The Good of the Novel

by Liam McIlvanney

  One of the distinctive marks of Hollinghurst’s style has always been its easy evocation of spaces, both interior and exterior. His imagination naturally inhabits and finds feeling in the aerial shapes of rooms, buildings, streets, parks, skies. He is, in fact, a far finer writer of the outside than Henry James. James is happiest indoors, in the class- and taste-inflected spaces of houses, and when he does permit his characters outside, it is often to hurry them through the streets, before ducking back into the dark interiors of shops or houses. For Hollinghurst, though, the urban outside – street markets, parks, gardens – is a place of exciting and often sexual freedom. It is outside that Hollinghurst’s narrative eye settles so readily upon forms of beauty which are déclassé, quotidian, available to all: the abstract tonal elegance of a dawn or dusk sky seen above trees, or the gleaming spin of a bicycle wheel, or the inscape of a slope of grass. Dusk, in particular, is a favourite Hollinghurst time, with its crepuscular promise, and its hints of illicitness, liminality and lust – of work ending and pleasure beginning. An exemplary dusk scene comes early in the novel, when Nick is standing on the balcony of the Feddens’ house, looking out over the communal gardens as the night thickens:

  Someone was walking a small white dog, which looked almost luminous as it bobbed and scampered in the late dusk. Above the trees and rooftops the dingy glare of the London sky faded upwards into weak violet heights. In summer, when windows everywhere were open, night seemed made of sound as much as shadow, the whisper of the leaves, the unsleeping traffic rumble, far-off car horns and squeals of brakes; voices, faint shouts, a waveband twiddle of unconnected music. Nick yearned for Leo, away to the north, three miles up the long straight roads. He felt hollow with frustration and delay. The girl with the white dog came back along the gravel path, and he thought how he might appear to her, if she glanced up, as an enviable figure, poised against the shining accomplished background of the lamplit room. Whereas, looking out, leaning out over the iron railing, Nick felt he had been swept to the brink of some new promise, a scented vista or vision of the night, and then held there.

  There is much to admire here: the way that sound is used to give form and depth to the dusk, the discreet excellence of that ‘waveband twiddle of unconnected music’, the way that Nick’s yearning for Leo, his first lover, is given a spatial correspondence, the way that a hint of the word ‘polish’ is brought out of the word ‘accomplish’ by its proximity to ‘shining’ and ‘lamplit’. One notices, too, how subtly Hollinghurst registers Nick’s changing knowledge of the scene before him. In the first sentence, the dog-walker is a ‘someone’; by the time she returns along the gravel path, Nick has realised it is a ‘girl’, but the moment of that realisation goes unexpressed. The discrimination occurs in the real time of the prose, and is unremarkable to Nick, and is therefore unremarked upon. One also notices the revisions in the last line of ‘looking out’ to ‘leaning out’, and of ‘vista’ to ‘vision’; these amendments, of course, record the act of Nick thinking, his aesthete’s refinement of his own image, as he realises that to ‘lean out’ from a balcony is more riskily glamorous than merely to look out, and that a ‘vision’ is more alluring than a ‘vista’.

  At moments or scenes such as this, when Hollinghurst’s prose inhabits so thoroughly a mind and a moment, when style is made finely attentive to the nuances of the lived moment, The Line of Beauty proves itself a historical novel of a high order: that is to say, a novel which does not occupy a historical period, but instead occupies a mind occupying a historical period. Milan Kundera in The Art of the Novel proposed that a novel should examine ‘not reality but existence. And existence is not what has occurred, existence is the realm of human possibilities.’ Hollinghurst’s novel is, at its best, an account not of what was, but of what might have been, in his chosen era. The good of this novel is that it offers, in Michael Wood’s phrase, a record not of ‘the fictional lives of real people but of the real lives of people who came extraordinarily close to existing’. One thinks of the moment when Nick notices the Miss Selfridge’s label which is turned out on the blue shirt of Leo. He is struck with a pang of fondness for Leo’s scruffiness, and longs briefly to tuck the label back into Leo’s collar. Here, a specific period reference does not seem like an opportunistic product placement – the kind of heavy-handed retail-dating which characterises so many ‘historical’ novels – but is instead stitched into the emotional fabric of the novel.

