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argurotoxosThis is the last of the Maurice posts I have planned, but it's a topic I wanted to comment on as soon as I saw the reference by name in Maurice. It's also a topic that has become very personal to me through The Charioteer. Plato's Phaedrus can be read online here; Maurice is by E. M. Forster and The Charioteer is by Mary Renault.
Plato's Phaedrus, similar to the Symposium, is a dialogue about love, particularly of the homoerotic sort. It begins with Phaedrus recounting a speech made by Lysias on how the non-lover is better than the lover for lovers spoil their beloveds by flattering them with undeserved praise, try to control the life of the beloved out of jealousy, and so on. Socrates follows suit and makes his own speech on the detriments of love. Then, coming upon a realization, Socrates chastises Phaedrus ("That was a dreadful speech which you brought with you, and you made me utter one as bad.") and makes a second speech praising love, which is the apex of the dialogue.
It is in this second speech that Socrates introduces the idea of a three-part soul symbolized by a charioteer and two horses -- one horse is clean and white and loves virtue, the other horse is mangy and black and loves anything that satisfies his desires, and the charioteer is the leader who must control the horses and preserve balance between all three. If it sounds similar to Freud, it is, with the charioteer as the ego, the white horse as the superego, and the black horse as the id. Socrates then describes how the charioteer and horses of both lover and beloved act when near each other.
Since this is Plato, self-control and a refrain from sexual acts are strongly encouraged for both the lover and his beloved. However, Plato says that even those who have been active sexually "are dear, but not so dear to one another as the others" and "when the time comes at which they receive their wings" both chaste and unchaste couples "have the same plumage because of their love."
In short, the Phaedrus presents a beautifully written (and highly idealistic) view of love spoken of in terms of a couple (a lover and a beloved) formed by two males.
The impact of Plato's Phaedrus can be seen in both Forster and Renault, who mention the Phaedrus by name in Maurice and The Charioteer, respectively. However, while Forster mainly introduces the Phaedrus for Clive, who is presented as a Hellenist, the Phaedrus is one of the central, continuous themes of The Charioteer, which derives its very title from the dialogue.
The place where the Phaedrus is mentioned by name in Maurice is when Forster is describing Clive's youth:
"The boy had always been a scholar, awake to the printed word, and the horrors the Bible had evoked for him were to be laid by Plato. Never could he forget his emotion at first reading the Phaedrus. He saw there his malady described exquisitely, calmly, as a passion which we can direct, like any other, towards good or bad. Here was no invitation to license. He could not believe his good fortune at first--thought there must be some misunderstanding and that he and Plato were thinking of different things. Then he saw that the temperate pagan really did comprehend him, and, slipping past the Bible rather than opposing it, was offering a new guide to life. 'To make the most of what I have.' Not to crush it down, not vainly to wish that it was something else, but to cultivate it in such ways as will not vex either God or Man."
Clive also criticizes the dean and calls him a hypocrite for trying to root out the "unspeakable vice of the Greeks" (i.e. homoeroticism) from Plato's dialogues. The irony is that Clive ends up turning his back on everything in the Phaedrus himself.
As for Maurice . . .:
"Maurice had no use for Greece. His interest in the classics had been slight and obscene, and had vanished when he loved Clive. The stories of Harmodius and Aristogeiton, of Phaedrus, of the Theban Band were well enough for those whose hearts were empty, but no substitute for life. That Clive should occasionally prefer them puzzled him."
An interesting comment, that the homoerotic tradition of Ancient Greece is appealing when one does not have a true relationship of the same kind in reality. It also makes me glad that they cut the scene of Maurice reading Plato in bed from the film version; it would've given the wrong impression (i.e. that he liked Plato).
How the Phaedrus ties into The Charioteer is an enormous topic that could easily take three or more posts to explore in all its detail. The Phaedrus is, in many ways, a symbol of self-knowledge in The Charioteer; a symbolic transitional point during which the character accepts his homosexuality, which is then passed on to the beloved so that he, too, might come to understand himself. Ralph is the first one to have it, which he passes on to Laurie, who in turn gives it to Andrew.
