editorial (continued 2)

MOORE, PAMELA. Chocolates for Breakfast. Rinehart 1956, pbr Bantam 1957. Candid, shocking story of a young girl’s disintegration; the opening episodes involve her rejection by a teacher on whom she has a crush, and there are variant overtones in her prolonged friendship with a school roommate, Janet’s suicide being the spur which makes Courtney resolve to pull herself together.

MORELL, LEE. Mimi. pbo Beacon Books 1959. Unusually good evening waster about night-club and theatrical people, with both male and female homosexual episodes; handled with subtlety and lightness almost unknown in this publisher’s paperbacks.

+ MORGAN, CLAIRE. (pseud of Patricia Highsmith) The Price of Salt. Coward-McCann, 1952, pbr Bantam 1953, 1959. Fine novel of an affair between two very nice, very courageous, very well-adjusted women whose initial attraction becomes the mainspring of both their lives. The author does not use one single stereotype or cliche; this is probably the American novel of the lesbian.

MORGAN, NANCY. City of Women, pbo Gold Medal 1952, 1959. Lesbian episodes In a novel of women living in barracks at Pearl Harbor.

MORLEY, IRIS. The Proud Paladin. N. Y. Morrow 1936. Lesbian content vague and doubtful, BAYOR and fco.

MORRO, DON. The Virgin. pbo Beacon 1955, released in 1959. scv.

MOSS, GEOFFREY. That Other Love. Doubleday, 1930. A long-continued affair between Phillida and an older friend breaks off because of the younger woman’s desire for children.

MOTLEY, WILLARD. Knock on Any Door. N. Y. Appleton-Century, 1947, pbr Signet 1953, (m).

+ MURDOCH, IRIS. The Bell. N. Y. Viking 1958, (m). A fine, occasionally funny novel of an Anglican lay church-community centers around Michael Meade, a man of honor, intelligence, and integrity—and a homosexual. His hopes of being ordained as a priest were destroyed when, as a schoolteacher, he became entangled with young Nick; Nick’s appearance at the community destroys Michael’s peace of mind thoroughly, and an obliquely handled relationship between Nick, Michael and a guileless youngster, Toby, spending the summer at the community, eventually destroys the community entirely. But it isn’t all gloom and doom; the level of the writing is highly competent, sometimes wildly hilarious, and through all his difficulties Michael is able to realize that eventually he will “experience again ... that infinitely extended requirement which one human being makes on another.” A book which emphasizes the triumph of love, and one of the recent best. ((Editor’s note; why are the best novels of male homosexuality written by women? Mesdames Renault and Murdoch are giving their best to the men. Is it a question of detachment?))

MURPHY, DENNIS. The Sergeant. Viking 1958, pbr Crest 1959, (m).

MURRAY, WILLIAM. The Fugitive Romans. pbo, Popular Library 1955. Brief variant episode among a Hollywood location crew abroad.

NEILSEN, HELEN. The Fifth Caller. Morrow, 1959. Dr. Lillian Whitehall, metaphysician, is murdered; as each of her five callers is interviewed to find the guilty party, it develops that the dead woman was a cruel, domineering repressed lesbian. Well written, though unsympathetic.

NEFF, WANDA FRAIKEN. We Sing Diana. Boston, Houghton 1928. Story of a girl too inhibited to face her own nature.

NILES, BLAIR. Strange Brother. N. Y. Liveright 1931, pbr Harris Publications 1949, pbr Avon 1952, 1958, 1959.

NIN, ANAIS. Winter of Artifice. Paris, Obelisk Press 1939, also in Under a Glass Bell, Dutton, 1948. The first edition has 100 pages or so, not included in later editions, in which she recounts her liaison with a famous American writer and his wife, all disguised, of course. (All of this writer’s work seems to be vaguely tinged with variance.)

Ladders to Fire. Dutton, 1945, 1946.

NORDAY, MICHAEL. Stage for Fools. Vixen Press 1955. pbr tct Strange Thirsts, Beacon 1959. Evening waster about a lush actress making a comeback on a college campus, who revenges herself on an indifferent male by entrapping his girl into a drunken lesbian episode and inviting him to watch the show. A shocker.

