Homosexualising the Novel: Alan Hollinghurst, Ronald Firbank and The Swimming-Pool Library

Abstract

Explaining why he chose Ronald Firbank (1886–1926) as his personal selection for the National Portrait Gallery’s 2009 Gay Icons exhibition, Alan Hollinghurst argued that Firbank is ‘celebrated as a master of high camp, but he was also a radical technician and radical homosexualiser of the novel’. Firbank is a powerful presence in Hollinghurst’s 1988 novel The Swimming-Pool Library. Not only does the novel’s narrator, Will Beckwith, read Firbank’s Valmouth and The Flower Beneath the Foot but Firbank himself makes a cameo appearance in the diaries of the elderly Lord Nantwich. That Firbank is assigned an iconic role in The Swimming-Pool Library is perhaps unsurprising in a novel that, like his own fiction, traces the intersections of desire, race, homosexuality and colonialism. For Hollinghurst, however, Firbank is not only a symbolic figure and a thematic pioneer. He is also a radically subversive technical innovator. In his extensive non-fictional writing on Firbank, Hollinghurst has repeatedly asserted that Firbank’s novels are homosexual not only in terms of content, but at a structural and aesthetic level. They are gay novels, as much as novels of gay life. This chapter explores what such a claim might mean, and how it can inform a reading of The Swimming-Pool Library.