Alan Hollinghurst is best known for his first two novels, the widely acclaimed The Swimming-Pool Library and The Folding Star. Born in 1954, Hollinghurst studied and taught at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he wrote an unpublished M. Litt. thesis on “The Creative Uses of Homosexuality in the Novels of E. M. Forster, Ronald Firbank, and L. P. Hartley” (1980).
Hollinghurst’s first publications were a poetry pamphlet, Confidential Chats with Boys (Oxford: Sycamore, 1982), and the story “A Thieving Boy,” in Firebird Two (London: Penguin, 1983). The Swimming-Pool Library (London: Chatto and Windus, 1988) and The Folding Star (London: Chatto and Windus, 1994), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, were critically feted and sold well. His most recent novel is The Spell (London: Chatto and Windus, 1998).
Hollinghurst provided the introduction to a collection of Ronald Firbank’s juvenilia, The Early Firbank, ed. Steven Moore (London/New York: Quartet, 1991), and his translation of Racine’s Bazajet has also been published (London: Chatto and Windus, 1991). He has written an introduction to a new edition of Ronald Firbank, Three Novels (London: Penguin, 2000), and lives in a flat overlooking Hampstead Heath, North London, where this interview took place on Monday, June 15, 1998.
RC The Swimming-Pool Library and The Folding Star were both written in the first person; The Spell in the third person. Could you comment on the shift?
AH I wish I could remember more about quite what I thought and felt when I started The Swimming-Pool Library, which, after all, came out over ten years ago. There was never any question but that it would be written in the first person. There was with The Folding Star, though. I remember trying to recast an early part of it into the third person just to see if it could be done. It seemed rather forced. As it went on, it became increasingly clear the book had to be inside the mind and preoccupations of its narrator, and that a lot of its point was derived from that. But I often felt terribly constrained by the first person. I longed to be able to leap back in time, go somewhere else, or have access to material which the law of writing in the first person prevented. I think I got fed up with the technical clumsiness of the ways one can introduce other people’s experience. Both the first two books have these rather self-obsessed narrators on whom other people’s lives rather unwelcomely impinge. There’s the way they slightly resent having to find out about all this other stuff. The ways you can present that other stuff are either by having someone read something or simply having someone tell it to them. Both, I think, are artistically rather crude and unsatisfactory.
There are all sorts of reasons for writing in the first person, however. They’re partly aesthetic, partly technical—and partly something else; to do with the lack of moral heavy-handedness that comes from writing in the first person, because everything’s floating and unknown. Everything’s responded to very subjectively. There’s an especially interesting engagement, I always think, between the reader and narrator. It’s like getting to know someone in real life, forming a view, and changing your mind about him or her. It’s interestingly unstable.
I actually found it very hard starting to write in the third person. I imagined it was the easy, old-fashioned way to write. But in the event I didn’t just write The Spell from one omniscient point of view. I suppose one model for what I did was Henry James’s The Awkward Age: the idea that each chapter would be seen from the viewpoint of a different character in a changing pattern; that these different viewpoints would illuminate a rather amorphous subject, but there wouldn’t be one controlling point of view. Each position would be ironized by the ones that flanked it. That came to necessitate a sort of stylistic change in my writing too. Whereas, particularly in The Folding Star, I was just luxuriating in the consciousness of one person, I found myself in The Spell writing in a much more spare, detached way. The whole thing turned out to be a process of exclusion and elimination.
I had a feeling with the first two books that they were all I knew about their subjects; that they were the whole thing. People would say: “What did happen to Will?” I’d say quite honestly: “I’ve no idea.” With The Spell, though, I actually know quite a lot about all the characters which didn’t get into the book. The whole thing was more a process of refinement. It felt very different. I think it was a bigger challenge in a way.
RC Nevertheless, did the experience of writing The Spell resemble that of writing the others? You’ve spoken of writing slowly but without substantial revision.
AH Yes. With this book, though, there were notes and sketches I’d accumulated and episodes I’d envisaged which in the end weren’t there. Indeed, if I’d told the story of each of the four protagonists, it would have been a huge book. I always wanted it to be a smaller, lighter, more transparent book.
RC Do you start writing a book with some sense of its size?
AH Yes. It’s quite exact actually. The Swimming-Pool Library I actually wrote in a desk diary. It was a leap year, so it had three hundred and sixty-six pages of manuscript. I had twelve chapters, each of which ended at the end of the month. So that book had a finite length before I even started writing. The Folding Star came out within about five thousand words of the length I’d projected for it. The Spell turned out a little longer than I’d originally thought.
RC You’ve said you leave some details of plot open when you start writing. But this early sense of what a book’s like must condition what follows to an extent.
AH I like to have some pretty clear sense of the main movement of the action. There isn’t really plot as such in The Spell. There’s a story, but not really plot, in the sense of some machinery going on, forcing coincidences on the characters. I wanted the form of the book to grow much more naturally out of the material; for it just to be a study of people and their relations to each other.
I have an idea of a book, an apprehension of the sort of color, tone, texture, and mood of it. Then there’s quite a lot of working out what’s going to happen. Things are discovered en route. I think it would be very boring to do it any other way. That’s why I could never write a detective story, where one would have to have the whole thing clear in advance, then just sort of fill it in. I like the actual writing to be a process of discovery. Certainly questions, like who would carry a particular bit of the narrative in The Spell, were often undecided. The decision to do the breakup scene between Alex and Danny from the point of view of Danny, for example, suddenly came to seem a brilliant idea.
RC That’s interesting. The Spell felt very much like a dance to me; as such, its steps felt reassuringly plotted—as if one were looking at something very assured and ordered.
AH I think when things are going well, that just happens. Things come together and the pattern emerges in some way: so, The Spell has sixteen chapters; there are four characters, and so on. It was part of the plan of the book, I suppose, that it starts off looking as if it’s about Robin and his predicaments, but turns out to be about other people and their predicaments as well. His is the first voice to go out of the composition. The book starts like a rondo, with Robin as the first subject. Its structure is sort of “A-B-A-C-A”; then Robin’s displaced.
