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Swing this shovel till it cracks the sky
I dreamed of swimming in a deep green trench of water between the narrow spits of a bay. It was not any of the coastlines of my childhood, although in the dream I had visited often. There was a seawall beyond the rocks and a small building which I do not remember as a lighthouse. I interpret its psychological significance to mean that I miss the sea.
For Mother's Day, we gardened ferociously, weeding and spading and raking another two beds at the front of the house and attending further to the raised one in the side yard. We planted sunflowers, basil, marigolds, phlox, and petunias and I didn't think I had overexerted myself, but after dinner I sat around staring into space until eventually I tipped over and stared at a wall. My father made rolls with prosciutto and pepper jack, my mother made a strawberry shortcake. I don't think I had had a lobster in almost two years.
If I wanted another hospital novel after Christianna Brand's Green for Danger (1944), I suspect I would have done better to re-read Mary Roberts Rinehart's K. (1915) than Mary Renault's Purposes of Love (1939), but I had just been complaining about the latter. I still dislike how inorganically it contrives the failure of its romance, falling back on melodramatic devices instead of taking advantage of established tensions in the relationship; the second half of the book is out of character with the first and it means that instead of being emotionally upset by the comfortless self-knowledge of the final scenes, I am aesthetically annoyed. This time around, however, I realized the novel also has an irony problem, namely that while its romance is m/f, the particulars of its defeat by heteronormativity cause it to read rather like a tragic queer novel when its author famously couldn't stand The Well of Loneliness (1928). Not only are Vivian Lingard and Mic Freeborn ambiguously gendered by name, both are bisexual and discernibly gender-non-conforming, carefully distinguished from the more Kinsey-polarized characters—an assertively womanizing surgeon, a splendid rake of a student nurse—around them. Their relationship is mediated through the complicating double of the heroine's brother, but it develops out of a friendship which has formed in its own right over shared interests and ease of company. I still use the novel's shorthand for certain conventions of heterosexuality, since the passage from which it is drawn makes so much sense to me:
"Neither of us, I imagine, has ever been much amused by the standard boy-meets-girl manoeuvres. We are people first, and belong to our sexes rather incidentally. We liked one another as people, and, as a person, I shall miss you damnably if you go."
I would appreciate the novel's interrogation of the possibilities of being a person first much more if it didn't collapse so hard and ultimately into gender essentialism, but it intrigues me for how long it is presented as an arguable ideal, certainly an ordinary state rather than a phase of indecision or latency. It is not more natural that the protagonists begin an opposite-sex affair after slight but significant experience on their own banks of the river. If anything, it's more fraught on account of all those boy-meets-girl manoeuvres whose numerous hazards they are encountering for the first time with one another. The ground and the binding of their relationship remains its queerness, which the novel casts in near-supernatural terms just as it prepares to tip its fever-edge over into the Platonic tragedy of who loves more and thereby loses:
They were too near, she thought, with a strange shudder of the spirit half of delight and half of fear: it was not nature, there were counterpoises and antagonisms set between men and women to divide them, even while they strove for union, and let them keep the shape of their separate souls. With instinctive wisdom they entrenched themselves in their differences, which nature had provided for their security. If people wandered beyond these fronts and met one another in no-man's-land, leaving their weapons behind them, this happened: this insufficiency of the body's surrender, this insatiable mating of the spirit, so lightly invoked in simile and song, so rare and terrifying in consummation.
The problem from shortly after this point in the novel is that Renault needs the relationship to fall off its axis in order to shake out the question of who's what, whereas I don't know why you would fuck up a perfectly good mutual fluidity. I don't actually believe the inevitable result of a romance beyond the bounds of gender norms is "Whoops, we accidentally melted into an Aristophanean androgyne." Then again, I suspect I am less binary generally than Renault: a choice of erastes or eromenos is neither my default nor my ideal template for a relationship, especially since her legitimately unusual effort to transpose it onto a male-female couple just ends up reproducing the battle of the sexes. It's worse than the end of The Friendly Young Ladies (1944), which at least has the back-handed grace of coming out of left Mars. The queerness of being a person who likes people is unsustainable, the event horizon of immutable roles cannot be escaped, the burden of affection falls most heavily right where it leaves the least surprise. I do not read demographically as a rule, but I may take this novel personally. There are lines in it that remind me of H.D. I seem to want to re-read Sayers as an antidote, but instead I think I am going to try to pass out.
