Given his interest in reconjuring lost Englands, it is fitting that Alan Hollinghurst passes his days alongside one of its best-preserved anachronisms. Hollinghurst’s home abuts Hampstead Heath, the great grassy eruption that bestrides north London, its woodland ancient and indifferent to besieging urban sprawl. The Heath has known many uses through the centuries, from Norman pig farm to aristocratic residency to (as memorably depicted in Hollinghurst’s Booker prize-winning novel The Line of Beauty) gay cruising waterpark. Hollinghurst’s home looks out over the base of the Heath’s Parliament Hill, the view of its ascent filling his two large sitting room windows.
I visit early one overcast afternoon to discuss his new novel, Our Evenings, and to look back on one of the most acclaimed careers in modern English letters. Hollinghurst buzzes me past the entryphone with a booming cheeriness (he was nicknamed “Basso Profundo” in the 1980s on account of his rich and operatic voice). He is eager to chat – his publicity tour was knocked off course by a bout of Covid a few weeks ago – and addresses me with warm brown eyes and a mirthful smile, encircled by a neat grey beard.
Hollinghurst’s new novel simultaneously contains some of his most autobiographical writing and a premise utterly removed from his own life. Written in the first-person, it opens with a young boy, David Win, living on the north Berkshire Downs in the 1950s and 1960s. Hollinghurst was born in 1954 and his father was bank manager in the market town of Faringdon, the basis for David’s invented hometown of Foxleigh.
It’s not the first time Hollinghurst has written about this area – what he tells me is his “essential landscape” – but it’s the first time he’s followed a narrator brought up there. He gives David several other autobiographical fragments, such as his fondness of mimicking Dennis Price’s Jeeves from the 1960s PG Wodehouse adaptations. And David follows Hollinghurst’s life further, to public school, as a young gay man at Oxford, before diverging as David becomes an actor in an experimental theatre troupe in London.
However, as the mixed-race product of his English mother’s colonial love affair in Burma, David is also a world away from Hollinghurst. Why did he make this shift? “I’d felt interested in this question for a long time of what it would have been like for me to have lived broadly through the time that I have with the distinguishing thing of being gay, but with a further sort of unconcealable thing of being a different race… I think it would be hopeless for me to assume the point of view of someone from a second-generation West Indian immigrant family or something like that. But the mixed-race thing seems interesting because it would be a way of sort of blending me with someone different – especially Burmese, which is marginal and little known about, and doesn’t have a strong presence in our society.”
David’s status of ethnic outsider is compounded by his lower-middle class background (his single mother is a dressmaker), and he attends boarding school on a scholarship funded by the Hadlow family, cultured upper-class philanthropists. But Giles, the Hadlows’ son and David’s exact contemporary, is a vicious bully who heads into politics and ultimately becomes a Brexit minister in the Conservative government. His trajectory, Hollinghurst tells me, is a reminder of “the society which [David] leaves, or thinks he’s left behind” in his bohemian life, but which he cannot escape, with Giles cropping up as “a recurrent threat” to his ambitions.
However, David’s race and class are subcategories within one of Hollinghurst’s recurring themes: the tension between insider and arriviste. I ask if this is a particularly English preoccupation. “I think it does have something to do with class mobility,” he says. But it’s also “something to do, in earlier periods particularly, with being in the separate world of a gay community… I think it’s an interesting thing for the novelist to move from one social world to another, with your protagonist antennae alert to all the differences and peculiarities of each world.”
Like most of Hollinghurst’s best-known novels, Our Evenings has a broad span, moving from the post-war decades through to 2020, dramatising the ironies of the passage of time as it goes. We later learn the text is from David’s own hand. And the amateur historian is a recurring figure in Hollinghurst’s work: the private memoirist, the commissioned biographer, and then, more ambiguously, the photo-album rummager and prying researcher, assembling lost letters, papers and poems to reveal buried truths. Hollinghurst has only once played the role of pure historical novelist – The Line of Beauty was written almost 20 years on from the 1980s it is set within. But elsewhere, characters and sometimes entire families are shown to move through decades of England’s 20th and 21st centuries to the present, burdened with the experiences and indignities that have framed their lives – racial in Our Evenings, but social and sexual in his earlier books.
This recasting of English history arguably constitutes the unifying theme of Hollinghurst’s fiction. Its origins lie in his graduate work at Oxford and his unpublished 1979 MLitt thesis, “The Creative Uses of Homosexuality in the Novels of E.M Forster, Ronald Firbank, and L.P Hartley”. “When I was a graduate student,” he tells me, “I was doing work about writers who hadn’t been able to write openly, or publish in their lifetime openly about sex, sexuality. What happens when you can’t do that?… You start writing rather original, quirky kinds of book, which get around the problem of not being able to discuss the things that you really want to discuss.”
