The Line of Beauty

British fiction set during the Thatcher era often reads like something out of Thomas Carlyle's worst nightmares: a world in which Mammon conclusively routs God, interiority loses out to mass-media performance, and even the most rational of rational self-interests gives way to self-destructive desire.  Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty--also known as last year's Henry James novel #3--charts the implosion of Thatcherite England through a grand tour of the Tories' almost-powerful politicos, businessmen, and donors.  Our protagonist, the pointedly-named Nick Guest, is a solidly middle-class postgraduate who, almost by accident, winds up living with the well-connected Feddens.  Nick regularly finds himself in all sorts of fascinating interior spaces, but truly resides nowhere: not with the Feddens, or his own parents, or even his two lovers.  Nor, despite his student status, is Nick really grounded in academia or genteel culture; we rarely hear anything about Nick's thesis on style (a subject that, if anything, usually embarrasses him) and his aesthetic sense is neither original nor expressed with conviction.  And, as one might expect, Nick's eventually open homosexuality further strands him outside the pale of Tory culture.

Like Kate Atkinson in Behind the Scenes at the Museum, Hollinghurst shunts historical events--Black Monday, the Falklands War--off into asides or half-understood conversations.  In many ways, this novel's real historical dynamic is erotic, whether overtly (Nick's sexual pairings, Gerald Fedden's affair) or implicitly (the quasi-chivalric rhetoric of Tory devotion to "The Lady").  Nick's sexuality energizes his apparent ability to move fluidly across apparently immutable boundaries of race and class: he conducts ultimately one-sided love affairs with a black clerk and a Europeanized Lebanese dilettante, while picking up rough trade on the side.  But this sexual mobility is an illusion, much as Nick's inclusion in the Fedden's family life proves to be; neither Leo (the clerk) nor Wani (the dilettante) ever claims to return Nick's affections, and there is no space for Nick within his lovers' respective households.  If, as his last name suggests, Nick is doomed to a life of contingency, then his boundary-crossing is less the transgressive act beloved of literary critics, and more the sign of his near-total exile. 

The conclusion of the novel, in which everyone closes ranks against the interloper, suggests that the only "there there" in Thatcher's England is a very conservative (as opposed to Conservative) notion of class and sexual behavior.  When Nick sourly notes that Gerald Fedden's adultery fails the "loyalty" test, Gerald sputters, "'Do you actually imagine that your affairs can be talked about in the same terms as mine?  I mean--I ask you again, who are you? What the fuck are you doing here?'" (420)  While the reader may snicker at Gerald's obvious hypocrisy, his rhetorical questions suggest the extent to which Nick has never really spoken "the language" of this particular social group.  Nick's most significant transgression--carrying out sexual liaisons within the Fedden household--stems from Gerald's own tentative tolerance of homosexual relationships; in taking Gerald at his word, however, Nick misreads upper-class codes of behavior.  Moreover, in presuming to bring his sexuality inside, in the most literal sense of the term, Nick badly misjudges heterosexual England's willingness to regard the gays in its midst as something other than barely-tolerated guests. 

Hollinghurst's interest in domestic interiors is one of the novel's few overt nods to James, and it's significant that Nick has no real space to call his own.  When he brings Leo home to the Feddens', he has "a sense of possessing the house and everything in it, calmly but defiantly, and of its stone staircase and climbing cornices reaching rather pitlessly up into the shadows" (150)--but, in fact, Nick lives "up in the roof, still clearly the children's zone, with its lingering mood of teenage secrets and rebellions" (4), and when he goes visiting with the Feddens, he finds himself shoved off into the least opulent guest rooms (e.g., 259).  By the end of the novel, it appears as though Nick may have inherited his own home from the dying Wani--except that Nick himself is having strong premonitions of his own death from AIDS.   Yet even belonging to a home doesn't confer a sense of rootedness or belonging.  Neither Leo nor his sister Rosemary (a lesbian, as we eventually find out), for example, feels altogether at ease in their mother's home, overstuffed as it is with the signs of her religiosity.   Similarly, Wani's interest in his own house substitutes conspicuous consumption for the more conventional signs of private domesticity: "He knew very little about art and design, and his pleasure in the place was above all that of having had something expensive done for him" (175).

Given the novel's title, which puns on cocaine lines and Hogarth's double curve (embodied in the novel by the ogee), it's hardly surprising that most of the novel's characters share Wani's attitude to aesthetics.  The pun's point may seem, at first, a little difficult to pin down: why link a mind-altering, addictive drug to what Nick describes as "the snakelike flicker of an instinct, of two compulsions held in one unfolding moment" (176)?  But "beauty" is an evasive and problematic thing in this book.   Asked to explain why James loves using the adjective "beautiful," Nick says

"Oh, beautiful, magnificent ...wonderful.  I suppose it's really more what the characters call each other, especially when they're being wicked.  In the later books, you know, they do it more and more, when actually they're more and more ugly--in a moral sense."

"Right..." said Simon.

"The worse they are the more they see beauty in each other."  (183)

This sense that moral ugliness intensifies an ironic, self-deluding kind of aesthetic perception echoes both the double "compulsions" of the ogee and the doubleness of the drug (an emotional "up" accompanied by all sorts of sordidness, physical and mental).  Most of the novel, in fact, suggests a world in which the very possibility of perceiving beauty, moral or otherwise, has been somehow eradicated from the human species.  Lord Kessler, one of the novel's more astute minor characters, ruefully observes that a visiting Henry James "found us rather vulgar" (50), and Nick has to concede that Wani's house is "vulgar" (175); money doesn't seem to bring much in the way of taste, although it can certainly purchase tasteful things. 

But there's not much sensitivity to art per se anywhere in the novel.  Mrs. Charles doesn't treat William Holman Hunt's The Shadow of Death as an artistic creation; for her, it "all goes to show how the death of the Lord Jesus and his Resurrection is foretold in the Bible from ancient times" (142).  As Nick attempts to point out, Mrs. Charles' unsophisticated approach to the painting collapses representation into argumentation, and bypasses aesthetics altogether. (Gerald's unappreciative but financially calculating response to the gift of a Gauguin is the upper-class counterpart to this scene.)   Her inability (or unwillingness) to "see" the painting as complex art instead of pure theological statement reappears later in her willed blindness to the sexuality of both her children.   At the same time, Nick's response to the reality of Mrs. Charles' faith is equally blind: "he saw her, as if from the air, climbing the steps and going into the stupendous church, which he felt he owned, all ironically and art-historically, more than her, a mere credulous Christian" (142).  His ability to respond to art on a purely aesthetic level, in other words, hardly leads him to a sympathetic understanding of other human beings.

This mental imbalance is symptomatic of the imbalance haunting the book.  Beauty disappears into vulgarity; sympathy vanishes into self-centeredness.  Nick, Wani, and Nick's friend Toby Fedden need cocaine in order to prop up emotions that have no other support.  Catherine Fedden retreats into mental illness before setting out to destroy her father's career.  Gerald's old friends cheerfully use him for their own financial ends.  The heterosexual characters do their best to quietly ignore or repress the snowballing presence of AIDS, even when it affects friends and family.  And the residual sites of love and compassion--the Guest and Charles households, for example--are themselves fraught with deceit and incomprehension.  Nick's final epiphany--"It wasn't just this street corner but the fact of a street corner at all that seemed, in the light of the moment, so beautiful" (438)--may be a breakthrough of a sort, the discovery (in the face of death) of how to truly experience "the  unfolding moment," but it's one that offers no real hope to the living.