Alan Hollinghurst: “A Drink, a Glow of Resolve and Sensible Postponement”

Photographers Unknown, A Drink, a Glow of Resolve and Sensible Postponement

“In truth the memoir was a game of postponement – a trick he played on himself almost daily, and fell for every time. There would be a poor and evasive morning, with letters to write as well, and a number of phone calls that had to be made; then lunch, at a place not necessarily close, and several things to do after lunch, with mounting anxiety in the two hours before six o’clock: and then a drink, a glow of resolve and sensible postponement till the following morning, when, too hung-over to do much work before ten, he would seek infuriated refuge, about eleven forty-five, in the trying necessity of going out once more to lunch. Over lunch, at Caspar’s or at the Garrick, he would be asked how work was going, when it could be expected, and the confidence of the questioner severely inhibited his answers – they had a bottle of wine, no more, but still the atmosphere was appreciably softened, his little hints at difficulties were taken as mere modesty – ‘I’m sure it will be marvelous’ – ‘It will take as long as it takes’ – and he left fractionally consoled himself, as if some great humane reprieve were somehow possible, and time (as deadline after deadline loomed and fell away behind) were not an overriding question. In the evenings especially, and towards bedtime, half-drunk, he started seeing connections, approaches, lovely ideas for the work, and sat suffused with a sense of the masterly thing it was in his power to do the next morning.”

-Alan Hollinghurst, The Sparsholt Affair, 2017, Picador Publishers, London

Born in May of 1954 in Stroud located in the Cotswold area of Gloucestershire, Alan James Hollinghurst is an English novelist, short story author, poet and translator. Continuing the tradition of Christopher Isherwood and Edward Morgan Forster, he presents in his work the protagonist’s gay orientation as a given fact and, building on that fact, examines both the complexities and mundane aspects of everyday gay life.

Born the only son to a bank manager father and a relatively emotionally-distant mother, Hollinghurst was raised in a politically conservative and financially comfortable family. He lived in all-male boarding schools from the age of seven to seventeen. Hollinghurst studied literature at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he earned his Bachelor of Arts in 1975. Upon receiving his degree, he taught for one-year terms on the Oxford campus at Somerville, Magdalen and Corpus Christi colleges. For his 1980 Master of Philosophy thesis, Hollinghurst wrote on the strategies adopted by such writers as Leslie Poles Hartley, Ronald Firbank and E. M. Forster to covertly express their sexuality in an age of stigma and prosecution.

In 1981, Alan Hollinghurst lectured at University College London and, in the following year, joined the staff of London’s weekly literary review, The Times Literary Supplement, where he edited the art and poetry pages before serving as deputy editor from 1985 to 1990. While working at the Times, he devoted his writing to poetry and published his first major collection, “Confidential Chats with Boys”, in 1982. This volume of poems was based on physician William Lee Howard’s 1911 sex education book of the same title which was adopted as standard by numerous boys’ schools.

Hollinghurst began work on four different novels before a grant allowed him to concentrate on his 1988 “The Swimming-Pool Library”. He presented his finished novel to his former housemate Andrew Motion, a subsequent Poet Laureate, who at that time was employed by London’s publishing house Chatto and Windus. The story is centered around Will Beckwith, a privileged, cultured and promiscuous gay man who meets the elderly aristocrat Lord Nantwich. This chance meeting and the later reading of Nantwich’s diaries lead Will to re-evaluate his own sense of the past as well as his family’s history. “The Swimming-Pool Library” won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1988 and, in the following year, the E. M. Forster Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

As a result of this successful literary debut, Alan Hollinghurst received an advance for his next novel, which allowed him to purchase a house in London’s Hampstead Heath and concentrate fully on writing fiction. His second novel, the 1994 “The Folding Star”, dealt with the incommunicable obsession of a middle-aged tutor for his seventeen-year old Belgian student. The tutor, Edward Manners, becomes involved in affairs with two men and, after introduced to the world of Symbolist painter Edgard Orst, is ultimately caught in the memories of his own adolescence and first love affair.

