Mainly The Charioteer

The Charioteer, Mary Renault, her neglected modern novels, and historical and literary landscape. I also have an EF Benson sideblog @fredbensonenthusiast. Profile pic Alec and Ralph by Lux. Background painting Ivan Aivazovsky.

[renaultphile]

Mary Renault and Julie Mullard

Tumblr TC best bits and longer posts are on my Wordpress blog celebrating The Charioteer

My TC fics are here

On this blog you will find numerous posts and conversations about Mary Renault, vast amounts of material on The Charioteer, some posts on her other novels, discussions about issues that might have interested her, along with a variety of related and unrelated posting.

For all things E.F. Benson, my sideblog is here.

[renaultphile]

Okay, I have finished Kind Are Her Answers (and, with that, all of Mary's work). I was surprised to find how much I liked the ending - it felt a bit like a psychological thriller.

Though, once again, I loved to see how this story shaped The Charioteer. "How strange, he thought, that he should not have foreseen this most obvious of all possibilities; that even afterward she would still come back. She had loved him, but it had not held her; what else was likely to hold her with more effect? Now that it had happened, he was unastonished, not even much shocked that it should be so soon.'

Change the pronouns and this could be Ralph's thoughts about Laurie in chapter 16. Though we would know Laurie's POV, that Laurie's clarity of the situation and slight role reversal of the beloved/lover is what would 'keep' him.

Oh it's so good to here from you, fellow 'Kind Are Her Answers' reader!! That's exactly how I felt, maybe because the book seemed to be dismissed so much as a 'blip', but I also really liked the ending, and was actually on the edge of my seat with that rather TC-like scenario!

I was so struck by the way she re-purposed many of the themes and some of the set-up for TC. Yes, definitely a version of Ralph and Laurie there, and it actually makes sense that Ralph might well just continue as if nothing had happened, with Laurie a little bewildered by the lack of fuss!

I felt there might be an element of 'coding' with Kit's dilemma about whether to sacrifice his career by getting divorced. It seemed like a scenario that could have many meanings. But I also wonder just a little if it was a love-letter to her father. I read somewhere that she later regretted not reconciling with him and maybe this was an attempt to process an unhappy marriage from the man's point of view. Maybe I'm just a big softy but I did warm to him.

[hoodietttv]

Oh, we're doing florid high lit prose instead of minimalist? Absolutely down, it's been a minute.

[13434052]

Mary Renault, The Charioteer.

[13434052]

Mary Renault, The Charioteer.

[alovelywaytospendanevening]

LA Times: Gore Vidal and Charlton Heston feud over Ben-Hur (1996)

Director William Wyler, screenwriters Christopher Fry and Gore Vidal, and actor Charlton Heston on the set of Ben-Hur (1959)

On March 17, Sunday Calendar published a letter from Charlton Heston in which he said that Gore Vidal’s account of their involvement in the making of the film Ben-Hur “irritates the hell out of me.” Heston was particularly incensed at a statement made by Vidal in the recent documentary film The Celluloid Closet, and quoted in Calendar, in which Vidal said that—without Heston’s knowledge—he had written a scene into the film that implied a homosexual relationship between Heston’s character and another. Here is the Heston letter reprinted and Vidal’s response.

What are we to make of Gore Vidal? He’s earned a respectable reputation as essayist-novelist, but now he’s determined to pass himself off as a screenwriter, particularly of Ben-Hur. Your piece on the portrayal of homosexuals in film demonstrates his obsession. Vidal, over the years, has made more and more extravagant claims of authorship. He was in fact imported for a trial run on a script that needed work. Over three days (recorded in my work journal), he produced a scene of several pages which Wyler rejected after a read-through with Stephen Boyd and me. Vidal left the next day. Vidal’s claim that he slipped in a scene implying a homosexual relationship between the two men insults Willy Wyler and, I have to say, irritates the hell out of me. CHARLTON HESTON Beverly Hills

Vidal’s response:

