In October 2012, Hurricane Sandy hit New York. In Morningside Heights, I found myself virtually unaffected, but A. and her twelve-year-old son O. (plus cat José Reyes) had to evacuate their West Street apartment and stay in my living room for a week. A. and I have been best friends since our first week at university, in 1988, and I can honestly say that our only major point of disagreement in life concerns the Oxford comma (she is pro, I am vehemently con). That week immediately preceded the presidential election, making A.’s job as a senior editor at the New Yorker particularly demanding. The New York City public schools were closed all week, and O. and I went for runs and inspected hurricane damage in Riverside Park, ate bagels, watched Firefly, the first season of Fringe and The Big Bang Theory and baked a cake—a lifestyle sufficiently suited to our mutual tastes that O. observed, at the end of the week, that he thought he might want to be a professor when he grew up. As a thank-you present, A. and O. commissioned a painting for me, an “Ideal Bookshelf”: artist Jane Mount paints portraits of people through the spines of their favorite books, in gouache and ink on smooth water-color paper. Mine includes many of the books I write about in these pages—Richardson’s Clarissa and Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Burke’s Reflections and Goffman’s Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Burgess’s 99 Novels and Rebecca West’s extraordinary The Fountain Overflows (perhaps my favorite novel of all time, paired with James Baldwin’s Just Above My Head in the innermost recess of my heart)—but also several more personal choices: Fire and Hemlock, by Diana Wynne Jones, which seems to me to capture the emotional tone of growing up better than any book I know, and Dick Francis’s novel The Danger. It is not his best novel, but it is one I possess in a signed hardcover first edition because my idolatry of Dick Francis at age twelve was such that my mother let me take half a day off school to attend his book signing in Center City.
I am sufficiently a novel-reader at heart that though Perec is one of my favorite writers, he never wrote a book that could be described as one of my favorite novels; in fact, I have to confess, shamefully, that I have never read Life: A User’s Manual in its entirety. There are a small handful of books, though, that seem to me to provide the fullest possible range of pleasures: the mandarin satisfactions of sentence-writing, the emotional and affective richness of fiction in the tradition of Eliot or Dickens, the aching sense of dislocation or loss that might be associated more with William Wordsworth or Paul Celan than with fiction as such. The two I’ll write about here both feature on my ideal bookshelf: the German writer W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn and the English novelist and critic Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty. They seem to me to represent the culmination of what can be done in each of two major lines of style that emerge from the nineteenth-century European literary tradition: the inward turn of the Proustian first-person voice in Sebald’s case; in Hollinghurst’s, the elaborations and acts of judgment associated with the use of the third-person voice by George Eliot and Henry James.1 Sebald’s book (it is not exactly a novel, rather a web-or netlike construction of equivocally fictional species, owing something to Thomas Bernhard’s crypto-autobiographical first-person voices and even more to the reflexive fictions of Jorge Luis Borges) can be thought of as testing the limits of what might be done with a first-person voice in the Proustian tradition, although the relationship with memory is here quite different. The impersonal first-person voice has been largely emptied out of all distinguishing traits, and serves primarily as a kind of repository for collective memory, calling Perec more strongly to mind than Proust. Hollinghurst’s novel is explicitly and outrageously Jamesian, a technically extraordinary accomplishment that is at once highly conservative and radically fresh in its language and subject matter; the novel’s third-person narration prominently features the sorts of satirical summing-up voices, the ability to swoop in and out of the thoughts of a focalizing character, that might seem to have disappeared from the novel as the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, a form of narration that Hollinghurst shows to be an exceptionally powerful aesthetic and moral instrument. Both books, though, as different as they may seem on the face of things, share Jamesian and Proustian elements, showing clearly the cross-pollination of these two lines of style, each offering a unique set of advantages for chronicling loss and delineating the devastation wrought by an epidemic or a conscious program of eradication.
When talking about Sebald, it’s tempting to use the term sensibility rather than style as such, especially as I am not capable of reading his books in the original German; on the other hand, Sebald very closely supervised their translations, having taught literature at an English university for most of his career. Sebald was born in 1944 and grew up in a postwar Germany of silences and forgetting. He writes between fact and fiction (I think, too, of Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival), and the photographs with which his texts are interspersed, as in Barthes’s curious autobiography, represent not so much a means of corroboration (I was there) as a device for calling into question what we think we know. They are curious, sideways, elliptical; they institute the slippage and blurring of fact rather than its fixity, with details often askew. Sebald’s texts have the patina of verisimilitude but cannot in any straightforward sense be thought of as nonfiction. Unlike other equally “literary” or well-crafted pieces of prose that are more clearly nonfictional—I am thinking here in particular of Primo Levi’s masterpiece The Periodic Table—the narratorial persona is definitively though non-pin-down-ably different from the real-world historical figure of the author himself, despite what the two may have in common (the divergence feels wider, I think, than in the case of Bernhard).
