Friendly Young Ladies (41 page)

More importantly, Renault explores here the issues of sexuality that were preoccupying her personally while she was composing
The Friendly Young Ladies
. Like Leo, who has been in a lesbian relationship with Helen for seven years, Mary had been involved with Julie Mullard for about the same length of time in the early 1940s when she wrote this novel. Their bisexuality—both Julie and Mary had numerous relationships with men during the first fourteen years of their partnership—is reflected in both Leo and Helen. In Dr. Peter Bracknell, Mary Renault even recreated a man who had been one of her lovers at the time she began
The Friendly Young Ladies
, Dr. Robbie Wilson. And just as a heterosexual attraction has a dire effect on Renault’s fictional lesbian couple, the heterosexual affairs in which she and Julie engaged during their early years together sometimes posed a serious threat to their lesbian relationship. One senses that in this novel Mary Renault was working out crucial questions that she had about her own sexuality as well as Julie Mullard’s.

The real-life lesbian couple ultimately fared much better than their fictional counterparts. In 1948, Mary and Julie left England for South Africa, where they lived together, monogamously, until Mary’s death in 1983. In Renault’s 1983 afterword (see p. 281), written shortly before her death, she appears to regret not having given her fictional lesbian couple a happier ending: She recognizes as a serious flaw in
The Friendly Young Ladies
what she calls the “silliness” of the conclusion, the ostensible removal of Leo from a “domestic life hitherto so well arranged”—a household that she describes early in the novel as manifesting the most comfortable aspects of a marriage: “warm, … permanent, settled, a home … [that is] secure.” Yet considering English censorship laws during the 1940s, it would have been as impossible for Renault to permit her fictional lesbian couple permanent domestic happiness as it would have been for her to be more explicit about their sexual life together.

With regard to the latter point, in this same afterword—written originally for Virago, a British feminist publisher whose 1980s lists included contemporary lesbian novels that minced no words about sex—Renault declares, somewhat defensively, “I have always been as explicit as I wanted to be. … Inch-by-inch physical descriptions are the ketchup of the literary cuisine, only required by the insipid dish or by the diner without a palate.” That is, it was not the censors that kept her from writing hot love scenes between the two women in the 1940s, Renault insists, but rather her artistic restraint.

In the more naïve times that preceded the gay movement of the later twentieth century, Renault’s reticence in presenting the nature of the relationship between Leo and Helen actually baffled critics, who seemed to have little idea what the book was about. The reviewer for the
Spectator
, for instance, admitted, “I could not quite make out what was up with Leonora.” The slightly more astute reviewer for the
New Statesman and Nation
appeared irked by what he considered Renault’s excessive subtlety, complaining, “One cannot even tell precisely how friendly the young ladies have been to each other.”
²
But the fact is, Renault was as explicit about the relations between her lesbian lovers as she possibly could have been in her day. Indeed, even the title
The Friendly Young Ladies
appeared too risqué for her American publisher: It was changed to the much-less provocative
The Middle Mist
when the book came out in this country in 1945, because the William Morrow Company worried about how the possibly homosexual connotation of the original title might be received.
³

Considering the climate of these years, had Renault been less subtle about the relations between her lesbian lovers surely her book would have been threatened by a fate similar to that of Radclyffe Hall’s
The Well of Loneliness.
Hall’s novel, which was published in 1928, was banned in England for the next four decades. As tame and even timid as it may seem by contemporary standards,
The Well of Loneliness
presented lesbianism with a clarity that deeply shocked and offended the average English reader of Renault’s generation.