  Such subtleties of touch make the novel’s occasional clumsinesses even more apparent, and more curious. Frequently, and for reasons that are not clear, Hollinghurst seems set on nudging his characters out of the realm of possibility and into that of caricature. Gerald’s buffoonery is played too large at times, and one wonders here and there if Nick – a conversationalist of often arresting banality, whose favourite words are ‘fascinating’ and ‘wonderful’ – is really so acute a social observer as the free indirect style implies him to be. One wishes Hollinghurst could have resisted his Dickensian habit of naming-as-destiny. Do the ungenerous Sir Maurice and Lady Tipper, who visit the family in the south of France, require that particular surname? Does Wani Ouradi’s have to carry its submerged hint of ‘Uranus’? Does Nick Guest’s name deepen or refine our understanding of his interloper status? In a novel which is concerned with delicacy of touch, and refinement of category, these allegorical namings seem like large hands pointing in the margins of medieval manuscripts, drawing attention to that which is already apparent.

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  In interview, Hollinghurst has described The Line of Beauty as a fiercely political book: an indictment of what he called ‘the new depths of poverty’ plumbed by Thatcherism, and the ‘spurious fantasy of elegance’ that was conjured up by wealth in the 1980s. Certainly, the novel has observations to make concerning the prejudices of racism, homophobia and snobbery during that decade, and how happily these three grim biases nested together in the minds of what Gerald – intending it as a compliment – calls ‘the property-owning democracy’ of the decade. And there are, it is true, little hints of political venom – brief flickers of Hollinghurst’s snake-tongue – as when Bertrand Ouradi praises Thatcher as ‘a very kind woman’. ‘Bertrand had,’ writes Hollinghurst with delicious savagery, ‘the mawkish look of a brute who praises the kindness of another brute.’ However, while we pass most of our time in the novel within the house and family of a Tory minister, politics as one would conventionally recognise it, and the consequences of politics, happen off-stage. The social and personal devastations of Thatcherism are alluded to in passing, never witnessed.

  As we read on in the novel, we realise that what Hollinghurst truly loathes about the Thatcher years is not the social consequences of its economic policy, but the coarseness of taste which it licensed. The true crime of the age, according to Hollinghurst’s audit, is its combination of so much appetite with so little taste. Gerald is the chief of sinners in this respect: Hollinghurst lavishes contempt on Gerald’s ‘facetious boom’, his ‘taste for the splendid’ – which is not to be confused with the beautiful – and his comic nervousness in the face of artworks to which he knows he is meant to respond. ‘I don’t see what’s so vulgar about being glorious,’ Gerald woundedly protests, after Nick has criticised his love of Richard Strauss. The problem with Strauss, Nick thinks to himself, is the ‘colossal redundancy’ of his music, ‘the squandering of brilliant technique on cheap material, the sense that the moral nerves had been cut, leaving the great bloated body to a life of valueless excess.’ It is to precisely this conclusion that Hollinghurst’s novel seems to want, morally, to commute: that the sundering of the aesthetic and the ethical will always lead first to vulgarity, and then to catastrophe.

