Q. What
initially sparked your interest in Mary Renault?
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. As we strolled about in front of the building,
waiting for the proprietor, 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, then aged thirteen and twelve, and two
girls, then nine and seven) 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 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.
Q. What do you
think would have happened in 1939 if Mary decided to publish her first book
under her real name, instead of a pseudonym?
Mary Renault is, of course, not her real
name. Mary Renault was born Eileen Mary Challans in London in September
1905. She died in 1983 in Cape Town,
South Africa, where she had lived with her partner, Julie Mullard, since
leaving England in 1948.
Nobody ever called Renault ‘Eileen’, and
until she went up to Oxford University, Renault was known to her family and
schoolmates as ‘Molly’. The nickname
suggested someone diminutive and pretty and Irish, the cute little girl her
mother always wanted, but Renault was none of these things, and claimed the
more adult name of ‘Mary’ as she began her studies at St Hughes’ College in
1925. It’s not surprising, having
finally named herself and claimed an identity of her own, that she would retain
‘Mary’ when she chose a pseudonym at the time of the publication of her first
book, The Purposes of Love, in
1939. But why change her surname, her
family name, the name she had inherited, as it were, from her doctor
father?
When she began her medical studies in 1933 Renault
could not have known the extraordinary demands nursing would make on her, but
she must have known that she was choosing a profession that would place her on
a daily basis in close contact with the reality of physical bodies, an experience
quite different from her rather abstract study of literature at St
Hughes’. She must also have known about
the uniform she would be compelled to wear, complicated layers which concealed
individuality and styled, as evident in the required headdress, on the
traditional clothing worn by medieval nuns.
Even the names by which she would be known in the world of English
nursing would emphasize her status as a professional at the same time that they
masked her individuality and minimized her identity as a woman. Within the hospital, she would be known by
her surname alone or as ‘Nurse Challans’; on the wards, doctors, nurses, and
patients would call her merely ‘Sister’.
By becoming a nurse, Renault was dedicating her life to serving others
and would follow a rigid regime of long hours on duty in extremely hierarchical
institutions. She was expected to live
in a cell-like room within the hospital or school, to be available on the wards
or in the surgical theatre during any emergency, and to maintain the decorum
and celibacy her vocation implied.
Nurse Challans, however, was engaging in two
activities her superiors did not imagine: She was finally writing a novel,
based autobiographically on her hospital experiences, and she was falling
passionately in love for the first time--with another female student. When Renault finished her novel in the late
thirties, it seemed practical, even essential for her future as a nurse, to
hide her identity under another surname.
It was likely a romantic impulse rather than any carefully-thought-out
or complex symbolism that lead her to choose the name of a character in a
Renaissance play, although in retrospect it’s tempting to conclude that she
also wanted to claim for herself an identity so different from what her time
and nation expected of her that she might even appear to be French. Later Renault would go further and refuse to stabilize even the pronunciation of her pen name: was it ‘Renault’ in the
continental manner (like, for instance, the car) or ‘Ren-alt’, as most English
people would naturally say it? She left
the pronunciation entirely up to her readers, as if to declare that what she
had written, both in her books and on their title pages, would need to stand on
its own, would need to represent her, would need to stand for her, in all its
ambiguity.
Q. What should feminists and members of the LGBTQ community take away from Mary’s story?
It may be tempting today to criticize Renault
for not being sufficiently radical. Such
criticism seems to me grossly unfair for several reasons. Most obviously, it stems from a failure to
understand the historical context which shaped Renault as a young woman coming
to maturity in pre-war England and which influenced her reading public at least
into the 1970s. Such criticism also
ignores Renault's rejection of any collective identity—for example, as a
lesbian, but also as a woman, as a white South African, and as a progressive or
a conservative within the culture of the Britain of her youth or the South
Africa of her maturity—a rejection that can be understood not so much as naive
and conventional but as sophisticated and even radical from a queer perspective
that argues that ‘identity categories tend to be instruments of regulatory
regimes, whether as the normalizing categories of oppressive structures or as
the rallying points for a liberatory contestation of that very oppression.’
Obversely, one might be tempted to pardon
Renault for her bisexual position, treating her as either naïve or ignorant,
caught inextricably in her own time and place, deprived of the knowledge and
insights available to us as a result of recent lesbian and feminist research
and theory. Such patronizing would be, I
feel, as unfair as it is unsubstantiated by the evidence not only of Renault’s
writing but of her own life. In her
afterward, written at the end of her life, to the Virago edition of The Friendly Young Ladies, Renault was
in fact pushed to defend her position. I
think we must take her at her word when she wrote, ‘I have sometimes been asked
whether I would have written this book more explicitly in a more permissive
decade. No; I have always been as
explicit as I wanted to be.’ Addressing
the same question more specifically in a letter to me in 1996, Julie (Renault’s
partner) would declare that the matter of sexual orientation and identity was
both more complicated and simpler than any explicit or popular label. Despite what their union may have looked like
to others, despite what it ‘approximated’ in living arrangements, commitment
and depth of feeling, there was nothing formal about their bond to each
other. Julie even went so far as to
declare, ‘we hadn’t planned to remain friends or whatever we call ourselves.’ Both Renault and Julie would have scoffed at
the idea that their partnership was in any traditional sense a ‘marriage’,
although what it was remained unnamed, even unnameable. Years later, however, they agreed that they
never would have left each other. In
Julie’s words, it ‘just seemed we liked each other best.’
Q. What do you
think artists today would think of Mary’s belief that “art should be not
without political implications, but above and beyond politics” (193).
Feminists
now recognize that the personal is political. All of Renault’s work is political
in this deeper and larger sense. She was
in no way writing tracts for or against any particular political candidate or
party platform or specific law, but she would have contended that her work
always engaged with ethical issues.
Insomuch as ethical issues are or ought to be at the core of how people
govern themselves and of what people expect from themselves and their society,
Renault’s work is always engaged, always political… whether or not she was
comfortable using the term.
Q. Are you
currently working on any new books or projects?
I
recently published my own historical novel, Transgressions,
about two writers, the English poet Richard Aldington and the bisexual American
poet Hilda Doolittle, whose passion was challenged by the forces of war and
their own bohemian views of art and marriage. With their circle of friends who
included Ezra Pound and D.H. Lawrence, Richard and Hilda rebelled against
convention both in their art and in their personal lives.
I am
now working on another biography: a life of my father, the Russian-American
psychoanalyst Gregory Zilboorg, from his birth as a Jew in Czarist Russia in 1890 through his death
in New York City in 1959. He served as
secretary to the Minister of Labor in Kerensky’s revolutionary government and
as a doctor at the front during World War I before escaping to America in
1919. After analysis in Berlin in the
late 1920s, he became a prominent psychoanalyst and his patients included
wealthy and artistic figures, among them Marshall Field III, George Gershwin,
Kay Swift, Moss Hart, Lillian Hellman and Thomas Merton as well as members of
the Warburg and de Menil Families. He joined the Quakers in 1922, but turned
increasingly towards more traditional Christianity and finally converted to
Catholicism in 1954. He wrote
extensively and his works include a history of psychiatry, for which he is still
known, while arguing in his later work that there was no incompatibility
between psychoanalysis and religion.
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