Alan Hollinghurst
“I have a sort of temperament which oscillates between the frivolous and the rather tragical” is how the British novelist Alan Hollinghurst sums up his approach to writing in an interview that I recorded with him in London in July 2021. Hollinghurst is a master of the English language. His novels are elegant, humorous and rich in literary and musical references, and they are playful in breaking the rules that divide high and low culture. With his literary narrative of gay life in Britain over the last hundred years, Hollinghurst has become one of the most influential British writers of his generation.
“I did have this enormous feeling of luck and opportunity, when I saw that this novel could be written and there was this huge unexplored subject in our national social history to examine. When I was a graduate student at Oxford in the mid 1970s, I wrote a thesis about gay writers, such as E.M. Forster, who hadn’t been able to publish openly about their sexuality in their own lifetime. And I think when I started to write this novel at the beginning of 1984, it was still unexplored territory.”
Alan Hollinghurst, on the origins of The Swimming Pool Library
“I didn’t feel it did and I rather resisted any pressure that was specific, but I felt it cumulatively, that I became a gay spokesperson, a representative gay writer. I’ve always felt that if what I said had any interest, it was because it was personal and that I was writing about things that were very intimate and mattered to me, but that I wasn’t going to write to any political programme or to meet the expectations or requirements of a particular group. But I think probably that the book itself, by being outspoken on these matters, did have a sort of political presence. One has to remember too that in that context – it came out in 1988 – in the thick of the AIDS crisis here and an often very hostile atmosphere towards gay men in particular created by the crisis, the whole nature of sexual identity was very politicised. So I think I was caught up in something political, without myself being a political writer.”
Alan Hollinghurst, replying to the question: "Did The Swimming Pool Library make you a political writer?"
In 2018 Czech Radio broadcast a programme looking at swimming in literature – from Leander in Ancient Greece to the present day. It included a short extract from Alan Hollinghurst’s brilliant 1988 novel, The Swimming Pool Library. A member of the supervisory board of Czech Radio, a certain Tomáš Kňourek, was outraged by a reference in the extract to an erect penis. He went on to state: “In my view Alan Hollinghurst is a homosexual activist, pretending to be a writer. This smut is a reflection of the level of social life in Great Britain, a country which has voluntarily allowed itself to be flooded with the most repulsive forms of Islam.”
I don’t think many people in the Czech Republic took Mr Kňourek’s words seriously, but I did feel motivated to make a programme to remind listeners that if Alan Hollinghurst is “pretending to be a writer” he is doing rather a brilliant job of it. I interviewed him in July 2021 at his flat overlooking Hampstead Heath and the outcome was a programme for Czech Radio called Houpu se mezi lehkomyslností a tragédií (Between the Frivolous and the Rather Tragical).
The documentary is in Czech, but here is our original interview in English.
In the interview there are quite a lot of references to specific works by the author, as I made the Czech programme with a view to including extracts from the novels. Here is a list of books mentioned in the interview.
The Swimming-Pool Library (1988), The Folding Star (1994), The Spell (1998), The Line of Beauty (2004), The Stranger’s Child (2011), The Sparsholt Affair (2017).