I thought originally The Spell was going to be quite a strict rondo. I remember saying to someone: “I’m not quite sure. What do you think—could I vary it? We don’t want reviewers referring to “this ruined rondo of a novel.” But I always did have some vaguely musical analogy in my mind for its structure.
RC Each of your books features some concern with aesthetics and the formal laws guiding creativity in one context or another. In The Spell, the context is architecture. Is the presentation of artists structuring their works significant within your novels?
AH It must be. I’m not quite sure how I’d define it though. All my books have quite a lot about buildings. This happens to be a preoccupation of mine. I love inventing buildings and describing them. I’m interested in the atmosphere of buildings. People probably often wonder why the hell I have got an enormous description of a building at a certain point, but I’m afraid they just have to put up with it. In The Spell, Robin’s an architect, and, particularly as a student, is someone who’s had a more analytical interest in architecture. But I suppose that doesn’t emerge as a major preoccupation. It’s more just something that’s his work, and there’s a certain amount in the book about work as a refuge or compensation when your life’s going wrong.
The Folding Star obviously offers much more detailed comment on a particular artist and how he worked.
RC Yes. That brings us to the very neat parallel in that book: the project of piecing together and reading the artist Orst’s triptych and the tripartite structure of the novel itself. Presumably that came to you early on.
AH I think The Folding Star was always going to be in three parts. I gradually found myself bringing in other triplets—sometimes rather capriciously: everything started to come in threes. The truth is I’ve always been involved in and lived a lot imaginatively in arts of different kinds. They seem to me something continuous with and deeply mixed up with the rest of life, so I’ve always given them quite a significant role in my stories.
RC I want to pursue narrative and point of view in the first two novels. You talked about the urge to go to a different time and place, and the problems that created structurally. I was thinking of how literally you sanctioned the inclusion of Charles’s writing in The Swimming-Pool Library by the explicit account of Will excavating his papers. One contrast that occurred was with Nabokov’s Lolita. At the start, Nabokov offers a proclamatory note justifying why Humbert Humbert’s story’s being told. Yet, though you ground Charles’s text explicitly in realist criteria, in neither The Swimming-Pool Library nor The Folding Star is there any real justification for the world of the books; for the nature of their language, for example.
AH No, that’s true. I suppose Nabokov is linking his book to quite an old tradition of presenting the whole thing as a kind of case history. In a way he’s parodying the way a lot of scandalous or sexually scurrilous literature—one thinks especially of those early novels about homosexuality or drugs—is presented in the format of shocking exposés one would read with supposed sociological intent. In my books, it’s true that neither narrator gives an occasion or reason for speaking.
RC The nearest you’ve come, I think, is in the short story “A Thieving Boy.” The narrator at one point mentions something happening which “necessitate[d] writing down.”1
AH Yes. I thought about this a good deal with The Swimming-Pool Library. It was really also to do with the AIDS epidemic blowing up while I was writing it, and wondering to what degree I should reposition the book and demonstrate within it that this crisis was going on in the world which the novel depicted. I decided not to at all, but to leave the story placed historically where it was, in 1983. Various ideas went through my head, though—having the whole thing written by Will when he was very ill, or his friend getting it off his hard disk after he’d died. They all seemed horribly corny and contrived. I think for aesthetic reasons as much as anything else I decided not to pursue them.
It wasn’t a question which bothered me when I was actually writing either book. I relied on some primitive assurance that here was someone telling a story, and here in due course would be someone reading it. And I don’t honestly think I can quite imagine what the future life was in which Edward would have written The Folding Star.
RC There’s enough to suggest Edward’s innate interest in both language and analyzing one’s own experiences for it to be plausible that he might write. There’s that playful other reference in The Folding Star to a much more self-conscious method of narration, too: Proust’s. It’s in the image of your character Marcel, sick and in bed.
AH You’re right that there are all sorts of literary jokes in that book.
RC In The Spell, you have new subject matter: drugtaking and its consequences. Do you think there’s a relationship between that and the move to the third person? Could it be that writing in that mode facilitated writing about that particular topic?
AH That’s interesting. I think of The Spell as much more personal than the other novels, despite its being written in the third person. Perhaps my writing it in the third person indicates a recognition at an unconscious level that it was somehow closer to me than the other books have been.
RC By using the word “personal,” you leave yourself open to some rather obvious questioning about the relationship between The Spell and your own experiences of drugs.
AH I think in my life, I’ve tended to have periods of very intense experience of some kind, after which I’ve withdrawn and written a book which in some way draws on them. I came to live in London in 1981 and started having a fuller and more enjoyable life by far than I’d ever done in Oxford. Part of The Swimming-Pool Library was to do with the excitement of being in London and about that change in my life. The Folding Star was partly about all sorts of unhappy things that had happened to me: people dying; my father dying.
Also, there’s a way in which your own books, as you think of them and remember them, keep slowly and subtly changing as time goes past. I haven’t read The Swimming-Pool Library for a very long time, and a lot of it I know I don’t remember particularly well. The Folding Star was published on my fortieth birthday. I’d been rather dreading my forties. But almost at once they turned out to be innovatory and exciting. I have the sense that I’ve lived my life in rather a peculiar order. I had my thirties in my twenties and now I’m having my twenties in my forties. With The Spell I wanted to write a book about change. The Folding Star is so fatalistic, I think. I wanted to write a book about the changes one can embrace which enhance one’s life—and the other big, slow changes one has to come to terms with as one becomes older. I wanted to write about having fun too.
RC It’s interesting to think of The Spell as a kind of reproach to The Folding Star. I hadn’t thought of the word “fatalist” in connection with The Folding Star, but there’s certainly an inexorability about it.
AH There certainly is. With The Spell I wanted to write more about pleasure. I know that the idea of pleasure itself has become a slightly charged thing—for instance, with the antigay movement and the perception that pleasure’s the only thing certain gay people want to have. I hoped to take a fairly ironic position on pleasure; one that shows it’s good to have fun, but that it isn’t the only thing. The Spell is different in all sorts of ways from my own experience, but Alex’s experience of being rejuvenated by having an affair with someone much younger and by taking lots of drugs does draw very directly on it.
