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The Masks of Mary Renault: a Literary Biography

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The Masks of Mary Renault: a Literary Biography The Masks of Mary Renault THE MASKS OF Mary Renault A Literary Biography Caroline Zilboorg University of Missouri Press Columbia and London Copyright © 2001 by The Curators of the University of Missouri University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65201 Printed and bound in the United States of America All rights reserved 54321 0504030201 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publications Data Zilboorg, Caroline. The masks of Mary Renault : a literary biography / Caroline Zilboorg. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8262-1322-7 (alk. paper) 1. Renault, Mary. 2. Homosexuality and literature—History—20th century. 3. Women novelists, English—20th century—Biography. 4. Lesbians—Great Britain—Biography. 5. Lesbians—South Africa—Biography I. Title. PR6035.E55 Z99 2001 823'.912—dc21 [B] 00-066602 ⅜ϱ ™ This paper meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48, 1984. Designer: Stephanie Foley Typesetter: BOOKCOMP, Inc. Printer and binder: Thomson-Shore, Inc. Typefaces: Franklin Gothic and Minion Frontispiece: Mary Renault in Durban, 1955. Photo courtesy of Julie Mullard. All photographs reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Ltd., London, on behalf of The Estate of Mary Renault Copyright © The Estate of Mary Renault. For Austin, Toby, Elodie, and Miranda contents Preface ix Acknowledgments xv one Formative Years 1 two Casting About 23 three The Body 48 four War 76 five Leave-Taking 101 six The Greeks 133 seven Politics 163 eight Art 184 nine Women 210 Bibliography 243 Index 255 preface In the process of writing this book, I have often been asked how I came to choose my subject. Most people with whom I discuss it recognize Mary Renault as the author of historical novels about the classical world; many confess to remembering a title or two; and some vividly recall The Last of the Wine, her first “Greek” novel, published in 1956, or The King Must Die, the first of her two books about the mythical Theseus, or her sweeping trilogy about Alexander the Great. I was drawn to her by none of these. Indeed, I dimly recall looking at The King Must Die in my school library and deciding that it was about experience so distant from my own that I made another choice. Then, after a summer of European travel in 1992, my family and I headed to Berlin for eight days in a pension on Knesebeck Strasse. We arrived early on a sunny August afternoon, but we found the doors locked and no one at home.Aswestrolledaboutinfrontofthebuilding,waitingfortheproprietor,I perused the display tables under the awning of a nearby bookshop, discovering among the secondhand volumes an alluring paperback copy of The Charioteer. The trove of books we had brought with us was nearly completely read, and I was very tempted by this one, even at six Deutschmarks. My children (two boys,thenagedthirteenandtwelve,andtwogirls,thennineandseven)needed to use the lavatory, so we wandered into the shop, were directed through and out into a nineteenth-century courtyard, to a small room on the left. I had seen the saleswoman raise her eyebrows at my request, but I was used to that: Any mother with four young children is used to such looks—there seem so many of us. When we returned to the shop, however, my husband beckoned me outside into the street. He was astonished; he had found a book he had long been seeking, Käte Kollwitz’s Tagebucher, but when he took it up to the ix x Preface counter to pay, he was told that he could not buy it: the shop was for “women only.” I should have guessed from its name: Lilith. Leaving my boys to wait with my husband, I went back in to purchase The Charioteer, for I was now fascinated. The cover featured a pastel illustration of a gentle young man with auburn hair. Dressed in a khaki uniform, he looked down and off to the left, while behind him a crutch was propped. The back cover advertised the story as a “moving and sensitive portrayal of a modern homosexual relationship.” I had thought Renault only wrote about great men in the ancient world. What was this “modern” novel about the Second World War? And what was a book about a homosexual man doing in a lesbian bookshop? What, in fact, was Mary Renault doing there? After hours of touring Berlin, I read The Charioteer late into the night over the next few days. It is a wonderful novel, and I realized by the end that it was, in complex ways I did not then understand, related to the Greek novels advertised inside as “Other titles by the same author.” I had no idea until several months later that this was the last book she would set in twentieth- century England, but I already felt that, when I finished the project I was then working on, I wanted to write something on Mary Renault. Renault wrote six successful novels with contemporary settings before turning in the 1950s to the historical fiction with meticulously researched classical backgrounds for which she continues to be well known. Renault’s writing both obscured her