For Mother's Day, we gardened ferociously, weeding and spading and raking another two beds at the front of the house and attending further to the raised one in the side yard. We planted sunflowers, basil, marigolds, phlox, and petunias and I didn't think I had overexerted myself, but after dinner I sat around staring into space until eventually I tipped over and stared at a wall. My father made rolls with prosciutto and pepper jack, my mother made a strawberry shortcake. I don't think I had had a lobster in almost two years.
If I wanted another hospital novel after Christianna Brand's Green for Danger (1944), I suspect I would have done better to re-read Mary Roberts Rinehart's K. (1915) than Mary Renault's Purposes of Love (1939), but I had just been complaining about the latter. I still dislike how inorganically it contrives the failure of its romance, falling back on melodramatic devices instead of taking advantage of established tensions in the relationship; the second half of the book is out of character with the first and it means that instead of being emotionally upset by the comfortless self-knowledge of the final scenes, I am aesthetically annoyed. This time around, however, I realized the novel also has an irony problem, namely that while its romance is m/f, the particulars of its defeat by heteronormativity cause it to read rather like a tragic queer novel when its author famously couldn't stand The Well of Loneliness (1928). Not only are Vivian Lingard and Mic Freeborn ambiguously gendered by name, both are bisexual and discernibly gender-non-conforming, carefully distinguished from the more Kinsey-polarized characters—an assertively womanizing surgeon, a splendid rake of a student nurse—around them. Their relationship is mediated through the complicating double of the heroine's brother, but it develops out of a friendship which has formed in its own right over shared interests and ease of company. I still use the novel's shorthand for certain conventions of heterosexuality, since the passage from which it is drawn makes so much sense to me:
"Neither of us, I imagine, has ever been much amused by the standard boy-meets-girl manoeuvres. We are people first, and belong to our sexes rather incidentally. We liked one another as people, and, as a person, I shall miss you damnably if you go."
I would appreciate the novel's interrogation of the possibilities of being a person first much more if it didn't collapse so hard and ultimately into gender essentialism, but it intrigues me for how long it is presented as an arguable ideal, certainly an ordinary state rather than a phase of indecision or latency. It is not more natural that the protagonists begin an opposite-sex affair after slight but significant experience on their own banks of the river. If anything, it's more fraught on account of all those boy-meets-girl manoeuvres whose numerous hazards they are encountering for the first time with one another. The ground and the binding of their relationship remains its queerness, which the novel casts in near-supernatural terms just as it prepares to tip its fever-edge over into the Platonic tragedy of who loves more and thereby loses:
They were too near, she thought, with a strange shudder of the spirit half of delight and half of fear: it was not nature, there were counterpoises and antagonisms set between men and women to divide them, even while they strove for union, and let them keep the shape of their separate souls. With instinctive wisdom they entrenched themselves in their differences, which nature had provided for their security. If people wandered beyond these fronts and met one another in no-man's-land, leaving their weapons behind them, this happened: this insufficiency of the body's surrender, this insatiable mating of the spirit, so lightly invoked in simile and song, so rare and terrifying in consummation.
The problem from shortly after this point in the novel is that Renault needs the relationship to fall off its axis in order to shake out the question of who's what, whereas I don't know why you would fuck up a perfectly good mutual fluidity. I don't actually believe the inevitable result of a romance beyond the bounds of gender norms is "Whoops, we accidentally melted into an Aristophanean androgyne." Then again, I suspect I am less binary generally than Renault: a choice of erastes or eromenos is neither my default nor my ideal template for a relationship, especially since her legitimately unusual effort to transpose it onto a male-female couple just ends up reproducing the battle of the sexes. It's worse than the end of The Friendly Young Ladies (1944), which at least has the back-handed grace of coming out of left Mars. The queerness of being a person who likes people is unsustainable, the event horizon of immutable roles cannot be escaped, the burden of affection falls most heavily right where it leaves the least surprise. I do not read demographically as a rule, but I may take this novel personally. There are lines in it that remind me of H.D. I seem to want to re-read Sayers as an antidote, but instead I think I am going to try to pass out.
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[Mmmm. Sea bugs.]
The end of The Friendly Young Ladies makes me want to scream and then write fix-it fic, sometimes in that order. I wish she could have been unconstrained by the censors.
