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Alan Hollinghurst, who is universally acknowledged as a master of the novel, first came to notice as a poet; by 1982 he was recognised as one of the leading poets of his generation. By examining the poems written in the decade in which they were his principal writings, as well as the occasional later poem throughout his career, this essay endeavours to show that the kind of poems he wrote had seeds of the novelistic in them from the first, both in subject and theme.

This chapter explores the playful parodies and erotic charades that pervade Hollinghurst’s work – from poems to novels including The Swimming-Pool Library, The Folding Star and The Line of Beauty. The chapter examines two interrelated questions: how does Hollinghurst’s work use literary and visual allusions – particularly sexological manuals and pornography? And how do these allusions renegotiate the parameters of camp? His dirty-looking stories prompt double-takes. But they also repay a second, closer examination. Their insights into the human condition and sensitive explorations of grief go far beyond the frisson induced by the first wink. Despite the works’ sexual exuberance, they acknowledge that sex cannot make up for everything else: a moment of connection does not soften the fundamental disconnects Hollinghurst pinpoints. The chapter argues that erotic, literary and visual allusions measure the distance between characters and reveal the different modes of attention required by the world beyond pornography and erotic interplay.

Before publishing The Swimming-Pool Library in 1988, the most substantial piece of writing that Alan Hollinghurst had completed was his 1977 Oxford M.Litt thesis. This early academic work is marked throughout by careful reading and a preoccupation with bibliography. This preoccupation grew into an obsession that characterizes the rather readerly eroticism of Hollinghurst’s first novel. Hollinghurst’s formative attention to the book as a student and a novelist offers a rare invitation to revisit both the hermeneutics and materiality of reading through the possibility of touch. Building on recent work in queer studies concerning touch and reading, this chapter presents a speculative blueprint for the queer mechanisms that underpin the structure of The Swimming-Pool Library and the intimacy of reading in Hollinghurst’s early work.

While many of the characters in Hollinghurst’s most recent novel can be more readily understood as bisexual than homosexual, much of the critical discussion around the text has situated it in terms of a gay identity and literary culture and thus erased its many bisexualities. Much attention has also been drawn to the lack of explicit sex in the novel when compared to Hollinghurst’s earlier works. Viewing the text’s narrative structure and less-direct approach to sex through the lens of bisexual camp, this essay reads in The Stranger’s Child a critique of the persistent rewriting of bisexuality as gay, queer, or immature, and a resistance to the category of the gay novel, which nevertheless anticipates its own reception as one

This chapter analyzes Alan Hollinghurst's book The Swimming-Pool Library. In contract, Boyd's book An Ice-Cream War is an exclusive male construction which is based on a combination of public school attitudes towards others while the otherness is defined in terms of race, gender, class, and nation. Furthermore, The Swimming-Pool Library takes on the otherness of homosexuality. Indeed, it is generally read as a “gay novel” eulogizing the brief period of relative permissiveness between the 1967 decriminalization of homosexuality in Great Britain and the explosive spread of AIDS in the early 1980s. Hollinghurst's linking of two generally unrecorded histories—of black London and of gay London—makes The Swimming-Pool Library a perfect example of what Christopher Lane identifies as the paradoxical nature of homosexual desire in “British colonial allegory.”

This essay explores the vexed matters of race and Empire in Alan Hollinghurst's The Swimming-Pool Library, tracing the lines of connection between colonial and contemporary constructions of otherness upon which the novel dwells.  In presenting the protagonist's libidinous pursuit of black sexual partners in 1980s' London as recycling some of the exploitative behaviours of colonial desire, the novel probes the possibility of opening up a critical space where an alternative rendering of race might be sourced amidst the cross-racial sexual encounters that seem driven by older, illiberal attitudes. Rather than support the view that the novel is fully complicit with familiar forms of racialisation, this essay suggests that a different, more liberal view of race relations can be glimpsed and is empowered by Hollinghurst's engagement with a counter-hegemonic tradition of gay writing that includes figures such as E. M. Forster and especially Ronald Firbank.

Written in the form of a dialogue between editors Michele Mendelssohn and Denis Flannery, this introduction explores the book's principles and summarises its specific chapters. Emphasising the extent to which the collection is a historically-tessellated exploration of the breadth of Hollinghurst's output, it explores the varied ways in which he is in dialogue with his various influences. For the writers in this collection, a sense of 'influence' emerges that is, while genial and accepting, also not devoid of antagonism and shadow. The extent to which susceptibility to influence can be read as a form of intoxication as well as a world-making state of primal vulnerability is also emphasised. The introduction stresses the extent to which Hollinghurst breaks new ground even as he prowls the precincts of well-established literary traditions. These traditions extend beyond the novel and encompass poetry, translation and theatre in his oeuvre which is also, the book also emphasises, richly in dialogue with cinema as a cultural force and with recent developments in critical theory.

