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The moral weakness of Britain’s ruling class Alan Hollinghurst revels in elite misbehaviour

Hollinghurst is a master sociologist of the ruling class (Line of Beauty, 2006)

Hollinghurst is a master sociologist of the ruling class (Line of Beauty, 2006)


October 3, 2024   7 mins

Elite misbehaviour is the Ariadne’s thread, the unifying theme, running through Alan Hollinghurst’s oeuvre. From his debut novel, The Swimming-Pool Library, to his latest work, Our Evenings, his characters tend to be entitled toffs — or bourgeois parvenus with a ringside view of their milieu — who get up to all kinds of nastiness.

All too often, an admixture of careerism and cynicism prompts them to throw in their lot with the most reactionary causes, which, amplified by the tabloid press, lead to disastrous social consequences. The stakes vary, oscillating between well-heeled prissiness and outright skinhead violence directed against homosexuals and racial minorities. Hollinghurst, of course, is too clever to tax us with straightforward causality. He works through implication and omission. Allied to this Jamesian habit of mind is a very English scepticism of theory.

But theory is one thing, morality another. Hollinghurst’s mannered, swaggering debut unquestionably brims with it. The Swimming-Pool Library is nothing less than an indictment of the moral shortcomings of Britain’s ruling class. Set in 1983, the novel takes place in a world of prelapsarian promiscuity before AIDS permanently consumed the gay scene. Just down from Oxford and in no real need of a job, William Beckwith, a sinewy 20-something aristo, is able to take full advantage of it — “the sex-sharp little circuits of discos and pubs and cottages” — thanks to his grandfather’s fortune, prematurely handed over to him to avoid death duties. His aristocratic ennui is offset by his penchant for predatory sex with subalterns, men “vastly poorer and dimmer than himself — younger, too. I don’t think [Will’s] ever made it with anyone with a degree. It’s forever these raids on the inarticulate.” His is the proprietary lust of the possessing classes. “I must have him” is Will’s refrain, and what he wants, he usually gets.

An encounter with a queer peer, Charles Nantwich, in a public lav soon results in a friendship. Rather taken by Charles and his club, a happily old-fashioned institution full of men of “fantastic seniority”, Will agrees to write his biography. And so, in a pivotal scene, Will lights upon an astonishing find in Charles’s diaries. The poor chap’s life, he learns, had been destroyed by an up-and-coming Tory politician, who whipped up a moral panic over homosexuality after Charles had been caught soliciting. If that isn’t awful enough, it turns out that the person behind it all was in fact Will’s own grandfather. Will’s cheerfully disinhibited gay existence, in other words, had all along been sustained by proceeds from the original sin of gay oppression.

At the time of its publication, the politics of The Swimming-Pool Library attracted much less comment than did the sex. Naturally enough, readers were rather more taken by its concupiscent protagonist, unencumbered by such quaint notions as consent. Will, who divides his time between clubland and cottaging, pines for young black men: “Oh, the ever-open softness of black lips; and the strange dryness of the knots of his pigtails.” Arthur, of West Indian origin, fits the bill, and lets Will have his way with him: “after a few seconds’ brutal fumbling, [I] fucked him cruelly. He let out little compacted shouts of pain, but I snarled at him to shut up and with fine submission he bit them back.”

As it was, The Swimming-Pool Library was a tamer affair than The Folding Star, Hollinghurst’s answer to Lolita and Death in Venice. Here’s his narrator, Edward Manners, finally having it off with the object of his sexual fantasies, his precocious pupil Luc Altidore, a Flemish teenager, in the novel’s climax: “I was up on the chair, fucking him like a squaddie doing push-ups, ten, twenty, fifty… I had a dim sense of protest, postponed as if he wasn’t quite sure.”

Now, in Our Evenings, his latest novel, Hollinghurst bites back the gay sex. Gone, too, is the racial fetishisation of his early works. Reviewers have been quick to detect a note of repentance in the new novel, and The New Yorker, of all places, complained how boringly PC it is. Its narrator is a gay Anglo-Burmese actor; its themes, prejudice and parochialism in postwar British life.

