The Mask of Command

I read Mary Renault's "Mask of Apollo"

Creatures, my parents have spent the past couple years slowly preparing to sell my childhood home, so I’ve helped sort, pack, and sell their books. This is how I got my paws on their 1960s paperback of Mary Renault’s The Mask of Apollo. It’s the perfect way to read this book: soft, foxed and furry pages, 95-cent cover price, and that transporting smell of old paperbacks—spiced and musty, an autumnal smell of whiskey and the warm, rotting center of the leafpile.

That description tips just a little over the edge of sentiment, no? A little too convinced of its own lyricism; a little too insistent on its own poignancy. And that’s what I feared Mary Renault would be like. I thought her one of those straight ladies who writes exclusively about Greek male homosexuality: Achilles and Patroclus, Alexander and Hephaistion, etc etc. And I have a stereotype of that style. I imagine these writers as highly interior and emotional. Swoony, adolescent, alternately languid and plangent. It turns out Renault is not like that! (She also had a woman partner, though that is no sure protection from the perils of idealized male love.) I fully loved this book, for reasons I didn’t expect.

The Mask of Apollo is narrated by Niko, an actor whose profession takes him around the Mediterranean world of the century leading up to Alexander. To the extent that there’s a “plot,” it’s mostly about the fate of the city of Syracuse, which is ruled by a tyrant when we first encounter it. But Syracuse emerges as a character relatively late; for a while we’re just following Niko as he lives in the world of the classical theater, falling in love with younger men in a kind of casually-described way, and slowly discovering that—YES—the gods are real and speak. Or… something even more to my taste than that: there is a living and speaking and strange reality, hinted at but not fully captured by the name “Apollo,” to which Niko becomes more and more sincerely dedicated.

I loved the pleasures this book promises from the beginning. We get descriptions of ancient life: the hair cuttings laid beside the honored corpse; the dust cloud rising along all the roads as tourists stream in to watch the Olympics; the taverns where the actors gossip and spy and get their hair done. The trends in theater—the mask in the title is real, and old-fashioned, fearsome in a way that suggests an unfashionably sincere awe.

If Renault swoons over anything, it’s the theater. If you, like me, thrilled a bit when Niko realizes that a much older actor might have actually met and spoken with Euripides, you will love this stupidly. There’s a play that requires physical and moral heroism… there’s a play to catch the conscience of the king, and a play to catch the conscience of the mob… there’s wartime use of ancient SFX to protect civilians hiding in a theater! If you harbor an old adolescent love for e.g. Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin, or even a shameful enjoyment of the theater elements of, like, If We Were Villains, this book will ring those bells for you good and hard.

And it’s also a Cold War novel, I think. The descriptions of Syracuse under tyranny suggest many different totalitarian contexts; specifically, it’s an island whose autocracy is shored up by the subjects’ fear of a powerful neighbor, which is a situation repeated on both sides of the Cold War. One of the novel’s main plotlines turns out to be, “Can Syracuse be free if her people have never known freedom?”

Which is related to the other questions that animate the events: Does disorder in a ruler’s soul lead inevitably to tyranny, and moral degradation in the populace? (yes. Lol relevant information in these times.) Is the mirror-image also true, where a ruler with an ordered soul produces order in a polis? (REPLY HAZY—ASK AGAIN LATER.) Should political history be shaped by personal love—charisma and eros, those guiding forces in education? And all these questions are things you only encounter once you’ve given some answer to the story’s other question: What is the will of Apollo?

Apollo isn’t only the god of poetry. He’s also the god of reason and the logos. Oh man, I don’t want to tell you how incredibly relevant this becomes to the story! I had no idea it was coming, and the gasp of delight I gave could be heard in Corinth. All I’ll say for now is that this book’s portrayal of heroic political and military leadership made me glad I’d recently re-read John Keegan’s Mask of Command… but the book on that shelf that this novel parallels most closely is by Saul Bellow. The Mask of Apollo is a more hopeful, far less self-lacerating (far less self-involved!) mirror for Ravelstein.

---

Toons for Our Times

This is the post that got me to pay for a subscription to Naomi Kanakia’s substack. It’s a “tale,” a fable about a demon. I don’t think you need the little postscript, but take a look and see what you think.

Weak Men Create Hard Times, Because Weak Men Vote for Strongmen

I was not the only person repping Matthew 25:31 - 46 at our local Hands Off protest. Some other signs:

Make Affordable Groceries Again

[a graph of the stock market with the legend] Is this what you voted for?

MUNDUS SINE CAESARIBUS [which turns out to be a riposte to a t-shirt worn by Mark Zuckerberg… why. Anyway this sign also said, in a tiny scrawl beside the main message, “Romanes eunt domus”! Did this guy persuade anyone? No. Did he please me, personally? Very.]

STOP DESTROYING AMERICA—THE LAND THAT WE LOVE

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands.

This here is actually a mask of Zeus, and a replica at that, but it gives the basic vibe, I think. Photographed by Carole Raddato and used under a Creative Commons license.