Nick went to university with Gerald Fedden’s son Toby, and is now a tenant in the Feddens’ London house with a mandate to keep an eye out for Toby’s psychologically frail younger sister, Catherine. His position as a visitor (enshrined, too, in his surname) conditions his behavior as well as his perceptions:
As an outsider he found himself floating again in a pleasant medium of social charm and good humour. Toby and Catherine could frown and sulk, and exercise their prerogative not to be impressed or amused by their parents. Nick, though, conversed with his hosts in an idiom of tremendous agreement. “Did you have glorious weather?” “I must say we had glorious weather.” “I hope the traffic wasn’t too frightful…” “Frightful!” “I’d love to see the little church at Podier.” “I think you’d love the little church at Podier.” So they knitted their talk together. Even disagreements, for instance over Gerald’s taste for Richard Strauss, had a glow of social harmony to them, of relished licence, and counted almost as agreements transposed into a more exciting key. (20–21)
There is a sharp satirical edge to the prose here; Nick’s agreement verges on parody as he echoes an idiom not yet quite natural to him, and the final sentence has the air of aphoristic summing-up (the metaphor of the transposition of keys can be imagined to have drifted into the third-person narration via Nick’s aesthete’s consciousness). Hollinghurst cunningly offers us some emblems for the place of satire in his narrative technique; two caricatures of Gerald Fedden hang on the kitchen wall, drawings “which he had made a point of buying from the cartoonists”: “When Gerald was in the kitchen, guests always found themselves contrasting him with his grinning, hawk-nosed cartoon image; the comparison was obviously to his advantage, though it couldn’t help stirring the suspicion that under his handsome everyday mask this predatory goon might indeed be lurking” (19–20). Note the compactness and power of this style of notation, the economy with which the words register something about Gerald and the way those around him perceive him and the political and social media in which he operates, not to mention Nick’s own funny combination of the obtuse and the perceptive, his cautious trying-out (always filtered through that highly polished and accomplished and self-contained third-person voice) of modes of commentary in which he is still a novice.
Another passage, part of the description of Nick’s first date with Leo, foregrounds the centrality of scrutiny, of ways of knowing in this novel. Here is the intensity of perception of a twenty-year-old to whom everything is new, whose capacities to observe and comprehend are great but who is still, as it were, trying out various social affects (again, the third-person voice is extremely close but not identical to Nick’s point of view):
Leo was certainly quite an egotist—Catherine’s graphological analysis had been spot on. But he didn’t expound his inner feelings. He did something Nick couldn’t imagine doing himself, which was to make statements about the sort of person he was. “I’m the sort of guy who needs a lot of sex,” he said, and, “I’m like that, I always say what I think.” Nick wondered for a moment if he’d inadvertently contradicted him. “I don’t bear grudges,” Leo said sternly: “I’m not that kind of person.” “I’m sure you’re not,” Nick said, with a quick discountenancing shudder. And perhaps this was a useful skill, or tactic, in the blind-date world, even if Nick’s modesty and natural fastidiousness kept him from replying in the same style (“I’m the sort of guy who likes Pope more than Wordsworth,” “I’m crazy about sex but I haven’t had it yet”). (30)
It is self-deprecating, even self-mocking of Nick to suggest that the meanings of the statement “I’m the sort of guy who likes Pope more than Wordsworth” would be immediately legible to his contemporaries, but in fact that particular preference is a time-honored way of marking out one’s own aesthetic and (by extension) sociocultural affiliations. Many of the poets of British Romanticism, Wordsworth foremost among them, dismissed Alexander Pope’s poetry as miniaturizing, concerned only with the reproduction of trifling domestic interiors, as opposed to the more masculine pleasures to be found in a poetry of the open air. Lord Byron set himself apart from this consensus and expressed a dandyish celebration of Pope’s artifice, and the whole thing would go down in literary history under the name of the Pope controversy.2
The high-cultural frame of reference matters a great deal in this novel, and unpacking some of the book’s allusions further illuminates the extraordinary craftiness of Hollinghurst’s technique. The Feddens with Nick as appendage travel down to Toby’s uncle’s estate in the country for a lavish twenty-first-birthday party, and traffic threatens to make them late for lunch, provoking an anxiety that Rachel Fedden attempts to diffuse by suggesting that her brother won’t mind as they’re just “taking pot luck” (43):
Pot luck turned out to be an exquisite light lunch served at a round table in a room lined with rococo boiseries that had been removed wholesale from some grand Parisian town house, and painted pale blue. On the ceiling, in a flowered ellipse, two naked females held a wreath of roses. Nick saw at once that the landscape over the fireplace was a Cézanne. It gave him a hilarious sense of his own social displacement. It was one of those moments that only the rich could create, and which came for Nick all wrapped up in its own description, so that he was already recounting it to some impressionable other person—a person, that is, as impressionable as himself. He didn’t know whether he should refer to it, but Lord Kessler said as he sat down, “You see I’ve moved that Cézanne.” (45)
Nick is alienated from others of his generation by his aesthete’s vocabulary and frame of reference; the depth and breadth of his knowledge are partly explained within the novel by the fact of his father’s being an antique dealer, giving it something of the smell of the shop, but Nick has also sharpened his aesthetic sense into an exceptional tool. The vocabulary here is Nick’s as well as the narrator’s (“rococo boiseries”), and the choice of Cézanne is clever: in one sense, the name simply stands for a whole class of paintings that most of us will only ever encounter in public museums rather than private homes, but Cézanne is also the name to conjure with when it comes to questions of realism and representation, so that it’s a small joke about the history of representation for Hollinghurst to have chosen this particular painter rather than, say, Monet or Matisse.
