Gay Brit Draws 'Line'

Alan Hollinghurst does not expect to be understood. In Chicago, the previous stop on a promotional tour of his 2004 novel “The Line of Beauty,” his audience was reduced to six when the book discussion conflicted with a White Sox game.

And at the outset, this final stop in Cambridge portends another embarrassing disconnect between author and reader: “a gay British guy and a straight American teenager walk into a café” (Algiers, to be precise) sounds more like a weak joke than the convening of kindred spirits. Circumstances don’t help, either–the room is noisy, and I have to lean forward and ask for frequent repetitions to understand Hollinghurst’s Oxonian accent and quiet, rapid delivery.

His opinion of my dubious comprehension, as well as his passion for precision and le mot juste, quickly becomes apparent. After describing his writing process as “putting on the veil,” Hollinghurst explains that he does not literally wear a veil, but only metaphorically distances himself from the surrounding world. The AIDS crisis “humanized” gay men, he says later–adding that he meant “humanizing for those who hadn’t seen them” as human before. Not, of course, that gay men suddenly morphed into homo sapiens in the 1980s.

He holds others to the same standards of language, showing mixed perplexity and amusement at the menu’s once-baked biscotti and noting that “biscotti” is Italian for “cooked twice.” And when I make a glibly glowing comment about a Henry James novel referenced in “The Line of Beauty,” Hollinghurst is quick to remember The Master’s insufferable minor characters.

With all these small scenes of confusion and clarification, Hollinghurst’s firm denial of a basic transatlantic divide between American and British approaches to literature may come as a surprise. There is no such thing as a British writing style that differs systemically from American counterparts, he argues. Oddly, though, he finds no contradiction in referring to “gay literature” and discussing its tone and preoccupations in contrast to the wider world of straight lit.

From a purely mercenary perspective, Hollinghurst’s self-labeling as a “Gay Writer” makes good business sense–when his work is criticized, supporters of gay writing as an institution tend to rally to his aid. When Section 28, a British law (now repealed) forbidding promotion of homosexuality by public authorities, threatened to bar his debut novel “The Swimming Pool Library” (1988) from libraries, its sales only grew. Similar counterattacks followed a review by John Updike ‘54 of Hollinghurst’s “The Spell” (1999), in which (according to Hollinghurst) Updike implied “some nonsense” linking the book’s creative failure to gay men’s procreative failure.

Hollinghurst, however, seems refreshingly unconcerned about success or failure. “People attach far too much importance to prizes,” he shrugged when asked about winning the Booker for “The Line of Beauty.” “I’m still amazed at the effect…Suddenly you become noticed all over the world.”

While clearly no strategist or self-promoter, Hollinghurst plays a fierce game of armchair politics. He delights in pointing out that “The Line of Beauty,” set in London from 1983 to 1987, contains nothing but praise and awe of then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, though the novelist (and, most would argue, the novel) rage against the “ghastliness” of the era and its leadership. Never explicitly advancing a political or moral agenda in his fiction, Hollinghurst nonetheless has plenty to say about real-life politics then and now. The ’80s saw a “sexualized idolatry of Mrs. Thatcher,” and while Tony Blair’s victory in 1997 finally offered “relief from the Tories” by his liberal Labour party, Blair’s record has become only “a crushing disappointment and a cruel disabusing.”

However incensed the armchair, I can’t imagine Hollinghurst ever trading it for the campaign stump. During our conversation and his Brattle Theater book discussion, the novelist avoids long eye contact and gives the impression of being folded shut in spite of his magnificent posture. The right angles of his silvering haircut and goatee intensify his wide, round eyes, rendering him by turn ingenuous, nervous, or boyishly elated. Externals aside, Hollinghurst suffers another setback: he refuses to keep track of his own credentials. He never re-reads his publications, and by now claims to forget most of “The Swimming Pool Library,” with subsequent novels slipping toward the same oblivion.

His own personal story fares better, as he still remembers his first stabs at authorship – “writing poems was the ‘cool thing’ at boarding school… unfortunately I was writing Wordsworthian sonnets when everyone else was on to free verse” – and then Oxford, where he admits staying “far too long” first studying, then teaching, then spending “the last year on the dole” doing little for the school, but sharing ideas (and rooms) with Andrew Motion, now UK Poet Laureate.

Not surprisingly, nearly all of Hollinghurst’s principal characters are gay, British, highly educated men. He admits being something of a “lazy bones” in the surface similarities of the characters to each other and to himself, but denies ever transposing real people into his fiction, with the exception of Thatcher’s periodic appearances in “The Line of Beauty.” (When asked what Thatcher thought of his depiction, Hollinghurst opined dryly, “I don’t think she reads much contemporary fiction.”)

Perhaps the most cataclysmically influential event of his pre-novel years was the rise of the AIDS epidemic in the mid-80s. Hollinghurst witnessed his own Oxford friend become one of the first known British casualties in 1984, when “nobody understood the disease. There was this tremendous ostracizing of the victim and the victim’s family out of ignorance and fear.” Early AIDS cases were hushed up or denied outright: “He kept getting things mysteriously wrong with him. It was very difficult to talk about. But eventually [AIDS] came to touch everybody somehow.”

So shaken by the past, Hollinghurst unsurprisingly chose the 80s to inform both the setting and the tone of “The Line of Beauty”. But, he insists, his next project could go anywhere. He doubts a return to poetry – “There’s something more suited about poetry to young people… many, though not all, of the greatest poets have been young poets. I think novel writing requires a longer and deeper experience of life” – but all else is fair game.

“I’m working on a number of short stories,” he says “though I feel a bit of a fraud doing anything that’s less than a hundred thousand words long.” He’d also consider writing a historical novel, a step that would be all the more timely after the BBC completes its film version of “The Line of Beauty” by director Andrew Davies, best known for period pieces like “Middlemarch” and “Pride and Prejudice.”

Regardless of genre or period, Hollinghurst’s style will remain his own: singular, lyrical, sharp, and evasive of neat definition. “I’ve tried to write both as accurately and as musically as I can,” he says. “I don’t understand quite what my own style is.” Maybe being understood isn’t everything.

—Staff writer Laura A. Kolbe can be reached at lkolbe@fas.harvard.edu.