But the contrast between Hollinghurst’s early and late style is overdrawn. True, veiny members “of a dimension” — as the hero of The Line of Beauty calls them with Jamesian portentousness — are out, but then again, his fiction is about gay sex only in the sense that Proust’s À la recherche is about dinner parties. Hollinghurst has said as much himself: “I only chafe at the ‘gay writer’ tag if it’s thought to be what is most or only interesting about what I’m writing. I want it to be part of the foundation of the books, which are actually about all sorts of other things as well — history, class, culture” — and architecture and painting, theatre and opera, love and loss, ephebophilia and gerontophilia, one might add.

“The contrast between Hollinghurst’s early and late style is overdrawn.”

Indeed, there are clear political echoes of The Swimming-Pool Library in Our Evenings. The gilded scion Will has his counterpart in Giles, who treats Dave with the same de haut en bas disdain that Will treats his black lover. Dave, 13 when the novel begins, is the son of a single mother — latterly a sapphic dressmaker — and her Burmese beau. As kids, Giles is given to giving Dave Chinese burns and assaulting him at night. And already, there are signs of the brat politician that Giles will become, a Viscount Beckwith après la lettre: a “violently self-important” Tory MP, a consummate little Englander Borisishly bumbling his way up the political ladder. He is (but of course) the architect of Brexit.

Their life chances supply an interesting study in contrasts, as Hollinghurst charts their lives from the Seventies to Covid, counterpointing Giles’s aristocratic philistinism to Dave’s bourgeois earnestness. Biracial, gay, Dave makes do with character parts, ultimately becoming a thespian of some standing. Giles, meanwhile, has a vertiginous ascent.

Yet Giles’s progress from school bully to the bullying beast of Brexit feels a little too on-the-nose, a facile concession to bien-pensant opinion. Hollinghurst has been subtler in the past. It betrays, moreover, a perspective ignorant — or perhaps innocent — of the rich tradition of progressive Euroscepticism in this country, encompassing inter alios Wynne Godley and Tony Benn. To The Times, Hollinghurst has recently pronounced Brexit a “national humiliation”, no less. Yet he is undoubtedly on the money in using it as a shorthand for the recrudescence of racism: hate crimes soared by 41% after the referendum.

There was a touch of Whiggishness to Hollinghurst’s previous two novels, which seemed to be saying “look how far we have come”. Undeniably true, of course: take, for instance, the long march from decriminalisation in 1967 to gay marriage in 2013. Here, by contrast, Hollinghurst offers a corrective. The dial can just as easily be rolled back by crafty agents provocateurs in politics and the press.

Our Evenings is also reminiscent of The Line of Beauty in that both novels are, after a fashion, lessons in elite reproduction. Dave and Giles study at the same posh school, yet only one of them is able to effortlessly step onto life’s escalator. Dave is only ever an interloper in polite society. The same is true of Nick Guest in The Line of Beauty, Hollinghurst’s most overtly political Bildungsroman. There, he set out to document “the Thatcher boom years from the inside,” as he later told The Guardian.

Down from Oxford to take a doctorate on Henry James’s style at UCL, Nick is a guest at the Feddens’ in Kensington Park Gardens. Fedden fils is a college crony of his, Fedden père a Tory MP. A petit-bourgeois parvenu among patricians, Nick at first feels welcome in this milieu, but as time wears on, we realise that this in fact is the story of a young man precipitously coming down in the world. Far from being the face of a new Tory tolerance, Gerald Fedden happily throws Nick under the bus to distract from his own financial and sexual improprieties. A “little pansy”, “little ponce,” Gerald’s mates call Nick, and the MP agrees: attaching oneself to a “real family” was “an old homo trick”.

Nick learns in a hard school of the existence of such a thing as toff solidarity. It’s a coming of age that mirrors his creator’s own. Hollinghurst, the son of an ex-RAF bank manager, grew up in Tory Stroud, before going up to Canford, a public school in Dorset in a repurposed country house. “We were terribly ignorant about anything to do with politics or society or real life. I was unthinkingly conservative. I absorbed conservatism from my parents and assumed that was all one did,” he later said. Magdalen College, Oxford, opened a world of radicalism, much as it did to Dave Win, an unthinking Liberal forced to think through his politics at Oxford.