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Please send me that bit! And also the sea bugs! Although the tissues arrived safely and, while inedible, are extremely useful.
The end of The Friendly Young Ladies makes me want to scream and then write fix-it fic, sometimes in that order. I wish she could have been unconstrained by the censors.
I don't know anyone who doesn't want to scream at the end of The Friendly Young Ladies. It is screamworthy.
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I am glad I did not suffer this re-read in vain!
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Renault, to me, is a hugely gifted artist wedded to an awful worldview. The painful thing is that every once in a while she rises above it, and you can see what might have been.
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I have no intentions of trying to persuade you to. I hadn't re-read it since discovering it and I think I am even more annoyed with it now. I disagree with it philosophically and it's also just not that good. I could have cratered that romance far more convincingly if I had to.
Increasingly, I can't re-read the Charioteer either, because while the heart of the story was literally formative for me, much of the rest makes me wince.
Understood. I am glad you were able to take from it what you needed when you did.
Renault, to me, is a hugely gifted artist wedded to an awful worldview. The painful thing is that every once in a while she rises above it, and you can see what might have been.
That's a factor in my frustration with Purposes of Love, actually. I am unironically interested by its exploration of the ways in which the heterosexuality of the romance stresses and endangers it from directions previously unconsidered by both parties: the question of marriage, the potential for pregnancy, the conflict of careers, all the societal considerations that just wouldn't affect two women or two men in 1938. Before it all falls over in a heap of conservatism, the novel actually pulls off the subversive suggestion that however deeply the principals are drawn to one another as people and however impossible it seems for them to break the relationship off, they might take less damage from pairing off with some nice queer alternative. And then it turns out that Renault isn't interested in that aspect of the narrative at all except insofar as it can be used to drive home the inevitability of the hetero norm. And she was already with Julie Mullard by the time she began writing the novel, so what the hell. And I'm left complaining about it because it's in my head.
Incidentally, I have not read it myself and so cannot recommend it per se, but when I saw that Valancourt had reprinted a rare gay (in both theme and author) novel, I thought of you: L. P. Hartley, The Harness Room (1971).
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I am wondering if you've read Kind Are Her Answers. Renault avoids this pattern by trivializing the talent and personality of the woman in question, and also by not beginning with her but with a different woman one is uninclined to like at all, though it's possible to be very angry at the book's treatment of her just the same. It's also sometimes difficult to see where we are seeing Renault's actual view of Christy and when we are just seeing Kit's. The line I recall very vividly is, "Honesty flourished in her like a weed untended." I, um, wow.
I compulsively reread all these books just the same because, before the fatal flaw opens, they are so very well done, so vivid, so human, so quirky and even, perhaps honestly and perhaps really not, humane and kindly.
P.
*This remark struck me very forcibly, not the first few times that I read it, but later on; and yet I am not sure it means what it could about Renault. I am not sure what it means at all, at this point, even about Hilary.
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This is probably true and it really, really is. The Mask of Apollo and The Praise Singer are the two novels where it comes least to mind, although I suppose I could be forgetting something.
(The Mask of Apollo is my favorite of Renault's novels and potentially the most important to me, although several others were strongly influential at different points in my life.)
The historicals are not immune, see Funeral Games (or don't, really argh all the way for multiple reasons, it's like she's punishing herself for something and incidentally us with it).
I really did write "ζῆ καὶ βασιλεύει" because I dreamed its central conceit, but I realized after I had written it that it is also an argument with Funeral Games. That novel I have never re-read and don't plan to. I did not enjoy the experience.
Return to Night, ditto.
I am actually very fond of Return to Night, partly because I can't believe the ending as Renault clearly intends me to: I don't care what Hilary pretends to herself about the Madonna of the Cave, if she and Julian manage not to panic themselves into breaking up in the next six months, I fully believe they will be set for life and thoroughly confuse their author when she checks back in about ten years to make sure that they are separating wretchedly on schedule.
it begins quite interestingly with a woman who has agency and her own life and then these pleasing factors are slammed head-on into a romance that perverts and wrecks them.
