[lit-ideas] Linea Pulchritudinis

  • From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2004 12:50:52 EDT

--- "Line of Beauty" takes the Booker.
I haven't yet read it and wonder what the phrase, "line of beauty" refers  
to. I believe (Geary may assist me on this) it's a scholastic medieaval phrase, 
 
"linea pulchritudinis". 
 
The Romans were noted for _not_ having a sense of 'beauty'. Hence the use  of 
'pulchritudo', instead. All derivatives of 'beauty' are _romance_ (French,  
etc.). OTOH, the closest idea to pulchritudo the barbarians (Old-German  
speakers) had was 'sheen', as in Martin Sheen.
 
But one wonders what Hollinghurst means?
 
Cheers,
 
JL
 
-----
 
Line of Beauty takes the Booker 
 
Alan Hollinghurst's novel of gay love in the Thatcherite 1980s beats bookies' 
 favourites to win £50,000
John Ezard, arts correspondent
Wednesday October 20,  2004
The GuardianAlan  Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty, the year's outstanding 
big literary novel,  carried off the £50,000 Man Booker prize last night in the 
face of strong  opposition from rivals and acute disappointment.  
His cuttingly fastidious view of gay lusts and ambition in Thatcherite  
Britain beat five other novels, including the runaway favourite, David  
Mitchell's 
highly touted and already high-selling Cloud Atlas. Mitchell's  imaginative 
tour of the world and the centuries was evens favourite with  Ladbroke's and 
5:4 
with William Hill.  
Hollinghurst's book was the first gay novel to win the Booker in its 36  
years. The chairman of judges, the former arts minister Chris Smith, said: 
"This  
was an incredibly difficult and close decision. It has resulted in a winning  
novel that is exciting, brilliantly written and gets deep under the skin of 
the  Thatcherite 80s. The search for love, sex and beauty is rarely so 
exquisitely  done".  
The result was a split vote, with Hollinghurst, Mitchell and Colm Tóibin's  
The Master, a fictional portrait of the author Henry James, "all very close".  
The Line of Beauty is a sumptuously written parable of the well-upholstered  
rise, decline and disgraceful fall of Nick Guest, an Oxford postgraduate who 
is  a proud, detached connoisseur of literature, music and style.  
He delightedly accepts an invitation to stay at the London mansion of the  
super-rich Feddens, motivated by his secret love for their son. The father,  
Gerald Fedden, is an almost effortlessly enriched junior minister, elected in  
the landslide years of Thatcherism.  
In his personal life, Nick graduates from a black working class lover to the  
millionaire son of a Thatcher-ennobled Lebanese supermarket magnate. The 
action  is set in the great houses, apartments, gardens, nudist Hampstead 
swimming 
and  French park landscapes where he has rawly described covert sex. His 
bubble is  burst by scandal and falling shares as Thatcherism begins to get 
flaky, 
and a  double physical nemesis.  
Nick is writing his thesis on the author Henry James, and references to James 
 novels fill his thoughts and stud the book. The final, foreboding two pages 
are  among the most finely wrought endings in modern fiction.  
Martin Higgs, editor of the bookshop chain Waterstone's magazine, said last  
night: "The Line of Beauty is a wonderful book, a sophisticated social comedy. 
 
What is interesting about this book is that it demonstrates a shift in our  
views on the 1980s.This era now seems different to today and can therefore be  
written about with a sense of detachment.  
"I see a broad audience for this sort of satire on the excessive greed and  
furious social climbing of Thatcherite Britain.  
"Hollinghurst, though, has previously been known mainly to a literary  
audience and particularly to a gay audience so I am delighted that this prize  
will 
help elevate his writing and give it a much wider appeal, something he  richly 
deserves."  
More than £100,000 was bet on the contest at William Hill and Ladbroke's with 
 David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas a runaway favourite, followed by Alan  
Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty.  
Extract: 'His vanity had become a kind of fear'  
When the women had gone, he went back upstairs, but in the remorseless glare  
of the news, so that the flat looked even more tawdry and pretentious. He was 
 puzzled to think he had spent so much time in it so happily and conceitedly. 
The  pelmets and mirrors, the spotlights and blinds, seemed rich in 
criticism. It was  what you did if you had millions but no particular taste: 
you made 
your private  space like a swanky hotel; just as such hotels flattered their 
customers by  being vulgar simulacra of lavish private homes. A year ago it had 
at least the  glamour of newness.  
Now it bore signs of occupation by a rich boy who had lost the knack of  
looking after himself. The piping on the sofa cushions was rubbed through where 
 
Wani had sprawled incessantly in front of the video. The crimson damask was  
blotted with his own and other boys' fluids. He wondered if Gemma had noticed 
as 
 she sat there, making her inanely upsetting remarks. He wasn't letting her 
in  here again, in her black boots. Nick felt furious with Wani for fucking up 
the  cushions. The Georgian desk was marked with drink stains and razor 
etchings that  even the optimistic Don Guest would have found it hard to 
disguise. 
'That's  beyond cosmetic repair, old boy,' Don would say. Nick fingered at the 
little  abrasions and found himself gasping and whooping with grief ...  
The last photo she had shown him was terrible: a Leo with his life behind  
him.  
Nick remembered making jokes, early on, in the first unguarded liberty of a  
first affair, about their shared old age, Leo being 60 when Nick was 50. And  
there he was already; or he'd been 60 for a week before he died. He was in 
bed,  in a sky-blue hospital gown; his face was hard to read, since Aids had 
taken it  and written its message of terror and exhaustion on it; against which 
Leo seemed  frailly to assert his own character in a doubtful half smile. His 
vanity had  become a kind of fear, that he would frighten the people he smiled 
at. It was  the loneliest thing Nick had ever seen.  
He thought he should write a letter and sat down at the desk. He felt a need  
to console Leo's mother, or to put himself right with her. Some deep 
convolution  of feelings about his own mother, as the one person who really 
suffered 
for his  homosexuality, made him see Mrs Charles as a figure to be appeased as 
well as  comforted. 'Dear Mrs Charles,' he wrote, 'I was so terribly sorry to 
learn about  Leo's death': there, it existed, he'd hesitated, but written it, 
and it couldn't  be unwritten. He had a feeling, an anxious refinement of 
tact, that he shouldn't  actually mention the death. 'Your sad news,' 'recent 
sad 
events' ... : 'Leo's  death' was brutal. Then he worried that 'I was so 
terribly sorry' might sound  like gush to her, like calling her wonderful. He 
knew 
his own forms of truth  could look like insincerity to others. He was 
frightened of her, as a grieving  woman, and uncertain what feelings to 
attribute to 
her. It seemed she had taken  it all in her own way, perhaps even with a touch 
of zealous cheerfulness. He  could see her being impressed by his educated form 
of words and best  handwriting. Then he saw her looking mistrustfully at what 
he'd written. He felt  the limits of his connoisseurship of tone. It was what 
he was working on, and  yet ... He stared out of the window, and after a 
minute found Henry James's  phrase about the death of Poe peering back at him. 
What was it? The extremity of  personal absence had just overtaken him. The 
words, which once sounded arch and  even facetious, were suddenly terrible to 
him, 
capacious, wise, and hard.  
· The Line of Beauty, Alan Hollinghurst (Picador, £16.99) 
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