The Friendly Young Ladies: A Novel

by Mary Renault

  It would be a pity—and it should not be necessary—to let Helen drop. She was the prettiest girl he had seen in a long time, and easy company. Besides, he would be taking up a certain amount of Leo’s time in the immediate future, and one must set about such things tactfully, not let her feel excluded or left on one side. It should not be difficult; she was fond of Leo, and when he had succeeded in ironing out some of the maladjustments there, would like him the better in the end.

  As for Leo, things were going so well that already he was looking ahead. It should take very little, now, to edge her out of those corners of escapism, those retreats from life into the Boys’ Own Paper. He had dipped into one of her efforts: the writing showed average competence; with a little emotional and mental stimulus, she might be stirred to attempt serious work and even, in time, make something out of it. His own usefulness to her would, of course, be temporary, and before long he intended to introduce her to a friend of his who liked women of her type and whose psychological layout, as observed by Peter, ought to link on to hers very nicely: so it would all continue to be interesting for quite a while yet.

  A bank of cloud, which had been hiding the sun, slid away from it; the light, swept from the edge of silver along which it passed, struck keen and lively on the willows and the water, sharpening leaves and wavelets and giving a sparkle to the fresh breeze. Peter whistled a little tune under his breath. It wasn’t much one could do, he thought, but one helped, one eased things along, one left something constructive behind. To-morrow there would be work again, bringing its solid irreplacable satisfaction; and, along with it, new people, new personalities behind the façade of trauma and disease, new opportunities for a word in season and a guiding hand. Life stretched before him, like an immensely amusing amateur theatre, in which sometimes one played the lead, sometimes effaced oneself with the lighting or the costumes and added one’s unseen quota to the effect just for the love of the game. Even now, at twenty-eight, he had not succeeded in making up his mind which was the better fun. Perhaps he had not tried. Why choose, when one could have both?

  He loitered in the sunshine, looking contentedly at the willow-trees rippling in the sun and wind on the deserted island, and beginning to think about his tea.

  AFTERWORD

  ON RE-READING THIS forty-year-old novel for the first time in about twenty years, what struck me most was the silliness of the ending.

  Leo and Joe have both been credited with reasonably good intelligence. He at least, the brighter of the two, would surely have had sense enough, in the sober light of the morning after, to steer them clear of such inevitable disaster. Sexual harmony apart, one cannot contemplate without a shudder their domestic life, hitherto so well arranged. Of course, more doomed and irresponsible unions happen in real life every day; but it is naïve to present them as happy endings.

  Tempting as it may be, with such a distant book, to start reviewing it as if it were by someone else—as in effect it is—one had better go on to recall what caused it to be written.

  In 1938, I was staying with a friend in the small hotel of a French fishing village, somewhere near Hardelot. I think it was in Boulogne that we picked up a copy of The Well of Loneliness, then still banned in England. It was a thick, pale brown paperback, a collector’s edition I expect today, but too bulky to have a chance at customs, so we left it behind. Every morning, before getting up and starting out for the beach, we used to read it with the coffee and croissants, accompanied by what now strikes me as rather heartless laughter. It is a fact however that we both found it irresistibly funny. It had been out ten years, which is a long time in terms of the conventions; but it does, I still think, carry an impermissible allowance of self-pity, and its earnest humourlessness invites irreverence. Solemn, dead-pan descriptions of Mary knitting stockings for Stephen—and when there was real silk!—and mending her “masculine underwear” (what can it have been? It was long before briefs; perhaps Wolsey combinations) are passages I can still not read with entire gravity.

  I was working just then on my second book; it came out in the week of Dunkirk, sinking without trace. The Friendly Young Ladies, my third, was written in the pauses of full-time hospital nursing. I had given it up when my first novel brought me in enough to live on; now, I was seeing again terribly ill and dying and bereaved people, and this time, as well, young men suddenly disabled for months or years, often for life, facing their future without complaint. (Years later, when the dust had settled, I wrote about them in The Charioteer.) Looking around at the lot of these fellow creatures, I thought it becoming in people whose only problem was a slight deviation of the sex urge—not necessarily an unmixed tribulation—to refrain from needless bellyaching and fuss.