Even at Oxford, word of Hollinghurst’s own literary talent was spreading. The writer Geoff Dyer, several years Hollinghurst’s junior, was taught by him in 1980, when Hollinghurst was a lecturer. “Even at that early stage he was reckoned to be a writer of promise,” he says, even if he doesn’t remember Hollinghurst as a particularly dedicated academic: “as far I could see, [it] seemed to mainly consist of playing the Space Invaders machine in the King’s Arms when he wasn’t teaching me”. Dyer – who recalls being struck by a short story in the Firebird 2 anthology in 1983, which had “all the hallmarks of the mature Hollinghurst” – was to become one of his former teacher’s most dedicated readers, and later critics.
Hollinghurst’s research at Oxford on the history of gay literature did form the basis for much of his later fiction: in some ways his career has formed a repudiation of the decorous constraints of his forebears. Putting homosexuality to a different sort of “creative use”, one thing he can never be accused of is sexual reticence.
Revisionist literary scholarship led to what we could term the revisionist historiography of Hollinghurst’s first novel, The Swimming-Pool Library, published in 1988. Its protagonist, William Beckwith, is a liberated homosexual par excellence, cruising in every sense through a trust-funded existence in west London. But when he saves the life of Lord Nantwich, a geriatric aristocrat cottaging in a Hyde Park public toilet, Will’s “queer peer” becomes his patron, asking him to write his biography. The request is barbed: in the idle research Will pursues alongside his more active campaign of promiscuity, he learns about Nantwich’s arrest in a post-war WC and subsequent imprisonment. And it is revealed Nantwich fell victim to a crackdown fronted by a draconian director of public prosecutions, later ennobled as Lord Beckwith. Will’s grandfather, the source of his income, and a symbol of upstanding, self-righteous, patrician England is thus revealed as soiled by an act of historical repression – and, from Will’s perspective, suppression.
The politics of The Swimming-Pool Library are therefore animated by what the critic Northrop Frye called “militant irony”. And it emerged from careful literary premeditation. The novel doesn’t feature a single female speaking character, the result, Hollinghurst tells me, of a conscious limitation he placed himself under. This rule would come to broken, and Hollinghurst’s later novels contain several movingly rendered female characters (arguably the most delicate part of Our Evenings is the bond between David and his mother Avril). But in those early days, Hollinghurst’s fictional world was subculturally confined, and he had considered taking such restrictions even further. Much of The Swimming-Pool Library is set underground (the swimming baths Will uses, the basement of Lord Nantwich’s house, the Central Line, which for Will serves as a reliable tunnel of love, or tunnel of pick-ups anyway), and Hollinghurst had toyed with trying to write an entirely subterranean novel, before abandoning the idea as unworkable.
However, the novel remains an unearthing, not only of the buried hypocrisies of the past but of the gay reality of the present, intended to explicitly disrupt heterosexual norms (Hollinghurst smiles when I describe it as “punk”). His next two novels, The Folding Star and The Spell, only continued the campaign. “If you wanted to read about gay sex” before then, Hollinghurst tells me, “you would either read something medical, or criminal, or pornographic.” And so he appointed himself laureate of the cock, ball and bum, and in Hollinghurst’s hands the penis itself aspires towards the baroque (“Here was the long, listless penis, there the curt, athletic knob or innocent rosebud of someone scarcely out of school”).
But even this blissful celebration became overtaken by the tragedy of history. When Hollinghurst started writing The Swimming-Pool Library, AIDS was an anxious rumour; by the time of publication, it was a plague. Readers then and now can see that the life Will Beckwith is leading – the summer of 1983 that he merrily calls “my time, my belle époque” – is doomed, not only by the thousands of young lives cut off, but by the renewed persecution of gay life that followed.
Alan Hollinghurst, photographed near his home on Parliament Hill, London by Billy Barraclough
Hollinghurst is clear about the “feeling of defiance” he wrote the novel in, the “strong anti-gay feeling and anti-gay legislation” which “was coming from inside the Establishment”. But the novel leaves its tensions notably unresolved. The reader is never sure if Will is “a charming attractive person or actually rather a monster”, as Hollinghurst puts it, and we leave him unchastened, still in possession of his tainted fortune, eyeing up a “young lad in pale blue trunks” at the gym. The hypocritical upper class feature prominently in Hollinghurst’s work: a dependable proportion of his characters have neither to serve their own meals nor open their own front doors. “They are good copy,” he says of this caste. “And I think of myself in a large way of writing in the tradition of English social comedy, which has obviously often had a strong class element and aristocratic characters who are either monsters or fools – the amusing licence of rich people to do what they like.”