Hollinghurst’s own progress reveals volumes about the immunity from politics denied to homosexuals, a people more buffeted than most by political interventions throughout modern history. He discovered that “to write about gay life, even if one’s intentions are not militantly political, can have political implications”. In an interview with the Oxon Review, he elaborated on “the Nick Guest paradox”: his protagonists want to assimilate into broader society without having to “follow through the socio-political implications of being gay in any radical fashion”, but political elites in particular, and society at large, will never leave them be. A belle-lettrist by disposition, he never set out to be a political writer (“I’m not a particularly political person”), though became one as a “by-product of something else”: the coming of AIDS and “the antigay moral backlash which ensued in this country, the whole ghastly experience of the Thatcher period”. Ghastly is about right. Her 1987 campaign unabashedly associated Labour with “gay pride” in a bid to discredit her opponents. The following year, Section 28 banned councils and schools from promoting tolerance to homosexuals.

Unsurprisingly, top-down homophobia has been one of Hollinghurst’s abiding preoccupations. It no doubt helps that elite mischief makes good copy: “I have written about rich or other upper-class people because they are good value. They have more scope for misbehaviour and thoughtlessness,” he said to Robbie Millen of The Times. It’s an eminently Jamesian sentiment. As the Master once observed, “there are bad manners everywhere, but an aristocracy is bad manners organised”. Unlike his wide-eyed protagonists, however, Hollinghurst is firmly unillusioned about this set: “What I’ve always been interested in is moral weakness.” Viscount Beckwith represents one version of it in The Swimming-Pool Library, through his sordid pandering to Sixties homophobia. He reappears in the Eighties, with a cameo in The Line of Beauty, as “a handsome old saurian of the right enjoying fresh acclaim these days”.

As for Gerald Fedden, that “uxorious bigamist” with photos of both his wife and the prime minister on his desk, he very much embodies the moral weakness of the ruling class of that decade. Hollinghurst sends up with great effect the ludicrous hold, by turns slavish and sexual, Thatcher had over her acolytes. “A foolish Tory MP” finds himself at the centre of the eponymous Sparsholt Affair, a sex scandal involving rent boys in 1967. In the real world, a mere six Tory MPs voted in favour of decriminalisation that year, even as polls showed that 63% of Britons supported the decision. It was as late as 2002 when the first gay Tory MP, Alan Duncan, came out; though there had been many gay Tory MPs since the age of John Macnamara and Chips Channon, that “fleeting flibbertigibbet” (as Hollinghurst called him) who once described Hitler as a “semi-divine creature”.

As we have seen, Our Evenings has rather more to say on elite irresponsibility than elite hypocrisy. Like his previous six novels, it is a bravura performance of empathy and observation, freighted with the kind of high-cultural allusions (Aeschylus and Alma-Tadema, Janáček and Jonson, Palladio and Pevsner) that have won him a cult following but also prevented him from becoming the object of tote-wielding deification of the cortado classes in the manner of a Sally Rooney. And once again, he has proven his chops as a superlative sociologist of the moral weaknesses of our ruling class.


Pratinav Anil is the author of two bleak assessments of 20th-century Indian history. He teaches at St Edmund Hall, Oxford.

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andy young
andy young
8 days ago

TL;DR.
I’m afraid that although one’s sexual orientation is dreadfully important to oneself, this is frequently not the case for the rest of us.

Arkadian Arkadian
Arkadian Arkadian
9 days ago

I stopped reading at “queer peer”.

Michael Kellett
Michael Kellett
9 days ago

I stopped at the nonsense about a 41% rise in ‘hate crime’.

Arkadian Arkadian
Arkadian Arkadian
9 days ago

You lasted way more than me 😀

Peter B
Peter B
9 days ago

I got a bit further to “the whole ghastly experience of the Thatcher period”.
He sure does need a lot of words to say “Tories bad, Thatcher evil”.
Note added: my comment suddenly reappears after being suppressed for several hours. Tempted to add a comment about “the moral weakness of UnHerd’s comment moderation”. But I don’t think I could spin it out to the required 1000 plus words.