The deserved success of The Celluloid Closet has set all sorts of odd birds atwitter of which easily the oddest is the spokesperson for the National Rifle Assn. and general flak for the National Review, one Charlton “Chuck” Heston. Over the years, I have told the story of how, faced with a hopeless script for Ben-Hur, I persuaded the producer, Sam Zimbalist (this was an MGM film and the writer worked not with the director but the producer; later the director, in this case William Wyler, weighed in) that the only way one could justify several hours of hatred between two lads—and all those horses—was to establish, without saying so in words, an affair between them as boys; then, when reunited at picture’s start, the Roman, played by Stephen Boyd, wants to pick up where they left off and the Jew, Heston, spurns him. This is the scene that was shot and this is the scene that viewers of The Celluloid Closet watched, with my commentary. Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan wrote that “seeing an appropriate clip makes a strong case for the truth of Vidal’s assertion that Boyd was in on the scheme while Heston was not.”

Now, Chuck, the hell irritated out of him, as he puts it, has sent what looks like a circular letter to a number of newspapers with his latest version of what went on in Rome that bright spring of 1958. Apparently, as Heston wrote, I “was imported for a trial-run on a script that needed work. Over three days (recorded in my work journal) he produced a scene of several pages which Wyler rejected after a read-through with Steve Boyd and me. Vidal left the next day.” Now one does not expect truth to be exactly a shining Grail (I’m slipping back into Ben-Hurese) for a spokesperson of the National Rifle Assn. and the National Review, but downright lying is not . . . well, wise, Chuck, is it?

In 1978 Heston’s “The Actor’s Life” (he never tells us who the eponymous actor is) was quietly published. Entry for April 23: ". . . I met Willy [Wyler] at the airport, as well as Sam Zimbalist and Gore Vidal, to a great accompanying fanfare of press. . . . " I was a contract writer at MGM and had written two films (The Catered Affair and I, Accuse) for Zimbalist. Yet Chuck, in his current letter to the press, says that I am now “determined to pass [my]self off as a screenwriter.” Surely the last thing anyone would want to do, then or now. But I was the screenwriter on the shooting script of Ben-Hur. My deal with Sam was that if I did the picture I’d be let out of my contract.

Sam then hired Christopher Fry, who had never done a film, to take over once I had, in my usual swift way, written what proved to be two-thirds of the script.

April 27: Chuck describes a party at Sam’s for “all the brass,” and an edgy conversation with me, published in an earlier version of his diaries, now cut. May 15: three weeks after my arrival (and I was still on the scene), “Today we rehearsed Vidal’s rewrite of this crucial scene with Messala [Boyd]. Indeed the crucial scene of the whole first half of the story. . . . This version is much better than the script scene” (the famous script that we all arrived with was the work, according to Sam, of S.N. Behrmann and Maxwell Anderson), “and Willy brought its virtues out in his usual manner. . . . " Poor Chuck was spared what Zimbalist and Wyler and I had to say about his astonishing woodenness in a series of readings for us. But then he had been no one’s choice for the film. Newman and Hudson were not available and so Willy brought in Chuck from a western where Chuck had made a convincing villain—guns have always brought roses to his cheeks. It was at about this point that Willy said my thwarted love notion was worth a try, “but don’t tell Chuck because he’ll fall apart.” I was delegated to tell Boyd what the scene’s subtext was; Steve was delighted.

Chuck now adds to his diary entry: “We never shot this scene of Gore’s, or indeed any of the attempts he made on other sequences.” Since Zimbalist was guardian of the pages of the script, no mere actor (or even director) was ever going to know who wrote what. In any case, my “three-day trial run” on the script turns out to have been at least three weeks, according to Chuck’s own journals. By 1995, (“In the Arena”), our memoirist is at it again, rearranging history. In this version, I was “briefly imported for a trial. A tart, embittered man, he seemed an odd choice. . . .” I should note, modestly, that my novel Julian—about the 4th century emperor—has been for many years much read in the Modern Library and at the time that I was helping out Sam in Rome I had a hit play (“Visit to a Small Planet”) running on Broadway, an experience Chuck, as actor much less writer, was never to undergo. As I wrote Paul Bowles, “I am doing a fast rewrite of a mammoth epic called Ben-Hur; I start at the beginning whilst my co-author Christopher Fry, a nice little man who looks rather the way Shakespeare must’ve looked, starts at the end and works towards me. It is predicted that we shall meet during the chariot race, though I rather hope to see him in Pilates’ audience chamber. What fun art is!”

