The Bad Boy of Athens

Classics from the Greeks to Game of Thrones

Daniel Mendelsohn

• Publisher: William Collins
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780007545162
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

‘Mendelsohn takes the classical costumes off figures like Virgil and Sappho, Homer and Horace … He writes about things so clearly they come to feel like some of the most important things you have ever been told.’ Sebastian Barry

The American Boy

‘WHOEVER TOLD YOU I’D SEND YOU A “FORM LETTER”?’

One spring day in 1976, when I was fifteen years old and couldn’t keep my secret any longer, I went into the bedroom I shared with my older brother, sat down at the little oak desk we did our homework on, and began an anguished letter to a total stranger who lived on the other side of the world. We lived on Long Island, in one of twelve identical ‘splanches’ – split-ranch houses – that lined a street in a suburb that had, until relatively recently, been a potato farm. It was very flat. The stranger to whom I wrote that day lived in South Africa, a fact that I had gleaned from the brief bio under the author photograph on her book jackets, which showed a middle-aged woman with a pleasant face and tightly coiled grey hair, her eyes narrowed and crinkling at the corners: perhaps humorously, perhaps simply against the sun. I had got her street address from the Who’s Who in our school library, where I often spent recess, bent over an encyclopedia entry that I particularly liked, about the Parthenon. Over a grainy black-and-white photo of the ruin as it appears today you could flip a colour transparency of how the building had looked in ancient times, gaudy with red and blue paint and gilding. I would sit there, day after day, contentedly toggling between the drab present and the richly hued past.

For the letter I wrote that day, I used the ‘good’ onionskin paper, anxiously feeding each sheet between the rollers of a black cast-iron Underwood typewriter that had been salvaged from my grandfather’s braid-and-trimmings factory in the city. I used it to type up school reports and term papers and, when nobody was around, short stories and poems and novels that I never showed to anyone – single-spaced pages so shaming to me that even when I hid them in the secret compartment under a drawer in the oak cabinet across from my bed (where I also hid certain other things: a real ancient Egyptian amulet I’d got as a bar-mitzvah gift from a shrewd godparent, a half-completed sketch I’d made of a boy who sat in front of me in English class) I imagined that they gave off some kind of radiation, a telltale glow that might betray the nature of the feelings I was writing about.

Now I was putting those feelings onto these translucent sheets, which protested with a faint crackle every time I advanced the carriage. When I was finished, I put the letter into the lightweight airmail envelope on which I’d typed the address: Delos, Glen Beach, Camps Bay, Cape 8001 South Africa. I didn’t make a copy of what I wrote that day, but I must have confided a fear that my correspondent would reply to my effusions with a form letter, because when her answer came, a few weeks later, typed on a pale-blue aerogram – the first of many that would find me over the next eight years – it began, ‘I wonder whoever told you I’d send you a “form letter” if you wrote to me. Are there really writers who do that?’

It was a question I didn’t know how to answer, since she was the only writer I’d ever tried to contact. Who else would I write to? In those days, I had two obsessions – ancient Greece and other boys – and she was, I felt, responsible for both.

The author to whom I wrote that day, Mary Renault, had two discrete and enthusiastic audiences; although I didn’t know it at the time, they neatly mirrored my twin obsessions. The first, and larger, consisted of admirers of her historical fiction. The second consisted of gay men.

Between 1956 and 1981, Renault published a number of critically acclaimed and bestselling fictional evocations of Greek antiquity. Like the works of Marguerite Yourcenar (Memoirs of Hadrian) and Robert Graves (I, Claudius), authors to whom she was compared, Renault’s novels were often cast as first-person narratives of real or invented figures from myth and history – a technique that efficiently drew modern readers into exotic ancient milieus. The best known and most commercially successful were The Last of the Wine (1956), which takes the form of a memoir by a young member of Socrates’ circle, through whose eyes we witness the decline of Athens in the last part of the Peloponnesian War; The King Must Die (1958), a novelization of the early life of Theseus, the legendary Athenian king who defeated the Minotaur; and a trilogy of novels about Alexander the Great – Fire from Heaven (1969), The Persian Boy (1972), and Funeral Games (1981).

