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One spring day in 1976, when I was fifteen years old and couldn't keep my secret any longer, I went into the bedroom I shared with my older brother, sat down at the little oak desk we did our homework on, and began an anguished letter to a total stranger who lived on the other side of the world. We lived on Long Island, in one of twelve identical "splanches"—split-ranch houses—that lined a street in a suburb that had, until relatively recently, been a potato farm. It was very flat. The stranger to whom I wrote that day lived in South Africa, a fact that I had gleaned from the brief bio under the author photograph on her book jackets, which showed a middle-aged woman with a pleasant face and tightly coiled gray hair, her eyes narrowed and crinkling at the corners: perhaps humorously, perhaps simply against the sun. I had got her street address from the Who's Who in our school library, where I often spent recess, bent over an encyclopedia entry that I particularly liked, about the Parthenon. Over a grainy black-and-white photo of the ruin as it appears today you could flip a color transparency of how the building had looked in ancient times, gaudy with red and blue paint and gilding. I would sit there, day after day, contentedly toggling between the drab present and the richly hued past.
For the letter I wrote that day, I used the "good" onionskin paper, anxiously feeding each sheet between the rollers of a black cast-iron Underwood typewriter that had been salvaged from my grandfather's braid-and-trimmings factory in the city. I used it to type up school reports and term papers and, when nobody was around, short stories and poems and novels that I never showed to anyone—single-spaced pages so shaming to me that even when I hid them in the secret compartment under a drawer in the oak cabinet across from my bed (where I also hid certain other things: a real ancient Egyptian amulet I'd got as a bar-mitzvah gift from a shrewd godparent, a half-completed sketch I'd made of a boy who sat in front of me in English class) I imagined that they gave off some kind of radiation, a telltale glow that might betray the nature of the feelings I was writing about.
Now I was putting those feelings onto these translucent sheets, which protested with a faint crackle every time I advanced the carriage. When I was finished, I put the letter into the lightweight airmail envelope on which I'd typed the address: Delos, Glen Beach, Camps Bay, Cape 8001 South Africa. I didn't make a copy of what I wrote that day, but I must have confided a fear that my correspondent would reply to my effusions with a form letter, because when her answer came, a few weeks later, typed on a pale-blue aerogram—the first of many that would find me over the next eight years—it began, "I wonder whoever told you I'd send you a 'form letter' if you wrote to me. Are there really writers who do that?"
It was a question I didn't know how to answer, since she was the only writer I'd ever tried to contact. Who else would I write to? In those days, I had two obsessions—ancient Greece and other boys—and she was, I felt, responsible for both.
The author to whom I wrote that day, Mary Renault, had two discrete and enthusiastic audiences; although I didn't know it at the time, they neatly mirrored my twin obsessions. The first, and larger, consisted of admirers of her historical fiction. The second consisted of gay men.
Between 1956 and 1981, Renault published a number of critically acclaimed and best-selling fictional evocations of Greek antiquity. Like the works of Marguerite Yourcenar ("Memoirs of Hadrian") and Robert Graves ("I, Claudius"), authors to whom she was compared, Renault's novels were often cast as first-person narratives of real or invented figures from myth and history—a technique that efficiently drew modern readers into exotic ancient milieus. The best known and most commercially successful were "The Last of the Wine" (1956), which takes the form of a memoir by a young member of Socrates' circle, through whose eyes we witness the decline of Athens in the last part of the Peloponnesian War; "The King Must Die" (1958), a novelization of the early life of Theseus, the legendary Athenian king who defeated the Minotaur; and a trilogy of novels about Alexander the Great—"Fire from Heaven" (1969), "The Persian Boy" (1972), and "Funeral Games" (1981).
Renault, who was born in London in 1905—she emigrated to South Africa after the Second World War—had published a number of crisply intelligent contemporary love stories between the late thirties and the early fifties; to her meticulously researched re-creations of the past in the later, Greek-themed books she was able to bring the emotional insight and moral seriousness you expect from any good novelist. Many reviewers appreciated the way she reanimated both myth and history by means of ingenious psychological touches. (She once said that the Theseus book didn't jell until she had the idea of making the mythical overachiever diminutive in stature: he's a legendary hero, but also just a boy with something to prove.) Patrick O'Brian, the author of "Master and Commander," was an admirer; he dedicated the fourth Aubrey-Maturin book to her, with the inscription "An owl to Athens"—the ancient Greek version of "coals to Newcastle." Academic classicists were also enthusiastic. One eminent Oxford don told an eager amateur that to get a sense of what ancient Greece was really like one had only to read Renault—"Renault every time." ("That really bucks me up," she exclaimed, when this remark was reported to her during her final illness.) The combination of historical precision, literary texture, and epic sweep won Renault a large public, particularly in the United States; her books, which have been translated into some twenty languages, have sold millions of copies in English alone.
One of those copies was a thick Eagle Books paperback of "Fire from Heaven" that was stuffed into a bookcase in our downstairs playroom, next to the black leather recliner. I read it when I was twelve, and I was hooked. Alexander the Great was my first serious crush.
It was my father who put the book in my hands. A mathematician who worked for an aerospace corporation, he had been a Latin whiz in high school and sometimes enjoyed thinking of himself as a lapsed classicist. When he gave me the paperback, I looked at the cover and frowned. The illustration, of a blond young Greek holding a shield aloft, wasn't very convincing; I thought he looked a lot like the boy who lived across the street, who had once taken a bunch of us waterskiing for his birthday. My dad said, "I think you should give this a try," averting his eyes slightly, in the way he had. Forty years later, I wonder how much he'd already guessed, and just what he was trying to accomplish.
"Fire from Heaven" traces Alexander's childhood and youth, ending with his accession to the throne, at the age of twenty. I finished it in a couple of days. The next weekend, I went to the public library and checked out the sequel, "The Persian Boy," which had just been published. It views Alexander's conquest of Persia and his nascent dream of forming a vast Eurasian empire from an unexpected angle: the book is narrated by a historical figure called Bagoas, a beautiful eunuch who had been the pleasure boy of the defeated Persian emperor Darius and who later became Alexander's lover, too. I read "The Persian Boy" in a day and a half. Then I reread both books. Then, after taking my dad's copy of "Fire from Heaven" upstairs and placing it inside the oak cabinet, I got my mother to take me to the B. Daltons bookstore in the Walt Whitman Mall, in Huntington, where, for a dollar ninety-five, I bought my own Bantam paperback of "The Persian Boy." Its cover featured, in miniature, the haunting image that appeared on the hardback edition from the library: a Michelangelo drawing, in dusty-red chalk, of an epicene Oriental youth in three-quarter profile, wearing a headdress and earrings. Whenever someone mentions "1973," or "junior high school," this small, delicate, reddish face is what I see in my mind's eye.
My fascination with these books had little to do with their canny evocations of Greek history, the persuasiveness of which I couldn't appreciate until years later. An important narrative thread in each novel is a story of awakening young love—homosexual love. In "Fire from Heaven," Renault sympathetically imagines the awkward beginnings of the relationship between Alexander and Hephaistion, a Macedonian of high birth who, the evidence strongly suggests, was his lover. In "The Persian Boy," Bagoas, sold into slavery at ten, already world-weary at sixteen, finds himself drawn to Alexander, who has suddenly become his master as well as the master of the known world. In both novels, arduously achieved seductions give the narratives a sexy charge: Renault makes Alexander the aloof object of the longings of the other, more highly sexed characters, Hephaistion and Bagoas, who must figure out how to seduce him.
Most seductive of all to me was the young characters' yearning to love and be loved totally. "Say that you love me best," Bagoas dreams in "The Persian Boy"; "I love you. . . . You mean more to me than anything," Hephaistion exclaims in "Fire from Heaven"; "Do you love me best?" Alexander asks in the latter novel's opening scene. (These expressions of deep emotional need run like a refrain through Renault's contemporary novels, too.) As it happens, "longing"—in Greek, pothos—has, since ancient times, been a key word in the Alexander narrative. In a history of Alexander's campaigns written by the second-century-A.D. historian Arrian, pothos recurs to describe the inchoate craving that drove Alexander—far more insistently than any mere lust for conquest or renown. Renault clearly felt the pull of all this longing, too: in addition to the three Alexander novels, she wrote a psychologically oriented biography, "The Nature of Alexander."
Reading Renault's books, I felt a shock of recognition. The silent watching of other boys, the endless strategizing about how to get their attention, the fantasies of finding a boy to love, and be loved by, "best": all this was agonizingly familiar. I knew something about pothos, and thought of the humiliating lengths to which it could drive me—the memorizing of certain boys' class schedules or bus routes, the covert shuffling of locker assignments. I was astonished, halfway through "Fire from Heaven," to find that this kind of thing had always been happening. Until that moment, I had never seen my secret feelings reflected anywhere. Pop music meant nothing to me, since all the songs were about boys wanting girls or girls wanting boys; neither did the Y.A. novels I'd read, for the same reason. Television was a desert. ("Will & Grace" was twenty-five years in the future.) Now, in a novel about people from another place and time, it was as if I had found a picture of myself.
There's a scene in "The Persian Boy" in which Bagoas realizes that he's in love with Alexander; in the slightly high style Renault developed as a vehicle to convey Bagoas' Oriental provenance, she describes this moment as (I now realize) a kind of internal coming out—a moment when, for the first time, a young person understands the nature of his own feelings:
The living chick in the shell has known no other world. Through the wall comes a whiteness, but he does not know it is light. Yet he taps at the white wall, not knowing why. Lightning strikes his heart; the shell breaks open.
Reading "Fire from Heaven" and "The Persian Boy" was such a moment for me. Lightning had struck, the shell lay broken open. I had begun to understand what I was and what I wanted; and I knew that I wasn't alone.
Renault was herself a lesbian, the elder daughter of a doctor and a primly conventional housewife. It was not a happy home. Both the contemporary and the Greek novels feature unsettling depictions of bad marriages and, particularly, of nightmarishly passive-aggressive wives and mothers. Renault's mother had clearly hoped for a "nice" girl instead of the unruly tomboy she got, and preferred Mary's younger sister. (Decades after I first encountered Renault's books, it occurred to me that all this could well be the source of the "love me best" motif that recurs so often in her work.) In later life, the author made no bones about having wished she'd been born a boy. Her first-person narrators are always men.
Indeed, it's possible to see in her lifelong fascination with dashing male heroes—Alexander the Great above all—an unusually intense authorial projection. In a letter to a friend, Renault recalled admiring the head of a statue of the Macedonian conqueror, which had given her an "almost physical sense of the presence of Alexander like a blazing sun below the horizon, not yet quenching the stars but already paling them. . . . His face has haunted me for years." David Sweetman, in his "Mary Renault: A Biography" (1993), referred to "Fire from Heaven" as "a love letter to the boy hero." It's no accident that her very first book, written when she was eight, was a cowboy novel. From the start, she seems to have been searching for an ideal boy protagonist, a fictional reflection of an inner identity. In all her work, boyishness is an unequivocally positive quality—even, or perhaps especially, in women.