Now let us go backstage and find out what was really going on. Pay attention, Chuck. Just before May 31, as contracted, I departed. Sam gave me the present of a briefcase. On May 31, MGM’s publicity man for the picture, Morgan Hudgens, sent me some pictures of the shooting with the note: “The horses began pounding around The Spina today—quite a sight! The big ‘Cornpone’ . . . " (Chuck, that’s you, I’m afraid), “really threw himself into your ‘first meeting’ scene yesterday. You should have seen those boys embrace! I’m afraid CH is definitely coming off Secunda in that battle of profiles. We miss you.” I had confided to Morgan my problems with Wyler (“Gore, this is Ben-Hur for God’s sake”) and so was pleased that, despite disagreements, he was doing my scene my way.

On 24 July, I got a weary note from Sam. He was pleased with Christopher Fry’s fine-tuning. He offered me a film to write called Never So Few. Then, shortly after, I read that he had had a heart attack and died. Wyler’s slowness, MGM’s corporate hysteria (had Ben-Hur failed, there would have been no studio—in retrospect, no bad thing)—the whole thing was far too much for easily the nicest person I’ve ever dealt with in the movies. As for the film itself, not one silly frame of it was worth Sam’s life. As for you, Chuck, just remember that wise saying, Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.

(Full article)

[perfectwitchcrown]

The context in the novel is tense but I did laugh that “charged relationship teetering between platonic and romantic that you make peace with being one sided because you can’t ever fully confirm the other is gay only for the other to show up two years later both out and w a partner” has been a thing since the 50s. And before, clearly, since Ralph’s calling it “a classic” lol.

[renaultphile]

Ralph's religious code!

Thank you so much @nurseadriansbrother for your fantastic analysis of Ralph’s comment about building up what he was into some kind of religion 💖 

Here is the link

Just commenting here, I had so many thoughts and didn't want to lengthen the thread!!! I have been looking into this topic for a while and also trying to get a better idea of the cultural landscape that informed this book and its readers, and you have pulled all the threads together so beautifully and made me wonder anew at the complexity and nuance of this book!!

I love all of it, but I particularly like the importance of the ‘sex-negative’ indoctrination applying to both sexes.  This reminds me of the comment by Alec Waugh in ‘Public School Life’ that the notion of sexless love being a higher form of love causes problems for young men when they marry and are expected to have sex with their wives!  Something that I think is reflected in all the comments about ‘having to like the girl’ versus ‘only getting along with real bitches’

And this broke my heart “The community he dislikes so much is real, and the idealized world isn’t” I love your parallels with the other ways that Ralph tries to separate his actions as more noble, such as the comparison with Sandy. And I have never made the exact connection with ‘make out’ in the section being reflected in the letter.

And finding something ashore as symbolic……..yes, I'm sold 👀👀

I have been reading about Shackleton, who I think might be a model for Laurie's little flight of fancy about Ralph 'making out' by being a polar explorer, but I always remember that although he was married, by all accounts he did not stay at home for long periods of time!

Thank you and you definitely don’t need to be more concise, this is packed full of little gems!!!!

[renaultphile]

@perfectwitchcrown I preserved another really good post on religion via my blog as the original Tumblr blog has sadly disappeared!

[renaultphile]

Hello! I liked your observation about Ralph in your post about Edmund Gosse’s memoirs. It made me think of this comment of Ralph’s when he is talking about his mother: “Her [italics] parents were Plymouth Brethren”. MR must have had something specific in mind here. From your readings, do you have any insights about this and any other thoughts you’d like to share about Ralph’s upbringing in a “ Christian household”?

Thank you so much for this ask @eclare1000, sorry, it’s a long one! I warmly recommend ‘Father and Son’ in its own right, I loved its compassion, humour and insights into childhood, and for me there are many resonances with Ralph.  We get so little, don’t we?  Just the reference to the cruelty of ‘good women’, the PB reference and the bit about Laurie not being brought up in a ‘Christian home’ which is so bitter and angry.

