The Charioteer (3*)

I've been an avid reader of gay fiction since purchasing a paperback edition of The Lord Won't Mind by Gordon Merrick at a mall bookstore in El Paso before leaving for college. Somehow this World War II novel by Mary Renault, published the year of my birth, had escaped my attention until now, although I was aware that her popular and critically-well received trilogy about Alexander the Great addressed his bisexuality.

The prose style of the book put me off at first.  Although evocatively written and sharply observed about the London blackout, I often couldn't make head nor tail of what was going on, as if Renault were deliberately obfuscating her theme because of a climate in the 1950s that made it impossible for either Gore Vidal or James Baldwin to write explicitly about the love that dares not speak its name.  But as I read on, it became clear that she had adopted reader confusion as a narrative strategy, perhaps as a reflection of her characters' states of minds.  They include two wounded soldiers, former schoolmates, and a Quaker hospital orderly and mostly reviled conscientious objector, who form a melodramatic love triangle.

If I had read The Charioteer in  my youth, when I feared a life of ending up a lonely alcoholic, listening to "Judy at Carnegie Hall," I might have responded quite positively to a book that by now feels absolutely abhorrent.  Renault idealizes Laurie and Ralph, particularly in contrast to the other gay characters who are drawn primarily as mincing, immoral caricatures.  I recall feeling just like Laurie when he attends his first gay party, recoiling from the scene and falling in love with Ralph because he conforms to an idea of masculinity that enables him to stay comfortably in the closet.

Andrew, the Quaker, nearly keeps the men apart because Laurie has begun a clandestine friendship with him during his convalescence.  He insists to Ralph, who's several years older and quite a bit more jaded, that Andrew is too innocent to be seduced.

It would spoil everything for him.  He would never do anything about it, and —well, you see, he—he’s an affectionate sort of boy.  He’s gone through life so far being fond of one person after another an it always it seems always to have made him happy.  Knowing would poison all that for him, it would never be the same.

Poppycock!  Renault gives voice to even worse internal homophobia when Laurie soothes a gay physician overwhelmed by his medical responsibilities after a nighttime bombing raid:

“You’ll be all right, because you’re more a doctor than you’re a queer.”

The same doctor comforts Laurie in turn with this assessment of Ralph's character who goes missing briefly after Laurie has been victimized by Ralph's former lover:

Unlike so many of our fraternity, he’s no good at ducking out.  It was his doing in this sense, that he was the link.  He let in the jungle.  About one queer in a thousand has the guts to accept that sort of responsibility. 

And yet: I found myself sobbing at the denouement which skillfully invokes the Greek myth that gives the novel its title.  It presages the classical setting of her future novels which also camouflage her contemporary prejudices.  I'll let Noel Coward have the last word:

I wish she'd stick to recreating the glory that was Greece and not fuck about with dear old modern homos.