Hollinghurst’s third novel, the 1998 “The Spell”, used the satirical and romantic style of a weekend in the country plot to follow the changing relationships within a group of friends and occasional lovers. This work was followed by the 2004 three-part novel “The Line of Beauty”. Set during the Thatcher years between 1983 and 1987, the novel followed the life of the young, middle-class gay protagonist Nick Guest. Through exploring the realities of Nick’s tense and intimate relationships and life as a gay man, Hollinghurst examined the themes of hypocrisy, drugs, privilege and homosexuality during the time of England’s emerging AIDS crisis. “The Line of Beauty” won the high-profile 2004 Man Booker Prize with its fifty-thousand pound stipend and became the first gay novel to be so honored. It was also a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.

Alan Hollinghurst’s fifth novel, the 2011 “The Stranger’s Child” which, told over the course of decades, revolves around a minor poet’s successful published poem and the resulting changes in his work and life. Received positively by critics, the novel was on the Man Booker Prize longlist, the Walter Scott Prize shortlist, and the winner of the 2013 Prix du Meilleur Livrr Étranger, France’s best foreign book prize. Hollinghurst’s sixth novel, the 2017 “The Sparsholt Affair”, explores the changing attitudes towards homosexuality as seen through the lives of two Englishmen: a teenager attending Oxford during the Second World War, and his later openly-gay son in London just after England decriminalizes homosexuality.

Hollinghurst currently lives in London with his partner Paul Mendez, the British author who authored the 2020 semi-autobiographical novel “Rainbow Milk” published by Dialogue Books, a Little, Brown and Company imprint.

“I grew up reading certain writers like Iris Murdoch who was very interested in sexual ambivalence and often created gay characters, usually from a cultured or academic background. I’m not sure how many straight writers I’ve read who create gay characters successfully from the inside, though I agree about Anthony Burgess and (his novel) “Earthly Powers”. — Alan Hollinghurst, 2017, Guardian Interview with Alex Clark

Note: For those interested, an interview between writer Peter Terzian and Alan Hollinghurst, “Alan Hollinghurst, The Art of Fiction No. 214”, is available through “The Paris Review”, a literary magazine featuring original writing, written interviews, podcasts and art. The article or a subscription to the magazine is available for purchase at: https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6116/the-art-of-fiction-no-214-alan-hollinghurst

E. M. Forster: “Madness is Not for Everyone”

Photographers Unknown, Beguiling the Senses and Enchanting the Mind: Photo Set Fourteen

“Madness is not for everyone, but Maurice’s proved the thunderbolt that dispels the clouds. The storm had been working up not for three days as he supposed, but for six years. It had brewed in the insecurities of being where no eye pierces, his surroundings had thickened it. It had burst and he had not died. The brilliancy of day was around him, he stood upon the mountain range that overshadows youth, he saw.”

—E. M. Forster, Maurice

Born on the first of January, 1879 in London, Edward Morgan Forster was a fiction writer and essayist. After his father’s death of tuberculosis in 1890, he and his mother moved to Rooks Nest in Hertfordshire until 1893. This house would serve as the inspiration for his future novel, the 1910 “Howard’s End”. An inheritance from his great-aunt Marianne Thornton in 1887 would enable Forster to live comfortably and pursue a career as a writer.

E. M. Forster attended King’s College Cambridge between 1897 and 1901. There he joined the discussion group known as the Apostles, whose members later constituted the Bloomsbury Group which included Leonard and Virginia Wolff, Giles Lytton Strachey, Clive and Venessa Bell, and artist Duncan Grant. After graduation Forster traveled through continental Europe, visiting Greece and Italy before returning to Surrey, England.