Giles Hadlow in Our Evenings – boys’ school dorm-room frolicker turned abstainer on the parliamentary gay marriage vote – falls squarely in this vein. And beyond the aristocracy, Hollinghurst tends to locate the crime of gay repression in and around symbolic institutions, within government, among the heroes of the two World Wars – and even within English poetry in the more recent novel The Stranger’s Child. But rather than judging or condemning, he relishes the ambiguity that surrounds his characters, along with the other dark secrets that underbelly English history. “One of the nice things about the novel is it particularises,” Hollinghurst gently chides my clumsy requests for political generalities. “I like all that moral ambiguity around the subject. I didn’t want it to be a programmatic thing.”
These themes achieved their most perfect shape in Hollinghurst’s fourth book The Line of Beauty, which won the Booker Prize 20 years ago this autumn. Geoff Dyer reviewed it at the time and recalls thinking that “it was almost inconceivable that a better novel would be published that year”. Its reputation has only grown since. Dyer praises “the state-of-the-nation quality he brings to it, without trying to populate it in a Dickensian way” and Hollinghurst’s depiction of the era’s “shifting class relations”. And between its drawing-room know-how, satirical comedy and zeitgeist-bottling ambition, The Line of Beauty is widely regarded as the finest social novel we’ve had this century, positioning Hollinghurst as a latter-day Henry James or Anthony Powell.
Hollinghurst’s masterpiece follows Nick Guest, a gay, middle-class Oxford graduate, and his association with the Tory MP Gerald Fedden and his family over the course of the 1980s. Through the seductions of the Fedden family – along with the arcs of the AIDS crisis, the quick money of the Big Bang and the arrival of cocaine as the upper class’s preferred snuff – the new rhythms of the decade receive one of their finest treatments. There was less flash-bulbed glamour in Hollinghurst’s own 1980s, most of which he spent working in literary journalism (some of his earliest book reviews appeared in the New Statesman) at the Times Literary Supplement, including as deputy editor. “I’ve had a very middle-class existence,” he insists, though, “Like anybody who goes to a public school and then to Oxford, I’ve rubbed up against quite a lot of rich people.”
The 1980s remains the ideological crucible of modern Britain. And its cultural exhaust also shaped the manner of politics’ contemporary protagonists. The posh style of the past two decades (Eton, Bullingdon, the Notting Hill Set) has its origins in the circles The Line of Beauty satirises, and their revival of a foppish, Brideshead aesthetic. “I was still in Oxford when the original Granada series was being filmed,” Hollinghurst tells me. “Friends of mine were getting parts as extras, and darting around with wing collars; vintage cars rolling down the Broad. That whole mania for Brideshead I remember happening… The endlessly extended English high society costume drama mood was something floating on top of the more brutal things that were going on in the Thatcher years.”
Hollinghurst recalls his Booker win with uncomplicated nostalgia: “I loved it.” But even in 2004, his triumph was semi-marginalised. “Booker Won by Gay Sex” ran the headline in the Daily Express, while Chris Smith, chair of the judges that year, felt the need to pre-emptively declare that “the fact that it was a gay novel did not figure at all in the discussions”. However, Hollinghurst’s study of the period, and particularly his examination of AIDS, has since spawned a rich progeny. Hollinghurst watched and enjoyed Russell T Davies’s 2021 TV series It’s a Sin (which seemed on nodding terms with The Line of Beauty too, featuring a brief affair between one of its leads and a repressed Tory MP). It also, Hollinghurst says, had an “educative” function, in that “it taught younger people about this whole thing which was already receding into history”.
Despite their intelligence and gravity, Hollinghurst’s novels always spurned the postmodern textual gadgetry wielded by many of writers of his age. “If we define the novelist in a very straight way, then it was a great irony that the best, male, straight-down-the line novelist was gay,” Dyer jokes. Hollinghurst has always been conscious of this tension between his conventionality (classical sentences, realism, the traditions of the comic novel) and the unconventionality of his subject matter. “I liked the idea at the start of doing something which was soaked in English culture and literature, but was also doing something disruptive,” he says of The Swimming-Pool Library. “That was really part of the point of that book – to bring together these things which had been rather separate before.”
The cool immaculacy of his writing seems driven by a desire to communicate a reality, whether it is correcting historical records, or simply relishing comic ironies and erotic visions. Perhaps it is this commitment to a traditional, near-Victorian conception of the novel that has driven him to such a celebrated, popular and credentialed position in our culture, his career making an implicit case for the beauty and purpose of the form. “I think I’ve always had a fairly basic belief in the fascination of storytelling, exploring the past and now in narrative, and just the sheer interest of entering into other people’s lives,” he tells me at the end of our conversation. “I have an undimmed belief in that.”
“Our Evenings” is published by Picador
[See also: The Renaissance in drawing]
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