Lucy Ellis, Trainee Solicitor
Mishcon de Reya
Good afternoon and welcome everyone to In Conversation with Allan Hollinghurst. So Allan, lovely to meet you.
Allan Hollinghurst
And you, thank you.
Lucy Ellis, Trainee Solicitor
Mishcon de Reya
Welcome to Mishcon.
Allan Hollinghurst
Thank you.
Lucy Ellis, Trainee Solicitor
Mishcon de Reya
We are here today to talk about Our Evenings which is Allan’s latest book. Our Evenings follows the story of Dave Win, a boy born in the late 1940’s. He’s mixed race, he’s born to an English mother and a Southeast Asian father but raised by his single mother in their home in Berkshire and later with her partner. David’s fiercely intelligent, he wins a scholarship to a private school and later to Oxford and he’s a gay man and has a flourishing career as an actor. If you wouldn’t mind us jumping straight in, could you tell us a bit about writing Dave and these different facets of his identity and personality?
Allan Hollinghurst
Yes um, Dave was as a result of something that had long struck me as an interesting possibility and actually came to seem more and more pressing of trying to see life from a different racial perspective um and I was exercised as to how this could best, best be done. I thought it would be interesting to write about someone who has lived through more or less the time that I have lived through, I think Dave is actually about six years older than me and who like me, would turn out to have the sort of the difference of being gay but would also have this further undisguisable difference of his skin colour and um racial heritage. But of course during the time I was sort of planning and writing the book, all these issues became tremendously prominent and politicised and I saw the obvious dangers of trying to write from the point of view of someone from a culture like say West Indian immigrant, sort of second generation or something which anyway has its own flourishing literature and cultural establishment in this country um and it would have been superfluous and I think probably rather objectionable sort of for me to try to do that. So the idea of a bi-racial identity struck me as potentially interesting and it would be someone who was sort of half, half a white Englishman like me and half, half someone different and I landed on the idea of someone who actually is very cut off from his, from his, his father’s identity and culture um Avril, David’s mother worked in Rangoon in the Governor’s office in the period leading up to Burmese Independence in 1947 and she had an affair with a man who remains rather mysterious and the whole affair itself is something which is effectively not talked about at home. She comes back to England, this little, very conventional Berkshire market town, gives birth as a single mother, she pretends that she got married but gives birth as a single mother to this brown faced child, so there are very sort of anomalous figures in that world in that world and I think that was one of the things that, that interested me and I thought that Dave being half, the Burmese thing had it’s own intrinsic interest and I remember I had a, a, completely I’ve forgotten about, but a, my little primary school in a similar, similar town in the 1950s and early 1960s, I had a half Burmese friend and of course thought nothing of it, in particular in the way that children don’t except that I do remember, he had a Burmese mother and a white English father whom I never met and I remember the mother and the atmosphere of the house and that, that very, it was a very strong thing, you know not only the War played such a heavy part in our imagination of that generation growing up then, but also all the things to do with the end of the colonial period and so people who had been in India, been in Malayia, had been in Burma and all the things they brought back with them, the sort of teak elephants and the brass trays and all those were very much sort of part of the, the atmosphere in my childhood. So I thought it would be quite interesting to have, try and re-enter that, remember that and that it would also be a sort of tactful way of, of approaching this whole racial question.
Lucy Ellis, Trainee Solicitor
Mishcon de Reya
It’s very interesting and I think it’s done very subtly and very well that these different parts of his identity, they’re shown and not told a lot in the novel.
Allan Hollinghurst
Yes.
Lucy Ellis, Trainee Solicitor
Mishcon de Reya
Not only in himself but also how he’s treated by other people and I wondered how you thought that the novel is showing you, not telling you, reflects your own experience of growing up gay and your identity and that sort of knowledge and understanding sometimes between the reader and Dave and sometimes it feels just for the reader.
Allan Hollinghurst
Yes, these are the sort of complexities of writing something in the first person of course rather than on the, the third and I mean this will be harder and harder for this to happen now when people know something about the book but I like the idea that his racial identity is not declared at the start and the reader who approached the book in the way without having the advantage of coming to this meeting first would sort of only discover about sort of four or five chapters in that this, this was the case and would just assume that this book was being written by a white person, like all my other books. So I like the idea of a complete normalness and naturalness obviously to, for the narrator of this circumstance and the repeat of shocks that he has of discovering that he’s seen differently by other people.
Lucy Ellis, Trainee Solicitor
Mishcon de Reya
Mm, there’s definitely some very moving parts where the reader sees that he is being treated differently, but then some very moving parts where he embraces his identity and I think he seems to find himself more towards when he goes off to Oxford and I think that section of the novel for me felt very English, there’s a lot of Englishness and some quaint parts of Oxford in the town.
Allan Hollinghurst
Yes.
Lucy Ellis, Trainee Solicitor
Mishcon de Reya
And England has a very strong sense in the novel but so does his home Foxley and Crackers and going off to Oxford and then also of London and I wondered how your experiences of these places have affected how they are written in the novel?