  The Line of Beauty is a novel which thinks at the level of metaphor, as well as of style; which makes its propositions by patterns of images, as well as by dialogue and argument. One of the most conspicuous of these patterns is that of reflection and self-admiration. The novel’s epigraph is taken f
rom Lewis Carroll, and looking-glasses are everywhere in the novel. Almost every surface gleams: lustrously polished wood, glinting surfaces of water, car bodyworks, ‘high hall mirrors’, ‘gilt-framed mirrors’. Walking alone through the Fedden’s house, Nick trails his fingertips over ‘the dark polished wood’ of the furniture, and sees himself ‘partnered by reflections as dim as shadows’ in the veneer. Reflective sunglasses lie about on table tops and sideboards, impassively registering the world (one remembers Nabokov’s association of sunglasses with venality in Lolita – the ‘lost pair of sunglasses’ which is ‘the only witness’ to Humbert’s near-ravishing of his childhood sweetheart, Annabel, on a beach). Everywhere, too, are the verbs and nouns of lustrousness: ‘shimmer’, ‘sheen’, ‘glaze’, and ‘gleam’ occur scores of times in the novel. Nick’s eye is caught by the ‘glassy polish of the table top’, the ‘gleaming slippage’ of a loose pile of books, ‘gleaming red veneer’, ‘gilt ballroom chairs’. When Nick and Wani slip into the bedroom of Wani’s parents for an illicit fondle, and the free indirect narrative notes that ‘the richness of the room was its mixture of shiny pomp, glazed swagged curtains, huge mirrors, onyx and glaring gilt’, it is only one of dozens of puns on the word ‘gilt’: puns which compact and reinforce the idea that an excessive veneration of appearance has led to an abolition of moral depth. Nick goes to look at himself ‘in the high gilt arch of the hall mirror’, in the Feddens’ house; a cabinet bookshelf is ‘a gilded cage’, and people sit on ‘little gilt chairs’. So thorough-going and influential is this lustrousness that it comes, after a while, to provide the texture and finish of Nick’s memory: he puts ‘a bright gloss’ on an idea, entertains the ‘gleam of a new possibility’, and recollections come ‘gleaming out of the blur of memory’.

  Hollinghurst also tropes the era’s obsession with style over substance in the novel’s eponymous motif: the ogee curve, or ‘line of beauty’. The ogee is first found in William Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty (1754), where Hogarth identified the sinuous S-shaped double curve as an exquisitely elegant form: ‘a sort of proportion’d, winding line,’ wrote Hogarth, ‘which will hereafter be call’d the precise serpentine line, or line of grace.’ Hollinghurst’s version of the ogee, of course, is a line of ‘beauty’, not a line of ‘grace’, and this secularising revision of Hogarth’s phrase is significant. For the ogee appeals to Nick – and comes to represent the decade – precisely because of its functionlessness, its disinterest in purpose or ethics. The ogee is, for Nick, an inscape of elegance, an expression of pure aestheticism. As the novel proceeds, Nick’s primed attention begins to find the ogee curve everywhere, in the ‘black and gilt S-shaped balusters’ of the Feddens’ house, in ‘mirror-frames and pelmets and wardrobes’, in the lines of cocaine which are chopped and arranged on the ‘polished’ glass tables and which Nick so keenly snorts, and of course in the ‘curve of the lower back and muscular bottom’ of men – the line of booty. The ogee echoes, too, the cambers of Hollinghurst’s own fine sentences, and the rise and fall of the 1980s themselves.

  ‘Ogee’, of course, swerves suggestively close to ‘orgy’, and the word thus registers a shadow of the decadence that exists in elegance. Certainly, the self-devoted and useless aestheticism represented by the ogee curve is, in one respect, precisely what Hollinghurst devotes his novel to warning against – a commitment to beauty so sharp that it snips ‘the moral nerves’. Yet for all his moral suspicion of aestheticism, Hollinghurst never manages fully to disavow or to denounce its claims and charms. This, perhaps, is his strongest affinity with Henry James: that Hollinghurst finds himself dismayed by the effects of aestheticism, yet also compelled by it. Both writers simultaneously desire and distrust absolute beauty.