The furniture at Hawkeswood is “mostly French, and of astonishing quality”: Nick straggles behind the others as they walk through the house, his heart beating “with knowledge and suspicion” (the language foregrounds the erotic aspect of this sort of aesthetic apprehension). The particular piece of furniture he contemplates here is a Louis Quinze escritoire or writing desk which Lord Kessler tells him was made for Madame de Pompadour, and the tone of the narration captures Nick’s own breathless appreciation and his simultaneous skepticism about whether these objects are sufficiently appreciated by those who live with them. Nick stands with Lord Kessler to admire “the bulbous, oddly diminutive desk—kingwood, was it?—with fronds of ormolu” (here the narration directly registers the deferential and yet authoritative tone of Nick’s manner), but the thought registered in the prose upon Nick’s arrival in the library is more sardonic:
Lord Kessler himself took him off to the library, where the books were apparently less important than their bindings, which were as important as could be. The heavy gilding of the spines, seen through the fine gilt grilles of the carved and gilded bookcases, created a mood of minatory opulence. They seemed to be books in some quite different sense from those that Nick used and handled every day. (47)
Is it the narrator or Nick himself who is the budding aphorist capable of formulating that verdict about the books’ bindings, “as important as could be”? It is not the sort of question that can be answered, but insofar as there is an answer, it must be both, just as the phrase “minatory opulence” may well be Nick’s, though we only have access to it through the third-person narration.
Nick is about to begin graduate work in English at University College London,
and when Lord Kessler asks him what he has chosen as his field, Nick invokes the term style itself:
“I want to have a look at style,” Nick said. This flashing emphasis on something surely ubiquitous had impressed the admissions board, though Lord Kessler appeared uncertain. A man who owned Mme de Pompadour’s escritoire could hardly be indifferent to style, Nick felt; but his reply seemed to have in mind some old wisdom about style and substance. (49)
One drama that plays out in the novel concerns the question of whether Nick’s faith in style can possibly be borne out, whether style can carry the weight he wants it to (in the absence of any clear set of ethical or political commitments, style is all Nick’s got). Nick is in many respects an unsympathetic character, immature, self-absorbed and painfully ignorant of what’s at stake in the political developments of these early years of his adulthood. But his knowledge of and love for beautiful things is one of the few true things about him. In the “ongoing Strauss feud” conducted between Nick and Gerald, it becomes “urgent for [Nick] to revile Richard Strauss,” which he does “happily but a little hysterically, as if far more than questions of taste were involved” (86). The radio commentator on the Saturday morning program to which Nick and Gerald are listening here (the “Building a Library” feature on BBC Radio 3) points to Strauss’s self-glorifying allusions, in his later work, to his own earlier output; Gerald responds viscerally and warmly to the same quality in Strauss that strikes Nick as “bumptious self-confidence” (85). The announcer (a “clever young man,” in the narrator’s sly phrasing) suggests of a particular recording that “the sheer opulence of the sound and those very broad tempi [might] push this reading over the edge, losing that essential drop of self-irony without which the piece can all too easily become an orgy of vulgarity” (86): a concept that Gerald is virtually incapable of understanding but that is related to Nick’s distaste. Catherine likes Strauss even less than Nick does but lacks his precise vocabulary for lambasting it; she simply calls Strauss and all other heavily orchestrated Romantic music “God-dammery,” a term explicated by the third-person narrator in terms native to Nick’s intellect and imagination:
What the problem was was this colossal redundancy, 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. And then there was the sheer bad taste of applying the high metaphysical language of Wagner to the banalities of bourgeois life, an absurdity Strauss seemed only intermittently aware of! But he couldn’t say that, he would sound priggish, he would seem to care too much. Gerald would say it was only music. Nick tried to read the paper for a couple of minutes, but was oddly too excited to concentrate. (87)
Extraordinarily perceptive and articulate in his aesthetic responses, Nick is obtuse in his political ignorance, though the narrator in this respect clearly has a wider knowledge, a perspective on the Thatcher years of which young Nick could have no inkling and to which older Nick may only hope to aspire. I am interested in the stylistic implications of this gap in knowledge; Nick is narratorial, as it were, in his perceptiveness and phrasing and observations, and the local effects of each paragraph owe a great deal to his filtering or framing consciousness, but he is also closed off from kinds of knowledge the narrator may have available to him. (It is only a potentiality at this early point in the novel.) Hollinghurst’s touch is very lovely in his weaving of Nick’s own phrases into the third-person narration. Consider this description of Leo, for instance: “He was wearing the same old jeans of their first