Warped. Beacon pbo 1955, 1960. Very apt title; evening waster about a crooked fight game. One sympathetically portrayed lesbian character in the many mixed affairs.

NORMANDIE, ROGER. The Lion’s Den. N. Y. Key 1957. scv.

+ O’BRIEN, KATE. As Music and Splendor. Harper. 1958. Novel of two very different young Irish girls sent to study music on the Continent during the great age of Italian opera; their personal lives differ as widely as their careers, One, Clare Halvey, drifts into a love affair with Luisa Carriaga, a Spanish contralto; their relationship is treated delicately, but with warmth and impersonal sympathy. Excellent for opera lovers and for those who are tired to death of books where every last detail is spelled out as frankly as the law allows.

+ O’DONOVAN, JOAN. Dangerous Worlds. Morrow, 1958. Collection of excellent short stories.

O’HIGGINS, HARVEY. The Story of Julie Cane. Harper, 1924. Explicit, for its day, story of an intense relationship between a schoolmistress and her ward.

OLIVIA (see DOROTHY BUSSY).

O’NEILL, ROSE. The Goblin Woman. N. Y. Doubleday 1930. Fey, symbolic novel of Helga, the Goblin Woman (who represents purity) set down in a society far from pure. There are many lesbian episodes and references to inter-*feminine love. (see poetry supplement.)

O’HARA, NOEL. The Last Virgin. Chariot Books pb 1959. This is a reprint of David George Kin’s “Women Without Men”, containing six of the ten stories; new title, new author, even new copyright date—who’s kidding who? It does not contain the damning introduction, and without it, appears fairly sympathetic. Curious little item.

PACKER, VIN (pseud; see also ANN ALDRICH) Spring Fire. pbo Gold Medal 1952. Now well-known and rather gamy novel of sorority house life and an unhappy lesbian affair between naive freshman Mitch and neurotic Lana.

Whisper His Sin. Gold Medal pbo 1954, (m).

+ The Evil Friendship. pbo Crest 1958. Viciously condemnatory novel of two little girls of fourteen who, consequent to their lesbianish attachment, plot together and carry out “a murder club”. Shuddersome, but, alas, well written. (Editorial query; why must so many of the detractors of lesbianism write such good books, while those who defend it are, all to often, of the Carol Hales “quality”?)

The Twisted Ones. pbo, Gold Medal 1959, (m).

PARK, JORDAN. (pseud of Cyril Kornbluth). Valerie. pbo, Lion, 1953, 1957. Minor lesbian episodes in a novel of witch-hunting; the episodes occur at a Witches Sabbat. Evening waster.

PARKER, DOROTHY: “Glory in the Daytime” in After Such Pleasures, N. Y., Viking 1934.

PATTON, MARION. Dance on the Tortoise. N. Y., Dial 1930. Boarding-school novel; the heroine, repelled by the emotional friendships around her, throws herself with relief into the arms of a man.

PAVESE, CESARE. Among Women Only. Noonday Press, qpb 1959 ($1.75). Recommended, highly tragic, novel by a writer considered, until his untimely death, one of Italy’s best.

+ PETERS, FRITZ. Finistere. Farrar, Straus & Co 1951, pbr Signet 1953, (m).

+ PETRONIUS, The Satyricon. (the earliest known novel, written about the time of Christ; the last flush of the pagan world.) Trans. William Arrowsmith, University of Michigan Press, 1959. This is also available in a highly expurgated Modern Library edition, n. d. Male, of course, and the Arrowsmith translation is hilarious and very readable.

PEN, JOHN. Temptation. (trans. from the Hungarian by John Manheim,) Avon Red and Gold, 1959, (m). Fine picaresque.

PEYREFITTE, ROGER. Special Friendships. NY, Vanguard 1950, (m).

+ PHELPS, ROBERT. Heroes and Orators. N. Y. McDowell & Oblensky 1958. Fine modern novel of family relationships, containing a lesbian character described as the most real, human and sympathetic in recent years; Margot, in love with her ex-husband’s sister Elizabeth. The two women live together, but any intimate relationship between them is disclaimed.

