Compared to the other historical stopping-points in Charles’ diary, the novel’s engagement with the Second World War is given relatively short summary. However, the way Will frames and narrates the events is unique to Charles’ life writings, underscoring the popular historiography of the Second World War as a sexualized, intimate state of emergency, shot through with illicit sex and romance under the cover and chaos of the Blitz. From Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day and Greene’s The End of the Affair to contemporary novels such as Sebastian Faulks’ Charlotte Gray and Sarah Waters’ The Night Watch, the wartime literary imagination often centers on a “fellow-feeling” that, as Will suggests, rubs uncomfortably against the Home Front’s declared ethos of
“selflessness and doing without” (227). Yet Will’s framing remarks also suggest a critical ambivalence about this wartime fantasy, what he calls “the other side of my apprehension about war” (Library, 224). Rather than celebrate war’s queering effects, Will indexes a
misgiving about the freedom enabled by this state of emergency. In doing so, he anticipates the degree of sexual conservatism that accompanied the course of postwar reconstruction, which gave a new meaning to the idea of social security.
With Britain’s geopolitical turn inward and domestic transition to a welfare state, and through its sheer need to reconstruct home spaces after the war, the measurement of postwar success was often registered through the family home as a conceptual site for experimentation and repair: both as repairing agent and as the thing to be repaired. This was in marked difference from the postwar of the First World War: as Peter Kalliney notes in Cities of Affluence and Anger, “[I]n contrast to the engineers of London’s imperial quarter, who designed ostentatious public monuments, the welfare state focused on the family home as an important site of cultural rehabilitation after the war.”142 This domestic modernization has become an abiding cultural legacy created in the wake of the Second World War, taken up especially by the postwar British novel as a genre formally and historically invested in the creation of the individual and the family home as sites for negotiating private and public life.
With the state exerting a new control over domestic class politics, it perhaps comes as no surprise that this period had severe ramifications for Britain’s gay
population. As Richard Hornsey notes, the dark side of the reconstructive imagination was its desire to “offer the public a comforting framework for imagining a metropolis protected from the possibility of conflict or trauma,” which took the “insidious form of
142 Peter Kalliney, Cities of Affluence and Anger: A Literary Geography of Modern Englishness (Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 2007), 122. For other accounts of this national turn inward around this period (and its registration by literature), see Alison Light’s focus on domesticity in the interwar period in Forever England: Femininity, Literature, and Conservatism Between the Wars (New York: Routledge, 2013), Esty’s A Shrinking Island, and MacKay’s Modernism and World War II.
social management” of city spaces in which “malignant social practices would, quite literally, be unable to take place.”143 Through controlling social behavior through city planning and domestic design, the immediate postwar decades “witnessed a complex set of cultural contestations around the dynamics of metropolitan male same-sex desire, as certain practices became confirmed in their criminality, new forms of queer subjectivity took shape, and alternative modes of resistance emerged.”144 The assumptions upon which the biopolitics (that is, bio-planning) of reconstruction are founded contribute to what Leo Bersani calls the “redemptive reinvention of sex”: here, the wish for sex to be properly socialized or organized as productive of citizenship.145 Britain’s postwar
reconstruction and its structuring ethos did not make much room for queer people, and if it did at all, it divided the good queers from the bad along liberal lines of social
citizenship—i.e., those who fit securely into the plan and those who didn’t. Given the location of its main epiphany and its structuring of the twentieth- century around this hinge point of the immediate postwar period, The Swimming-Pool Library provides an important case-study for examining these reconstructive structures of feeling. One of the few critics who studies the novel’s specific postwar legacy is Alan Sinfield, who suggests that the novel “asserts subcultural history and responsibility, not
143 Richard Hornsey, The Spiv and the Architect: Unruly Life in Postwar London (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 15.
