People are strange

Fans of Alan Hollinghurst are a patient lot. It’s not as if they have a choice. It has been seven years since last novel, The Line Of Beauty, was released and scooped one of literature’s most prestigious prizes, the Man Booker. Working at his own pace means that Hollinghurst felt no pressure to live up to any expectations.

“I am so slow so it’s not as if I do anything as a reflex action to anything else. I thought of it as a blessing and an opportunity and that the next time around I’d have a captive audience waiting for my book. Luckily, I am quite good at shutting out worries of how I’m going to perform and satisfying my own designs,” says Hollinghurst.
Sitting over tea on a lovely warm day in Dublin, Hollinghurst is in fine form, as well he should be. His new novel, The Stranger’s Child, has received well-deserved praise from almost every quarter.
The Stranger’s Child opens in 1913 and is written in episodes up until 2008. Its subject matter is a poet, Cecil Valance, a rich, aristocratic young man who exerts a magnetic attraction over almost everyone who meets him, most notably his Cambridge friend George Sawle and his sister Daphne, both of whom have intimate relationships with him. When Cecil is killed during the First World War, his poem ‘Two Acres’, supposedly written for Daphne, becomes widely regarded as an invocation of a lost England, much like Rupert Brooke’s poem ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’.
“I was deliberately toying with Brooke,” says Hollinghurst. “I got interested in that world a few years ago, the Cambridge world before the First World War. I read the first biography of Brooke, not a perfect book by any means, but I thought he was an interesting and complex character, a martyr to his own beauty in a way, who had a lot of unsatisfactory relationships with adoring women and adoring men. I gave Cecil some of those attributes. But that’s why I mention Brooke from time to time and have Cecil know him. That’s what writers do a lot of the time if they have a fictional character based on a real one, they bring in the real one as well to show they are not the same.”
His early death is the making of Cecil’s name as a poet and he continues to exert a fascination over subsequent generations. Into Daphne and George’s lives comes Paul Bryant, a young working-class man determined to write the definitive life of the poet.
“Paul Bryant was the most difficult character to assemble, partly because I tend to give my main characters a lot of my own interests and enthusiasms and I wanted him to have some of them but not to be like me. To not have the benefit of a university education and to feel like an outsider to the group of people he is writing about.”
Writing the biography, Paul, a young gay man, is met with silences and ulterior motives at every turn. Social mores around issues of sexuality, particularly gay – and to a lesser extent, female – sexual experience, mean that Cecil’s life, and the lives that intersected with his, must be kept secret.
“I quite like that thing of playing with the reader’s sympathy. You are encouraged to feel quite close to Paul early on, but then you start to wonder about him. With Daphne, when they finally come together, they are two characters the reader is invited to feel an interest in and then they come head-to-head and the reader doesn’t quite know whose side they are on.”
“There is something iconoclastic about the desire of Paul’s generation to, well not to get at the ‘truth’, but perhaps getting carried away by the new freedoms obtained after 1967, and the Sexual Offences Act decriminalising homosexuality, and what can be said in biographies. Gay lives could be talked about openly for the first time. Paul is part of this – an era of hearsay giving way to an age of documentation. Things that had been rumours before could be established. But these new freedoms can be abused. We don’t know, it may be a very good book, but there may be something exploitative and mendacious and hurtful about it too.”
The various scholars and biographers that chose Cecil as their subject do so because they find him intriguing, but in the end they turn him into a commodity. Does Hollinghurst feel this is true of all criticism and academia?
“I suppose artists hope to produce something of lasting significance. But I think there is a sense where a biographer, in particular, is on the lookout for a good subject. For the biographer, finding new materials is a commercial opportunity and scandal becomes the currency.”
In The Stranger’s Child the ‘truth’ about anybody is a slippery thing. The characters vacillate between selfishness, selflessness and the reader is asked to fill in the gaps.
“The unknowable dimension of the characters’ behaviour is what I was aiming for. The book is so much about how much or how little we know about other people and how little we know about the past and especially other people’s past,” says Hollinghurst. “Much like real life.”
Cecil is the novel’s most documented character. However what we know about him does not change; instead what Cecil ‘means’ to poetry-lovers, scholars and biographers evolves as attitudes and beliefs change over the course of the 20th century.
“I wanted to avoid the thing that there was going to be some belated revelation about Cecil. I wanted the reader to have privileged access to certain things about him from the first part of the book and watch everybody else moving closer and further away from the truth about him,” says Hollinghurst.
The Stranger’s Child is too rich and complex a novel to sum up in a few sentences. However, it is in part an alternative history examining the visibility of gay lives. Cecil’s former lover George marries, and settles down to an existence that seems comfortable and companionable, but rather asexual.
“We gather he has been unnerved and making a marriage to please his mother,” says Hollinghurst, who won’t be drawn on the exact nature of George’s relationship with his wife. “But we see glimpses of him thinking of the life he might have lived.”
The life George might have lived is one later characters take for granted. There is an open and vibrant gay culture, greater social acceptance, easy hook-ups via technology, and civil partnerships. However, these relationships seem to lack the eroticism of the earlier, hidden ones as if Hollinghurst was making a comment on the romanticism of a taboo.
“No. That’s very interesting. That’s certainly something you hear older people saying a lot. After the change in the law and the advent of a much more open gay culture, especially in London and the big cities, that it had taken away something, some essential magic when things had to be secret and coded. The element of being outside the law was exciting.”
Romanticising the taboo is all very well if you don’t have to live with it however.
“Oh yes, the removal of secrecy may take away something, but it has all sorts of other benefits, which in real life certainly outweigh the loss of that romance!”