Renault, who was born in London in 1905 – she emigrated to South Africa after the Second World War – had published a number of crisply intelligent contemporary love stories between the late thirties and the early fifties; to her meticulously researched recreations of the past in the later, Greek-themed books she was able to bring the emotional insight and moral seriousness you expect from any good novelist. Many reviewers appreciated the way she reanimated both myth and history by means of ingenious psychological touches. (She once said that the Theseus book didn’t gel until she had the idea of making the mythical over-achiever diminutive in stature: he’s a legendary hero, but also just a boy with something to prove.) Patrick O’Brian, the author of Master and Commander, was an admirer; he dedicated the fourth Aubrey-Maturin book to her, with the inscription ‘An owl to Athens’ – the ancient Greek version of ‘coals to Newcastle’. Academic classicists were also enthusiastic. One eminent Oxford don told an eager amateur that to get a sense of what ancient Greece was really like one had only to read Renault – ‘Renault every time.’ (‘That really bucks me up,’ she exclaimed, when this remark was reported to her during her final illness.) The combination of historical precision, literary texture, and epic sweep won Renault a large public, particularly in the United States; her books, which have been translated into some twenty languages, have sold millions of copies in English alone.

One of those copies was a thick Eagle Books paperback of Fire from Heaven that was stuffed into a bookcase in our downstairs playroom, next to the black leather recliner. I read it when I was twelve, and I was hooked. Alexander the Great was my first serious crush.

It was my father who put the book in my hands. A mathematician who worked for an aerospace corporation, he had been a Latin whiz in high school and sometimes enjoyed thinking of himself as a lapsed classicist. When he gave me the paperback, I looked at the cover and frowned. The illustration, of a blond young Greek holding a shield aloft, wasn’t very convincing; I thought he looked a lot like the boy who lived across the street, who had once taken a bunch of us waterskiing for his birthday. My dad said, ‘I think you should give this a try,’ averting his eyes slightly, in the way he had. Forty years later, I wonder how much he’d already guessed, and just what he was trying to accomplish.

Fire from Heaven traces Alexander’s childhood and youth, ending with his accession to the throne, at the age of twenty. I finished it in a couple of days. The next weekend, I went to the public library and checked out the sequel, The Persian Boy, which had just been published. It views Alexander’s conquest of Persia and his nascent dream of forming a vast Eurasian empire from an unexpected angle: the book is narrated by a historical figure called Bagoas, a beautiful eunuch who had been the pleasure boy of the defeated Persian emperor Darius and who later became Alexander’s lover, too. I read The Persian Boy in a day and a half. Then I reread both books. Then, after taking my dad’s copy of Fire from Heaven upstairs and placing it inside the oak cabinet, I got my mother to take me to the B. Daltons bookstore in the Walt Whitman Mall, in Huntington, where, for a dollar ninety-five, I bought my own Bantam paperback of The Persian Boy. Its cover featured, in miniature, the haunting image that appeared on the hardback edition from the library: a Michelangelo drawing, in dusty-red chalk, of an epicene Oriental youth in three-quarter profile, wearing a headdress and earrings. Whenever someone mentions ‘1973’, or ‘junior high school’, this small, delicate, reddish face is what I see in my mind’s eye.

My fascination with these books had little to do with their canny evocations of Greek history, the persuasiveness of which I couldn’t appreciate until years later. An important narrative thread in each novel is a story of awakening young love – homosexual love. In Fire from Heaven, Renault sympathetically imagines the awkward beginnings of the relationship between Alexander and Hephaistion, a Macedonian of high birth who, the evidence strongly suggests, was his lover. In The Persian Boy, Bagoas, sold into slavery at ten, already world-weary at sixteen, finds himself drawn to Alexander, who has suddenly become his master as well as the master of the known world. In both novels, arduously achieved seductions give the narratives a sexy charge: Renault makes Alexander the aloof object of the longings of the other, more highly sexed characters, Hephaistion and Bagoas, who must figure out how to seduce him.