From where Ralph gives the book to Laurie [all quotes are from the 1959 edition]:
"'I'm just looking for something. Oh, yes, here it is.' He stood up with a thin leather book. The spine said The Phaedrus of Plato. Laurie hadn't got much beyond selections from Homer. He thought Lanyon, in this practical mood, was bequeathing him a crib.
"'Read it when you've got a minute,' said Lanyon casually, 'as an antidote to Jeepers. It doesn't exist anywhere in real life, so don't let it give you illusions. It's just a nice idea.'
"Laurie was strongly aware that as he took it their hands had touched. He said, 'I'll always keep it. Thank you.'"
And where Laurie passes the book on to Andrew:
"As if the sensation had come as a message, he felt something usually too familiar for consciousness, a flat heaviness in a pocket. He got out the book and turned it over in his hand, with the feeling that there was something that needed seeing to. Remembering, he tore out the fly-leaf, then got out his pen and wrote Andrew's name on the first page. 'Please, will you give him this?'
"Dave looked at the lettering on the spine. 'You know,' he said, 'even the most exalted paganism is paganism none the less.' He took the book, looking at the scored and salt-stained cover, at the blood. Something came into his face which had been there on the day when Laurie had seen him watching the battle in the air and the falling planes. 'Yes,' he said. 'I'll give it him with your love.'"
We see Laurie with the Phaedrus multiple times throughout the book. The first time it appears in the hospital we learn that Laurie has kept it with him quite literally ever since Ralph gave it him; it's been soaked by salt water and stained with blood, but Laurie still keeps it:
"For the first time in months, he had remembered the dirty little parcel done up in newspaper at the back of his locker. It had contained the things saved from his pockets after Dunkirk, when the clothes had been cut away. A pocket-knife; a pipe he had been trying to get used to; a lighter; and the book Lanyon had given him seven years ago, with a brown patch of blood across the cover, and the edges of the pages stuck at the top. At different times he had tried the knife, the pipe and the lighter, found them ruined, and thrown them away. The book had looked done for, too; but it was still there."
The moment Ralph gave Laurie the Phaedrus itself also made a great impact on Laurie's life, as is evident later when Laurie describes Charles and his set to Ralph; Laurie never succumbed to the notion that it was all about sex because he was modeling himself on the higher ideals he saw in the Phaedrus and, in a rather hero-worshiping way, in Ralph himself:
"All kinds of little things came suddenly back to him; but most of all he remembered the term after Lanyon had gone. Over and over, during those first months, Laurie had re-lived the scene in the study, guarding it with a fierce secrecy as a savage guards a magic word. Now he felt strands and fibres of Lanyon twitching in his mind where he had not recognised them before, and realised the source of those standards which had supplemented his mother's in those parts of his life where she could not go.
"He knew that he didn't want to submit any of this to daylight. Lanyon's survival belonged only between the worn leather covers of the Phaedrus."
Later, Laurie pulls apart the pages with a knife and brings the Phaedrus outside to read it, only to have Andrew show up unexpectedly while reading.
Andrew's arrival; the first quote is from the Phaedrus:
"'...he sees himself in his lover as if in a mirror, not knowing whom he sees. And when they are together, he too is released from pain, and when apart, he longs as he himself is longed for; for reflected in his heart is love's image, which is love's answer. But he calls it, and believes it, not love but friendship; though he too--'
"'That book must be good,' said Andrew. 'What is it?'
"Laurie felt his heart jerk like a shot deer. An uncontrollable reflex, as he sat up, made him slap the book shut and lean his hand on it.
'Good lord, Andrew,' he said breathlessly, 'you made me jump half out of my skin.'"
Laurie's vision of the book when Andrew asks to see it:
"'What were you reading before I interrupted you. What is it -- can I see?'
"Laurie kept his hand on the book covering the title. In his imagination the pages were printed not with their own paragraphs only, but with all that he himself had brought to them: it seemed as though he must be identified and revealed in them, beyond all pretense of detachment, as if they were a diary to which he had committed every secret of his heart."