PHILLIPS, THOMAS HAL. The Bitterweed Path. Rinehart 1949, pbr Avon 1954, 1959, (m).

POWELL, DAWN. A Cage for Lovers. Boston, Houghton Mifflin 1957. Mannish, wealthy hypochondriac keeps her nurse-companion in virtual slavery until the younger girl breaks away and marries. Competent novel by a popular author.

PRIEST, J. C. Private School. Beacon pbo 1959 scv.

PRITCHARD, JANET. Warped Women. Beacon pbo 1951, 1956, 1959. Despite the lurid blurb and cover, this is a nice evening waster about an innocent young girl who goes to work for a woman’s health club which is, behind the scenes, an abortion mill run by gangsters. Fronting for the group, an attractive lesbian takes a fancy to the heroine, eventually protects her against the gangster boss at the risk of her own life. The heroine then marries a nice boy who’s been telling her all along that the place is rotten. Suspenseful, interesting.

PROUST, MARCEL. Remembrance of Things Past, the great work of the well-known French homosexual author, is available in many (virtually all except rural-provincial) libraries, numerous college editions, etc. Long sections are variant, male-homosexual or lesbian; bibliography would occupy entirely too much space. Try a stray volume in qpb and see if Proust is your cup of tea—he isn’t everyone’s.

PURTSCHER, NORA. Woman Astride. Appleton-Century, 1934. Woman spends almost her entire life in male disguise. Offbeat, variant rather than explicitly lesbian.

PYKE, RICHARD. The Lives and Deaths of Roland Greer. NY, Boni 1929, (m). Horrifying.

RAVEN, SIMON. The Feathers of Death. London, A. Blond, 1959, Simon & Schuster 1960, (m).

RAYTER, JOE (pseud. of Mary McChesney). Asking for Trouble. Morrow 1955, pbr Pocket Books 1959. Murder mystery. A mannish, hardboiled lesbian plays an important part.

REHDER, JESSIE. Remembrance Way. G P Putnam’s Sons 1956. Retrospective tale in which the heroine recalls a summer in girl’s camp, when she was enslaved simultaneously to a domineering director (woman) and her daughter.

REMARQUE, ERICH MARIA. Arch of Triumph Appleton 1945, pbr Signet 1950, 1959.

+ RENAULT, MARY. Promise of Love. Morrow, 1939. Novel, in a hospital background, contains variant relationship, lightly treated.

The Middle Mist. Morrow, 1945. Excellent, humorous novel, featuring the boyish Leo (Leonora) who, with her friend Helen, lives on a houseboat quite happily (“It only makes sense for the surplus women to arrange themselves one way or another.”) This is, beyond a doubt, the wittiest, most refreshing book on the list; the girls have problems, but they have them, and solve them, without any well-of-loneliness agonizing. The story is resolved in Leo’s gradual feminization and marriage.

The Last of the Wine. Pantheon, 1956 (m; Greek.).

The King Must Die. Pantheon 1958, pbr Pocket Books 1959. Minor male and female homosexuality in Cretan setting.

The Charioteer. Longmans, 1953, Pantheon hcr 1959. Male, major, femininely delicate. Virtually all of this writer’s work contains some reference, though sometimes remote and slight, to variance.

RENAULT, PAUL. Raw Interludes. Brookwood, 1957, scv. No relation to Mary Renault; since Renault, Mary, has a double plus, the editors agree we should invent a double minus.

RICE, CRAIG. Having Wonderful Crime. Simon & Schuster, 1943. Hilarious murder mystery leads into the byways and gay bars of Greenwich village.

RICHARDSON, HENRY HANDEL. The End of a Childhood. London, Reinemann, 1934, hcr N. Y. Norton.

The Getting of Wisdom. N. Y. Duffield, 1910. Both are volumes of loosely connected variant short stories.

ROLLAND, ROMAINE. Annette and Sylvie. Holt, 1925. The first volume of a trilogy, this deals with an intense attachment between two young (adolescent) half sisters who meet for the first time in their teens.

RONALD, JAMES. The Angry Woman. Lippincott 1948, Bantam pbr 1950. A businesswoman keeps a young girl reluctantly captivated until the girl commits suicide.