Most seductive of all to me was the young characters’ yearning to love and be loved totally. ‘Say that you love me best,’ Bagoas dreams in The Persian Boy; ‘I love you … You mean more to me than anything,’ Hephaistion exclaims in Fire from Heaven; ‘Do you love me best?’ Alexander asks in the latter novel’s opening scene. (These expressions of deep emotional need run like a refrain through Renault’s contemporary novels as well.) As it happens, ‘longing’ – in Greek, pothos – has, since ancient times, been a key word in the Alexander narrative. In a history of Alexander’s campaigns written by the second-century-AD historian Arrian, pothos recurs to describe the inchoate craving that drove Alexander – far more insistently than any mere lust for conquest or renown. Renault clearly felt the pull of all this longing, too: in addition to the three Alexander novels, she wrote a psychologically oriented biography, The Nature of Alexander.

Reading Renault’s books, I felt a shock of recognition. The silent watching of other boys, the endless strategizing about how to get their attention, the fantasies of finding a boy to love, and be loved by, ‘best’: all this was agonizingly familiar. I knew something about pothos, and thought of the humiliating lengths to which it could drive me – the memorizing of certain boys’ class schedules or bus routes, the covert shuffling of locker assignments. I was astonished, halfway through Fire from Heaven, to find that this kind of thing had always been happening. Until that moment, I had never seen my secret feelings reflected anywhere. Pop music meant nothing to me, since all the songs were about boys wanting girls or girls wanting boys; neither did the YA novels I’d read, for the same reason. Television was a desert. (Will & Grace was twenty-five years in the future.) Now, in a novel about people from another place and time, it was as if I had found a picture of myself.

There’s a scene in The Persian Boy in which Bagoas realizes that he’s in love with Alexander; in the slightly high style Renault developed as a vehicle to convey Bagoas’ Oriental provenance, she describes this moment as (I now realize) a kind of internal coming out – a moment when, for the first time, a young person understands the nature of his own feelings:

The living chick in the shell has known no other world. Through the wall comes a whiteness, but he does not know it is light. Yet he taps at the white wall, not knowing why. Lightning strikes his heart; the shell breaks open.

Reading Fire from Heaven and The Persian Boy was such a moment for me. Lightning had struck, the shell lay broken open. I had begun to understand what I was and what I wanted; and I knew that I wasn’t alone.

‘IT’S NOT WHO YOU ARE, IT’S WHAT YOU DO WITH IT’

Renault was herself a lesbian, the elder daughter of a doctor and a primly conventional housewife. It was not a happy home. Both the contemporary and the Greek novels feature unsettling depictions of bad marriages and, particularly, of nightmarishly passive-aggressive wives and mothers. Renault’s mother had clearly hoped for a ‘nice’ girl instead of the unruly tomboy she got, and preferred Mary’s younger sister. (Decades after I first encountered Renault’s books, it occurred to me that all this could well be the source of the ‘love me best’ motif that recurs so often in her work.) In later life, the author made no bones about having wished she’d been born a boy. Her first-person narrators are always men.

Indeed, it’s possible to see in her lifelong fascination with dashing male heroes – Alexander the Great above all – an unusually intense authorial projection. In a letter to a friend, Renault recalled admiring the head of a statue of the Macedonian conqueror, which had given her an ‘almost physical sense of the presence of Alexander like a blazing sun below the horizon, not yet quenching the stars but already paling them … His face has haunted me for years.’ David Sweetman, in his Mary Renault: A Biography (1993), referred to Fire from Heaven as ‘a love letter to the boy hero’. It’s no accident that her very first book, written when she was eight, was a cowboy novel. From the start, she seems to have been searching for an ideal boy protagonist, a fictional reflection of an inner identity. In all her work, boyishness is an unequivocally positive quality – even, or perhaps especially, in women.