RC If we consider Alex’s experiences next to those of Edward in The Folding Star, though, their fates aren’t so different. You give Alex a new lover at the end of The Spell, but only after he’s been jilted for the second time—and rather inexorably so.
AH The Spell always had to have a happy ending. That was very important. I could feel some perverse tug of my pen bringing it towards last-minute disaster after all, but I fought it off.
RC The second rejection of Alex feels totally true, however.
AH Yes. Anybody else could see it coming a mile off, of course—which I hope is very like life.
RC I’m interested in the idea of The Spell doing something explicitly which your other two do implicitly: namely, coming up with ways of characterizing people and their sexual behavior that’s distinct from the more rigid, preconceived forms of sexual identity. You deploy that idea of “givers” and “takers” in relationships, for example.
AH The “givers and takers” thing is expounded as Alex’s own little system. Are you saying there are tacit or inherent ways of classifying people present in the books?
RC Yes. That may be Alex’s system, but it is one which, as he articulates it, Danny recognizes and acts on in a way which suggests it might be true more generally. It’s also a theory which pertains to each of the developments in all three books in a way, if only insofar as the law of “givers and takers” becomes another way of talking about the centrality of power to relationships.
AH I suspect the power thing was very much bolder in the first two books: in The Folding Star, there’s the fact of Edward’s being enslaved to Luc, but professionally having power over him. In The Swimming-Pool Library there’s Will’s rather seigneurial relations with others.
When you fall in love, you do give somebody else a sort of power over you. The social codification of it is vaguer in The Spell, I think: only Robin has that sense of social superiority and tends to think of himself as rather grand. Justin is a sort of passive-aggressive character.
RC Part of the comedy in The Folding Star lies in the extent to which Edward moves ever further into abuses of power—again, rather like Humbert Humbert in Lolita—and finds himself trying to justify becoming involved in a dominating and abusive power relationship. I couldn’t help thinking of that when I read that you’d aspired to teach, both at school and university.
AH Yes. It’s probably a good job I got out into the world of journalism when I did.
RC But does that necessarily involve less abusive power relations?
AH Well, if there is abuse, it works in a different way.
RC An analysis of power dynamics within human relationships does seem central to your work.
AH It seems so. I don’t think I’m very conscious or schematic about it. It’s just inevitably there. In The Swimming-Pool Library, the class thing was obviously played on much more strongly. The Folding Star tries to escape from all that—partly by taking the action to another country. It’s far more a book about bourgeois life.
RC To me The Folding Star is the stronger, because it disavows some of the easier privileges of power Will has in The Swimming-Pool Library: youth, beauty, class. Will’s social advantages seem to stack matters so heavily in his favor. With Edward in The Folding Star, tutorial domination’s about all he has over Luc. Consequently, the power dynamic’s more interesting.
AH Edward’s circumstances are almost deliberate inversions of Will’s situation in The Swimming-Pool Library. I’m conscious that I was playing around with archetypal things in those situations and, as it were, denying Edward so much Will took for granted. One book’s a sort of comedy of sexual success; the other, a comedy of sexual frustration. I think The Folding Star is sexier in a way; it’s more permeated with the unattainable. By contrast, Edmund White said he thought The Spell very utopian, which I hadn’t thought of myself.
RC There’s quite an easy interaction between generations of gay men in The Spell. That might appear rather utopian.
AH Perhaps The Spell was always supposed to have some of the elements of Shakespearean romantic comedy. In it, there’d be an older man, but essentially people would be young, attractive, and getting in a muddle. The characters might be too generously touched with glamour, but I don’t think they’re impossibly so. Part of the joke of The Swimming-Pool Library was, as you say, that Will’s given the maximum opportunity to do what he wants. He’s spoiled.
RC Paradoxically, that opportunity doesn’t bring rewards: the book, as you suggest, is finally less sexy—even, I’d say, less romantic than The Folding Star. Edward anticipates fulfillment in this one, longed-for encounter, whereas Will’s sense of confidence in himself is tied to a sense of disappointment in others—or a sense of not being satisfied by others.
AH Yes. Danny in The Spell has some of those characteristics, except he’s much more hard up and much less sophisticated. But he has low expectations of others and is obviously frightened of anything bigger and deeper.
RC Both Danny and Justin seem to be missing a whole register of responses to the world that Alex retains—or acquires. Bob, the drugs dealer, remembers Alex as the one who falls in love with people—which suggests that’s exceptional in metropolitan gay subculture.
AH I suppose something is being hinted at, which may be true to a greater or lesser extent. I think it’s likely that if, from when they’re very young, people live in a metropolitan gay subculture, they’ll be like this. I know so many people like that—people who become heart-hardened when very young. They live in the gay world almost as though no other world existed. That fascinates me, because it’s so much the opposite of myself. That conversation between Bob and Alex is not unlike conversations I’ve had with friends who say they’ve never been in love, whereas I feel I’ve more or less spent my entire life in love. That sort of polarity is one I wanted to touch on. Whether it’s strictly a generational thing I don’t know, but I suppose it’s more and more likely to happen if people live in this particular metropolitan gay culture there is now.
RC You use the polarity between types of people for dramatic ends. There are people who seem hardened in that way; then there are others, who are acted upon. Presumably, it wouldn’t be interesting to explore the psychology of the hardened people. You don’t suggest they have deep levels of generosity buried underneath. These people are only interesting insofar as they become tools for the development of the others.
AH You may be right. Justin and Danny are the two characters who only have three chapters each in the book; the other two characters have five chapters each. Perhaps one reason is that they don’t have the richness of inner life the other two have; they’re there as agents of the confusion and misfortune of others. But I wouldn’t want to be too categorical about that. There are just people who are much more susceptible in all sorts of ways than others, and who have a much greater awareness of the complexity of everything going on around them.