Allan Hollinghurst
I think there’s quite a lot of autobiography in it and this is the thing about getting older, this and the previous two books I’ve written both have very long timespans and I think this one’s about sort of sixty years isn’t it and I think the previous two perhaps even rather longer than that and it just seems to be the way that, that my mind is working as I get, get older and the retrospective thing, which I’ve always been interested in and my first book The Swimming Pool Library, is narrated by a man in his mid-twenties who encounters a much older gay man and, and reads his journals and so he’s given these sort of windows into the past and into episodes in, in English gay life and history that he wouldn’t have known about otherwise. So that idea of sort of jumping back backwards seems to me quite a, a prominent thing in the way I’m working sort of imaginatively. And this little, little town, yes, which is in real life called Farringdon, which is where I lived for the first eight years of my life, is somewhere which has come back to me with extraordinary sort of vividness and it’s very, and I think Dave himself says something about this in the book, you know, sort of you get older, you have this unanticipated access to periods in your own past and things come back unremembered before in many cases with extraordinary vividness, whereas what you did three weeks ago you can barely remember so, it’s, so I think probably the books themselves are kind of enacting that, that process of sort of plunging into these moments in the past. Dave is, as you said at the beginning, he’s, he’s clever and so despite who he is and his rather disadvantaged background, he wins a scholarship to this school near the town, little, small public school as a boarder, then wins a scholarship to Oxford. So really the whole of the first half of the book is in two almost equal halves, the whole of the first half of the book is about his sort of top class, expensive education sort of turning him into an exemplary little Englishman. But at the end of the first half of the book there are all these sort of compound crises that happens to him and in the second half of the book we find him sort of out in the world, which isn’t contained within this, this, the structure of the academic life and having to make his own way and actually, probably before fully comes off in all sorts of ways that he wasn’t capable of doing before. One of his ways of, of sort of surviving early on has been discovering his gift for mimicry and, and at school he’s, he has great success in various parts in school plays and so forth, then goes, goes to Oxford where he, he culminates in his huge triumph playing Moscow in Ben Johnson’s old play in the end, his last year and really at that point, you know the days when student plays at Oxford were reviewed in The Times, he gets, he gets a glowing review in The Times, a great career, theatrical career ought to be waiting for him but of course because of who he is and what he looks like, this is impossible and he only gets humiliating sort of tiny, sort of racially stereotyped parts, if anything at all. So I suppose at that point I rather broke with the pattern which was following my own life of having gone to a boarding school, gone to Oxford and, and there I think he sort of moves further away from me. I think there’s probably a lot of me in the first half of the book and rather the second part is rather less autobiographical.
Lucy Ellis, Trainee Solicitor
Mishcon de Reya
And you spoke there about how the first half of the book is his younger years up until probably around the end of university and then the chapters jump quite a lot faster ahead, there’s one that I think I’ve realised quite abruptly was, it started with “oh it was ten years ago” and it was the last chapter.
Allan Hollinghurst
Yes.
Lucy Ellis, Trainee Solicitor
Mishcon de Reya
And I’d just been reading all about how it was day by day for the first half.
Allan Hollinghurst
Exactly.
Lucy Ellis, Trainee Solicitor
Mishcon de Reya
And alongside that, I think his early relationships in the first half of the novel are so vivid and so detailed and they have the intensity of being young…
Allan Hollinghurst
Yeah.
Lucy Ellis, Trainee Solicitor
Mishcon de Reya
…and it’s all very vivid and then later in the novel I think when he’s with his partner, he says “Oh I introduced her to my husband” and I went ah, when did that happen?
Allan Hollinghurst
Yes.
Lucy Ellis, Trainee Solicitor
Mishcon de Reya
And I just wondered if you could speak a bit more about how you wanted to frame these relationships and the inference of time in the novel.
