“He looks battered, but is smiling, / like an old seaman, nearly at rest. / A gold-haired boy twirls upside-down on rings.” These words are taken from the 1975 poem Isherwood is in Santa Monica by Alan Hollinghurst, who was studying English at Oxford’s Magdalen College. One of his literary forebears, Christopher Isherwood, who wrote the blatantly gay books Goodbye to Berlin (1939) and A Single Man (1964), is shown in the poem seeing a much younger youngster playing on the beach. The novelist Gysrav von Aschenbach is depicted in the painting, watching the youngster while he dies in his deck chair.
With seven volumes that have made his name associated with gay British literature over the past fifty years, Hollinghurst is now approaching his seventies. His early works, which include his 1988 debut novel The Swimming-Pool Library and his 2004 Booker Prize-winning novel The Line of Beauty, focus on specific historical moments, including the Aids crisis, Thatcherism, and the UK’s 1988 Section 28 law that prohibited the “promotion of homosexuality.” His most recent three books, Our Evenings (2024), The Stranger’s Child (2011), and The Sparsholt Affair (2017), cover whole LGBT lives. Anemoia, or the longing for a place and a time one has never experienced, is frequently present together with nostalgia.