RC Peter Brooks, in his book Reading for the Plot, talks of Balzac’s characters as “desiring machines” whose urges motor the plot forward.2 Though you’ve rather disclaimed plot in terms of your own creative priorities, I wondered what your response would be to the idea that—certainly in The Folding Star and, in a way, in The Swimming-Pool Library too—sexual pursuit and desires more generally constitute the chief engines of plot.
AH I quite agree with that; these are appetites of one kind or another. It’s the same with The Spell: quite what “the spell” is remains elusive, but clearly falling in love is part of the desire to be taken over by something that transforms your life and makes it more beautiful. It may be a temporary thing or an illusion. It may just be a trick. But I think desires, appetites, and their innate tendency towards addiction, towards obsession, towards a need which becomes a habit, is what The Spell is about.
In my first two books I did feel it made for a sort of tension, which I tried to rationalize as between one sort of narrative, in which nothing in particular happens except for people hanging around and waiting for something to happen to fulfill their desires, and some other, more abstract notion of plot.
RC This deployment of desires to further plot doesn’t strike me as especially English. I can think of more books in French that work that way—particularly in gay fiction. Jean Genet’s do, explicitly. There’s Renaud Camus’s Tricks, where gay desire motors plot in a fairly transparent way. But these books don’t necessarily distinguish themselves from a mainstream literary tradition.
AH Well, Genet’s so alternative in most respects. One feels even his writing about sex is really about something else.
RC I was thinking of a tradition of using sexuality in narrative going back at least as far as de Sade.
AH That’s right. It’s perverse, isn’t it? It deliberately comes from another angle. I suppose I recognize something of that deliberateness in what I was doing when I was starting out, except that I was simply coming from an angle that was, broadly speaking, my own, so it seemed natural to me. It just seemed a way of getting at the truth.
RC There were one or two hostile responses to The Folding Star’s libidinity. The objection has been that the book shares the morally dubious territory of Lolita in its apparently cavalier narration of an abusive power relationship—one which leads to sex between two people of very different ages, notwithstanding the fact that you make Luc seventeen.
AH Yes. It hadn’t crossed my mind that the relationship was abusive until the book came out in America—which shows my general moral turpitude, I suppose. The question did come up quite a bit there, in a way that here in Britain it didn’t.
RC The status of seventeen-year-olds may become one of the defining moral questions of the age.
AH There’s a particular local reference to Britain’s age-of-consent debates there. But I had checked and knew that the age of consent in Belgium was sixteen anyway!
RC I want to move from the harnessing of sexual desire to propel plot forward to a much more prevalent tradition, thinking of English gay authors, particularly. This is to do with neutralizing desire; deadening or preventing it before it starts. In The Spell, there’s a brief reference to Robin as somebody capable of compulsive behavior who, because of that, turns off the tap completely. Nowadays in gay literature there generally aren’t these wounded or flawed characters at the margins of books; people who’ve devoted themselves to their club-footedness, or to artistic sublimations of sexual desire.
AH Bringing to the center people who could acknowledge and fulfill themselves, however compromised or satirized it may be, was certainly part of my conscious intention in The Swimming-Pool Library. The idea was not to write about people in some way disadvantaged and sitting in the margins but up there—out there, in your face. So one doesn’t associate those characters with habits of mind and repressive social patterns one wants to discard. But I think I’ve always had characters who can’t quite make it into this world of hedonistic fulfillment. Will’s friend the doctor in The Swimming-Pool Library very much sublimates his feelings into his work. Hugh in The Spell is similar.
RC These are very real figures in the gay world: people who dedicate themselves to watching or staying on the margins.
AH Yes. I don’t think that is necessarily just a gay thing. I think it’s like that in life generally.
RC Within fiction, such figures can also act as a useful brake.
AH That’s true. Certainly as I was writing those first two books in the first person, it was very important to have some sort of foil; something to contextualize and ironize; to provide a dissident voice to the self-adoration or self-absorption of the narrator.
RC This contextualization also relates to the importance of etiquette and manners in your work: the Jane Austen-like scope of it, as it has been called.
AH Well, all sorts of people are saying The Spell is very Austenesque. It had never struck me. Carmen Callil came up with a brilliantly detailed analogy of how The Spell is like Emma or Sense and Sensibility. When characters go to the club, it’s like going to London or Bath; both books play with the ambiguous merits of village society, and so on. At some level, although the whole procedure of my book is so different, it does, I suppose, refer to that tradition. I think The Folding Star is much more self-conscious in terms of literary analogues and prototypes—in the deliberate play with Lolita and Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. The Spell, apart from the odd joke about Thomas Hardy, I didn’t really think of as having those kinds of affiliations, but perhaps it does.
RC The heavy element of literary referentiality in The Folding Star might lead it to be read in the light of other books. An author surrenders his book ultimately, of course, but even so, does this concern you?
AH You mean: “Not as good as . . .” [Laughs] I think of the book as being itself; not in sum like any other book. But I couldn’t help but draw on those things with The Folding Star. It’s just the way my mind works. It could be read and enjoyed, I hope, by somebody who hadn’t read Lolita or Death in Venice, or the other obscure books I fed into it.
RC I wasn’t aware until recently that you’d taken Orst’s life from a Belgian symbolist novel.
AH Yes—Bruges la Morte by Georges Rodenbach. No Belgian reader I spoke to had ever heard of it, of course.
RC I wanted to draw on the M. Litt. thesis you wrote at Oxford on the importance of homosexuality to the writings of E. M. Forster, L. P. Hartley, and Ronald Firbank. I was surprised to find just how much that work fed directly into The Swimming-Pool Library.
AH The Swimming-Pool Library grew in part out of that thesis: the idea of juxtaposing what couldn’t be said with something that could now be said loud and clear; the contrast between concealment and display.
RC One or two other novels have been attracted by the same topic—and the same counterpoint of older and younger gay experiences and sensibilities: Mark Merlis’s American Studies, for instance.
AH Yes, that was very good; an amazing first novel—so controlled; and terribly depressing.