Although Renault was entranced by the Greeks from an early age—by the time she finished high school, she had devoured all of Plato—at St. Hugh's, a women's college at Oxford, she studied English. After taking her degree, she decided against teaching, one conventional route for unmarried, educated middle-class women, and instead trained as a nurse; her first three novels, published during the war years, were written during her off-hours from clinics and hospitals. In 1934, she met Julie Mullard, a vivacious young nurse who became her life partner for nearly fifty years, until Renault's death. In a 1982 BBC documentary, the two come off as unpretentious and suspicious of self-dramatizing fuss.
The couple stayed in England during the war, but after Renault won the hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar MGM prize for "Return to Night," a 1947 novel about a woman doctor in love with a handsome, troubled, much younger actor, she became financially independent. ("You're the best of all . . . I love you. Better than anyone," the doctor tells her lover in the novel's final pages.) They emigrated to South Africa almost on a whim, after reading travel advertisements following a particularly grim postwar winter in England. It was in Africa that Renault wrote the last of her contemporary novels. Soon after, she turned to the Greeks.
As she later told the story, the decision to start setting her novels in ancient Greece began with a question rooted in her early reading of Plato. During a pleasure cruise that she and Mullard took up the east coast of Africa, Renault recalled, she got to thinking about the Greek historian Xenophon—a stolid, less intellectually adventurous fellow-student of Plato's in Socrates' circle, who later became famous for the military exploits he recounted in his "Anabasis"—and began to wonder what the members of that circle might actually have been like, as people. The product of her inspiration was "The Last of the Wine."
Toward the end of her life, Renault wrote that the novel was "the best thing I had ever done." It's not hard to see why she thought so. A shrewdly unsentimental historical portrait of Athens at the beginning of its moral and political decline, it is enlivened by a love story between two of Socrates' students and deepened by a surprisingly vivid re-creation of Socrates' philosophical dialogues as, well, dialogue. There are rich and nuanced cameos of historical characters (not least, Socrates himself) and grand set pieces, all rendered with exacting fidelity to the original sources. Renault fans like to cite her stirring description of the great Athenian fleet's departure for its invasion of Sicily—a misguided campaign that ended in disaster.
And, perhaps better than any other of the Greek novels, "The Last of the Wine" demonstrates how Renault used subtle but telling touches to persuade you of the Greekness of her characters and settings. Classical Greek tends to be loaded with participles and relative clauses; Renault reproduced these tics. ("He, hearing that a youth called Philon, with whom he was in love, had been taken sick, went at once to him; meeting, I have been told, not only the slaves but the boy's own sister, running the other way.") She also used "k" rather than the more usual Latin "c" in her transliterations of proper names—Kleopatra, Sokrates—which gives her pages just the right, spiky Greek look. As a result of this minute attention to stylistic detail, the novels can give the impression of having been translated from some lost Greek original.
It's possible to see Renault's shift from the present to the past as motivated by something other than intellectual curiosity. Setting a novel in fifth-century-B.C. Athens allowed her to write about homosexuality as natural. In "The Last of the Wine," the narrator muses on the abnormality of Xenophon's apparently exclusive heterosexuality: "Sometimes indeed I asked myself whether he lacked the capacity for loving men at all; but I liked him too well to offend him by such a question."
The hinge that connects her earlier works, love stories in which intelligent people—doctors, nurses, writers, actors—struggle with various emotional conundrums, and the later, historical fiction, in which the fact of love between men, at least, is no conundrum at all, is a novel called "The Charioteer." Published in 1953, it is set, despite its classical-sounding title, during the Second World War, and wrestles with the issue of "Greek love." Older gay men can recall that, in the fifties and sixties, to walk into a bar with a copy of this book was a way of signalling that you were gay. Today, the book is referred to as a "gay classic."
I finished reading "The Charioteer" for the first time on December 28, 1974, when I was fourteen. I know the date because I recorded it in my diary. The man who placed it in my hands was a music teacher, around my parents' age, whom we knew to be gay: he had a "roommate" with whom he shared a house in a nearby suburb. My mother and father were open-minded, and they saw nothing wrong in letting their four sons hang out with this civilized man, who took us to concerts and restaurants, and who let me sing with the church choir he directed.
What my parents didn't know was that the music teacher sometimes left copies of Playgirl lying around when I visited his house. I was both curious and embarrassed. Curious because of course I wanted to look at pictures of naked men, having spent hours pretending to be interested in the Playboy centerfolds the kids on my block would steal out of a neighbor's garage; and embarrassed because I perceived that it wasn't appropriate for this middle-aged man to be making porn available to a fourteen-year-old. Curiosity prevailed. Two years had passed since I'd read the Alexander books—paperback copies of which were now stacked, along with Renault's other books, into a neat little ziggurat in my bedroom cabinet—and there were things I wondered about, specific things, that weren't described in the Mary Renault books. I would wait for my teacher to go into another room, to start dinner or put on a recording of Thomas Tallis, and would snatch the magazine up and look at the photographs, which both titillated and repelled me. It was exciting to see the nude male bodies, however patently silly the cowboy boots or policeman hats might be; but it was hard to connect those images to the ideas of love that I had taken away from "Fire from Heaven" and "The Persian Boy."
I remember the day that this teacher handed me the jacketless hardback of "The Charioteer," with its dark-gray buckram boards. We were downstairs in his den, and he'd been playing me a rare LP of ancient Greek music. I was feeling very grownup and was trying to impress him with my passion for all things Greek—a subject that led me, soon enough, to Renault's novels. He said, "If you like Mary Renault, there's another one I think you'll be interested in." He motioned me to follow him upstairs to his bedroom. He searched in a bookcase for a moment until he found what he was looking for. I took it home and started reading it. At first, the Second World War setting disappointed me; I had no interest in modern history.
The title of "The Charioteer" alludes to Renault's beloved Plato. In the dialogue called "Phaedrus," the soul is likened to a charioteer who must reconcile two horses, one white and well behaved (the rational and moral impulses), the other scruffy and ill-bred (the passions). Renault's book recasts the Platonic conflict as a human drama. Laurie Odell, a wounded young soldier who is recovering at a rural hospital—his given name is Laurence, but Renault pointedly used ambiguous names and nicknames whenever she could—finds himself torn between a secret love for an idealistic Quaker youth, Andrew (who seems drawn to Laurie in an innocent, nonsexual way), and a more complex, physical relationship with a slightly older naval officer, Ralph. The plot pushes Laurie toward a culminating choice between the two men. That choice implies another: whether to remain a loner or to enjoy the solidarity afforded by the local gay set, whose members Renault paints in campy colors: they're named Bunny and Binky and Bim, and wear Cartier bracelets. Laurie, by contrast, is a kind of holy fool: "His loneliness had preserved in him a good deal of inadvertent innocence; there was much of life for which he had no formula."
I, too, was an innocent. By a kind of literary osmosis that is possible only when you're young, I absorbed without question Renault's idealization of severe, undemonstrative men; I wasn't yet able to recognize, in the author's clichés of gay effeminacy, certain unexamined prejudices of her own. Nor did it occur to me to question a central element of the text: the rather dated assumption that it would be better for Andrew never to be made aware of his sexuality. (It "would scatter his whole capital of belief in himself," Laurie thinks. "He must never know.")
Now, of course, I can read the book as it ought to be read, as a coming-of-age story: Laurie abandons the inchoate but potent ideals of adolescence, symbolized by the pure and curiously sexless Andrew, in favor of an adult relationship, one that is physical as well as emotional, with complicated and compromised Ralph, who, like Laurie, bears physical as well as emotional scars. But, because I was so young when I read the novel for the first time, I saw the arc from the ideal to the real, from youth to maturity, as a tragic one. To me, Andrew and Ralph were figures in a vast allegorical conflict. Under the white banner of Andrew there was Renault, and true love, and the ancient Greeks, with their lofty rhetoric and marmoreal beauty; under the black banner of Ralph there was Playgirl, and sex, and thoughts about naked men—the messy and confusing present.
Although there was much of life for which I had no "formula," either, I thought I knew enough to decide that, if being gay meant marching under the black banner—aligning myself with my music teacher, or the few characters you saw on TV who, you somehow knew, were gay: the limp-wrists and the effete, the spineless Dr. Smith on "Lost in Space" and the queeny Paul Lynde character on "Bewitched"—then it would be better to remain alone.
Unlike Renault's Greek novels, which portrayed desire beneath the scrim of a historical setting, "The Charioteer," whose characters used words like "queer," allowed for no evasions. "I know what I am," I wrote in my diary the day I finished reading it for the first time. By then, I was obsessively in love with a yellow-haired swimmer who put up with my dogged stalking for three years before he turned around one day early in our senior year and, planting himself in front of his locker, which I had gone to some lengths to insure was next to mine, told me quite calmly that he didn't want to talk to me anymore, and didn't. But I had never thought of my feelings for him as "gay" or "queer": it simply was how I felt. "I know what I am," I wrote. "Now I must think what to do with it."
"What you are . . . what to do with it" is a paraphrase of a line from "The Charioteer." Someone utters it during a climactic scene at a birthday party that's being given for a young gay doctor. At the party, the characters start arguing about what would now be called identity politics: about whether the thing that sets you apart ought, in some fundamental way, to define you. As lonely as he is, Laurie finds himself resisting the temptation of joining this group—of "making a career" of his "limitations," as he puts it to himself. It's in response to this debate about identity that Ralph articulates the liberating formula: "It's not what one is, it's what one does with it."
Renault grew up in an era in which it was difficult to think of homosexuality as anything but a limitation; to her credit, she was independent-minded enough to try to resist that prejudice. Later in the book, the doctor rejects the premises that make blackmail possible:
I don't admit that I'm a social menace. . . . I'm not prepared to accept a standard which puts the whole of my emotional life on the plane of immorality. I've never involved a normal person or a minor or anyone who wasn't in a position to exercise free choice. . . . Criminals are blackmailed. I'm not a criminal. I'm prepared to go to some degree of trouble, if necessary, to make that point.
Renault later wrote that this passage of dialogue "gave the starting-point to my first historical novel"—"The Last of the Wine," in other words, the novel in which homosexuality wasn't considered a limitation.
When I was fourteen, the characterization of homosexuality as a "limitation" seemed reasonable enough. How could it not be a handicap, when it left you with freakish feelings that no one else you knew seemed to share, apart from middle-aged men who left dirty magazines around for you to pick up, feelings that you knew, more instinctually than consciously, you had to hide? What I did with it, after a few anxious months of trying and failing to picture the vast, nearly featureless landscape of the future, one in which the only road sign now, brand-new, freshly painted, bore the word "queer," was to try to be good—to try to be like Laurie Odell. "I must make some good resolutions for the new year," I had written in my diary. "I will try to do better next year."