  What makes The Line of Beauty most interesting, perhaps, is watching the play of longing between Hollinghurst and the world he is bent on criticising: the intermittence of control on his part that is exposed during those parapraxic moments when the novel comes to know more about him than he about it. Repeatedly in The Line of Beauty, Hollinghurst reveals himself to be more in love with the careless style of the aristocracy, and the languid beauties made possible by wealth, than he can acknowledge or even sense. The novel’s tone frequently lapses into a bitchy rapture for the Thatcher era: the one compulsion (to judge, critique, censure) collapses into the other (to evoke, describe, celebrate). At times, Hollinghurst becomes so involved with precisely cataloguing the material attributes of his characters – their paintings and furniture, their buildings and their estates – that he seems to slide into a gilty [sic] reverie. Like a mesmerist who has mistakenly looked in a mirror, he manages to enchant himself with his own incantations. This is, in part, a consequence of the demandingly subtle ethics of the free indirect style, which yields much to the writer in fluency and perspective, but which can claim a toll in the coin of moral compromise.

  Hollinghurst’s uncertainty over whether to despise or to crave his wealthy world finds one of its expressions in his use of the word ‘lustre’, which appears scores of times in the novel. Hollinghurst is aware, of course, of the buried hint of concupiscence in the word, and plays knowingly on this, but he seems less sure as to which of the word’s two opposed main meanings he wishes to invoke by it. For ‘lustre’ can connote on the one hand a tawdry superficiality of light, and on the other a deep sustaining refulgence. Hollinghurst’s use of the word often hovers indecisively between these meanings, or rocks inconsistently back and forth between consecutive uses: he appears uncertain whether the ‘lustre’ of the novel’s world should be condemned or praised. This uncertainty stands in contrast to the decidedness of James, who uses the word ‘lustre’ dozens of times in The Golden Bowl – but only ever to indicate a superficiality of thought or a falsity of appearance.

  ‘What would Henry James have made of us?’ wonders a character halfway through The Line of Beauty. James would, one thinks, have recognised and sympathised with the moral struggle that we see occurring in The Line of Beauty; the struggle, that is, between Hollinghurst’s aestheticism and his moralism. For James, too, was morally wary of wealth, but also powerfully attracted by it, in particular by the deep sincerity of old wealth. James had little problem censuring new wealth (like that of Adam Verver), but the allure of old money – like that of old knowledge, and what in The Ambassadors he calls ‘antique order’ – gripped him strongly despite himself.

  The best way to understand the nature of Hollinghurst’s ambitions and failures as a moralist is to measure him against James. In The Golden Bowl, his most sustained investigation of the relationship between beauty and morality, James suggested that aestheticism of any sustained kind is profoundly hazardous. Hollinghurst, however, can never quite bring himself to a declaration of this totality. He tries to goad himself to such a conclusion, only to find himself drawn away from making it by his finger-trailing fondness for the beauty of beauty.

  The conspicuously abrupt ending of The Line of Beauty seems to be a function of Hollinghurst’s belief that he must moralise: that the ethical must, ultimately, be seen to supersede the aesthetic. After the novel’s long, indolent central sections – which tell of holidays in the summer house in France, of great parties in country houses, and in which the plot pools almost to the point of stillness – the swiftness of the closing chapters, their rapid tumble of events, surprises the reader. Gerald’s affair with his assistant is exposed, as are certain irregular financial dealings in which he has been involved, and the press also sniff out Nick’s relationship with Wani, a scandal which further contributes to the public disgrace and political undoing of Gerald. Inside the house, Nick finds himself no longer welcome: there is a sudden contraction of hospitality into hostility, and he is brusquely evicted.

  As Nick shuts the great blue door of the house behind him, and slips the keys back through the letter box, he is returned to the Notting Hill street where his adventure had begun four years earlier. The implication, to which we have abruptly been brought, is that the nuanced a
esthetic taste which we watch Nick finessing and enjoying throughout the novel means nothing without a similarly finessed ethical sense: that the apprehension of appearance must be joined with an apprehension of consequence. There are echoes, here, of James’s own ritual renunciation of wealth and beauty at the end of The Ambassadors, when Lambert Strether – the character who most resembles James – rejects all that Europe has to offer him, and returns instead to America. The ending of The Line of Beauty can be seen to offer a similarly pentecostal resolution, in which – in James Wood’s phrase – the novel decides upon an ‘extremity of … moral turn, [such that], as it were, the story itself must turn on its beautiful creations and devour them in moral flames.’