RC You both used the 1950s to reflect some highly significant social shift. The great critical response to The Swimming-Pool Library reflected in part, I think, a sense that it answered an unresolved question concerning the British gay literary canon: namely, what is the relationship between gayness as a matter of content and gayness such as it might be traced as literary style. In the thesis, you argue for a clear division. For instance, you say Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man is “not distinctively homosexual, for it relies on a new moral climate free from discrimination against homosexuality”3 Literary critics have recently taken such matters up; clearly, when you were working on the thesis in the late 1970s, you were working in a much sparer context.
AH That’s true. I don’t want to exaggerate, but actually no one had written much about these things then, about a lot of things which soon became fairly current or commonplace, even. I had an excitement of discovery about it then which I can’t quite recapture.
RC Gay writers, of course, don’t only draw on other gay literary influences.
AH Quite. Other literary precedents we’ve been talking about suggest that, in formal or stylistic terms, what you use, however consciously or unconsciously, does not necessarily arise from the gay tradition. There are writers I find imaginatively useful like Nabokov, one of the most heterosexual writers ever.
RC Presumably you have to suppress some of the inquiring instincts that went into the thesis in writing fiction yourself: concerning questions relating to audience, historical context, and so on. A writer probably shouldn’t think about these in relation to his own work.
AH I’m not aware of them really. It would be absurdly self-conscious to be thinking about your audience all the time. One of the most beautiful and enjoyable things about writing novels, I think, is going into an inner space and doing this private thing. I try to shut everything out.
I suppose there are writers who do sit there thinking about their audience and their place in the canon, which would be a kind of inhibition. But I’ve never felt a conflict between being a critic of any kind—which I hardly am at all now—and my own work. The nice thing about being a critic or reviewer is reading something and finding out about it. I’ve never been at all theoretical, in my cast of mind. What I enjoy in other writers is partly the question any practitioner has: “How does he do that?”; matters of atmosphere, sensibility; things you might get not from novelists at all, but from poets. All the time I was writing The Folding Star, I wasn’t reading fiction. I was reading Milton or Gerard Manley Hopkins. I feel my imagination’s much more saturated with poetry than with fiction.
RC The idea you just described of entering a fiction-friendly state sounded rather dreamlike and uncensored.
AH Yes, it is one which is free of censorship, I suppose. It’s a field of play. One’s not overlooked. I loved that feeling when writing The Swimming-Pool Library: that nobody had seen a word of it; nobody knew about it, or had any particular expectation of it. It just seemed to evolve quite easily according to the terms I’d established.
RC Is it easy to stay free of such senses of expectation as more books come out?
AH I think you never recapture the innocence of the first exercise of your power. After that, the pleasure is always more fleeting or occluded.
The short middle-section of The Folding Star I wrote in a very exhilarated state, though. I did what I still do to some extent, but then I had a part-time job as well, so it seemed more dramatic: just taking four weeks off; literally unplugging the telephone and not seeing anybody; getting totally immersed in writing, and having the lovely feeling of being able to think about the work deeply and continuously.
I’ve found each book in general harder to write than the last, which must be something to do with increased self-consciousness. It has partly to do, perhaps, with a dread of repeating oneself. It’s frustrating to think: “Actually, I’ve described this perfectly well in my first book,” but having to find some other, perhaps less satisfactory way of describing it—simply because one mustn’t repeat oneself. Or, of course, you forget. You come up with some wonderful phrase; it turns out you’ve used exactly the same phrase in your previous book. Nicholson Baker wrote in U and I rather cleverly about not wanting to repeat yourself and the almost absurd procedures of variation you introduce—which is probably just personal vanity actually. Nobody else would notice it, and it would hardly matter if they did.
RC Some writers become more and more aware of peculiarities of vocabulary.
AH Yes. It’s very striking reading something through in proof, I always find. You’re often suddenly aware of whole patterns of word usage. Quite unsurprisingly, they can be Freudianly revealing ones. I hadn’t realized the extent to which The Spell is permeated by oscillations between the words “doubt” and “reassurance” which run the whole way through it. I knew that this was an idea in the book—of people longing to be reassured that everything was all right. But I hadn’t realized quite how thorough my subconscious had been about the whole thing.
RC That could be an alternative title: Doubt and Reassurance.
AH [Laughs] That would get them in!
RC When do titles come to you?
AH With The Spell, I had the title before I began—with a slightly uneasy feeling that there must already be a famous book called The Spell. There doesn’t seem to be. It sounded right. Then someone said: “There’s Hermann Broch’s Die Bezauberung.” That probably won’t worry too many readers, though I don’t yet know what the German translation of my title will be.
RC Have the previous novel titles been translated literally? That would be difficult, I should think.
AH Well, both my previous titles are absolutely impossible to translate. The Folding Star tended to be called The Evening Star, or some poetic term for it. That’s fine, except when you get to the passage where the narrator muses on the sense of the word “folding.” You can’t do it. With The Swimming-Pool Library, because you can’t use nouns as adjectives in other languages—certainly not Latinate languages—you have to introduce some other grammatical relation. So it’s called The Library of the Swimming-Pool, which of course isn’t quite the point. The Spell shouldn’t be so difficult, although it won’t carry the other resonances of the word: “a spell of time,” as it were.
RC Do you pursue your works in translation?
AH Only The Swimming-Pool Library has been translated into French. I read that in manuscript. It had been abominably translated. I was glad I’d read it, and I made hundreds of corrections, but I couldn’t bring myself to read the final version. I’ve read the Italian translations of my first two books in proof and been able to pick up some misunderstandings. My Italian’s really not very good, but when you wrote the book yourself, you know at least what’s supposed to be going on. I encourage translators to ask me if they don’t understand something, but often they don’t. If it comes out in Japanese, I’ve got no way of knowing.
RC Were you involved in the proposed television adaptation of The Swimming-Pool Library?
AH The BBC sat on it for ages, then decided not to do it. Kevin Elyot wrote an excellent screenplay, originally in three parts. Then he was asked to recast it into two; then they still didn’t do it. I read it at each stage and made one or two tiny suggestions, but thought he’d done it brilliantly. So I was involved, and knew the putative producer. The option lapsed three years ago. Channel Four looked at it, but they were doing another series of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City and said they couldn’t have two gay-themed things in the same year.