The next year, I turned fifteen, and still didn't really know what "better" might mean. Finally, I decided to write to Mary Renault and ask her.
In my first letter to Renault, I poured out my story—ancient Greece, discovering her books, discovering that I was gay through her books. In her reply, which arrived in mid-April, just after my sixteenth birthday, she deftly deflected my adolescent effusions while putting to rest my anxieties about form letters:
Are there really writers who do that? I knew film stars do. You can't blame them, really; apart from the fact that about half the people who write to them must be morons who think they really are Cleopatra or whoever, they get such thousands that if they attempted answering themselves they'd never get to the set.
Writers, though, write to communicate; and when someone to whom one has got through takes the trouble to write and tell one so, it would be pretty ungrateful to respond with something off a duplicator. I think so, anyway.
This, as she had intended, pleased me. And yet of my fervent confessions there was only the briefest acknowledgment, which segued immediately and harmlessly into a charming compliment and a gentle dismissal:
I am truly glad the books have meant all this to you; especially as you write very good English yourself. . . . Greek history, or something, has certainly given you a clean and simple style. I wish you the very best of luck with your work, and a happy fulfilled career.
I read and reread the letter. I was a gay adolescent; I was accustomed to overinterpreting. Just as I wasn't what I pretended to be, so everyone and everything else, I thought, concealed secret meanings, communicated in hidden codes. (I had to think a moment before I realized that "a duplicator" was a copying machine.) But there was nothing else, apart from the scrawled signature and, below it, printed instructions about how to fold the aerogram. "Verseël Eers Die Twee Syklappe, Dan Hierdie Een—Seal The Two Side Flaps First, Then This One."
"Meant all this to you"? Maybe I hadn't been clear enough. I sat down and started another letter.
This time, I enclosed a few pages of one of the short stories I had secretly written. Like nearly everything I wrote then, it was about an intense friendship between two fourteen-year-old boys, one of whom was, inevitably, serious and dark-haired and creative, while the other was, just as inevitably, carefree and blond and athletic. This story, which was more ambitious than the others—it had a prologue set in a kind of classical limbo—was, like the others, a slavish pastiche of Renault: her diction, with its faint aura of prewar England ("Phaedo, whatever do you want?"), her settings ("Under the ancient olive tree, the two young men were talking"), her characters ("Speaking of Sokrates, have you seen him lately?"), even her punctuation. (Renault, according to her biographer, had a particular fondness for the semicolon. I still remember the thrill I felt when one of my college professors wrote, in the margin of an undergraduate essay, "You have semicolonitis!") I was convinced that this lofty effort would persuade her that I would be a worthy correspondent. Feeling very much the author, I was emboldened to ask her whether she, too, had a kind of compulsion to write—although I secretly doubted whether hers had the same source as mine. For me, writing was a kind of sympathetic magic, a way of conjuring the swimmer boy and keeping him close.
She wrote back within a couple of weeks, at the end of April. I know she must have read the story because of her tactful allusion to it:
Your nice letter came this morning. Something tells me you are going to have a future as a writer. Keep at it; very few people get published at 16 or even 20, but don't worry. . . . There is only one way to learn to write and that is by reading. Don't read for duty, try all the good stuff though, sample it, then devour what stimulates and enriches you. This will seep in to your own work, which may be derivative at first but this does not matter. Your own style will develop later.
Now that I am a writer who has received mail from young readers, I appreciate the patience and gentleness of this paragraph. I doubt that, at the time, I registered the implications of "which may be derivative"; it was enough that she thought I had a future as a writer. This show of confidence dulled the disappointing force of her equally graceful but firm leave-taking:
Yes, you are right, I do have a compulsion to write and am very frustrated and unhappy if I am kept from doing it. . . . And this is the reason I can't go on writing to you. Not that it is too much trouble; writing a book is very much more trouble; but if I wrote more than one thank-you letter to all the people who are kind enough to write to me, I would never write another novel again. Or I would have to take to those "form letters"—rather than which I wouldn't answer at all.
So this really is goodbye—but the very best of luck to you all the same.
This time, I felt no great disappointment. Over the next months, as my stalking of the blond swimmer became more abject, as more and more meals ended with me bursting into tears and locking myself in my room as my parents clumped helplessly down the hallway after me, the sentence "Something tells me you are going to have a future as a writer" served as a charm. I knew I had no right to expect anything else from her.
Then, that December, she sent me a Christmas card.
I will never know why she changed her mind and wrote again, eight months after she said that she couldn't go on corresponding; at the time, I was so excited by her overture that I didn't dare ask. But I can speculate now. When I read Sweetman's biography, ten years after Renault's death, I learned that the mid-nineteen-seventies had been a particularly trying period for her. In the autumn of 1974, she fell and injured her leg, necessitating an irritatingly lengthy recovery. Soon afterward, Mullard, who was high-strung, suffered a minor breakdown and had to be briefly institutionalized. At just about the time that Renault and I exchanged our first letters, she had decided to put her affairs in order and make provisions for her estate. Perhaps she thought that a letter from an American teen-ager every now and then might provide some distraction, despite (or perhaps because of) the adolescent turmoil it contained.
Something else has occurred to me. Like all writers, Renault spent much of her time alone; a good many of her friends, as I also learned later, were gay men, often ballet dancers and actors and theatre people. What she did not have in her life, as far as I know, was children—or students. I wonder whether she wished for some. (In "The Charioteer," Laurie is described as someone who "usually got on with strong-minded old maids"; was that how she saw herself?) Shrewdly drawn scenes of apprenticeships, of actors or princes or poets learning their craft, figure in a number of the novels. In "The Last of the Wine," Socrates, faced with an earnest, if pretentious, student, resorts to "teasing him out of his pomposities"—as canny a characterization of what it's like to teach freshmen as any I know of.
Renault's special feeling for the relationship between a teacher and a student imbues the poignant finale of "The Mask of Apollo," her 1966 novel about an Athenian actor who gets mixed up in Plato's disastrous scheme, in the three-sixties B.C., to turn a corrupt Sicilian tyrant into a philosopher-king. Years after the fiasco, the actor meets the teen-aged Alexander, already charismatic and alive with curiosity about the world, and realizes, wrenchingly, that this youth would have been the ideal student for Plato, now dead:
All tragedies deal with fated meetings; how else could there be a play? Fate deals its stroke; sorrow is purged, or turned to rejoicing; there is death, or triumph; there has been a meeting, and a change. No one will ever make a tragedy—and that is as well, for one could not bear it—whose grief is that the principals never met.
I wonder whether something like this was in Mary Renault's mind that day in December when she decided to write back to me after all. Maybe she liked the thought of having a student—someone to tease out of his pomposities. Maybe, with all that grief around her just then, she thought she could at least avoid the grief that comes of never making contact.
We corresponded for the next eight years. I always addressed her as "Miss Renault" or "Mary Renault"; I still can't think of her as "Mary." She only ever addressed me as "Daniel Mendelsohn" and, once I was in college, "Mr. Mendelsohn." During that time, I finished high school, went to college, graduated, got my first job. She published her biography of Alexander and two more novels. We didn't write often—a few exchanges a year—but knowing that she was out there, interested in my progress, was like a secret talisman.
During the first few years, when I was still in high school, I tried not to be too familiar or too earnest—the mistake that I had made in my first couple of letters. (Recalling a lesbian novel she disliked, Renault wrote of its "impermissible allowance of self-pity" and "earnest humourlessness.") Instead, I would tell her about what I was reading, some of which, of course, was chosen with an eye to pleasing her. "I am delighted you've been reading the Phaedrus," she wrote to me early in 1978, when I was a senior in high school. "It's good furniture for any mind." Sometimes she would make suggestions. "Have you ever tried Malory's Morte Darthur? It is very beautiful. On no account read a version pulped down into modern English, it ruins the flavour." A year earlier, I and the other eleventh graders had been made to memorize the opening lines of "The Canterbury Tales" in the original Middle English, an exercise that we both feared and derided; reading her letter, I began to wonder, as I hadn't done before, what it might mean for language to have "flavor."
Occasionally there would be an item about her or one of her books in the news; it gave me a thrilling sense of privilege to be able to write to the author herself to learn more. When I was a junior in high school, the teacher who had given me "The Charioteer" showed me an issue of a magazine called After Dark, which I only later realized was a gay magazine. It featured an ambitious photo spread about the upcoming movie adaptation of "The Persian Boy," and referred to young dancers and actors who were hoping to be cast as Bagoas. Excited, I wrote to Renault asking for details. "I certainly wish they had not raised the hopes of so many actors in this way," she replied, explaining that the movie rights hadn't even been sold yet, "and I wish too that so many actors didn't imagine that the book author has any say in the casting! They could as fruitfully approach the office cleaner." (Sweetman, in his biography, relates how a young actor had written to her, offering to have "the operation" if it meant getting the part. "That," she wrote back to him, "would be gelding the lily.")
I continued to send her the stories I was writing. As I reached the end of high school, these were getting darker: the beginning of my senior year, in the fall of 1977, had been scarred by the confrontation with the blond swimmer. Later that day, I ran out of my house and walked around the blandly identical neighborhoods for hours. At one point, I climbed to the top of an overpass and looked down—not serious, but serious enough. Then I burst out laughing, amused by my own theatrics; it was a beautiful autumn afternoon, and in a year I'd be in college, where I'd be able to study Greek and Latin and find new, like-minded friends; where, I secretly hoped, there might be a Laurie Odell for me. I wrote about this incident to Mary Renault, aware, as I did so, of wanting her to perceive that I was learning from her—that I wasn't giving in to adolescent foolishness. I was, after all, someone who had a future as a writer.
She read these later stories, too. By this point, one (or sometimes both) of the two inseparable friends who were always at the center of my fiction, the brunet and the blond, the writer and the athlete, would die of a rare disease, or meet with a terrible accident. As she had done before, and would do again, Mary Renault ignored the impermissible self-pity and the earnest humorlessness, and simply encouraged me:
Just carry on enjoying yourself with writing. Love what you are doing and do it as well as you can, and the tree will grow. Nobody ever did their best work at 17 except people who died at 18! You are now just getting the soil in your garden right—except that unlike a garden, even at this stage your work is producing flowers, very likely not yet ready for the flower-show, but giving you a lot of joy.
The stories did not, in fact, give me much joy. But knowing that she had read them did.
