Akhenaten

Lord Nantwich, an elderly gay aristocrat, frequents the Corinthian Club and there meets Will Beckwith, the novel's protagonist and anti-hero. Nantwich asks Will to ghost-write his life-story, and invites him to his house to discuss the pro­ject. Nantwich's house is built over the remains of a Roman bath which he has had decorated with an explicit homoerotic mural: the ancient and modern are layered over each other. Upstairs, Nantwich shows Will the collection of what he calls his 'icons', images of particular meaning to Nantwich's own sexual history. Among them is a carving of Akhenaten, acquired in Egypt after one of Nant­wich's sojourns in Sudan, where he had fallen in love with a local boy. Nantwich's objet d'art is obviously based on a famous group of carvings from Amarna, the so- called sculptors' trial pieces, such as the one with two heads usually identified as Smenkhkare' and Akhenaten (see Plate 7.2). The sculpture stands in the unused dining-room, hidden behind a cloth. Hollinghurst invests the carved 'icon' of Akhenaten with an almost sacral quality. As Nantwich ritualistically unveils it like a Torah scroll or a monstrance, it is an object of revelatory significance. He explains the piece to Will:

'It's an artist's sketch, like a notepad or something, but done straight onto the stone. You know about Akhnaten, do you?'

'No, I'm afraid I don't.'

'I thought not, otherwise you would have seen the significance of it straight away.'"

Plate 7.2 Limestone trial piece with the heads of two rulers, excavated at Amarna in 1933. Egyptian Museum, Cairo, inv. JE 59294.

The significance is that Akhenaten made a decision to change shape and perform another identity. 'The king seemed almost to turn into a woman before our eyes', says Will, scrutinising the carving. The suggestion may be that Akhenaten is an ancient metaphor for choosing to be different, choosing not to be mannish: the implications, in this context of writing a gay history, are obvious. Akhenaten's ephemeral act, recorded for ever 'straight onto the stone', survives into the mod­ern world as a model. Later Nantwich and Will look at the rest of Nantwich's 'icons', including a painting of Bill Richmond, an cighteenth-century freed slave. 'I'm afraid he's not as pretty as the King Akhnaten', says Will, to which Nantwich camply replies, 'He wasn't in a pretty business, poppet.' Akhenaten's 'pretty' feminine face is contrasted with Bill Richmond's rugged features, but both are sexual objects, reminders of Nantwich's physical attraction to black men and the links between erotics and race.

Akhenaten's meanings to some gay readers make his appearance in Lord Nantwich's house unsurprising. An image of Akhenaten is a highly suitable prop in this environment, with its assemblage of ancient gay memorabilia. And Egyp­tian references and similes flickcr through Hollinghurst's novel, all connected with the gay past. Sleek male beauty is compared to that of men in Egyptian wall-paintings.¹'²

And the first picture Will sees in Nantwich's entrance hall is an 'unusually large' lithograph of an Egyptian landscape, its size indicating Egypt's symbolic importance in writing a gay history, both as the setting for Nantwich's sexual exploits and also more generally.

The Swimming Pool Library hints at the other gay incarnation of Akhenaten - as a camp object. To me, the quasi-religious scene where Akhenaten's bust is revealed in Lord Nantwich's musty dining-room is a masterpiece of high camp writing. By its very nature camp eludes definition, but one way of thinking about it is as an aesthetic or style which expresses what is personally meaningful in terms of exaggeration, artifice and elegance.¹³ I would add that other crucial ingredients of camp are a parodic, hyperbolic excess, in which femininity and feminine signifiers are wildly exaggerated, and a self-conscious eroticism that does not conform to conventional notions of sex and gender. And Akhenaten certainly has a camp persona. The comment of the visitor to the 1973 Amarna art exhibition in New York I quoted as the epigraph to this chapter, who con­ceived Akhenaten as a swishing transvestite parading as his own wife, illustrates this. In such a context Hollinghurst's Akhenaten, with his assumed performance of femininity, exaggerated self-representation and ambivalent sexuality, is per- fecdy cast as the leading part in this camp floorshow. It is to two of these camp Akhenatens that I now turn.

Camp Akhenatens: Derek Jarman and Philip Glass