A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Chronicles of Robin Hood. This was Sutcliff’s first published book, so she hasn’t fully developed her characteristic style yet (although you will be glad to hear that at one point Little John looks at Robin Hood like a faithful hound!), but this is nonetheless a cracking good read. Very pacy! Lots of Robin Hood stories that I wasn’t previously familiar with! I’ve never delved as deep into the Robin Hood mythology as King Arthur, but both story cycles seem to have stories on stories on stories.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve begun reading a Naomi Mitchison biography, and also reading Mitchison’s 1920s collection of short stories, When the Bough Breaks, which is mostly stories set around Vercingetorix’s Gaulish rebellion against Rome. All very good; the one that sticks with me right now is the story of a Greek artist who went to sketch Vercingetorix for a coin after Vercingetorix had been years in prison (I guess Rome was striking memorial coins for the Triumph in which Vercingetorix was to be killed?), and just, you know, as a member of one conquered people to another, and their very different relationships with Rome…

I’ve been talking to skygiants and genarti a bit about Mitchison and Sutcliff and Mary Renault as a cluster of writers who are all in different ways concerned with slavery and Empire (Renault more in her historical novels than her contemporaries, of course), and Megan Whalen Turner as perhaps the chief modern exponent of this tradition. There’d be a good Ph.D. thesis in it for someone, maybe.

What I Plan to Read Next

Lisa See’s Lady Tan’s Circle of Women. I’ve been meaning to read this since it came out, and it is at last time!

I knew the vague outlines of Mary Renault’s life before I read David Sweetman’s Mary Renault: A Biography, but this book answered a number of questions for me and was also so intensely readable that I stayed up long past my bedtime finishing it, which is especially impressive as you always know how a biography ends.

First, I am happy to report that Robbie Wilson, the original of horrible doctor Peter from The Friendly Young Ladies (the one who thinks he can cure women by pretending to be in love with them) apparently was not Mary Renault’s lover, although he wanted to be (he “had come with his toothbrush,” in the words of Renault’s life partner Julie Mullard), but merely a friend, and before too long Renault decided Wilson’s own theories about healing through love were claptrap, so probably we are in fact supposed to think Peter’s completely full of it too.

(Sweetman doesn’t seem to quite get The Friendly Young Ladies: he complains that Leo and Helen’s relationship is never fully explained, and I realize there is never a “Harold, they’re lesbians” moment, but nonetheless I thought it was pretty plain, all things considered. Sweetman also says that after her night with Joe, Leo “knows she must leave him too.” OH IF ONLY. I wish I could read that copy of the book.)

Second, I’ve always been puzzled why Renault emigrated to South Africa after winning the MGM prize in 1947. Apparently, income tax in Great Britain was still nineteen shillings on the pound (!!), and British citizens weren’t allowed to move outside the Commonwealth (!!!!!) (okay I know that rich people were apt to exaggerate when complaining about the Post-War Tyranny of the Labour Party, but “you can’t move outside the Commonwealth” genuinely seems pretty bad), so she picked South Africa more or less on a whim so she could keep at least some of her prize money. And then the first apartheid laws to be passed the very week that she arrived in the country.

Sweetman notes that in South Africa, Renault was largely isolated from the feminist and gay rights movements, and I do wonder if she might have had a different relationship to them if she had seen them up close and in person. Of course, different might mean even more disapproving! But conversely, familiarity might have changed her mind over time.

Finally, just before she died, Renault was doing final edits on a medieval novel. She didn’t quite finish it, and as per Renault’s wishes, Mullard burned all her unfinished work after she died… And I get it, but also OH what I wouldn’t give to be able to read that novel!

A wild entry of Books I Have Abandoned appears! In the interests of completism I decided to read Mary Renault’s North Face, which I have heard is her weakest book, and on the basis of the fact that I barely dragged myself through two chapters, I certainly agree. I skimmed the rest, and it appears to tell the story of two middle-aged women competing over a sad mountaineer, who is so utterly indifferent to their interest in him that at the end of the book he and his dishy young lover agree to invite them to the wedding, as they’ll surely take an interest!

The joke being of course that these women will both be crushed, only our lovers are too indifferent to realize. It seems mean-spirited and curiously airless - as much minute psychological detail about every chess move in every conversation as a Henry James novel.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I’ve gotten my sticky paws on another William Heyliger novel! For those of you who were not yet around for previous installments of the Great Heyliger Quest, William Heyliger was a writer for boys in the first half of the twentieth century who wrote epically earnest sports stories, Boy Scout stories, and stories about boys trying to find their vocation, as in today’s book Quinby and Son, wherein young Bert, dissatisfied with working at his father’s clothing store, tries to start a new store with his father’s clerk (a steadfast disciple of the book The Secrets of Business Success), only to swiftly find himself in far over his head.