I wrote to Renault less frequently once I went off to the University of Virginia. (The swimmer had grown up in Virginia; I thought there might be someone else like him there.) I started learning Greek during my first semester, and found a kind of happiness in grammar, which insisted on a level of precision not available in English: the nouns, often familiar-looking (anthrōpos, historia, klimax), each one of which has five different forms, depending on how it's used in a sentence; the vast spiderweb of the verb system. For me, as for many beginning classics students, learning Greek and Latin unlocked the secrets of my own language. With delight I learned that "ephebe" consists of epi, "upon," and hēbē, "youth": an ephebe is a male at the acme of his youth. And you learn, too, to sniff out a fake. The word "homosexual," for instance, is a solecism, a hybrid of Greek (homos, "alike") and Latin (sexualis, "sexual"). A homo- word with a purer pedigree, as I learned when I started reading Homer in Greek, was homophrosyne, "like-mindedness," which is the word Odysseus uses, in the Odyssey, to describe the ideal union of two spouses—the kind of union that he's trying to return home to.
My own quest for homophrosyne was proving unsuccessful. No Laurie Odell had materialized. How did you make contact? There was, I knew, a gay student union that met regularly in one of the many red-brick-and-white-stucco neoclassical buildings on campus, undistinguished knockoffs of Jeffersonian originals. But I was dismayed to see that the building was right in the middle of the campus; I was terrified that someone I knew would see me going in. So I would walk past the posters for the meetings, my eyes briefly alighting, as tentative as a fly on a peach, on the word "gay," as I made my way each morning to Greek class, during my first year, or, the next year, to Greek 201 ("Plato's 'Apology' "), or, the year after, to the course in which, for the first time, I read Sophocles in Greek. The text, I remember, was "Philoctetes," a play about a crippled hero who has been abandoned on a desert island for so long that it's no longer clear whether he can rejoin society.
Beneath my fear of being found out, a larger anxiety lurked. I was starting to worry that, even if I were to "make contact," the ideal I'd found in "The Charioteer" didn't exist. There was a boy in one of my English classes, a tall, dark-haired prep with a beaked nose and a Tidewater accent, who, I now realize, was trying to make contact with me. He'd stop me after lectures and ask if he could borrow my notes; once, after mentioning that he was in one of the choral groups, he called to invite me to come to his dorm room to listen to his new LP of Purcell's "Come Ye Sons of Art." But I never called him back. After a while, he started asking some other kid for notes at the end of lectures.
I studied hard and absorbed my grammars and didn't confide any of this to Mary Renault. She had brought me to the Greeks, and had shown me what I was, and it was somehow shaming to let on that I was having a hard time finding anyone like the characters in her novels. Somewhere in "The Persian Boy," when the young Bagoas is being schooled at Susa in the arts of the courtesan, the kindly master who is preparing him for service to the King reminds him of a crucial rule of life at court: "Never be importunate, never, never." I was no longer sixteen, and I was determined never to importune her.
She must have noticed, at any rate, that I was no longer enclosing short stories with my letters. That's because I wasn't writing anymore. How silly those stories had been! I was twenty-one; I was going to be a scholar, not a writer. I was comforted by the incantatory rhythms of grammatical paradigms; by syntax, which was soothingly indifferent to emotion. During my senior year, "Funeral Games" was published. I went to the local bookstore every day to see if it had come in yet and, when it did, bought it and read it right away. The novel begins as Alexander is dying and proceeds to describe in grimly unsentimental detail the story of the internecine power struggles that resulted from his premature death. I was struck by the starkness of the narrative. Gone were the exalted adolescent yearnings of "Fire from Heaven," gone the plush erotic Orientalisms of "The Persian Boy." It was as if all feeling had been stripped away. I read it with a kind of sour enjoyment; it matched my mood. I wrote her to tell her how much I'd liked it. "Your letter gave me very great pleasure," she began her reply:
Besides its generous appreciation of what the book is about, this is actually the first letter about it from an ordinary reader—meaning of course one who had no professional or personal reason to read the book. I am so glad that you liked it.
I knew what she meant, but I was a little hurt. I, at any rate, thought that I had a "personal" reason to read it.
My letters to Renault were even less frequent after I graduated from college. I was too embarrassed. For one thing, I had decided not to go on to do a graduate degree in classics, which she had once urged me to do, on the ground that it was always good to have "solid" knowledge of a subject, even if one wanted to be a writer rather than an academic. I wrote that I was forgoing graduate school because I "hoped to gather knowledge of the world"—probably because I had read somewhere that she had become a nurse in order to gain real-life experience to write about.
I moved to New York City and found a job as an assistant to a small-time opera impresario whose obscene tirades against disloyal conductors and greedy sopranos would seep, like his cigar smoke, beneath the smoked-glass door of his inner office in the tiny "suite" he rented, in the Steinway Building, on West Fifty-seventh Street, into the area where I was stationed. Sitting at my desk while he shrieked into the phone, I was too timid even to quit. But in my letters to Renault I swaggered and lied and pretended to be using my classical learning to gain insight into the real world. In the spring of 1983, I wrote her a letter that I ostentatiously typed on our company stationery ("DANIEL MENDELSOHN, ASSOCIATE"): "I've found that reading Plato while one isn't actually studying intensively gives one an entirely new perspective—like being a Christian on weekdays." (That last phrase is an almost verbatim citation from "The Charioteer.") I went on grandiosely, "After all, it wasn't meant to be read and discussed at cocktail parties, but lived, in a way; or so I think."
The fact is that I wasn't spending much time on Plato. Mostly, I was going out to bars: Boy Bar, down on St. Marks Place, where young men, self-consciously "over" the disco aesthetic just then, lounged in khaki shorts and Topsiders and played pool at a table under a giant stuffed fish; the Pyramid, where you'd go afterward, once your standards had started to erode; the Works, on the Upper West Side, with its aloof actor-waiters in their too carefully pressed polo shirts, lined up neatly against the black walls like empty bottles; bars that didn't last long enough for me to remember their names, while I tried, as I continued to put it to myself, to "make contact."
Sex rarely appears in Renault's books; it's either omitted altogether or suggested with such elegant circumlocution that I sometimes didn't realize that certain passages were sex scenes when I first read them. This was partly because of the author's own idealized exaltation of platonic love, and partly for reasons that she identified as writerly ones. "If characters have come to life," she once wrote, "one should know how they will make love; if not it doesn't matter. Inch-by-inch physical descriptions are the ketchup of the literary cuisine, only required by the insipid dish or by the diner without a palate." As I reread her books in high school, I looked in vain for signs of what lovemaking might actually be like; what (for instance) "a trick I learned at Susa" (as Bagoas recalls of an attempt to liven things up in bed with the Persian emperor) might be, or what "the sufficient evidence of his senses" (the hint that Laurie and Ralph have finally slept together, in "The Charioteer") might allude to. But in college I had finally, if fleetingly, discovered sex, and in New York it was everywhere, if you wanted it. It seemed perfectly reasonable to have sex if you couldn't find love. Occasionally, I'd bring someone home, or go to his place, and often it would be pleasurable and sometimes it would be someone I liked. But always in the back of my mind was a certain image of what I wanted, and since nobody I met quite matched it, I held back. I had come to feel that getting involved with real people was, somehow, a betrayal.
Sometimes I comforted myself with this thought: hadn't Laurie Odell also been a loner? The first summer I lived in New York, a friend told me about a gay therapist who "did group" on the East Side, and suggested that I join; it was a great place to meet nice guys, he said. I went for about five sessions. Some of the men were in relationships with each other: one couple consisted of a tall, extraordinarily handsome young man of about my age and his "lover," a short, quite ugly man in his forties with a gigantic nose. I thought it surprising that they would be together. Never having had a lover, and embarrassed by my lack of experience and, even more, by the secret ideal that was keeping me from experience, I rarely said anything during the sessions. Finally, one day, the others turned to me all at once and asked me to talk about myself. At some point, inevitably, I mentioned the Mary Renault books and what their vision of love meant to me. "Oh, Mary," the big-nosed lover of the beautiful ephebe said, and only after a moment did I realize that he was not referring to the author but addressing me, "join the real world!" I never went back to "group." I recorded this incident in my journal. The entry ends with the sentence "I ought to write Mary Renault soon." But I didn't.
In April, 1983, I wrote my last letter to her. In it, I lied and concealed and sprinkled the pages with allusions to Plato. I enclosed, as I sometimes liked to do, a cartoon from this magazine having to do with the ancient world. In it, a corpulent king is getting the lowdown from his vizier on a visiting delegation: "The Athenians are here, Sire, with an offer to back us with ships, money, arms, and men—and, of course, their usual lectures about democracy." In early May, she replied. She began by thanking me for the New Yorker cartoon. ("I don't know if it would have amused Thukydides; he didn't amuse easily, he had seen it all; but I bet it would have given a good laugh to Philip of Macedon, when that arch democrat Demosthenes made a pact with the Great King of Persia.") Then she went on to tease me. "I'm glad you're enjoying Plato. Of course he meant his ideas to be lived. . . . But he certainly felt happy at having them discussed at drinking parties. Look at the Symposium!" I was too mortified to reply. I thought she must be appalled by me.
That summer, I decided that I wasn't cut out for "the real world," and began to make plans to apply to graduate school in classics. Early in September of 1983, I walked out of the Steinway Building just as a handsome man, blond and square-jawed, pedalled past on a bike; he grinned and rang his little bell at me. We dated for a while, but, as before, I wasn't quite sure what to do, now that I had a "relationship." Later that month, I wrote in my journal, worrying that, whereas the characters in books seemed to have so much forward momentum, I didn't. I still wasn't sure how you got to be the author of your own life. The journal ends there. The only additional item is a clipping from the Times, dated Wednesday, December 14, 1983.
I had been thinking about sending Renault a Christmas card but hadn't got around to doing it. Then, that Wednesday morning, I walked into the Steinway Building, went through the lobby past the display of grand pianos, got into the elevator, scanned the front page of the Times, and suddenly said, loudly, "Oh, no!" I slumped against the back of the elevator and started crying. The only other person in the elevator was old Mr. Koretz, the Holocaust survivor who rented the office next to ours.
"What happened?" he asked, stooping a little and bringing his large face close to mine, his eyes gigantically magnified by his glasses. He was tall, often wore a raincoat, and his slightly phlegmy Middle European consonants were comforting. "Did someone die?"
I shoved the Times in his direction and pointed. Down below the fold, next to the contents, under the heading "Inside," was the item that had caught my eye: "Mary Renault Dies. The historical novelist Mary Renault, who based many of her best-selling books on the legends of ancient Greece, died in Cape Town. Page B5."
Mr. Koretz gave me a noncommittal look. "It was someone you knew?"
"Yes." I nodded; then I shook my head. "No." He gave me a look. "It's hard to explain," I said.
After work, I hurried home to write a condolence letter to a person whose existence I couldn't know of until I turned to page B5 and saw there, at last, the discreet proof of a suspicion I had long entertained but never dared ask about ("the writer's companion of the last 50 years, Julie Mullard"). "Dear Miss Mullard," I began; and then, not for the first time, poured out my heart to a stranger in South Africa.
