Writing about pain
Andrew Brown
The Alexander Trilogy Mary Renault (Penguin £4.95) The Friendly Young Ladies Mary Renault (Virago £3.90)
It is curious that the 'hospital novel' has become a byword for meretricious ro- mance. Though many doctors have turned into first-rate writers — Chekhov and Schnitzler for example — they have tended to write about almost anything but 'their Medical work. The only first-class piece of writing about illness this century that I know of is How the Poor Die. What makes this lack odder is that the advances of Medicine have meant that far more people are seriously ill now, and survive, than at any previous time, while greater numbers of Intelligent and literate people look after them. These need not be doctors. Nurses and even nursing auxiliaries are closer than doctors to the pus and incontinence of everyday death. Their work does nearly as Much as drugs to make physical pain tolerable. Yet little or none of these experiences have become literature. This is Partly because the job is so horrifying and must so urgently be forgotten. Not even among idle journalists have I seen such Unremitting drunkenness and such frantic Pursuit of copulation as in the off-duty ,,I.Inurs of the nursing auxiliaries in a `-heshire Home where I once worked. It took all our energy to forget what we were d°Ing; but to write one must remember. one writer who did remember these things, and who put her memories to good use, was Mary Renault. She trained and worked as a nurse, as an act of deliberate Policy, to enlarge her knowledge of the World before writing about it, and the success of this decision deserves attention. To judge from her obituaries, at the end nf, last year, she was remembered officially With a mixture of envy and contempt, as a Writer of historical — or to the donnish, unhistorical — romances who struck it rich and moved to South Africa, where she never complained about apartheid, which Was obviously an unforgiveable dereliction Of her duties as a writer. But she deserves for be remembered properly, and praised, tor at least two reasons. The first is that she vjas a careful and conscientious writer who "new how to get large effects with small Words. There are not so many of those about that we can afford to let one die unremarked. The second is that she made general sense of the particular truths that nurses learn. Here is her version of a scene obligatory in almost any historical novel:
The air was loud with sound; harsh crying and keening, deep creaks as of strained wood. It was the call of kites, hovering and stooping and fighting for choice shreds, mixed with the croak of the ravens . . . When the column passed near, they rose in a screaming cloud and hovered angrily over their meal; only then could one see the raw bones, and the rags torn by the wolves in their haste to reach the entrails. The stench, like the noise, shifted with the breeze . . .
'Alexander', said Hephaistion, 'I think that man there's alive.' A council of vultures was considering something out of sight; bouncing forward, then recoiling as if offended or shocked. There came into view a feebly flailing arm.
This passage, from Fire from Heaven, illustrates both of her chief qualities. It serves no important purpose in the book; it is merely the background, while the hero gets from A to B. But it is carefully done and contains delightful flashes: the vultures 'bouncing forward and then recoiling as if offended or shocked' is very good; 'raw bones' is excellent. A sloppy writer might have hurriedly thought them white; a pure- ly medical one might have written 'ex- posed', which lacks the sense of outrage.
Her past as a nurse never intrudes on her books. The medical details are — I assume — right, but they are done inconspi- cuously. Though two, at least, of her early books — The Charioteer and The Friendly Young Ladies — are set in hospital, or among nurses, they are about the conflict between love and self-deception, and the awkward necessity of courage. The horrors in the background are merely there to re- mind us that neither love nor self- deception help very much against death. In these books, the courage that nurses need rather more than compassion (for without courage compassion cannot be exercised) is shown as a communal virtue, like a sol- dier's pride. The private courage that her characters need is demanded by homo- sexual love. Her treatment of this was fairly light-handed; it is impossible not to warm to anyone who was reduced to help- less giggles when she first read The Well of Loneliness. What mars these earlier books is her treatment of the variously pro- miscuous, camp, or otherwise unserious minor figures. They are vivid, jerking cari- catures, well done in their way, but they do not fit with the other characters who care less for the opinion of society.
This flaw disappeared when she started to write historical novels, since she was no longer writing about societies in which her characters' sexual orientation was consider- ed a matter of public interest. They could get on with the things that interested her: pride, courage and honesty. And here, I think, her experience as a nurse came good in a most unexpected way. For one of the things which separates us from the charac- ters in any historical novel is the constant exposure to physical pain. It may be that pain hurt less before antibiotics and anaes- thetics. I doubt it. What is certain is that the sort of courage demanded to surmount physical pain is a quality we do not often need now, and one which must have chan- ged the characters of anyone alive even 200 years ago in ways that we find hard to imagine.
An example is supplied by the practice of castration. It is difficult to think that this operation, performed without anaesthe- tics, would leave the victim as any sort of recognisable human being. The pain and the humiliation would destroy the persona- lity, just as it does to the eponymous hero of Russell Hoban's Pilgermann. Yet eu- nuchs have been fairly common in most periods of history; even the Vatican, which now condemns vasectomy, once had a choir of castrati; and in Eastern despo- tisms, eunuchs have been very powerful. Bagoas, the narrator of Mary Renault's The Persian Boy is a eunuch; he is even castrated on stage, as it were; and the ac- count of how he makes some sort of life for himself is marvellously done. It may seem odd that a lesbian nurse should have writ- ten so well about male courage and love, but in fact she was a sufficiently good writer to make it seem odder that no one else with her advantages has managed it.
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