Generally I think Heyliger’s school sports and Boy Scout stories are stronger, but I did enjoy the subplot about Bert’s friend Bill, who loses his leg while jumping the trains on a lark, but discovers a path forward in life as an artist of natural history sketches.

What I’m Reading Now

I made the grave mistake of reading through Dracula Daily’s list of other books that are being serialized on email, and now on top of Whale Weekly (a weekly installment of Moby-Dick in your inbox!) and Letters from Watson (the Sherlock Holmes short stories, in roughly chronological order), I’ve signed up for Literary Letters, which serializes obscure epistolary novels of the past, starting with The Lightning Conductor: The Strange Adventures of a Motor Car. As you know, I can’t resist an obscure old book…

Our heroine Molly (with Aunt Mary breathlessly in tow) has just descended on England, bought a motor-car from a Gorgeous Man (capitalization in the original; I bet he is either the villain or the romantic lead or possibly both), acquired a chauffeur named Rattray, and attempted to learn how to drive… only to promptly crash into a haberdashery! All in just three letters. Delighted with the heroine’s voice: like a particularly flighty Jean Webster heroine.

What I Plan to Read Next

DELIGHTED BEYOND RECKONING to find that archive.org has a treasure trove of William Heyliger books, including the long-yearned-for The Spirit of a Leader, a book about high school student government, an excerpt of which was my Heyliger gateway drug! At last I can read the whole story.

ALSO delighted to inform you that I found an article about William Heyliger, in which I discovered that he also wrote a few books under the pseudonym Hawley Williams, including Batter Up!, which is available as a Google book! The article (it begins on page 15) includes a lengthy quote from an autobiographical sketch by Heyliger, with this passage which captures for me the appeal of his books: “I have tried, to the limits of my particular craft, to be a romantic realist. I am never particularly interested in what my characters do; I am always interested in why they do it. My stories do not move in the sense of physical action; they do move thru the medium of psychological action.”

I’ve just discovered that the copy of The Friendly Young Ladies which I recently acquired has a second afterword (after Mary Renault’s first afterword), written by Lillian Faderman (author of Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America), from which I learned that horrible doctor Peter Bracknell who “cures” women by pretending to fall in love with them was in fact based on Mary Renault’s lover Dr. Robbie Wilson.

DEEPLY horrified to learn that this man was based on a real person, of whom Renault was presumably rather fond. I would love to believe that Mary Renault wrote Peter Bracknell in the spirit of “I bet you think this song is about you,” but in fact, knowing about Dr. Wilson furthers my suspicion that we’re meant to take Leo seriously when she muses of Peter, “Fundamentally he’s a far better human being than I am.”

In what possible sense? It’s not just that I disagree with this assessment (though I very much do!); I don’t understand what fundamental virtue we’re meant to believe he possesses. He’s vain, self-satisfied, and dishonest, not only to his patients but in his assessment of himself. Or are we supposed to believe that he attempts his “cures” out of genuine (if deeply misguided!) care for his patients, rather than to flatter his own vanity?

Faderman is also quite annoyed that till the end of their lives, Renault and her lover Julie Mullard “continued to conceive of themselves as ‘bisexual’ despite the fact that for the last thirty-five years of Mary’s life and of their domestic partnership, neither woman had erotic relations with men.” Really? Really? Voluntarily enduring a romantic relationship with the man who served as a model for Peter Bracknell didn’t establish Mary Renault’s bisexual bona fides for all time?

More seriously: I think Faderman thinks that if Renault had embraced the word lesbian she might have also embraced the gay liberation movement, but as that might have required a personality transplant, I feel... perhaps not? Renault is not radical in the way we, as later readers, perhaps WANT her to be radical, but on the other hand perhaps the mark of true radicalism is that decades after your death people are still reading your work and going "This is bonkers."

Mary Renault's Promise of Love (Purposes of Love in the UK) is her first novel and POSSIBLY her most grindingly miserable, although I haven't read all of them for purposes of comparison.

The book kicks off with Vivian, a 26-year-old student nurse in a London hospital, surprised by an unexpected visit from her brother Jan, who lives light and unattached and can rarely be bothered with such trammels as "regular correspondence." (He is a couple of years older than Vivian but similar enough in appearance they are often mistaken for twins.) Jan takes Vivian to visit his friend Mic, who (it is subtly clear), is in love with Jan. Vivian ALSO reads as more or less in love with her brother, which I suppose is a nice change of pace from Renault's usual mother-son Oedipal overtones.