It really is like a sudden collision: I expected the romance in Purposes of Love to fall apart for completely different reasons and in The Friendly Young Ladies I didn't see it coming at all. (Jo Walton has claimed that it comes naturally as part of Renault's recurring concern with love as a contest with an inevitable winner and a loser. I agree that it fits the pattern, but I also feel it crashes in too suddenly at the last minute of the novel to make any sense in terms of its characters. The ending of The Charioteer is filled with people behaving like idiots, but at least they are not behaving like idiots who have had personality transplants.)
And yet I don't feel that Renault is angry about this, more that she has a serious contempt for women and feels we can never ever get it right
I know very little about her as a person in some ways—I have still never followed up on the biography I encountered in college and used as an index to the novels I hadn't read—but whether it's contempt or despair, once seen it's impossible to ignore. I read her so very young that for a long time I didn't see it and then it was a shock. She may be angry on her own behalf, but it comes out as Not Being Like Other Girls. ("Equality! I hope I need never sink so low. That poppy syrup!") Otherwise she seems to see no alternative that isn't just throwing the whole woman away. And then her contemporary novels are so chronically skeptical about the survival of queerness in the face of inexorable, however unconvincing heterosexuality, I don't understand how her life worked at all.
I am wondering if you've read Kind Are Her Answers.
I have not—it's her one remaining novel I haven't read. The problem is that the previous remaining novel was Purposes of Love and having come to that one off North Face, I just became very gun-shy.
Renault avoids this pattern by trivializing the talent and personality of the woman in question, and also by not beginning with her but with a different woman one is uninclined to like at all, though it's possible to be very angry at the book's treatment of her just the same.
I have to tell you, this is not helping the gun-shyness.
"Honesty flourished in her like a weed untended."
That's an amazing sentence and what?
I compulsively reread all these books just the same because, before the fatal flaw opens, they are so very well done, so vivid, so human, so quirky and even, perhaps honestly and perhaps really not, humane and kindly.
I found many important things in her which she may or may not have intended for me to find and I am absolutely fine with confounding her intentions.
This remark struck me very forcibly, not the first few times that I read it, but later on; and yet I am not sure it means what it could about Renault. I am not sure what it means at all, at this point, even about Hilary.
I am sure it means that Renault and I don't mean the same thing by a woman.
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Return to Night and The Charioteer are the only two non-historical Renaults I've read, both as part of a
re: Mary Renault as a person, having then read the Sweetman biography of her, in most case, I dislike "blame the parents" as a too easy excuse, but in this case: really, blame the parents. The mother was as horrible as all the mother figures in her various works make it easy to guess, and the father wasn't any good, either, though in a less abrasive way. It's a not so minor miracle she managed a live long good relationship with another woman at all, given the circumstances. This said, Renault if the biography is anything to go by was a complicated mix of good and bad, as are most people, but what really made me feel a bit warmer towards her than I used to when reading her books is that I wrote her as a character for a Yuletide story (that's what I had to read the biography for), Saving Mrs. Fleming, in which she encounters Alfred Hitchcock.
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I think so!
Jo's right that it runs through Renault's classical novels, too, but I don't think of it as affecting the central relationship in The Mask of Apollo, which is not a romance novel, but which does have a healthy long-term love running through it, which may be another reason it is my favorite. I don't have to argue with that one as I do with The Charioteer or Return to Night. Its understanding of fourth-century Athenian theater has been left behind since its publication and some odds and ends of its author's other attitudes slip through in ways with which I have disagreed since high school, but I just really like it.
nouns are good! solid, dependable (though those are adjectives)
Since I haven't read the novel, this is just me wondering based on the pieces on the table--what do you think?
Re: nouns are good! solid, dependable (though those are adjectives)
Most of her classical novels are not romances in the modern sense, so I don't think so: it's very much part of the ethos of The Last of the Wine (1956), for example, although not in the same crushing fashion as in her contemporary novels; it is definitely a factor in her conception of the relationships of Alexander the Great. The Mask of Apollo may be just be that different and that good.
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This is probably true and it really, really is. The Mask of Apollo and The Praise Singer are the two novels where it comes least to mind, although I suppose I could be forgetting something.
(The Mask of Apollo is my favorite of Renault's novels and potentially the most important to me, although several others were strongly influential at different points in my life.)
I think you are right about those two novels having less or none of that. The Mask of Apollo is far and away my favorite Renault book; it is so amazing in all ways great and small, such a complete tour de force structurally, thematically, with the utterly persuasive small details of working in the theater at that time even though I think she had to invent most of them. Every time I read it I forgive her for everything.
