Back to Normal: Hollinghurst's Late Style
Alan Hollinghurst | Our Evenings | Random House | October 2024 | 496 Pages
Our Evenings, English writer Alan Hollinghurst’s seventh novel, follows his previous two efforts in the sheer ambition of its historical sweep. Like The Sparsholt Affair (2017) and its antecedent, the Booker-longlisted The Stranger’s Child (2011), the novel traces the life of a central character through decades of immense historical and social change: in this case, from an early adolescence in the sixties to the onset of the covid pandemic in the present era. These years, which straddle 1967 and the legalisation of male homosexual acts (at least in private, and above the age of twenty-one) are made to bear particularly on the novel’s characters, since as always Hollinghurst’s interest is in gay life and the mark history leaves on gay men and women. Unlike his previous two novels, however, and indeed for the first time since his perverted masterpiece, 1994’s The Folding Star, Our Evenings is presented in the form of a memoir, and so is narrated exclusively in the first person. As a result, it promises to be less a historical restitution for figures maligned or neglected by history than a vivid rendition, as far as such a thing is possible, of the actual experience of historical gay lives.
The novel tells the story of David Win, like Hollinghurst a scholarship boy at a minor English public school (Hollinghurst’s Canford has been translated into the rather improbable “Bampton”), yet unlike him a half-Burmese Englishman contending with everyday racism in a post-war Britain in denial about its baleful influence upon the world.
A prologue set at the time of writing (roughly a year or two before the pandemic) introduces the narrative via the death of David’s scholarly benefactor, Mark Hadlow, whose son, Giles, is currently lording it up as Brexit Minister in the Conservative government. Our Evenings uses these characters to set up two sympathetic oppositions—between kindly artistic patron and philistine on the one hand (father and son), and between a gay and sensitive actor and his straight sadist tormentor on the other (David and Giles). (Giles, as David tells us later in the novel, has “the ability…to butt his way into my life at even intimate moments,” but when we first meet him—in David’s stay at Mark’s estate, a tradition bestowed upon all school scholarship holders—he is administering nightly “Chinese burns” to David’s sleeping body, making the intrusion of intimacy more or less the point).
David spends these early years of his life as the charge of his mother, Avril, a lower-middle class seamstress whose affair with a Burmese man (she was stationed as a typist in Myanmar while it was still a British colony) has not survived the passage back to England. David spends the course of the novel not knowing his father (or having visited Myanmar, for that matter); and finding himself forced, as a visibly East Asian person, to account for a culture of which in fact he knows nothing. David’s feelings of uprootedness are only magnified by his mother’s romantic affair with her neighbour, Esme, a liaison it takes years for either party to declare openly. And though lesbianism has never been illegal in England (Queen Victoria is supposed to have opined that “women do not do such things”), the relationship is enough to earn ostracism from family members, and to generate the kind of hubbub at Bampton that David, as a closeted gay man himself, could sorely do without.
Our Evenings then moves through David’s time at Oxford in the late sixties (when he finally comes out, and when legalisation takes effect), charting his decision to become an actor and thus make good on a childhood talent. In the seventies, David joins a radical acting troupe that performs drama in the line of Edward Bond and Arnold Wesker (in one play the audience is shrouded in darkness while the performers hurl suggestive innuendoes) and shuttles from boyfriend to boyfriend. He is intermittently supported by Mark Hadlow as he does so, and is once forced to encounter Giles at a party Mark invites him to.
Otherwise, David doesn’t see Giles again till the late eighties, when both are asked to give talks to the newly coeducational upper grades at Bampton—David, on a career in acting, and Giles on the evils of what was then still the European Community. The two are thrown together again at a literary festival (once more, Giles’s tub-thumping rightwingery is rewarded above David’s sensible erudition in the comparable size of his audience) and David meets Richard, his event’s interviewer, who becomes his boyfriend for the novel’s closing chapters. In the 2010s, a further series of clashes occurs—at the British Museum, and at a dramatic reading David gives—since Giles’s remit, as Minister for Arts in David Cameron’s coalition government, extends inevitably to David’s own. When Giles becomes Brexit minister his influence expands further: “tearing up,” as David puts it in the prologue, “our future and our hopes.” In the final chapter, the first-person perspective shifts to Richard as he recounts David’s murder at the hands of racists who hold him responsible for the global pandemic—a depressing verdict on the state of race relations in the UK, and a picture somewhat vindicated by violent anti-immigrant riots that have blighted the country over the past summer.
