skygiants | (no subject)

I haven't read a Mary Renault book since I was a very young teenager who thought Greek mythology was cool, but I was feeling in the mood for mid-century prose and ended up reading The Friendly Young Ladies on the plane a few weeks ago and. Hmm. Well, I mean, I was expecting a lot of queerness and some conflicted feelings about its portrayal, and indeed that was what I got!

The Friendly Young Ladies spends several chapters following Elsie, a wildly sheltered eighteen-year-old with wildly dysfunctional parents. Elsie soon develops a crush on a visiting doctor and decides to run away from home and find her long-lost sister, who left ten years ago in the midst of Mysterious Scandal, at which point it becomes very rapidly clear that in fact the book is not really about Elsie at all.

Elsie discovers her sister Leo -- the actual protagonist of the book -- living in domestic bliss on a houseboat with her girlfriend Helen, having made a modest success at the writing of popular Westerns. Leo and Helen have a solid, healthy, committed open relationship and as soon as they were introduced I spent the rest of the book extremely stressed out that they were going to be broken up by the end of it because I DON'T TRUST MARY RENAULT WITH HAPPINESS.

Things that threaten Helen and Leo's relationship but do not seem to be at actual risk of breaking them up:
- having Elsie hanging around the houseboat all the time being mostly useless and entirely clueless (by the end of the book Elsie STILL has not learned that queerness is a thing, and, like, I GET why Leo would just want to entirely avoid having this conversation with her sheltered bourgeois baby sister but it might have helped)
- having Elsie's smugly awful doctor crush hanging around the houseboat all the time trying to seduce either Helen or Leo into being straight, he'll generously devote his time to helping either or both with this, he's not picky! (Leo instead seduces his girlfriend, in the funniest scene in the book)

Things that may in fact be at risk of breaking Helen and Leo up:
- Joe, who comes from America and provides Leo with flavor-text for her books, and writes the kind of modernist novels that Mary Renault and Leo think are amazing (Elsie picks one up at one point, discovers a naturalistic scene involving mother washing her dead baby, and puts it down again very quickly, which I'm not sure I blame her for although Mary Renault does), and functions as Leo's Chill Best Bro With Whom To Perform Homosocial Masculinity until suddenly traditional heterosexuality gets in the way, which unfortunately Mary Renault (of the 1930s) thinks might be True Love

(It's worth noting that Mary Renault of the 1980s, in an afterword, thinks Leo would be ridiculous to even consider giving up what she has with Helen in favor of the inevitable crash-and-burn with Joe, which is definitely a correct opinion. Unfortunately, Mary Renault of the 1980s also has some extremely incorrect opinions, like "I don't understand why the gays these days keep doing silly attention-grabbing things like 'asking' for 'rights' instead of just being chill and not making people mad...")

And, I mean, there's a lot to unpack in the Leo-Joe relationship and how it reflects Leo's complicated relationship with gender -- and of course a person with complicated gender feelings in 1937 has different tools and vocabulary to express that than a person in 2018 and I feel like some of the available 2018 tools might indeed be relevant and helpful here and CERTAINLY might help with, for example, Joe writing a dramatic letter about how in pursuing love interest f!Leo he's ruthlessly throwing his best bro m!Leo under the bus because the two probably can't coexist! (And there went my affection for Joe, who really is perfectly nice for the first 2/3 of the book.)

So it's interesting and frustrating and sad, but also it doesn't have to be, which of course is a large part of why it's frustrating. Leo and Helen and Joe were all doing perfectly fine before Mary Renault decided to throw all-encompassing heterosexuality at them! It was entirely unnecessary!

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

coyotegoth

I reread The Persian Boy a year or so ago; it holds up well.

From:

kore

I haven't read much Renault other than the mythical/Classical books and 'of course' The Charioteer (such a great book), but yeah, "very queer and very conflicted" describes her quite well.

From:

kore

Isn't it good? Bagoas is such a great narrator.

From:

aurumcalendula

I found the book frustrating (which seems to be the case with me and most of Renault's works, tbh).

I hated the bit of the 1983 afterward *grumbles about both the 1983 and 2003 afterwards that were in my edition*.

From:

vass

I read that about ten years ago, and... yeah. I definitely remember that afterword. Clearly the correct way of dealing with societal homophobia and discrimination is to win a shitpot of money and use that to emigrate to another country. That's much more dignified and mature than, what was it, "inverts waving banners"?

From:

littlerhymes

Leo instead seduces his girlfriend, in the funniest scene in the book

PERFECT - ok she should clearly have just stopped the book right there.

From:

sovay

Leo and Helen and Joe were all doing perfectly fine before Mary Renault decided to throw all-encompassing heterosexuality at them! It was entirely unnecessary!

Unnecessary heterosexuality is part of the crash and burn of Purposes of Love (1939), although that novel has several other problems, including inopportune TB. I think it may be a thing with Mary Renault. Return to Night (1947) manages to pull out of the stall to the point where I actually think its central m/f romance has a much better chance of succeeding than the narrative does, but The North Face (1948) never even gets off the ground. (The B-plot would have been an awesome A-plot, but the hugely less interesting A-plot edges it out and the last chapter again relies on everyone's motivations going unconvincingly to hell.) I have never seen a copy of Kind Are Her Answers (1940) and am vaguely afraid of what I would find if I went looking.

I like the writing of Helen, who I think is still a rarely represented kind of character: a bisexual woman in a committed lesbian relationship without any trauma in her past to have disposed her away from men. People assume it, but it isn't there. Otherwise The Friendly Young Ladies annoyed me so much when I first read it that I have never gone back to see how I would feel about the parts that aren't the ending now.