Jerry Carroll
Jerry Carroll
8 days ago
Reply to  Peter B

Maybe the bog was a long way off. Cut the man some slack.

Ethniciodo Rodenydo
Ethniciodo Rodenydo
9 days ago

Yes a made up stat often employed by those of malign intent

Ben Jones
Ben Jones
9 days ago

Try having a drink every time he mentions Oxford. Hic!

Chipoko
Chipoko
9 days ago

Me too!

William Amos
William Amos
9 days ago

Another strange piece from Dr Anil.

Jerry Carroll
Jerry Carroll
8 days ago

Ariadne’s thread was a better place to stop.

Ben Jones
Ben Jones
9 days ago

You are The Spectator’s deeply irritating Sam Leith writing in pseudonym, and I claim my five euros.

A Robot
A Robot
9 days ago

“top-down homophobia has been one of Hollinghurst’s abiding preoccupations.” Bottom-up homophobia is also a thing.

Susan Grabston
Susan Grabston
9 days ago

Agree. Another overlong ramble which i didn’t finish. What’s the point of writing if you don’t have something you want to communicate? Please can Unherd include author names uniformly.on home page so i can avoid going forwerd.

Caroline Galwey
Caroline Galwey
9 days ago

God this is boring. And feels weirdly old-fashioned, too, now that gayness has been overtaken – and how – as the cause du jour.

Andrew Vanbarner
Andrew Vanbarner
7 days ago

“Queers for Palestine” is a group of activists now, stateside. I don’t know if they’re a thing in the UK, but they’re either wildly incoherent, or profoundly ignorant, as are feminists who seem to be pro-Hamas. Are they at all aware of their fates, if their “liberation” movements succeed in the Middle East, or, worse, in the West?
Remainers, I suppose, need to be completely open to alternative sexualities, while at the same time condemning men who do reprehensible things like chat up women. Small wonder our birth rates are plummetting.

Francis Turner
Francis Turner
9 days ago

The reality of Nu Britn is that the new ” ruling class” are the Pooteresque lower middle classes, as per the majority of MPs in Parliament. Draylon suits, white nylon shirts, pointy corfam shoes and windsor knotted terylene ties, when not in hoodies and ” troyners”. They have a visceral dislike and envy of the erstwhile ruling class, and everyone and anyone who went to Eton, Harrow, Radley, Ampleforth and a few others, landowners, any one who served in The Guards or Cavalry, who goes hunting, shooting and racing, yet joy in sending their own offspring to insignificant minor public schools.

Christopher Barclay
Christopher Barclay
9 days ago
Reply to  Francis Turner

A Gordian knot of neuroses in your comment. Sorry, I don’t have time to help you untie them.

Susan Grabston
Susan Grabston
8 days ago
Reply to  Francis Turner

At £30k expenditure I doubt Starmer is in a draylon suit. If so, an even worse operator than current showing.

Richard Craven
Richard Craven
8 days ago
Reply to  Francis Turner

*Tryners.
Otherwise, spot on.

Francis Turner
Francis Turner
7 days ago
Reply to  Richard Craven

its the pronunciation that I was quite deliberately illustrating!

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
9 days ago

What tosh-I’m glad to have avoided it

Disputatio Ineptias
Disputatio Ineptias
9 days ago

Much more preoccupied with style than substance, and the style is tedious and overworked.

mac mahmood
mac mahmood
9 days ago

There is no reason why moral weaknesses have to be the preserve of the hoi polloi while the toffs enjoy greater facilities to indulge in lapses and ward off the consequences thereof. But I do not believe that a upper class ruling elite, in the usual sense, exists as such any longer in the UK. There are echoes of it in works by people like Julian Fellowes who keep the aspidistra of the upper classes flying to whet the appetite of the Spectator and Unherd reader types who continue to pine for the glory days of the empire. Otherwise, if they exist, they exist skulking around in the cupboards of a few private clubs that still continue to function. In general they are neither heard nor seen, except in the pages of expensive glossies. The aristocracy have been reduced to the level of wide boys seeking to making money on the sly wangling COVID related supply contracts.