And when Andrew asks further:
"Andrew picked it up and said, 'I haven't read this one. I thought it was the Phaedo for a minute, we did that at school. What's it about?'
"Laurie remembered in the nick of time to say, 'Well, primarily, it's about the laws of rhetoric.'"
The Phaedrus does discuss rhetoric in the second part of the dialogue, but Laurie is intentionally trying to change the subject here. He can't tell Andrew that it's about love because Andrew is his beloved and Laurie, throughout the entire book, tries to preserve what he sees as Andrew's innocence; Andrew has to come into self-knowledge on his own and Laurie doesn't want to do anything that would upset or interfere with Andrew. Presumably, this was Ralph's initial stance regarding Laurie until his expulsion; the similarities between Ralph and Laurie's relationship at school and Laurie and Andrew's relationship in the rest of the book really cannot be understated.
Laurie does tell Andrew a bit more about the dialogue when he asks and Andrew learns that it was Ralph who gave it him, but Laurie words his answers as carefully as he can, as can be seen here:
"'Love.' Laurie skimmed as lightly as he could over the most treacherous word in the language. 'The first speech sets out to prove that a lover who isn't in love is preferable to one who is. Being less jealous, easier to live with, and generally more civilized.'"
After Laurie and Ralph meet again, the Phaedrus also makes an appearance:
"'There was something you did for me once. I expect you'll have forgotten long ago; but it made all the difference. I just wanted to tell you.' He groped in the leg-pocket of his battle-dress, found what he wanted, and held it out. 'Do you remember? You gave me this.'
"It must be true, he thought, that Ralph had forgotten; for he stared at it dumbly, almost stupidly, and only reached out to take it just as Laurie was about to put it away again. He carried it over to the table and held it under the shaded reading-lamp, standing up so that the light only fell on his hands and on the book. Suddenly Laurie remembered what it had looked like that day in the study, crisp and clean and nearly new. The pool of light was small, but bright and hard: it picked out the bloodstain and the rubbed edges, and the rough whitened patch from the sea. He said, 'I'm sorry I've not looked after it better.'"
Even after his reunion with Ralph, Laurie still keeps the Phaedrus with him:
"Involuntarily he felt at the leg-pocket of his battle-dress; he had got into the way of keeping the Phaedrus there again, as he had in the south coast training-camp and afterwards in France. Now it no longer stood for something rounded off and complete, but for confusion and uncertainty and pain and compassion, and all the tangle of man's mortality. And yet, he thought again, it was for such a world that it had been written."
Listening to Ralph telling a story also sends Laurie back to the time when he first read the Phaedrus:
"In the weeks of that summer holiday seven years before, after he had read the Phaedrus by the stream in the wood, he had gone for long walks alone, and, returning, sat in the evening by a September fire, so silent and enclosed that more than once his mother had asked if he was well. It was of this that he had been dreaming."
Of course, Renault doesn't need the Phaedrus physically there to reference it, as can be seen by the charioteer imagery used in this passage from the very end of the novel:
"Quietly, as night shuts down the uncertain prospect of the road ahead, the wheels sink to stillness in the dust of the halting place, and the reins drop from the driver's loosened hands. Staying each his hunger on what pasture the place affords them, neither the white horse nor the black reproaches his fellow for drawing their master out of the way. They are far, both of them, from home, and lonely, and lengthened by their strife the way has been hard. Now their heads droop side by side till their long manes mingle; and when the voice of the charioteer falls silent they are reconciled for a night in sleep."
I've been considering it a lot lately and, if it's true that everyone has that one special book that they identify with, I think The Charioteer is mine. It wasn't always. Even after I started reading Renault, Fire From Heaven was my immediate favourite. But the things that Laurie goes through, his gradual and sometimes painful quest to discover who his is and his place in the world . . . Sometimes I think it's all there, only in an altered form, shaped by the time period in which we each live.
"At some stage of a broken midnight conversation, he had said, 'I've often had a feeling that there's nowhere I really belong.' He had hardly known himself what he wanted; but Ralph had said, without a moment's hesitation, 'You belong with me. As long as we're both alive, this will always be your place before anyone else's. That's a promise.'"