I feel the emphasis with ‘her parents’ suggests his maternal grandparents are distant in some way, perhaps they cut off his mother when she ‘married out’?   It could mean his mother is no longer PB (doesn’t feel likely though)?  Or, it could mean that his father was PB too, but a convert, not born into the faith.  I suppose it means her upbringing was very strict, and it left her at a loss to cope with something perfectly natural (two pre-pubescent children showing curiosity about their bodies).  So he says ‘She couldn’t help how she felt’, as if she’d been programmed and couldn’t just be humane.  I’m struck by her inability to articulate what she felt, which I think is such a major theme in the book. 

In the Gosse, there is a very strong theme, particularly with his mother, of fatalism and letting God decide, a lack of agency.  I wonder if that plays a part, and that’s why he is so bitter, because she abrogated responsibility.  She failed to recognise perhaps that her religious upbringing was urging a kind of un-Christian cruelty on a helpless child.  Is that why he feels so responsible, because religious faith let him down and he has taken all of it on himself? 

I get the feeling that his father came from a less strict (but still Christian) background but went along with whatever his mother wanted to please her, and did the beating for her and the rather clichéd exhortation to ‘learn a clean life’. 

I also wonder if completely unrealistic expectations were loaded onto Ralph as a young child (another theme in the Gosse), making the crimes of 6-year-old Ralph all the more heinous.  And of course there is a similar fall at 19 – his expulsion being all the more scandalous for his immense prestige (as Laurie puts it).

There are some other resonances for me that are fascinating.  I had already started to wonder about Ralph’s love of language and facility for making up stories and telling lies to get out of trouble.  There are also several references to Laurie thinking he is just making things up about himself to please him!  I wondered about the idea of fiction being a ‘forbidden thing’ in a religious household, and was amazed to discover that Edmund Gosse’s mother believed fiction a ‘sin’ and kept it out of the house – he did not have access to literature for much of his childhood.  I sometimes feel that Ralph might have discovered the joys of telling stories relatively late, and relished their power.

Another thing that fascinates me about the Plymouth Brethren is that they are essentially rebellious – they were formed in defiance of organised religion.  So Ralph’s mother grew up in a ‘rebellious household’ but was indoctrinated with ideas from a young age that she couldn’t properly articulate.  Then she ‘rebelled’ on some level.  For me this ties in with that very contradictory aspect of Ralph, that he is desperate to be part of a community, but he also makes up his own rules.

And related to this, bible-study is the key – PB do not accept intermediaries telling them what to believe.  Gosse describes the way his parents spent hours discussing biblical texts together.  I feel Ralph did this as a child, and when he discovered the Phaedrus, I imagine him reading it with the same fervour, poring over every word looking for a moral code he could live by – working up what he was into a religion.

I just checked that bit again about ‘good women’ and found this: “Suddenly he seemed to remember the text of his earlier sermon” Wow!  Ralph is sermonising, but now he has found a new religion!  PB were big on converting people and in ‘Father and Son’, Gosse refers to being expected to ask strangers he meets if they are saved.  Hitherto I have felt that Ralph is in ‘Head boy’ mode or ‘school debate’ mode when he is arguing so forcefully with Laurie.  But now I am seeing a passionate and fervent preacher.  He is a proselytiser all right.  Perhaps Mary wanted to give one of her most attractive and powerful characters a bit of religious fervour when stating his cause.  After all, why should religious people have the monopoly on the right to be a decent human being?

