Until
399 Broadway
After 1 August
Mary Renault
c/o Pantheon Books
Dear Miss Renault:
I’ve never written a “fan letter” before, nor do I quite know why I am attempting one now. I’ve just finished reading Return to Night which was the only one of your books I had left to read and I’ve picked up Peter Wolfe’s Mary Renault to see again what he has to say.
Your books have been inspirational to me since I first read The
King Must Die sometime during college.
I’ve read and reread all your historical novels but generally I find
myself returning to The Charioteer which I call your best book, a great
novel, and surely the finest piece of writing ever done outside ancient
When I finish a Mary Renault novel, I have paradoxical feelings: of emptiness at a wonderful world’s having come to too soon an end; and of fullness at my own life’s stretching ahead of me holding open the opportunity still to be better. Your people are becoming as rare in literature as they are in life, and having a half-finished novel put away at home awaiting my time, energy and inspiration, I appreciate that fact.
I would like to say something about your abilities as a writer in character portrayal – their communication and lapse of it, their restrained dialogue which tells so much without resorting to explicitness, their readings and misreadings of subtleties--, in description and in storytelling, but this would be like a groundling remarking to Shakespeare that he’s good. Such a remark must have its place, I know, but the less dwelt upon the better, I suppose.
As an incidental point which I find interesting, I also
wanted to say that after living three years in
This letter, Miss Renault, amounts to the greatest thanks I can give to you for having been who you are and done what you’ve done. I’ll be able to live my life with your books to return to, but, glutton that I am, I hope there will be more in the future which will continue your history and my inspiration.
Yours Sincerely,
(handwritten) Bob Locke
Bob Locke
P.S. I began this letter in the simple desire of wanting to thank you and in the egotism of wanting to praise you. But a thought occurred to me while writing that I might also indulge my selfishness a bit by asking a favor of you. My copy of The Charioteer is now quite battered and torn, though not yet bloodstained and salt sea-sprayed. If you could consider sending me my own copy from your hand, I would be honored and value it forever. This is very bold of me and you may feel free to ignore this request if you are offended. I shall be grateful to you always anyway.
(on blue aerogram)
Dear Mr Locke,
Thank you so much for your letter, and all the generous things you say in it. I am truly glad the the [sic] books have meant to you the kind of thing I would have wanted them to mean. Thank you for telling me. Real life does contain a lot of decent people, some very good ones, and some with fulfillable aspirations who only need encouragement. The present fashion for assuring them all that only the bad in them is real, and all the rest some sort of convention, sentimentality or hypocrisy, is one that I find alarming. It’s a responsibility I wouldn’t want to take on myself.
Pantheon are re-issuing THE CHARIOTEER in September after a long time out of print. When they do I shall once more have some author’s copies (at present I’ve only my own) and than [sic] I will let you have one with my best wishes.
Kind regards,
Yours sincerely,
(handwritten) Mary Renault.
(on blue aerogram)
Dear Mr Locke,
THE
CHARIOTEER in the new edition has now arrived and I am posting off your copy as
I promised. It will take a week or two
to come by sea, so I have sent it to the
With kind regards,
Yours sincerely,
(handwritten) Mary Renault.
Mary Renault
“
Dear Miss Renault:
Thank you so much for your letters of the third and
fourteenth of July. I’m terribly excited
over the letters as well as the copy of The Charioteer which will be
waiting for me in
I would like to share something with you as well, a story of
my own which so captured me when the skeleton of it was told me by its heroine
in
I’ve struggled with myself over the propriety of sending you an unpublished manuscript on two accounts, but on the urging of two of my friends, I’ve decided that my wish to share the story with you (especially) outweighs these two hesitancies. For one, I don’t think it’s a good idea to send an uncopyrighted story through the international mails, and for the other, I’d not like you to think that I’m trying to exploit your already proven sense of generosity by using you as an editor or contact. This story will one day be published, of that I’m confident, and I’m not in any particular hurry for it. But on the chace [sic] that it won’t be published after all, I’m sending it to you now. In great part, your writing has been my inspiration for this story and you therefore should have the opportunity to read it. It is the only gift I can make to you and please accept it as merely that. I hope you will enjoy it one tenth as much as I’ve enjoyed your work.
Thank you again for what you’ve given me.
Yours sincerely,
(handwritten) Bob Locke
Bob Locke
(handwritten) P.S. Manuscript “And Higher More Brothers’ coming under separate cover. If it does not reach you, please let me know.
(2002 note: “And Higher More Brothers” was the first title of Story for a Black Night)
(on blue aerogram)
(handwritten)
Dear Mr. Locke,
Many thanks for your letter, which arrived this morning. The story won’t be here yet awhile, being a larger packet ; but for reasons I’ll explain, I am writing before it comes.
I appreciate tremendously your wish to share it with me, and look forward to reading it ; but I do hope you will forgive me if I don’t write you a detailed appreciation or criticism. My position with regard to reading things is rather difficult. Ten years ago or more – I suppose it was after I was first a Book of the Month – publishers started sending me masses of advance copies of every sort of novel, for me to read them and give them an advertising quote. Perhaps some authors who get these things either don’t answer, or give a quote without actually reading the book. I couldn’t bring myself to adopt either of these courses. On the other hand I found that to read a full-length book, before even starting to formulate any opinions on it and write them down, would cost me a full day’s work ; even with a short story it would be half a day. This I just can’t afford ; not in the financial sense, but the quality of my work can’t afford it, neither could my time schedule – it is unfair to give a publisher a date and let them down. So I adopted the practise of reading historical novels only, because I think one owes something to fellow writers in one’s own line of business, and as you may have seen from time to time, I have recommended quite a lot whose quality impressed me. Beyond that I dare not put a foot, or the floodgates would be loosed again, and moreover, authors whose books I didn’t read will think I was just ducking an adverse opinion. It is to make sure that you yourself don’t think this that I am writing before I have seen your ms.
