“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.
At the conclusion of Thomas Mann’s 1912 novella Death in Venice, Tadzio is seen on the shore. Plus ça change, as one would say after reading Hollinghurst’s most recent book, Our Evenings.
With seven volumes that have made his name associated with gay British literature over the past fifty years, Hollinghurst is now approaching his seventies. From his 1988 debut novel The Swimming-Pool Library to his 2004 Booker Prize-winning novel The Line of Beauty, his early works center on certain junctures in history, surrounded by the Aids crisis, Thatcherism, and the UK’s 1988 Section 28 statute that forbade 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.
