you can never read the same book twice
Mar. 11th, 2012 12:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kindkitI've been re-reading bits of Mary Renault's The Charioteer, mostly because I've been thinking a lot about queer life during the Second World War and Renault's novel is among the few that deal with it from a historically close position (the book was published in 1953).
I still have the paperback copy of The Charioteer that I bought when I was 15 years old. It cost $3.95, which was a lot of money to me then, and I can still remember the thrill of wonder at finding a book that had actual gay men as main characters. I'd been reading about queer men before then, but largely in form of a few (usually dismissive or pitying) lines in a biography, or the more revealing bits of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Then, in a chain bookstore in Minnesota, there was this. As I recall, I nervously put it back on the shelf (what if someone had seen me looking at it?) and went away, only to come back a week or two later, having worked up my courage to buy it.
I read it and re-read it obsessively, struggling with the things I didn't understand (pretty much all of the historical background, the British idiom, and the indirection with which Renault described emotional and sexual matters). I still remember certain passages more or less by heart.
I still love it, or I love the essence of it, the characters and their personal story. But much of the political side of the novel--Renault's argument, conducted through ethical discussions among the characters, that it's possible to be queer and still lead a meaningful and responsible life--has dated rather badly; the word Renault uses frequently to describe queerness is "limitation," and her most positive characters tend to feel they owe a debt to society for their failure to be heterosexual. There's also a strong masculinist (for lack of a better word) bias; queer male characters who are feminine or camp are also, with one possible exception, shown as petty, treacherous, and decadent. (The possible exception is an important one, though: we briefly meet an RAF flight lieutenant who is camp and bitchy as hell, then we learn he's exhausted and on the verge of a breakdown from the stress of constant operations, this being autumn 1940 with the Battle of Britain just ending and the Blitz beginning, and then he's killed in action. He's an iconic hero and a camp queer man simultaneously, and probably the most subversive thing in the whole book.)
I haven't re-read The Charioteer for a long time, because it was so precious to me in my teens and early twenties and in some ways it hurts to go back with a more critical eye.
What I'm finding on this re-reading, to my surprise, is that I'm a touch impatient with Andrew Raynes, the innocent Quaker boy and conscientious objector who's one vertex of a love triangle (the main character, Laurie, is torn between his love for Andrew, who is gay but doesn't know it, and for Ralph Lanyon, a naval officer Laurie knew at school, who emphatically does know he's gay and with whom Laurie begins his first sexual-and-romantic relationship). As a teenager I was always on Andrew's side a bit; he's a sweet-natured idealist and he and Laurie have the lovely romantic scenes of sitting yearningly together under the trees. I pitied him for the emotional difficulties that caused him to repress his sexuality.
This time . . . I kind of wanted to slap him, or at least give him a stern talking-to. Between his lack of self-knowledge and his religious beliefs (when he does come to realize he's gay, he's ashamed and decides it would be wrong for him to see Laurie again), he nearly ruins Laurie's life, not to mention Ralph's. First his presence in Laurie's life leads Laurie to stamp down on his own sexual feelings so as not to distress Andrew, in fact to be willing to do that permanently rather than disturb their relationship. Then Laurie nearly gives up his real and loving relationship with Ralph because his love for Andrew, lacking sexual expression, feels purer. Finally, losing Andrew almost drives Laurie to suppress his own sexuality and try to become heterosexual. And meanwhile poor Ralph is being torn into little shreds by Laurie's uncertainty and refusal to commit himself. (There's a moment when Laurie thinks about Alec and Sandy, a couple who are friends of Ralph's, and decides that Sandy's hurtful behavior towards Alec happens because Sandy thinks of Alec as invulnerably strong. It occurred to me on this reading that Laurie treats Ralph the same way.)
I suppose, logically, the problem is Laurie rather than Andrew, but both Laurie and the narrative tend to let Andrew off responsibility for the way his "innocence" comes at Laurie's expense. Andrew's terribly young--19 or at most 20--but we've seen the contrast with Ralph's emotional courage and self-awareness at that age.
As I get older, I guess I've just come to value Ralph's sort of virtues (pragmatic kindness, unshowy bravery, honesty about what he wants) over romantic idealism and innocence. Not that Ralph's by any means flawless; when he does fuck up, he does so spectacularly. On this reading, I'm more than usually horrified by Ralph's plan to commit suicide. How could he possibly imagine that it wouldn't destroy Laurie? I suppose by that point he's not capable of thinking about it; he's more broken than Laurie knows, he's lost everything that matters to him, and he thinks he's corrupted Laurie and tainted his life. Still, Ralph's emotional mess strikes me as less destructive overall, and more amenable to improvement, than Andrew's constant unknowing drain on Laurie's emotions. Ralph needs stability and love, while not even Andrew knows what Andrew needs. (Andrew needs to come to terms with himself, and I like to think he does eventually, but until then he's not able to really love anyone. He's repressing so much that he's not a whole person, and he hasn't got anything to give. To sustain his own ignorance of his sexuality he's got to hold back emotionally. I worry that the poor boy will end up coming too much under ex-gay!Dave's influence and decide to treat repression, conscious repression, as a virtue.)