Allan Hollinghurst
Yes. Well, the two halves of the book, as you were saying move at very, very different kind of tempi and the first half moves quite slowly and this is the part which is where life is contained within the structure of academic terms and years and of course Dave is, you know he’s moving through adolescence so he’s, he’s inside and physically he’s growing and changing a lot and that he has all the intensity of feeling one has as an adolescent but it’s contained within, within this imposed sort of social structure of the academic school life and university life. Yes, I wanted, I wanted to sort of create that, that feeling as you say of detail and intensity and everything being new and potentially challenging but perhaps marvellous, you know, all that, the ambiguity of, of learning. And the second half, I hope it sort of wrongfoots the reader a little bit and that they’re used to going along at this sort of snail’s pace and suddenly things, things are leaping ahead and that I think reflects you know what I was just saying about the way time speeds up when you get older in this, when you become, well you’re not having this experience yet but you will do and it’s extremely disconcerting, the something you thought happened nine months ago was actually six years ago and you feel that time has got out of control, so I, I was partly trying to mimic that, that experience in the structure of the later part of the book where things sort of speed, that sort of kind of accelerando towards the, the end. Yes so, and I wanted to show Dave having his first, at Oxford he sort of falls in love hopelessly with a, an extremely nice but straight, but straight boy who’s ideal in every way apart from the one fact and he finds this overwhelming and difficult experience, but then when he’s out he, he first of all gets a job, his race is seen by people in the world of theatre and film as a rather malleable sort of thing so he’s cast in various kinds of East Asian roles, he might be a sort of a Thai, his first job is in the terrible sort of TV soap opera called Hibiscus Hotel where he has to play a Malayan hotel receptionist and so he’s, the opportunities that he’s given are in themselves rather sort of humiliating, but after he leaves, it’s not quite clear how that job comes to an end whether he resigns in disgust or he’s given the, given the chop but anyway he joins a kind of alternative sort of radical touring theatre group and they put on sort of quite confrontational sort of versions of classics as well as new plays, a lot of nudity and so forth. And I sort of cooked this little company up out of various companies that actually existed, I think it’s a little bit sort of, I mean it’s hell in a way, it’s supposed to be a company which is run on an entirely democratic principles with sort of mature contributions from everybody but in fact is run by a tyrannical director who humiliates all the actors and always, always gets his own way. And the conditions of having to have three plays in your head at the same time and staying in damp boarding houses and traipse round the country are really rather grim. But also it’s very liberating and the little group itself, as I say I probably, I don’t think any actual group was so racially mixed as this one but I wanted it to be a little sort of community of its own, sort of floating free as it were with people of many different ethnicities and somehow very welcoming to people of sort of different sexuality and so forth. So it's a sort of challenging alternative little sort of unit that are floating round in the world. I can’t remember what the question was but I think…
Lucy Ellis, Trainee Solicitor
Mishcon de Reya
I think it’s after this.
Allan Hollinghurst
Okay.
Lucy Ellis, Trainee Solicitor
Mishcon de Reya
But I also, it’s very interesting that you’re talking about his acting career throughout the novel and I think it is quite a stark contrast to that of Giles, who becomes a politician, although they have the same beginnings at Bampton School and I wondered if you could just tell us a bit more about the importance of those two careers for those two characters…
Allan Hollinghurst
Yes.
Lucy Ellis, Trainee Solicitor
Mishcon de Reya
…and how they interlink.
Allan Hollinghurst
Well, when we meet Dave at the beginning of the book in 1962, he’s thirteen and about to be fourteen, he’s in the sort of Easter holidays of his first year at this boarding school, which he has won the scholarship to. There’s an exhibition, it’s called the Hadlow Exhibition and it’s sponsored by a family of sort of wealthy, leftish, cultural philanthropists called the Hadlows and they invite Dave to go and spend a weekend at Mrs Hadlow’s sort of family farm under the Berkshire Downs. The fly in the ointment is that their son Giles is also a pupil at this school of, of Dave’s age, and someone who has been picking on him and bullying him, and Giles is just a sort of horrible person and he’s always both physically attacking and sort of mocking Dave, of course who is far cleverer and more perceptive than he is, and I think probably at the beginning the reader expects that their sort of parallel careers to form more of the structure of the book, actually Giles is someone who I, I didn’t treat altogether fully as a character, you know, he’s just a bully and a brute, he will go on to break with his charming, lovely, generous parents, who are sort of as I say leftish, he becomes, he makes a lot of money, becomes a Tory politician and in the end a sort of leading Brexiteer and a sort of lifelong Eurosceptic and so in fact radically opposed to everything that his parents embody and try to further. And you know for long periods in his life Dave just forgets all about Giles and I hope the reader will be perfectly happy to forget about him too, but then he keeps popping up at sort of unwelcome moments, so he’s, he’s as I say an obstacle or an obstruction and one who eventually assumes sort of considerable power, but I decided from the beginning that he wasn’t someone I was going to sort of investigate in the a sort of sympathetic way that a novelist might, I wasn’t go to give him any sort of inner life and the book is after all, you know it’s the memoire of, of Dave and it’s about his life and but into which this, this annoying, difficult, obstructive figures keeps erupting.
Lucy Ellis, Trainee Solicitor
Mishcon de Reya
Mm, it’s interesting because you’re right, the reader does read and think “oh he’s going to be a very important figure” but he just sort of flits in and out and he’s just a bit of an annoyance really, he’s just like “uh, back here he is again interrupting Dave.”
Allan Hollinghurst
Yes, he’s important I suppose, he is important you know in the overall sort of structure of the narrative, but he doesn’t take up a lot of the narrative itself.
Lucy Ellis, Trainee Solicitor
Mishcon de Reya
Mm, because there are a lot of characters who do flit in and out, I think a few of his Oxford friends, you don’t really hear from them.
Allan Hollinghurst
That’s right, yes. There was a lot of moving on I think, yes. When he goes from the nice world of his little local primary school to, to Bampton, he sort of severing his connection with that and thrown, thrown into a quite new sort of social situation. When he goes to Oxford of course, that world sort of expands but I think after the big sort of crisis at the end of his Oxford, Oxford life he, something in him actually wants to cut himself off from where he was before I think this is quite often the case with people when they go through something like this. And it’s partly a form of shame, you know, the, the feeling that they’ve let down people so they, and that, I mean the relationship between Dave and his, his mother is obviously a very sort of strong element running right through the book, well there’s a period when you know they’re, he, they’re rather distant from each other. So, yes.