Sebald published a nonfiction book called On the Natural History of Destruction, about writing and memory in the wake of the Allied bombing of Dresden during World War II, and that title phrase offers one avenue of entry into the strange and fascinating book that is The Rings of Saturn. Though The Rings of Saturn describes the narrator’s walking tour around East Anglia, it also concerns the death of Jews in the European camps (Sebald’s family had Jewish connections, though his father fought in the German army and spent the last part of the war in a prisoner of war camp), the European war in the air, citywide firestorms. One of the characters the narrator meets and converses with is a gardener named William Hazel who remains obsessed, some sixty years later, with the bombing raids launched on Germany from “the sixty-seven airfields that were established in East Anglia after 1940”:
People nowadays hardly have any idea of the scale of the operation, said Hazel. In the course of one thousand and nine days, the eighth airfleet alone used a billion gallons of fuel, dropped seven hundred and thirty-two thousand tons of bombs, and lost almost nine thousand aircraft and fifty thousand men. Every evening I watched the bomber squadrons heading out over Somerleyton, and night after night, before I went to sleep, I pictured in my mind’s eye the German cities going up in flames, the firestorms setting the heavens alight, and the survivors rooting about in the ruins. One day when Lord Somerleyton was helping me prune the vines in this greenhouse, for something to do, said Hazel, he explained the Allied carpet-bombing strategy to me, and some time later he brought me a big relief map of Germany. All the place names I had heard on the news were marked in strange letters alongside symbolic pictures of the towns that varied in the number of gables, turrets and towers according to the size of the population; and moreover, in the case of particularly important cities, there were emblems of features associated with them, such as Cologne cathedral, the Römer in Frankfurst, or the statue of Roland in Bremen. Those tiny images of towns, about the size of postage stamps, looked like romantic castles, and I pictured the German Reich as a medieval and vastly enigmatic land. Time and again I studied the various regions on the map, from the Polish border to the Rhine, from the green plains of the north to the dark brown Alps, partly covered with eternal snow and ice, and spelled out the names of the cities, the destruction of which had just been announced: Braunschweig and Würzburg, Wilhemlshaven, Schweinfurt, Stuttgart, Prorzheim, Düren, and dozens more. In that way I got to know the whole country by heart; you might even say it was burnt into me. (38–39)
This excerpt shows how important the technique of collage is for Sebald—he incorporates others’ words, together with photographs and often topographical descriptions, into a sort of pastiche. The preoccupation with questions of scale is also highly characteristic of Sebald’s approach, here and elsewhere, as is the loving description of the large relief map in which one can see all of Germany in miniature, with those strange emblems the size of postage stamps.
Sebald frequently gestures to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century styles—most notably to Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici, though with meanderings also reminiscent of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and Montaigne’s Essays—but the book is patently less early modern than postmodern in its instabilities and uncertainties. The rambling walking tour the narrator embarks upon at the book’s outset is without a clear purpose other than to dispel the “emptiness” that takes hold of him after the completion of a long stint of work (3). The book itself is composed under the shadow of the deaths of several university colleagues, including a lecturer in Romance languages named Janine Dakyns:
Janine had taken an intense personal interest in the scruples which dogged Flaubert’s writing, that fear of the false which, she said, sometimes kept him confined to his couch for weeks or months on end in the dread that he would never be able to write another word without compromising himself in the most grievous of ways. Moreover, Janine said, he was convinced that everything he had written hitherto consisted solely in a string of the most abysmal errors and lies, the consequences of which were immeasurable. Janine maintained that the source of Flaubert’s scruples was to be found in the relentless spread of stupidity which he had observed everywhere, and which he believed had already invaded his own head. It was (so supposedly he once said) as if one was sinking into sand. (7)
The narrator moves through an associative summary of Janine’s thoughts on sand in Flaubert into a vivid description of the setting for his and Janine’s regular conversations about Flaubert, an office so flooded with paper that “a virtual paper landscape had come into being in the course of time, with mountains and valleys” (8). This “amazing profusion of paper” is another replica, a scale model of some geological catastrophe, a thing of beauty as well as of terror: in this case the narrator moves on through an image of Janine amidst her papers resembling “the angel in Dürer’s Melancholia, steadfast among the instruments of destruction” to Janine referring him to a surgeon who might know something about the whereabouts of the skull of Sir Thomas Browne. The prose runs continuously, with few paragraph breaks and punctuated only by the occasional photographic reproduction, touching down at one unexpected place after another and arriving at a description of Rembrandt’s painting The Anatomy Lesson, a picture that casts doubt (so the narrator argues, at any rate—I have hotly disputed the question of the orientation of the hand with my own students!) on its own verisimilitude:
Contrary to normal practice, the anatomist shown here has not begun his dissection by opening the abdomen and removing the intestines, which are most prone to putrefaction, but has started (and this too may imply a punitive dimension to the act) by dissecting the offending hand. Now, this hand is most peculiar. It is not only grotesquely out of proportion compared with the hand closer to us, but it is also anatomically the wrong way round: the exposed tendons, which ought to be those of the left palm, given the position of the thumb, are in fact those of the back of the right hand. In other words, what we are faced with is a transposition taken from the anatomical atlas, evidently without further reflection, that turns this otherwise true-to-life painting (if one may so express it) into a crass misrepresentation at the exact centre point of its meaning, where the incisions are made. (16–17)
This sense of deep unreliability or instability in vision is all-pervasive in The Rings of Saturn. The narrator is obsessed with technologies of viewing, their powers and their limits, as when he sits down on a bench and looks out to sea:
I felt as if I were in a deserted theatre, and I should not have been surprised if a curtain had suddenly risen before me and on the proscenium I had beheld, say, the 28th of May 1672—that memorable day when the Dutch fleet appeared offshore from out of the drifting mists, with the bright morning light behind it, and opened fire on the English ships in Sole Bay. In all likelihood the people of Southwold hurried out of the town as soon as the first cannonades were fired to watch the rare spectacle from the beach. Shading their eyes with their hands against the dazzling sun, they would have watched the ships moving hither and thither, apparently at random, their sails billowing in a light northeast wind and then, as they manoeuvred ponderously, flapping once again. They would not have been able to make out human figures at that distance, not even the gentlemen of the Dutch and English admiralties on the bridges. As the battle continued, the powder magazines exploded, and some of the tarred hulls burned down to the waterline; the scene would have been shrouded in an acrid, yellowish-black smoke creeping across the entire bay and masking the combat from view. While most of the accounts of the battles fought on the so-called fields of honour have from time immemorial been unreliable, the pictorial representations of great naval engagements are without exception figments of the imagination. (76)
Sebald’s prose is difficult to excerpt; I have already strained the limits of readerly sympathy, I suspect, by quoting so extensively, and yet the passage continues for several pages longer, its juxtapositions and swerves inseparable from the content of what it treats. Several pages later, still looking out over the same scene, the narrator reflects upon a cloudbank that reminds him of a mountain range he once walked the length of (it seemed a thousand miles long) in a dream:
The jagged peaks of the mountains I had left behind rose in almost fearful silhouette against a turquoise sky in which two or three pink clouds drifted. It was a scene that felt familiar in an explicable way, and for weeks it was on my mind until at length I realized that, down to the last detail, it matched the Vallüla massif, which I had seen from the bus, through eyes drooping with tiredness, a day or so before I started school, as we returned home from an outing to the Montafon. I suppose it is submerged memories that give to dreams their curious air of hyper-reality. But perhaps there is something else as well, something nebulous, gauze-like, through which everything one sees in a dream seems, paradoxically, much clearer. A pond becomes a lake, a breeze becomes a storm, a handful of dust is a desert, a grain of sulphur in the blood is a volcanic inferno. What manner of theatre is it, in which we are at once playwright and actor, stage manager, scene painter and audience? (79–80)
The use of small elements to invoke the large is near-magical, the kind of sympathetic magic that works by metaphor and metonymy (the use of a puddle of water, a few twigs, a scrap of sailcloth and the human breath, for instance, to solicit beneficial winds for a ship at sea); the cumulative effect owes something to Proust, undoubtedly, but there is no such clear end goal here as in Proust’s recreation of the lost past.
