Trust Me on This : Sex, Lies and History

My dad is telling me a bedtime story from one of his favorite books: A little rich kid, Bagoas, lives in a mountaintop castle in what eventually would be called Iran. He sees his family murdered. Even 2,500 years ago, this was considered just a routine change in local government.

Bagoas is castrated and sold at auction. A recession hits and he’s turned out as a whore. He catches the eye of a middle-aged king. “I was to be enjoyed, like the flame and crimson birds, the fountain and the lutes; and this I soon learned to manage, without jarring his dignity.”

My dad’s bedtime stories are a tease. The next morning, over French toast, he gives me the book to read. We have done this for almost 50 years, and I’ve tried it, less successfully, with my own kids. This time, though, I remind Dad that I do not read historical novels, particularly about ancient eunuchs.

Nevertheless, he smuggled the book into my car trunk and it turned up on an island when fog smothered the tennis court on a day there was nothing to do but sit on the porch, rock and read. It began:

“Lest anyone should suppose I am the son of nobody, sold off by some peasant father in a drought year, I may say that our line is an old one, though it ends with me. . . . I was ten years old, and learning a warrior’s skills, when I was taken away.”

I read Mary Renault’s “The Persian Boy” through the rest of that afternoon, after dinner, back on the porch the following morning though the sun was out and the courts were dry. I can’t vouch for its scholarship, although others have, but I didn’t much care; without jarring my dignity, it carried me away, and the feel of the fabrics, the tastes of the wine and the clang of the swords were as real as I needed them to be.

Bagoas is a quintessential narrator, like the pre-man Huck Finn or the unmanned Jake Barnes, an outsider operating inside. Bagoas becomes devious, invisible. He hears all the gossip of the court, yet doesn’t spread it. He feels but never shows. He shares the mounting concern as the young barbarian, Alexander the Great, comes closer, conquering all in his path.

Like most of the brand-name novels on the best-seller lists, “The Persian Boy” is about sex, lies and history. But they seem like catalogues, out of date by publication, while Renault’s timeless world of high-level treachery and sensuality illuminates the present as well as the past. “The Persian Boy” even informs two basic books of the ‘80s, that text on ego and greed, “Barbarians at the Gates: The Fall of RJR Nabisco” by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar and “Dancer From the Dance,” Andrew Holleran’s short masterpiece about the beautiful and the doomed in Gay New York.

After all, Alexander the Great was the quintessential takeover artist, and Bagoas was every paramour who loved a Greedhead’s soft side.

Yes, Bagoas loved Alexander and it was great. But I’m not going to tell you more about the book and spoil it. You have to trust me.

“The Persian Boy” led me into Renault’s trove of antique treasures, including two other books about Alexander, “Fire From Heaven” and “Funeral Games,” “The Mask of Apollo,” “The Last of the Wine” and, perhaps her best, “The King Must Die.”

You probably can learn all you need to know about statecraft, honor, teamwork and the dangerous rituals of bull-baiting in this violent page-turner about a teen-age king who allows himself to be kidnaped to Crete as a religious sacrifice because he won’t abandon his companions.

King Theseus is a tough-minded, highly sexed jock who finds that the blood-drenched lessons of the Bull-Court are the lessons of time out of mind: Respect your enemies, love your friends, and while you prepare to die with dignity try to answer the basic question--”How far can a man move within his moira , or, if all is determined, what makes one strive?”

Moira is destiny, written by the gods and goddesses, and Renault made her own room to move within it. She was born Eileen Mary Challans, a doctor’s daughter, in London in 1905. She was educated at Oxford but she became a nurse to learn about “life” for her fiction.

While training, she met her lifelong companion, Julie Mullard, and began writing well-received contemporary novels, often with medical and/or homosexual themes. One of them, “Return to Night,” won the $150,000 MGM Award in 1946. It never was filmed, but Renault became financially independent.

She traveled to Greece, where the Alexander books began to take shape. She couldn’t settle there because, she wrote, it was a “man’s country,” particularly inhospitable to unmarried foreign women.

Ironically, she found her home in Cape Town, South Africa, where she lived until her death in 1983. She was active in PEN and in the anti-apartheid movement. South Africa, she wrote, helped her understand power and ignorance and cultural complexity.

Renault wrote at least 16 books, several of them nonfiction about ancient Greece. Happily, I have not yet read them all. Yet, long before I finish that chapter of my moira, I’ll be going back home to Dad for another bedtime story.

Richard Eder is on vacation.