Edited Date: 2018-10-07 05:35 am (UTC)

From:

teenybuffalo

Renault does a fantastic job of making us understand that he's (1) a kindhearted person deeply wronged but also (2) a part of his culture and time such that he accepts societal cruelty as being The Way Things Are, in the way we accept our societal cruelties, and (c) a keen judge of character, without being made to look stupid by (2). I love that book so much.

From:

teenybuffalo

Oh my gosh, I remember this one. I jumped into it with both feet after tearing through her classical romances, and, well, parts of it were excellent. Let's end it about 2/3 of the way through, before all the sick-making stuff about "the woman who came out of the water."

From:

teenybuffalo

Hard agree. And we fade on the image of Leo the Magical Lover conquering all.

From:

antisoppist

although that novel has several other problems
I find that one the worst because Vivian and Mic are just so grindingly boringly grim and neither are enjoying it much because compulsory heterosexuality. But it does have Colonna dressing like Byron and casually seducing student nurses though.

I would like a Kind Are Her Answers from the point of view of Kit's unsympathetic wife Janet, who is unwilling to get over her antipathy and meet his Properly Heterosexual Needs as all women must, and leaves him to go and do charity work. I hope she has an amazing time without him.

Most of them would benefit by being written from the POV of an entirely different character really.

From:

coffeeandink

I think the only good thing I can say about Kind Are Her Answers is that it's better than North Face. Purposes of Love has so many gender and sexuality problems it's hard to pick the worst one, but probably the thing that most wrecks it for me as a story is it's attempts to pretend that Mick and Viv aren't really both in love with her horrible brother.

The Charioteer and Return to Night have enough that I love that I can overlook the parts that I hate, but in general her contemporaries are painful.

From:

skygiants

The ones I read as a kid were the Theseus books, at I think around the same time I read I, Claudius, but Graves stuck better for me at the time; I don't really remember much about the Renault except some tenuous imagery related to mazes and ritual sacrifice.

From:

skygiants

I haven't read The Charioteer and the thing is I think I've only just now realized it's not one of her mythical/classical books...

From:

skygiants

I had always sort of gotten the impression I would PROBABLY find her frustrating and I guess it's nice to have that impression confirmed! I'm not sorry I read it, because there's interesting stuff in it, but with many buts.

From:

skygiants

It's a whooooole lot of 'REALLY, MARY?' Just be nice and society will pleasantly and conveniently change around you, that's definitely how that works!

Edited Date: 2018-10-07 02:52 pm (UTC)

From:

skygiants

I read that scene and I was like "oh, perhaps my fears are unfounded, this book does understand what I want out of it after all!" AND THEN.

From:

skygiants

I mean -- without ascribing too much autobiography to Renault -- I can understand in an abstract way why a queer person writing in the 1940s would return over and over to the question of whether a comfortable queerness really is enough when everything around you says that it shouldn't be, whether heterosexuality is going to arrive horribly someday after all and blow everything you think you know about yourself out of the water. I get it, but it makes it no less frustrating to watch.

I wish the book had more of Helen in it; the part where she explains why she just has not got time for committed relationships with men anymore almost makes the entire book worth it.

From:

skygiants

Leo roundly embarrasses whatsisface the doctor! Great! Everyone's fine! LET'S LEAVE IT THERE AND NONE OF THE REST HAPPENED.

From:

sovay

I find that one the worst because Vivian and Mic are just so grindingly boringly grim and neither are enjoying it much because compulsory heterosexuality.

I actually liked Vivian and Mic quite a lot to begin with; I just couldn't believe the way their romance falls apart. Both of them have enough problems in their personal lives and their ideas of one another that the relationship could have collapsed organically if that was what the author wanted, although based on the first half of the book I don't feel it necessarily would have. Instead she kept throwing melodramatic devices at them until the inevitable failure wound up feeling implausibly over-enginereed, like the romance equivalent of grimdark. It felt like cheating.

But it does have Colonna dressing like Byron and casually seducing student nurses though.

Yes. "Like a steel plate of Lord Byron gone blond."

From:

sovay

probably the thing that most wrecks it for me as a story is it's attempts to pretend that Mick and Viv aren't really both in love with her horrible brother.

At which it must have failed completely, because I took that as read.

From:

sovay

I can understand in an abstract way why a queer person writing in the 1940s would return over and over to the question of whether a comfortable queerness really is enough when everything around you says that it shouldn't be, whether heterosexuality is going to arrive horribly someday after all and blow everything you think you know about yourself out of the water..

I understand asking the question. I feel the incredibly artificial way in which Renault kept answering it should have laid it to rest, though. She has to jerry-rig so much about her characters in order to get the inevitable arrival of heterosexuality to destroy them, I wish she had realized it probably meant that comfortable queerness works in the modern world after all.

Edited Date: 2018-10-07 04:50 pm (UTC)

From:

sovay

Just be nice and society will pleasantly and conveniently change around you, that's definitely how that works!

One of the only lines I don't like in The Mask of Apollo (1966), otherwise my favorite Renault novel for a variety of reasons, ascribes a variant of this attitude to a classical Greek character who is queer in socially non-conforming ways and it has gritted my teeth ever since I noticed.

From:

sovay

I don't really remember much about the Renault except some tenuous imagery related to mazes and ritual sacrifice.

I still like, can still re-read, and still find important things in The King Must Die (1958). It was either the first or the second Mary Renault I ever read.

hawkwing_lb did a really good review of it a few years ago, observing the places where it's sheer fantasy with enough archaeological specificity that it reads like history if you don't know better. I re-read The Bull from the Sea (1962) most recently in 2015 and I just don't like it. It has some interesting things and otherwise no.

Edited (Tiny Wittgenstein) Date: 2018-10-07 05:01 pm (UTC)