I bought a copy of The Charioteer (New York: Pantheon 1959) six months ago or more, and kept meaning to read it. I’m terribly fond of Mary Renault’s Greek novels, but had heard bad things about her early ‘contemporary’ books, from her later writings among other things. Still, I have a nasty tendency to fan-boy completism, so I picked it up. On the other hand, I then left it unopened for six months.
When I finally started to read it (on an airplane, or perhaps on a train, I don’t recall), I thought I would dislike it a lot. The first seven pages are, well, dreadful, and the next four or five aren’t great. Then it starts picking up. And then I was completely fascinated.
It’s a Gay Classic, of course, one of the earliest books about Being Gay. I won’t go into detail about the plot, but the main character is a young man who realizes pretty early that he prefers men to women, but has a pretty miserable collegiate introduction to what we call the Gay Lifestyle. Then the war, and then the Triangle. He has the British post-war novel protagonist disease, making him unable to make up his mind properly and prone to joylessly giving in to temptation. Still, the dilemma is not so much between the older man and the younger but between the Gay Lifestyle, with gay friends and gay enemies, codes and camp, bitchiness, drugs, and drink, and the Straight World, with vicious prejudice, narrow-minded conformism, deception, frustration, and loneliness. One way gets you laid a lot more, of course, but you have to put up with men named Bunny who have nothing but sensation; the other way gets you serious conversation but lonely, frustrating nights (and midafternoons).
The solution, of course, is for society to accept homosexuality, opening the ghetto gates and allowing gay people to have straight friends without deceit, and admit to crushes on straight men without being beaten bloody. Hey, I know! Let’s move to Ancient Greece!
,
-Vardibidian.
The time is now. The place… is Ancient Greece.
–Nathan Lane, The Frogs