The Swimming-Pool Library

by Alan Hollinghurst

‘Delighted to hear that you’re to be Swimming-Pool Librarian. You must tell me what sort of books they have in the Swimming-Pool Library.’

Nipping into that library of uncatalogued pleasure was to step into the dark and halt.

There were more reckless propositioners, like the laid-back Ecuadorian Carlos with his foot-long Negroni sausage of a dick; his (successful) opener to me had been: ‘Boy, you got the nicest dick I ever see’—a gambit only really useful to those who are pretty well set up themselves.

We were very happy on the roof, sometimes reading, sometimes stroking and exciting each other, mostly just soaking up the sun.

whilst the sun beat on my closed eyelids like summer lightning over crimson lacquer.

I expect you had something momentous in your childhood. It’s the whole gay thing, isn’t it. The unvoiced longing, the cloistered heart

It was not nice to think of female fingernails doodling over his smooth man’s body.

Odd—though perfectly natural—how going away disconnects one from life.

insouciance

prurient

subaqueous

he has aged extraordinarily & looks ripe with corruption & self-abuse.

He was slender, & beautifully dressed, of indeterminate age but clearly older than he wanted to

‘I’m a waiter.’ ‘Ooh.’ There was a peculiar silence. ‘Well, I’m sure you won’t have to wait very long,’

O the difference of man and man. Sometimes in the showers, which only epitomised and confirmed a general feeling held elsewhere, I was amazed and enlightened by the variety of the male organ. In the rank and file of men showering the cocks and balls took on the air almost of an independent species, exhibited in instructive contrasts. Here was the long, listless penis, there the curt, athletic knob or innocent rosebud of someone scarcely out of school.

It took something of an effort to look at myself in the mirror which usually gave me such quick, uncomplicated pleasure.

The air was full of screams—the screams of children’s games which no one mistakes for real screams as they blow on the wind from street to street. If there were real screams, I found myself wondering, would it be possible to tell the difference, would anyone detect the timbre of tragedy?

‘I think tennis the least erotic of all sports,’ I lied firmly, ‘marbles and pigeon-fancying not excluded. Please turn it off.’

The whole thing had that achieved bizarrerie which made it normal to the participants, demonic to the outsider.

a musical and dinner and then, one assumed, some especially Spanish and honourable congress.

No discipline made me feel more free, or contained me and delighted me within its own element so much as swimming.

I wanted men to walk out together. I wanted a man to walk out with.

On the floor there was competition, more athletic than sexual, and I would find myself challenged, magnetised by strangers, drawn into faster and faster action, though no words were said, we affected not even to look at each other.

I think some sort of crisis about being gay had got him to the gym, which gave him both lovers and a new body.

the endearment, as always when spoken by a real man, a virtual stranger, moving me for a few seconds intensely.

‘I think he’s perfectly hideous, but I suppose it’s nothing to do with me.’

a model of tense insouciance.

swimming and darting in the water and to mingle with the pale phosphorescence of the fish.

It was viewed, certainly, as a warning, but in fact it intrigued me & made me the keener to come, partly because I thrive on the very solitude & emptiness it was meant as a warning against; but also because I never believed the story.

More strictly it was like a cramp when swimming—a sudden challenge in a friendly element, threatening where before it had only sustained.

I’m not sure if he was the one I prayed for or the one to whom I made my intercession.

insularity

followed such awkward and demanding patterns, was so thrown out for the service of others, that ordinary things like mealtimes and provisions obeyed a quite different logic. Often he would live for weeks on three-minute snacks, and he was used to breakfasting at five in the morning or lunching at five in the afternoon. The fridge and cupboards were always full of little items to eat, many of them bought from the local Japanese supermarket.

James was wonderfully well-adjusted to being ill-adjusted.

capricious,

What was more horrifying, though, was how, in the company of the police, my vulnerable, brutalised state was not soothed but exacerbated; the feeling that anyone might turn on me came over me again as I worried about James.

Humiliation! I had made such an effort when we met to be charming, but now I wish I hadn’t bothered. Perhaps all lovers resent such old friends, who know things that they don’t? Either that, or they really court them. But again it was that terrible feeling that no one ever notices me or remembers me.’

thought of W. doubtless already back with his boy & made myself madly rational about it all, how it wdn’t last, how it was just sex, how yet again he had picked on someone vastly poorer & dimmer than himself—younger, too. I don’t think he’s ever made it with anyone with a degree. It’s forever these raids on the inarticulate.

Lay there longing for someone poor, young and dim to hold me tight

I’ve gone so long without love and I’ve become simply so accustomed to it all, as if that’s how life is and evermore shall be—death—horror—amen.

It means we must be as creative as possible—even if we can’t actually have children, we must give ourselves completely to whatever we do,

I was muttering audibly about people around me, and when they showed signs of offence, deviating abruptly into sarcastic good manners.

There was a statutory preamble of remarks about girlfriends and what-have-you, but that out of the way we started kissing & stroking each other pretty uninhibitedly, & stripped off & had it away on the sofa & then on the floor three or four times.

I wd rather remember it as one of those rare & wonderful days when two strangers come together in deliberate ignorance of each other for their mutual pleasure.

swam before my eyes like emblems of his years of fidelity, and festive tokens of his future, now elegiac, now heartlessly splendid.

We sat, as before, in the little library, Charles’s den, the only part of the house which did not come under Graham’s orderly care.

‘I want you to have a job.’ ‘I just don’t want the wrong one,’ I said, sounding spoilt even to myself.

I thought, not for the first time, how odd it was to know so much about someone I didn’t know.

I think most men are happiest in a male world, with gangs and best friends and all that.’

All my true friends were black,’