December meme: The Charioteer as a war novel

[kindkit]

naraht asked me to talk about Mary Renault's The Charioteer as a war novel.

I think TC has--very understandably--received so much attention as among the first gay novels in English with a happy ending that the extent to which it's also a Second World War novel is neglected. The war is omnipresent in the story: blackouts and air raid sirens, the aerial combat that happens over the hospital, the uniforms and fire-watch duties, the rationing and the sentimental songs. The lightning-fast romance of Laurie and Ralph, who go from "gosh, it's been seven years, what have you been doing?" to "and of course we'll live together, circumstances permitting" in the space of maybe a month and a half, strikes me as a very wartime thing too. A lot of straight couples got married after knowing each other for even less time.

The importance of the war in the book goes beyond background details, though. One thing I've been thinking about is Andrew's status as a conscientious objector. Modern readers tend to admire him for that, but I wonder whether Renault's original 1953 audience, many of whom would have served in the war in one capacity or another, would necessarily have done so. A lot of them, I suspect, might have been more inclined than modern readers to agree with Ralph's less sympathetic judgment of Andrew as "a passenger when human decency's fighting for survival." I'm not arguing that this is the right way to view Andrew, but I wonder whether in 1953, the novel would have come across as more critical of Andrew than it seems to readers now.

Most significantly and interestingly in my view, TC focuses on characters who have become disabled due to wartime injuries. There aren't a lot of war novels that do this--characters either die or they fight on. Laurie and Ralph's injuries are severe enough that neither will ever go into combat again, although Ralph continues to serve in the Navy in what seems to be an intelligence capacity. Most of the novel is of course set in a military hospital, and we follow Laurie through the last of several surgeries that don't repair his leg as well as he'd hoped, through physical therapy and the corrective boot to help him walk (the first version of which actually makes his leg worse), through his grief over his disability and his beginning to learn to live with it. Coping and adapting are things we see both Laurie and Ralph do a lot of: Laurie has to deal with stairs, low sofas, not being able to kneel in church, and pain and fatigue, while Ralph struggles with his car's gearshift and with other people's reactions to the sight of his damaged hand. I can't think of any other war-related story (in fact any story) where disability is so much a pervasive, ordinary part of the characters' lives. There's a general theme of physicality in the novel, and I think it's significant that it deals so matter-of-factly with the consequences of war on human bodies.

To conclude, I want to bring things back to the basic fact that The Charioteer deals with gay men serving in the armed forces in wartime. Even now, war novels and history books hardly acknowledge that such men existed, or lesbian servicewomen for that matter. It's sad that sixty years later, the trail that Mary Renault blazed in 1953 is still so little followed.

Comments

[lilacsigil]

I wonder whether in 1953, the novel would have come across as more critical of Andrew than it seems to readers now.

Possibly not so much more - Britain during WWII was much more aware of conscientious objectors and willing to find other roles for them after the disasters of WWI. And with the constant bombing, COs weren't always in less danger than other men. One of my grandfathers (not a CO, enlisted, but was assigned a government job) never saw combat but was still bombed at least four times, twice on land and twice at seas. He was an army pharmacist and engaged in massive medical logistics, and several of his assistants were COs.

I agree about the disability themes, which are disappointingly few in other media, even that set at the same time.

[kindkit]

Good point about the bombing, though I don't think that the possible criticism of Andrew in the novel is about cowardice. He's clearly not a coward. But I think the argument Ralph makes is that Andrew puts his personal moral principles above stopping the oppression of other people--that he's willing to let Hitler conquer huge swathes of Europe, send people to concentration camps (which are specifically mentioned in the novel and which were known about, although the Nazi genocide wasn't necessarily, during the war itself), etc., and that even his willingness to be sent to a concentration camp himself, should Hitler win, doesn't necessarily mitigate that passivity. I don't entirely agree with Ralph's argument, but I don't think it's entirely wrong, either. And I do wonder what Renault's original audience, who were probably less inclined than modern liberal/left readers to reject the use of military force, would have thought.