RONNS, EDWARD. The State Department Murders. pbo, Gold Medal 1952, (m) fco.

ROSMANITH, OLGA. Unholy Flame. pbo Gold Medal 1952, (m). fco (But I like this personally very much. A modern Svengali.)

+ ROSS, WALTER. The Immortal. Simon & Schuster 1958, Pocket Books Cardinal Edition 1959, (m).

ROYDE-SMITH, NAOMI. The Tortoiseshell Cat. Boni & Liveright 1925. An unworldly girl’s capture by a predatory lesbian.

The Island. Harper, 1930. Sad, tense book about an ugly, unhappy girl nicknamed “Goosey” and a clinging cousin who will neither love her nor let her go.

RUARK, ROBERT. Something of Value. Doubleday 1955, pbr Pocket Books 1958. Very minor.

RYAN, MARK. Twisted Loves. Bedside Books 1959, pbo, scv.

SABATIER, ROBERT. Boulevard. (Prix de Paris award novel, trans. from French by Lowell Blair). David McKay 1958, pbr Dell 59, (m). Marginal.

SACKVILLE-WEST, VICTORIA. The Dark Island. Doubleday, 1934. Shirin is the over-emotional, unconventional wife of Venn, dour owner of the “dark island”, Storn. He treats Shirin so badly that she seeks companionship, love and affection from Christina, her husband’s secretary; through jealousy (not unmixed with pure sadism) Venn arranges for Christina to be drowned in a boating “accident”. Haunting.

+ SALEM, RANDY. Chris. Beacon pbo, 1959. The plus indicates good of kind, not intrinsic merit. An interesting story of a lesbian triangle—Chris, Dizz, and young Carol. One reader commented that this story was a sort of lesbian dreamworld—these women seemed to live in a society, and a world, completely unmixed with ordinary life at all. Certainly they are all treated as quite the ordinary thing, and there are almost no hints that there is a heterosexual world outside the gay one, which must be taken into account. Certainly it makes no incursions into the novel. Chris, a conchologist, her life complicated by her frigid girl-friend Dizz, suffers and drinks too much and sleeps around until Carol, one of her random pick-ups, decides to stick to her, and eventually frees Chris from this attachment. Good but unreal.

+ SANDBURG, HELGA. The Wheel of Earth. McDowell, Oblensky 1958. Roughly a third of a long novel of Midwestern rural life deals with the lengthy attachment between Frankie Gaddy and an older woman, Genevieve.

SARTON, MAY. A Shower of Summer Days. Rinehart, 1952.

SARTRE, JEAN-PAUL. No Exit. Knopf 1947, qpb Vintage 1955. Play.

SAVAGE KIM. Girl’s Dorm. Vixen Press 1952.

Baby Makes Three. Vixen, 1953. No reports on either of these, but in view of the publisher they are probably evening wasters at best.

SAYERS, DOROTHY L. The Dawson Pedigree. Harcourt 1928, fco.

+ SCHIDDEL, EDMUND. Girl with the Golden Yo-Yo. pbo Berkley 1955, 1959, (m). Also contains some brief analysis of lesbian jazz circles in Germany after WWI.

The Other Side of the Night. pbo Avon 1954-5, Berkley 1959, (m).

SCHMITT, GLADYS. Confessors of the Name. Dial, 1952, pbr Permabooks ca. 1953-55. A relatively minor lesbian character in a long novel of ancient Rome, with explicit lesbian scenes during a Saturnalia orgy.

A Small Fire. Dial 1958. (m.) minor.

Alexandra. Dial 1947, pbr Pocket Books 1949. Very vague and minor threads of contact in a novel of intense friendship between two women. Emotionally high.

SCOTT, LES. Twilight Women. Arco 1952, pbr Beacon 1956. Evening-waster suspenseful adventure story of a chase-type kidnapping: Rance, the hero, pleasantly entangled with two beautiful Polynesian girls, who eventually take him to a Utopian tropical island where he happily marries both of them. The contact between the girls is incidental and included simply to heighten excitement for male readers, but it’s good fun in a Sax Rohmerish way.

Three Can Love. Arco, 1952.

