St. Aubyn and Hollinghurst

Today's much-too-long New Yorker profile of Edward St. Aubyn has at least two noteworthy details: 1) he named his daughter Eleanor, the same as the atrocious mother in the Melrose novels and 2) contrary to those novels' plot, his own mother, Lorna, merely threatened to leave Le Plan, their fabled 80-acre estate in Provence, to a New Age group but in fact she sold it to him. Ian Parker writes: 

"The year that he lost the Booker [2006], St. Aubyn sold Le Plan to a “very nice and massively rich” French family that reminded him of characters in the Babar books. His mother had died, after a series of stokes, the previous year, between the delivery and the publication of a novel that described her physical and cognitive decline. She had no more money. St. Aubyn had by then given himself a few years to experience Le Plan through the eyes of his son. For Lucian, “it wasn’t filled with these dark and complex meanings,” he said. “He just thought it was completely fabulous, as indeed it was. You know, there were cherry trees and apricot trees with ladders leaning against them—you could climb up and have an apricot. And frogs, and a series of ponds, and goldfish, and water lilies: this little fiefdom, this hamlet, which took quite a long time for a small boy to walk around.”

"Alan Hollinghurst had visited Le Plan several times in previous years, and had written parts of The Line of Beauty there. Just before the property changed hands, he came to stay with St. Aubyn, and they went from building to building, deciding what should be added to a bonfire that burned for three weeks. As St. Aubyn recalled, “I’d be saying, ‘Oh my God, I remember getting this suit!’ There would be, of course, a story attached to everything. And I’d look at Alan, who’d say”—firm, low voice—“ ‘Burn it.’ ” After a while, St. Aubyn skipped the anecdotes; Hollinghurst continued to say, “Burn it.”

Read the entire profile here. Get St. Aubyn's new novel Lost for Words [and Kindle].