[lilacsigil]

Yeah, the point I wanted to make more generally was that there were a lot of roles to serve in the war and very few people rejected the war effort entirely, even COs. Ralph is seeing the war in terms of fighting, but that's only one part of war, the part that's aligned in Ralph's opinion with bravery/cowardice, when in reality there's a huge number of people supporting their efforts, whether because they can't fight, won't fight, or are more valuable where they are, and putting them down as cowards is going to encompass a good portion of the 1953 readership.

[naraht]

Thanks for some very interesting thoughts! I hope you won't mind a few rambles in response.

TC is a war novel but also very clearly a home front novel, if being slightly unusual in that it is primarily about soldiers and ex-soldiers on the home front. It took me many readings before I noticed how carefully Mary Renault avoided direct descriptions of combat: we don't get Ralph reminiscing about his time in the Navy, apart from encountering Laurie on his ship. Nor do we get Laurie's memories of France. It's as if he and Reg just materialised on the beach at Dunkirk. I wouldn't necessarily class this as a weakness of the story but I suspect Renault was conscious of what she had the knowledge to depict plausibly, and what she didn't.

I almost wonder whether contemporary readers might have found the novel *more* sympathetic to conscientious objectors than modern readers do. Mary Renault clearly (I think) doesn't agree with Andrew's stand but she goes to great pains to make him sympathetic and his viewpoint understandable. Which not everyone would have bothered to do, or felt it was desirable to do.

(It also fairly clearly disentangles conscientious objection from queerness as themes in the novel. I suspect many readers, both straight and queer, would have seen them as more closely linked in practice, which is an interesting thing.)

Disability is of course such a key theme in the novel; I would love to see it discussed more in the secondary literature, both in the context of TC and of WWII generally. You can find a lot more about disability in WWI and I wonder why--something to do with the focus of the literature of the period, or to the fact that it's further in the past?

[oursin]

Disability after WWI - I wonder if this was because drastic improvements in surgery, etc, meant that far more of the forces were coming home, but with disabilities from wounds that previously would have killed them. Also the fact that previously British wars had been largely fought by a small professional army, whereas in WWI a vast percentage of the fighting forces were not professionals and came home to civilian life. So a greater awareness and numbers of charities and rehab projects set up in the aftermath.

One of the books in Olivia Manning's Levant Trilogy has one of the viewpoint characters undergoing physio after being wounded. But I don't think in general the issue has been as much discussed. There's a combination of historical distances and the sources becoming available that affects this, I think.

[kindkit]

Well, but Renault depicts things like exclusively gay-male gatherings that she wouldn't know first-hand either. (I presume she had some gay male friends, but if she was learning about gay male society from them, she could have learned about combat situations from men who had served in combat. In fact some of her gay male friends could probably have told her!) My sense is that TC just doesn't need combat scenes. The hints of traumatic memories may well be more effective than a full-blown Dunkirk scene would have been.

On the subject of disability, I think oursin makes some good points. I'd add that the trench warfare of WWI made combatants proportionately much more likely to be wounded, sooner or later, than combat in WWII. If I remember correctly (I'm too lazy to look it up right now) a much larger number of British combatants, both as a percentage and in absolutely numbers, were wounded in WWII than WWI.

The one kind of injury that does come up now and again in WWII discussions and stories is burns. WWI pilots who were burned tended, not having parachutes, to crash and die, whereas more WWII pilots survived with severe burns. Burn treatments and facial reconstruction made huge leaps in WWII because so many pilots needed it. But I agree, there does seem to be a lot less attention to other kinds of wartime injuries.

[naraht]

Hmm, I think that "knowledge to depict plausibly" and "first-hand knowledge" aren't quite the same thing, though I would argue that the party in TC is probably mostly based on first-hand knowledge. After all, she and Julie lived with a gay couple and moved in gay expat circles in South Africa, and according to Julie those scenes were based on parties they actually went to. Such a party would not have to be 100% free of women in order to provide the model for Alec and Sandy's birthday, after all!

Knowledge of combat, however, would have to have been at second hand. I agree that the novel doesn't have to open with a big, blazing panorama of Dunkirk, but doesn't it seem slightly odd that Laurie never thinks back to his retreat through France, or that Ralph never tells any war stories?