Touchable. Arco, 1951. Probably much the same as above.

SCULLY, ROBERT. A Scarlet Pansy. N. Y. Faro, 1933, Hesor 1937 hcr, Reprinted and completely rewritten by Royal, no pub. no date, Baltimore, Oppenheimer, 30s and 40s. In 1950, D W Cory called this “the low point of the homosexual novel”. A lot of trash has been written since, which makes this look simply silly. (m). A confusing novel of the “gay” world, including some butchy and peculiar lesbians.

SEELEY, E. S. Sorority Sin. Beacon pbo, 1959. scv.

SELA, LORA. (pseud of Carol Hales) I Am a Lesbian. Saber pbo, 1959. Would-be shocker about a poor innocent girl being pushed into love affairs with brutal boys, raped, etc; by cruel relatives and friends, when all that God wants of her, according to the author, is for her to be a Happy Well-Adjusted Noble Lesbian. This isn’t even scv, since the writers of sexy trash usually know something about sex or trash or both. Read it and snicker.

SETON, ANYA. Katherine. Houghton, 1954. (m. minor)

SHAW, WILENE. The Fear and the Guilt. pbo, Ace, 1954. Softball-playing Ruby brings sweet-leech Christy to her Tobacco Road home. There, to disarm suspicion, Christy allows herself to be first seduced, then married, by Ruby’s father. Sympathetic for a shocker, but oh, my!

SIDGWICK, ETHEL. A Lady of Leisure. Boston, Small, 1914. A passionate, But quite innocent, attachment between women in their twenties.

SIMENON, GEORGES. In Case of Emergency. Doubleday 1958, pbr Dell 1959. A common theme—a good man enslaved by a worthless girl—is treated here by a very good European writer. A subplot deals with the attachment between the girl and her maidservant.

SINCLAIR, JO. (pseud. of Ruth Seid) Wasteland. Harper Bros. 1946. This is the excellent and heavily lauded Harper prize novel of that year. Told on the psychiatrist’s couch, it concerns the failure of Jewish Jake Braunowitz to live up to his manhood ... which forces this job onto the shoulders of his sister Debbie, a lesbian. The psychiatrist discovers that he ran from his responsibilities in the first place due to feeling weaker than the masterful intelligent Debbie; then, after forcing her to take a man’s role in the family, he turns around and feels guilt and shame at her adjustment to the situation. Excellently done.

SPEERS, MARY. We Are Fires Unquenchable. Murray and Gee, Hollywood 1946. fco. A badly written, almost illiterate novel, the first few scenes of which are laid in a girl’s college swarming with luridly treated lesbians and in an assortment of Bohemian settings.

+ SMITH, ARTEMIS. Odd Girl. Beacon pbo, 1959. The blurb reads “Life and love among warped women”, but don’t let it scare you. This is one of the better and more serious approaches to the writing of a serious novel of lesbians through the stereotyped pattern of the paperback novel. The basic plot concerns Anne, and her experiences in trying to find out for herself, the hard way, whether she is a lesbian or whether she can successfully adjust to life as a normal woman. The story ends with the surprising, but growingly popular affirmation that “adjustment” is not always to be desired at all costs. The cover also calls this a story of “society’s greatest curse”; meaning homosexuality; but for once it isn’t treated that way.

The Third Sex. pbo, Beacon, 1959. Most of the remarks made above also apply to this one, though the heroine is Joan, a college girl who fears that she is becoming a lesbian, and fights it by redoubling her affairs with men. Slightly more sensational than “Odd Girl”, but well written, well thought out and generally excellent.

SMITH, DOROTHY EVELYN. The Lovely Day. N. Y. Dutton, 1957. Interesting novel of an English village on a choir outing, contains a minor but funny account of an unconscious lesbian’s decisions.

SMITH, SHELLEY. (pseud. of Nancy Bodington.) The Lord Have Mercy, Harper 1956, pbr tct The Shrew is Dead, Dell 1959. English mystery story; a major subplot involves a pair of lesbians.

SNEDEKER, CAROLINE DALE. The Perilous Seat. Doubleday, Doran 1929, marginal (m) in a juvenile of ancient Greece; the hero, being sold into slavery, attempts to disfigure himself to escape “the fate of handsome boys among the Persians.”