[renaultphile]

@perfectwitchcrown I don't know if this is what you have in mind, but just reposting a couple of things relating to Ralph and religion

[mademoiselle-red]

[alovelywaytospendanevening]

LARB: A Short, Selective, and Incomplete History of LGBT Publishing

The most famous gay male novels published before 1960 remain Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar (1948, E. P. Dutton) and James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956, Dial Press). Their authors’ later eminence kept the books in print and available to generations of gay boys furtively searching the stacks of their local libraries for anything about homosexuals. There were, however, a few other books by gay writers, albeit closeted, published between 1940 and 1950 in which homosexuality was either a central theme or which featured major homosexual characters. Most prominent were The Fall of Valor (Rhinehart, 1946) by Charles Jackson, best known as the author of The Lost Weekend; The Gallery (Harper & Brothers, 1947) and Lucifer with a Book (Harper & Brothers, 1949) by John Horne Burns; and James Barr’s Quatrefoil (Greenberg, 1950).

In these midcentury novels, the protagonist awakens to his homosexuality, engages in hopeless and/or unrequited love affairs that serve mostly to emphasize the depravity of his desire, and comes to a bitter end. In The Fall of Valor, the protagonist ends up drenched in his own blood and crawling across the floor after having been beaten by the straight man with whom he has fallen in love; in Quatrefoil, the protagonist survives but his lover dies in a plane crash. The Gallery is a collection of short stories, one of which is set in a gay bar in Italy during the American occupation after the war. The story is little more than a sympathetic vignette Burns snuck in perhaps to test the waters for his second novel, Lucifer with a Book, which catalogs the gay goings-on at a private boy’s school. It was roundly condemned; Catholic World alleged that it was “filled with cynical obscenities.” And, of course, famously the protagonist in The City and the Pillar ends up murdering his boyhood crush after being rejected by him, while the gay affair in Giovanni’s Room terminates with the eponymous Giovanni on the executioner’s scaffold.

What gay men related to in these depressing novels were the glimmers of humanity the gay writers were able to slip into their lead characters, whom they depicted as ordinary men rather than as stereotypes of either the screaming queen or sociopathic fag variety. Also, by identifying gay spaces in the books’ settings they signaled to a couple of generations of lonely, isolated men that such spaces existed. Finally, they recognized that gay men were driven not by simple or predatory lust but by the need to love and to be loved. That they were not allowed to find such fulfillment was, the books hinted, not entirely their fault; perhaps, they tentatively suggested, society, too, must bear some responsibility for these ruined lives because of its treatment of homosexuals.

More than a decade later, the publication of two important novels by gay writers showed marginal progress. The protagonist of John Rechy’s City of Night (Grove Press, 1963) was a moody hustler in the mold of James Dean who roamed the gay underworld of late ’50s and early ’60s America. The single man of Christopher Isherwood’s eponymous novel A Single Man (Simon & Schuster, 1964), was a middle-aged English teacher at a Southern California community college whose younger lover of many years has been killed in a car accident while visiting his family to whom he had remained closeted. Both novels were apparently based on autobiographical material, which seems to be a frequent occurrence in early gay literature as the writers were working in a literary void and so were compelled to draw heavily upon their own experiences.

Publication of these two books presaged a shift in attitude about homosexuality, if not by society, then by gay men themselves who would, within a decade, abandon the role of pathetic victim they played in midcentury gay novels and take up the banner of liberationists. This change would also change how they wrote about themselves.

It was in the ’70s that interest in gay writers (and they were mostly gay men) really picked up steam. The most consequential literary developments of the era took place on the coasts. In San Francisco, Armistead Maupin launched a serialized novel published as Tales of the City (1978, Harper & Row), the first of an enormously popular series that chronicled gay and straight San Francisco with equal sympathy and cheerfulness. A little later in the decade, a group of New York writers that dubbed itself the Violet Quill was much more strenuously literary than Maupin. Its members included Edmund White and Andrew Holleran who achieved mainstream publication of novels, including White’s Nocturnes for the King of Naples (1978, St. Martin’s Press) and Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance (1978, William Morrow & Co.). The house organ of the New York gay writers was Christopher Street (1976–1995), a magazine that covered both politics and culture and featured both nonfiction and fiction. Its co-founder, Michael Denneny, would become the best-known and perhaps most influential gay editor of the 1980s and 1990s. That era would become the Golden Age of gay and lesbian publishing was on the horizon. And the terrible and awesome fuse that lit that fire was AIDS, which left, amid losses we still feel acutely today in the absence of nearly an entire generation of gay men, a wealth of fiction, poetry, and prose that made possible the many forking paths through which we would come to contemporary queer literature.

