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| Alan Hollinghurst at home in Hampstead. Photograph: Karen Robinson for the Observer |
Alan Hollinghurst: ‘I was fortunate to come along just as gay lit was coming into its own’
As he publishes his new novel, the Booker prize winner explains why he is looking back to an era before the Sexual Offences Act
Alex Clark
Friday 22 September 2017 12.00 BST
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s he was working on his sixth novel, Alan Hollinghurst, who describes himself as highly distractable during the throes of creation, found himself writing an introduction to Offshore, Penelope Fitzgerald’s 1979 Booker prize-winning miniature masterpiece, and then reviewing Hermione Lee’s biography of the writer. “And so I read every word, and I fell very much under her spell, and was troubled by her example – why can’t I write a wonderful book which is 173 pages long, rather than 473 pages long? And I rather beat myself up about this, before facing up to the fact that actually I was writing a 400-and-something page book and just have to live with it. It is what I do. But I really envy that and long to write a short novel.”
Looking at his back catalogue, from his 1988 debut novel The Swimming-Pool Library to The Line of Beauty, which led him in Fitzgerald’s footsteps to the Booker podium in 2004 (accompanied by “Gay Sex Wins Booker” headlines from various predictable quarters), the emergence of a novella seems unlikely, although he tells me he’s attempting to fool himself that his next project – merely glimmers at the moment, although he has started a new notebook – is precisely that.
But Hollinghurst’s novels, including his latest, The Sparsholt Affair, which ranges from 1940 to the present day and features a kaleidoscope of narratives, require expansiveness and the sense of a large canvas on which to unfold; he needs a certain airiness to contrast with his focus on his characters’ intimate, and often secret, lives. In his last novel, The Stranger’s Child, he began just before the first world war and moved forwards to explore the effect of a sexually charismatic young poet over subsequent decades. The Sparsholt Affair also employs that novel’s five-part structure, with jumps in time and perspective and narrative gaps carefully exploited to maximise mystery and ambiguity.
And there is, as so often in Hollinghurst’s work, absence. Here, it is embodied by David Sparsholt, “the glamorous blank into which people read what they want”, in the author’s words. First spied across the quad and through the windows of Christ Church, Oxford, “a figure in a gleaming singlet, steadily lifting and lowering a pair of hand-weights”, Sparsholt fascinates the group of literary and artistic students who are not only physically attracted to him, but drawn by the differences in class and social background between them.
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| Hollinghurst winning the Man Booker Prize in 2004. Photograph: Ferdaus Shamim/WireImage |
Many years later, Sparsholt becomes entangled in a sexual scandal that ends with his imprisonment, but which is never fully elaborated. “I wanted to create in the reader that sense of half-remembered details,” Hollinghurst explains. “If you think about the Poulson scandal in the early 1970s [a property and corruption case that resulted in the resignation of the home secretary, Reginald Maudling] … the Profumo affair people remember a bit better, but actually, if we tested each other on it now, we’d probably be a bit rocky, and that was a very, very prominent scandal.”
The Sparsholt affair, by contrast, despite one of the character’s memories of it – “Money, power … gay shenanigans! It had everything” – seems puzzlingly unscandalous; the reader intuits simply a threesome. “It’s happened at a time, of course,” says Hollinghurst, “when, if it was, as we have reason to think it was, a gay threesome, it’s illegal. It’s happening before the changes in the law that we’re celebrating at the moment.”
If it seems unfathomable now that consensual sex between three adults should result in public exposure, prison and disgrace, then Hollinghurst’s construction of an intergenerational narrative that juxtaposes the lives of gay men and women both before and after the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 is all the more brilliantly acute. As the novel continues, Sparsholt’s son Johnny comes into focus, making his way as a young gay man in the period shortly after the act. But, as Hollinghurst points out, “when the very thing that he’s trying to claim for himself is something which has been the source of terrible catastrophe, has been very publicly censured and punished, it increases his own sense of guilt and uncertainty”. By the time the novel closes, Johnny is a man in his 60s, “rather at sea” in a world of dating apps and online contact.
I ask Hollinghurst if immense societal and political change, whether legislative or technological, poses a problem to a writer whose subject has been what happens to desire when it is forced to express itself in covert fashion. “It’s a great difference,” he agrees. “I can see that I keep going back to the periods when things were more difficult and clandestine, because they seem from a fictional point of view to be more rewarding.”
A case in point might be a wonderful scene in The Sparsholt Affair in which Johnny makes his first visit to a gay club, the Sol y Sombra, or “Solly”, taken there by two female friends. (“So you’re lesbians, are you?” the doorman asks them. “Don’t be vulgar,” comes the reply.) Johnny is both gauche, hungrily hoovering up the food forced on customers to comply with regulations, and mesmerised. “How do you know Ivan?” he asks a new acquaintance. “Bradley hesitated, put his arm through Johnny’s and pulled him slightly aside. ‘I’ve got a cock, darling.’”