Sebald’s narrator is preoccupied with impossible viewing points: the bird’s-eye view of the vantage point of Jacob van Ruisdael’s View of Haarlem with Bleaching Fields, the Waterloo Panorama. The latter is housed “in an immense domed rotunda, where from a raised platform in the middle one can view the battle—a favorite with panorama artists—in every direction”:
It is like being at the center of events. On a sort of landscaped proscenium, immediately below the wooden rail amidst tree-stumps and undergrowth in the blood-stained sand, lie lifesize horses, and cut-down infantrymen, hussars and chevaux-légers, eyes rolling in pain or already extinguished. Their faces are moulded from wax but the boots, the leather belts, the weapons, the cuirasses, and the splendidly coloured uniforms, probably stuffed with eelgrass, rags and the like, are to all appearances authentic. Across this horrific three-dimensional scene, on which the cold dust of time has settled, one’s gaze is drawn to the horizon, to the enormous mural, one hundred and ten yards by twelve, painted in 1912 by the French marine artist Louis Dumontin on the inner wall of the circuslike structure. This then, I thought, as I looked round about me, is the representation of history. It requires a falsification of perspective. We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do not know how it was. The desolate field extends all around where once fifty thousand soldiers and ten thousand horses met their end within a few hours. The night after the battle, the air must have been filled with death rattles and groans. Now there is nothing but the silent brown soil. Whatever became of the corpses and mortal remains? Are they buried under the memorial? Are we standing on a mountain of death? Is that our ultimate vantage point? Does one really have the much-vaunted historical overview from such a position? Near Brighton, I was once told, not far from the coast, there are two copses that were planted after the Battle of Waterloo in remembrance of that memorable victory. One is in the shape of a Napoleonic three-cornered hat, the other in that of a Wellington boot. Naturally the outlines cannot be made out from the ground; they were intended as landmarks for latter-day balloonists. (124–25)
At one point the book gives us a little glimpse of Lear and the dead Cordelia, “both of them so tiny, as if on a stage a mile off” (174), words that highlight the similar effects of viewing technologies and theater itself, and the reader is repeatedly asked to attend to miniature things and models, not just the ones I have already mentioned but a host of others, including one of my favorites, which comes in a meditation on the intimacy between the history of art and the history of sugar. The connection is expressed in the fact that families trafficking in sugar lavished their profits on country residences and town houses full of art, and many important museums were endowed by sugar dynasties or connected in one way or another with the sugar trade, with trade money legimitized by this sort of patronage:
At times it seems to me, said [Cornelis] de Jong, as if all works of art were coated with a sugar glaze or indeed made completely of sugar, like the model of the battle of Esztergorn created by a confectioner to the Viennese court, which Empress Maria Theresia, so it is said, devoured in one of her recurrent bouts of melancholy. (194)
The characters who populate the pages of Sebald’s book are themselves afflicted with all sorts of melancholy compulsions that speak to their being immured in a lost past: the poet Edward FitzGerald has an endless passion for the correspondence of Madame de Sévigné, who is “far more real to him than even his friends who were still alive,” which prompts him to assemble a massive and never-to-be-completed dictionary “which would not only provide commentary on all her correspondents and all the persons and places referred to in their exchanges but would also offer a key of sorts to the way in which she had cultivated and developed the art of writing” (200); the secluded lives, on a remote Irish estate, of the Ashbury family, who live “like refugees who have come through dreadful ordeals and do not now dare to settle in the place where they have ended up” and whose members occupy themselves with work that “always had about it something aimless and meaningless…not so much part of a daily routine as an expression of a deeply engrained distress” (a son working for fifteen years on a ten-yard fat-bellied boat, though he knows nothing about boat-building, or a mother collecting flower seeds in paper bags which hang under the library ceiling like clouds of paper [210–22]). One of the most memorable of these figures concerns the farmer Thomas Abrams, who has been toiling for twenty years on a perfect scale model of the Temple of Jerusalem, its completion endlessly deferred due “to the size of the model, which covers nearly ten square yards, and to the minuteness and precision of the individual pieces” (243), a project that seems (even to its creator) in equal parts meticulous and futile.
The icon for the book itself is Sir Thomas Browne’s figure of the quincunx, the netlike geometric pattern echoed in all sorts of other figures here, from the “invisible net” of the radar that protected British airspace during World War II (227) to the warp and weft of eighteenth-century domestic silk manufacture. Sebald’s net-like structure involves the stitching together of one bit to another so that the strands cannot really be disentangled. This loose and unorthodox patterning is somewhat akin to the kinds of unconventional ordering principle that attracted Perec, Barthes and others—alphabetical organization, other experimental ordering of one kind or another, the nonnarrative sequential ordering of Koestenbaum’s “My ’80s” and Sante’s “Commerce”—and it may be said that style, insofar as it foregrounds the unit of the sentence, has an affinity with the nonnarrative.