Although I know you specially said you were not asking me to act as a contact for you, you would not have said this had you not believed it can be done. To save you from further disappointments in the future, I hope you will take the word of someone who has been 30 years in the business ; publishers pay their ‘readers’ (handwritten in margin) (editors) a very good salary to tell them what kind of book it will be to their advantage to publish, and they take notice of no one else. In past years, when I myself have been in quite good standing with my publishers, I have made several attempts to sell them mss. by other people. Invariably the reply has been the same ; a very courteous put-off, with a corresponding let-down for the author concerned. There are only two kinds of writer who can get other writers’ work taken ; one who is also a ‘reader’, or one who owns the house. I am neither.
I hope you will forgive me for explaining why I cannot do things which you have not asked me to do. But my experience has so often been that writers do believe one can assist them in these ways, and if one writes to say one has liked their work they then become very hopeful that one will.
Of course I will let you know when your story comes. If I don’t write you can assume it hasn’t arrived yet. I do most sincerely hope you have sent me a carbon or photostat and not the original ms. That would be an alarming responsibility!
Yours sincerely,
(handwritten) Mary Renault.
(on very thin white paper, two pages)
Dear Bob Locke,
Thank
you for a most valuable and moving experience.
AND HIGHER MORE BROTHERS impressed me tremendously. Though I don’t know
Central to the conception is the tremendously important fact that all the races of men, despite their differences in mental aptitudes – an of course there are differences, as every honest person knows in spite of ‘committed’ blackmail – have been supplied with just the same degree of moral concern ; it varies with the individual only, never with the culture or the group, however wide the average one considers. This is to my mind the most convincing of all proofs of the existence of God.
Ma’s dilemma would be real to anyone, but is probably
especially complete to me because of my nurse’s training. Not having children, I can merely speculate
on the point you make so well, that the mother is so closely bound to her
family that they seem like part of herself which she is therefore called upon
to sacrifice as she might cut off her own hand.
For me there is the feeling that all of these are people, and would one
have the right to sacrifice two patients for the sake of one? I look back on my time in the isolation ward
and realise that everything was elaborately organised to be sure this dreadful
choice should never present itself ; and it is with a
shock of realisation that one sees, put so naturally in your story, the fact
that in earlier ages, and in many places today, it has done so again and
again. Of course everyone remembers how
Thucydides says about the plague in
It is a surprise to me that a story as good as this should still be in MS form and not in print. You are surely a practising professional, whose name I would know if I saw American periodicals. Of course I see that though it is the right length for itself, it is a bad length commercially. It is the sort of thing the NEW YORKER could, and should, find room for ; but they are more or less fixated, I imagine, on what one might call the Updike formula, and would hate to seem inadequately disillusioned.
I have just one criticism, if you won’t think it an impertinence: the title. Even after one has read the story, though one sees the general idea it is a little bit off-key because nearly everyone in it is female ; but, more important, it is hard to say, and if you read it aloud it would almost certainly be received as AND HIRE MORE BROTHERS. (I once ill-advisedly called an early story of mine RETURN TO NIGHT, and everyone thought it was Tonight.) However, my judgement may very easily be wrong in this.
By the way, the MS was read by an extremely critical friend of mine who often thinks my enjoyment of this or that has been over-facile ; and she had nothing but enthusiasm and praise.
Do you need the MS back? I shall look after it carefully, and will send it you if you do. I see it is a photocopy, but a very good one.
I don’t suppose the copy of THE CHARIOTEER I promised you will have had time to arrive yet ; I think I wrote a line to let you know I’d posted it. If it doesn’t turn up eventually, let me know.
With all good wishes,
Yours sincerely,
(handwritten) Mary Renault.
P.S. Do you think of bringing out a book of short stories? It would make a good lead for that.
2002 note: There is a letter from me which is so embarrassing that I choose not to include it. But it concerns my joy over receiving and rereading The Charioteer and my dismay over having taken up so much of her time and worry that I was trying to use her to get to a publisher.
(on blue aerogram)
(handwritten) 11 . 10 . 73
Dear Bob Locke,
Thanks so much for your letter. I am glad that you have forgiven me. I think you would understand if you knew the story of my experience. I’ve had many generous gifts of work from scholars and archaeologists, who of course need nothing from me except the courtesy of thanks ; I’ve had books from publishers who tell me with professional plainness that they would like something for a quote, which is fair enough, and no hurt feelings if I don’t feel able. But I think I am right in saying that in my 30 years as a published writer, you are the first person ever to send me unpublished work without some hope that I could help promoting it. Not only that, but you are the first person ever who has sent me unpublished work which was of what seemed to me publishable standard. Modesty seems to be in direct ratio with merit! So often I have wrung my brow trying to write a letter which would be reasonably tender to an author’s natural feeling towards the product of his or her heart’s blood, only to find I had raised false hopes and had to write a much more agonising letter. I dreaded having to do this with someone as likeable as yourself, so tried to turn on a sort of early warning system. I am truly touched that you sent this very good story just as a present to give me pleasure, and you can be sure I’ll keep it. Do write more and make up a collection of book length, or one other long-short story which would do so. I am sure that is your one hope – for purely commercial reasons – of coming out in hard covers, which the work so well deserves. The very best of luck to you.
Yours sincerely,
Mary Renault