Thank goodness Philip Hoare won this year’s Samuel Johnson nonfiction award.
The prize-giving party was so dull and so excessively stage-managed for
television that there were people sitting to the left and right of me in the
auditorium (where our drinks had been confiscated) seething “get on with
it!” under their breath, while corporate-style videos of why the seven
shortlisted authors had chosen to write about their subjects were played on
a giant screen in front of us.
Hoare had one dedicated to him but it didn’t remotely capture his personality.
He came across as an exuberant if whale-obsessed man (the book for which he
has just won the £20,000 prize, Leviathan, is a five-year study of whales).
And though it is true that he is extremely animated as well as profoundly
whale-obsessed, there are several aspects of his character that somehow
eluded the camera; that he is stark raving mad, for example. Not
certifiable, of course, and deep down very sane and self-disciplined as all
writers must be, but on the sharp end of eccentricity, nonetheless, a total
lunatic at times, with a voice that travels through the octaves like a
concertina. Every so often, if you tell him something that he finds
particularly shocking — that journalists were told who had won the prize
several hours before it was officially announced, for instance — he lets out
an astonished “noooo!” or “shiiiiiitttt!”
He’s very entertaining, so it is something of a surprise that he’s capable of
being a recluse, spending weeks on end, when he’s writing, not talking to
anyone except, when he has to, his newsagent. He says that he doesn’t
“connect with the literary world”, which is comforting to those of us who
were there on Tuesday evening suffused by its stodgy stuffiness: Hoare gives
you faith that hardcore, obsessive eccentrics still inhabit the increasingly
commercialised world of books.
I say “Philip Hoare” but, as it emerged in one of the surreal moments that
punctuated our meeting the next day in Waterstone’s, that’s not quite
accurate. We were discussing his early life: the cosseted middle child of a
working-class family — his father was a cable tester, his mother a housewife
— he was born and raised in Southampton, and went to live in London in the
mid-Seventies where he became deeply immersed in the punk scene: “peroxide
hair, four earrings, bondage trousers, the whole works”. He launched two
fanzines (Breakdown and Elemental), then got a job at Virgin Records, where
he became the indie singles buyer for the chain before being poached by
Rough Trade records. There, he says, he was a bad employee, turning up late
every morning. But “because it was such a hippy dippy, Utopian,
communitarian place at the time”, they couldn’t sack him and gave him his
own record label instead.
“I was a crap businessman, I couldn’t manage the groups: they all took heroin
and sold their equipment to buy smack.” The one thing he excelled at,
however, was getting his bands talked about in the music press. “That’s when
I started writing. I was reviewing bands under an assumed name, so I was
sending in reviews of my bands and getting them published. Hilarious!”
So what was the assumed name he used to write his reviews?
There was a little pause. Then he said: “Philip Hoare.” Another brief silence
as both of us weighed up the significance of what he had just revealed.
Was it commonly known that he had built his literary career on a pseudonym? In
a small voice he finally said: “I don’t think so, no. I kind of reinvented
myself. It’s like creating a character. Like David Bowie, who was the person
who most influenced me in my early life, I suppose. This notion of creating
Ziggie Stardust or Aladdin Sane. And also punk, this notion of the arts as
autoact, something outside yourself that does these things. You can talk
about this person who is like this abstract concept in a way and there’s
this other person who you are. And that’s a different person. I haven’t
talked about this. It’s quite funny actually. It’s because in my previous
life I was that person and now I’m this person.”
Under the name Philip Hoare he has published six books, biographies mainly,
and many articles. His attachment to his alter ego is evidently very deep.
Even his e-mail address starts with “PHoare” (which, when you say it out
loud sounds a lot like “phwoarr”, and not coincidentally, as we shall find
out later).
And what about his friends? What do his friends call him?
“Patrick.”
Before we get into that, we must talk a little about whales. Philip — or
Patrick (I’ll just call him “Hoare” from now on) — can’t stop going on about
them. He dreams about them and on the day we meet he is wearing a T-shirt
with a picture of a whale on the front. His obsession began about seven
years ago after the director John Waters (Hairspray, Serial Mom) read his
biography of Stephen Tennant, reviewed it ecstatically for The New York
Times and invited him to join him for the summer in Cape Cod. On the last
day of his trip, Hoare decided to go whale watching and became instantly,
passionately, hooked.
“The first time I went whale watching, a whale came very close to the boat and
looked up at me like that.” (He does an impersonation of a whale peering out
of the corner of one eye.) “And it’s a real moment! It’s not like looking at
a horse or a cow. A whale is sentient. You can read intelligence there, you
can see it’s checking you out and that’s very scary! Intimidating!
Fantastical! That was the challenge for me that sent me off writing the
book: to understand what the connection is and what it represents.”
But aren’t horses or cows sentient beings too? Don’t they check people out?
“Not in that way. Not in that way!” he insists, now very animated and flailing
his skinny arms about. “When a horse looks at you, it’s dull. It’s dull! I
was challenged about this, but anyone I know who has ever been looked in the
eye by a whale says the same thing. It’s a transcendental experience. I
mean, it sounds wishy-washy and New Age, and that’s one of the things I’ve
tried to get away from in the book, but it does change your life.”