After Jan floats off again for his next job, Vivian and Mic of course fall in love with each other. Actually this part of the book is rather sweet. (The courtship parts of Mary Renault's books are often sweet; it's a pity the characters can't remain in perpetual courtship.) As it turns out, they have a lot more in common than just "being in love with Jan," and they bond over their shared loves of fencing, ballet, and falling outside of gender norms, although over the course of their relationship this proves a source of tension at least as much as alliance.

Vivian is, understandably, a little anxious about the fact that Mic was in love with her brother first: as he admits, the first time he kissed her it was because she looked so much like Jan in that moment. "Did you fall in love with me because my sibling turned you down and I'm the next best thing?" is a tough starting place for a relationship and honestly I would understand if Vivian were even more anxious about it than she is, but possibly the fact that she also thinks Jan is the bee's knees makes it easier to accept? (They actually spend very little time sighing over how Jan is the MOST amazing, possibly only because it's so obvious that they don't feel the need to spell it out to each other.)

Mic and Vivian are also both a little !!!! about the fact that Vivian is Mic's first real relationship with a woman: he's had one previous lover, a schoolmate while he was in school, and of course there's the aforementioned one-sided crush on Jan. Sometimes they joke about it, but underneath there's a real unease, which comes out particularly in one scene where Vivian dresses up in Mic's clothes (including a velvet tie he just happens to own - IIRC velvet ties were very Oxford aesthete) and Mic rips them off her and Vivian is like "He's going to be so upset about hurting me when he's calm again" and... well, anyway, clearly it's a sore spot.

By this time the honeymoon period (which lasted, I believe, two whole months) is beginning to wane. Then Vivian goes on night shift at the hospital, and the relationship collapses in slow motion under the combined weight of their insecurities, some of which to be honest were a little obscure to me. This is the part where the fact that this is Mary Renault's first novel shows the most strongly: she's trying to do the thing she does so well in many of her later books, where you understand many of the character motivations mostly by inference, but she hasn't quite mastered the art yet and there are times when it's just not clear what we're meant to be inferring.

(Honestly a LOT of what goes wrong is that Vivian is dog-tired from working night shift and if they had just been patient it might have worked itself out when she got back on day shift. No one is at their best when they have to be nocturnal for three months!)

Anyway, the relationship hits the skids. But Vivian discovers that Mic is showing signs of tuberculosis! She rushes to him to try to save him, realizes that she cannot, and decides - to write to Jan, begging him to come visit Mic! "I thought, perhaps, that if he were to see you again he might realize he was comparatively happy before he met me, and come in time to treat all this as irrelevance. It's an escape rather than a solution, but it's all that I can see..."

Jan is appalled. Generally speaking, the most grievous sin in Mary Renault is the refusal to Face Reality, and here Vivian is suggesting that Jan (beloved by both Vivian and Mic for his fantastic ability to fully face and enjoy the reality of any place he finds himself) should aid and abet Mic in escapism?

Frankly I think "remembering that there is a life outside your failed love affair and finding new sources of happiness" IS a solution to a failed love affair, and not sheer escapism, but generally I've discovered that when Mary Renault characters Face Reality they almost always come up with something that I consider completely barmy. (In The Friendly Young Ladies Leo, Facing Reality, concludes that the evil doctor Peter who pretends to be in love with his woman patients to cheer them up "is really a much better person than I am." NOT UNLESS YOU KICK PUPPIES FOR FUN, LEO.)

Jan, breaking the habit of a lifetime policy of non-attachment and non-interference in other people's affairs, goes to visit Vivian, then reluctantly goes to visit Mic, and then they go for a drive and Jan dies after breaking his back in a car accident.

I must say that as I was reading I shrieked at the melodrama of this. It occurs to me that in a way it's an externalization of the same bizarre narrative process that occurs with Leo at the end of The Friendly Young Ladies. Jan is Vivian's masculine double (always mistaken for her twin; free, unattached, impersonally interested in everything but not deeply emotional involved in it), just as Leo is part boy and part woman; and, like Leo's boyish side, Jan has to die so that Vivian can fully lose her personality to her flesh-and-blood male lover.

The night after Jan's death, Vivian goes to Mic, and they reconcile. (Like Laurie at the end of The Charioteer, Mic acts not out love, but compassion.) They are together again, and Vivian "knew, without joy or sorrow but in a motionless certainty, that he was the possessor of her self also."