The phenomenal surge of gay and lesbian literature in the 1980s and 1990s, at small presses and big ones, would not have been possible without a reading audience and distribution channels that brought the books to those readers. Lesbian presses benefited from the existence of women’s bookstores and newspapers that started up in the 1970s. They were joined in the 1980s by a chain of independent gay and lesbian bookstores and the explosive growth of the gay and lesbian presses.

In both large and small cities, these gay and lesbian bookstores functioned not simply as retailers but as informal community centers. They provided forums for readings and meetings, and they kept books on their shelves for much longer than other independent bookstores. Gay editor David Groff noted in a 1993 essay in Poets & Writers that the rate of return from bookstores for lesbian and gay trade paperbacks “can be lower than five percent whereas nongay trade paperbacks have return rates of up to seventy percent.”

As with bookstores, there was also an explosive proliferation of gay and lesbian newspapers across the country and, again, this growth was not limited to major coastal cities. In practical terms, that meant that, while a straight, first-time novelist might receive a handful of reviews, a gay or lesbian debut might get dozens from newspapers across the nation that spoke specifically and directly to the writer’s potential audience.

In his Poets & Writers essay, Groff was upbeat about the gay and lesbian boom among New York publishers during that time, attributing it to the emergence of “an ever-growing audience out there eager for the facts, entertainment, stories, education, and self-definition that gay and lesbian books can provide.” Groff pointed out the unique and crucial role books played in a community that otherwise had few or no representations of itself in other cultural platforms: “We don’t really have movies, television, or music to call our own,” he said. “[M]ostly what we have is books. Gay and lesbian books sell so consistently because we need them so urgently.”

The big gay boom did not last. The big publishers were the first to bail out when gay and lesbian books failed to meet their economic expectations. As early as 1993, Groff was firing warning shots. “For all the brouhaha over lesbian and gay book-publishing triumphs, there is still a low ceiling on that success,” he cautioned. “Few hardcovers can exceed sales of 20,000 copies and few promise to assemble a large enough audience to be a lead title for a mainstream publisher, with the attendant publicity and promotion that could attract new queer and straight readers alike.” In a 2020 email, he parted the curtains and showed what had been going on behind the scenes at the big houses. “At the New York houses we were under great pressure: every single book we published that succeeded or failed became an immediate and weighty metric indicating the viability or futility of the entire LGBTQ category,” he explained. “No other genre of book endured that same reflex of dubiousness and dauntedness.”

Denneny was less circumspect. In a conversation after he’d left publishing, he said that as soon as the New York houses realized queer books weren’t the Golden Calf they’d imagined, publishers, many of whom had held their noses as they published these titles, couldn’t dump them fast enough. By the mid-1990s, contracts were being canceled and, more grimly, writers were dying of AIDS. By 2000, the Golden Age was over.

At the beginning of the 21st century, the big publishers and the literary establishment virtually abandoned books by queer writers after the great outpouring of gay and lesbian literature between 1980 and 1995 failed to deliver bottom-line balloons. This queer equivalent of the Harlem Renaissance owed its existence to a robust network of gay and lesbian media and bookstores as well as the tectonic social and cultural shifts ushered in by the AIDS epidemic, which dramatically brought the gay and lesbian community and its stories of suffering and heroism into public consciousness. By the late 1990s, a new generation of drugs had transformed HIV infection from a death sentence to a chronic, but manageable illness (though not for everyone, of course). Simultaneously, the networks of gay and lesbian media and bookstores began to collapse, displaced by the internet, on the one hand, and by big chain bookstores and Amazon on the other. Many of the most important small presses that had been the backbone of queer publishing also disappeared. The result was that fewer queer books were being published.

