A wonderful evening with Alan Hollinghurst at the Festival

Wellington writer Maggie Rainey-Smith reports:

Finlay Macdonald chaired Alan Hollinghurst this evening at the Embassy, a session I had booked and was looking forward to.  I was not disappointed and nor I am sure were any of the other eager audience (capacity crowd again) . The session began with some light banter (literally).   Alan asked that the bright spotlight on him be turned down as he couldn’t see the audience.   Finlay very quickly responded by pointing out that while Alan might find the lights bright, he Finlay was ‘revelling in it”.

               Alan Hollinghurst has a very dry sense of humour and fortunately Finlay knew just when and how to respond and also when to move from banter to a serious interview.   It must be a challenge when your subject is so quick with quips such as the following – Finlay explained how he had met Alan Hollinghurst back in 2005 when he was fresh from his Booker Prize triumph and evidently Finlay had ventured to ask him how it felt.   The response had been ‘It’s a little early to tell’.    Finlay had decided that it was surely time now for an answer to that very question slightly re-phrased and so he asked “How did it affect you?”    Alan Hollinghurst, drily: “Quite favourably” (much appreciative laughter).

               So you sort of get the drift.   He went on to explain how important the Booker Prize was to an American audience and he agreed, that before the Booker, his ‘profile was dwindling’ and that the impact of the prize was to add ‘further mystique’ to his profile – and added cheerfully that of course they were terrified to open up the prize to the Americans in case they started winning it.  There was a bit more light-hearted banter around the topic but finally, he told us he had seen the Booker Prize ‘as a wonderful encouragement’.  He went on with good humour to say that with all the fanfare and attention he almost forgot how to book an airfare for himself and finally got sick of answering questions about ‘The Line of Beauty’ and decided to go away and not answer another question ... “for at least a few days.”   His dry humour perfectly timed – I think you had to be there.

               He talked about how difficult he finds writing a novel and that instead of it becoming easier with each novel, it has become harder.  He said that after ‘The Line of Beauty’ he thought he would write a collection of short stories and added that his publisher wasn’t all that enthused.  He had one short story published in Granta and then wrote two more which then instead grew into his novel ‘A Stranger’s Child’.    Also he told us, that in 1981 he was paid one hundred pound by Faber & Faber for a book of poetry which remains an unfulfilled contract.

               The reason he believes his novels have become more difficult to write is the complicated structural tasks he has set himself which he didn’t necessarily think would be obvious to the reader.  He described this as the “Jamesian challenge” – referring to Henry James as his influence.  He spoke of the time it takes him to write (seven years between novels and about four years to write his latest) – but too he spoke of his method which is slow and painstaking so that the first draft is more or less the final draft.

               And then, quite stunningly, he read.    We can be entertained, we can laugh, we can enjoy the to and fro, the banter, the insights into structure, the motivation for writing, all of these.   But the truth of the matter is that there is nothing quite as perfect as listening to a good writer read their own work.   Alan Hollinghurst is of course a very, very good writer, and he read from his novel ‘A Stranger’s Child’ first of all very carefully setting the scene for those who have not read the novel so that we were immediately in the scene he read.   It was perfect.   It was riveting.  The audience was enthralled.    

               He spoke too of the exhilaration in writing his first novel ‘The Swimming Pool Library’ where he was breaking new ground and writing overtly of homosexuality in a new atmosphere of permission and how looking back he was glad not to have been captured by the need to write an ‘Aids Novel’ and yet too, how ‘The Line of Beauty’ incorporated this theme without it being an agenda for the novel.  

               At question time someone ventured to ask him why there was so much sex in his novels and was this because it was a personal preference or because of the subject matter e.g. homosexuality.   Alan Hollinghurst couldn’t hear the question, and so Finlay interpreted and either he couldn’t hear it, or he chose to reframe it.    But the next person asked if the author felt a responsibility to represent a particular gay sector of the community and Alan quite clearly said he wrote about these topics from personal preference and not from any personal responsibility to any group (not his exact words, but something akin to this, I think), which to some extent I think very nicely also answered the first question.

               There was too late in the piece a slight segue into Victorian architecture and earlier on in the interview, Alan Hollinghurst made this delightful comment that novels reveal more about authors than they realise and also that he gives his characters interests that often reflect his own ‘”because the nice thing about being a novelist, you are sort of in charge”.   

               And after that I trotted down the road to the Library Bar in Courtenay Place, to hob-nob with some very high profile international and local writers ... lovely bubbles again... yes, I’m really sort of in the mood now.