Many of the fiction writers whose sentences and undertakings are most interesting to me (Lydia Davis, David Markson, Thomas Bernhard) are working in a format that is significantly less oriented toward narrative than most other fiction. That is not to say that style is incompatible with narrative. On the contrary: novels by Austen, Flaubert and others represent the supple and dynamic knitting together of the sentence-oriented sharpness of the aphorism with a forward propulsion that depends on story, plot, mystery, fate in a fashion that is deeply embedded in chronological time and that relies on the development of plot and character and all of the other traditional components of the genre we call the novel. As Sebald represents in many ways a culmination of what can be done with the wayward wandering Proustian first-person voice, wandering in time and place, so Hollinghurst can be seen as at once a striking traditionalist and an extraordinary innovator in the line of descent that runs from Austen and Flaubert through to Henry James. Though his novels look much like the great works of nineteenth-century fiction, in other words, Hollinghurst’s style seems to me no less innovative than the more obviously estranging techniques practiced by Perec or Sebald, and this is not just because he includes the transgressive subject matter of men having sex with men and taking drugs: it has to do with the sentences he writes and what he believes they can do.
The Line of Beauty’s protagonist, Nick Guest, is writing his thesis on James and calls himself a Jamesian. James is present by allusion within the narrative, and present on almost every page in terms of the homage paid to his narrative voice and use of point of view. The Golden Bowl is particularly strong here as an influence, not just in the novel’s preoccupation with beautiful objects, their worth and their flaws but in the treatment of important questions about knowledge and perspective in a format that gives the power of filtering everything to the consciousness of an individual character. Hollinghurst hews even more closely and consistently to Nick’s point of view, though, than James does to those of the Prince and Maggie. I will quote the novel’s opening paragraph in full—the novel is broken into three sections, each with a title and a date: “The Love-Chord” (1983), “To Whom Do You Beautifully Belong?” (1986) and “The End of the Street” (1987):
Peter Crowther’s book on the election was already in the shops. It was called Landslide!, and the witty assistant at Dillon’s had arranged the window in a scaled-down version of that natural disaster. The pale-gilt image of the triumphant Prime Minister rushed towards the customer in a gleaming slippage. Nick stopped in the street, and then went in to look at a copy. He had met Peter Crowther once, and heard him described as a hack and also as a “mordant analyst”: his faint smile, as he flicked through the pages, concealed his uncertainty as to which account was nearer the truth. There was clearly something hacklike in the speed of publication, only two months after the event; and in the actual writing, of course. The book’s mordancy seemed to be reserved for the efforts of the Opposition. Nick looked carefully at the photographs, but only one of them had Gerald in it: a group picture of “The 101 New Tory MPs,” in which he’d been clever enough, or quick enough, to get into the front row. He sat there smiling and staring as if in his own mind it was already the front bench. The smile, the white collar worn with a dark shirt, the floppy breastpocket handkerchief would surely be famous when the chaps in the rows behind were mere forgotten grins and frowns. Even so, he was mentioned only twice in the text—as a “bon viveur,” and as one of the “dwindling minority” of Conservative MPs who had passed, “as Gerald Fedden, the new Member for Barwick, so obviously has,” through public school and Oxbridge. Nick left the shop with a shrug; but out in the street he felt delayed pride at this sighting of a person he knew in a published book. (3)
The third-person voice here is an immensely precise tool for registering degrees of knowledge and incomprehension. Nick is hypersensitive to social nuance but inexperienced enough to have only a precarious grasp on the meanings of what he sees; he is a class outsider in this world of privilege, which makes him at once acutely observant and uncertain in his judgments. Though the voice remains very close to Nick’s own point of view, in other words, the novelist is able to hint at things that Nick himself does not understand, including (in the title and the shop display) the hint that the election of Margaret Thatcher will indeed have been a natural disaster of sorts for many, though not for all of the characters whose lives this novel will chronicle. Nick has an ear for satire but as yet lacks the confidence in his own judgment to position himself as a satirist, though his emerging self-confidence can be heard in the aphorisms that puncture the description. The narrator notes Nick’s “faint smile” and the uncertainty it conceals, but the following sentence is sharper and more confident, and it seems to emerge from Nick’s consciousness rather than exclusively pertaining to the narrator’s voice: “The book’s mordancy seemed to be reserved for the efforts of the Opposition.” It is the sort of remark one might utter to get a laugh at a certain kind of dinner party: Nick has been studying the ways of the set he’s now moving among, and has begun to be able to capture a style of wit that will qualify him to socialize there even as he remains an outsider with only a temporary passport to belonging. Nick takes a childish pleasure in his proximity to the minor players of the Thatcher revolution as singled out by this ephemeral political chronicle, and the effect of the passage as a whole is to underline Nick’s failure to understand anything of the significance of the historical moment he’s living through.