Francis Turner
Francis Turner
9 days ago
Reply to  mac mahmood

Have you actually met, or spent time with any members of our aristocracy?

Anna Bramwell
Anna Bramwell
6 days ago
Reply to  mac mahmood

Fellowes’s picture of the upper ( and lower) classes is extraordinarily wrong, historically as well as dumb cliches.

JR Stoker
JR Stoker
9 days ago

Drivel, oh dear. Tories bad, LibDem good, Labour saintly (not those horribly sweaty manual working ones of course) is all it needs to say.

Tony Kilmister
Tony Kilmister
9 days ago

Hate crime didn’t rise by 41% in the wake of the Brexit vote. Allegations of hate crimes, essentially emails and tweets to police forces in the business of encouraging people to report, rose. Given the low absolute numbers, it didn’t require many very online people of bad faith to create a 41% surge. Meanwhile, the cops simply accepted that crimes, rather than alleged crimes, had been committed. No investigations into the truth of the allegations.

When Salman Abedi murdered 22 people and injured more than 1000 at the Manchester Arena around a year after Brexit, it didn’t qualify as a hate crime.

That aside, the article does a service in revealing Mr Hollinghurst’s barely one-dimensional take on the British upper orders.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
8 days ago

Why is this and other Unheard articles so boringly long? Excruciating.

Mark epperson
Mark epperson
8 days ago

Rubbish.

ELLIOTT W STEVENS
ELLIOTT W STEVENS
8 days ago

Both the authors involved here (writer and subject) are reasons why book burnings were invented. Laborious.

Hugh Bryant
Hugh Bryant
8 days ago

Extraordinary the lengths these ruling class types will go to to convince themselves that the ‘ruling class’ is someone else.

William Amos
William Amos
8 days ago

It is hard to reconcile the lurid descriptions of criminal and semi-criminal sexual behaviour contained in the opening paragraphs with the appeal for sympathy and support contained in the closing of the piece.
Are we supposed to be charmed and disarmed by descriptions of sexual encounters “unencumbered by such quaint notions as consent”, by “predatory sex with subalterns” and “ephebephilia”? I believe the latter phenomenon has a different name on the statute book.
And are we then asked to join in the lamentations that “political elites in particular, and society at large, will never leave them be”?

geoffrey cox
geoffrey cox
8 days ago

It’s ‘he has proved’, not ‘he has proven’ (last para.) in standard UK English – unless, of course, the author has suddenly decided to take on the persona of an 18th century Scots lawyer or such.

Jerry Carroll
Jerry Carroll
8 days ago

Lot of big words and obscure references here. Was this an academic paper originally? The professors love those.

Andrew Vanbarner
Andrew Vanbarner
7 days ago

Oh, for heaven’s sakes. The upper classes have almost always been far more tolerant of alternative sexualities than the petit bourgoise. And the working classes have always been ill served by socialism.
One’s sexuality should not preclude, nor require, a belief in free markets. The two topics are unrelated.
The rest of us truly don’t care, as Queen Victoria (who, famously, denied the existence of lesbians and had to have it explained to her) is long dead.
There is literally no reason why one’s sexual preferences would require a belief in the European Union. (They strike me as the most sanctimonious of poofters, anyway, those mandarins in Brussels, as horrified by Morrissey as they are by Tommy Robinson.)
Be a man. Stand on your
own.
No one who matters, at your club, will care much.

Faith Ham
Faith Ham
7 days ago

How far British lit has fallen from P.G. Wodehouse. Yes, I’m that dull, simple Luddite, but at least I can read my book openly on the metro .

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
7 days ago

The article is boring because Hollinghurt is boring. His books have become more and more wordy and are now practically unreadable. He needs a ruthless editor to slash at least 60 percent of the verbiage. There might be good novels somewhere in there but it’s too much work to find them.

Anna Bramwell
Anna Bramwell
6 days ago

A little facile? Surely not.