RC It would have been daring for television.
AH I guess. It was my first experience of this whole process which so many people go through: the tension and disappointment of trying to get any film project off the ground. I’ve lost interest in it, I’m afraid, though of course I’d be very happy if someone decent wanted to do it.
RC The Spell would seem the easiest book to do as film. The first-person narration of the first two books needs fundamental restructuring for film narrative.
AH Yes. It had absolutely never crossed my mind, but several of The Spell’s early readers said it would make a good film. I can imagine it being done, I suppose, by someone with a very distinct style. But, again, so much of the narrative procedure of the book would go by the board.
RC Did your interest in the proposed adaptation of The Swimming-Pool Library reflect artistic engagement in the other medium, or financial interest?
AH Well, with The Swimming-Pool Library, I wouldn’t have made much money. I was attracted after a while by the idea of its being transformed into another medium, and having it watched by thousands of people simultaneously.
RC But the key matter would be that it was in a version you respected?
AH Yes, though who knows how it would have changed when it was actually being filmed. I’ve rejected various requests from people who obviously sounded hopeless or whose approach I didn’t like very much.
RC The Folding Star is too dangerous for film, I guess.
AH If you had a director who was a real artist and could thoroughly reimagine the whole thing in expressive cinematic terms, it could be rather good—though as you say, very bold. I wouldn’t fancy having to raise the money.
RC It’s clear that various forms of artistry interest you from the novels; film doesn’t seem among them.
AH No. I go to the pictures from time to time, but it’s not a big preoccupation for me.
RC Is that because with film the unit of meaning’s predominantly visual, and your interest is with the linguistic?
AH Well, I think of myself as quite a visual writer; quite a descriptive writer. When I do go to the cinema, though, it’s rarely enough for me to be completely dazzled and overwhelmed by the miracle of the medium itself—the beam of light. It’s fantastic. I have, of course, been very moved by films. I probably go more often than I do to the theater. My experience of theater here tends to be rather disappointing, but that’s partly just laziness, I think.
RC You wrote for the theater, translating Racine’s Bazajet. Would you do it again?
AH Well, I loved doing it. There was something fascinating about the moment when suddenly a group of serious professional people got together to learn the words I’d written by heart. I got very absorbed in that. It’s a bit like going into your own space to write a book—going to a freezing cold rehearsal room in Islington every day, and all these people are there, doing this mysterious thing, then going back out into the world where no one knows what they’ve been doing, which is storming up and down, delivering great tirades. That was rather amazing. The atmosphere clung to me for a bit, but it was a long time ago. I wouldn’t mind doing another. I have a vague ambition to translate Corneille’s last play, but I’d only do it if somebody wanted to put it on.
RC Your comments remind me of Henry James’s disappointment in the theater. He understood the potency of a live audience reacting immediately to one’s work, as opposed to the less direct relationship to one’s fiction readers.
AH Yes. He was stagestruck, one could say. James lived life in so many degrees of reserve that there’d have been something peculiarly exciting to him about the idea of a live audience and that immediate contact. Obviously, he felt his recurrent, persistent failures very keenly. I’ve never myself thought of writing a play.
RC Do you think constructing dramatically is something you don’t do?
AH I take so much pleasure in describing things. Of course I like writing conversations, and I don’t really think of them as separate categories. I like to think I can do everything I try. But I do like describing buildings, for example, so I think if I did write a play, I’d have to have these intolerable stage directions describing everything in enormous detail—like George Bernard Shaw’s.
These things happen to me. I don’t go out and look for them. So far a play has never suggested itself.
RC You’ve spoken of how, having started writing poetry, the impulse simply left you.
AH Yes. It just stopped, or I stored up the energies and kinds of observations I was making at the time and put them into the fiction instead.
RC When you get the impulse to write about something, is there always also the sense that this is the idea for a novel, rather than for anything else?
AH Yes.
RC If it weren’t, would you avoid pursuing it?
AH No. I’d happily write a short story if something came along with the “short story” light flashing. It’s just never happened. My whole procedure seems to be one in which things are allowed to resonate in quite large structures. It must be terribly hard writing short stories.
I just start with little ideas—a picture of a room in my head, and the people who might be in it. I have odd moments of porousness when everything I see seems somehow usable or suggestive, and others when I’m quite closed to such possibilities. I find that at this current time—approaching having a book out—I’m absolutely closed. The idea of writing anything is utterly remote at the moment. There are other times when I’m highly suggestible. And usually, when I do start getting ideas, they are so disparate that they could only be accommodated in something reasonably capacious.
RC Is part of the pleasure of writing, then, the intellectual one in linking together disparate things?
AH Yes; to juxtapose. The only story I ever wrote, “A Thieving Boy,” did just come to me suddenly like that. I saw it whole and wrote it extremely quickly. There wasn’t that process of the discovery and articulation of something, which is what really interests me about writing novels.
RC “A Thieving Boy,” early as it was, suggested to me that you’d discovered a very distinct writing style fully formed.
AH I haven’t read it for such a long time that I can’t remember it very well. It has the technical trick of being written in the first-person plural, so you don’t actually know whether it’s the husband or wife writing it. But I can’t remember how successful it was now.
RC It has the technical assurance of your later work. You’ve previously mentioned there being several unfinished novels before The Swimming-Pool Library—presumably they fall between that and the story.
AH Yes. I abandoned several novels earlier on.
RC What caused the shift from writing unfinished novels to The Swimming-Pool Library, do you think?
AH Partly it was just growing up and my rate of change slowing down. It takes such a long time to write a novel. When you’re young, you grow out of things before you’ve got very far with them. You can immediately see what’s wrong with something. Partly it was because I used to read things to friends and spoil what is for me some essential magic of privacy. I’d told the story already, so why bother to go on and write the book? I’d given it away in some sense—killed it somehow. So I learned not to do that. Partly too I think it was simply the weakness of the material itself.
RC Others might be describing the same thing when they talk of learning their craft, but they don’t often describe that in terms of this personal development.