144 Ibid., 3.
145 Leo Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave? And Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 22. See also Part Four (“Politics”) of Matt Houlbrook’s Queer London, which gives an account of the “construction of the ‘homosexual’ as source of cultural danger and a threat to national stability and, hence, a suitable subject for criminal law” (15). See Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918-1956 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
only against Thatcherite selfishness, but against the consensus that failed to acknowledge gay men.”146 To Sinfield, the novel’s main function is to uncover the sexual conservatism and discrimination that belied the seemingly liberal postwar consensus, which it mainly achieves through Will discovering his grandfather’s role in the postwar “gay pogrom.” While the novel is significantly invested in exposing the discriminatory ethos of the postwar period, I’d suggest that this ethos is not overtly registered through the political structures of the postwar consensus and the welfare state. Compared to the eventfulness of two world wars, British imperialism, and Falkland War, which are directly marked as distinct historical periods, the postwar period makes itself known through obliquely rendered spatial effects. As the absent center or empty place of the novel, the 1940s and 1950s provide an archive of degraded spaces including the Blitzed ruins of wartime London, such as the houses bought up by Lord Beckwith and Charles, and the church Charles transforms into a Boys Club in 1955; the postwar housing towers, where Will is assaulted by the young neo-Nazis as he searches for Arthur; and most directly, the prison where Charles is incarcerated under the Labouchère Amendment. All three of these institutional spaces index aspects of Britain’s changing postwar landscape as it transitioned from a warfare to a welfare state, and embarked on ambitious projects of architectural and social reconstruction.
This period of social reconstruction can be felt as a conceptual, encrypted hinge point or epistemic gap in Hollinghurst’s novel The Stranger’s Child, whose five sections leap from 1913, 1926, 1967, 1979-80, to 2008, skipping over the Second World War and
146 Alan Sinfield, “Culture, Consensus and Difference: Angus Wilson to Alan
Hollinghurst,” British Culture of the Postwar, eds. Alistair Davies and Alan Sinfield (New York: Routledge, 2000), 96.
the immediate postwar period completely. Like The Swimming-Pool Library, The Stranger’s Child measures the events of this absent temporal episteme architecturally, noting that the family estate was made into a military hospital during the war, and then sold soon after to become a boys’ prep school.147 What differentiates The Swimming-Pool Library, however, is that it does not fixate on the family estate as the main site of
inhabitation and institutionalization. Instead, the characters circulate amongst social spaces that begin to outline a form of intimacy that, while still codified by institutional or public routines, is experienced as less coercive or stifling to its characters than that of the established home space as imagined by reconstruction.148 Though Will’s belle époque occasioning the novel technically begins after he left his post at the Cubitt Dictionary of Architecture (“a grandiose project afflicted by delay and bad feeling”), The Swimming- Pool Library can be read as recording its own dictionary of gay social architecture, introducing the reader to the sociological constellation of queer sites such as clubs,
cinemas, schools, the tube and gyms that make up Will’s world; historical locations of the colonial home and postwar prison; and a literary archive including Benjamin Britten’s opera Billy Budd, and the figures of E.M. Forster and Ronald Firbank. Through exploring the way characters engage with these spaces, Hollinghurst poses the key question of the
147 See also Hollinghurst’s The Spell (1998), whose architect protagonist Robin Woodfield is dedicated to renovating country estates into flats.
148 Here, it might also be useful to juxtapose these two Hollinghurst novels with two by Sarah Waters—comparing The Swimming-Pool Library to The Night Watch (2006) and The Stranger’s Child to The Little Stranger (2009). Unlike Hollinghurst’s span of the twentieth-century and enfolding of the war/postwar period within them, Waters’ novels are situated squarely in this period, with The Night Watch moving backwards in time from 1947 to 1944 to 1941 (and also featuring a prison space). The Little Stranger provides an even more direct comparison to The Stranger’s Child, as both focus on a haunted family house.
novel: whether one can experience intimacy without its institutionalization or enclosure. Additionally, the novel’s attention to the structuring energies of space asks us to compare the way sexuality is produced both by repressive state apparatuses of law (prison) or norms (marriage, home spaces), as well as by structures of gay identity formation such as social sites or the intellectual operations working to canonize literary history. In what follows, I address this question from two angles: first, in terms of the bad
institutionalization of domestic home spaces and the sense of claustrophobia they produce, and second, in terms of the fantastic metaphor of the swimming-pool library.
III. Homespaces and the Bad Institutionalization of Domesticity