But Renault could never have written a book like
The Well of Loneliness
, even had she not been constrained by realistic fears of censorship. She read it ten years after its publication, while she and Julie were vacationing in more-liberal France, where the book had never been banned. It was, in fact, reading Hall’s novel that led Renault to write
The Friendly Young Ladies
—because she despised it so. The differences in approach and temperament between the two authors is apparent immediately through their choice of titles—the heavy solemnity of “The Well of Loneliness,” the wry lightness of “The Friendly Young Ladies.” As a far more sophisticated writer than Radclyffe Hall, Renault was appalled by the book’s overheated prose written with a brass pen, and by its humorlessness, its “bellyaching and fuss.” Renault was determined to write a book on the subject of female same-sex relationships that was more amusing, one that presented such relations as merely “a slight deviation of the sex urge,” one that would not make a political cause of homosexuality, as she believed Hall’s novel did. Leo’s characterization of her social and personal position as a lesbian sums up well Renault’s view of the subject:

I don’t feel separate from the herd. … I like them. Why should they pamper oddities, anyway? It’s they who are in charge of evolution. They think it’s better not to be odd, as far as they bother to think about it at all, and they’re quite right. There are shoals of women made up pretty much like me, but a lot haven’t noticed and most of the rest prefer to look the other way, and it’s probably very sensible of them. If you do happen to have your attention drawn to it, the thing to do is to like and be liked by as many ordinary people as possible, to make yourself as good a life as you can in your own frame, and to keep your oddities for the few people who are likely to be interested.

The tone of this passage as well as its apolitical sentiment are a fairly direct response to the “bellyaching and fuss” of Stephen Gordon, Hall’s protagonist, who, in a typical passage such as the following, envisions troops of homosexuals, vociferously demanding justice from the universe:

“Stephen, Stephen [they called her in her vision], speak with your God and ask him why He has left us forsaken!” She could see their marred and reproachful faces with the haunted, melancholy eyes of the invert—eyes that looked too long on a world that lacked all pity and all understanding. … Rockets of pain, burning rockets of pain—their pain, her pain, all welded together into one great consuming agony. … And now there was only one voice, one demand; her own voice into which those millions had entered. … Acknowledge us, oh God, before the whole world. Give us also the right to our existence!

Renault found the maudlin language of such effusions “irresistibly funny.”

She lived to see the rise of a strong gay political movement such as Hall longs for in passages like the one above: Predictably perhaps, she disdainfully called the movement “sexual tribalism.” In the 1970s and 80s, much of her readership came from movement gays, who championed her books such as
The Charioteer
, one of the first to present twentieth-century male homosexual love in a positive manner, and
The Last of the Wine,
which began an extremely popular series of novels about male homosexuality in ancient Greece and Rome. But she continued to consider the twentieth-century gay liberation movement to be “defensive stridency” that would do nothing to bring about “tolerant individualism,” such as characterized ancient Athens and Macedonia, which she wrote about so feelingly. Renault’s conservatism can perhaps be best understood by seeing her as a product of an earlier era in which middle-class homosexuals got on in the world by keeping their “oddities” to themselves or exposing them only to “the few people who are likely to be interested,” as Leo recommends.

Mary and Julie were, of course, largely closeted. Though they were very close to a number of gay men, they had almost no lesbian friends. Despite their life together, which spanned nearly half a century, Mary refused the term “lesbian” as descriptive of her relationship or of herself. Julie, who survived her, shared her sentiments, declaring in a 1996 interview that in South Africa, where she continued to live, “only the really flamboyant types will admit to being lesbian, very unattractive.” If they had to label themselves at all, Mary and Julie preferred “bisexual.” Apparently they continued to conceive of themselves as “bisexual” despite the fact that for the last thirty-five years of Mary’s life and of their domestic partnership, neither woman had erotic relations with men.
⁴

Renault’s political conservatism aside, in
The Friendly Young Ladies
she has created a clever and compelling study of sexual complexity. She does this by playing not only off of her own experiences, but also by presenting an ironic gloss of
The Well of Loneliness
. Leo appears at first glance to be another version of Hall’s Stephen Gordon. Her masculine tastes are apparent from early girlhood when, we’re told, she spent her money not on powder and rouge, but rather on telescopes and knives fitted with screwdrivers. As a young woman with a dress allowance she bought not pretty lace collars and silk stockings, but rather a plain tweed suit, whose pockets soon bulged, like a boy’s, with bits of string and apples.