The novel’s title refers, by my count, to three, mutually informing experiences that emerge through the course of the narrative: the arrangements made by Richard and David to spend time with each other when Richard has a break from acting; a line from Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves,” which David’s university friend Stella accidentally elides in reciting the work of that anxious and plausibly closeted poet; and a movement from Lois Janáček’s piano pieces, On an Overgrown Path, which David listens to as a pupil at Bampton over one-on-one sessions of appreciation with a favoured schoolmaster. Later, inch-thick in his acting ventures, David bristles at a potential sponsor’s “mixture of sex talk with sharp, rather technical remarks about Mozart and Sheridan,” but that combination has in fact been foreordained by these sessions with “Mr. Hudson.”
There is every evidence, here as in Hollinghurst’s other novels, that cultural knowledge may play an essential part in being gay: as if, for a tendency usually only indirectly acknowledged, art were a form of paraphrase that served to contain otherwise unruly sexual energies. “The taxonomy of love is so crude,” notes David, with the distance of time, of these intimate tête-à-têtes, and in his denial of physical love—“nothing ever ‘happened’”, David specifies—lies the telling assertion that “something,” on some other level, did.
If a shared appreciation of culture is a means of expressing these desires covertly, Our Evenings suggests that it can also prove treacherous. When Dusty Springfield makes an appearance on weekend television singing “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me,” Avril’s response—“Mum screwed up her face and said, ‘Isn’t she flat as hell?’”—tries to get out of gay desire on a sort of formal technicality; appropriately so, since Springfield’s songs of straight-laced trysts with preachers’ sons have become a proverbial example of gay love hiding in plain sight. David’s experiences at university signal what can happen in the absence of such careful overcorrections: after being called upon to read his prizewinning essay before his peers at Oxford’s Sheldonian Theatre, an associate congratulates him on his delivery: “It was like Oscar Wilde,” he says innocently, “read by Sybil Thorndike.”
Hollinghurst read English Literature (not Modern History, as David does), but David’s award—The Chancellor’s Essay Prize—is equal in prestige to the Newdigate prize for poetry, which Hollinghurst won as an undergraduate at Magdalen College. An absurdly competitive and storied accolade—past holders include Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin and, indeed, Oscar Wilde—the Newdigate presaged an exemplary academic career that formally culminated in an MLitt degree in 1979. Its thesis—“The Creative Uses of Homosexuality in the Novels of E.M. Forster, Ronald Firbank, and L.P. Hartley”—is a valuable resource in making sense of Hollinghurst’s aesthetic commitments. With its provocative theme, canonical or quasi-canonical author-subjects, and its total absence of literary theory, queer or otherwise, the thesis embodied the paradoxes that would define Hollinghurst’s position within the contemporary English canon. In its attempt to place the gay experience at the heart of the twentieth-century English novel, it was also a conservative project, concerned more with renovation than innovation: an appropriate preoccupation when these narratives unfolded in the sorts of dilapidated English country houses that would provide the backdrop to many of Hollinghurst’s own fictions.
Broadly missing from that thesis was Henry James, a writer who would come to occupy Hollinghurst’s attention through the course of his career, and whose own great country-house novel, The Spoils of Poynton, would dominate Hollinghurst’s thinking in the years ahead. James was not out by any means, so there are limits to how “creatively” he could have used his own plausible homosexuality. But then, modern readings of James have tended to see the repression of James’s presumed impulses not just as a feature of his complex prose style but the point of such a style—especially since queer theorist Eve Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet, a seminal study from 1990 which, by some neat dialectical manoeuvring, found proof of James’s gay desire precisely in the fact that it was undisclosed.