Nick went to university with Gerald Fedden’s son Toby, and is now a tenant in the Feddens’ London house with a mandate to keep an eye out for Toby’s psychologically frail younger sister, Catherine. His position as a visitor (enshrined, too, in his surname) conditions his behavior as well as his perceptions:
As an outsider he found himself floating again in a pleasant medium of social charm and good humour. Toby and Catherine could frown and sulk, and exercise their prerogative not to be impressed or amused by their parents. Nick, though, conversed with his hosts in an idiom of tremendous agreement. “Did you have glorious weather?” “I must say we had glorious weather.” “I hope the traffic wasn’t too frightful…” “Frightful!” “I’d love to see the little church at Podier.” “I think you’d love the little church at Podier.” So they knitted their talk together. Even disagreements, for instance over Gerald’s taste for Richard Strauss, had a glow of social harmony to them, of relished licence, and counted almost as agreements transposed into a more exciting key. (20–21)
There is a sharp satirical edge to the prose here; Nick’s agreement verges on parody as he echoes an idiom not yet quite natural to him, and the final sentence has the air of aphoristic summing-up (the metaphor of the transposition of keys can be imagined to have drifted into the third-person narration via Nick’s aesthete’s consciousness). Hollinghurst cunningly offers us some emblems for the place of satire in his narrative technique; two caricatures of Gerald Fedden hang on the kitchen wall, drawings “which he had made a point of buying from the cartoonists”: “When Gerald was in the kitchen, guests always found themselves contrasting him with his grinning, hawk-nosed cartoon image; the comparison was obviously to his advantage, though it couldn’t help stirring the suspicion that under his handsome everyday mask this predatory goon might indeed be lurking” (19–20). Note the compactness and power of this style of notation, the economy with which the words register something about Gerald and the way those around him perceive him and the political and social media in which he operates, not to mention Nick’s own funny combination of the obtuse and the perceptive, his cautious trying-out (always filtered through that highly polished and accomplished and self-contained third-person voice) of modes of commentary in which he is still a novice.
Another passage, part of the description of Nick’s first date with Leo, foregrounds the centrality of scrutiny, of ways of knowing in this novel. Here is the intensity of perception of a twenty-year-old to whom everything is new, whose capacities to observe and comprehend are great but who is still, as it were, trying out various social affects (again, the third-person voice is extremely close but not identical to Nick’s point of view):
Leo was certainly quite an egotist—Catherine’s graphological analysis had been spot on. But he didn’t expound his inner feelings. He did something Nick couldn’t imagine doing himself, which was to make statements about the sort of person he was. “I’m the sort of guy who needs a lot of sex,” he said, and, “I’m like that, I always say what I think.” Nick wondered for a moment if he’d inadvertently contradicted him. “I don’t bear grudges,” Leo said sternly: “I’m not that kind of person.” “I’m sure you’re not,” Nick said, with a quick discountenancing shudder. And perhaps this was a useful skill, or tactic, in the blind-date world, even if Nick’s modesty and natural fastidiousness kept him from replying in the same style (“I’m the sort of guy who likes Pope more than Wordsworth,” “I’m crazy about sex but I haven’t had it yet”). (30)
It is self-deprecating, even self-mocking of Nick to suggest that the meanings of the statement “I’m the sort of guy who likes Pope more than Wordsworth” would be immediately legible to his contemporaries, but in fact that particular preference is a time-honored way of marking out one’s own aesthetic and (by extension) sociocultural affiliations. Many of the poets of British Romanticism, Wordsworth foremost among them, dismissed Alexander Pope’s poetry as miniaturizing, concerned only with the reproduction of trifling domestic interiors, as opposed to the more masculine pleasures to be found in a poetry of the open air. Lord Byron set himself apart from this consensus and expressed a dandyish celebration of Pope’s artifice, and the whole thing would go down in literary history under the name of the Pope controversy.2
The high-cultural frame of reference matters a great deal in this novel, and unpacking some of the book’s allusions further illuminates the extraordinary craftiness of Hollinghurst’s technique. The Feddens with Nick as appendage travel down to Toby’s uncle’s estate in the country for a lavish twenty-first-birthday party, and traffic threatens to make them late for lunch, provoking an anxiety that Rachel Fedden attempts to diffuse by suggesting that her brother won’t mind as they’re just “taking pot luck” (43):
Pot luck turned out to be an exquisite light lunch served at a round table in a room lined with rococo boiseries that had been removed wholesale from some grand Parisian town house, and painted pale blue. On the ceiling, in a flowered ellipse, two naked females held a wreath of roses. Nick saw at once that the landscape over the fireplace was a Cézanne. It gave him a hilarious sense of his own social displacement. It was one of those moments that only the rich could create, and which came for Nick all wrapped up in its own description, so that he was already recounting it to some impressionable other person—a person, that is, as impressionable as himself. He didn’t know whether he should refer to it, but Lord Kessler said as he sat down, “You see I’ve moved that Cézanne.” (45)
Nick is alienated from others of his generation by his aesthete’s vocabulary and frame of reference; the depth and breadth of his knowledge are partly explained within the novel by the fact of his father’s being an antique dealer, giving it something of the smell of the shop, but Nick has also sharpened his aesthetic sense into an exceptional tool. The vocabulary here is Nick’s as well as the narrator’s (“rococo boiseries”), and the choice of Cézanne is clever: in one sense, the name simply stands for a whole class of paintings that most of us will only ever encounter in public museums rather than private homes, but Cézanne is also the name to conjure with when it comes to questions of realism and representation, so that it’s a small joke about the history of representation for Hollinghurst to have chosen this particular painter rather than, say, Monet or Matisse.
The furniture at Hawkeswood is “mostly French, and of astonishing quality”: Nick straggles behind the others as they walk through the house, his heart beating “with knowledge and suspicion” (the language foregrounds the erotic aspect of this sort of aesthetic apprehension). The particular piece of furniture he contemplates here is a Louis Quinze escritoire or writing desk which Lord Kessler tells him was made for Madame de Pompadour, and the tone of the narration captures Nick’s own breathless appreciation and his simultaneous skepticism about whether these objects are sufficiently appreciated by those who live with them. Nick stands with Lord Kessler to admire “the bulbous, oddly diminutive desk—kingwood, was it?—with fronds of ormolu” (here the narration directly registers the deferential and yet authoritative tone of Nick’s manner), but the thought registered in the prose upon Nick’s arrival in the library is more sardonic:
Lord Kessler himself took him off to the library, where the books were apparently less important than their bindings, which were as important as could be. The heavy gilding of the spines, seen through the fine gilt grilles of the carved and gilded bookcases, created a mood of minatory opulence. They seemed to be books in some quite different sense from those that Nick used and handled every day. (47)
Is it the narrator or Nick himself who is the budding aphorist capable of formulating that verdict about the books’ bindings, “as important as could be”? It is not the sort of question that can be answered, but insofar as there is an answer, it must be both, just as the phrase “minatory opulence” may well be Nick’s, though we only have access to it through the third-person narration.
