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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.
no subject
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).