Philip Hoare

Photograph by John Waters.

PHILIP HOARE - Profile by Michael Bracewell

You can learn a fair deal about Philip Hoare - the writer and the man - from the fact that his first book, a biography of the aesthete Stephen Tennant, was championed by the cult American film director John Waters, while his last - the history of the Royal Victoria Military Hospital at Netley, drew the highest praise from W.G.Sebald.

At the heart of Philip Hoare's motivation and personality seems to lie what his close friend, the artist Linder Sterling, has described as "the tension of opposites". On the one hand, he is a supreme anatomist of glamour, with an encylopaedic knowledge of society intrigue from Wilde to Warhol by way of Noel Coward; on the other he is an ascetic and a devout Roman Catholic, with an often dark view of history, writing what one critic described as "a scholarly equivalent of 'The Blair Witch Project.'"

As if to confirm the role of contradiction and contrast in his life, Hoare divides his time between suburban Southampton, where he was born in the late 1950s, and a flat in Shoreditch, in the East End of London. Meeting him at the latter, it seems almost as though the sense of contrast is maintained by the views from his windows on the ninth floor: to one side the soaring, ceremonial spire of the Hawksmoor church at the end of Fournier Street, to the other, blank receding slabs of featureless urban modernism, stretching away in the crepuscular light of a winter afternoon. The ancient and modern, the religious and the secular, seem to tug at this eyrie with equal force.

"I've come to realise that what runs through my books is an acute sense of place." says Hoare; "The reason why I wrote about Stephen Tennant was that he was the embodiment of a fantastical world which I had inhabited throughout my mid adolescence; a world which for me stretched on the one hand from the Ballet Russes, to on the other David Bowie's 'Jean Genie'. But the idea that Stephen was living in the neighbouring county to me, and that he was still alive when I started to write about him, suddenly brought to life the contrast in myself between my deeply suburban background and that fantasy world I had aspired to. Stephen really had been a Bright Young Thing; and he had looked like David Bowie in 1927 - wearing gold dust in his hair and that extraordinary leather coat with the chinchilla fur collar - an alien in Mayfair. And I was Stephen Tennant's stalker...John Waters would love that.."

As the meeting with Tennant, says Hoare, "changed his life", so his subsequent biography of the aesthete dilettante, 'Serious Pleasures', became a best-seller on both sides of the Atlantic. The book's American launch - during which Hoare was driven in a limousine sent for him from Long Island by Horst P. Horst - was written up by Quentin Crisp in his New York diary, who approvingly compared the biographer to his subject.

But 'Serious Pleasures' - with a stress on the 'serious' - also established the manner in which Hoare's treatment of his chosen subjects seemed to hold up a mirror to the present by excavating the exotica of the past. As the 1980s had seen the triumph of a particular obsession with sub-cultural style - beginning with the extravagant costume and nightlife of the 'New Romantics', which Hoare had witnessed first hand - so his biography of Tennant described how the ancestry of such exuberance far surpassed its contemporary equivalent, in terms of outrage, taste and attitude.

"Stephen Tennant was infinitely more extraordinary than someone like Leigh Bowery could ever dream of. And he possessed that deeply aristocratic sense of the English amateur. It would have been almost vulgar to actually produce or make anything. Everything was done privately, for one's friends..."

With his roots in the erudite and aesthetically honed scene of art-punk fanzines and independent record labels - he had edited 'Breakdown' and 'Elemental' before working for Rough Trade's 'Operation Twilight' - Hoare's development as a writer had been inspired by the history of romantic dissent and the demi-monde between elegance and anarchy. The success of 'Serious Pleasures' led to his bravura biography of Noel Coward - a massive and exhaustively researched work, which extended his reputation as a leading authority on decadence and dandyism. Vitally, however, his interests as a writer ran far deeper than simply celebrating the alluring gloss of glamour; it was some far stranger, moral dimension that really intrigued him.

"The transition from Stephen to Noel was so difficult. I felt as though I was being unfaithful. Even in life they had been very bitchy towards one another. In a way, 'Noel Coward' sits outside my other books. It's a big biography in every sense, and the 'approved' version, in a way - which is not to say that Coward's estate totally agree with it all. But I felt as though I was being constrained by that form, and in many ways writing about Noel was why I stopped becoming a biographer.."

If Hoare had reflected the giddy glamour of fin-de-millenium London back to itself in his biographies of Tennant and Coward, then his subsequent book, 'Wilde's Last Stand' was an infinitely darker and deeply political description of the consequences of decadence. It was as though, in his descriptions of high aesthetic languour and luxury, Hoare had been establishing one half of a moral equation, the concluding formulae of which, in 'Wilde's Last Stand', described social neurasthenia, cultural claustrophobia and the road to total war.

At the centre of 'Wilde's Last Stand' are the glinting, obsessive eyes of Noel Pemberton Billing - futurist, ideologue and English fascist. Taking his place in the greater cast of Hoare's writings, he appears like some representative of dark forces, in a moral stand-off between aesthetes and militarists.

"There was again a geographical connection. Billing was living and working in Southampton - five hundred yards from where I went to primary school. He represents a diseased kind of patriotism - wanting to have County Council lethal chambers for alien internees, for example. The darkness of that, to me, was a kind of true decadence."

'Wilde's Last Stand' saw Hoare's development as a prose stylist, as well as an historian. In its language and imagery, and the densely layered intrigue which it recounts, the book seems to cast its own enchantment - as bewitching and unnerving, in its way, as the symbolist and vorticist painting of the era which it describes. In addition to its darker themes, it marked the deepening of Hoare's interest in the pathology of his subjects, specifically in terms of trauma - which would be the central theme of his next book, the eerily titled, 'Spike Island: The Memory of A Military Hospital'. It was at this point that Hoare allowed history to become self-portraiture, and for his subbjects - in a way which is arguably Wildean - to reflect him back to himself.

"It felt the right thing to do, because I knew that I wanted to write about my own experience. I had come to a point in my life where I was sick of writing about other people; it was also the product of a change in my own life, as I was now living more in Hampshire than in London. It was inspired by death, too, unfortunately - of a friend, of my father, and of my brother I lost as a child. Such disruption inevitably triggers a psychic weirdness, like a form of anarchy."

In his most recent work, as it deals with such a visceral sense of landscape, there is a strong sense in which Hoare's writing as an historian doubles as a covert account of his own loss and trauma. In this he conforms directly to Bridget Riley's definition of an artist, as being "a person who has an inner text that they need to translate." For Hoare, reading W.G.Sebald's 'The Rings of Saturn' provided the intellectual authorisation to pursue the ghosts of himself through his writing - to translate his 'inner text' more openly.

His latest book, 'England's Lost Eden: Adventures In A Victorian Utopia', is the compelling, astonishing account of a religious sect called The New Forest Shakers; yet clearly the 'lost Eden' of the title is also a place within the author - its consciousness exhumed and rewritten as history, as though to lay some weary ghost. As such the book is history as a spiritual journey, more than hinting at Hoare's intense relation to his sense of God. "I feel haunted by the past, and in a very direct way, which is completely to do with this hard wiring of strangeness that is buried under the English landscape. With this new book I am putting forward the notion of faith as subversion - of claiming your own space, and not compromising."

First published Daily Telegraph, 12 February 2005

www.PhilipHoare.co.uk