Nick is about to begin graduate work in English at University College London, and when Lord Kessler asks him what he has chosen as his field, Nick invokes the term style itself:
“I want to have a look at style,” Nick said. This flashing emphasis on something surely ubiquitous had impressed the admissions board, though Lord Kessler appeared uncertain. A man who owned Mme de Pompadour’s escritoire could hardly be indifferent to style, Nick felt; but his reply seemed to have in mind some old wisdom about style and substance. (49)
One drama that plays out in the novel concerns the question of whether Nick’s faith in style can possibly be borne out, whether style can carry the weight he wants it to (in the absence of any clear set of ethical or political commitments, style is all Nick’s got). Nick is in many respects an unsympathetic character, immature, self-absorbed and painfully ignorant of what’s at stake in the political developments of these early years of his adulthood. But his knowledge of and love for beautiful things is one of the few true things about him. In the “ongoing Strauss feud” conducted between Nick and Gerald, it becomes “urgent for [Nick] to revile Richard Strauss,” which he does “happily but a little hysterically, as if far more than questions of taste were involved” (86). The radio commentator on the Saturday morning program to which Nick and Gerald are listening here (the “Building a Library” feature on BBC Radio 3) points to Strauss’s self-glorifying allusions, in his later work, to his own earlier output; Gerald responds viscerally and warmly to the same quality in Strauss that strikes Nick as “bumptious self-confidence” (85). The announcer (a “clever young man,” in the narrator’s sly phrasing) suggests of a particular recording that “the sheer opulence of the sound and those very broad tempi [might] push this reading over the edge, losing that essential drop of self-irony without which the piece can all too easily become an orgy of vulgarity” (86): a concept that Gerald is virtually incapable of understanding but that is related to Nick’s distaste. Catherine likes Strauss even less than Nick does but lacks his precise vocabulary for lambasting it; she simply calls Strauss and all other heavily orchestrated Romantic music “God-dammery,” a term explicated by the third-person narrator in terms native to Nick’s intellect and imagination:
What the problem was was this colossal redundancy, the squandering of brilliant technique on cheap material, the sense that the moral nerves had been cut, leaving the great bloated body to a life of valueless excess. And then there was the sheer bad taste of applying the high metaphysical language of Wagner to the banalities of bourgeois life, an absurdity Strauss seemed only intermittently aware of! But he couldn’t say that, he would sound priggish, he would seem to care too much. Gerald would say it was only music. Nick tried to read the paper for a couple of minutes, but was oddly too excited to concentrate. (87)
Extraordinarily perceptive and articulate in his aesthetic responses, Nick is obtuse in his political ignorance, though the narrator in this respect clearly has a wider knowledge, a perspective on the Thatcher years of which young Nick could have no inkling and to which older Nick may only hope to aspire. I am interested in the stylistic implications of this gap in knowledge; Nick is narratorial, as it were, in his perceptiveness and phrasing and observations, and the local effects of each paragraph owe a great deal to his filtering or framing consciousness, but he is also closed off from kinds of knowledge the narrator may have available to him. (It is only a potentiality at this early point in the novel.) Hollinghurst’s touch is very lovely in his weaving of Nick’s own phrases into the third-person narration. Consider this description of Leo, for instance: “He was wearing the same old jeans of their first date, which for Nick now had a touching anecdotal quality, he knew them and loved them; and a zipped-up tracksuit top which made him look ready for action, or for inaction, the rigours and hanging about of training” (91). The application of the phrase “anecdotal quality” is Nick’s wittiness, not just the narrator’s (this is marked partly, I think, in Hollinghurst’s choice of how to punctuate the sentence, with the associative comma chosen in preference to the perhaps more correct semicolon that could have preceded the clause “he knew them and loved them”), and we are attracted to Nick, despite his evident flaws and weaknesses, partly because of these powers of perception and description, powers that are also what draw us to the narrative voice. Nick can trust to nothing but this set of skills and a deeply founded set of aesthetic precepts, and his moments of misunderstanding and panic around others often hinge on questions of artistic (mis)interpretation. It is the discussion, at cross-purposes, of the Holman Hunt painting whose reproduction hangs in Leo’s mother’s house (“just the sort of painting, doggedly literal and morbidly symbolic, that Nick liked least” [141]) that shows the impossibility of Nick’s coexisting with Leo’s family members, and when Nick tells Leo that his mother and sister are “wonderful,” he hears “the word hang, in the silence between the lights, as if in inverted commas, and underlined too: the wonderful of gush, of connoisseurship, of Kensington Park Gardens” (144). In the end, he is not sundered from Leo by the fact of his response to Scarface (to Nick, shocking, bombastic) in the scene that follows—they have gone to the film on Leo’s recommendation, but Leo doesn’t like it much either. In the moment before he learns this, though, Nick “as so often [has] the feeling that an artistic disagreement, almost immaterial to the other person, was going to be the vehicle of something that mattered to him more than he could say” (148).
