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Neither of us, I imagine, has ever been much amused by the standard boy-meets-girl manœuvres
I am glad that Mary Renault continued in her career as a novelist, because The Mask of Apollo (1966) is an important book to me. I am now a little more impressed than I was that she did so, because Purposes of Love (1939) is not very good. I like the first half: the introduction of Vivian and Jan like ambiguous twins in Twelfth Night, Mic who is physically attracted to both of them and falls in love with one, Vivian for whom the relationship becomes a way of distinguishing herself from her brother, who has always been the dominant one of the pair; it is frequently remarked that she looks like Jan, not the other way round. The jacket copy makes much of the characters' bisexuality, but the gender of their previous partners is less of an issue than their inexperience: they are each the other's first serious relationship. Vivian worries about being subsumed into Mic as she was, in some ways, into Jan; Mic worries that he's not a fit partner for anyone, especially a woman. Their sense of already knowing each other is uncanny. It makes the places where they jar or don't quite match all the more wounding. It's complex, thoughtful, potentially bittersweet, and jam-packed with technical medical detail (Vivian is a nurse in training, Mic a pathologist at the same hospital), Renault knew whereof she wrote. And then the hard right collapse into melodrama occurs. There's an affair, there's an illness, there's a fatal accident, there's a tragic ending, there are people behaving all ways throughout that are just this side of in character but definitely spilling over into stupid. I'm not quite sure what happened. Renault would later revisit the hospital setting and the genderqueer romance with Return to Night (1947), the first one of her modern novels I read after The Charioteer (1953)—I have some arguments with the ending of that one, but at least I didn't think it needed to be rewritten from about the halfway mark. Maybe there's some deeper argument I'm just missing, but at the point where it was casually mentioned that somebody had TB, I started to give up.
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derspatchel and I are in New York, in a room at The Jane with the ceiling fan going and the window open anyway for a breeze. I read the book on the train down. I desire now to visit the Strand posthaste so I can get something else into my head.)
On the bright side, I now know that Errol Morris considers Shakes the Clown (1992) an achievement of cinema on a par with Touch of Evil (1958), because he was sitting behind us at Tupelo last night and expressed this opinion to the waiter. And then didn't explain himself further, so your guess is as good as mine.
We are off to explore.
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derspatchel and I are in New York, in a room at The Jane with the ceiling fan going and the window open anyway for a breeze. I read the book on the train down. I desire now to visit the Strand posthaste so I can get something else into my head.)On the bright side, I now know that Errol Morris considers Shakes the Clown (1992) an achievement of cinema on a par with Touch of Evil (1958), because he was sitting behind us at Tupelo last night and expressed this opinion to the waiter. And then didn't explain himself further, so your guess is as good as mine.
We are off to explore.
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Morris is right.
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I haven't;
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We stayed here last April when we saw One Man, Two Guvnors and The Gang's All Here (1943). We may never stay here in summer again, as our room does not have air conditioning, but it's still a very nice room. And we have a view of the river, which always rocks.
[edit] We found the air conditioner. It was in a very counterintuitive place and the remote was made to work by simple expedient of pressing every button we could think of, but the room is now cooling down and maybe I will sleep tonight without cold compresses on my head. Jane, we maligned you!
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I still want to stay in the Chelsea Hotel. One day. Either the room Bob Dylan stayed in, or where Leonard wrote his famous hymn for Janis.
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I suppose it's a good thing to be reminded how much a novelist's skills can develop over time.
I hope the Strand has helped you. I've not been through their door in a good while, despite not infrequent visits to the vicinity. I should stop in the next time I have a chance to do so.
We are off to explore.
Happy exploring! I hope ye have a wonderful time!
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It came through.
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I didn't realize they could be seen outside of their native Rhode Island!
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https://twitter.com/DelsNYC
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It's like they're moving north with global warming.
(Okay, New York is south. Never mind that simile.)
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*all the hues of envy here" but in April, I will be there in April..
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What will you be in New York in April for?
(And hurray! Everybody should get to visit the Strand.)
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I showed him his first original Godzillas, with subtitles.
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You are an excellent godparent.
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Enjoy!
Nine
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We have!
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All of her contemporary novels have something wrong with them. (Except The Charioteer.)
And yes, she got a lot better and she was learning how to write novels when she wrote this one.
But I think she deserves credit for even attempting to examine the question of who is the lover and who is the beloved in a male-female couple, in 1938. Nobody else was even interested in the question. Maybe nobody is now, because they're sure not writing about it. Maybe I am the only other person in the world who ever thought about this? I've been thinking about it a lot recently because it's thematic for _Thessaly_.
(They'd have been able to cure the TB before it killed him. If they survived WWII.)
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This is a thought-provoking question. My first instinct is to say that the viewpoint character tends to be the lover because "lover" is a more active position to be in than "beloved." To have the viewpoint character be mainly the object of someone else's love seems like it would be stifling or oppressive.
But then I start wondering about real life... but real life has all sorts of patterns and I'm guessing rarely divides up easily into either category, or people are in both, etc.