He became so wrapped up in whales that Waters eventually told him to get it
off his chest and write a book about them. “John said, ‘You’ve become a
whale stalker’. I used to show him my photographs of whales and he just
said, ‘This is whale porn. You’re spending more time with whales than human
beings.’ And basically, as a way to stop me talking about whales, he said,
‘Write the book’. But, yes, as you can see, start me up and you can’t stop
me.” Jubilantly, he shouts out: “I’m channelling whales forthe world!”
It’s really quite difficult to get him off the subject of whales. Once or
twice, it looks as if I’ve managed it, but sooner or later we’re back
talking about whale conservation or the sexual connotations of Moby-Dick as
a title, or whether or not whales have their own dialects. And many of the
things he has found out in the course of his research are fascinating. He
almost jumps out of his chair when he recalls the time he first read a book
by the world’s pre-eminent whale expert, Hal Whitehead: “It’s a very dry
book, very scientific, facts, figures, diagrams. You get to the last two
pages and he has started talking about whales having a culture and he talks
about sperm whales having the biggest brain that ever lived. And in those
last two pages of this book he says — ‘Not only do I believe that sperm
whales have a culture, I believe they may have a religion!’ I dropped the
book! This is like Richard Dawkins turning around and saying, you know, ‘My
cat is a Buddhist’. It was a shocking, shocking thing.”
Leviathan has had spectacular reviews and the only real criticism that has
been levelled against it was Hoare’s tendency to anthropomorphise. But it’s
difficult to talk to him, or indeed to read the book, without being drawn
into his theories. Waters says his friend’s great talent as a writer is his
ability to pull the reader in “and get you into the cult”. However, isn’t
there a limit? Does he think he has become a whale bore?
“Nobody has ever told me to stop talking to them about whales. Not yet anyway.
They might well do.”
Before he came to books, Hoare was a journalist writing under his pseudonym
for magazines such as Harpers & Queen and Vogue. In some ways his
pseudonym relates to his homosexuality, he says. “Definitely it is a form of
defence mechanism, but it is also to do with not having gone to a proper
university, it’s to do with being an autodidact. I was being an imposter.”
Does he think that it has given him a certain cachet? “Yes, definitely.
Philip Hoare opens doors!” It certainly sounds a lot posher than his real
name and it seemed to have the right kind of effect on the upper echelons of
society with which he had started to become increasingly preoccupied by his
early thirties. After the Stephen Tennant biography he wrote two more: on
Noël Coward and Oscar Wilde.
“My early books were much about high society and I lived in that world. You
know the way Oscar Wilde was regarded as an after dinner entertainer? That’s
what I was in a way. I would go to very grand houses and be interesting to
society and I’d have all sorts of gauche manners.” A faux pas at a lunch
with Princess Margaret particularly sticks in his mind: “I made the huge
mistake of asking for seconds. And the look she gave me! The look! I kind of
realized what I’d done but I kind of thought ‘F*** it, I want another
helping of pudding and I’m going to eat it.’ And Margaret glaring at me with
those glacial blue eyes; although I think she thought it was quite funny in
the end.”
But there was always a mismatch between the person and the persona: Patrick is
reclusive, adamantly single (“I’m far too selfish to have a relationship”)
and prone to depression (“No good books are born of happy people”). Philip,
on the other hand, is gregarious, socially conscious and hugely
entertaining. Writing biographies, he now says, was ultimately false.
“Because of that notion of this supposed objective person reporting the
truth and, you know, psychological analysis. It’s rubbish. It’s impossible.
You are implicated in the story.”
Two more books followed: Spike Island: The Memory of a Military Hospital and
England’s Lost Eden: Adventures in a Victorian Utopia, a study of
19th-century cults. But with Leviathan, says Hoare, he has tried to be more
authentic and true to himself: “I’ve really tried to let myself go. That
book is a lot about sex. I mean whales to me represent sex. Because they are
sensual creatures. If you were a sperm whale and you were sitting in front
of me , you’re 60ft long and you’re 60 tons, and I came up and did that,
your entire body would quiver. Sperm whales smell like sperm. I won’t say
whether I like it or not, but it’s a deeply sexual thing. It’s true!
Moby-Dick is completely sexually obsessed. There’s an entire chapter in
Moby-Dick about a man wearing a whale’s foreskin, and what amazes me is that
you go to the States and everyone’s taught this book at high school, but
they don’t have any comprehension of these sub layers. I think that’s why I
saw the sexual element of whales, through Melville. For a writer, that’s
tantalising.”
I don’t think Hoare will revert to plain old Patrick again. But Patrick and
Philip have more things in common now; the two are merging and the success
of Leviathan is a testament to that. Soon he will immerse himself in another
book (he is not sure what on yet) and in the meantime, he will spend the
£20,000 on whales. “It’s like giving the money to a crack addict.” Once he
has conquered his latest obsession, there will no doubt be another one, just
as bonkers and just as compelling to his readers.
Leviathan or The Whale, published by Fourth Estate at £8.99. To order it for
£8.54 inc p&p call 0845 2712134 or visit timesonline.co.uk/
booksfirst