Although Renault was entranced by the Greeks from an early age – by the time she finished high school, she had devoured all of Plato – at St Hugh’s, a women’s college at Oxford, she studied English. After taking her degree, she decided against teaching, one conventional route for unmarried, educated middle-class women, and instead trained as a nurse; her first three novels, published during the war years, were written during her off-hours from clinics and hospitals. In 1934, she met Julie Mullard, a vivacious young nurse who would be her life partner for nearly fifty years, until Renault’s death. In a 1982 BBC documentary, the two come off as unpretentious and suspicious of self-dramatizing fuss.

The couple stayed in England during the war, but after Renault won the hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar MGM prize for Return to Night, a 1947 novel about a woman doctor in love with a handsome, troubled, much younger actor, she became financially independent. (‘You’re the best of all … I love you. Better than anyone,’ the doctor tells her lover in the novel’s final pages.) They emigrated to South Africa almost on a whim, after reading travel advertisements following a particularly grim post-war winter. It was in Africa that Renault wrote the last of her contemporary novels. Soon after, she turned to the Greeks.

As she later told the story, the decision to start setting her novels in ancient Greece began with a question rooted in her early reading of Plato. During a pleasure cruise that she and Mullard took up the east coast of Africa, Renault recalled, she got to thinking about the Greek historian Xenophon – a stolid, less intellectually adventurous fellow-student of Plato’s in Socrates’ circle, who later became famous for the military exploits he recounted in his Anabasis – and began to wonder what the members of that circle might actually have been like, as people. The product of her inspiration was The Last of the Wine.

Toward the end of her life, Renault wrote that the novel was ‘the best thing I had ever done’. It’s not hard to see why she thought so. A shrewdly unsentimental historical portrait of Athens at the beginning of its moral and political decline, it is enlivened by a love story between two of Socrates’ students and deepened by a surprisingly vivid recreation of Socrates’ philosophical dialogues as, well, dialogue. There are rich and nuanced cameos of historical characters (not least, Socrates himself) and grand set pieces, all rendered with exacting fidelity to the original sources. Renault fans like to cite her stirring description of the great Athenian fleet’s departure for its invasion of Sicily – a misguided campaign that ended in disaster.

And, perhaps better than any other of the Greek novels, The Last of the Wine demonstrates how Renault used subtle but telling touches to persuade you of the Greekness of her characters and settings. Classical Greek tends to be loaded with participles and relative clauses; Renault reproduced these tics. (‘He, hearing that a youth called Philon, with whom he was in love, had been taken sick, went at once to him; meeting, I have been told, not only the slaves but the boy’s own sister, running the other way.’) She also used ‘k’ rather than the more usual Latin ‘c’ in her transliterations of proper names – Kleopatra, Sokrates – which gives her pages just the right, spiky Greek look. As a result of this minute attention to stylistic detail, the novels can give the impression of having been translated from some lost Greek original.

It’s possible to see Renault’s shift from the present to the past as motivated by something other than intellectual curiosity. Setting a novel in fifth-century-BC Athens allowed her to write about homosexuality as natural. In The Last of the Wine, the narrator muses on the abnormality of Xenophon’s apparently exclusive heterosexuality: ‘Sometimes indeed I asked myself whether he lacked the capacity for loving men at all; but I liked him too well to offend him by such a question.’

The hinge that connects her earlier works, love stories in which intelligent people – doctors, nurses, writers, actors – struggle with various emotional conundrums, and the later, historical fiction, in which the fact of love between men, at least, is no conundrum at all, is a novel called The Charioteer. Published in 1953, it is set, despite its classical-sounding title, during the Second World War, and wrestles with the issue of ‘Greek love’. Older gay men can recall that, in the fifties and sixties, to walk into a bar with a copy of this book was a way of signalling that you were gay. Today, the book is referred to as a ‘gay classic’.

I finished reading The Charioteer for the first time on 28 December 1974, when I was fourteen. I know the date because I recorded it in my diary. The man who placed it in my hands was a music teacher, around my ...