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Interesting. I don't remember a lot of Freud; I remember finding the ending unsatisfying, but I would have to re-read it in order to pinpoint the problem. The last time was in college.
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I agree with that—it was one of the points in its favor I was explaining to
(The affair frustrates me, because I understand why Vivian responds to Scott-Hallard; she is trying on heteronormativity. With Colonna, she was also the object of desire, but never by assumed social default: Colonna is just like that about things she wants. (I liked her, by the way, and I hoped she and Valentine salvaged a happy ending in some other novel Mary Renault did not write.) She's never had a male lover who wasn't Mic and it is not unreasonable of her to wonder whether she likes commands better than conversations. It's not unreasonable of Mic to be hurt that she tried to find out without even telling him first, especially with a man who personifies everything he can't stand about male-female roles. Everything else he says to her in that first argument is inexcusable and I couldn't believe she would respond to it by going back to Scott-Hallard—not because Mic should have shamed her out of it, but because she so clearly didn't prefer commands, and I just wanted to shake everybody, the author included.)
[edit] Maybe I am the only other person in the world who ever thought about this?
I have thought about it, but not at novel-length, because there are ways in which the idea runs badly counter to me: I don't want to be fixed in one position or the other, no matter who I'm with, and it interested me that at first neither did Vivian or Mic.
There is just enough reality in the ending of Purposes of Love for it to upset me on the train, because the person who once told me that I made him feel like a princess in a tower (immedately because I used to climb in through his window to visit, generally because he said I'd rescued him) was the same person who left me suddenly and badly; he wasn't hurt by going, so I must have loved him more. On some level I am always still expecting that to happen now, even when I believe better of the people on the other end of the relationship. It sucks.
(They'd have been able to cure the TB before it killed him. If they survived WWII.)
I knew that because I researched it for "The Clock House," but in 1938 Renault wouldn't have.
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With Mic and Vivian I don't think they will be able to have that conversation, which means what they have is the ghost of love... and that isn't a happy ending. But not everything has to be. "They're back together but it's irretrievably broken" is indeed a distressing way to end a romance novel. But it's not really a romance novel. It's exegesis on Plato just as much as The Last of the Wine is.
I'm glad you've thought about it because for a minute I was feeling really odd. I don't want to be fixed in one position either, but culturally it's difficult. I'm sorry that person sucked, and I am glad you have better people now. I have also had problems with this a lot from all kinds of angles.
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No, that's fair. My first dramatized version of The Secret Garden (1987, Derek Jacobi as Archibald Craven) is the only one I've still seen acknowledge that the characters would hit adulthood just in time for World War I, with semi-predictable results.
With Mic and Vivian I don't think they will be able to have that conversation, which means what they have is the ghost of love... and that isn't a happy ending.
I don't want a happy ending for Mic and Vivian because they're supposed to be in a romance novel; I want them not to have this unhappy ending because it feels inorganic—externally and awkwardly imposed—for all the reasons previously described. They have problems as a couple which I believe, also previously described, which if Renault was insistent on pushing to a distressing conclusion could have led to a falling-off of the relationship and the same cold morning (although I would have been sorry, because a successful genderqueer romance in 1938 would have been awesome). Vivian could have backed off so strongly from allowing Mic the same indivisibility from her life she always automatically gave Jan that he takes it as a lack of trust, so afraid of becoming once again the more loving one that she looks like the less; Mic's emotional insecurities are huge and complex, starting with his illegitimacy and surfacing most recently with his fear that his sexuality disqualifies him from loving Vivian, which is why the only one of his violent actions I believe is the way he flips out at her when she masquerades as her brother, because what if he does want that more? What if she does want the standard boy-girl manoeuvres—he thinks—and he can't give them to her? They could have destabilized as a couple without the need for an out-of-character affair or the vaguely disquieting way it takes Jan's death to commit Vivian and Mic to each other (another fixing: Vivian no longer has a doppelgänger, Mic no conflict of interest). I don't know that I would have liked that outcome better, but at least it would have felt like a storytelling decision, not a complete cave-in.
I have also had problems with this a lot from all kinds of angles.
I hope there are better people for you too.
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And yes, there are better people for me too, thank you. My people are wonderful and I feel very fortunate in them.
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I realize you can't know, but do you have any intuitions or surmises?
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It feels like she shied off from writing Vivian and Mic's relationship on its own terms and fell back on the traditional disruptions—infidelity, inability to communicate, sudden shocking loss—to give it dramatic shape, which means the shape it ends up taking is a lot triter than the one it started out with. (See reply to
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Happy exploring!
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We went to Coney.
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How are things on the isle of rabbits?
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I approve!
How are things on the isle of rabbits?
We went to Queens for the afternoon and then caught our train home. I am sorry not to have seen you this weekend, but we didn't manage to interface with anyone except one of
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I had a rather chaotic weekend, which I will probably write up at some point quite soon. I am glad to know you were here, even if I didn't see you. Next time we will make a plan.
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Just read. Definitely planning next time.