Philip Hensher

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Biography

Philip Hensher was born in London in 1965 and was educated at Oxford University. His doctoral thesis, at Cambridge University, was on 18th-century English painting. He is the author of several novels and a collection of short stories and he wrote the libretto for Thomas Adés' opera Powder Her Face, based on the life of the Duchess of Argyll. He is a regular broadcaster and contributes reviews and articles to various newspapers and journals including The Spectator, the Mail on Sunday and The Independent.

His first novel, Other Lulus (1994), set in Vienna, centres on a young girl's discovery of a family connection with the composer Alban Berg. His six years spent working at the House of Commons in London provided the backdrop to his second novel, Kitchen Venom, published in 1996. The book combines a story of murder and intrigue at the House with a deft account of the eccentric relationships and rituals that have been played out for centuries. It won a Somerset Maugham Award and sparked controversy when it was revealed that the author had been sacked from his job as a parliamentary clerk after giving an interview to the gay magazine Attitude. Pleasured (1998), his third novel, is set in Berlin on the eve of the fall of the Wall.

His short story 'Dead Languages' was included by A. S. Byatt in The Oxford Book of English Short Stories (1998). The Bedroom of the Mister's Wife, a collection of short stories, was published in 1999. Many of the stories had previously been broadcast on radio or published in newspapers and magazines including Granta, The Independent and the Erotic Review. The Mulberry Empire (2002), is a love story and an account of conflicting imperial ambitions during the first Anglo-Afghan war.

In 2003, Philip Hensher was nominated by Granta magazine as one of 20 'Best of Young British Novelists'. His latest novel is The Northern Clemency (2008), shortlisted for the 2008 Man Booker Prize for Fiction and the 2009 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia Region, Best Book). He lives in South London and is a member of the Council of the Royal Society of Literature.

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Genres (in alphabetical order)

Fiction, Libretto, Short stories

Bibliography

Other Lulus   Hamish Hamilton, 1994

Kitchen Venom   Hamish Hamilton, 1996

Pleasured   Chatto & Windus, 1998

The Oxford Book of English Short Stories   (includes short story 'Dead Languages' by Philip Hensher)   Oxford University Press, 1998

The Bedroom of the Mister's Wife   Chatto & Windus, 1999

The Mulberry Empire   Flamingo, 2002

The Fit   Fourth Estate, 2004

Selected Essays   Fourth Estate, 2006

The Northern Clemency   Fourth Estate, 2008

Read about books by Philip Hensher at encompassculture.com - the British Council's book database and global online book club

Buy books by Philip Hensher at Amazon.co.uk

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Prizes and awards

1996   Somerset Maugham Award   Kitchen Venom

2008   Man Booker Prize for Fiction   (shortlist)   The Northern Clemency

2009   Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia Region, Best Book)   (shortlist)   The Northern Clemency

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Critical Perspective

The prolific journalist, novelist, short-story writer, critic and opera librettist Philip Hensher is one of the very few authors to be at ease with the existence of a homosexual aesthetic. He describes himself as someone writing within a gay sensibility and claims that there are identifiable themes that, 'for obvious reasons, ... loom larger in homosexual writing than in straight writing.' Secrecy is one such theme and it informs both Hensher’s fictional writing and his image as a writer. Hensher is candid about his homosexuality, but his coming out is limited to his sexual orientation. As for his literary and political themes (his fictional models, his writing style, his views on the relationships between East and West), he has remained contradictory. For example, about his sources of inspiration, Hensher himself concedes that they are odd choices for someone writing from a queer point of view. One of his literary aims is precisely to queer his personal canon: 'I only ever wanted to write a novel which would be exactly the same in all respects as the novel Conrad would have written if he'd lived to 150 and got more interested in hot gay sex.' Similarly, with regard to choosing to start his libretto for Thomas Adès’s opera Powder Her Face with a blow-job, he issued declarations which aimed more to create an incongruous persona, pleased to shock, than to clarify his aesthetic and political views. In these respects, Hensher shares his protagonists’ constant fear of 'being found out' in their subtler and inner emotions.

At the centre of Hensher’s fictions, there is always a longing for something or someone that is desirable or that has been lost. In the short story collection, The Bedroom of the Mister's Wife (1999), at the end of 'White Goods', the lawyer looks with nostalgia at his former vocation as a painter and concludes: 'I was a painter once, although this seems to surprise most people. Not any more. I am a lawyer now. ... I thought it was important to write it down before it was all forgotten.' Tempted by a devilish estate agent, the husband and wife in 'To Feed the Night,' which Hensher claims to be inspired by Tolstoy’s 'How Much Land Does a Man Need,' are constantly looking for new houses to give meaning to their childless marriage. The wife goes as far as feeling 'her own want move inside her like a child'.