STAFFORD, JEAN. Boston Adventure. Harcourt, 1944.

STEIN, GERTRUDE. Things as They Are. Banyan Press, Pawlet, Vermont. (Very rare; $25 and up second hand.) A novel by the well-known surrealist poet ... possibly her only coherent work ... dealing with lesbianism.

STONE, SCOTT. The Divorcees. Beacon pbo 1955, released 1959 Evening waster about a racketeer who specializes in quick divorces, and his girlfriend who flirts with all the women as he disengages them from their husbands.

Margo. Beacon pbo 1955, released 1959. scv.

Blaze, Berkley pbo or pbr, n. d. no data except “trash”.

SOUBIRAN, ANDRE. Bedlam. Putnam 1957, pbr Pyramid 1959, (m). Minor.

STONEBRAKER, FLORENCE. Sinful Desires. pbr Bedside Books, 1959. (previous paperback, publisher unknown, ca. 1951). Silly novel about a married woman briefly captivated by a stereotyped lesbian.

+ STURGEON, THEODORE. (pseud. of Edward Hamilton Waldo). “Affair with a Green Monkey”. Venture Science Fiction May 1957; also in A Touch of Strange, Doubleday 1959.

“The Sex Opposite”. in E. Pluribus Unicorn, Abelard 1952, Ballantine pbr 1953.

"The World Well Lost" in E Pluribus Unicorn. Many of Sturgeon’s other short stories and novelettes touch on extremely strange, offbeat relationships.

+ SWADOS, FELICE. House of Fury. Doubleday 1941, pbr Lion 1955, Berkley 1959. One of the better paperbacks, dealing with racial tensions and muted lesbian attachments in a girl’s reformatory.

SWINBURNE, ALGERNON. Lesbia Brandon. Falcon Press 1952, edited and annotated by Randolph Hughes. A famous incomplete novel by the well-known poet, for students rather than readers. Really only a handful of scattered chapters, too scrappy to judge; see also poetry supplement.

SYDNEY, GALE. Strange Circle. Beacon Books pbo 1959, 1960. Grace Garney, feeling unwanted, gets a job with Mrs. Flocke, a repulsive lesbian, and repels a pass; this, however, revives childhood memories, and during a rift in her affairs with a man, she has a brief affair with Inez, a friend with an unsatisfactory husband. Evening waster.

SYKES, GERALD. The Center of the Stage. N. Y., Farrar 1952, pbr Signet 1954. Witty novel of the theatre, with a minor lesbian character.

TAYLOR, DYSON. Bitter Love. orig. copyright 1952, Pyramid 1958, (m). Worldly woman marries a homosexual who wants her for a “front”.

TAYLOR, JOHN. Shadows of Shame. Pyramid 1956, 1959, (m).

TAYLOR, VALERIE. Whisper Their Love. Crest pbo 1957. Unsympathetic college novel of a girl suffering through a lesbian affair while all around her the other girls suffer through rape, incest and abortion. Over-written.

Girls in 3-B. Crest pbo 1959. One of three young girls who come to the city to find jobs or careers. Barby, drifts into a lesbian relationship, mostly out of revulsion against two unfortunate experiences with men. Excellent, sympathetic.

+ Stranger on Lesbos. Crest pbo 1959. A married woman with a grown son and indifferent husband, returning to college for work on a college degree, is ripe for an affair with “Bake”, a confirmed lesbian. The affair is told with sufficient skill and restraint to make it believable; even Frankie’s eventual return to her old life is not a cliche “happy ending” but well prepared and well characterized. Remarkably good; the degree of progress from the first to the third of these novels makes your editors anxious to see where Miss Taylor goes from here.

TELLIER, ANDRE. Twilight Men. Greenberg 1931, pbr Lion 1950, 52, 56, Pyramid 1959, (m). Well known.

+ TEY, JOSEPHINE. (pseud. of Elizabeth MacKintosh.) Miss Pym Disposes. Macmillan 1948; also in Three by Tey, Macmillan 1954. Slowly built-up, excellently constructed mystery of a girl’s school, where a close attachment between two seniors provides solution and motivation for a murder. The level of mystification is so high that even on the last page the reader is gasping with the final, shocking surprise.