I tell the novelist how much the slightly dingy hedonism of the Solly made me laugh. “It’s a funny thing; when you could openly have gay clubs after 1967, but they had all these complicated licensing laws, and one thing was that they had to serve a meal. You had to be a member, so you paid; I can remember when I first went to London gay clubs in the late 70s having to become a member, this ridiculous thing, and write down your address. And then you got this fucking salad!” (There is an additional twist of humour: Johnny’s salad includes a revolting knob of sweaty, gristly ham; he later becomes, like Hollinghurst, a committed vegetarian.)
The vibrancy of club life – “passing through a door, going down a staircase, into this magical other place where your desires can be made fresh” – is frequently returned to in Hollinghurstworld, perhaps most notably in his (shortest) novel The Spell, which sees a strait-laced civil servant brought to life in the 1990s rave scene. It’s evidently a world away from what he describes as “the strange frictionless nature of easy and instantaneous contact” and carries with it an element of romance to which he knows that he keeps returning. Does he feel, then, that he is engaged partly in describing a vanishing world?
And what about now? “The distinctive purpose of gay writing, its political purpose or its novelty or its urgency have gone, and the gay world, as it changes, is perhaps not so stimulating to a fiction writer like me,” he says – although he’s careful to make clear he’s talking about his own writing rather than issuing blanket statements. “It doesn’t mean it can’t be written about.”
But Hollinghurst has never seen himself or wanted to be seen as a chronicler of gay life or “to claim to be a responsible historian of it; but of course I’m deeply interested in it and its effects on people’s lives, and the way that one’s telling a story that’s not over; it’s not a fixed thing that one’s writing about, but something that’s constantly changing.”
He is also deeply interested in the form of the novel – a form in which he says he has an “undiminished confidence”, feeling that people will continue to want to read it for a long time to come. Our conversation about reflecting historical change in fiction leads him to an astute observation, about “a larger question, which one’s always seeing articles about, wondering why there are so few mobile phones in novels”. His view is that there is something “inherently old-fashioned in the novel. There is a subconsciously retrospective element of entering the world of a novel, even if it’s about something burningly contemporary. There’s something old-fashioned about the experience of being narrated to.”
He has often been likened to Henry James, whom he greatly admires, although he says he has tried to avoid using him as a model. In The Line of Beauty, though, he did set himself the Jamesian task of writing in the third person, entirely from the viewpoint of one character, the symbolically named interloper Nick Guest. “I’m glad I did it, but I don’t think I want to do it again,” he laughs. Instead, he has become far more interested in the opportunities that shifting viewpoints can offer – the scope for irony and for the “double intelligence” of reflecting on both life and art that he finds in James and in George Eliot.
Hollinghurst is now in his early 60s, and, although he has “an old-fashioned sense that novels are really about young people; they are about how people find themselves and become themselves”, he has also become interested in depicting people as they age. He has lived for many years, mostly alone, in a flat overlooking Hampstead Heath; it is extremely tidy and ordered, but not remotely spartan, hung as it is with artworks and filled with books. Visual art is key to The Sparsholt Affair – Johnny becomes a portrait painter, with Hollinghurst deliberately wanting a non-literary central character – and we peer for a while at a miniature by Louis-Léopold Boilly. It is that double intelligence again: the artist’s extreme control alongside what we (and the painting’s subject) may believe or wish we can glean from the finished product.
A typical Hollinghurst character, like him, is an only child. Often, his creations seem to stand on the edge of things, keen to engage with the melee, convivial, socially adept and alive to the currents between people, and yet happy to retreat to their own company when needed. There must be a link, surely?
“I think that’s very probably true,” he answers. “I was once asked to contribute to a book of essays by writers about being only children, and actually I thought, I don’t want to examine too closely this thing which I just knew was actually rather fundamental to my psychology, to my whole being as a writer. That double sense of being an outsider, wanting to penetrate a world, but also having a sort of self-reliance that I think only children have. They’re very happy to be by themselves and quite a lot of their interesting life is happening when they’re by themselves.”
The business of ageing, he notices, has also led him to feel that in writing, “I’m constantly opening up a forgotten room in my past, as it were”. It has perhaps also led him to a slightly more artistically optimistic place. The Sparsholt Affair ends on an upbeat note, in contrast to some of his previous work. “I have this tremendous urge to push the characters off a cliff, which I have to hold back from,” he chuckles. This time, he seems to have relented – for now.
• The Sparsholt Affair is published by Picador.
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