Here's what i've been reading lately—mostly just books, but perhaps a singular short story or essay if I find it particularly striking.
Index:
Reread on the acquisition of a Bjørn Wiinblad plate depicting Gwendolen Fairfax; I had not read this play since high school (the only Wilde I have read thus far), and I found it much more enjoyable this time around. I am excited to watch one of the recordings of the play that can be found online, as well as reading more Wilde.
A very short, interesting log (really more of a diary) kept by Thomas Knowles, a young man who paused his studies at Harvard to sail as a greenhorn on a whaling ship out of New Bedford. He is only on the ship for a few months before hopping on another passing ship to go to England (he was in-laws with the captain, so one gets the sense he might have been granted some special favors) and in that time they find almost no sperm whales and kill none. His log is instead notable for its descriptions of the other sailors on the boat and for documenting just how boring something like whaling could be. The setup—an educated young Harvard student striking out into the wilderness only to find it boring, indifferent, and unforgiving—makes the book almost feel like an aquatic analog of Williams' Butcher's Crossing, though Knowles' trip never devolves into an orgy of killing (at least not when he was onboard).
Another small-press Cape find, this time on antiquing. This short book presents a selection of Goyer's columns, all of which originally appeared in the Nauset Weekly Calender from 1972-8. Most columns focus on one type of antique (butter molds, trivets, etc.) and follow roughly the same structure: a basic historical overview is provided, followed by advice on identifying and valuing the various variations of said antique which may be found in the wild. While I can see how these short columns could have been engaging when read weekly, interspersed in a larger, more varied paper, when collected in aggregate they become quite repetitious and boring. The most interesting columns are those on fans, weather vanes, stereoscopes, bells, and gravestone epitaphs. There are also several columns reminiscing on the past more broadly, covering topics like Puritan society and Goyer's own childhood.
Goyer is, above all else, cloyingly nostalgic and patriotic. This passage, which ends a column on vice and punishment in Purtian New England, stuck out to me for being so on the nose as to seem intentionally sarcastic, though I highly doubt this was her intention (it would make a great epigraph!):
"It is said that when Rebecca Nurse, an aged woman of Danvers, Massachusetts was sentenced to be hanged for witchcraft (and she was hanged about 1678), that the judges were all drunk. They all repented afterwards, but it was too late. Despite all this, we must believe the Puritans had integrity, sincerity, and simplicity. Most them that is. How else could we have built such a nation?"
This is one of the innumerable small books of local interest published by an independent publisher (in this case the Dennis Historical Society) on Cape Cod. If my experiences trawling through the used book stores of the peninsula are anything to go by, the Cape had a booming small press industry in the 20th century, with special editorial emphasis placed upon local history and folklore. This book presents the lives of eight Dennis-born sea captains, all of whom were sons of the 19th century and worked mostly in trade. The life of Captain Joseph Baxter of West Dennis (1834–1916), the first chapter of the book, is both the longest (21 pp) and by far the most interesting. The narrative presented purports to be the direct words of Baxter, as recorded by his daughter Hattie as he lay on his deathbed. One gets the sense that Baxter was a natural story-teller, and perhaps also a natural embellisher; over the course of his time at sea he claims to have helped run extra-legal courts and executions in goldrush-era San Francisco, been offered the Princess of a Micronesian island's hand (as well as the crown), and been mistaken for John Wilkes Booth during the assassination manhunt.
The stories of the other captains, while never reaching quite the same level as that of Cap. Baxter, all have at least some nugget of either historical interest or oddity. Take this laconic anecdote from the life of one Captain Peleg Thacher of South Dennis (1861–1934), who unfortunately is missing a complimentary Captain Bildad:
"Once when the captain was returning to Boston on the S.S. Indian, when the ship was off Chatham, he looked over toward his home shores and saw a red glare in the sky. He remarked that it might be his home burning. And it was. He knew when he arrived in port."
The great debate on the death of the white male millennial author continues unabated; and it is all I can do to humbly try to keep up, reading back-linked articles, interviews, and, God help me, substack posts. Most of these pieces are, of course, intellectually dishonest at best and propagandizing at worst. Somewhere deep in the horrible depths of cultural combat someone linked this piece by Kriss, published a few months before Jacob Savage's Compact piece. I was pleased to find in it a succinctly articulated expression of the root of my general uninterest in "alt lit" (and a lot of mainstream literary fiction as well, but at least it doesn't pretend to be anything other than what it is.):
"A writer can’t not respond to the present, because it’s the only thing that’s actually here. A writer can’t be anyone other than themselves. But an obsession with raw surging nowness or authentic personal experience can often just feel like an excuse for incuriosity. If mainstream literature shows it’s possible to be deeply incurious while maintaining a superficial commitment to diversity, alt lit shows that a superficial commitment to being countercultural and different doesn’t guarantee much either. There is probably no shortcut to a better literature, but a start might be writing that tries more ambitiously to escape its own confines, expanding into the large and sensuous world we actually inhabit, in all its contradictory and ironic dimensions. This writing would take a genuine interest in other people, other eras and other ways of being."