To Love and be Wise. Macmillan 1951. Another well done mystery, with a variant attachment also providing motive and solution and a high level of suspense and surprise.

TESCH, GERALD. Never The Same Again. G P Putnam’s Sons 1956, pbr Pyramid 1958, (m). Not for the squeamish, but a well-done novel of an affair between a teen age boy and an older man.

+ TIMPERLEY, ROSEMARY. Child in the Dark. Crowell 1956. Two of the three stories in this book involve intense attachments, variant but not explicitly lesbian, between an English schoolmistress and a young girl.

THAYER, TIFFANY. Thirteen Women. Claude Kendall, 1932. Mildly nasty shock-story of a murder, involving thirteen women, one mixed up with a lesbian; she eventually commits suicide.

Thirteen Men. Claude Kendall 1930, (m). Much the same stuff as above only masculine in emphasis. Thayer is a good writer, but not everyone’s choice.

THOMPSON, JOHN B. Girls of the French Quarter. Beacon pbo 1954.

Frenzy of Desire. Encore Press 1957. Evening wasters.

THOMPSON, MORTON. Not as a Stranger. Chas. Scribner’s Sons, 1954 pbr Pocket Books 1955. fco, very minor episodes.

+ THORNE, ANTHONY. Delay in the Sun. Literary Guild, 1934. A “heartening idyll” of two friends who, during a long stopover in Spain, resolve their relationship.

+ TORRES, TERESKA. Woman’s Barracks. Gold Medal pbo 1950, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59 and probably every year from now on, for a while anyhow. Gold Medal’s most popular title so far is the story of a group of women with the Free French women’s army, at loose ends and disassociated from family, friends and personal attachments. Among the many threads of the plot is the story of naive young Ursula, who, through her relationship with warm, tough, friendly Claude is helped to maturity and eventually to readjustment to normal life.

Dangerous Games. Dial 1957, pbr Crest 1958. A married woman, discovering her husband is having an affair with her closest friend, briefly becomes infatuated with her too.

Not Yet. Crown 1957, pbr Crest 1958. The story of four young girls in a French school; not children but “not yet” women, and their adjustment to life and love. The narrator, the least mature, is as yet infatuated only with Mother Nathalie, her teacher; no overt behavior is implied except kisses, but the nun’s reaction when the heroine begins to be interested in boys brings this under the scope of the study.

The Golden Cage. Dial 1959. (trans. from French by Meyer Levin). A group of refugees in wartime, waiting for visas in Portugal, undergo various transient attachments. Among the group are several lesbians, treated with sympathy and sensitivity.

TRAVIS, BEN. The Strange Ones. Beacon pbo 1959, (m). Evening waster about a young no-good who earns his living as a paid escort/gigolo and relaxes with boy friends but still loudly insists he is normal. Your editor enjoyed this out of sheer perversity; usually novels treating of male homosexuality engage the subject with deadly seriousness, while the paperback originals reek with drooling voyeuristic strip-teases about lesbians, for the sake of men who like to enjoy pipe-dreams about lesbians making love, and about some Big Handsome Hero who eventually converts the girls to “normality” with some secret formula of caresses. So it is a nice change to see the gay BOYS getting the in-and-out-of-the-sheets treatment for once.

TRYON, MARK. The Fire that Burns. Berkley pbo 1959 scv.

Take it Off. Vixen Press 1953, Modern Press 1956, scv.

UNTERMEYER, LOUIS. (Editor). The Treasury of Ribaldry. Doubleday 1956, pbr Popular Library 1959 (v. 1). This contains Lucian’s “Dialogues of Courtesans”, entitled in this translation “The Lesbian” and “A Curious Deception”. The hardcover edition also contains some of the Songs of Bilitis.

VAIL, AMANDA (pseud. of Warren Miller). The Bright Young Things. Little, Brown, 1958. pbr Crest 1960.

In a story of two worldly young college girls experimenting with life and love, a subplot involves two of their friends, lesbians. Minor but fun.