The advent of easy self-publication and online distribution via platforms like Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing, the emergence of new small queer presses, and a renewed if tokenistic interest in queer writers by the remaining big publishers has opened the floodgates to a fresh stream of LGBTQ books. But more books means greater competition for the attention of an LGBTQ community that also finds itself increasingly represented across other cultural platforms — TV, movies, and most significantly, social media — that to some extent have displaced literature as the community’s main source of self-validation and self-identification. Then, too, there has been a rather striking change in the tone of much queer literature. Historically, queer literature was the literature of the Outsider, a sphere inherently engaged in the political and social questions distinctly associated with homosexuality. Now, with the apparently greater acceptance of queer people, much of the literature being produced — especially by Big Publishing — tends toward the introspective, apolitical, and non-ideological.

As such, the past decade has been both the best and the worst of times for LGBTQ publishing and writers. Authors can now bypass the gatekeeping publishing apparatus completely by producing and marketing professional-looking print copies or ebooks through the self-publishing options available to them on the internet. Many queer writers have taken this option, even as it comes with a number of significant challenges, not least of which is finding a way to stand out amid a crowded marketplace. Between self-publication, publication by the remaining LGBTQ small presses, and publication by the Big Five publishers, it’s probably safe to say there are more LGBTQ books in print at this moment than at any other time in publishing history. This includes a growing body of transgender fiction that encompasses every genre from speculative fiction, literary novels, romance, erotica, and crime fiction.

The sheer volume of all new titles released every year — hundreds of thousands — and the simultaneous balkanization of the reading public to smaller and smaller niches makes it more difficult for queer writers to preach beyond the choir. Preaching to the choir has its advantages of course; it means there is a market of sympathetic and engaged readers. But most writers like to think that, at whatever corner of human experience they begin, there is some universal aspect to their work. In a world of niche markets and marketing, constantly flooded by new titles clamoring for attention, it is harder and harder to break through the noise and reach those readers outside the ambit of a writer’s specific community.

The future of queer publishing, whether from the independent presses or the mainstream publishers, is tied in part to the future of books — are we, as is sometimes said, entering a post-literary world? More crucially, however, the future of queer publishing is inextricably tied to the future of queer self-conception itself. Older gays and lesbians experienced themselves as part of an embattled minority, alternately ignored and demonized by society at large; this was no academic argument — they often bore the stripes to prove it, as well. In the 1950s and 1960s, there were so few cultural accounts of our lives that when we stumbled across a book that provided one, even if it was marred by the obligatory tragic ending, queer readers seized upon it like a Holy Grail, proof that they existed and were not alone. Even later, in the 1980s and 1990s, this enormous need for validation drove gay and lesbian publishing: we needed to tell and to hear stories about and by ourselves, particularly during the AIDS epidemic. Books were not mere escapes, they were manifestos, and writing our lives and experiences was an act of political activism, even if your subject was a gay vampire.

Is this still true? Do younger generations of LGBTQ folk experience themselves as threatened and erased and in need of self-validation? And if they do, will they look for themselves and a better future in books? Or will they find it on their smartphone screens? Or some revolutionary, bio-integrated technology yet to be devised? Or in a shift of cultural consciousness in which gender identity and sexual orientation truly become private and morally neutral aspects of personality? Will writers no longer feel the need to write books with the same polemical passion that drove the writers who created the LGBTQ vast literary culture? Whatever the future brings, one thing is certain: the compulsion to tell stories that arise from the deepest sense of ourselves, however those stories may be told, will not disappear, and foremost among those storytellers will be our queer voices.

Full article: (Part 1) · (Part 2) · (Part 3)

[popofflupine]

The Charioteer (1953)

Explore a hand-picked collection of Pins about The Charioteer (1953) on Pinterest.

My drawing references for the Charioteer! Clothing, settings, faces, kisses etc.

I meant to post this ages ago! It needs an update and I haven't got citations for everything 😶 but hopefully it'll be useful to someone else!

[alovelywaytospendanevening]

The New Yorker (June 1997): "Just Between Cousins"

[Selected letters between Gore Vidal and Louis Auchincloss]

[13434052]

Mary Renault, The Charioteer.

