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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
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.