British and African Literature in Transnational Context

4. Raids on the Inarticulate: Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library and the Closets of Imperial and Postimperial British History

4 Raids on the Inarticulate Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library and the Closets of Imperial and Postimperial British History Although still locked in the colonial archive, Boyd’s book offers, nonetheless , an interesting critique of Englishness, which appears in An Ice-Cream War as an exclusively male construction based on an amalgam of public school attitudes toward others—whether their otherness is defined in terms of race, nation, class, or gender. Alan Hollinghurst’s extraordinary debut novel The Swimming-Pool Library (1988) occupies similar ground but explicitly (very explicitly!) takes on the otherness of homosexuality. Indeed it is generally read as a “gay novel” eulogizing the brief period of relative permissiveness between the 1967 decriminalization of homosexuality in Great Britain and the explosive spread of AIDS in the early 1980s. Its Dorian Grayish narrator and numerous direct allusions to other gay authors such as Ronald Firbank and E. M. Forster establish the novel’s canonical genealogy as that of classic gay English literature from Oscar Wilde on.1 Readings that highlight the book’s sexual politics in terms of local English social history make perfect sense, of course, given its primary setting in contemporary London in the summer of 1983. Those segments set in the past (conveyed through Will Beckwith’s reading of Lord Charles Nantwich’s various diaries and journals) tell a fairly coherent history of upper-class gay male life in twentieth-century England by stitching together narratives that cover three main phases: the 1920s of Ronald Firbank and the Bright Young Things, the post–World War II backlash in the1950s,andthebriefpostlegalization,pre-AIDSperiodofthe1970sand early 1980s. But while London is central to that history, presented to the reader in meticulously realistic cartographic detail, the London of each of those three phases is a very extensive chronotope, allowing Hollinghurst 92 / Part II. Colonial Histories to suggest the great antiquity of the city extending back to Roman times, and, more particularly, insisting on the continuous presence and social significance, but limited visibility, of free black people in London since the late eighteenth century. Hollinghurst’s linking of two generally unrecorded histories—of black London and of gay London—makes The Swimming-Pool Library a perfect example of what Christopher Lane identifies as the paradoxical nature of homosexual desire in “British colonial allegory.” Africa, and British colonial notions of Africa, are crucial to that desire, and their real and notional aftereffects, as we shall see, link white native and black exotic in ways that intriguingly problematize simplistic notions of Englishness and Africanness as discrete identities within easily determined racial and social hierarchies.2 As with the silenced askaris in An Ice-Cream War, however, full articulateness and the power to create a textual record is reserved for English white males. As with Boyd’s brothers Cobb, in the young Charles Nantwich, Hollinghurst gives a compelling account of the intense homosociality of the imperialist project as mediated through public school training at home and military and civilian administration abroad.3 Both of the Cobbs’ sexual identities are determined in one way or another by the absence of girls in their schooling: the stolidly bourgeois Gabriel Cobb finds his heterosexual makeup determined by his experience of female-administered chastisement , while Felix, deprived of women peers, guiltily desires, first, his bestfriend’ssister,and,subsequently,hisbrother’swife.Theemergenceof both young men’s sexuality coincides with the national crisis of the First World War, and Boyd effectively links the pressures on them to conform to notions of manliness defined by normative heterosexuality and conventional notions of patriotism. Such fraternal competition perfectly fits the definition of homosocial desire provided by Eve Kosofsky-Sedgwick as a structuring device whereby men’s apparently heterosexual desire for women “serves a more or less perfunctory detour on the way to a closer, but homophobically proscribed, bonding with another man” (qtd. in Lane 8). Insofar as the fraternal competition reflects what is happening at the national level, Boyd’s novel graphically depicts the homosocial nature of English nationalism, that English national identity—white, male, and middle class—crucially depends on regulating the exchange of women among men. As Lane points out, however, the term homosocial has come to be applied to “men potentially identifiable as homosexual and less commonly Raids on the Inarticulate: Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library / 93 to a precarious structure that regulates same-gender relations by ensuring the relative stability of heterosexual exchange...