From the Deep Archives: Alan Hollinghurst's THE SWIMMING POOL LIBRARY

Novelist and activist Tim Murphy maintains a Substack called "The Caftan Chronicles," wherein he interviews mostly gay men Of a Certain Age. His latest post delivers a juicy conversation with the excellent British novelist Alan Hollinghurst. Tim asks many of the questions I would ask if I were to interview Hollinghurst, whom I’ve never met. I’ve read all of his novels — most recently, Our Evenings — and admire him tremendously. He writes dense, elegant literary fiction in the lineage of Henry James with all the explicit sexuality of Edmund White. I’ve only written about him once. I reviewed his debut novel, The Swimming-Pool Library, in 1988 for the late great 7Days.

The beauty of The Times Literary Supplement editor Alan Hollinghurst’s first novel is that no matter how ambitious its storytelling gets, it remains grounded in the central ritual of contemporary gay male life: going to the gym.

The crumbling Corinthian Club, with its locker rooms and lap-swimming lanes, is where the handsome, idly rich 25-year-old narrator William Beckwith goes for respite from his black teenage boyfriend, who may or may not have murdered someone. It’s where he meets Phil, the ostensibly straight young hotel porter with whom he falls in love. And it’s where he first encounters Charles Nantwich, the elderly and eccentric lord who engages William to turn his travel diaries and rambling reminiscences into “official” biography.

Combining deft characterizations with passages of frank eroticism, Hollinghurst ventures into territory mastered by gay-fiction peers Edmund White and Robert Ferro. If he is less graceful (less literary) than they at integrating his themes and sub-plots, he nonetheless achieves a rich, intelligent take on gay history. In contrast to his own spoiled, rather careless life, the narrator glimpses the human face of literary forebears (such as Ronald Firbank, who makes a cameo appearance in Nantwich’s diaries) and gains sobering insights into earlier generations of aristocratic homosexuals for whom the line between respectability and sexual freedom was more dangerous to tread.

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