Found this buried on a shelf while moving and decided to read it before sending it off to my friend Ken. A very charming little book, with a rather meandering history of European calligraphy followed by some examples of historical and contemporary (to 1951) handwriting. The handwriting examples are by-far the most interesting part of the book, though the historical section does mention some early works on calligraphy that seem worth exploring more.
It is hard for me not to compare this book to The Line of Beauty; there are obvious external parallels one can draw between both books—architecture, classical music, the interweaving of another author's work through the text (though Firbank comes to play a much larger role in the story than James ever did)—to the point that The Swimming-Pool Library felt, at times, like a first iteration of what would become The Line of Beauty. Both books are concerned with the artifice of both class and gay life in 1980s Britain, and both linger uncomfortably in the shallowness, bordering on callousness, of their main characters. Both examine race through the coupling of the upper class, white protagonist with a working class, black lover (couplings whose sexual dynamics also hold true across both books—perhaps the largest difference between Arthur and Leo is the language used to describe them, and indeed the racial language throughout the entirety of The Swimming-Pool Library feels shockingly dated in a particularly English way. Of course, much of this language is deliberate mirroring of that found in Charles' diaries while in Colonial Sudan; still, I think there is a fascinating evolution to be seen in English society when comparing both books racial language).
Yet, for all their superficial similarities, the underlying structures of both books are so strikingly inverted as to make The Swimming-Pool Library feel the mirror image of The Line of Beauty. The main characters of each book, William Beckwith of The Swimming-Pool Library and Nick Guest of The Line of Beauty, are fundamentally similar men who are developed in almost the exact opposite way. William initially seems like an entirely shallow, vapid man, only interested in sex and stimulation. He is extremely sexually obsessed, not to mention experienced, and it is only over the course of the book that we come to see his intense longing for deeper connection, a longing that cannot overcome his callous attitude towards his partners. Nick Nick, when we first meet him, is a shy, yearning virgin on the cusp of his first sexual encounter, a young man who seems both intensely interior and aesthetically/emotionally engaged with the world; it is only as the novel progresses that we realize this interiority was only the gilding of innocence, quickly rubbed off by experience to reveal the same callous interior William sports from the beginning. Both books build to a disastrous revelation; Nick is his narrative's holder of secrets, hiding his affairs and sexual escapades throughout almost the entire book, while William is the one from whom information is withheld, with the truth of his family's bigoted past only being revealed to him (and the reader) in the final pages. While I found both character's arcs engaging, I thought the approach taken in The Line of Beauty, in which the Nick's shallowness is slowly, brutally revealed, was much more emotionally effective.
The Swimming-Pool Library very much eschews conventional plot structure: while there are several smaller subplots, none really serve to raise the narrative tension towards the grand finale; instead, the book spends most of its time simply dwelling in William's world, letting the reader meander while silently throwing more and more weight behind the shocking final reveal. It is as if a great battering ram is slowly and unknowingly being raised with each chapter, adding more force to the eventual assault. This unusual narrative structure, or lack thereof, serves wonderfully to force the reader into William's shoes. I have read few books in which the central secret was so secret; it is truly as unknown to the reader as it is to William. There is something wonderful in how closely the reader is to William in the last pages of the novel, manically reevaluating every interaction over the course of the story to figure out who knew what and how they might have been subtly broadcasting their knowledge.
The Line of Beauty takes a much more conventional approach, with the reader both aware of Nick's secrets and awaiting their eventual, inevitable airing. This more traditional structure means the novel can much more effectively create a sense of rising tension, which definitely helps to keep the reader engaged (The Swimming-Pool Library does drag in some places), but I can't say that I liked it better, as the experience of reading The Swimming-Pool Library was so unique.