A month later, a card arrived. On the front, the words "IN MEMORIAM MARY RENAULT 1905–1983" were printed in black. To my surprise, the handwritten note inside suggested that this companion knew who I was. ("She was never aware of any generation gap. People were people to her.") Had Mary Renault discussed me with her companion? What else had they talked about? At that moment, I wasn't so much afraid that my confidences had been shared as I was startled to realize that Renault had existed for other people: that she wasn't only "Mary Renault," who wrote novels and sometimes wrote to me, but was also "Mary," which was how Mullard kept referring to her, a woman who might have casually discussed this and that with her companion—for instance, the letters she had been receiving over the past decade from a young American—the way my parents discussed this and that: work, New Yorker cartoons, things that had come in the mail.
I put Mullard's card in a large manila envelope that, years earlier, my mother had provided for this correspondence, labelling it, as she liked to do when she organized my things, with my initials, in blue Magic Marker. ("Mary Renault: DA.") I'm pretty sure that, as I did so, I told myself that this was the last letter I'd ever be receiving from Camps Bay, Cape Town, South Africa.
For the next twenty-five years, this was true. Then, one morning in December, 2008, the letters started coming again.
It was because of a review of a book of mine, a collection that contained an essay I'd written about Oliver Stone's film "Alexander." I had ended the piece by mentioning how Renault's Alexander novels had inspired me to become a classicist and, eventually, a writer. The reviewer mentioned the Renault connection. Three weeks later, a handwritten letter with colorful South African stamps was forwarded to me. "Dear Daniel Mendelsohn," it began, and went on:
GW Bowersock's NYRB review of your How Beautiful . . . reveals that the Daniel Mendelsohn of whom I am an avid reader is no other than "the American boy" of whom Mary Renault used to speak with enjoyment many years ago!
My correspondent identified herself as Nancy Gordon. The handwriting was firm and clear, although she was quite elderly. ("I am 87. Old. Old. Old.") She told me that her late husband, Gerald, a lawyer and writer, had been a member of PEN South Africa when Mary was president, and that the two couples—Nancy and Gerald and Mary and Julie—had spent a good deal of time together. Nancy was the sole survivor of the little group. "Mary, Julie and Gerald are all gone, but I feel somehow called," she wrote, "as humble messenger from Mary, to salute you. She would have been so chuffed!" At the end of the letter were her signature and e-mail address.
Then, in a P.S., she asked, "Do you still feel for Mary?"
It was a complicated question. Of course I felt for "Mary." In every sense, she has accompanied me through my life. The ziggurat of books has been disassembled and reconstituted in various apartments and graduate-student lodgings over the years, but it is still there. The Eagle Books "Fire from Heaven" and the Bantam "Persian Boy" are now so fragile, the pages so brown and brittle with age, the covers so mummified in Scotch tape that long ago lost its adhesive, that you can't really read them. They're sitting on a shelf in my bedroom, as wizened and unrecognizable as relics.
And yet, as the years passed, I wondered whether I would have been recognizable to her. When Sweetman's biography of Renault came out, I read it right away; in one passage he writes about Renault's distaste for "the worst aspects of the [gay] sub-culture . . . the constant search for sexual gratification without affection, the impermanence of most relationships." Well. I'd never found a Laurie; although I'd been with some good men, the one-night stands vastly outnumbered the affectionate encounters and long-term relationships. In graduate school, I had been a leader of the Gay Alliance and been involved in a good deal of campus activism. I debated, as I did so, whether this constituted "making a career of one's limitations," and decided that it didn't.
So yes: I still felt for Mary. But what had she felt for me? I knew, of course, that she had read my letters carefully—and not only because of her thoughtful replies to them. In 1978, when I was in my first year at Virginia, her penultimate novel, "The Praise Singer," about the great lyric poet Simonides, was published. On page 44 there's a scene in which Simonides, who was famously ugly, recalls how, as a youth, he had resolved to kill himself: having climbed to the parapet of a temple, he looks up at the bright sky and realizes he's being foolish. In real life, he went on to have a happy and fulfilled career. She had indeed paid attention.
But had there been anything else? Until I got Nancy's letter, I thought I would never know. This is why I said "yes" when, after a year of writing to Nancy—a correspondence that has grown far larger, by now, than the one I shared with Renault—she invited me to come to Cape Town, to see Delos, the bungalow down by Camps Bay, the beach where Renault and Mullard had lived, where Renault had received my letters and written hers to me, and to meet some of Renault's friends, who had also wondered what had become of "the American boy."
We spent four days in Cape Town. "We," because I took my father: I owed him this. We stayed in a hotel overlooking Camps Bay. It was odd, as we drove there from the airport, to see the words Camps Bay on road signs. I'd been writing the name for years, and had never thought of it as a real place.
The climax of our visit was a dinner party at which Nancy Gordon gathered a few of Mary Renault's old friends. Nancy is small and vivid; she greeted me and my father wearing a floor-length, brightly patterned cotton dress, with horn and wooden bangles going up both arms. In the distance, we could see Table Mountain's strange flat top, the mist pouring over it like dry ice off of a stage. Before the others arrived, she pointed to a chair in the corner of her living room: "Mary used to like to sit in that chair. She'd sometimes come over to our place for a drink looking out at the beach and I remember she would suddenly get up and say, 'I must go write to my American boy.' "
My American boy. When we had checked into our hotel, we found an envelope from Nancy containing a few handwritten sheets labelled "Remembering Her." One of the memories she'd jotted down was of the family who lived in the bungalow next to Renault's, "with lots of kids, all very blond." The boys, Nancy wrote, had all been excellent surfers, and Mary had loved watching them. Now, as we stood there in Nancy's living room next to the chair, looking out the large plate-glass windows at the surf where the neighbor boys had played, I thought: Mary Renault had turned away from the blond boys to write to me.
The other friends arrived. To each man or couple, Nancy would exclaim that I was "the American boy" to whom Mary used to write, all those years ago. Over dinner, they all traded what were, clearly, favorite anecdotes. There were stories about Mary and her love of sports cars, stories about how Mary had found out that her gardener was growing marijuana and spent the night flushing it down the toilet, the story of how Mary and Julie insisted that the fig leaf on a bronze statue of Mercury they'd bought be replaced by an anatomically correct male member. "As nurses," Renault had told the workman, "we certainly know what penises look like." At one point, I mentioned that she had made me read Malory's "Le Morte D'Arthur," and everyone laughed. "She made everyone read Malory," someone cried out. "All of us had to!"
I sat and listened, waiting to hear something that would give me a clue to what she'd have felt about me and my writing. What would she have made of my first book, with its matter-of-fact descriptions of the way that I and so many of the gay men I know have lived—the endless talk of wanting boyfriends, of finding a "real" relationship, and the late nights spent hooking up online? At some point, I asked Owen Murray—a former ballet dancer to whom Renault, he told me with a sly grin, had once said, "I wish I'd been born with your body and face"—whether she knew about what really went on between men. I had visited the house he shares with his partner, which is filled with small mementos of Renault: Venetian glass paperweights that had sat on her desk and windowsill, the statue with its add-on penis. Taped to the refrigerator were photographs of Murray, shirtless, still muscular, smiling broadly, at gay parades, on gay cruises, at gay clubs; I figured that he would know what I meant when I said "what really went on between men." But it was hard for me to fathom his response. "Mary wanted her men friends to live up to the Greek ideal," he said. I was a classicist, and I knew that the ideal of "Greek love" was itself a fantasy of Victorian "inverts" who, as Renault had done, projected their pothos for an accepting society onto the distant past. The "Greek ideal": what could this mean in real life? When I pressed Murray on this point, he said, "She liked her friends to be coupled." I shut up and listened to the stories.
Toward the end of the evening, the conversation turned to the many correspondents Renault had had. "People used to write her all the time," Owen said. "Married men who were secretly gay, closeted men—there were thousands of letters when she died." Someone else mentioned a prominent American politician who had come out to Renault in a letter, as I had done all those years ago; the others nodded knowingly, enjoying the expression on my face when I heard the famous name. I asked where all these letters were and what had become of them. Owen said that they had been destroyed after Mary's death, in part to protect the men who had written them. I thought of my onionskin pages, blackening and curling in the flames.
During the next couple of days, I visited some of the men who had been at Nancy's dinner. Each showed me some precious relic, and each offered me a keepsake. Owen gave me an address book, with alphabetical tabs, in which Renault had scrawled notes on various works in progress. (Under "I" there's a page on which she wrote the word "Ideas," and then a few lines with a sketch for a scene that ended up in "The Mask of Apollo.") There were some copies of manuscripts ("Notes on Oedipus," "Notes on the King Must Die"), given me by Roy Sargeant, a theatre director who was making plans to stage a play he'd commissioned, in which the shades of Renault and Alexander meet in the Underworld. Nancy gave me the dainty porcelain cup Renault drank from as she worked.
I took them all. Then my father and I flew home. At some point, I turned to him and shared a thought I often have as I sit awake on a long-haul flight: I think, I told him, about the bags of mail in the cargo hold below, what fervor they contain, what lives they might alter.
Eventually, my father fell asleep. I remained awake, replaying in my mind the events and conversations of the previous few days. In particular, I was thinking of something that Owen had said at Nancy's house. Although I had been enjoying the anecdotes and reminiscences, I was feeling unsatisfied; there was no way of knowing, finally, what Mary Renault would have thought of the man that the American boy had become. Then, toward the end of the evening—during the conversation about all the people who wrote letters to Mary Renault—Owen, who'd been watching me react to the surfeit of new personal details about her, spoke up. He talked slowly and loudly, as if addressing the others, but I knew that he was talking to me. "Mary used to say to people who wrote wanting to know her that they should just read her books." He paused and then gave me the tiniest smile. "But she understood why they wrote her personal letters."
At that moment, sitting at a table eight thousand miles from home, I saw that I'd come to South Africa chasing a chimera. I had already found the Mary Renault I needed, years earlier. I thought again of the yellowing books on my shelf; I thought, too, of the relationships that had never quite worked out, edged aside by a phantom out of a novel. She had shown me a picture of what I was, when I needed to see it, and had given me a myth that justified my fears and limitations. The writers we absorb when we're young bind us to them, sometimes lightly, sometimes with iron. In time, the bonds fall away, but if you look very closely you can sometimes make out the pale white groove of a faded scar, or the telltale chalky red of old rust.
That was last year. As I write this, I'm sitting in my office. Hanging on the wall opposite my desk is a signed photograph of Mary Renault. When Nancy Gordon first wrote to me, she mentioned that she had it, and that she had been wondering to whom she might give it. ("I can't give it to just anyone.") So she sent it to me, and I framed it. It's clearly from the same sitting as the one that appeared on Renault's dust jackets, the one in which she's crinkling her eyes against the sun. On the bottom she had scrawled, "With love from Mary"; but there's nothing at the top, no dedication. I suppose it was for Nancy and Gerald. Then again, when you're a writer, you never know who will end up reading you, or how. I never pretend, when visitors ask me about it, that it was meant for me. But she is up there, watching me as I write. ♦


