Alan Hollinghurst

Writing under the influence

Michèle Mendelssohn, Denis Flannery, Michele Mendelssohn, Denis Flannery, Michèle Mendelssohn, Denis Flannery

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781526134288
  9780719097171
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526100368
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: Literature

This groundbreaking, cross-generic collection is the first to consider the entire breadth of Alan Hollinghurst's Booker Prize-winning writing. Focused through the concept of influence, the volume addresses critical issues surrounding the work of Britain's most important contemporary novelist. It encompasses provocative and timely subjects ranging from gay visual cultures and representations, to Victorian, modernist and contemporary literature, as well as race and empire, theatre and cinema, eros and economics. The book reveals the fascinating intellectual and affective matter that lies beneath the polished control and dazzling style of Hollinghurst's work. Alongside contributions by distinguished British and American critics, the book includes an unpublished interview with Hollinghurst.

Alan Hollinghurst: Writing under the influence uses a creative range of critical approaches to provide the most authoritative and innovative account available of Hollinghurst's works.

1

Abjuring innocence: Hollinghurst’s poetry

Bernard O’Donoghue

Although Alan Hollinghurst’s reputation as a leading novelist of his time is beyond question, it was important to be reminded by Rachel Cooke in her Observer interview with him on the occasion of the publication of The Stranger’s Child, in 2012, that ‘he wasn’t always going to be a novelist though. Poetry was his first love.’ At school, he says in that interview, he was fascinated by poetical forms; for example he wrote three sonnets for a competition on ‘the pleasures of life’. He says, ‘Being a poet at school had a certain prestige; it was a source of glamour. And if you could write modernistic poems, which no one could understand, then even more so.’¹ This mischievously blimpish view of poetry disguises a taste for the modern (if not exactly the modernist) that Hollinghurst has never shed. For example, his taste in architecture, about which he has written with some authority, marries the classical, on which he is an informed commentator, with a firm commitment to the imaginatively new.

Hollinghurst’s initial love for the practice of poetry continued from school to his distinguished career in English, begun in 1972, at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was undergraduate, graduate and tutor. From his first year he was tutored and befriended by John Fuller, with whom he was a major mover in the running of the college’s very successful poetry group, the Florio Society, of which Hollinghurst was secretary (the only executive post) in his second year.² In 1974 his poem ‘Death of a Poet’ (the assigned subject) won the university’s prestigious Newdigate Prize for poetry, and throughout his undergraduate career, at the end of which he got a First Class degree, although he worked with distinction on English fiction and drama it was generally thought that his primary bent was for poetry.³ After taking his BA in 1975, he stayed on at Magdalen College where he wrote an M.Litt. on a group of novelists: Firbank, Forster and Hartley.⁴ In the thesis he argued that (as with Proust’s Gilberte and Albertine) these writers featured innamoratas who were ostensibly female but might be based on male attachments, the celebration of which would have been controversial at the time of publication. Of the three writers considered in the thesis, Firbank remained his strongest enthusiasm: Hollinghurst edited three of Firbank’s novels for Penguin Classics and wrote essays on him in the Yale Review (2001) and in the Times Literary Supplement (2006).⁵ Firbank’s works and life are a prominent theme in The Swimming-Pool Library.

Although his academic interests seem to have shifted towards fiction by the time of his M.Litt. in 1980, Hollinghurst’s publications remained primarily in poetry for a while longer. John Fuller’s Sycamore Press published two early Hollinghurst pieces: ‘Isherwood is at Santa Monica’ and ‘The Well’ were published in 1975 as Sycamore Broadsheet 22; in 1982 it published Confidential Chats with Boys, a pamphlet made up of five numbered sections in unrhyming quatrains of twenty lines each. In between those two publications, Hollinghurst was one of the six writers included in Faber’s Poetry: Introduction 4.⁶ There were ten poems by him in the Faber volume, including the two from the Sycamore broadsheet. But, he tells Rachel Cooke in the Observer interview, after Confidential Chats, ‘the Muse left me’.⁷ In 1981 his friend Andrew Motion included Hollinghurst’s three-part poem ‘Where the Story Ended’ in a Christmas supplement for the Poetry Book Society.⁸ ‘Where the Story Ended’, dwelling on ‘Miss Monk’s front-garden’, is already concerned with the evanescence of lives and the buildings they occur in, a prominent theme in his later fiction: the poem ends with

the places

deserted by the dead who woke

and slept here for a century.

