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.
You are The Spectator’s deeply irritating Sam Leith writing in pseudonym, and I claim my five euros.
“top-down homophobia has been one of Hollinghurst’s abiding preoccupations.” Bottom-up homophobia is also a thing.
I stopped reading at “queer peer”.
I stopped at the nonsense about a 41% rise in ‘hate crime’.
You lasted way more than me 😀
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.
Yes a made up stat often employed by those of malign intent
Try having a drink every time he mentions Oxford. Hic!
Me too!
God this is boring. And feels weirdly old-fashioned, too, now that gayness has been overtaken – and how – as the cause du jour.
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.
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.
A Gordian knot of neuroses in your comment. Sorry, I don’t have time to help you untie them.
What tosh-I’m glad to have avoided it
Much more preoccupied with style than substance, and the style is tedious and overworked.
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.