Lucy Ellis, Trainee Solicitor
Mishcon de Reya
I wondered if you could maybe tell us a bit more about Avril, Dave’s mother, and the inspiration for her character.
Allan Hollinghurst
Inspiration is slightly hard to talk about in this case. My own mother, of whom I was the only child, died at the age of 97 just when I was finishing my previous book, The Sparsholt Affair, and the whole experience of that and sort of dealing with everything afterwards, selling her house in Gloucestershire, effectively saying goodbye not only to her but to the whole world that always geographically she represented, you know everywhere that I, that part of the country that I knew so well in the Cotswolds and, and no longer having a home there, that, an unanticipated sort of double sense of bereavement after, after her death and feeling very much that I wanted to write something that was about the relationship between a lonely, a gay only child and his mother, but not wanting to write about her and so I think, I mean in terms of the narrative, my mother has very little in common with, with Avril and Dee but something that I probably wanted to say about my, an admiring thing that I wanted to say about my mother’s own sort of fortitude and resilience and humour and so forth, it finds its way into the portrait of her. The bond obviously between the single mother and the only child is very strong in the early years before the book begins and the, you know, our evenings are the subject of part of the meaning of that phrase of the evenings that they shared in their little flat in the town. Avril works as a dressmaker so she’s working at home and it’s a job which gives her, despite, especially early on being something of a outcast, or at least a disapproved of figure in this very conventional community, it also gives her a rather intimate sort of access to, to women in the town for whom she’s making clothes and Dave realises once he’s gone off to school and left her alone in the evenings, you know the evenings probably weighing rather heavily on her, and that one of her customers, a rather overwhelming, wealthy divorcee called Esme Croft is occupying an increasingly important space in her mother’s life. And I think this is, and it’s not really a spoiler to sort of talk about this, but they become, they become an item and but again because it’s very typical of, of Avril not to talk about things, not to talk about Burma, not to talk about the man who fathered her child, nothing is explicitly said about this and at the end of Dave’s school life, Avril and Esme move in together, they move into Esme’s big house on the edge of, edge of the town. Dave meanwhile of course has, is sort of realising more and more inescapably that the truth of his own sexuality and after this sort of heartbreaking attachment to this kind of man, man at Oxford, he sort of reaches the point where he thinks that everything has to come into the open and the first half of the book really ends with the scene when they all sort of come out to each other. And I rather liked again the idea of this untypical but sort of queer family if you like, which constitutes itself on the edge of this rather conventional world of the town. And Esme has quite a large sort of social life of a kind that Avril doesn’t and I may have slightly exaggerated the scale and liveliness of the lesbian scene in sort of mid-century Berkshire but I had a lot of fun with, with Esme and she’s one of those sort of robust, slightly larger than life, and good hearted character who sort of as a writer I’m always looking forward to when they come back on, you know.
Lucy Ellis, Trainee Solicitor
Mishcon de Reya
I think from my reading of Esme as well and their first holiday when they all go away together and Dave, Dave’s reaction is one of slight confusion but also sort of understanding or…
Allan Hollinghurst
Yes.
Lucy Ellis, Trainee Solicitor
Mishcon de Reya
…there was, I think a quote that said something like, “they played the pretence so well that I was almost beginning to believe it” but of course they were just friends and there was nothing going on there, but at the time he says “oh but we go on holiday with Uncle Brian and we can’t go on holiday with Uncle Brian now” and it’s really showed a lot about the interesting family dynamics that are painted throughout the novel and against this little family unit that he has with Avril and Esme, it starts, the novel starts with him going to see the Hadlows and Mark Hadlow and Cara Hadlow, who become sort of parental figures for him throughout the novel.
Allan Hollinghurst
Yes.
Lucy Ellis, Trainee Solicitor
Mishcon de Reya
Why did you find it, them so interesting as characters to keep them throughout the book?
Allan Hollinghurst
It’s just, as you say they were partly filling a parental role and fatherless Dave, throughout his life he has various older men who assume an emotionally very significant role to him and Mark Hadlow first appears really as his sort of benefactor and protector and they take a quasi-parental interest in him, I think, they’re terribly disappointed in their own, horrible son. Here is this clever, charming, gifted young man, how nice it would be if he was theirs, so there’s a sort of, it’s not quite the Freudian family romance but I think Dave partly has a sense of how nice it would have been if he’d had them as his parents and, and I mean it in a rather sort of Henry James’ way, I leave it rather mysterious as to quite how the Hadlows make all this money but clearly a lot of this is involved in, in Europe and Mark himself is half French, his mother is French actress and he drives an extremely chic French car, so he represents all the glamour of sort of continental and international life in this rather parochial, British setting. And I think that all, that all sort of feeds into the overarching kind of Brexit subject of the book. I mean, it’s very much not a Brexit novel but it is framed by, it opens in the early ’60s when the UK was making its first attempts to join the EU and it ends sort of shortly after the disastrous decision to leave it so, that’s the kind of temporal arc of the book and so I wanted the, I suppose the Hadlows represent, yes, sort of something enlightened, international, fostering, optimistic, of a kind which their son doesn’t and again, they disappear for long periods but then they sort of step in, they sort of reach out to Dave at perhaps a difficult moment and they sort of take him under their wing and they, so yes, I mean, I suppose there’s an element of sort of fantasy to them probably but, but I just wanted them to be people who really only seem to do good.