"Henceforward their relationship was fixed, she the lover, he the beloved... In the secret battle which had underlain their love, of which she, only, had been aware with the mind, she was now and finally the loser. There were several ways in which she might partly have evaded the knowledge she brought to this moment..."

But Vivian does not avail herself of these evasions: she Faces Reality. And what a reality! My God. Who would buy love at the price?

I don’t know if I’ve grown desensitized to Mary Renault, or if Return to Night is simply less agonizing than her other books, but I made it through the whole thing without screaming even once, although there were definitely moments when I went “Oh, Mary, you and your Oedipus complex kink.”

And by “moments” I mean the time that Julian recounts a dream where he kills his father - who died when he was a baby! Can you be Oedipal about a father you never met? I mean in the Freudian sense; obviously Oedipus DID kill a father he’d never met… And Julian’s entire relationship with his mother. And also the fact that I’m like 75% sure that we are meant to believe that when Julian was brought into the cottage hospital with a head injury, he mistook Dr. Hilary Mansel for his mother, or rather a nice version of his mother who actually loves him, and that’s why he fell in love with her.

There’s also a Portentous Cave which is symbolic of both The Womb and Death. Plus Mary Renault’s Thoughts about the Nature of Men and Women. (There might be a novel out there which is not diminished by its author’s theorizing about The Nature of Men and Women, but I haven’t met it yet.)

Okay, I’m making fun of it a bit, because how can you NOT when the author got their id all over the page like this. But actually I mostly enjoyed this book. The main romance between 23-year-old Julian Fleming and 34-year-old Dr. Hilary Mansel is sweeter than anything so laden with Oedipal overtones has any right to be. The book deals honestly with the possible difficulties of this relationship - people might think Hilary got her claws in Julian when he was briefly her patient; Hilary is concerned that Julian’s feelings for her will change as she ages - without cludging up the narrative with unhappiness. Yes, other people might think things (probably will think things, people being people), and yes, feelings do change over time sometimes, but overall Hilary and Julian just seem to make each other happy, and surely that’s the most important thing.

I also really liked Hilary’s friendship with her landlady, Lisa, and Lisa’s relationship with her husband Rupert; Lisa and Rupert adore each other but their natures are so at odds (Lisa is a homebody, Rupert a foreign correspondent with a powerful wanderlust) that it’s hard for them to live together. One of the joys of reading Mary Renault is that the side characters often feel as real as the mains: they are not there just as supporting props, but are people with lives and struggles of their own.

…and okay I did kind of want Hilary and Lisa to fall in love over their cozy evening cups of tea, even though I actually liked both Hilary/Julian and Lisa/Rupert just fine. But also COME ON Hilary and Lisa are RIGHT THERE and they get along SO WELL and they look after each other so sweetly.

As I reported yesterday, I have AT LONG LAST finished Mary Renault's Fire from Heaven, which I have been reading since, God help me, August.

In the past I've sort of informally sorted war books along an axis, based on their attitude from war, which axis runs from BRUTAL to GLORIOUS. During Fire from Heaven, it occurred to me, perhaps belatedly, that these are properly two separate axes: brutal to not-brutal and glorious to not-glorious. These axes should be overlaid to form four quadrants of war stories.

So, on the glorious/not-brutal quadrant, you have classic boy's own war adventures. On brutal/not-glorious, you've got things like All Quiet on the Western Front. And then you've got Fire from Heaven, which is in the "war is brutal AND glorious" quadrant."

In a sense this is unavoidable: it's a book about Alexander the Great, who is Great because he conquered a swathe of the known world, and this is not a book that is trying to complicate your understanding of whether that is truly Great. This is a book about how Alexander is the bee's knees, and although war is brutal (I wouldn't say that Renault lingers unduly on the brutality, but there is a certain "this is not a boy's own story" emphasis on its presence) this does not, somehow, mean it is not glorious. In fact, brutality and glory may be inseparable.

For many modern readers, and by "many modern readers" I of course mean myself, this is an alien view. Frankly, I probably found it as challenging as many of her early readers may have found her positive depiction of Alexander and Hephaistion's love affair. (This is adorable and does not take up a lot of page time.) I was not, unfortunately, in the mood to be challenged, particularly not on this particular topic, because I read so many war books over the past year that I am honestly just tired of war right now, so whenever Alexander marched to the cusp of another brutal yet glorious battle I screeched to a halt, hence the fact that it took me four months to read the darn book.

Possibly I'm just not the right audience for historical fiction about world conquerors. I should keep this in mind if I ever run across a novel about Napoleon.