Some of James’s stylistic quirks have made it into Hollinghurst’s latest novel. There are the adjectival clusters, long strings of braided modifiers that have the effect of clouding the object under scrutiny: consequently, David’s mother’s friends are consumed by “instant rowdy impenetrable gossip,” and some much-ogled lads holidaying on the same resort as the youthful David are anticipated “with an anxious luxurious certainty.” Then there are James’s use of adverbs, which pair mood or impression with a concrete physical action, largely overborrowing on the remit given by everyday usage: “Marco was scowlingly busy”; “I walked frowningly past the reception desk” (compare with James’s “Ralph smokingly considered,” a famous example from his revised edition of The Portrait of a Lady).
More significant, perhaps, is the larger furtive atmosphere of James’s style, which can prove opaque even at the disclosure of major plot points, and whose habits of indirectness Hollinghurst ingeniously uses, especially in the novel’s early sections, for the cloaked articulation of queer desire. Hollinghurst is on the record as claiming to be drawn to periods in history in which gay sex was either illegal or strongly discouraged: “the secrecy,” as he once told The Oxonian Review, “makes for rich material.”
The relative success of the novel’s early passages lies in the tense manner by which subtext is shifted to the fore, with neutral action becoming charged with sexual feeling. There is a latent sexual sense, for instance, in a train as it is first perceived coming into the station near Mark’s family pile, behind which “four carriages shivered into place,” just as the frequent, pictorial resort to descriptions registering a disturbance in the quality of air or light—”the air thickened and tingled”; “the air itself had the shimmer of his presence”; “Morgan came over, a shimmer in the air as he shook hands and chatted with Robert’s parents”—imbues a coded meaning in otherwise sexless interactions, like a colourist’s brush adding texture on to an even surface.
Gayness, to put it gauchely, underwrites the powerful urgency in Hollinghurst’s descriptions—to say that his writing would be unimaginable without it is not so much to paraphrase his subject-matter as to name his novels’ perspectival positioning. Description, in Our Evenings as elsewhere, draws its power from being at the margins of things: as long as it can stay at those margins, Hollinghurst’s writing can continue to describe the world in vivid ways, because it will seem a place unfamiliar enough to need uncovering.
When David feels called upon to describe the environs of his mother’s town at the onset of spring, he notes the inclusion of “paths through hazel woods that by now were green overhead and all around, the floor of the wood greening densely too with spring saplings and young nettles; sometimes voices heard, figures half-seen through the fresh undergrowth, a man and a girl on the path ahead, separating for a moment as they came towards us, her arm around his waist and stifled laughter when I glanced back.” The sheer beauty and delight in precise physical detail, an effect that carries over throughout the novel in dozens of instances of an equivalent panache and brilliance, is carefully balanced with the need to recreate what it felt like to make sense of adult sexual experience from outside this confused exclusion zone, which geography and distance explain only partially. The fragmentariness of the laughter and snatched dialogue, and the impression of a visual scene without any very definite start or end, is at least as much about the difficulty in piecing together memory as it is about recreating an adolescent sense of incomplete discovery: a common enough experience, and a prolonged one when these desires remain prohibited.
If the need for secrecy lends itself to a more dynamic writing, The Line of Beauty, Hollinghurst’s most widely recognised achievement, suggested a device for transferring that vitality into the modern world: updating the furtive dynamics of a bygone era by thrusting a marginal gay and lower-middle class character into a hostile social setting. Hollinghurst, as he told The Paris Review, wrote that novel “against the grain of my political convictions”: its trick lies in its ability to be seduced by the elite world of Thatcherite Toryism, even as its adherents make life more difficult for gay and less privileged people. The novel’s protagonist, Nick Guest—like Anthony Powell’s Nick Jenkins, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway, an outsider in an established setting (though the clue is as much in his last name as in his first)—graduates from Oxford in 1983. In the wake of Margaret Thatcher’s first electoral landslide, Nick lodges in the upscale Kensington terrace of Gerald Fedden, a newly elected Tory MP. It’s an association he has made on the strength of his academic achievements, since Gerald is the father of Toby, a friend from Oxford, and the first in a series of complicated unrequited seductions that culminates, in a comically mad party scene at the Feddens’ house, with a toe-to-toe dance-off with Thatcher herself.
