Alan Hollinghurst

Alan Hollinghurst’s books include The Line of Beauty.

Imperial Dope

Alan Hollinghurst, 4 June 1981

Creation is a novel that describes, creates and analyses history, and it is not the first of Gore Vidal’s novels to do so. He has already devoted a lengthy trilogy to American history, and Julian, though set some eight hundred years later than Creation, shares the new novel’s concern with history both political and religious in the ancient world. Both books examine critical ways in which ideas of a more or less religious kind impinge on and determine political and imperial growth. Julian’s apostasy could have prevented the development of the Christian Church and radically affected the progress of the Western world, and the novel captures a period of ideological instability. Similarly, in Creation, the counterbalance of emergent oriental religions is caught at the moment when paganism was being overthrown, and the course of world civilisation to a great extent conditioned.

Best Things

Alan Hollinghurst, 20 August 1981

By and large we are interested in the thoughts, opinions and intentions of writers we are interested in, and by and large writers are keen to express these things in reviews, essays and memoirs subsidiary to their main work. A critic lurks, an implicit presence, in every creative writer, and though most of them are starved of a Boswell to transcribe and irradiate obiter dicta as facets of the creative life, they are none the less eager to shine their light on their own work. At its best, self-consciousness is forgotten and the act of self-explanation becomes a part of the self-vindication of the work and even of the creative process in general.

Letter

Unfair to Craig Raine

20 August 1981

SIR: I have no wish to be made to seem curmudgeonly about the talent of a poet who has given me as much pleasure as Craig Raine has; I felt it essential to approach his new book in the way I did, and Mr Hirsh (Letters, 17 September) acknowledges the justice of this. On the other hand, I did not say that Raine is an Imagist, and I considered it too obvious to mention that his imagery is interlocking...

Silence

Alan Hollinghurst, 17 September 1981

In his moving first novel The Sweet Shop Owner Graham Swift illuminated the history of one man through flashbacks on the last day of that man’s life. Through the succinctly evoked provincial decades one of the engrossing features was the difficulty of love and of communication between generations, even within a family – a problem which threatened, at a local level, the transmission of a sense of history or a justification of the past which Swift so perceptively re-created. At the crisis of the novel, the separate lines of memory and present action converged in the riveting description of a running race in the principal character’s childhood, recalled during his last faltering walk. In Swift’s second novel, Shuttlecock, narratives of two generations are again developed in tandem – but with a more exhibitionistic cleverness; and again the failure, or, at best, distortion, of communication between fathers and children is witness to the compromise of ideals – often an ideal of nature – which should have transmitted themselves in a sense of the past.

Biographical Materials

Alan Hollinghurst, 15 October 1981

Donald Mitchell recalls that Benjamin Britten had a low opinion of music critics in newspapers. Alan Blyth’s compilation Remembering Britten would have done little to make him change his mind: it is a book fundamentally misconceived and often grotesque in execution. The tributary volume of memoirs, such as the one Stephen Spender compiled after Auden’s death, has the value not only of illuminating its subject but of providing a complex shading of reaction and relation through the personalities of the contributors. Alan Blyth has recorded reminiscences from 30 persons who knew Britten, and then systematically eradicated the element of personality by paraphrasing the recollections in his own words. Only Imogen Holst and Sir Michael Tippett have escaped this platitudinous reworking since their contributions had appeared previously elsewhere, and the effect of their words is of a far higher intensity than that of the others’. The absurd though sympathetic grandeur of Tippett’s style carries a real conviction: ‘The news of Benjamin Britten’s death brought a sense of loss to every musical person of the whole world’; or, ‘a sense of death was sharper still in Death in Venice, the last of all operas.’ This ‘last of all’, however, proves to be a mistranscription of the original article: the proof-reading throughout is slovenly – ironically in a book which repeatedly comments on the punishingly high standards Britten always set himself.

Tied to the Mast: Alan Hollinghurst

Adam Mars-Jones, 19 October 2017

Alan Hollinghurst​’s tally as a published novelist is six books over 29 years, so that’s more than two thousand pages of astonishing responsiveness to light, sound, painting, the...

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The Rupert Trunk: Alan Hollinghurst

Christopher Tayler, 28 July 2011

Henry James met Rupert Brooke on a visit to Cambridge in June 1909, having been invited there by some young admirers who made him feel, he wrote in a letter, ‘rather like an unnatural...

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Welly-Whanging: Alan Hollinghurst

Thomas Jones, 6 May 2004

It is to be observed, that straight lines vary only in length, and therefore are least ornamental. That curved lines as they can be varied in their degrees of curvature as well as in their...

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Alan Hollinghurst’s new novel is a spoiled gift which, as an ugly baby makes us search for deficiencies in its attractive parents, forces us to reconsider its creator’s talents. That...

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Lost Youth

Nicholson Baker, 9 June 1994

Alan Hollinghurst is better at bees than Oscar Wilde. On the opening page of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde has them ‘shouldering their way through the long un-mown grass’. A bee...

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Catch 28

John Lanchester, 3 March 1988

Writing about sex tends to go wrong in one of two related ways. The first is through embarrassment or over-excitement on the part of the author: overly rhapsodic descriptions of sex, in...

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