Lines of Beauty

Picador

Rs 499

Pages: 564

“And then his name,like Wallace or Wellington’s,/ crept into our streets and public houses”

— Mick Imlah

Once a “gay writer”,Alan Hollinghurst,came in from the margins to become just a “writer” sometime over the last 20 years. He continued to write the history of the marginal front and centre,except that the underground had become the mainstream long ago,in his day and ours. Yet,the subterranean could still be fictionally written back into temporal settings where it couldn’t be talked or written about originally. So when the 2004 Booker winner’s next offering is cast aside by a panel headed by a former MI5 director,let’s rejoice at the repeated intimations of Hollinghurst’s stature as one of the finest wielders of the English language,who unabashedly writes in an elegant,conservative style others of his ilk do not dare to,or care to.

The Stranger’s Child,titled after Tennyson’s own from In Memoriam,is dedicated to Hollinghurst’s friend and late poetry editor of the Times Literary Supplement,Mick Imlah,who too dared to do what poets of his day wouldn’t dream of,and whose premature death in 2009 stole one of its best young talents from

English poetry. In this novel,Hollinghurst’s absent,offstage protagonist,World War I,steals the Georgian poet Cecil Valance,robbing post-war England of a Rupert Brooke-like figure who might have checked the paradigmatic shift wrought by modernism. But Brooke had already been turned into a joke by the Siegfried Sassoons and Wilfred Owens after the war. Valance’s reputation is debated and transmogrified till 2008,by when he had become a “crap poet”. Stranger’s Child,in keeping the major historical narrative out of the frame,focuses on the minor history — as a fictional literary biography that examines how a literary legacy is actually made and debunked,how time changes everything and memory never ceases its myriad games.

Valance,an aristocrat and bisexual,visits “Two Acres”,the home of his Cambridge buddy and lover,George Sawle,for a weekend in the Edwardian summer of 1913. Making love to George in the woods,he also unleashes himself upon George’s unsuspecting 16-year-old sister,Daphne. The poem he leaves Daphne (Two Acres) becomes the signature of a generation and the celebration of an England lost for ever. It is through Daphne,Hollinghurst’s first central female character,that the memory of Cecil is made and unmade,traced from 1926 to 2008 over five sections. By the time Paul Bryant,a gay bankman turned literary biographer,comes to work on his book on Cecil in Daphne’s old age,history has been replaced by myth,the truth buried with the past,the facts of that long-ago weekend in 1913 having receded far beyond accurate recollection and comprehension,filtered through partial perspectives.

Hollinghurst,like every writer worth her reputation,abhors the journalistic penchant for collapsing a writer’s life with her work and digging for traces of autobiography in the fiction. It’s another matter that the 57-year-old drops ample hints of his own life and preoccupations in his novels,but the chatter over Cecil,who lies entombed in marble in the Valance family chapel,steadily obscures his short life,also eclipsed and mythologised by the poem. Just as “Corley Court” — Cecil’s beloved and “violently Victorian” ancestral residence — has been architecturally recast by his war-damaged brother Dudley,Daphne’s first husband,and ends up as a prep-school in its last avatar,while “Two Acres” is swallowed up by London’s suburban sprawl. But the bungling Bryant isn’t at fault; even in 1926,when Cecil’s friend Sebastian Stokes originally assembled the family and friends for his biography,the past was already being re-imagined and unremembered.

The supreme irony is this: by 2008,gay life and literature —whose history Hollinghurst has spent a lifetime excavating and then etching on the past or present,beginning with The Swimming-Pool Library (1988) — had been completely mainstreamed. But the story of George (for whom the poem was perhaps actually meant) and Cecil is forgotten,written over,not even considered by family,till a biographer suspects. Even as Cecil becomes a myth,his poem is reduced to an annotation for queer theory,and the reader knows nobody will read Cecil Valance,the fallen poet,nor even Georgian poetry.

The idea of Englishness and the identity of England have continuously morphed,in a process that began abruptly after the Great War. Why then does a writer as subversive as Hollinghurst return to the Edwardian twilight to re-imagine and rewrite a long-lost way of living? Well,without the meaningless tag of “gay”,Jamesian Hollinghurst would be a conservative,certainly an aesthetic one. It can be noticed in the ideological battle a dead Georgian poet and a destroyed Victorian mansion are made to join against the grand sweep of history. It was always a lost battle,but the turf was worth defending,because it was demarcated by the lines of beauty.