Lucy Ellis, Trainee Solicitor
Mishcon de Reya
Mm, and I think it’s very interesting you mentioned Mark’s mother, who was an actress and it’s the first real scene that we see Dave doing his acting and you can tell it’s such an influential time for him and then hence his entire career, and then conversely with that with Giles and you can see the irony is of him becoming Minister for Culture later in life and he’s not got a cultural bone in his body. Why did you decide to do that? Is there a point that you wanted to make there in Giles’ career?
Allan Hollinghurst
Um, I think I was just, I mean it’s partly about the sort of, the difficulty for the creative arts in the sort of cultural landscape that we’ve been living through and the feeling of successive governments and having sort of scant interest in investing in culture and sort of starving the arts sector and everything, and so I mean there’s a sort of element of obviously sort of satirical excess about this thing where they, in the coalition government in 2012, Giles is made the Minister for the Arts, having absolutely no knowledge or interest in the arts at all and you know, during the period of austerity, obviously seeing something which he can really get stuck into and decimate so, I mean I think there is more, more of a satirical tone in this, probably in this, the treatment in those later parts of the book.
Lucy Ellis, Trainee Solicitor
Mishcon de Reya
And is there anything that you see in the beginning of the novel that has really flourished towards the end because we’ve spoken about how the time jumps quite quickly towards the end of the novel and in the beginning it’s quite slow and you’re, you feel like you’re there day to day with the characters, but you do remember these big scenes, for example Dave doing his acting with Mark’s mother. Is there anything that you were really hoping to plant in the beginning?
Allan Hollinghurst
Well, I think that is a plant, yes, it turns out when Dave goes to stay with the Hadlows on this, this opening weekend of the book that there’s going to, alarmingly going to be another guest that we haven’t been told about, who is Mark, Mark’s mother, who is this French actress. I suppose she’s in her early seventies probably but, consider she’s not quite old enough yet for some of the senior roles in, and she’s a rather overwhelming and glamorous, imperious figure who sort of tells Dave some very unwelcome sort of home truths about what’s likely to happen to someone of his, his appearance in the world of, of theatre and how difficult he has no idea about this and he feels that they’re rather getting ahead of themselves when she’s sort of preparing him and there’s a sort of, I hope quite comical, comical sort of rehearsal feel that they, they do together, and he’s never heard of this famous French actress of course and so sort of assumes that she is actually a very major figure. I think we later come to perhaps doubt, doubt that rather, she’s probably someone rather on the way, on the way down. Anyway, she has, she has a grand manner and anyway it’s effectively his, his first encounter with a sort of, a proper actor or an actress, so that has an imaginative impact on him. All sorts of things, you know, and not only the sort of the deterioration which we’ve just been talking about with, in more recent years, but all sorts of things have changed culturally, socially, legally over the long span of the book, you know, and I these are things obviously that I’ve written about quite a lot in, in my earlier novels of changes in gay life and the very sort, the suppression of feeling and concealment and everything in the early parts of the book is contrasted with a completely different sort of legal and social atmosphere at the end and with Dave, when he becomes an actor, we’ve sort of seen two very contrasting sort of love affairs that he has over a period of several years, but in the present day he’s, he’s, he’s happily married to a man a bit younger than himself and yeah, so the present day of the novel is happening in the sort of context of their happy domestic life and the whole circumstances in theatre having changed, so that he’s now, he's not a great star or anything but he’s a very gifted actor and he’s getting quite a lot of parts in classics and in you know new plays at the Donmar and the Almeida and so forth. So he’s sort of doing quite nicely for himself in ways that were unimaginable as the, as the terrifying French grandmother pointed out, unimaginable at the beginning of the novel.
Lucy Ellis, Trainee Solicitor
Mishcon de Reya
I think as well the way that he does find his route into acting with the French grandmother and then he starts these little mimicries at school and…
Allan Hollinghurst
That’s right.
Lucy Ellis, Trainee Solicitor
Mishcon de Reya
…he sort of finds himself gaining audience and winning over people who had these views of him, I think in the beginning there was a boy who was going to bully him and he looked around and saw other people laughing, so then he laughed…
Allan Hollinghurst
That’s right.
Lucy Ellis, Trainee Solicitor
Mishcon de Reya
…and I think that was quite an influential scene as to his development and how you see these things changing over time.
Allan Hollinghurst
Yes. I mean, I thought the thing of mimicry which plays quite a large part in children's lives I think, but will be quite an interesting one for here because as a sort of insider-outsider, he’s observing this new world that’s he’s noting how people do things, how they speak and behave and finding that he has this gift of mimicry, and this is something which makes him rather popular amongst other boys because he can, he can imitate the masters you know much better than anybody else. So, in a way, it’s his complicated thing of sort of both criticising and assimilating yourself to a kind of dominant culture which you’re in at that moment and suggests that his sort of adaptability and the way of becoming other people. I don’t want to labour this point but the actor’s ability to become other people is something which he finds naturally liberating and sort of expressive in larger ways.