The use of genealogies in Hollinghurst’s narratives evokes the influence of the past on his characters, and proposes an explanation of their actions. But Hollinghurst’s genealogical stories are paradoxical and eccentric. They evoke origins in order to reject them. In The Folding Star the search for origins, or any reliance on their claim to be explanatory, becomes a wild goose chase. In The Spell the characters cling to their histories, yet they need to let them go. The necessity, shown in both novels, is fraught because what must be rejected is the gay genealogy of the present. The gay present consequently faces a future unmoored from its past. Hollinghurst’s work is caught up in a conflict similar to his characters.’ His novels evoke the influence of A. E. Housman, Ronald Firbank, Thomas Hardy, and Gordon Bottomley—an eccentric grouping of modernist era writers. They constitute a genealogical origin and explanation of Hollinghurst’s place in literary history. Yet the content or the form of the work of those authors implies the need for dissociation from generative origins. They are hollow auguries of what is to come. It is the hollowness of history that genealogies in Hollinghurst’s novels emphasize most.

This chapter offers a reading of The Line of Beauty, and a reconsideration of The Swimming Pool Library. It begins with the feeling of inhabiting his novels, where the pleasure and excitement of being within his sentences resonates with the ‘scenes’ of his novels: the rich comfort of being within lucid and solidly imagined spaces, and the complex relation of gay sexuality to that pleasure. The edge given to craftsmanlike sentences, and the alert, desiring gaze around beautifully-made and -furnished buildings, signal what is unusual in Hollinghurst’s relation to tradition. They recognise, the chapter argues, that tradition is constantly estranged by the status of built spaces as property, and the capture of property by the mechanisms of value. Hollinghurst writes during and about the London property booms, structuring the fantasies through which we apprehend our subjectivities and their scenes. This chapter thus supplements a realist moral exploration of the traps of desire and aesthetic pleasure with a reading of Hollinghurst’s modernist attention to the fields of value and fantasy.

This chapter reads Alan Hollinghurst's translations of Jean Racine (1639-1699), with particular emphasis on his 1990 translation of Racine's Bajazet (1672). It connects Hollinghurst's translations of this violent and anomalous tragedy with a range of artistic and theoretical work all from about 1990: Tony Kushner's translation of Corneille, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's use of Racine to develop her theory of the closet and Derek Jarman's Racinian-inflected film adaptation of Marlowe's Edward II, among others. Situating Hollinghurst's Racine in this cluster of works makes him part of a cultural energy that can only be read as a deeply skeptical response to Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 declaration of 'the end of history'. Exploring the interplay between the specifics of Hollinghurst's translation and current theoretical work on queer temporality and theatrical time, the essay also connects Hollnghurst's Bajazet to the particularly intense phase of the AIDS epidemic with which it coincided and to cultural responses thereto.

This chapter analyses the presence of the cinema in Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library. It argues that cinema does not have a consistent role in the novel as motif or metaphor but functions instead an element of excess. As such it functions like history in what is a historical novel of gay life, the history that will exceed and foreclose the story’s suspended temporalities. History is the Other to the novel’s enchanted summer, ‘the last summer of its kind there was ever to be’. History is also HIV, ready to spread its appalling blossom through the Utopia of sex beyond book and summer’s end. Like this history, the cinema in The Swimming-Pool Library must be held at bay: it resists integration into the middlebrow poise of the novel and the unruffleable surface of its realist prose.

In a very full interview, edited and revised by both participants, from an exchange between Alan Hollinghurst and Hermione Lee which took place at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing at Wolfson College Oxford on 7th February 2012, the novelist and the biographer discuss The Stranger’s Child and the topics arising from that novel in relation to life-writing: the private and the public life, families and secrets, the effect of idealisation and sentiment in the evolving versions of a life-story, changing ideas of privacy in twentieth and twenty-first century life-writing, the suppressions and distortions which biography entails, the use of documentary materials in biography, censorship, sexuality, and biography, the effect of Lytton Strachey (and his biography) on the history of gay writing, and English literary traditions.

In tracing the afterlife of a fictive WWI poet based on Rupert Brooke across a century, Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child explores both the political power of the archive and its arbitrary and contingent nature. The novel’s depiction of an archival quest owes a debt to Henry James’s The Aspern Papers and his conceit of the “visitable past”. Like Aspern the novel ends with a fire in the archive. The sacred origins of art and nation that biographers and historians seek in the archive are nothing but myths, and the figure for time that the novel favours is ultimately not the Jamesian “visitable past” but the Tennysonian “ stranger’s child.” The Stranger’s Child evokes a future inheritor who will neither know nor care what came before, and it thereby resembles contemporary theories of queer temporality that repudiate a reproductive futurism summoned forth in the name of the child.

This chapter constitutes a close reading of classical elements in the pornographic novel Teleny and argues that, by employing Roman rather than Greek models of devoted erotic partnership as a parallel for the relationship between the novel’s contemporary male lovers and by sexualizing ‘Greek love’, the novel subverts more mainstream ideas about ancient sexuality. The chapter discusses Oscar Wilde’s putative authorship of the novel, describes the broader use of the Classics in Victorian pornography, and analyses the novel’s use of Hadrian and Antinoüs in terms of its exploitation of both Greek and Roman paradigms. The chapter explores the subversive engagement of Teleny with Roman discourse about marriage, as well as the discourse of Roman sexuality and in particular, Rome’s interest in Priapus, and the concept and vocabulary of irrumatio. The chapter’s conclusion traces the later reverberations of Teleny’s reception of Roman homosexuality in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming Pool Library.