AH I don’t think I did learn a craft really—not in any deliberate way.
RC Don’t you think of the earlier novels as exercises in craft-learning?
AH Not really. The earlier ones, which I wrote in my late schooldays, were very free-form. I tried writing an explicitly gay novel when I was a graduate. Again, it was a novel glamorized by London. A bit later on, I started more seriously writing a rather Jamesian novel, set in Venice and about a teenage boy who has an affair with his father’s mistress. I think parts were quite well written, but there actually just wasn’t enough to it. That Jamesian or Proustian disguise of trying to write about an affair with a middle-aged woman was kind of beyond me, I think. Perhaps I could do it now, I don’t know—but I certainly couldn’t do it then. So I abandoned that. Then The Swimming-Pool Library slowly took shape.
RC Were these stories that reached you from others or that you’d invented?
AH I invented them, I think.
RC Then you came across certain elements that you were going to piece together into The Swimming-Pool Library. Given that you’ve already said certain key elements of a book’s plot remain unknown to you, was the successful completion of a project also about learning to resist the impulse to complete a story first in your head before bringing it to the point of articulation?
AH Yes. There may be some not fully conscious wariness of that; of having to leave it to some extent unknown. There are two things here: there’s giving away the story, and giving away the novel. The former is some quite primitive thing which must be to do, I think, with what must be a stronger narrative impulse in me than I recognize. The other thing is being in a position as I start a book of not exactly knowing what’s going to happen in the later parts, or what twists it might take en route to an end I may see fairly clearly. For example, I wrote the last paragraph of The Spell first. I knew it was going to end on the clifftop. But there were all sorts of twists before the characters got there that I hadn’t fully envisaged.
RC Was this a new strategy—to start at the end?
AH It wasn’t really a strategy; just how it happened. Usually the clear moments I’ve had have been where something has crystallized to do with the early stages of the story. Unusually, in this case, I saw an image with which I wanted to end the book.
RC You’ve said the sex scene between Edward and Luc in The Folding Star was only clear to you just prior to writing it. I was interested in the open-endedness of the final image of the book—the picture of the missing Luc. Did that come to you similarly late?
AH Yes. I was about to do a huge contrapuntal, thirty-page resumé of all the novel’s motifs, but I thought: “Fuck it, I’ll write this one paragraph instead.” That seemed to be it, which was a great relief—for me and everybody else. It’s enigmatic and involves a sort of double take. You have to read the paragraph twice to see what’s going on in it. A lot of people don’t realize what’s going on: that Edward is looking at a photograph of Luc. People have given me extraordinary interpretations of it: that he’s looking through the window of a ferry, for instance.
RC Both The Folding Star and The Spell end in a rather open-ended way.
AH They all do, I think.
RC But, though in The Swimming-Pool Library one feels one’s been given everything that’s important to the story—the story of Charles’s life is complete, that is—there is that gesture of Will’s, his refusal to write the life. Surely that offers a thematic ambiguity: the suggested connections between him and Charles aren’t forced into some easy move to closure.
AH In both The Swimming-Pool Library and The Folding Star there’s a lot of plot business just before the end. Then they have a sort of coda leaving everything in suspense or solution.
RC Is that something you realized only in retrospect?
AH No. I knew what I was doing.
RC You spoke of reading poetry during the writing of The Folding Star. Do you consciously avoid reading novels when writing?
AH Yes. In general I don’t like reading other fiction while I’m writing fiction, so I go back to old favorites.
RC You said you read Milton, whose voice is very strong. Some writers complain of the dangers of being taken over by another voice.
AH I know. I actually read James’s The Wings of the Dove in the middle of writing The Folding Star, which slightly goes against what I was saying and was potentially suicidal in that sense. I think I got away with it. In the particular case of Milton, it involved Comus especially—and the very end of Paradise Lost. I was reading him more for the imagery of the woods and lawns, which is reused in the common in The Folding Star. I love writing about trees.
RC So is it simply pleasure that takes you back to poetry?
AH I’m not sure. Poetry often moves me very intensely. I suddenly feel I must read it—as I did yesterday. I thought: “I must read W. B. Yeats’s ‘The Municipal Gallery Re-visited.’” I took it down and felt completely overcome. I love that compact effect of a poem. You can read it very quickly, which of course you can’t do with fiction. It’s something to do with the consolation of rhythms you know unfolding, too; rhythms you’re familiar with. It’s like listening to great music. You know what to expect and still you keep hearing it afresh.
RC Rhythm and poise are equally central, presumably, when you write prose.
AH I think rhythm’s important. I’ve never stood back from myself as I was doing it quite enough to know what it is I’m doing, though. Sometimes my rhythms are too euphonious.
RC The slow, measured method of composition you’ve described makes it sound as if the musicality of the prose concerns you constantly. There isn’t that vast unburdening of a first draft some writers mention.
AH I can’t analyze it terribly clearly, but I know I’ve never done that torrential thing. I write other things like that—I write long letters torrentially, and with an odd lack of style. Well, I suppose they do have a style of their own. But I recognize that as quite distinct from the way I’d write fiction.
RC You spoke of having no sense currently of what the next novel might be. Is there a big gap between works where you don’t know what will occur?
AH I may have misled you slightly. What I find tends to happen each time is that when I’m writing the last bit of a book, suddenly I’m full of ideas for another one—which is very nice, of course. I’ve made a lot of notes and thought about it a lot, but for the last two or three months I haven’t, really, and I won’t come back to it until The Spell has been published. I’m not nearly ready to start writing yet. I’m going to Houston, Texas, for the fall semester this year to teach creative writing, so I think I won’t write anything until I come back. The invitation to do that just came completely out of the blue, and, in the way some things are offered to you that you’d never yourself have thought of doing, I just said: “Yes, all right.”
RC Does the proposed break from fiction not concern you? Perhaps you’ve never had the worry that your talent might dry up.
AH I haven’t. I’ve always had an underlying confidence that things would happen in due course. There are times when I find it difficult to write, but I’ve never really had the experience of writer’s block.
