Neither of us, I imagine, has ever been much amused by the standard boy-meets-girl manœuvres

[sovay]

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.

(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.

Comments

[sovay]

And it was 1938. Heck, even in 1981 this book was a revelation -- bi people!

I agree with that—it was one of the points in its favor I was explaining to derspatchel last night—and with the lover-beloved exploration, although I think that also collapses in the end. As the lover, Vivian is still left the vulnerable one in the partnership, the one who loves more, the one who can be hurt more: "now and finally the loser." It is usual for the woman to be the one who would be broken if the man left her; the text acknowledges this among the other excuses that Vivian does not make to herself, which I think means Renault at least isn't trying to argue it's the inevitable trend of a heterosexual relationship, but it's still where they end up. And it fixes the terms of their relationship in a way I find difficult to believe would satisfy either of them, considering it ran originally on constantly shifting grounds, maintaining equilibrium. Kissed by Scott-Hallard, Vivian reflects, "She was used to Mic's love-making, which was one side of a conversation. This was simply a command." They're in bed together by the last pages, but I am not sure they will ever quite be able to have a conversation again.

(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.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

She wouldn't have. But I spend too much time worrying about what happens to people in books relative to history. I have the complete future lives of all the characters in The Friendly Young Ladies worked out.

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.

[sovay]

But I spend too much time worrying about what happens to people in books relative to history.

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.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

[Mic and Vivian] OK, I agree, that would have been better. And Jan not dying would have been much better. Jan's a little too Olympian to be true in that time and place anyway.

And yes, there are better people for me too, thank you. My people are wonderful and I feel very fortunate in them.