Lucy Ellis, Trainee Solicitor
Mishcon de Reya
Mm, I think it’s quite, it’s very interesting that the character that he does begin this mimicry with, as well as the masters, is a Jeeves character…
Allan Hollinghurst
Yes.
Lucy Ellis, Trainee Solicitor
Mishcon de Reya
…especially as the novel begins with him going from his home with his single mother in Berkshire to the Hadlow’s great house where they have a lot of money and I think in the beginning as well, he’s addressing Mark as ‘Sir’ and the dialogue used and I think Giles says something and he’s told to “watch his language” and Dave says, “I didn’t really understand what he said”, didn’t understand what it was that he did and what was wrong with it and I just wondered if you could maybe tell us a little bit more about the idea of class throughout the novel.
Allan Hollinghurst
Yes. So I think it obviously does play, play its part. I mean it’s not really a grand house, you know it’s a, it’s a working farmhouse with a sort of dairy, sheep and dairy, there’s cows being milked, you know it’s, it’s obviously a bigger sort of house than he’s used to and it’s the house where Cara Hadlow was born and grew up and so it’s become a sort of country retreat for the Hadlows from their much grander London residence and their London life. How much is class itself a disadvantage to Dave? I think it’s very much sort of subsumed into the other things actually and I think I’ve written more about these sort of, of rather nightmarish sort of adventures in class in earlier books like The Line of Beauty and so on, and there’s an element of that theme of a sort a person of a humbler background moving into a richer one, but I don’t think that the sort of elements of class, prejudice and so forth play such a strong role in this book probably.
Lucy Ellis, Trainee Solicitor
Mishcon de Reya
Mm, I think it’s, there’s strong distinctions between how you see Dave against the Hadlows but the same prejudices are seen in Dave against other people, for example his later relationship with Hector.
Allan Hollinghurst
Yes.
Audience
And the encounters that Hector has with other people and how Hector is by others as well.
Allan Hollinghurst
Exactly. Yes, Hector is a black actor in this travelling theatre company that, that Dave has a sort of difficult, an intense but difficult affair with and I think he was partly for me a way of sort of dramatising the kind of degradations of racial prejudice as it were, and Dave is someone who’s found more acceptable than a person of African origins and so they’re a sort of, a number of difficult scenes where Dave is more or less sort of tolerated but Hector isn’t. And I hope it’s clear that Hector is actually, you know, he’s a brilliant, potentially great sort of classical actor but constantly thwarted by questions of, well by racial prejudice. I mean, he gets a job for a season, he leaves the touring company and goes to the RSC and given the part of Barnardo in, in Hamlet, which I think is, how many words does he say it is, 127 words or something and you know, Barnardo who opens Hamlet, comes on and Dave says watching him, he would think if he’d never seen Hamlet that this imposing figure sort of coming on with his challenge out of the dry ice on the battlements at Elsinore at the beginning of the play was somebody who was going to play a major part in this drama and actually after the first two scenes, he’s never seen again. So, again it’s this question of the apparent preferment, you know, getting a job with the RSC for god’s sake, is also a form of, of humiliation, he doesn’t have the chance really to show what he’s made of and like a lot of people, as you were saying, he sort of disappears from the narrative but we gather later on that he’s gone to Hollywood and he’s sort of made a quite different career for himself playing gangsters and cops and things in the American cinema at the cost of sort of concealing his sexuality. So, he’s had a success but it’s been very qualified by all sorts of other things.
Lucy Ellis, Trainee Solicitor
Mishcon de Reya
I think there’s definitely some very moving scenes in how people are othered in this way, Hector especially, I think that’s very much seen. There’s also a scene where Dave goes to meet an older director in which his race is very much othered…
Allan Hollinghurst
Yes.
Lucy Ellis, Trainee Solicitor
Mishcon de Reya
…and taken advantage of. And I think it’s done beautifully throughout the novel and it’s a very interesting theme.
Allan Hollinghurst
Oh well I’m glad you do.
Lucy Ellis, Trainee Solicitor
Mishcon de Reya
I just wondered if there was an instances that you particularly enjoyed or found your favourite part of writing that you thought was a great scene in which one person’s views another in this othering way?