text:
The Marine Corps shuffle this summer of generals assigned to San Diego is clearing the way for the service's next Afghanistan commander.
Brig. Gen. Daniel Yoo, commanding general of Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego and the Western Recruiting Region, will take charge of U.S. and international troops in southwestern Afghanistan next year at the helm of a Camp Pendleton-led task force, a Marine official said.
An East Coast Marine, Maj. Gen. W. Lee Miller, is currently in charge of the NATO force headquartered at Camp Leatherneck in Helmand Province.
When Yoo deploys in the winter, he will lead Marine Air-Ground Task Force 14, a smaller unit than the Marine expeditionary forces from both coasts and a brigade that once included 10,000 to 20,000 Marines deployed to the area.
Less than 7,000 Marines remain in southwest Afghanistan. Most U.S. combat forces are scheduled to withdraw from Afghanistan by the end of 2014, when the NATO mission ends.
Yoo, who has led the depot since June 2011, is scheduled to relinquish his command on Friday, July 26, to Brig. Gen. (select) James W. Bierman.
Within a month Yoo will move to Camp Pendleton to fill a vacant post as second-in-command of the 1st Marine Division, until he deploys to Afghanistan, said Capt. Alfred Reynolds, a division spokesman.
The division also got a new leader this summer when Maj. Gen. Ronald Bailey relinquished command in June to Maj. Gen. Lawrence Nicholson.
Among other recent changes in command, Brig. Gen. Carl E. Mundy III relieved Maj. Gen. John J. Broadmeadow Wednesday as the commanding general of 1st Marine Expeditionary Brigade at Camp Pendleton.
Broadmeadow took over the brigade in December as a temporary dual-hat job to the one he had held since June 2011, as commanding general of the 1st Marine Logistics Group. His stint in charge of the logistics group headquartered at Camp Pendleton included deployment to Afghanistan last year as the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force coordinated a steep drawdown of troops, bases and equipment in the region.
Lt. Gen. John A. Toolan, commanding general of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, credited Broadmeadow at his change of command ceremony for preparing the Corps' middle-weight unit for a more prominent role responding to anything from conflict to humanitarian assistance, on land or sea.
"The Marine Expeditionary Brigade is taking on an increasingly more important role in today's environment ... as a showcase of what Marine Corps crisis response capabilities can do," Toolan said, according to a Marine news release.
He thanked Broadmeadow for being the Marine "who really made that bridge happen, the guy who's truly transformed a lot of what the MEB was doing."
Broadmeadow said the brigade epitomizes what the Marine Corps is all about. Its "Marines and sailors must remember that they are this country's premiere crisis response force. They will be skilled in getting out the door quickly, whenever, to go wherever, our country requires."
On July 11, Brig. Gen. Vincent A. Coglianese took command of the logistics group from Broadmeadow, who is slated to become commanding general of Marine Corps Logistics Command in Albany, Ga.
Coglianese's old job as head of Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton and West Coast Marine Corps installations will be filled later this summer by an aviator, Brig Gen. John W. Bullard, Jr.