*shrugs* Ralph's just . . . better. More solid, more interesting, more complex, more able to love and be loved for real and over the long term. The novel several times suggests that Andrew, for Laurie, is a kind of echo of Ralph (they even look alike) and Andrew and Laurie's friendship/love a way for Laurie to keep that original boyish admiration, that moment in Ralph's study that's all thrilling potential and one (implied) chaste kiss without the more complex and difficult aspects of an adult sexual relationship.
I keep coming back to two images from the novel. One is the expulsion from Eden in Paradise Lost, which Andrew and Laurie quote; Paradise Lost has long been read as implying a felix culpa, a fortunate fall in which the loss of innocence means a gain in freedom and moral maturity. The other image is Ralph's, later Laurie's, and finally Andrew's copy of the Phaedrus, which lays out precisely the ideal of Platonic love, in which sexual longing is suppressed and misrecognized as friendship, that Andrew enacts. The book is stained with Laurie's blood from his wound; platonism comes up against the reality of bodies and is forever marked. The book's passing to each new owner tends to indicate transitions, moments of new maturity and loss of innocence: Ralph being expelled from school, Laurie realizing that his relationship with Andrew is impossible. Receiving the book means, for Laurie and one hopes for Andrew, the start of self-acceptance as queer; giving it away means having achieved some measure of self-acceptance and beginning to live an adult queer life.
This is perhaps the other most subversive thing about The Charioteer: its rejection of the idea that queer sex is a diminution of a platonic ideal, a failure of innocence and virtue. This is subtly done and not always consistent, but ultimately more successful, I think, than the novel's more obvious arguments for the dignity of queer lives and relationships.
I still have the paperback copy of The Charioteer that I bought when I was 15 years old. It cost $3.95, which was a lot of money to me then, and I can still remember the thrill of wonder at finding a book that had actual gay men as main characters. I'd been reading about queer men before then, but largely in form of a few (usually dismissive or pitying) lines in a biography, or the more revealing bits of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Then, in a chain bookstore in Minnesota, there was this. As I recall, I nervously put it back on the shelf (what if someone had seen me looking at it?) and went away, only to come back a week or two later, having worked up my courage to buy it.
I read it and re-read it obsessively, struggling with the things I didn't understand (pretty much all of the historical background, the British idiom, and the indirection with which Renault described emotional and sexual matters). I still remember certain passages more or less by heart.
I still love it, or I love the essence of it, the characters and their personal story. But much of the political side of the novel--Renault's argument, conducted through ethical discussions among the characters, that it's possible to be queer and still lead a meaningful and responsible life--has dated rather badly; the word Renault uses frequently to describe queerness is "limitation," and her most positive characters tend to feel they owe a debt to society for their failure to be heterosexual. There's also a strong masculinist (for lack of a better word) bias; queer male characters who are feminine or camp are also, with one possible exception, shown as petty, treacherous, and decadent. (The possible exception is an important one, though: we briefly meet an RAF flight lieutenant who is camp and bitchy as hell, then we learn he's exhausted and on the verge of a breakdown from the stress of constant operations, this being autumn 1940 with the Battle of Britain just ending and the Blitz beginning, and then he's killed in action. He's an iconic hero and a camp queer man simultaneously, and probably the most subversive thing in the whole book.)
I haven't re-read The Charioteer for a long time, because it was so precious to me in my teens and early twenties and in some ways it hurts to go back with a more critical eye.
What I'm finding on this re-reading, to my surprise, is that I'm a touch impatient with Andrew Raynes, the innocent Quaker boy and conscientious objector who's one vertex of a love triangle (the main character, Laurie, is torn between his love for Andrew, who is gay but doesn't know it, and for Ralph Lanyon, a naval officer Laurie knew at school, who emphatically does know he's gay and with whom Laurie begins his first sexual-and-romantic relationship). As a teenager I was always on Andrew's side a bit; he's a sweet-natured idealist and he and Laurie have the lovely romantic scenes of sitting yearningly together under the trees. I pitied him for the emotional difficulties that caused him to repress his sexuality.