The fulfillment of the Phaedrus, only not so optimistic, but so much more real.
Plato's Phaedrus, similar to the Symposium, is a dialogue about love, particularly of the homoerotic sort. It begins with Phaedrus recounting a speech made by Lysias on how the non-lover is better than the lover for lovers spoil their beloveds by flattering them with undeserved praise, try to control the life of the beloved out of jealousy, and so on. Socrates follows suit and makes his own speech on the detriments of love. Then, coming upon a realization, Socrates chastises Phaedrus ("That was a dreadful speech which you brought with you, and you made me utter one as bad.") and makes a second speech praising love, which is the apex of the dialogue.
It is in this second speech that Socrates introduces the idea of a three-part soul symbolized by a charioteer and two horses -- one horse is clean and white and loves virtue, the other horse is mangy and black and loves anything that satisfies his desires, and the charioteer is the leader who must control the horses and preserve balance between all three. If it sounds similar to Freud, it is, with the charioteer as the ego, the white horse as the superego, and the black horse as the id. Socrates then describes how the charioteer and horses of both lover and beloved act when near each other.
Since this is Plato, self-control and a refrain from sexual acts are strongly encouraged for both the lover and his beloved. However, Plato says that even those who have been active sexually "are dear, but not so dear to one another as the others" and "when the time comes at which they receive their wings" both chaste and unchaste couples "have the same plumage because of their love."
In short, the Phaedrus presents a beautifully written (and highly idealistic) view of love spoken of in terms of a couple (a lover and a beloved) formed by two males.
The impact of Plato's Phaedrus can be seen in both Forster and Renault, who mention the Phaedrus by name in Maurice and The Charioteer, respectively. However, while Forster mainly introduces the Phaedrus for Clive, who is presented as a Hellenist, the Phaedrus is one of the central, continuous themes of The Charioteer, which derives its very title from the dialogue.
The place where the Phaedrus is mentioned by name in Maurice is when Forster is describing Clive's youth:
"The boy had always been a scholar, awake to the printed word, and the horrors the Bible had evoked for him were to be laid by Plato. Never could he forget his emotion at first reading the Phaedrus. He saw there his malady described exquisitely, calmly, as a passion which we can direct, like any other, towards good or bad. Here was no invitation to license. He could not believe his good fortune at first--thought there must be some misunderstanding and that he and Plato were thinking of different things. Then he saw that the temperate pagan really did comprehend him, and, slipping past the Bible rather than opposing it, was offering a new guide to life. 'To make the most of what I have.' Not to crush it down, not vainly to wish that it was something else, but to cultivate it in such ways as will not vex either God or Man."
Clive also criticizes the dean and calls him a hypocrite for trying to root out the "unspeakable vice of the Greeks" (i.e. homoeroticism) from Plato's dialogues. The irony is that Clive ends up turning his back on everything in the Phaedrus himself.
As for Maurice . . .:
"Maurice had no use for Greece. His interest in the classics had been slight and obscene, and had vanished when he loved Clive. The stories of Harmodius and Aristogeiton, of Phaedrus, of the Theban Band were well enough for those whose hearts were empty, but no substitute for life. That Clive should occasionally prefer them puzzled him."
An interesting comment, that the homoerotic tradition of Ancient Greece is appealing when one does not have a true relationship of the same kind in reality. It also makes me glad that they cut the scene of Maurice reading Plato in bed from the film version; it would've given the wrong impression (i.e. that he liked Plato).
How the Phaedrus ties into The Charioteer is an enormous topic that could easily take three or more posts to explore in all its detail. The Phaedrus is, in many ways, a symbol of self-knowledge in The Charioteer; a symbolic transitional point during which the character accepts his homosexuality, which is then passed on to the beloved so that he, too, might come to understand himself. Ralph is the first one to have it, which he passes on to Laurie, who in turn gives it to Andrew.