date, which for Nick now had a touching anecdotal quality, he knew them and loved them; and a zipped-up tracksuit top which made him look ready for action, or for inaction, the rigours and hanging about of training” (91). The application of the phrase “anecdotal quality” is Nick’s wittiness, not just the narrator’s (this is marked partly, I think, in Hollinghurst’s choice of how to punctuate the sentence, with the associative comma chosen in preference to the perhaps more correct semicolon that could have preceded the clause “he knew them and loved them”), and we are attracted to Nick, despite his evident flaws and weaknesses, partly because of these powers of perception and description, powers that are also what draw us to the narrative voice. Nick can trust to nothing but this set of skills and a deeply founded set of aesthetic precepts, and his moments of misunderstanding and panic around others often hinge on questions of artistic (mis)interpretation. It is the discussion, at cross-purposes, of the Holman Hunt painting whose reproduction hangs in Leo’s mother’s house (“just the sort of painting, doggedly literal and morbidly symbolic, that Nick liked least” [141]) that shows the impossibility of Nick’s coexisting with Leo’s family members, and when Nick tells Leo that his mother and sister are “wonderful,” he hears “the word hang, in the silence between the lights, as if in inverted commas, and underlined too: the wonderful of gush, of connoisseurship, of Kensington Park Gardens” (144). In the end, he is not sundered from Leo by the fact of his response to Scarface (to Nick, shocking, bombastic) in the scene that follows—they have gone to the film on Leo’s recommendation, but Leo doesn’t like it much either. In the moment before he learns this, though, Nick “as so often [has] the feeling that an artistic disagreement, almost immaterial to the other person, was going to be the vehicle of something that mattered to him more than he could say” (148).
The second part of The Line of Beauty is set in 1986, the third in 1987, and each one represents the further corrosion of Nick’s painful innocence, his entrance into a world of knowledge. Nick is now the lover of the glamorous English-Lebanese playboy Wani, and his induction into a more sophisticated and corrupt sexuality than the one Leo facilitated in the first part of the book is one of the forms of knowledge that continues to push Nick’s perspective into even closer alignment with that of the knowing narrator. The subtlety of the play between those two perspectives, mostly overlapping and sometimes abruptly—briefly—sundered, is astonishing. Nick lives with Wani in the flat on the top two floors of a Kensington house whose ground floor houses the magazine offices for Ogee, the magazine named for the eighteenth-century artist William Hogarth’s “line of beauty,” an S-shaped curve that Hogarth believed would impart liveliness to any composition:
Nick smiled to himself at the flat’s pretensions, but inhabited it with his old wistful keenness, as he did the Feddens’ house, as a fantasy of prosperity that he could share, and as the habitat of a man he was in love with. He felt he took to it well, the comfort and convenience, the discreet glimpsed world of things that the rich had done for them. It was a system of minimized stress, of guaranteed flattery. Nick loved the huge understanding depth of the sofas and the peculiarly gilding light of the lamps that flanked the bathroom basin; he had never looked so well as he did when he shaved or cleaned his teeth there. Of course the house was vulgar, as almost everything postmodern was, but he found himself taking a surprising pleasure in it. (175)
It is a knife’s edge only that separates Nick’s knowledge from the narrator’s. It is impossible to say for sure where Nick’s knowledge ends: does Nick himself have access to the phrase “his old wistful keenness,” and to the psychological insight implied in it? To the sort of self-distancing implied not just in the ability to think “I have taken to it well” but to phrase it, instead, “I feel I have taken to it well”? And is such attentiveness to phrasing a matter of intelligence and insight, or merely of fussiness? Perhaps the clearest marker of Nick’s passage through time is his new comfort with vulgarity: he is no longer so trammeled by the fastidious tastes of his upbringing.
Nick’s affair with Wani is a secret from the magazine’s other employees, to whom Nick manages to present himself as a wise sophisticate. One of his favorite conversational techniques is to utter phrases adapted from Henry James: “a trifle too punctually, though not yet quite lamentably bald”; “he spoke, as to cheek and chin, of the joy of the matutinal steel” (182). Nick “felt he was prostituting the Master,” the narrative
continues, “but then there was an element of self-mockery in these turns of phrase—it was something he was looking at in his thesis. He was at the height of a youthful affair with his writer, in love with his rhythms, his ironies, and his idiosyncrasies, and loving his most idiosyncratic moments most of all” (182–83).
“Youthful” must be strictly the narrator’s term, not Nick’s—it is near-inconceivable that Nick could in this context apply the adjective to himself—but that perspective offers a sense of the precariousness of Nick’s fantastic current life. Hollinghurst alludes to James repeatedly, as when Nick reads James’s memoir by the swimming pool at the Feddens’ place in France:
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