Both books aim to explore the place of gay men in '80s British society by contrasting their main character's experiences with those of a different time period. The Line of Beauty is a book concerned almost solely with the future, both known and imagined. The members of the wealthy, conservative Fedden family, and the broader swath of entrenched British wealth they represent, are almost fanatically obsessed with the monetary, cultural, and social gains they think Margaret Thatcher will provide for them. Much of these characters' time is spent hungrily eyeing their future conquests: Gerald shows little interest towards his actual elected duties and can only look forward towards the ever-greater government positions he sees himself occupying; Nick can only look to his next sexual partner or vanity project. The spectre of the looming AIDS crisis, which haunts the first two sections of the book but does not become an articulated threat until the third, plays on the hindsight which this novel's 2004 publication date gives both Hollinghurst and the reader, a luxury unavailable to The Swimming-Pool Library, published in 1988. The knowledge of this forthcoming devastation forces the reader to always be thinking ahead in a sick parallel to the optimistic wondering of the Feddens: when will people start getting sick? Who will get sick? Who will die?
By contrast, The Swimming-Pool Library is concerned exclusively with the past. This is established from the very beginning of the novel when William explains that, owing to the exorbitant sum his grandfather has given him, he has almost no interest in planning (or even thinking) about his future, besides whatever man/boy he is currently trying to sleep with. The novel instead becomes an exploration of the gay past, as he reads Lord Nantwich's diary and interprets it through the lens of his own gay present. These comparisons are made corporeal as the threats faced by those in the diary are mirrored in the experiences of William and those around him: William is gay bashed by members of the National Front just as Nantwich's former servant/companion (of undetermined orientation) was beaten to death in a racially motivated attack, and William's best friend is arrested for soliciting gay sex, just as Lord Nantwich once was.
The fact that The Swimming-Pool Library does not touch on the AIDs crisis at all only adds to its historicity, as well as its historical focus, as Hollinghurst himself comments on in the afterword found in the 2022 Picador edition of The Line of Beauty:
My first novel, The Swimming-Pool Library, came out in 1988, and was set in 1983—a five-year gap that covered the time of its composition, and in which the world the novel described changed dramatically. I began writing it on 1 January 1984, and it was intended to be strictly contemporary, though it also attempted to sketch in, through the diaries of an eighty-three-year-old man, a life that was as long as the century. In the summer of 1984 a close friend of mine developed a puzzling inability to heal or recover from minor ailments, and by early November he was dead.By the time I was completing the book, in the summer of 1987, thousands of people were dead and dying of the same condition, and I, infinitely more trivially, was faced with an artistic problem. Should I adjust my depiction of the gay world to reflect what was happening? Should I add a dark update to its episodes from gay history? For various reasons, both of taste and technique, I decided to close the narrative in the late summer of 1983; but any reader in the late '80s and onwards would see that the young narrator's heedless present day had become historical in the ways that he, and I, could never have predicted.[1]
It is interesting to think about this quote in light of William and Lord Nantwich's own discussions of their "gay past:"
'I'm always forgetting how sexy the past must have been—it's the clothes or something'
'Oh, it was unbelievably sexy—much more so than nowadays. I'm not against Gay Lib and all that, of course, William, but it has taken a lot of the fun out of it, a lot of the frisson. I think the 1880s must have been the ideal time, with brothels full of off-duty soldiers, the luscious young dukes chasing after barrow-boys. Even in the Twenties and Thirties, which were quite wild in their own way, it was still kind of underground, we operated on a constantly shifting code, and it was so extraordinarily moving and exciting when that spurt of recognition came, like the flare of a match! No one's ever really written about it, I know what you mean, sex somehow becomes farcical in the past,' Charles looked at me very tenderly. 'Perhaps you will, my dear.'
How many gay men now might say the exact same thing about the 1970s, or pre-AIDS gay life more broadly?
The writing in The Swimming-Pool Library was very good—at times great—but, as with the aforementioned structural aspects, when read in the light of the complete mastery of style displayed in The Line of Beauty it is hard to not read this fine prose as a precursor to something greater.
Every bit as sprawling, discursive, and idiosyncratic as I had heard, but also surprisingly emotional, philosophical, and humorous. The general image of this book as "a crazy guy hunts a whale in between boring chapters on nautical terminology" could not be more distorted. Melville exercises his command over the English language with the same total control as Ahab exerts on his crew, and the sentence-to-sentence construction of each chapter was so captivating that I could have read a full book in the same voice about simple whale facts.
As I read I followed along with Robin VanGilder's chapter-by-chapter blogposts on the book. I found his focus on the character of Ishmael as narrator (the book is really more about the Ishmael writing it than it is the Ahab acting it out) and his obsessive desire for information very enlightening. This angle added yet another inch of blubber to the dense coating of faith, fate, and nature themes which wrap the book's bones.
The Swimming-Pool Library
[1] Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty, 3rd ed. (London, England: Picador, 2022), 503; this afterword was originally published in the Guardian August 5th, 2011.