timid but beautiful male waiter. The novel, exquisitely written and wholly unapologetic, was proclaimed by Edmund White as ‘The best book on gay life yet written by an English author.’
Following a hiatus since his last novel, 2004’s Booker Prize-winning The Line of Beauty, an examination of the sex-and-drug-fuelled years of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, Hollinghurst (pictured above, left) is back. His new book, The Stranger’s Child, may have taken a while to come out (‘I always have this rather slow writing metabolism’) and deals with loss and illusion rather than the raw candour of previous works, but it was almost universally acclaimed by critics. There were shockwaves in the industry when it failed to make the Booker shortlist. Hollinghurst, 57, welcomes me into his London flat on a bitter winter’s day in early January. He possesses a sumptuously rich voice (it was affectionately known as ‘Basso Profundo’ at The Times) and this, combined with his neatly trimmed beard, a bashful solemnity and gentle confidence, gives the author the air of an esteemed man of letters. It is, quite simply, impossible to imagine him writing anything sexually explicit.
Hollinghurst is aware of the paradox. ‘I’m essentially a rather shy and retiring person,’ he offers unprompted with a rueful smile. ‘There was confusion in readers’ and interviewers’ minds because [The Swimming-Pool Library] is narrated by this tremendous stud. This very glamorous, reckless person. And they were actually bewildered when they met me.’
The book’s release created a stir in the UK, as much for its timing as its content: in 1988, the then-Conservative government was pushing through Section 28, a law that sought to ban local authorities from ‘promoting homosexuality’.
As society wrestled with gay rights, and the media raged about the Aids epidemic, Hollinghurst’s flagrantly sexual novel came as a shock. I suggest that makes him something of a political hero, but he politely rejects the idea, even as he describes the law as ‘ghastly’.
‘The Swimming-Pool Library got rather tangled up with [Section 28]. I just wrote the book on instinct. It seemed to be a good idea to explore this territory that hadn’t really been explored before.’ And it was a natural follow-up to Hollinghurst’s Oxford University MLitt thesis, in which he analysed three authors – including EM Forster – who, unlike himself, were unable to write openly about their homosexuality.
Britain has progressed enormously, of course; Section 28 was repealed in 2003, and a sumptuous 2006 BBC adaptation of Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty passed by with barely a raised eyebrow. Gay men in the UK inhabit a different world from the one in which Hollinghurst grew up in.
I bring up another famous gay writer, Emma Donoghue, author of the bestselling (and Booker-shortlisted) 2010 novel Room and the non-fiction literary history Inseparable: Desire Between Women in Literature. Donoghue once told me: ‘Even as a teenager, I was looking out for stories of love between women, and hungry for them, because growing up in Ireland in the 1980s, I really felt like I was the only lesbian in the world.’ Was it the same for Hollinghurst?
‘I suppose it was,’ he says, gently stroking his beard as he meditates on the question. ‘In the ’70s [discussion of gay writers] was still all rather new. In straight writing there was a lot of sexual candour, but it hadn’t happened in terms of gay sex. By the 1980s, we were certainly ready.‘I started writing [The Swimming Pool-Library] at the beginning of 1984, before the Aids crisis had really begun, but over the years, as I was writing, it had an immense impact,’ he adds. ‘I left the book securely in its moment – it finishes in the late summer of 1983. But anyone who read it would know that the world they were reading about had severely changed. It became historic in a way that I could never have anticipated.’
Architecture, one of Hollinghurst’s great loves, also plays a large part in his novels. We discuss Shanghai, which the author visited seven years ago. As we talk, he jumps up with almost child-like enthusiasm and pulls down two coffee-table books on Chinese architecture.
‘I’m very interested in the boxing-in and hiding parts of buildings. Shanghai was so mysterious. I remember my first night, having dinner in a beautiful villa with lovely gardens, drinking vintage champagne, which was paid for with notes with Chairman Mao’s face on. I love those surreal disjunctions.’
Intrigue and concealment shroud The Stranger’s Child, a book which unpeels layers of literary memory to ask what lies beneath. Cecil Valance, a young, bisexual writer killed during World War I, achieves posthumous fame for a poem penned in a teenage girl’s autograph book. Years later, a gay biographer questions whether the poem was actually written for the girl or her brother – Cecil’s clandestine male lover.
‘I am quite interested in the sort of illusory charm that all sorts of things have. In this case, it’s part of a little literary puzzle: the idea that this narrative is automatically read as a heterosexual one, that there is this hidden story that will wait a long time to be told.’
The book shies away from explicit sex – surprising, perhaps, given that Hollinghurst was recently quoted in UK Esquire as saying, ‘There are only so many ways one can describe a penis, and I think I’ve covered most of them.’
‘Yes, I knew the moment that came out of my mouth that it was going to be a huge… what do you call those quotes [placed prominently in articles]… pull quote, yes! But it was too late to pull it back. But no, it’s not a bad joke.’ He laughs softly with a smidgeon of good-humoured embarrassment at the memory.
In The Swimming Pool-Library, the main character, Will, lives for sex; in The Stranger’s Child a tactful prudence reigns. At one point, set near the start of the book during the year 1913, the poet Cecil and his lover, George, go into the woods. ‘Even there, with uncharacteristic tact, I avert my eyes,’ Hollinghurst points out. ‘So much of the book is about speculation. A book full of uncertainties and unknowable things.’
The novel is also about what makes a biography, about the way a writer’s life infiltrates their work and – in the end – if it matters. In a recent Financial Times article, journalist Emily Stokes wonders whether Hollinghurst’s life could possibly be as filled with as much ‘sex, cocaine and country houses’ as his works. Sitting in his tastefully decorated, discreet London flat, with its vast, sweeping views over a bleak Hampstead Heath, I already know the answer.
‘No,’ he replies with a twinkle. ‘I mean, thank God you don’t have to do everything you describe.’