From where Ralph gives the book to Laurie [all quotes are from the 1959 edition]:
"'I'm just looking for something. Oh, yes, here it is.' He stood up with a thin leather book. The spine said The Phaedrus of Plato. Laurie hadn't got much beyond selections from Homer. He thought Lanyon, in this practical mood, was bequeathing him a crib.
"'Read it when you've got a minute,' said Lanyon casually, 'as an antidote to Jeepers. It doesn't exist anywhere in real life, so don't let it give you illusions. It's just a nice idea.'
"Laurie was strongly aware that as he took it their hands had touched. He said, 'I'll always keep it. Thank you.'"
And where Laurie passes the book on to Andrew:
"As if the sensation had come as a message, he felt something usually too familiar for consciousness, a flat heaviness in a pocket. He got out the book and turned it over in his hand, with the feeling that there was something that needed seeing to. Remembering, he tore out the fly-leaf, then got out his pen and wrote Andrew's name on the first page. 'Please, will you give him this?'
"Dave looked at the lettering on the spine. 'You know,' he said, 'even the most exalted paganism is paganism none the less.' He took the book, looking at the scored and salt-stained cover, at the blood. Something came into his face which had been there on the day when Laurie had seen him watching the battle in the air and the falling planes. 'Yes,' he said. 'I'll give it him with your love.'"
We see Laurie with the Phaedrus multiple times throughout the book. The first time it appears in the hospital we learn that Laurie has kept it with him quite literally ever since Ralph gave it him; it's been soaked by salt water and stained with blood, but Laurie still keeps it:
"For the first time in months, he had remembered the dirty little parcel done up in newspaper at the back of his locker. It had contained the things saved from his pockets after Dunkirk, when the clothes had been cut away. A pocket-knife; a pipe he had been trying to get used to; a lighter; and the book Lanyon had given him seven years ago, with a brown patch of blood across the cover, and the edges of the pages stuck at the top. At different times he had tried the knife, the pipe and the lighter, found them ruined, and thrown them away. The book had looked done for, too; but it was still there."
The moment Ralph gave Laurie the Phaedrus itself also made a great impact on Laurie's life, as is evident later when Laurie describes Charles and his set to Ralph; Laurie never succumbed to the notion that it was all about sex because he was modeling himself on the higher ideals he saw in the Phaedrus and, in a rather hero-worshiping way, in Ralph himself:
"All kinds of little things came suddenly back to him; but most of all he remembered the term after Lanyon had gone. Over and over, during those first months, Laurie had re-lived the scene in the study, guarding it with a fierce secrecy as a savage guards a magic word. Now he felt strands and fibres of Lanyon twitching in his mind where he had not recognised them before, and realised the source of those standards which had supplemented his mother's in those parts of his life where she could not go.
"He knew that he didn't want to submit any of this to daylight. Lanyon's survival belonged only between the worn leather covers of the Phaedrus."
Later, Laurie pulls apart the pages with a knife and brings the Phaedrus outside to read it, only to have Andrew show up unexpectedly while reading.
Andrew's arrival; the first quote is from the Phaedrus:
"'...he sees himself in his lover as if in a mirror, not knowing whom he sees. And when they are together, he too is released from pain, and when apart, he longs as he himself is longed for; for reflected in his heart is love's image, which is love's answer. But he calls it, and believes it, not love but friendship; though he too--'
"'That book must be good,' said Andrew. 'What is it?'
"Laurie felt his heart jerk like a shot deer. An uncontrollable reflex, as he sat up, made him slap the book shut and lean his hand on it.
'Good lord, Andrew,' he said breathlessly, 'you made me jump half out of my skin.'"
Laurie's vision of the book when Andrew asks to see it:
"'What were you reading before I interrupted you. What is it -- can I see?'
"Laurie kept his hand on the book covering the title. In his imagination the pages were printed not with their own paragraphs only, but with all that he himself had brought to them: it seemed as though he must be identified and revealed in them, beyond all pretense of detachment, as if they were a diary to which he had committed every secret of his heart."
And when Andrew asks further:
"Andrew picked it up and said, 'I haven't read this one. I thought it was the Phaedo for a minute, we did that at school. What's it about?'
