CLIP: "Gay Sex Wins Booker"

This is an interview that I conducted with Alan Hollinghurst in April of last year for "G" Magazine, a gay interest publication put out by Asia City Publishing. After winning the Man Booker prize for Literature in 2004, Hollinghurst went on a book tour that included a stop at the Hong Kong Literary Festival last spring. I met him in his Causeway Bay hotel, where we talked about his book, *The Line of Beauty*, his love of music and Henry James, and how cocaine captured the 80s.

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“Gay Sex wins Booker” was the Daily Express headline that ran last autumn (2004) when Alan Hollinghurst’s novel, The Line of Beauty, took Britain’s top literature prize. He talks to Jenn Yee about both the novel and life after winning the Booker.

HK: You’ve spoken about the “write what you know” mantra in the past. How much of your own experience has informed The Line of Beauty?

AH: Quite a lot. The impressionable young man coming to London with a sense of a whole new world opening up in front of him was very much my own experience and a lot of Nick’s [the protagonist] interests are mine. As with everything I write, there’s a lot of me spread around in it. It’s like having an argument with myself, I put bits of myself into different characters. At the same time, I certainly didn’t move in the circles described in the book in the 80s, thank god. In the end, I think the imagination is rather important when writing and I was always rather depressed by this idea that you should only write what you know.

HK: What is it that draws people to the book, as so many of the characters are not sympathetic, and hard to relate to in any way…

AH: Yes they are. Nick himself has been a sort of mystery to me, actually. He is a person who doesn’t behave very well on various occasions and I wanted to suggest that his aesthetic way of looking at the world has rewards and limitations, and does rather leads him astray. I don’t myself read books so as to identify with a character – I know this is the way some people do read fiction, they like to have someone they really like in it – but I was always more interested in the complexity of a character. I think I’ve always been interested in bad behavior - people not doing what they should - it’s much more fun to write about than good behavior.

HK: Sex, drugs and rock n’ roll, or in your case, classical music…

AH: Sex, drugs and Richard Strauss…yes…

HK: How much did you consciously or subconsciously use this formula in your book?

AH: All four of my books have been quite essentially about gay sexual behavior, particularly the first one. It’s always been a central thread of them. Cocaine just seemed to me to be the right kind of drug as a metaphor for those years in the mid-80s, the acceleration and the excitement that comes with it. It’s rather a selfish drug. I never touched it myself in the 80s, but I was aware it was going on. It is difficult to write about people taking drugs interestingly, it’s like talking about people’s dreams, experiences that are fascinating to them, but everybody else gapes with boredom. I wanted to bring out in the book the monotony involved with cocaine as part of everything that starts to go wrong.

HK: And rock n’ roll…?

AH: I’ve always had a thing about music in the books. Perhaps I haven’t actually described music, but I’ve always been interested in what writing can do about music, since there is so much that’s not communicable in words. Nonetheless you can describe the sort of sensations that people have while they’re listening to music. I just wanted to show Nick in a realm of aesthetic sensation surrounded by people who were bored to death and longing for a drink, that he was someone who invested a lot of his values in things that mattered terribly to him and didn’t seem to matter to anybody else.

HK: Nick is obsessed with various things in the book, including music. Are you anything like him?

AH: I have been very obsessive about music at various times of my life. Secondary school was the beginning of a lifelong Wagner obsession. There were years when I was student, and it will seem rather crazy, really, but I just sort of lived in Wagner the whole time. It was a distorting feeling. You sometimes wish life would conform to a Wagner opera, which it almost always failed to do (which is just as well). He is obviously one of those incredibly powerful artistic inventors sort of akin at a much higher level to Tolkien, where you find an artist who creates a whole world and system in which you want to absorb yourself.

HK: You seem to have a fondness for very old things…buildings, music, authors. Who are your influences?

AH: Henry James has long meant a lot to me, and I’ve made it a little more explicit in this book. I do feel like I want to make an homage to a certain writer when I’m writing myself. In my second book, The Folding Star, which is about a man falling in love with a teenaged boy, I was conscious of it being two other things, one of which was Death in Venice and the other of which was Lolita. I am conscious at times of playing with literary situations. James is a useful figure to a novelist because he’s interested himself in the technique and structure of a novel. I saw various Jamesian challenges in this book: it’s written in the third person and everything is seen through consciousness of one character. It’s a very difficult way to write a book. A hundred years earlier he was writing about rather similar worlds of rich but unprincipled people, worlds into which idealistic, innocent, vulnerable, young people are on their own without knowing quite what they’re up against.

HK: How is it being a full-time writer?

AH: Almost ten years ago now, I “retired” from the Times Literary Supplement. And I took to retirement very well. I wasn’t depressed or anything, perhaps I was thrown back to my natural idleness. With writing, when I get going, I have quite an austere regime. I don’t see much of people, it’s an odd, monastic existence. I like to be able to concentrate continuously.

HK: So has the Booker affected your private life much?

AH: It has, actually. I seem to be rather more in demand. The question is how long it will last. Literary fame is quite a transitory thing. People recognize me for a little while, but it takes me such a long time to write a new book, that people forget what I look like.

HK: What’s the strangest question you’ve been asked at a book signing?

AH: Well, people can get sort of fresh, or they’ll press a brown envelope into your hand containing more information about them than one would care to know…but it’s generally a friendly experience. After the long-drawn out, solitary experience of writing, it’s nice to meet people who know your work.