life and allowed her to explore issues vital to her—among them war, peace, heroism, career and vocation, women’s roles, sexual expression, and both female and male homosexuality and bisexuality. In this biography I explore Renault’s identity as a gifted writer and a sexual woman in a society in which neither of these identities was clear or easy. The shift in her writing from contemporary to Greek situations divides her work in a way that may be useful if simplistic, but certainly the classical settings allowed her to mask material too explosive to deal with directly while simultaneously giving her an “academic” freedom to write about her subjects with both personal and critical safety. Renault’s reception also complicates an understanding of her achievement, for she has a special status within the academic community where she is both widely read and little written about; she is “popular” with a sophisticated audience, yet often not taken seriously as a consummate artist. One reason for her reputation is her choice of the genre of historical fiction, generally perceived as a limiting form, neither history nor fiction; another reason must certainly be her femaleness. Renault’s interest in Preface xi sexuality and specifically in homosexuality and bisexuality, in fluid gender roles and identities further contributed to her marginalization—yet these very interests, particularly today, warrant a reevaluation of her work and a rereading of all of her writing. From the very beginning of her literary career, Renault engaged with questions about what constitutes homosexual identity and the meaning of same-sex love or same-sex sex acts or desire (or, for that matter, the meaning of opposite-sex love or sex acts or desire)—just the sorts of issues now receiving attention from feminist, lesbian, gay, and queer theorists.1 Renault’s own views derive from a predominantly constructionist position, which is at once conservative (that is, shaped by Freudian notions current in the 1930s through the 1950s) and radical, based on her own experiences of both heterosexual and lesbian desire and on her historical and intercultural awareness that same-sex desire and same-sex sex acts have different meanings at different times and in different places. Of course, as Renault seems well aware, heterosexuality is as much a construct as homosexuality, and both are equally dependent on changing cultural models; both categories have histories and are arbitrary and contingent. Renault is, in fact, concerned to demonstrate that heterosexuality as well as homosexuality needs to be “denaturalized”— that is, contextualized and historicized—rather than assumed as natural, while she presents homosexuality as both a more or less stable identity (a minoritizing view) and a general, more or less stable if not often realized tendency (a universalizing view). Gender is also an important issue for Renault; indeed, her understanding of what she presents in her work as a wide spectrum of sexualities has its source in her awareness of gender and its performative dimensions. Renault’s writing offers eloquent evidence for Jagose’s observation that many of the insights and hopes associated with queer theory at the end of the twentieth century have long histories,2 while Renault’s subjects and themes have more in common with queer understandings of sexuality than with the progressive homophile movements and thinking of her youth and early maturity or even with the “gay liberationist” movements and theories of the 1970s and 1980s. A critique of gender itself seems implicit in her fiction, while the denaturalization of gender in her attention to human sexualities suggests a stance not merely liberationist but queer. 1. See, for example, Annamarie Jagose’s historical survey of these issues in Queer Theory. 2. Ibid., 43. xii Preface Because she refuses to naturalize the concept of gender, Renault’s novels implicitly challenge many of the conclusions—especially those concerning male homosexuality and lesbian feminism—that Adrienne Rich offers in her famous essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” Rather, Renault’s writing reveals affinities with the sort of thinking about sexuality and gender (as well as about power, class, race, and love) that underlies Monique Wittig’s work. For example, Wittig’s arguments destabilize the presumption of gender central to Rich’s analysis and conclude that “In a society in which men do not oppress women, and sexual expression is allowed to follow feelings, the categories of homosexuality and heterosexuality would disappear.” Theorists such as Judith Butler and Diana Fuss have criticized such thinking, while Rich, committed to generating political action, has gone so far as to characterize Wittig’s position as “a liberal leap across the tasks and struggles of the here and now,” words that might well—although not necessarily negatively— apply to the attitudes Renault develops in her contemporary as well as in her historical fiction.3 Despite a lifelong partnership with a woman, Renault refused to use the term lesbian to characterize either herself or her relationship.
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