Allan Hollinghurst
Yes. I mean I enjoyed writing that scene, yes Dave, Dave’s quite susceptible to older men, you know, and he, yes I think that they’re doing a very risqué version of Troilus and Cressida in Southampton in which he appears wearing very little for most of the show, and in the dressing room afterwards the sort of handsome older man sort of comes round and eyes him up as he’s getting dressed and things, and he’s actually someone who’s had a career as a sort of theatre designer himself and has lived with another man in a, a house in, down in Dorset and he invites Dave to go down and I think Dave thinks actually he might get some money out of, you know a cash strapped company, but when he gets there he realises as things go on that he’s been picked out by this man particularly because of his race, so, and he’s working his way through these feelings of it’s not nice to be picked on because of your race but what do I feel about it when actually this man has very warm and indeed sort of erotic feelings about my being of this race so, I was trying to explore that complicated issue there, which is, as you say, is a form of othering, is there something relatively benign in it or is it in fact really a sort of predatory, is it a form of simply of racial prejudice or you know, it’s quite an interesting and complicated area and I won’t say quite what happens when he does get to this house in Dorset but that was quite an interesting scene to write I think, I found. I mean generally, I find larger questions of sort of putting the book together can be quite challenging and particularly when you’re having to select episodes out of you know someone looking back over, over such a long period, I mean selection is always one of the main issues with planning a book but it seems to become particularly overwhelming in this case, all the stuff that I could put in and indeed I do, unusually for me write quite a lot of material that didn’t make it in the end and sort of pursued little narrative lines which eventually fizzled out or just didn’t seem to earn their place in the larger structure of, of the book. But so things sort of cause me worry and take a lot of time but the actual writing of the scene, I mean once I’ve got two or three people in the room and got them talking, that’s when I’m, I’m really happiest and that to me is the, the sort of joyful part of writing.
Lucy Ellis, Trainee Solicitor
Mishcon de Reya
And I think we’re going to have some questions in a minute if anyone wants to think of them or put them in the chat. But just, whilst people have a little think, the last question that I had is if you could share with us a bit more about the title because I definitely noticed it a lot through the book and you touched on this earlier and a quote that really stayed with me is when Dave is talking about his career as an actor and he says, “our evenings are rarely our own”…
Allan Hollinghurst
Yes.
Lucy Ellis, Trainee Solicitor
Mishcon de Reya
…because I thought it just, it speaks to quite a few different elements of the book.
Allan Hollinghurst
Yes. It’s the name of a, of a little piano piece by Janacek, the first piece in his, his sequence called ‘On an Overgrown Path’ which I’ve have loved since I was, you know, Dave’s schoolboy age myself and I always thought it was just a beautiful, it’s a mysterious piece which seems both sort of everyday but shot through with all sorts of sort of larger premonitions and hauntings. I just thought it was a beautiful phrase really and having previously published six novels which all began with a definite article, there was a rather liberating feeling of getting rid of it so, and unusually for me it was, I had the title you know before I started writing the book and I was pleased with it because it seemed, as you were saying, to, to mean lots of different things and to fit different circumstances in different parts of the book, you know both the childhood evenings of mother and son, and you know half a century later the, the evenings that Dave is spending with, with Richard and the evenings which they’re spending apart because for the actor, you know, or the theatre actor, evenings are almost invariably spent doing their job, so it’s rather difficult for the, for the partner of the, of the actor who’s, who’s treasured evenings are actually necessarily spent largely alone so, yeah, I thought it was a nicely adaptable phrase, I mean resonant and beautiful in itself but, but with a lot of applications in the context of the marriage.
Lucy Ellis, Trainee Solicitor
Mishcon de Reya
Can I open up any questions to anyone?
Allan Hollinghurst
It’s rather marvellous that the clock in this room has not been adjusted to winter time, so suddenly we’ve been talking for nearly two hours but no we haven’t.
Audience member
Hi there, thanks for coming. Your first novel came out in the late ‘80s and it’s now 2024 and there’s also been quite a decent chunk of time between each of the novels that have come out between those two. I’m curious to know whether or not sort of societal changes towards gay rights, obviously the ‘80s was a particular time for the gay community in this country and across the world, the extent to which if any societal changes in attitude towards gay rights etc has informed your, the writing of each of the different books as you come to write them.
Allan Hollinghurst
I think it has affected them enormously and affected them sometimes because they take so long to write but even during the course of writing a book, you know, and that first book, The Swimming Pool Library, which I started at the beginning of 1984 and the world that I was writing about in that book changed radically over the years that I was actually writing it, with the coming of the Aids crisis and then having to make decisions about whether the book itself would reflect this, and in fact I decided to make its present day 1983 and sort of not engage with that subject, but anybody reading it when it came out in 1988 was of course was reading it through the historical awareness of what had happened immediately afterwards so, I think that gave me from the start this sense of in that book I was looking back and exploring changes in gay, gay life but this was a very live subject which was constantly developing and changing and that’s been part of the interest of continuing to write about it, yes, and I think I’ve almost always been interested in sort of looking back and exploring earlier periods when writing, when writing about these things certainly but living life as a gay man was so much more challenging and I found that very interesting to do but the books all have a sort of present day element in them and the present day sections I think all reflect the constantly changing, evolving and generally speaking later on, improving situation.
Audience member
I’m probably going to word this really clumsily so, sorry if I do. But speaking to everyone in my book group, who are all kind of women in their forties and fifties, everyone said “oh I love Allan Hollinghurst, amazing” but I just wonder is that your imagined reader or are you writing for quite a different audience to that?