I did not initially like The Praise-Singer that much because I was attracted to Renault by the queer content; and at that time and place you took what queer content you could get, alas. But I think it doesn't devolve into gender essentialism because Simonides is not queer and can stay where he is. There's a tragic queer romance in it, for sure, but he just takes it for granted and is not in nor of it.
I've come to appreciate that book far more over the years, though it lacks the depth and numinous quality of /The Mask of Apollo. Also I became very fond of Simonides, but he is just not Nikeratos.
I am actually very fond of Return to Night, partly because I can't believe the ending as Renault clearly intends me to: I don't care what Hilary pretends to herself about the Madonna of the Cave, if she and Julian manage not to panic themselves into breaking up in the next six months, I fully believe they will be set for life and thoroughly confuse their author when she checks back in about ten years to make sure that they are separating wretchedly on schedule.
I am entirely with you on the actual durability of that relationship. There is very good stuff in it.
I'm perpetually miffed at the undercutting of Hilary's experience, expertise, and general skill level; at first I liked the acknowledgement that even if one is second-rate at one's dream, it's better to have it, but I very much disliked the strong implication that David got the job because he was just better at being a doctor because he was a man. I mean, what even. But I can reread it with more pleasure throughout than many of the others.
I am haplessly fond of Kind Are Her Answers, but I am not sure that I would recommend it. But the actual romance, and the way that Christy, who is conceived of in a particular way by Renault but just continually escapes the bounds of her definition to be amazing, keep me coming back. There is a strong unregulated poly component to the plot, and while Renault wants to decry it she can't really manage because Christy has gotten away from her.
I like Kit (one of the main viewpoint characters and the romantic hero insofar as that term makes any sense here; he's a doctor) well enough, but there are a couple of moments of extreme medical arrogance directed at the woman I mention above, who is very badly behaved AND YET. I am there for Christy and her funny little theatrical company. I will say that Renault can make fun of Kit when she is so inclined, which cuts the effects of the arrogance a bit.
Also the ending is not tragic. There are a lot of things on a knife-edge, though. Also, for good or ill (I cannot decide) some very detailed glances at how Group worked. The person going to Group is very snobbish and annoying but sometimes one feels that in some part Renault agrees with her.
I should stop going on. I haven't described the best moments because I am still not sure I can actually recommend the book. But I feel that while a lot of Renault's habits and attitudes when writing fiction are already present, quite a few of the most unfortunate ones are not yet set in stone. This book has some first-novel issues, but it seems freer than some of the later ones.
P.
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They are the most like one another and the least like her other novels, classical or not: they are about making art and living in the world. The Mask of Apollo has the structure of the tragedy whose principals never meet, which is so beautifully constructed that it also took me years to catch on; The Praise Singer is more of a lens on a window of time; but neither of them is as strictly Platonic as The Last of the Wine or, the stinger of The Mask of Apollo notwithstanding, really part of the Alexander cycle. And they aren't romances. They are about serving the god.
The Mask of Apollo is far and away my favorite Renault book; it is so amazing in all ways great and small, such a complete tour de force structurally, thematically, with the utterly persuasive small details of working in the theater at that time even though I think she had to invent most of them. Every time I read it I forgive her for everything.
I discovered it in high school. My first of her novels must have been The King Must Die because I remember it as far back as elementary school, but I picked up The Last of the Wine in ninth grade specifically and then The Charioteer and then The Mask of Apollo and I loved it from start to finish. For a long time it was among the books kept like talismans by the head of my bed. (It didn't lose its place: I no longer live somewhere with a bookcase by the head of my bed. This is an oversight and I intend to correct it in the next apartment.) Its epigraph is technically the first real piece of classical Greek I read on my own, because within a semester I knew the translation she had chosen was not faithful and as soon as I had the grammar for it I made sure for myself. The last line is better: ὦ ἐμὸν ἐκμήνας θυμὸν ἔρωτι Δίων. "O my heart you drove mad with love, Dion."
But I think it doesn't devolve into gender essentialism because Simonides is not queer and can stay where he is. There's a tragic queer romance in it, for sure, but he just takes it for granted and is not in nor of it.