Again echoing Radclyffe Hall, Renault describes Leo’s body as masculine: Very much like Stephen Gordon’s, it is “straight, firm, and confident … [with] small, high breasts, straight shoulders and narrow hips.” However, while Hall attributes Stephen’s physical masculinity to “congenital sexual inversion” (which is supposed to explain too the instinctive sexual repulsion Stephen feels for men and the desire she feels only for women), Renault makes no connection between Leo’s boyish body and her sexual desires, which have no exclusive object. If Leo has been repelled by heterosexuality it was not because she was born an invert, but rather because she witnessed and was disgusted by her parents’ conflictual relationship. By presenting Leo’s similarities to the mannish Stephen Gordon as well as her crucial differences, Renault seems to argue quite intentionally that, counter to Radclyffe Hall’s convictions, sexuality is far from a simple matter of congenital load.

Just as Leo is a commentary on Stephen, Helen is a commentary on her counterpart in
The Well of Loneliness
, Stephen’s lover, Mary. Like Mary, Helen is entirely feminine, a pretty woman who wears “pretty nightgowns” and knows how to apply powder and rouge, in contrast to Leo who “pull[s] a lipstick out of her pocket [and] line[s] her mouth with a few brisk strokes.” In her relations, Helen is nurturing, womanly. She is indistinguishable from the prototypical femme figure who—not only in Radclyffe Hall’s novel but also in most of the mid-twentieth-century lesbian pulps—must leave a butch like Leo and run to the arms of a real man before the last page. But in
The Friendly Young Ladies
Renault turns the tables. She is playing with the possibility of sexualities that are well outside of Hall’s rigid categories of the “true congenital invert” and the feminine woman whose homosexuality is “merely a phase”: She presents the womanly Helen as having little interest in heterosexuality—she tried it and she didn’t like it (despite her being depicted at a party as “tucked into the arm of a large, athletic young man”). The masculine Leo, however, is sexually fulfilled only once she finally goes to bed with Joe. In the defection of one member of the lesbian couple to heterosexuality, Renault again seems to echo Radclyffe Hall only to subvert the predictability she despised. It is Renault’s femme who is certain of her lesbian status; it is her butch who will, apparently, go off with a man.

Although Renault had no interest in contemporary theories that isolated the individual from “the herd” on the basis of his or her sexuality, it is astonishingly easy to find in
The Friendly Young Ladies
passages that resonate very well with both lesbian-feminism and queer theory. Renault eschewed the feminist movement as well as the gay-and-lesbian movement, oversimplifying feminism in her claim that its notions about gender and sexuality were not complex enough to fit her, and that “my inner persona occupied two sexes too indiscriminately to take part in a sex war.”
⁵
Nevertheless, Helen’s incisive analysis of male-female relations as she experienced them—which is intended to explain her preference for women—might easily have been written by a lesbian-feminist of the 1970s. Helen chose to leave heterosexuality not because she had an unsatisfactory sexual relationship with the man with whom she lived (the sex part of their relationship was fine, she insists), but rather because he was domineering, inconsiderate, selfish, insensitive—in short, the whole litany of complaints with which lesbian-feminism charged men:

He was just a cad to live with. Things like wanting all the space for his own work and not leaving me any room for mine. Or time. I don’t think he liked, really, seeing me work at all. I was better at it than he was, that might have been one reason why. Between women, you see, an issue like that is bound to come out straightforwardly, but a man can cover it up for ages. And then, he thought I ought to like his friends but he needn’t like mine. If I had a cold or a headache or wasn’t feeling bright for the usual sort of reasons, he just used to go out; it never occurred to him to do anything else. Leo isn’t any more domesticated than most men, but she isn’t above filling you a hot-water bottle and fussing you up a bit. … Finally he tried to make me have a baby so I’d have to [marry him]. He said it was for my good. I was tired of arguing by then so I just packed and went. I expect he’s scratching his head about it still.

Joe, the man to whom Leo will apparently go by the conclusion, carrying “her manuscript, portable typewriter, and an armful of essential books,” is not at all like the head-scratcher. He clearly respects her work as a writer, a profession they share, and he understands that she needs space and privacy for that work, just as he does. “I can work any place where there’s a door that shuts, and so can you,” he tells Leo. He is the evolved man that feminists of the 1970s cried for. Many of them, observing that such men were rare and, like Helen, despairing that testosterone made the behaviors she complains of practically inevitable—made choices just like hers.