But that was 1953, in fault-tolerant England. According to the Chicago Manual of Style (¶ 5.5), dash-hybrids are currently illegal in the U.S. In the name of biodiversity, however, I stuck a few of them in out-of-the-way places in my first novel, over the objections of the copy-editor, in 1988. I thought I was making history. But Salman Rushdie had beaten me to it, as it turned out: The Satanic Verses, which appeared a few months before my book, uses dozens and dozens of dashtards, and uses them aggressively, flauntingly, more in the tradition of Laurence Sterne than of Trollope. Brad Leithauser’s arch, Sebastian Knight-like frame-narrator, in Hence (1989), uses many commashes; and Leithauser discussed Rushdie’s “Emily Dickinsonian onslaught of dashes” in a New Yorker review that same year — although somehow Emily Dickinson doesn’t seem quite right. But we’re just playing at it now, the three of us — we aren’t sincere in our dashtardy;—we can’t be.
It would be nice to see Dr. Parkes or Dr. Lennard (of parenthetical fame) attempt a carefully researched socio-historical explanation of the passing of mixed punctuation. Unfortunately, a full explanation would have to include everything — Gustav Stickley, Henry Ford, Herbert Read, Gertrude Stein, Norbert Weiner, Harold Geneen, James Watson, Saint Strunk, and especially The New Yorker’s Miss Eleanor Gould, whose faint, gray, normative pencil-point still floats above us all. And even then the real microstructure of the shift would elude us. We should give daily thanks, in any case, to Malcolm Parkes, for offering us some sense of the flourishing coralline tide-pools of punctuational pluralism that preceded our own purer, more consistent, more teachably codified, and perhaps more arid century.
(1993)
A Novel by Alan Hollinghurst
Alan Hollinghurst is better at bees than Oscar Wilde. On the opening page of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde has them “shouldering their way through the long unmown grass.” A bee must never be allowed to shoulder. Later that afternoon, Dorian Gray, alarmed by Lord Henry Wotton’s graphic talk of youth’s inevitable degeneration, drops a lilac blossom that he has been “feverishly” sniffing. Bee numero due appears, taking most of a paragraph to “scramble all over the stellated globe of the tiny blossoms” and further interrogate the “stained trumpet of a Tyrian convolvulus.” Here again, when you’re talking about bee-legs and their prehensile dealings with plant tissue, “scramble” doesn’t quite do the trick.
In The Folding Star, on the other hand, Alan Hollinghurst’s narrator (who has several traits in common with Wilde’s disillusioned, youth-seducing Lord Henry) describes lying on a bench in the sun, “breathing the seedy vanilla smell of a bush on which half a dozen late bees still dropped and toppled.” “Dropped and toppled,” with its slumping music, is brief and extremely good: avoiding the mention of blossoms altogether, it nicely captures the heavy, dangled, abdominal clumsiness of those end-of-shift pollen-packers.
There are things like this, and better than this, to be grateful for on almost every page of Hollinghurst’s new book — in almost every paragraph, in fact. And yet it isn’t glutting to read because its excellences are so varied and multiplanar. Hollinghurst, it seems, has an entirely sane and unmanic wish to supply seriatim all the pleasures that the novel is capable of supplying. The conversation, especially, is brilliant, but everything — depraved or refined or both — is tuned and compensated for, held forth and plucked away, allusively waved at when there’s no time for a thorough workover, and neatly parsed when there is. The narrator is a sad man, past-besotted, unachieving and “drinky” if not drunken, with moments of misanthropic Larkinism (“Books are a load of crap,” he unconvincingly quotes near the beginning), but his lost-youth mood is the opposite of depressing because he describes whatever suits him with an intelligence that cheers itself up as it goes.
He — Edward Manners — has come to a mythical, silt-choked, fallen Flemish city (Ghentwerp? Brugeselles? some hybrid, anyway) to start fresh by tutoring two boys in English. One is the son of an art historian who has been plugging away at a catalogue raisonné of a minor (and fictional) Burne-Jonesite Symbolist and syphilitic with the wonderful name of Orst — Edgard Orst, that is, depicter of fabric-draped interiors, spare seascapes, and allegorical women with orange hair and racy chokers made of Roman medals. But this first boy has asthma and is plump, so forget him. The other “lad,” Luc Altidore, seventeen, he of the wide shoulders and wondrously puffy upper lip, is the descendant of an eccentric luminary named Anthonis Altidore, a sixteenth-century printer (Christophe Plantin?) who, so we learn, successfully traced his ancestry straight back to the Virgin Mary. (“One imagines some pretty murky areas around, say, the third century,” somebody comments.) Despite the presence of a bewildering array of men and their variously sized and angled organalia in Edward Manners’s gay bar-coded sensibility, young Luc, though he may possibly be a heterosexual (mixed blessing!), and though the thought that he is related to Jesus Christ is “slightly unnerving,” utterly appropriates our likable if occasionally glum hero’s romantic imagination. Luc is no rocket scientist. “I could have impressed him, even gently squashed him with my knowledge,” Manners thinks, but allowances must be made for the language problem, and anyway, as Lord Henry Wotton explains, “Beauty is a form of Genius — is higher, indeed, than Genius as it needs no explanation.” Manners, in a fever of early-thirties infatuation, can’t stop thinking about that cursed “molten trumpeter’s lip” which blows all the available competition away; like some “creepy old hetero,” he finds himself sniffing used lad-undies and crusty lad-hankies, tasting dry toothbrushes and stealing negatives in order to get closer to this unattainable Altidorian Gray, who though he is at his best in white jeans can “ironise” even a pair of khakis, leggy piece of work that he is.
Like Hollinghurst’s great first book, The Swimming-Pool Library, The Folding Star has many characters but few women. The author takes pains to greet them and make them feel welcome in a chapter or two, and he clearly bears them no ill-will, but he can’t focus on them for longer than half an hour. It’s too bad that we don’t have a little more time with the charming (and page-boyish) Edie, for example, who is willing to listen to any lurid sketch of gay fetishism with “the open-minded expression of someone on holiday good-naturedly learning the rules of a foreign national game.” But Edward is fundamentally suspicious of, or at least uninterested in, the “never fully plausible world of heterosexual feeling.” An awed or intrigued reference to the male “genital ensemble” occurs every fifteen pages or so, as well it should. (For instance: “sometimes modest and strong, sometimes lolloping and heavy-headed, its only constants an easy foreskin, a certain presence, and a heather-honey beauty”; or, he “pissed fiercely in the bushes; then stood for a while slapping his dick in his palm as a doctor smacks a vein he wants to rise.”) An analogous visual insatiability within the straight world, however, Edward views with fastidious distaste. Presented with some antique dirty pictures of a laundrywoman, he says: “I made my interest scientific, dimly thinking what a prig I was when it came to women and the indignities men demanded of them.”
All this seems both true and funny — there is a deep chasm, no doubt essentially vulval, of reciprocal incomprehensibility that normally separates the gay cosmology from the prevailing straightgeist; we might as well recognize the obvious cleavage and wrest some entertainment out of (for example) our mutually baffling pornography. Manners, with refreshing intolerance, goes so far as to say that “there was always something lacking in those men who had never had a queer phase as boys, it showed in a certain dryness of imagination, a bland tolerance uncoloured by any suppression of their own, a blindness to the spectrum’s violet end.”