The second part of The Line of Beauty is set in 1986, the third in 1987, and each one represents the further corrosion of Nick’s painful innocence, his entrance into a world of knowledge. Nick is now the lover of the glamorous English-Lebanese playboy Wani, and his induction into a more sophisticated and corrupt sexuality than the one Leo facilitated in the first part of the book is one of the forms of knowledge that continues to push Nick’s perspective into even closer alignment with that of the knowing narrator. The subtlety of the play between those two perspectives, mostly overlapping and sometimes abruptly—briefly—sundered, is astonishing. Nick lives with Wani in the flat on the top two floors of a Kensington house whose ground floor houses the magazine offices for Ogee, the magazine named for the eighteenth-century artist William Hogarth’s “line of beauty,” an S-shaped curve that Hogarth believed would impart liveliness to any composition:
Nick smiled to himself at the flat’s pretensions, but inhabited it with his old wistful keenness, as he did the Feddens’ house, as a fantasy of prosperity that he could share, and as the habitat of a man he was in love with. He felt he took to it well, the comfort and convenience, the discreet glimpsed world of things that the rich had done for them. It was a system of minimized stress, of guaranteed flattery. Nick loved the huge understanding depth of the sofas and the peculiarly gilding light of the lamps that flanked the bathroom basin; he had never looked so well as he did when he shaved or cleaned his teeth there. Of course the house was vulgar, as almost everything postmodern was, but he found himself taking a surprising pleasure in it. (175)
It is a knife’s edge only that separates Nick’s knowledge from the narrator’s. It is impossible to say for sure where Nick’s knowledge ends: does Nick himself have access to the phrase “his old wistful keenness,” and to the psychological insight implied in it? To the sort of self-distancing implied not just in the ability to think “I have taken to it well” but to phrase it, instead, “I feel I have taken to it well”? And is such attentiveness to phrasing a matter of intelligence and insight, or merely of fussiness? Perhaps the clearest marker of Nick’s passage through time is his new comfort with vulgarity: he is no longer so trammeled by the fastidious tastes of his upbringing.
Nick’s affair with Wani is a secret from the magazine’s other employees, to whom Nick manages to present himself as a wise sophisticate. One of his favorite conversational techniques is to utter phrases adapted from Henry James: “a trifle too punctually, though not yet quite lamentably bald”; “he spoke, as to cheek and chin, of the joy of the matutinal steel” (182). Nick “felt he was prostituting the Master,” the narrative continues, “but then there was an element of self-mockery in these turns of phrase—it was something he was looking at in his thesis. He was at the height of a youthful affair with his writer, in love with his rhythms, his ironies, and his idiosyncrasies, and loving his most idiosyncratic moments most of all” (182–83).
“Youthful” must be strictly the narrator’s term, not Nick’s—it is near-inconceivable that Nick could in this context apply the adjective to himself—but that perspective offers a sense of the precariousness of Nick’s fantastic current life. Hollinghurst alludes to James repeatedly, as when Nick reads James’s memoir by the swimming pool at the Feddens’ place in France:
He was reading Henry James’s memoir of his childhood, A Small Boy and Others, and feeling crazily horny, after three days without as much as a peck from Wani. It was a hopeless combination. The book showed James at his most elderly and elusive, and demanded a pure commitment unlikely in a reader who was worrying excitedly about his boyfriend and semi-spying, through dark glasses, on another boy who was showing off in front of him and clearly trying to excite him. From time to time the book tilted and wobbled in his lap, and the weight of the deckle-edged pages pressed on his erection through the sleek black nylon. He noted droll phrases for later use: “an oblong farinaceous compound” was James’s euphemism for a waffle—compound was sublime in its clinching vagueness. (273)
The contrast between Nick’s sexual arousal and his reading of James is shocking, but it is partially domesticated by the extent to which the juxtaposition is managed by Nick himself for maximum titillation, with the phrase “deckle-edged pages” itself suggesting a certain level of self-mockery (deckle edges are the rough and uneven trim on books from an era when the pages still had to be cut with a knife, though they continue to appear on mass-produced books to tastelessly ornamental ends).
It is almost clinical, the dispassion with which the narrator notes Nick’s slightly embarrassing mining of James’s pages for witty remarks of the sort we have already seen him using with his coworkers in the office. Nick’s only sincerity lies in his love of beautiful things, but his reliance on that love is shaken or swayed by the temptations of adult life. The narrator observes, of the market hall in the town where Nick grew up (it is also Gerald’s constituency, and Nick has returned for the election):
It had been the pride of Nick’s childhood, he had done a project about it at school with measured plans and elevations, at the age of twelve it had ranked with the Taj Mahal and the Parliament Building in Ottawa in his private architectural heaven. The moment of accepting that it was not by Wren had been as bleak and exciting as puberty. (249)
The distance between young Nick and older Nick is painful; young Nick’s unselfconscious love for architecture (the fact that he has such a thing as a private architectural heaven, and the appealing nerdiness of the triumvirate of buildings Hollinghurst selects for it) endears him to us, but only at the risk of mild ridicule, and the simile of the second sentence highlights the grotesque aspect of this strong identification rather than its seductive one. Most people (though not, presumably, most people who like Hollinghurst’s novels) would find it ludicrous to compare the passing into knowledge that represents giving up the fantasy of one’s local favorite building having been designed by the great architect to whom it is commonly attributed with the transfigurations of puberty, described here with a pair of adjectives that is lovely precisely because the words’ mating is so deeply unexpected.
Nick’s love for beautiful things is associated here with his sexuality; the novel plays around with the idea that all male aesthetes must be gay (witness Nick’s earlier speculations about the man who owns Madame de Pompadour’s escritoire), and it is observed of Toby’s sandwich-making that “it was a bit of a mess, a mishmash, lots of dressing was sploshed in—it was almost as though he was saying to Nick, who had once had a job in a sandwich shop, ‘I’m not a poof, I haven’t got style, I can’t help it’” (280). Part 2 of the novel culminates in the celebratory party at the Fedden house at which Margaret Thatcher (referred to here only as “the Lady”) makes her appearance. Nick, in a haze of cocaine-induced confidence, is the only man bold enough to present himself as a partner:
He gazed delightedly at the Prime Minister’s face, at her whole head, beaked and crowned, which he saw was a fine if improbable fusion of the Vorticist and the Baroque. She smiled back with a certain animal quickness, a bright blue challenge. There was the soft glare of the flash—twice—three times—a gleaming sense of occasion, the gleam floating in the eye as a blot of shadow, his heart running fast with no particular need of courage as he grinned and said, “Prime Minister, would you like to dance?” (335)
It is almost one of Nick’s Jamesisms, this affected but sharp analysis of Thatcher’s appearance as “a fine if improbable fusion of the Vorticist and the Baroque” (we feel Nick’s own enjoyment in the sharp unexpectedness of the insight and the pungency of his own phrasing), and the tableau is one of the most vivid scenes in the book.