And it's not unkind about women, which didn't strike me as strange the first time I read it. There's that passage where Simonides after being deceived in love reflects that at least he didn't let it make him into another Hipponax, blaming all women for the failings of one; there's his first meeting with Lyra, where it offends him on her behalf that her services were bought for him without asking her first; there's their friendship, which endures whether they are lovers or not. "Often, still, I find myself thinking, I must tell Lyra that." And then she wrote Funeral Games. It's thematically appropriate that it should have been her last book, but it's her bitterest novel, even worse than The Bull from the Sea. At least I managed not to read it last, but The Praise Singer would have been a better sendoff.
I've come to appreciate that book far more over the years, though it lacks the depth and numinous quality of The Mask of Apollo. Also I became very fond of Simonides, but he is just not Nikeratos.
Nikeratos is my favorite of her characters also. I have opinions about the Bacchae because of his performance.
Her Anakreon got into a poem of mine. My memory is that I met him a year or so before I read the original.
Axiothea is also in a poem, which I can't link, but it's in this chapbook.
I am entirely with you on the actual durability of that relationship. There is very good stuff in it.
And very useful for my development as a reader to be able to disagree so strongly with an author based on internal evidence of her own book.
I'm perpetually miffed at the undercutting of Hilary's experience, expertise, and general skill level; at first I liked the acknowledgement that even if one is second-rate at one's dream, it's better to have it, but I very much disliked the strong implication that David got the job because he was just better at being a doctor because he was a man. I mean, what even.
Renault's third-person narration is so tightly meshed with her authorial voice that I am never sure what we're meant to take as the character's subjective assessments and what is supposed to be the book telling us the truth. But I also kind of want to drown David in a bucket for some of the things he said to her, which affects my opinion of him as a superior being.
But the actual romance, and the way that Christy, who is conceived of in a particular way by Renault but just continually escapes the bounds of her definition to be amazing, keep me coming back. There is a strong unregulated poly component to the plot, and while Renault wants to decry it she can't really manage because Christy has gotten away from her.
Okay, that is attractive and interesting to me; some of the best effects in the modern novels are when they get away from Renault. If I am ever in a used book store again and see a copy, I will pick it up.
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I've noticed this attitude in a whole lot of 20th-century women writers, to differing degrees. For this the notion of decolonizing the mind is so crucial. DON'T THINK OF YOURSELF IN THOSE TERMS.
I'm recalling a manga writer who did this; she wrote SF in which the characters whose sex could alter. She'd draw them looking like gender-normative cis women, but declare them men, and then it would be a huge tragedy when they had to become actual biological females, because that would mean suddenly they had to no longer care about adventures or honor or bravery or dedication; nope, from then on it had to be about nothing other than looking attractive, finding a mate, and rearing offspring. As if adventures, honor, bravery, and dedication could never ever coexist with a body that can make babies! It was very, very frustrating, but mainly I felt sad for her.
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Seriously. It's revealing how tied up in some conceptions a writer who wants to break through others can be ... or is it just that this was an early work?
We are people first, and belong to our sexes rather incidentally. I *love* that, whereas the next paragraph you quote is so full of unanchored abstractions in convoluted dance with each other that I just had to back away and leave it to its maneuvers.
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In the case of Purposes of Love, I think it's both. It's very clumsily handled because it was her first novel, but she really believes that the constantly shifting equilibrium of the early stages of the relationship must sooner or later resolve once and for all: one of them must be the more loving one, which means something rather darker and more dependent for Renault than it does for Auden. It is a construction of the world with which I don't agree, but it also feels particularly cruel in light of how—in the broader rather than specifically gendered senses—non-binary those early stages were. All possibilities collapse. Like I said the first time I read the novel, I wasn't necessarily expecting the romance to work out, but the author pulls so many artificial strings to make her point, it just feels unbelievably over-engineered. And I am left unpersuaded.
I *love* that, whereas the next paragraph you quote is so full of unanchored abstractions in convoluted dance with each other that I just had to back away and leave it to its maneuvers.
Hee. I understand what the passage is saying, I just think it's wrong.
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I just don't *get* that notion of love--and as you say, the static-ness of it--at all. How can that be her experience? Things are always changing; people are always changing; dynamics are always changing--how can it be that she things romantic love ends up in that frozen winner-loser scenario? ... Rhetorical question, but...
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Heee. (I had never heard of that podcast.)