Allan Hollinghurst
Um, I honestly don’t have an imagined reader and I never have. I think it was part of the complex reaction I had early on having written the first book which was a very sort deliberately, defiantly gay, gay book about gay life in the present and the past and obviously it had a considerable gay readership, but it was part of the point of it was that it was, I hope that it was going to escape from the quite small ghetto of gay books written by gay men for gay readership and was going to be read more, more widely. And then I, because it was quite successful, the first book, I then sort of saw there was a potential, I felt imaginatively it was a potential trap that I would then be this gay writer who was just doing this, this thing and I didn’t want to feel that there were any, particular expectations on me that I would write a particular kind of book and I think I, in so far as I ever had one, I just sort of banished the idea of a, of a target reader that I didn’t want, I wanted to write books which fulfilled as completely as I could my own idea of, of what I wanted them to be and not to please the expectations of a particular kind of person. So, I think you know there are little things, particular little joke or something I think might amuse a particular friend or I mean little private things like that but I really don’t think of, of a general readership at all so I’m absolutely delighted that your, your reading group feel so warmly towards these books.
Audience member
Thank you.
Allan Hollinghurst
I thought I was going to get a tremendous grilling from lawyers here.
Audience member
Well I’m not a lawyer so you’re okay. You, I’m not sure how involved you were in the TV adaptation of The Line of Beauty, but I wondered what your, what you thought of that adaptation and whether you had any plans to do that with other books of yours?
Allan Hollinghurst
I was, I wasn’t really, I wasn’t contractually involved in it in any way, I wasn’t a producer or anything, but you know I was alive, which, Andrew Davies who adapted it said anyway, said quite candidly at the beginning he preferred his authors dead because they couldn’t, so I was a bit of an annoyance but also perhaps quite useful in a way too, so I did read successive drafts of the script and made, made a few suggestions which I think were generally heeded. And, and I love, I was completely fascinated by the whole, I mean I didn’t really know anything about it before, the whole process of adapting a film, filming a book and I think I was quite sort of grown up about handing it over to people who did know how to do that and realising that it, you know changing into a completely different medium with its demands and, was something I had no expertise in myself and I would certainly never want to write a, well I wouldn’t want to write a screenplay anyway but one of my own books because it just requires a completely different skillset, and I think so, I think it was generally quite a happy… have you seen it?
Audience member
Yeah, yeah, I loved it, yeah.
Allan Hollinghurst
You loved it? Yes, oh good. I think it was, it was good and I remember feeling at the time it would be nice if they’d had a much bigger budget but probably everybody does and it was done rather fast so that things which might ideally have been done the following summer, with the whole sequence which is supposed to be set in the sort of southwest of France in a heatwave, you know was actually filmed in October just outside Brighton, and it was quite challenging for the actors sort of shivering in their swimming trunks, so I think you know a lovely thing about it was that the all the young people in it were actually doing their first screen roles, Dan Stevens and Hayley Atwell and so on and so it had a lovely sense of freshness about, about that, I think. Yeah. I would love it, I’m always optioning books in the hope that someone will, will do them. But nothing, nothing else has yet materialised I’m afraid.
Lucy Ellis, Trainee Solicitor
Mishcon de Reya
Any other questions?
Audience member
Sorry, it just took me a while to work up the courage there. You said you really enjoyed writing the relationship between Avril and Esme and you said in this book that Dave sort of has diverted a little bit from your previous characters by being biracial. Do you think you could sort of segue into writing a female protagonist? Do you have any appetite to do that?
Allan Hollinghurst
I think I would hesitate to write in the first person from a female perspective, I think. I mean I have had quite, you know, in my book, The Stranger’s Child, well the main, main character is a sort of centre of consciousness for a a lot of the book is a woman who we follow from sort of her teens to old age and I’ve sort of loved doing that, but who knows, I haven’t got a clue about the next book so, I mean, it would be an interesting challenge. I think I felt I could do it with the slight ironic distance of writing in the third person. The first person would be much more of a challenge, I think. It’s very interesting the first person because it gives you all the intensity of everything being seen through the lens of this person’s consciousness and experience, but it’s also very circumscribed because of sort of all the problems of how you bring in all the other stuff that you might want to have in there in a book and, and part of its interest I think and it’s one of the reasons that I thought it would be interesting to write this book from the point of view it’s the sort of admission of, of ignorance in a way writing in the first person, the first person narrator only knows what, what they know, unlike an omniscient narrator and I thought it would be rather, my worries and my sort of presumptuousness in writing from a different racial perspective as an omniscient narrator, whereas Dave as the narrator, he can withhold whatever he likes to tell you, not understand or whatever. It seemed again a more sort of tactful and interesting way of doing it. Could I take the further leap to, I don’t know, well perhaps you know for the, seven years’ time we’ll have, have another meeting and see.
Lucy Ellis, Trainee Solicitor
Mishcon de Reya
I think we’re approaching the end of our hour. If anyone has a final question, please let me know, otherwise I think for those in the room, Allan will be around for a short while longer to sign some books. And thank you so much for talking to me and coming in today.
Allan Hollinghurst
Oh well thank you very much indeed for doing it, it’s been a pleasure.
Lucy Ellis, Trainee Solicitor
Mishcon de Reya
It’s lovely to have you.
Allan Hollinghurst
Thank you.
Mishcon de Reya
It’s business. But it’s personal.