RC The idea of being bombarded with ideas for the new book as the previous one closes is familiar to many writers, I think. One theory I’ve heard is that it’s a prompt from the subconscious to encourage the completion of what’s at hand without too much further delay.
AH I recognize that event—the feeling that of course you’re aware of what’s wrong with this book, and if you took another year you could make it a much better one, but actually you’ve just got to let it go. The mingled relief and dissatisfaction in that moment is rather hard to describe. There’s this sudden presence of other ideas: perhaps it is the subconscious trying to get you to force the book closed. It could be the opposite, though—the subconscious saying: “You’ve got all these other ideas—why don’t you put these in the book as well?” But you defy it, saying: “No, this is the end.”
RC Is there a lot of material from the notetaking you don’t finally use?
AH I think part of the point of the long gap that’s happening now is that these ideas have the chance to settle. You go back to them and think: “That’s not much of an idea after all.” But there will be things there that will go into it.
RC You sound quite confident about things having to reach a point of maturation—which rather begs a question concerning the teaching of creative writing. That involves, by definition, writing to order.
AH Yes. It’s not that I don’t believe skills can’t be honed by exercise, because they obviously can. But I think it’s so much more difficult in prose writing anyway. If you can get everybody writing sestinas, that’s different.
RC In America it’s often a criticism to say a novel feels as if it has come out of a creative writing program. Just as honing is useful, there’s a danger of overstating the importance of technical lessons.
AH Of course there is, yes. I’m really very skeptical about the whole thing. One has to have something to say.
RC In the introduction to The Early Firbank, you wrote of the world of his novels constituting a kind of child’s exposure to the world of adult conventions.4 I couldn’t help connecting that to the introduction of Roops, Will’s nephew in The Swimming-Pool Library. Roops has this morality-free understanding of homosexuality—a nice way of indicating the importance of changes in gay life in the last decades: that a child might have an unprejudiced view of homosexuality.
AH That was his function in that book. It informed or is in some way parallel to a kind of innocence in Will’s own attitude. That whole idea of being like a child—I still recurrently feel like a child. I’m quite surprised to find how incredibly old I am. That’s certainly a motif in The Spell, too: the idea of having a guide or mentor; the person who helps you to be yourself or change yourself, or shows you things you didn’t know. There’s quite a lot of imagery in The Spell to do with that. And it’s also partly to do with another twist in The Spell: the treatment of the relationship between son and father. That’s obviously another buried preoccupation of all the novels, I think: that, generally, there are sorts of substitute relationships. In The Swimming-Pool Library, Will’s parents we never even see. But he has a representative figure—his grandfather—from an older generation.
RC There are ways in which what seem like vertical relationships get played out horizontally in all your novels. Such themes might have preoccupied some writers in terms of the exploration of psychology. Your treatment, however, involves a sort of aloof dramatization of possible ways of behaving. This distinction between the dramatic or social and the psychological is rather crude, I admit, but it does work as a basic differentiation; a way of distinguishing the work of many gay writers, for instance, from the heavily psychologizing novel tradition of, say, D. H. Lawrence.
AH Yes, especially because they want to escape that sort of psychiatric pigeon-holing.
RC This school of fiction occurs subsequent to the impact of Freud, whose work was key to certain modernist writers but not others. I think you’re right in saying gay writers are invariably reluctant overtly to psychologize because of the history of gay men being read psychologically to their detriment.
AH Yes. This returns us to the idea of the novel as motored by impulse and desire. I always loved the idea of just describing people’s behavior: that this is what this person did on this occasion, and not really saying any more about it.
RC I think it’s no accident that somebody like Lawrence—despite his psychosexual preoccupations—isn’t interesting to most gay novelists.
AH Firbank was the least psychological writer there ever was, and his allegiance is more to late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ideas of character, which don’t have any psychological dimension at all. I suppose his approach comes out of a comedy of types and humours, ultimately: the feeling that people just are their impulses and caprices; they don’t have any inside to them. That can be very funny and sort of true. It was certainly one of my ideas in The Spell: ruling passions; the idea that everybody goes through their lives with particular fantasies, dreams, and beliefs which could never stand the test of reality but which nonetheless dominate them.
RC Perhaps concomitant to this, and something to do with the open-endedness we talked of earlier, is the fact that the obvious novelistic reward of self-knowledge isn’t given to your characters.
AH That’s right. Whilst the reader’s given the opportunity to learn something, Will, one feels, won’t be changed by this experience.
RC The concluding gesture of The Swimming-Pool Library remains the possession of the reader. Will articulates what the conclusion of the tale is, but doesn’t himself give it due importance.
AH No.
RC You’ve spoken of your lack of religious beliefs. At the same time, your books have a keen interest in morals. Presumably you simply don’t look to the Church for guidance in that area.
AH I honestly don’t, which I think comes partly out of having had a very intensely religious adolescence, followed by a total revulsion from religion. I’ve retained a fairly steely distance from the whole thing. To me it’s an irrelevance—which isn’t of course to trivialize the whole nightmarish chaos that religions bring about in life. I’m simply not preoccupied with theological questions, I don’t think—which one could be, as an atheist.
RC What of the fiction writer’s choice between describing a world that’s predominantly material or one which suggests that consciousness has—like it or not—spiritual undertones?
AH I don’t think my books are wholly material. I’m not saying I don’t have a spiritual sense. But it isn’t a religious sense, although I am very susceptible to aestheticized kinds of religious emotion—in buildings, music, and poetry. I find Hopkins’s religious sonnets wonderfully moving and convincing, for instance, even though I don’t believe.
RC The power of the aesthetic seems a suitable theme on which to close. Thanks very much for your time.
1. Hollinghurst, “A Thieving Boy,’ in Firebird Two, 95–109 (quotation from 108).
2. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 39–40.
3. Hollinghurst, “The Creative Uses of Homosexuality in the Novels of E. M. Forster, Ronald Firbank, and L. P. Hartley,” 10.
4. Hollinghurst, “Introduction” to Ronald Firbank, The Early Firbank, ed. Steven Moore, vii–xi (x).