sovay | 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.

(

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.

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

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