The American Boy
Daniel Mendelsohn, the classicist and translator of the Iliad, finally wrote about his correspondence with Mary Renault from the 1970s until her death, in a moving piece in the New Yorker I have only now come across. It is wonderful.
"...Like all writers, Renault spent much of her time alone; a good many of her friends, as I also learned later, were gay men, often ballet dancers and actors and theatre people. What she did not have in her life, as far as I know, was children-or students. I wonder whether she wished for some. (In “The Charioteer,” Laurie is described as someone who “usually got on with strong-minded old maids”; was that how she saw herself?) Shrewdly drawn scenes of apprenticeships, of actors or princes or poets learning their craft, figure in a number of the novels. In “The Last of the Wine,” Socrates, faced with an earnest, if pretentious, student, resorts to “teasing him out of his pomposities”-as canny a characterization of what it’s like to teach freshmen as any I know of.
Renault’s special feeling for the relations between a teacher and a student imbues the poignant finale of “The Mask of Apollo,” her 1966 novel about an Athenian actor who gets mixed up in Plato’s disastrous scheme, in the three-sixties B.C., to turn a corrupt Sicilian tyrant into a philosopher-king. Years after the fiasco, the actor meets the teen-aged Alexander, already charismatic and alive with curiosity about the world, and realizes, wrenchingly, that this youth would have been the ideal student for Plato, now dead:
All tragedies deal with fated meetings; how else could there be a play? Fate deals its stroke; sorrow is purged, or turned to rejoicing; there is death, or triumph; there has been a meeting, and a change. No one will ever make a tragedy-and that is as well, for one could not bear it-whose grief is that the principals never met.
I wonder whether something like this was in Mary Renault’s mind that day in December when she decided to write back to me after all. Maybe she liked the thought of having a student-someone to tease out of his pomposities. Maybe, with all that grief around her just then, she thought she could at least avoid the grief that comes of never making contact...."
The American Boy
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/01/07/the-american-boy