[renaultphile]

i'm glad you say you're enjoying these asks because i've GOT to know your (and anyone else who might be reading this; i'm asking the whole class!!) opinion about what the hell that line about delphi is about. right after laurie literally lifts his hands from his eyes after remembering his boyhood dreams and is faced with the reality of the room, the war, their injuries:

"Life is cruel, he thought; leaving out war and all that wholesale stuff, human life is essentially cruel. Sometimes you can feel a smile. The Greeks felt it. Apollo Loxias at Delphi smiling in the smoke behind the oracle, and saying, “But I don’t mean what you mean.”"

is it about the irony of laurie's dream coming true in a way he didn't ever envision? he got what he dreamt of but not in the romantic idealistic way he dreamed of it. at the party he even gets to go along with ralph when he goes away, but the "quest" is to get supplies for sandy's tantrum after a queer party.

also this scene: "Laurie began to get up, turning himself into a sitting position and catching hold of the chair-arm to pull on. He sat there for a moment, his head beside Ralph’s knees, and this sharp sense of life’s cruelty trembling in him like an arrow that has just struck."

he's suddenly realizing his feelings for ralph? and he feels life's cruelty because of his love for andrew?

also completely way back in the book, but the scene where laurie is cleaning up the bathroom after sandy's suicide attempt and finds ralph's glove, pats it "kindly," and then leaves it, then lies to ralph and says he hasn't seen it... i can't help but feel like that's STRONG foreshadowing for ch.16 and his lie about the call. choosing compassion over the truth.

I had a vague memory of writing something about the delphic oracle reference and I'm just linking to it here as I think some of it is relevant and I went to remind myself, but I have to say, your interpretation about his dreams coming true resonated with me so much here! I've often thought that the moral of the story could be seen as 'never meet your heroes', or 'be careful what you wish for', but yes, I hadn't thought of it exactly in that way. I remember someone saying the party is like a descent into hell but it is a kind of twisted version of all Laurie's fantasies. I love that interpretation, thank you.

But picking up on that theme of getting what you want, but not in the way you wanted it, when I re-read my piece I remembered what happens next - Laurie goes back and kisses Andrew, then he has the erotic dream about Ralph which he can't talk to him about! So again, he is getting what he wished for but everything is misplaced.......

And I love your interpretation of the glove, that is a great example of Laurie protecting Ralph from his feelings of pity. Actually now I think about it, it's also an analogue to Andrew's complaint to Laurie, when he says 'you oughtn't to think of me as someone whose head has to be stuck in a bag'. Again, he decides for Andrew what to hide from him in the name of 'protection'. So interesting......

[adrianholstein]

So, my URL compels me to ask, do you have any more thoughts about The Charioteer you'd like to share?

I have to say that it is perhaps my first time to realize how different queer romance (may I call it this?) and slash could be, especially one written in 1950s. The whole atmosphere is different, cold, humid, sealed into the cruelty of April described in The Waste Land.

Also I really, really like the Classical references popping up here and there, since I am interested in early queer expression. I just chuckled as Laurie called Andrew Saint Sebastian in frustration and oh the Greeks! Typically her style. Ans TC's ending is one of the most poetic scenes I've seen.

My heart squeezed when I thought that both Ralph and Andrew were about to leave Laurie but fortunately that didn't happen. Andrew perhaps would have a harsh time balancing his feelings and religion and I hope that he would manage that. And Ralph, at first sight I thought he was an Achilles figure but obliviously he was too mature and responsible to be Achilles (lol). He acted strong but still had some insecurity (should I considered his feelings towards Andrew expressing his anxiety? He thinks that the platonic relationship between Laurie and Andrew "doesn't count" because it's not sexual)

I'm now going through the early chapters again and have discovered more details I haven't noticed. I think I really should dive into the text and read between lines.

[renaultphile]

I'm so glad you enjoyed it! There is such a wealth of references, but Laurie calling Andrew Saint Sebastien is such a good one. There is so much to discover, happy hunting!

[shadows-on-the-sky]

where can we read beach head? I can't find a copy anywhere

Hey,

You can download the ebook using one of the links provided in this post, or, if you want a physical copy, you can try taking a look at AbeBooks or Biblio. Unfortunately, it seems prices for it have been ballooning lately.

Good luck!