This time . . . I kind of wanted to slap him, or at least give him a stern talking-to. Between his lack of self-knowledge and his religious beliefs (when he does come to realize he's gay, he's ashamed and decides it would be wrong for him to see Laurie again), he nearly ruins Laurie's life, not to mention Ralph's. First his presence in Laurie's life leads Laurie to stamp down on his own sexual feelings so as not to distress Andrew, in fact to be willing to do that permanently rather than disturb their relationship. Then Laurie nearly gives up his real and loving relationship with Ralph because his love for Andrew, lacking sexual expression, feels purer. Finally, losing Andrew almost drives Laurie to suppress his own sexuality and try to become heterosexual. And meanwhile poor Ralph is being torn into little shreds by Laurie's uncertainty and refusal to commit himself. (There's a moment when Laurie thinks about Alec and Sandy, a couple who are friends of Ralph's, and decides that Sandy's hurtful behavior towards Alec happens because Sandy thinks of Alec as invulnerably strong. It occurred to me on this reading that Laurie treats Ralph the same way.)
I suppose, logically, the problem is Laurie rather than Andrew, but both Laurie and the narrative tend to let Andrew off responsibility for the way his "innocence" comes at Laurie's expense. Andrew's terribly young--19 or at most 20--but we've seen the contrast with Ralph's emotional courage and self-awareness at that age.
As I get older, I guess I've just come to value Ralph's sort of virtues (pragmatic kindness, unshowy bravery, honesty about what he wants) over romantic idealism and innocence. Not that Ralph's by any means flawless; when he does fuck up, he does so spectacularly. On this reading, I'm more than usually horrified by Ralph's plan to commit suicide. How could he possibly imagine that it wouldn't destroy Laurie? I suppose by that point he's not capable of thinking about it; he's more broken than Laurie knows, he's lost everything that matters to him, and he thinks he's corrupted Laurie and tainted his life. Still, Ralph's emotional mess strikes me as less destructive overall, and more amenable to improvement, than Andrew's constant unknowing drain on Laurie's emotions. Ralph needs stability and love, while not even Andrew knows what Andrew needs. (Andrew needs to come to terms with himself, and I like to think he does eventually, but until then he's not able to really love anyone. He's repressing so much that he's not a whole person, and he hasn't got anything to give. To sustain his own ignorance of his sexuality he's got to hold back emotionally. I worry that the poor boy will end up coming too much under ex-gay!Dave's influence and decide to treat repression, conscious repression, as a virtue.)
*shrugs* Ralph's just . . . better. More solid, more interesting, more complex, more able to love and be loved for real and over the long term. The novel several times suggests that Andrew, for Laurie, is a kind of echo of Ralph (they even look alike) and Andrew and Laurie's friendship/love a way for Laurie to keep that original boyish admiration, that moment in Ralph's study that's all thrilling potential and one (implied) chaste kiss without the more complex and difficult aspects of an adult sexual relationship.
I keep coming back to two images from the novel. One is the expulsion from Eden in Paradise Lost, which Andrew and Laurie quote; Paradise Lost has long been read as implying a felix culpa, a fortunate fall in which the loss of innocence means a gain in freedom and moral maturity. The other image is Ralph's, later Laurie's, and finally Andrew's copy of the Phaedrus, which lays out precisely the ideal of Platonic love, in which sexual longing is suppressed and misrecognized as friendship, that Andrew enacts. The book is stained with Laurie's blood from his wound; platonism comes up against the reality of bodies and is forever marked. The book's passing to each new owner tends to indicate transitions, moments of new maturity and loss of innocence: Ralph being expelled from school, Laurie realizing that his relationship with Andrew is impossible. Receiving the book means, for Laurie and one hopes for Andrew, the start of self-acceptance as queer; giving it away means having achieved some measure of self-acceptance and beginning to live an adult queer life.
This is perhaps the other most subversive thing about The Charioteer: its rejection of the idea that queer sex is a diminution of a platonic ideal, a failure of innocence and virtue. This is subtly done and not always consistent, but ultimately more successful, I think, than the novel's more obvious arguments for the dignity of queer lives and relationships.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-13 03:09 am (UTC)[Perhaps I ought to plan a re-read of the book for this summer, and see how it strikes me five years on from my first reading. I expect I might be even more impatient with Laurie and his waffling and his hurting Ralph (who was my favorite character practically as soon as he was introduced). Awugh, that book. As the kids are saying these days: 'all the feelings'.]
no subject
Date: 2012-03-14 01:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-13 03:09 pm (UTC)Also, Ralph is so amazing.
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Date: 2012-03-14 01:02 am (UTC)I love Ralph enormously. He's not perfect--he's got a lot of internalized homophobia himself and is brutally judgmental of men who fail to meet his standards of masculinity--but he manages to be amazing despite all that.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-14 03:18 am (UTC)I need to reread the book.
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Date: 2012-03-14 03:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-14 02:22 pm (UTC)