"Laurie remembered in the nick of time to say, 'Well, primarily, it's about the laws of rhetoric.'"
The Phaedrus does discuss rhetoric in the second part of the dialogue, but Laurie is intentionally trying to change the subject here. He can't tell Andrew that it's about love because Andrew is his beloved and Laurie, throughout the entire book, tries to preserve what he sees as Andrew's innocence; Andrew has to come into self-knowledge on his own and Laurie doesn't want to do anything that would upset or interfere with Andrew. Presumably, this was Ralph's initial stance regarding Laurie until his expulsion; the similarities between Ralph and Laurie's relationship at school and Laurie and Andrew's relationship in the rest of the book really cannot be understated.
Laurie does tell Andrew a bit more about the dialogue when he asks and Andrew learns that it was Ralph who gave it him, but Laurie words his answers as carefully as he can, as can be seen here:
"'Love.' Laurie skimmed as lightly as he could over the most treacherous word in the language. 'The first speech sets out to prove that a lover who isn't in love is preferable to one who is. Being less jealous, easier to live with, and generally more civilized.'"
After Laurie and Ralph meet again, the Phaedrus also makes an appearance:
"'There was something you did for me once. I expect you'll have forgotten long ago; but it made all the difference. I just wanted to tell you.' He groped in the leg-pocket of his battle-dress, found what he wanted, and held it out. 'Do you remember? You gave me this.'
"It must be true, he thought, that Ralph had forgotten; for he stared at it dumbly, almost stupidly, and only reached out to take it just as Laurie was about to put it away again. He carried it over to the table and held it under the shaded reading-lamp, standing up so that the light only fell on his hands and on the book. Suddenly Laurie remembered what it had looked like that day in the study, crisp and clean and nearly new. The pool of light was small, but bright and hard: it picked out the bloodstain and the rubbed edges, and the rough whitened patch from the sea. He said, 'I'm sorry I've not looked after it better.'"
Even after his reunion with Ralph, Laurie still keeps the Phaedrus with him:
"Involuntarily he felt at the leg-pocket of his battle-dress; he had got into the way of keeping the Phaedrus there again, as he had in the south coast training-camp and afterwards in France. Now it no longer stood for something rounded off and complete, but for confusion and uncertainty and pain and compassion, and all the tangle of man's mortality. And yet, he thought again, it was for such a world that it had been written."
Listening to Ralph telling a story also sends Laurie back to the time when he first read the Phaedrus:
"In the weeks of that summer holiday seven years before, after he had read the Phaedrus by the stream in the wood, he had gone for long walks alone, and, returning, sat in the evening by a September fire, so silent and enclosed that more than once his mother had asked if he was well. It was of this that he had been dreaming."
Of course, Renault doesn't need the Phaedrus physically there to reference it, as can be seen by the charioteer imagery used in this passage from the very end of the novel:
"Quietly, as night shuts down the uncertain prospect of the road ahead, the wheels sink to stillness in the dust of the halting place, and the reins drop from the driver's loosened hands. Staying each his hunger on what pasture the place affords them, neither the white horse nor the black reproaches his fellow for drawing their master out of the way. They are far, both of them, from home, and lonely, and lengthened by their strife the way has been hard. Now their heads droop side by side till their long manes mingle; and when the voice of the charioteer falls silent they are reconciled for a night in sleep."
I've been considering it a lot lately and, if it's true that everyone has that one special book that they identify with, I think The Charioteer is mine. It wasn't always. Even after I started reading Renault, Fire From Heaven was my immediate favourite. But the things that Laurie goes through, his gradual and sometimes painful quest to discover who his is and his place in the world . . . Sometimes I think it's all there, only in an altered form, shaped by the time period in which we each live.
"At some stage of a broken midnight conversation, he had said, 'I've often had a feeling that there's nowhere I really belong.' He had hardly known himself what he wanted; but Ralph had said, without a moment's hesitation, 'You belong with me. As long as we're both alive, this will always be your place before anyone else's. That's a promise.'"
The fulfillment of the Phaedrus, only not so optimistic, but so much more real.