***

ALSO, does Mary Renault have an Oedipus complex kink, or DOES she have an Oedipus complex kink? It had not occurred to me that this could be a thing, but I've read four of her novels now, and the Oedipal thing is ALL over three of them, and the fourth one has female main characters, so there's really no place to shove in an Oedipal complex, but let's be real, The Friendly Young Ladies had MORE than enough going on already.

1. In The Charioteer, baby!Laurie asks his mother to marry him. They grow up to have an arrestingly dysfunctional relationship during which she's more or less constantly telling him to stop having feelings about things like "you put my beloved dog down because he was inconvenient." (At one point Laurie, apparently with no sense of irony, tells Ralph "my mother's pretty well-balanced." Laurie. Laurie. IS SHE, Laurie?)

2. In The Last of the Wine, Alexias's father accuses him of sleeping with his hot young stepmother and Alexias runs away into the hills SO far and SO fast that he almost DIES and then collapses, sobbing, because although the accusation is not literally true it is true in his HEART. And then he gets his first girlfriend, who is literally old enough to be his mother.

3. In Fire from Heaven, baby!Alexander (like Laurie!) asks his mother to marry him, AND ALSO spends most of the book seesawing about whether or not he wants to kill his father, before finally deciding that his father is NOT his father so patricide is not technically patricide and is, therefore, okay, probably. But then his father dies of other causes anyway.

In a way it is futile to ask why an author kinks on certain things, but also WHY. WHY, MARY.

I scream this to the heavens as if it is going to in any way hinder me from reading more Renault books. It definitely will not. I will continue reading them and then shrieking like an incoherent dolphin.

...But probably these further Renault readings will take place after a break of some months because honestly I am SO tired of war books right now. I've read so many. I just want to read books about books and savor the quiet life among people who are not leading any conquering armies at all.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Nothing! Alas alas! But admittedly I have been rather busy with the move this week.

What I’m Reading Now

After a LONG pause, I’ve picked up Mary Renault’s Fire from Heaven again!... only to get bogged down again when Alexander again goes off to war. I realize that Alexander the Great’s reputation rests on conquering the known world, so of COURSE any book about him is going to be a book about conquest, but every time he goes a-conquering I’m thinking about the people who are about to get slaughtered/raped/sold into slavery/etc and then I get stuck again.

This will probably be less of a problem when I get to The Persian Boy, as Bagoas presumably is not in a position to personally decide whether or not he happens to feel like sacking this particular city. (I think it is the personal responsibility for the sacking that is a sticking point for me: I didn’t have this problem in The Last of the Wine, or any of Rosemary Sutcliff’s books about soldiers.)

What I Plan to Read Next

Linda Sue Park’s Prairie Lotus!

I have finished Mary Renault’s The Last of the Wine! Or, as I have taken to calling it, “Mary Renault’s ancient Greek philosopher RPF,” because Alexias meets MANY philosophers in this book. Clearly you couldn’t walk through Athens in the time of Socrates (or Sokrates, as the book spells it) without knocking over a philosopher, but also Renault wants to cram in ALL the philosophers. There’s a random cameo near the end of the two Thebans from the Phaedo. Why not!

But the book is also a love story, recounting Alexias’ love affair with Lysis. The characters get together pretty early in the book, because why shouldn’t they? It’s Athens, everyone approves more or less (sometimes people make dirty jokes but that’s just how humans are about sex), and they have exactly the right age gap to make it maximally socially acceptable, so have at!

So rather than a story about how they got together, it’s a story about how their love affair developed over time and how the onrush of current events (the war with Sparta, which is going well until it’s a disaster) shaped their lives.

( Spoilers )

I just couldn’t resist this fandom meme when thisbluespirit posted it, so I’ve stolen it for myself. I’m doing the first two questions together because they are basically the same answer.

1. What's changed about your fandom life in the last 365 days?

MUCH AGAINST MY WILL I have fallen in Charioteer fandom, by which I mean mostly reading selections from the book over and over, although I’ve also dabbled my toes in the fic.

I was just rereading the part where Laurie first tells Ralph about Andrew, and he’s explaining to Ralph why he just can’t let Andrew know ever about his feelings for him even though he’s pretty sure Andrew is queer too and just hasn’t realized it yet; and Ralph is all, “You’ll meet him again in a few years and he’s going to have a boyfriend,” and Laurie is VERY hurt…

Anyway, it just occurred to me that Ralph is commenting bitterly on his own situation with Laurie. He too! held back from telling the boy he loved (Laurie) about his feelings because he had some idea about protecting Laurie’s innocence, and here Laurie is! a few years later! with a boyfriend. Sort of.

2. Your newest fandom.

See above!

( The full list of questions )