Hollinghurst had still been an undergraduate when the ‘Isherwood’ pamphlet was published in 1975, and he had not yet come out as gay. But there are plenty of hints in the two poems there – more overt in the ‘Isherwood’ poem than in ‘The Well’, which is a strange mixture of Freud and Grendel’s mere in Beowulf. The context of the ‘Isherwood’ poem tells us everything we need to know: on St Valentine’s Day in 1953, at Santa Monica, Christopher Isherwood, who was forty-eight, met the eighteenyear-old Don Bachardy; they were to remain partners until Isherwood’s death in 1986. But there were other reasons why that encounter came to mind in 1975 or the years leading up to it. Significant prompts for the poem may have been two films much celebrated at the time: Cabaret was a major event in 1972, based on Isherwood’s two Berlin Stories, published in 1945 but describing events in Germany in 1931–2 as Hitler was coming to power. (Several other stories in the series had been published in the 1930s, including ‘Sally Bowles’ in 1937, included in Goodbye to Berlin (1939); ‘Mr Norris Changes Trains’ was published in 1935.) An earlier film based on the two 1945 Berlin Stories by Isherwood was I am a Camera in 1955, which influenced Cabaret in a number of ways. Isherwood had gone to Berlin to take advantage of the sexual freedoms associated with the Weimar Republic as its era was coming to an end and speeding into repression. The second major film– even more celebrated in those years –which may have been a less direct influence was Visconti’s Death in Venice, based on Thomas Mann’s short novel about the writer Gustav von Aschenbach, who is obsessed by a beautiful Polish boy Tadzio as the city is invaded by plague. Three of the five stanzas of Hollinghurst’s Isherwood poem end with a refrain: ‘A gold-haired boy twirls upsidedown on rings’ (and the fourth is a variation on it). It is a line that for a filmgoer of the time unmistakably recalls Tadzio in Visconti’s film, even if the immediate occasion of the line was a television documentary about Isherwood in which a golden-haired young man did indeed twirl upside down on rings at Santa Monica.

The first line of Hollinghurst’s second stanza develops the reference to Isherwood: ‘Novelist, camera, and three-poem poet’. The poem ends with the poet/novelist able to be frank, ‘a happy escapee, / home, with himself and few secrets’.⁹ The sea-traveller in that stanza, ‘home from a lost sea’, is able to engage with one of the most secure homecoming poems in the language, Stevenson’s ‘Requiem’ (more sardonically evoked in Philip Larkin’s ‘This Be the Verse’). Hollinghurst’s poem is a subtle evocation (remarkable for so young a writer) of a flickering black-andwhite film, and it sustains its uncertainties to the end with the word ‘escapee’: Isherwood has escaped the homophobic judgements such as those of the doctor noted in the poem who labelled him ‘Infantilismus’, into a free Californian world with ‘miles of beach and a crazy pier’; but the ‘escapee’ also recalls the disapproval that greeted Isherwood and Auden’s departure to America shortly before the start of the Second World War.

This poem might lead us to expect Hollinghurst to become a socially engaged – even campaigning – poet, very unlike the schoolboy with his interest in poetical forms. But ‘The Well’, the second poem in the broadsheet, is entirely different. It is hard to avoid a Freudian interpretation – hard even not to suspect a play with such interpretations:

Its rim is fringed

with moss and hart’s-tongue fern,

a fronded entry, mysterious

and soft as a vulva.¹⁰

The spirit of the poem is again secrecy – what is ‘never talked of ’ – though here applied to the world of female sexuality. Hollinghurst’s teasing references to homosexuality are already striking.

Confidential Chats with Boys took its title from a sententious American book by William Lee Howard, MD, published in 1911 (and reprinted in 2006 ‘as a facsimile of the original’ because it was ‘a scarce antiquarian book’, according to Amazon).¹¹ The first of the five sections of Hollinghurst’s pamphlet begins in the spirit that its title promises:

There are things in trousers called men,

almost too well-mannered, passing

as gentlemen – human skunks

hatched from rattlesnakes’ eggs. (CCB 1)

And it ends in that same spirit:

Keep your eye on that jug,

that candlestick, and when he moves,

hit him to leave him scarred:

scar the skunk and coward for life. (CCB 1)

It is astonishing, and horrifying now, to realize that the violence here comes straight from Howard’s pathological book: ‘Sometimes it is necessary to smash a boy who makes evil suggestions to you. Don’t talk to him, smash him in the face. Smash him good and hard.’¹²

The campaigning spirit of this first section of Hollinghurst’s poem is maintained only stealthily, though: the following four sections are a series of detailed and wonderfully evocative memories of the poet’s childhood as the only child of a country bank manager. These memories are perhaps the most impressive pieces of technical lyricism that Hollinghurst has written: the first sense of a stable poetic voice. The poem as a whole is a kind of miniature bildungsroman in verse, moving from the isolation and sickly terror of section 2, with ‘the orchid silence’ such women as the long-legged lady in Sickert’s ‘pink and gree...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: a dialogue on influence: Michèle Mendelssohn and Denis Flannery
• 1 Abjuring innocence: Hollinghurst’s poetry: Bernard O’Donoghue
• 2 The touch of reading in Hollinghurst’s early prose: Angus Brown
• 3 Poetry, parody, porn and prose: Michèle Mendelssohn
• 4 Race, empire and The Swimming-Pool Library: John McLeod
• 5 The Stranger’s Child and The Aspern Papers: queering origin stories and questioning the visitable past: Julie Rivkin
• 6 Ostentatiously discreet: bisexual camp in The Stranger’s Child: Joseph Ronan
• 7 Hollow auguries: eccentric genealogies in The Folding Star and: The Spell: Robert L. Caserio
• 8 Some properties of fiction: value and fantasy in Hollinghurst’s house of fiction: Geoff Gilbert
• 9 Cinema in the library: Alan O’Leary
• 10 Using Racine in 1990; or, translating theatre in time: Denis Flannery
• 11 ‘Who are you? What the fuck are you doing here?’: queer debates and contemporary connections: Kaye Mitchell
• 12 What can I say?: secrets in fiction and biography: Hermione Lee interviews Alan Hollinghurst
• Index