Ancient Greek in a Cardigan : MARY RENAULT: A Biography, <i> By David Sweetman (Harcourt Brace: $24.95; 307 pp.)</i>

One of the most revealing examples of Mary Renault’s painstaking accuracy as a historical novelist can be found not in her books on ancient Greece, but in her garden. There, in the middle of the flower beds that surrounded her house in South Africa stood a weather-worn statue of Hermes, a metal reproduction that sported a fig leaf, the obligatory cache-sexe that came to symbolize for Renault all that she despised about her contemporaries’ bashful Victorian images of classical Athenian culture. Irritated by the leaf’s coyness, she hired a metal-worker to amputate it with a hack-saw, only to find, when he had finished slicing off this prudish reminder of 19th-Century censoriousness, that he had emasculated the sculpture altogether (since there was, as is so often the case, nothing whatsoever underneath). Disappointed by the hermaphrodite she had inadvertently created, she hired the same workman to restore the figure’s manliness--but was unprepared for the massive endowment he welded on, a gigantic organ entirely unsuited to a classically proportioned Attic male.

Her unflinching sense of realism, however, had its limits. When rumors began to circulate that Hollywood was going to pull out the stops and turn “The Persian Boy” into a magnificent epic a la Cecil B. De Mille, hairless youths with willowy bodies began to send her photographs in hopes of landing the part of Bagoas, the beguilingly beautiful eunuch who narrates the novel. One particularly desperate candidate even stated that he would be willing to submit “to the knife” simply for the opportunity to star in what promised to be an atrocious bit of Hellenic kitsch, but only if Renault would guarantee him the role. Although she was capable of butchering a sculpture in order to meet her exacting standards of accuracy, she drew the line at a real person, claiming that, even if this delirious adolescent were spayed in the name of artistic verisimilitude, such an unconscionable act of mutilation would only be “gelding the lily.”

David Sweetman’s “Mary Renault” tells the story of one of the most popular historical novelists of the 20th Century, a kind of mass-market Marguerite Yourcenar, who wrote so convincingly about the homoerotic culture of classical Greece that many readers thought that she was a man writing under a nom de plume. (Mary Renault was in fact a pseudonym, but simply for Mary Challans.) Other readers, impressed by her uncanny intimacy with her subject, believed that she was in fact a reincarnation of someone who had actually witnessed the events she described and thus was simply functioning as a sort of belletristic channeler.

Sweetman does an admirable job of exploring the mysteries of how this dowdy, buck-toothed British woman, who invariably appeared in public swaddled in baggy cardigans, could write stories for which she appeared so miscast--steamy narratives about Persian eunuchs who wear eye shadow and perform exotic dances to choruses of appreciative cat calls from lusty battalions of ancient Greeks.

Born in 1905, Renault was a gruff, charming, masculine lesbian who grew up in what would now inevitably be called a dysfunctional family headed by a meddling shrew who constantly needled her daughter about her indifference to her femininity, holding up Mary’s docile and somewhat insipid sister as a paragon of ladylike daintiness. At the age of 18, this bullied tomboy escaped her mother’s tyranny by fleeing to Oxford where she began training as a nurse, a thankless career that tided her over for the next 15 years until she was finally able to make her living as a novelist. In the course of her studies, she started an affair with another student, Julie Mullard, whom she found attractive even in the starched, androgynous school uniform, with its servile bib and its antiseptic “Flying-Nun’s” cap. The relationship, which lasted a full 48 years until Renault’s death in 1983, began inauspiciously under circumstances reminiscent of a sadistic girls’ boarding school, with vicious headmistresses snooping around for the telltale signs of insubordination and depravity as Mary and Julie slipped in and out of each other’s beds performing unspeakable acts.

In 1948, Renault and Mullard left England for good, in part to escape the austerity of post-World War II London. They settled, somewhat capriciously, in South Africa where Mary became famous in 1953 for “The Charioteer,” a book placed next to James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room” and Gore Vidal’s “The City and the Pillar” as a cornerstone of contemporary gay fiction. She immediately acquired a huge homosexual following and was to favor the company of campy gay men for the rest of her life, entering so enthusiastically into their community that she seems to have been awarded among them the status of a mascot--an honorary gay man trapped in a lesbian’s body. Aside from Julie, she shied away from other lesbians, indeed, from women in general, and preferred instead to ogle the lithe bodies of the bleached-blond surfers who rode the waves before her house on the beach, providing constant inspiration for her voluptuous portrayals of sexual friendships in the agora and the gymnasium.

Because Renault was reluctant to use the word lesbian in application to herself, perhaps out of her own homophobia, perhaps out of a curmudgeonly spirit of independence, Sweetman’s candor is particularly enlightening. The book does, however, have a number of weaknesses. While excellently written, his account of how Renault became the pre-Stonewall standard-bearer of gay liberation is marred by his tendency to present unnecessary information about his subject, a flaw that reflects the idolatrous shortsightedness of a somewhat uncritical fan. His tendency to clog an otherwise lucid narrative with a mass of gratuitous details is symptomatic of a larger problem: his hagiographic attempt to portray Renault as a more highbrow writer than in fact she was.

While meticulously researched, her work can be both faulted and enjoyed as a brilliant costume drama full of neoclassic reverence for antiquity. She transformed ancient Greece into a complex frieze of heroic moments in which the major players of the time parade before us in togas and tunics, striking noble poses, brandishing swords, and standing stiffly in the prows of ships, their eyes fixed on the horizon like intricately carved figureheads. Despite her conscientious scholarship, there is an inescapable touch of Hollywood in her narratives, an element of kitsch, an undercurrent of sentimentality that prevents her stories from becoming merely stately mausoleums that she excavated from mountains of empirically demonstrable facts.

But in Sweetman’s biography she emerges as a kind of armchair archeologist who, during the literary equivalent of a dig, unearthed rather than simply wrote her narratives, exhuming them intact like perfectly preserved historical artifacts. To treat her as a forbiddingly erudite scholar simply because she dealt with classical Greece is to misunderstand her real strengths as both a vivid writer of popular adventure stories and an accessible and stylistically elegant vulgarizer of an important chapter in Western history.