  If at this time there was a book to whose excellence I looked with envy, it must have been Compton Mackenzie’s Extraordinary Women. Set in an idyllic, pre-tourist Capri, it is a masterpiece of gentle satire, wit, style, and pervading unbitchiness; better on the whole than Vestal Fires, in which he explores the male side of that human comedy. Only now, looking it up in a reference book, I learn to my surprise that it preceded, not followed, Radclyffe Hall’s book. I had always taken it for, so to speak, his Cold Comfort Farm. It is all there: poor Rory, with her French bulldogs and boxeuses, her monocle which in moments of emotion falls into her drink, her Villa Leucadia, her sad pursuit of dandified caddish Rosalba, her uncomfortable boiled shirts. But no, she must have been done from life. There are magnificent social disasters, in the grand English tradition later upheld by Anthony Powell: the concert cut short with crashing chords when Cleo, the pianist, observes Rosalba flirting with someone else; the appalling party where people make scenes and lock themselves in rooms, and the sole, awful male guest feels it his mission to cheer the poor girls up; the debacle of the white peacocks; Rosalba’s impulsive offering of Rory’s piano, borne on the shoulders of staggering porters, to an unimpressed visiting celebrity; it is all done with benign good humour and with moments of high seriousness. Not all the extraordinary women are absurd; some are civilised, philosophical, and make their lives without fuss. It continues to amaze me that, only a year after the first edition of this delicious and durable book appeared, Radclyffe Hall, enjoying all the freedoms conferred by independent means, could bring herself to sound so woebegone a note.

  Would she, had the word been then in vogue, have described her protagonists as “gay”? I shouldn’t wonder. This splendid Old French word, once trailing clouds of glory, resounding with the trumpets of the lists and the songs of troubadors, has become a casualty as deplorable as “disinterested” which likewise has no real synonym. Whether the subject is politics, sociology or sex, nothing is so damaging as euphemism; like air-freshener, it proclaims a bad smell below. “Poor” has remained an honourable term, while “underprivileged” has drawn to itself associations with bed-bugs.

  Conventions change; but defensive stridency is not, on the whole, much more attractive than self-pity. Congregated homosexuals waving banners are really not conducive to a good natured “Vive la différence!” Certainly they will not bring back the tolerant individualism of Macedon or Athens, where they would have attracted as much amazement as demonstrations of persons willing to drink wine. Distinguished homosexuals like Solon, Epaminondas or Plato would have withdrawn the hem of their garments; Alexander and his friends would have dined out on the joke. Greeks asked what a man was good for; and the Greeks were right. People who do not consider themselves to be, primarily, human beings among their fellow-humans, deserve to be discriminated against, and ought not to make a meal of it.

  That is what I would describe as an explicit statement. Unfortunately, that adjective too has become a cut-down word. In this truncated sense, I have sometimes been asked whether I would have written this book more explicitly in a more permissive decade. No; I have always been as explicit as I wanted to be, and have not been much more so in recent books. If characters have come to life, one should know how they will make love; if not it doesn�
�t matter. 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.

  There is much in The Friendly Young Ladies which I would now write differently, supposing I could be bothered to write it at all. To one passage at least I can still respond wholeheartedly: Joe’s opinion on p. 160 of the demand that writers should be ready to cook their books for good causes. One can only reflect that in 1937, the approximate date in which the story is set, Joe didn’t know he was born.

  Mary Renault, Cape Town, South Africa, 1983

  AFTERWORD TO THE VINTAGE EDITION

  THE FRIENDLY YOUNG LADIES is Mary Renault’s most autobiographical novel. Like her character Leonora, Renault (a pen name for Mary Challans) was bored as a child by conventional female play; like “Leo,” as Leonora is called throughout, young Mary was boyish, bookish, fascinated by cowboy stories, and had constant conflicts with her mother who “liked everything nice.”1 To escape from her parents’ perpetual discord, Mary, again like Leo, left home, guiltily believing she had deserted her younger sister Joyce, just as Leo felt she had deserted her sister Elsie.

  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 rea
dership 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.