Like Hollinghurst, Nick has an interest in Henry James, and is even pursuing a project on The Master for graduate study. Perhaps channelling the enterprising spirit of the times, Nick attempts to pitch The Spoils of Poynton as a television serial to some American studio executives. The crudeness of their objections—they want a revised storyline to feature sex scenes and think Fleda Vetch, the protagonist’s name, recalls “the ugliest girl in the school”—signal their inaptitude for the task (James was proud enough of that last name to use it twice). They also help to underscore what James was attempting to achieve in that novel, in which the redoubtable Mrs. Gereth, possessor of a collection of fine artistic curios (the “spoils” of the novel’s title), attempts to marry her hapless son off to a woman who can see a value in them. If the executives are entirely bereft of culture, The Line of Beauty is more interested in the conundrum of a Tory elite who have been exposed to high art, but who, like Mrs. Gereth’s son, have failed to put it to its proper uses. Gerald, who quotes Samuel Johnson’s words of caution about spoiling unworthy heirs to justify the mood of excess at Toby’s twenty-first birthday (“It was typical of Gerald not to have realised that Dr. Johnson’s poem was a ruthless little satire”) and who uses Lewis Carroll to account for bulky purchases from a posh French delicatessen (“Something for everybody!...All must have prizes!”) is the apogee of this: quoting Alice in Wonderland without perceiving his own similarity to the hatters.
Yet for all the Tories’ fecklessness, that novel still held out hope that art may be able to offer a genuinely transcendental sense of communion. In a comic scene from early in the novel, Giles and Nick find themselves eating breakfast together in the Feddens’ kitchen, listening to Richard Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben on BBC Radio 3’s “Record Review” programme, and arguing over the piece’s artistic merits (Gerald is for Strauss and Nick is anti). Suddenly, Nick is “ready to say all kinds of things” to his host—some of which come dangerously close to insult. That a brief glimpse of common ground might allow people to articulate otherwise impossible thoughts is surely as good an argument as any for why art might afford a life with meaning, and it is perhaps the element that most distinguishes the aesthetics of the new novel from those of the former. If Giles Hadlow has a defining characteristic, it is that he lacks an inner life altogether: he has, as his father opines, “no sense of beauty.” This makes his promotion to the position of Minister of Arts in David Cameron’s government particularly galling to David: it is, David stresses, a role to which Giles is ‘so laughably unsuited’ that his appointment is “itself a grim warning.”
Giles has been appointed, as David speculates, “to give the arts a good kicking”—a plausible judgement when the Tory party is the team at issue, but possibly not one complex enough to manage the kind of sustained opposition the novel wants to draw between the two characters. Instead, the brusque dispatching of Giles’s artistic chops seems to reflect his corresponding lack of a meaningful character arc; his seamless transition from childhood sadist to mean-spirited Tory MP providing little in the way of dramatic complexity. Indeed, if the coincidences of time and place stretch credulity in the novel’s later moments—there really do seem to be too many book events at which both characters are scheduled as rival speakers—it may just be a sign that tension is not where Hollinghurst wants it to be. It’s a small world, especially in literary London, so such run-ins cannot entirely be discounted: all the same, I came to read Giles’s every new and more improbable sighting as a reminder of the creaking visibility of the narrative’s inexpert mechanics, a covert admission that its sense of opposition has not meaningfully been filled in.
Part of the problem lies in the novel’s movement from an earlier to a more recent epoch: in that sense, the challenge remains the same as in his last two novels, which struggled to transfer their sense of cloistered narrative excitement to a comparatively un-closeted era. A previously subtle transition through time, for instance, has been replaced by fussy steering: one journey by tube is described as “a longish leap, a good forty-five minutes on the newly dubbed Overground.” Some other dates from the modern era seem improbable, and even physically impossible. Thatcher, it is claimed, writes the preface to Giles’s book on the perils of the European Union in 2008: a full four years after being so struck by the debilitations of a series of strokes that her eulogy at Ronald Reagan’s funeral required videorecording in advance. These less dynamic later sections produce diminishing returns the closer they crawl towards the modern era, accounting for an eery, top-heavy atmosphere: modernity becomes more blurry in the novel’s rendering, while more distant eras are conjured with a franker vividness.