subset: commoncrawl


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Hello. I am currently a high-school student. As I am going to apply for Computer Science at my local university after the summer, I have bought the book used in the beginners class for programming. Having solved all the tasks in the first two chapters of the book with relative ease, I found the third chapter to be far more difficult. Here is the task I am struggling with (translated from Norwegian):
Create a program that allows the user to write in a sequence of integers from 1-9 from the keyboard, and writes out a report about how many times the integers 1-9 occurred. Allow the user to end the sequence with a negative number. For example, if the user writes 8 0 2 8 8 9 5 9 -3 the program should write the following: 0 occurs 1 time. 2 occurs 1 time. 5 occurs 1 time. 8 occurs 3 times. 9 occurs 2 times Hint: create a table for ten integers that can save the number of times a number has occurred (int[] times = new int[10];)
Can anybody point me in the right direction here?
Please note that I have a very basic knowledge of Java. I have only solved very basic problems, the most advanced of which include creating a calculator for the quadratic formula, a program that allows the user to enter how many numbers he wants to find the average of etc. Thus, I need to be fed this information with a tea-spoon.
EDIT: Just tried this:
import java.util.*; public class Kap3Oppg1 { public static void main(String[] args) { Scanner in = new Scanner(System.in); int[] ganger = new int[10]; int input; do { System.out.println("Tast inn neste tall: "); input = in.nextInt(); for (int i=0;i<ganger.length;i++){ System.out.println("Tallet "+i+" forekom "+ganger+" ganger."); } } while (input >= 0); } }
I am getting an error due to i<input.length. i<input is just weird. Am I even walking in the right direction?


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Sweeping changes to Indiana's criminal code took effect Tuesday that will send more low-level, nonviolent criminals to community corrections programs and jails instead of state prisons, causing concern by some about the financial burden it will put on counties.
The new guidelines establish felony ranges numbered from Class 1 to Class 6, instead of the previous A through D system. They also decrease minimum sentences for many crimes, but call for the most serious felons to serve 75 percent of their sentences, instead of 50 percent.
The code updates provide for two possible funding mechanisms. Sheriffs can receive a per diem and medical expense reimbursement for felony offenders with a release date of less than 90 days. Starting next year, the reimbursements include the lowest-level felony offenders with a release date of less than 366 days. Both are subject to approval by the state budget agency.
The law allows for $11 million in grants to community corrections and probation departments if the Department of Correction saves money because of the code changes. If there are no savings, there will be no grants.
"All other states that have done justice reinvestment have set aside money — Indiana has done nothing yet," Monroe County chief probation officer Linda Brady told The Herald-Times. "I keep saying 'yet,' because I'm hopeful."
Lake County Sheriff John Buncich told The Times of Munster that he doesn't foresee an immediate impact, but expects to see an increase in the jail population as judges begin implementing the new sentencing guidelines.
"I'm afraid we are in for some problems down the road," Buncich said.
The Lake County Jail already is under federal oversight after the U.S. Department of Justice cited the jail in 2009 as deficient in health care and sanitation.
Larry Landis, executive director of the Indiana Public Defender Council, said counties can request more money for community corrections programs. Indiana lawmakers also are also expected to appropriate money to increase programs to help offenders with mental illness and substance abuse problems.
"I think that is the concern; will the money follow?" Landis said. "We will know once they go back into session in January."
Porter County Superior Judge William Alexa told the Post-Tribune of Merrillville he's concerned the requirement that more serious criminals serve 75 percent of their sentences instead of 50 percent could negate the original intent of the law.
"It's going to make longer prison terms, and the prison population is going to go up," Alexa said.


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Is the White House actually willing to see the Democrats lose control of the House, on the theory that it could help President Obama win reelection in 2012?
Some Democrats are suspicious that's the case – though it's difficult to find one willing to say so on the record.
The issue has come to the fore following White House spokesman Robert Gibbs's comment Sunday on "Meet the Press" that has ignited fury among Democratic leaders. "I think there's no doubt there are enough seats in play that could cause Republicans to gain control," Mr. Gibbs said. "There's no doubt about that."
Gibbs has since softened the comment, but that did not stop House Speaker Nancy Pelosi from unloading on him at a closed-door meeting of the House Democratic Caucus Tuesday night. Gibbs was not there, but she reportedly went after another White House aide in the room, suggesting Gibbs didn't know what he was talking about.
At Wednesday's White House press briefing, Gibbs said that he has a "cordial" relationship with Speaker Pelosi. He also said, "I think we will retain the House and the Senate."
Political analysts say that Gibbs on Sunday was just stating the obvious. The question is, was it smart to do that – given that the comment helps energize Republicans at a crucial time for organizing and fundraising, less than four months before the Nov. 2 midterm elections. One countertheory is that Gibbs was issuing a warning to the less-than-enthusiastic Democratic base – as in, hey, wake up; we are in danger of losing the House, despite the party's large majority.
To take over the House, the Republicans need a net gain of 39 seats. On the Cook Political Report scorecard, 60 Democratic-held seats either "lean Democratic" or are a "tossup." An additional four Democratic seats "lean Republican." Only seven Republican-held seats are seen as vulnerable.
(Political analysts see a Republican takeover of the Senate as a steeper climb.)
On Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Obama has an opportunity to clear the air with Democratic House leaders, who are coming to the Oval Office to talk about legislative priorities before the August recess.
But is there, in fact, an argument to be made that it benefits Obama to lose the House in November? After all, if Republicans controlled at least one chamber, maybe the public would hold them at least partially responsible for the state of the country. When President Clinton lost control of Congress in his first midterms, in 1994, he was able to regroup and "triangulate" his way to reelection, by finding common cause with conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans.
Whether Obama has the skill to do that is questionable. And, analysts say, political polarization could be a big problem.
"There's a raging debate ... as to whether divided government would be a disaster or hold out some opportunities," says William Galston, a policy aide in the Clinton White House. "A lot depends on your assessment of the extent to which political polarization has worsened since the mid-'90s. My view is it's gotten substantially worse, and it was already bad then."
Mr. Galston, now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, says he's pessimistic that 2012 would be a rerun of 1996, in the event of a GOP takeover of the House. "The Republican Party now is even more monolithically conservative and even more driven by its base than 15 years ago," he says.
If the Democrats do lose the House – and Galston places the odds at better than 50-50 – then Obama can pull a President Truman and call it a "do-nothing Congress" that is stifling change.
Democratic strategists say, all things being equal, they'd rather keep the House.
"Thank you very much, I'd rather accomplish things in those two years, and hopefully the next four years, and not get stalled," says Peter Fenn, a Democratic communications consultant.
There's another big reason for Obama not to want the Democrats to lose the House: Rep. Darrell Issa (R) of California. If Republicans take the House, Representative Issa would become chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee – and gain the subpoena power that goes with the job. Issa and his staff have a reputation for being relentless over suspected wrongdoing.


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2013 Best Of Truckee & North Tahoe contest kicks off Friday
Our residents and businesses are what make our communities thrive. So why not celebrate their achievements, as chosen by their peers?
Nominate your favorite businesses, places and people in the region in the 2013 Best of North Tahoe & Truckee online competition, brought to you by the Sierra Sun and North Lake Tahoe Bonanza.
This year, we have 80 different categories, under the grouping of Best People, Best Food and Drink, Best Business and Best Places/Events. You can nominate any person, place or business in the Truckee/North Tahoe area, including Incline Village and the West Shore.
As for nominations, we encourage honesty among our residents and readers — that means no multiple entries from the same IP addresses to get a leg up on the competition. We will closely monitor multiple votes coming in from one IP address — as well as instances of automated voting — and we reserve the right to disqualify any nominee if we feel there are abnormal patterns.
By being honest, it allows for the best possible results, and it also encourages local businesses to develop their own campaigns, especially through social media, to encourage residents to vote.
The nomination period begins the morning of Friday, April 26, and it ends at 5 p.m. on Friday, May 17. From there, we will tab up all the nominees, and those with the most entries in each respective category will be named Best Of for 2013. Winners and runners-up will be announced in a special section in late June.
Click here to access the contest and make your entries.
Questions? Email Kevin MacMillan, the managing editor of the Sun and Bonanza, at firstname.lastname@example.com.
Happy voting, Truckee/Tahoe.