In 1914, by which time he had written all but one of his novels, E. M. Forster visited Egypt, Germany and India with fellow Bloomsbury Group member Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, the British political scientist and philosopher. During the First World War, Forster, a conscientious objector, served in the British Red Cross in Egypt as a Chief Searcher for missing men. Returning again to India in the early 1920s, he became the private secretary to Tukojirao III, the Maharajah of the state of Dewas; the story of which was told in his 1953 non-fiction work “The Hill of Devi”.

After his return to London from India, Forster completed the last of his novels published in his lifetime, the 1924 “A Passage to India”, for which he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. During the 1930s and 1940s, Forster became a notable broadcaster on BBC Radio and became associated with the British Humanist Association,which opposed censorship and advocated for penal reform and individual liberty.For his published work, he was awarded a Benson Medal by the United Kingdom’s Royal Society of Literature in 1937.

E. M. Forster was open about his homosexuality to his close friends, but not to the public. He had a number of male lovers during his adult life; but he was at his happiest during a two-year relationship with the young policeman Bob Buckingham, who later married. After Buckingham’s marriage, both Buckingham and his wife continued to be included in Forster’s social circle. Others in his social circle included writer Christopher Isherwood, the poet Siegfried Sassoon, composer Benjamin Britten, Belfast-novleist Forrest Reid, writer and editor of “The Listener” J. R. Ackerley, and socialist poet Edward Carpenter and Edward’s lover George Merrill.

Forster’s “Maurice” was written between 1913 to 1914, revised twice in 1932 and 1959, and finally published posthumously in 1971. A tale of gay love in early twentieth-century England, it follows the protagonist Maurice Hall from his school days into a relationship in his older years. The novel was inspired by the cross-class relationship between poet Edward Carpenter and his working-class partner George Merrill, both of whom served as the models for Forster’s gay characters, Maurice Hall and Alec Scudder.

After completing a first draft by 1914, Forster tentatively showed the novel to select friends, and continued to do so over the forthcoming decades, reworking it as time passed. The openly gay novelist Christopher Isherwood saw the draft in its various revisions on a few occasions, and repeatedly implored Forster to publish it. However, Forster continued to insist on it not being published.

Despite the passing of time and of individuals, to whom he felt the revelation of his homosexuality would hurt most, Forster believed there had been no profound progression since the days of Oscar Wilde’s conviction, an incident that flooded the papers when he was sixteen, and thought that public attitudes had only incrementally shifted, from, in his words, ‘ignorance and terror to familiarity and contempt’. Instead, he bequeathed the manuscript of “Maurice” to Isherwood, and, a year after Forster’s death, the novel was finally published.

E. M. Forster was elected an honorary fellow of King’s College Cambridge in January of 1946. He declined a knighthood in 1949 and was made a Companion of Honor in 1953. Forster was honored in 1969 with membership in England’s Order of Merit, and, through his lifetime, received nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature in sixteen separate years. E. M. Forster died at the age of ninety-one of a stroke on June 7th, 1970 in Coventry, Warwickshire. His ashes were scattered in the rose garden of Coventry’s crematorium, near Warwick University.

Note: E. M. Forster had five books published in his lifetime, one published posthumously, and one, “Arctic Summer”, never finished. His work included “Where Angels Fear to Tread”. published in 1905; the 1907 “The Longest Journey”; “A Room with a View”, published in 1908; the 1910 “Howard’s End”; “Passage to India” published in 1924; and his “Maurice” published in 1971. Although Forster was against having his work presented in any form other than literature, all his books, with the exception of “The Longest Journey”, his personal favorite and most autobiographical, have been made into either plays, films, or both.

An article by Professor Kate Symondson on E. M. Forster’s gay fiction can be found at the British Library’s site located at: https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/e-m-forsters-gay-fiction

E.M. Forster: “Man is the Measure”

Photographer Unknown, Man is the Measure

“I did not fear that I might tread upon a live rail and be killed. I feared something far more intangible-doing what was not contemplated by the Machine. Then I said to myself, “Man is the measure”, and I went, and after many visits I found an opening.”
― E.M. Forster

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