This fact alone seems to be symptomatic of a wider issue of sympathy at the novel’s core, as the noticeable decrease of curiosity about the Tory party empties seduction of its former mileage. The sociological interest to this portrayal—suggesting new, Brexit-produced fault lines whose sharpened edges make rapprochement perhaps more difficult than ever—isn’t without a certain bearing on the characterisation, however unwitting the novel remains about its offered insights. When Our Evenings revisits Radio 3’s “Record Review,” it is no longer with the hope of fostering dialogue, but of making a cruder complaint about lapsed standards: ‘“Too many ‘you knows’ and ‘sort ofs,’” said Richard, and I gruffly agreed.”
This attitude gets a more extended airing in David’s performance at the Aldeburgh festival of the spoken sections of An Oxford Elegy, Ralph Vaughan Williams’s musical arrangement of Matthew Arnold’s “Thyrsis” and “The Scholar Gypsy.” It is possible to perceive what ensues—Giles arrives by helicopter in his capacity as Minister for the Arts, and interrupts the performance by leaving early—as a statement on the philistinism of the present age, and thus as a particularly pessimistic reading of Poynton’s stance on the possibility of passing on a culture. But there is also a way to read this faceoff as a rather reactionary quibble with modernity, whose improbable mechanics (arts ministers don’t tend to have access to such generous budgets) barely conceals its distaste for art’s undeserving custodians. Twenty years ago, a piece like An Oxford Elegy, uniting a figure of arch poetic conservatism like Arnold (“our common fault,” he wrote in Culture and Anarchy, lay in “overvaluing machinery”) and a conservative composer like Vaughan Williams, bugbear of Benjamin Britten and other musical experimenters for typifying the decidedly non-innovative “English sound” that makes him such a favourite at birthdays and funerals, would have served as a cultural shibboleth for the right. That Hollinghurst is now happy to marshal the piece in defence of all that’s true tells a fascinating story about the realignment of British politics; for Hollinghurst’s novel itself, the result is a sympathetic void.
Hollinghurst’s first four novels distinguished themselves by the personal ground they hoped to excavate and a corresponding chronological slimness. Even The Line of Beauty, whose ambitions were certainly towards some larger commentary about politics, tracked a comparatively condensed slice of experience: specifically, the years 1983–7, an era of unrepresentative high-Tory pre-eminence wedged between Thatcher’s shaky first term and her disastrous last two years. In The Stranger’s Child and The Sparsholt Affair, the structure of Hollinghurst’s preferred narrative model changed: though that first novel was a more overtly self-conscious attempt to assume the mantle left by Howards End, in fact both novels took Forster’s novel’s famous injunction—“only connect”—to be a principle at least as applicable to human relations as to narrative structure. This latter was now characterised by large historical sweeps and bracing leaps through time, each allowing the progress of history to be traced in generations of people affected by a drama introduced in those novels’ opening sections.
Formally, the continuity between those novels and Our Evenings largely outweighs the differences: if anything, the shift to the first person allows a note of bombast more in line with the prerogatives of omniscient third person than with a perspective keen to foster intimacy. A curious tendency to typify has made its way even into the prose’s quieter moments: when attempting to make small talk with an older stranger, David remembers “an awkward outsider’s sense of work-time”; Mark’s uncle George, when quizzed about his war experiences for David’s school assignment, has “an old man’s slight loss of confidence and fear of misunderstanding”; when David revisits the Hadlows’ estate with other classmates the summer after his residency, it is “with a former guest’s sense of showing Cousins the way”; Mark Hadlow himself has “a busy man’s way of making things easy and agreeable”; as David’s stage career takes off, a more senior star shakes her head “with that actor’s sense of sharing memories too numerous and disordered to know where, or whether, to start.” Writing like this gives off the uncanny feeling that it is ransacking experience in order to lend shape to a general rule; if its interests seem distinct from those of evocation, this may be because Hollinghurst’s novel has simply set its sights on grander imperatives, without wishing to linger in the local for too long.