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MBA Women of Color with Consortium
Pre-MBA Webinar Series
Free for Forté members
An MBA is a wise choice for women looking to take their careers to the next level, start their own ventures, or branch out into a new direction—and there are other equally important considerations.
Representation matters in school and in the workforce. This panel of successful women of Black/African American and Hispanic/Latin American heritage who are alumnae from Forté sponsor schools want to share their personal experiences and ideas with prospective female MBA students.
Our panelists will discuss:
- How an MBA transformed their careers
- Challenges and Opportunities faced as multicultural women and lessons learned
- The importance of diversity and inclusion in today's business
In addition, learn more about The Consortium for Graduate Study in Management, a preeminent organization for promoting diversity and inclusion in American Business.
Find out if an MBA is right for you!
Join to View On Demand
Already a member? Log in.
Forté webinars are produced for the benefit of our members. Information provided on this webinar should not be reproduced, distributed or published without the written consent of Forté and permission from individual speakers. If you wish to use our content, please contact Forté for permission.


text:
Financial Times
named Darden the No. 4 school in the world for business ethics.
For more than four decades, the Olsson Center has led key conversations about the role of ethics in business and in society.
In 2012,
Bloomberg Businessweek
ranked Darden the No. 2 school in the nation for teaching business ethics.
Learn more about the research interests of our faculty and fellows.
Read about recent publications by our faculty.
What is Stakeholder Theory?


text:
Welcome to Mt. Beacon Incline Railway
Latest News
The first electrified incline, built in 1902, that was ridden by over 3.5 million visitors in its 75 years of operation.
Destroyed by fire in 1983, the restoration of the Mt. Beacon Incline has the explicit goals of historic preservation, environmental responsibility and economic sustainability.
Read more about the initiative's goals and vision.
Excelsior Video
Watch this 8 minute movie to learn more about the project's vision and benefits to the community and region and how you can help bring back the Incline.


text:
Owens Hunter Transport Series Box 55040 features a rugged aluminum construction, lockable slam latch, three dog compartments, rear vents and cross ventilation between compartments. Read More
This item ships directly from the manufacturer. Please allow additional transit time.
Owens Hunter Transport Series Dog Box # 55040A triple compartment dog box constructed of rugged diamond tread aluminum. This box features lockable slam latch doors with storm covers, rear vents with removable covers and cross ventilation between lined compartments. No storage.
Overall Dimensions: 58"W x 40"D x 20"H
Dog Compartment Dimensions: 19.25"W x 39"D x 19"H with notches in side for short bed trucks.
- Brand: Owens Products
- Size: Overall Dimensions: 58"W x 40"D x 20"H


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This project is made possible by the generous support of the Louisa Stude Sarofim 1995 Charitable Trust and The Brown Foundation, Inc., of Houston, both through the initiative of Louisa Stude Sarofim '58, and the General Art Fund. Additional support for educational programming is provided by the Carlyn Steiner '67 and George Steiner Endowed Fund, in honor of Joan Smith Koch.
Unless otherwise credited, all images are by Petegorsky/Gipe.
Image: Yong Soon Min, born South Korea, 1953. Movement (detail of "energy source"), 2008 (revised 2012). Installation. Records, CD's, round mirrors of varying sizes with painted green disk.


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Sitting in front of a computer all day can take a toll on the back. This flowing sequence, demonstrated by fitness expert Jennifer Kries, who uses it on her "Hot Body Cool Mind" DVD series, helps to restore the mobility and ease to your spine using some of the same stretches your pets use. Do it in the middle of the afternoon when you need to release stiffness and get energized.
What it does
This series of movements increases blood flow to the muscles surrounding the spine, stretches the upper body and strengthen the legs and buttocks.
What to do
Start the exercise with your feet parallel and slightly wider than hip-width apart and your hands on the tops of your thighs. Inhale and arch your back, bending your knees into a squat as you look up at the ceiling. Exhale and rise slightly as you contract your abdominals and round your back like a cat, dragging your palms down your legs as you round. Repeat this arch-and-contract motion five times. Then move on to the next move, called blossoming open.
For this exercise, come to a standing position. Inhale and clasp hands at your chest, then exhale, pushing straight out in front of you, palms facing out and rounding your back. Inhale and drop your hands to your upper legs. Skim them up your legs to your waist with fingers spread wide as you lower into a slight squat with an arched back.
Exhale as you drape over your bent legs like a rag doll. Inhale and roll up vertebra by vertebra, extending your arms to the ceiling with the backs of the hands facing each other, then circling back behind you in a backstroke manner, ending with your arms at your sides. Repeat three to five times.
How much
Do this flowing series together, starting with five repetitions of the first exercise, before ending in three to five repetitions of the second set of movements.


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sponsored by
CHRIS COYNE, agent - State Farm Insurance
Local post office food drive May 10
Send a link to a friend
02, 2014]
The Lincoln post office
will once again conduct a postal carrier food drive. This year the drive
will be on Saturday, May 10.
As a reminder, the food products
donated should be nonperishable boxed or commercially canned
products. Homemade goods, frozen foods or other items subject to
quick spoilage should not be donated to this food drive, and no
glass containers should be used.
Food collected will be distributed
among local food pantries.
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Liberty News
LU wins second-straight Sasser Cup
|Left to right, head track and field/cross country coach Brant Tolsma, head women's basketball Carey Green, Senior Woman Administrator Meredith Eaker and Director of Athletics Jeff Barber accepted Liberty's second-straight Big South Sasser Cup trophy at Thursday's conference awards banquet.
For the second year in a row and the seventh time in the last 12 athletics seasons, Liberty has captured the Big South's George F. "Buddy" Sasser Cup, an award given annually to the top performing athletics department in the conference during each academic year.
Additionally, Liberty also won the Men's All-Sport Trophy for the third-consecutive year and the fourth time since the award was established six years ago.
The Sasser Cup was presented to Liberty Thursday evening, at the league's annual Spring Meetings Awards Dinner and 25th Anniversary Banquet held at McBryde Hall on the campus of Winthrop in Rock Hill, S.C.
For the full story, see libertyflames.com


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Friends of Downtown was founded in 1981 by a group of regular citizens interested in finding ways to sensibly revitalize Chicago's central business district.
The Friends of Downtown are recognized as a vital and influential component of the city's design and building process. We directly influence planning and development decisions through debate, public advocacy, and cooperation with other civic organizations. We create awareness of important issues affecting downtown, enabling citizens to develop their understanding and voice their opinions of Chicago's physical and social environment. In short, we've played important roles in introducing new uses in downtown, and recognizing and promoting commercial, governmental and nonprofit efforts that have helped make downtown Chicago the thriving business, cultural, residential, and educational district it is today.
What We do
Find out about our organization, mission, our methods, and the results of our decades of advocacy.
Take Action
Ready to take the next step? You can become a contributor to our cause, or participate yourself.
Photography provided by Adam Lund


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Privacy Policy: the customer is required to read full text
In accordance with the provisions of D. Decree no. 196 of 30/06/2003, the data will be used by Publitour © SpA, even with the use of electronic and automated means, for purposes related to the announcement, for statistical purposes and to inform you of future company. The data will not be shared or sold to third parties except for the necessary contractual or legal obligations. It is your right to control, update, modify, cancel or oppose to their treatment according to Article 7 of that Act.


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Over 775,000 votes were cast online to put Dale Earnhardt Jr. onto the cover of Nascar® The Game(™): Inside Line. It looks like Nascar fans aren't the tech-averse no-nothings haters think they are.
It's no surprise that Earnhardt Jr. would edge out Kasey Kahne for the cover spot, given that Dale's been Nascar's
Mr. Congeniality most popular driver nine times.
While the Sprint Cup cars just started to use fuel injection, Nascar management has clearly learned how to run a successful online poll, which is more than can be said for Mountain Dew after their recent Nazi-themed mishap. Even the drivers are tech-savvy enough to get on Twitter in the middle of a race. Stock cars have come a long way from moonshine running.
The game itself is made by Activision and has all the cars, drivers, and 23 tracks of the regular season. You can see what the gameplay will look like in this clip at Bristol, where the Sprint Cup will head this weekend.
The game comes out November 6 and is console-only for Xbox, Playstation, and the Wii.
Photo Credit: Nascar The Game


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Pettit College of Law to celebrate commencement May 20
Justice McGee Brown
Ohio Northern University's Pettit College of Law will celebrate its 2012 commencement ceremony in the ONU Sports Center on Sunday, May 20, 2012, at 2 p.m. Approximately 90 students will be awarded degrees, and Dr. Daniel DiBiasio, Ohio Northern University president, will preside.
The ONU Sports Center is scheduled to open for the commencement exercises at 12:30 p.m. A musical prelude will begin at 1:30 p.m., followed by the procession of faculty and juris doctorate candidates.
John Paul Bratcher of Marion, Ind., will give the invocation, and Heather Armstrong of Elmira, N.Y., will sing the national anthem.
Ohio Supreme Court Justice Yvette McGee Brown will deliver the commencement address. Brown, who became the first African-American woman to serve as a justice on the Supreme Court of Ohio in 2011, began her career in 1992 when she was the first African-American elected to the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas, Domestic Relations and Juvenile division. In this position, she created the Family Drug Court and the SMART Program, an intervention program. In 2002, she retired from the court to create the Center for Child and Family Advocacy at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus. The Center serves children and families who are experiencing abuse. In addition to her legal career, Brown is an active community member, having served on numerous boards, including Ohio University, the Ohio State University Medical Center board, the National Council of the OSU Moritz College of Law, M/I Homes Inc., and Fifth Third Bank of Central Ohio. She also has served as chair of the United Way of Central Ohio and on the YWCA Columbus Board of Directors.
Amy Jeffries of Modesto, Calif., will deliver the student address.
Gregory L. Frost, a 1978 ONU alumnus, will receive an honorary doctor of law. Frost began his legal career as assistant Licking County prosecutor. He worked in the juvenile division, adult felony division, civil division and appellate division. While serving as the assistant prosecuting attorney, Frost maintained his role as partner at the law firm Schaller, Frost, Hostetter & Campbell. There, he handled personal-injury lawsuits, domestic-relations matters and small-business issues. In 1993, Frost was appointed to the Licking County Municipal Court, where he served for seven years before being elected to the Licking County Commons Pleas Court for 13 years. In March 2003, Frost was sworn in as judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio.
David C. Crago, dean of the Pettit College of Law, will give remarks. Assisted by members of the tenured law faculty, Crago will next place the academic hood upon each candidate, which will be followed by DiBiasio's presentation of the diplomas. Armstrong will sing the musical benediction, and Kelli Vaughn of Dayton, Ohio, will give the spoken benediction.
A reception for graduates and families will take place in the College of Law immediately following the ceremony.