The sudden revelation of the protagonists’ desires and of their attainability, however, produces a crisis in the characters which prompts them to suppress their wishes. These sudden epiphanies bring Hensher’s characters close to the modernist fiction which he so much despises.  In 'A Geographer', Bruno, an Italian bank employee working in London, glimpses the possibility of romance with Simon, a rent boy met while cruising on Hampstead Heath, and currently in hospital due to queer-bashing. Such thought of romance subverts his calm and thoughtfully-planned life, until Bruno realizes the utter incompatibility of their existences: 'Like a bullet his knowledge that Simon would get better, and his love would find other chances, was in him, lodged; and it was in goodbye that he craned around the face, ... and kissed its partial and plural goodbyes to a man, and to more than that, to a chance ... and it was to something in himself that Bruno was kissing goodbye.' In Hensher’s first novel,  Kitchen Venom (1996), John, the Clerk of the House of Commons Journal, is forced to kill Giacomo, the Southern-Italian rent-boy he regularly has sex with, because of their mutual realization that they could be happy together. Giacomo represents a threat to John’s secrecy, as the Clerk is considering giving up his closeted life as a widower with two daughters and settle down with him. Giacomo has to be eliminated so that John can go back to his ordered and unemotional life which mirrors the sterile and unchanging procedures of the House. Through the character of John, the novel (narrated by Margaret Thatcher and set at the time of her downfall), exposes secrecy as the principal political tenet, thus subverting the ideal of democracy. The title anticipates this subversion by making clear that a source of nourishment can become 'a place from which poison could come'.

Secrecy and incongruities loom large in Hensher’s aesthetic and political choices as well. While he conceives novels as 'closed linguistic worlds' which 'people write ... with the cunning illusion that it’s actually the real world,' he claims that he is not a modernist. He argues he does not like modernism and thinks Virginia Woolf is 'shit ... [and] responsible for putting more people off fiction than anybody.' Yet, he then proceeds to include in his personal canon authors such as Conrad, Proust, Henry Green, Ivy Compton-Burnett, and Thomas Mann who all share, to an extent, modernist concerns. Realism seems to be Hensher’s preferred writing mode as he contends that 'there has to be a iron-centre of old fashioned nineteenth-century realism running through anything that’s any good.' However, his monumental novel, The Mulberry Empire (2002), about the 1830s disastrous British expedition to Afghanistan, seems to prefer a post-modern playfulness and a stylistic pastiche combining camp and the historical novel from an Orientalist perspective. 'Anachronisms and plain falsifications have on the whole been indulged in when it pleased me,' states the author in his final disclaimer, and continues by implicating readers in his own literary game: 'the homages to and thefts from the greatest Nineteenth century writers, from Astolphe de Custine to Surtees, are better left for the reader’s indignant discovery'. Hensher has also been less than clear on the novel’s political statement. On the one hand, the author seems to praise the Afghan rebellion against British troops and to point at the parallels between the novel’s historical episode and the contemporary War on Terror: 'It’s difficult not to get to the end of the story and feel that the Afghans were incredibly heroic really and basically did what they had to do to defend their country. I think that whole imperial urge has never really gone away. When you hear Tony Blair now talking about how we are going to go into places and put everything right, you think, "This is what people were saying 150 years ago."' Such comments would be consistent with the last chapter of the book, which condemns the 'vainglory' of the British Empire and its plan to civilise the Afghans. Things become less clear, though, when Hensher declares his fascination with Orientalism and claims that 'the Empire was an absolutely brilliant thing for the British to have established – both for themselves and for its subject people ... . The Afghans would have been much better off in the long term if they’d lost this war. They’d have infrastructure and all sorts of things'. In one of his Independent columns, Hensher characterises the British Empire not as 'asset-stripping', but as 'taking responsibility' for its subjects. Decades after the Empire downfall, imperialist fantasies still haunt British fiction, even when written within a gay sensibility.

Luca Prono, 2004 

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Contact information

Publisher (General enquiries) Fourth Estate HarperCollins Publishers 77-85 Fulham Palace Road London  W6 8JB England Tel: +44 (0)20 8741 7070 Fax: +44 (0)20 8307 4440 http://www.harpercollins.co.uk

Agent A. P. Watt Ltd 20 John Street London  WC1N 2DR England Tel: +44 (0)20 7405 6774 Fax: +44 (0)20 7831 2154 E-mail: apw@apwatt.co.uk http://www.apwatt.co.uk

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