This strategy might have worked effectively with the last two novels, which, in detailing the changing acceptability of gay lives in Britain, tapped into an extraordinary historical truth that could be depended upon to serve a proverbial purpose. If British Social Attitudes surveys are anything to go by, then the progress of gay men in navigating the transition from a repressed to an open era should enjoy the uncontested sympathy—perhaps even the shared sense of release—of any sensitive or curious reader, and not just of fans who have followed Hollinghurst’s career up to this point. Though Our Evenings attempts to embed its structure with a similar feeling, it just isn’t obvious that Brexit carries the same weight as a phenomenon: its political effects are too recent, and its impact on gay lives too nebulous, for it to enjoy the unqualified treatment as a social ill the novel plans for it. A truly terrible rendering of a political discussion, unfolding in rehearsals for a play that David is getting ready to perform on the eve of the referendum, sees a fellow English actor apologise to a visiting French co-star: in its strange airless flippancy, it seems the apogee of the novel’s lack of curiosity about contemporary history. “I’m so sorry Annick,” says the actress, “that you should have to witness this squalid business. Very soon it will be over, and then I hope we can get back to normal.”
Conversations of this kind do of course take place in real life, and the flippancy about politics may even be excused by its framing in actors’ patter. All the same, David’s refusal to understand the contemporary world isn’t treated as a character quirk or an attitude that is ever seriously put in contention with others: when set against Giles’s callow Toryism, the predominant opposition seems instead a technical one, the vivid doing battle with the thinly-sketched. Some tacit acceptance of this imbalance seems to come in the fact that, though funerals tend to be a fairly risk-free way of assembling a novel’s characters in a single space, Giles is a dramatic no-show at the obsequies given in memory of his philanthropic father. In his absence, the series of eulogists attesting to Mark’s largesse, followed by an impressive rendition of a Haydn string quartet, combine to stack the sympathy even further in Giles’s disfavour. As David confides, in a judgement that could serve as a chilling verdict on the preoccupations of the novel generally, the “vigour and inventiveness and sanity” of the line-up merely confirms that Giles has made the right call all along: “we all saw how impossible it would have been for Giles to be there.”
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If Hollinghurst’s fiction no longer wants to look its antagonisms in the eye, this may merely reflect a reversion to his early academic interests, and those of his quieter, more locally brilliant early novels. These early works—and especially his first, The Swimming-Pool Library—seemed to work consciously under the influence of L.P. Hartley: that subject of Hollinghurst’s MLitt thesis whose works display a similar interest in the retrieval of painful memory and the shaky and often disturbing passage from youth to young adulthood. Hollinghurst has always dismissed Hartley’s influence on his fiction, and the presence of Forster and Firbank are certainly superficially more observable in the novels: the former in narrative structure, the latter in wit and dialogue. But for the evocation of time and place, the disappointments and lingering dislocations of youth, and for their dominant tone of yearning it is Hartley who comes to mind. Most memorably, he seems to be behind The Swimming-Pool Library’s narrator’s haunting verdict that 1983 was “the last summer of its kind”: words that hang over the otherwise thrill-seeking narrative exploits, and which tacitly and brilliantly re-frame The Go-Between to be about gay life on the cusp of the AIDS epidemic.
If Hartley underwrites what makes Hollinghurst’s prose, at its best, amongst the most distinctive to have emerged out of England in the last forty years, there are signs he has inherited the defects of this buried influence, along with the incontestable strengths. Hartley, who could conjure a child’s perspective with stunning evocation, as in The Sea and the Anemone; or who could track the cruel reversals of unrequited love, as in Simonetta Perkins, was always on shakier ground in a novel with a more ambitious timespan and with greater claims to make about experience. Simply, The Go-Between was unable to convince the reader that a boyhood summer spent as mediator in an illicit love affair was an event of such magnitude that it could prevent its protagonist from placing his trust in other people decades later. Hollinghurst has sometimes found a structuring device that gives coherence to the vision from which an appreciation of his beautiful style can then proceed. At others, as most notably in The Spell, a bed-hopping capriccio about the joys of consuming ecstasy in Clapham Common, the results can be listless and inconsequential. Our Evenings shares this tendency with the less successful of Hollinghurst’s creations, with the added quirk that Brexit seeks to imbue a sense of drama, if only in phantom form. To his larger question—of whether the gay experience can continue to furnish an original attitude to life in the wake of innumerable social strides—Hollinghurst has yet to shape a convincing answer.