Despite the pseudo-sophistication of this Nick, there is a terrible naïveté in the pleasure he takes in his new world of money and cocaine and unlimited sex. Indeed, he is still considerably less worldly-wise than he understands himself to be, a fact revealed by his shock at the discovery of an affair between Gerald Fedden and his secretary, Penny. One way of describing the central drama of the book as a whole—certainly of its last section—is to say that it asks whether art can really be the repository of morality in the way that Nick would like to believe, or whether it will prove insufficient to the burdens of ethics and politics. That final section is considerably shorter than the two preceding ones and quite different in tone; it takes an unexpected swerve, and calls much of what we have come to take for granted about the novel’s aestheticism into question. We learn that Leo has died of AIDS, and Wani will soon do so (his beauty has been devastated—“He commanded attention now by pity and respect as he once had by beauty and charm…. Nick thought he still looked wonderful in a way, though to admit it was to make an unbearable comparison. He was twenty-five years old” [376]). The precedent of Henry James looms very large still here, but Nick’s adherence to a Jamesian style has come to seem increasingly irrelevant—almost self-delusional—in the context of Wani’s illness, Leo’s death and the scandal that’s about to break when news of Gerald’s affair gets out.
As I mentioned earlier, one aspect of James’s “late” style, those long winding sentences of infinite syntactical complexity, is commonly attributed to James’s having adopted the habit of dictating rather than writing by hand; Nick, too, dictates letters to his secretary, and finds himself like James “able to improvise long supple sentences rich in suggestions and syntactic shock,” all “old-fashioned periods and perplexing semi-colons” (346). This is “periods” in the sense of oratorical periods, those sentences structured with a Ciceronian balance redolent of the eighteenth century (“I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son”). But the power of aestheticism to ward off the sordid has worn very thin, and an objective correlative for the sorts of moral decay expressed in political and sexual corruption can be found in the formerly lovely desk in Wani’s house: “The Georgian desk was marked with drink stains and razor etchings that even the optimistic Don Guest would have found it hard to disguise. ‘That’s beyond cosmetic repair, old boy,’ Don would say. Nick fingered at the little abrasions and found himself gasping and whooping with grief” (357).
It is the news of Leo’s death that has exposed the tawdriness and pretension of Wani’s flat to Nick, so that he can express his emotional wretchedness only by mourning (on the face of it) the destruction of a beautiful object, an object no less thoroughly ruined by the excesses of the previous years than Leo and Wani have both been. But it is in this scene that Nick finds some measure of redemption, the return to a simpler aestheticism (or at any rate a form of emotion still experienced primarily through objects but not necessarily culpable just because it represents a displacement from the human) that gives him at least the first inklings of ethical awareness. It is “an anxious refinement of tact” that makes him uncomfortable even mentioning Leo’s death in the condolence letter he writes to Leo’s mother:
“Your sad news,” “recent sad events”…: “Leo’s death” was brutal. Then he worried that “I was so terribly sorry” might sound like gush to her, like calling her wonderful. He knew his own forms of truth could look like insincerity to others. He was frightened of her, as a grieving woman, and uncertain what feelings to attribute to her. It seemed she had taken it all in her own way, perhaps even with a touch of zealous cheerfulness. He could see her being impressed by his educated form of words and best handwriting. Then he saw her looking mistrustfully at what he’d written. He felt the limits of connoisseurship of tone. It was what he was working on, and yet…. He stared out of the window, and after a minute found Henry James’s phrase about the death of Poe peering back at him. What was it? The extremity of personal absence had just overtaken him. The words, which once sounded arch and even facetious, were suddenly terrible to him, capacious, wise, and hard. He understood for the first time that they’d been written by someone whose life had been walked through, time and again, by death. And then he saw himself, in six months’ time perhaps, sitting down to write a similar letter to the denizens of Lowndes Square. (358)
The denizens of Lowndes Square are Wani’s family members, and the revelation that hits Nick here is like something out of a Greek tragedy.
His encounter with the physical artifact of the magazine, its first and only issue, which arrives in a bundle from the printers near the end of the novel casts another light on the relationship between aesthetics and ethics:
Strange teetering mood of culmination. Five minutes later he wished he had it to read through fresh again; but that could never happen. He took a copy upstairs to the flat, and opened it at random several times—to find that its splendour had a glint to it, a glassy malignity. No, it was very good. It was lustrous. The lustre was perfected and intense—it was the shine of marble and varnish. It was the gleam of something that was over. (428)
This is one of a cluster of passages that reflect on the relationship between beauty, style and the emotions, as in the scene where Nick (the revelation of his scandalous activities during his time as a lodger at the Feddens having lost him his place there) realizes he must tell Gerald that he will leave the house:
Nick went up to his room, and stood looking at the window sill. Late-morning, late-October sunlight dimmed and brightened indifferently over it. He was lost in thought, but it was thought without words, pure abstraction, luminous and sad. Then a simple form of words appeared, almost as if written. It would have been best in a letter, where it could have been done beautifully, with complete control. Spoken, it risked tremors and deflections. He went downstairs to see Gerald. (415)
The temptation to avoid the risk of being seen to be moved by emotion is presented here with immense humanity and tolerance, even as writing is shown to be a coward’s recourse for dodging the “tremors and deflections” of the personal encounter.