VANEER, WILLIAM. Love Starved Wife. Bedside Books Inc, 1959. scv.

VAN HELLER, MARCUS. The House of Borgia, Paris, Olympia Press, 1957. Volume #16 in The Traveler’s Companion, straight scv.

VAN ROYEN, ASTRID. Awake, Monique. Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1957, pbr Crest 1958. Astrid, an orphaned child in some unnamed European country (Holland, Belgium, Sweden?) is sent to live with her uncle Rainier; she lives upstairs with Rainier (eventually with a Lolita-like intimacy) while Rainier’s wife lives downstairs with a lesbian friend, Dini. Despite a “broadminded” plea for understanding, Rainier strictly forbids Astrid to have anything to do with the girls. The book is well-written, tasteful, and certainly candid.

VAUGHAN, HILDA. The Curtain Rises. N. Y. Chas Scribner 1935. A young girl, Nest, in London, falls in with a fiftyish spinster with a reputation for aiding young and pretty girls who also have talent. Miss Fremlyn invites Nest to live with her as her companion, showering her with education, attention and restrictions; Nest is naive, Miss Fremlyn unaware, at least consciously, of her own emotions. They travel and live together for some time, but the affair breaks up when Nest, who has always kept in touch with her boy friend, is discovered with him and Miss Fremlyn, considering this a betrayal, dismisses her. Explicit, well done.

VERNE, CHARLES. The Wheel of Passion. N. Y. Key 1957. scv.

VIDAL, GORE. The City and the Pillar. E P Dutton 1948, pbr Signet ca. 1950, (m).

The Season of Comfort. E P Dutton 1949, (m).

WAHL, LOREN. The Invisible Glass. Greenberg, 1950, pbr tct If This be Sin, Avon 1952, pbr tct Take Me as I Am, Berkley 1959, (m).

WALFORD, FRANK. Twisted Clay. Claude Kendall, 1934. fco. A young girl, a psychotic sadist ... is bisexual and has one big affair with an older woman. It must be marked for people with very complete collections only; it is depressing, inaccurate, etc. “The writing, etc, are excellent, but oh my, what a plot!”

+ WARD, ERIC. Uncharted Seas. Paris, Obelisk Press 1937, (Fairly easy to obtain second hand, and not at all like most of the sexy trash tagged Paris elsewhere in this list.) An excellent, perceptive and controlled story of Diana Bellew, a young married woman with children, a childish husband and too much money and time on her hands, and her successive affairs with three women. The writing is unusually good for male authorship.

WEBB, JON EDGAR. Four Steps to the Wall. Dial 1948, pbr Bantam 1953, (m). Prison novel.

+ WEIRAUGH, ANNA ELISABET. The Scorpion. Greenberg 1932, Willey Book co, 1948, pbr Avon Books 1957, complete; pbr tct Of Love Forbidden, greatly abridged, 1958. Well-known novel of well-bred German girl, Metta (in some translations, Myra) who, in her late teens, falls in love with a worldly lesbian, Olga, who does much to free her from her stuffy background, but repudiates her painfully in a family crisis. After Olga’s suicide Metta seeks for her real self and real destiny, first in the Bohemian drink-drugs-sex merrygoround of Berlin between the wars, then hides from life in a stuffy middle-class setting; when even here she finds herself pursued by a lesbian tease, Gwen, who flirts with Metta to inveigle her into a sordid party a trois, Metta resolves to go away and come to terms with her own soul.

The Outcast. Greenberg 1933, Willey Book Co 1948. The sequel to the above, this finds the heroine of The Scorpion living quietly in the country. She undergoes a painful and unsatisfactory affair with Fiametta, a dancer, but when this proves unsatisfactory settles down sadly but peacefully with a couple of sexless men friends.

WEISS, JOE, and Ralph Dean. Anything Goes. Bedside Books pbo, 1959. Fast-moving evening waster with a minor lesbian angle.

WELCH, DENTON. Maiden Voyage. L. B. Fischer 1945, (m). Minor.

In Youth is Pleasure. L. B. Fischer 1946. (m minor)

+ WELLS, CATHERINE: “The Beautiful House” Harpers, March 1912. An idyll of two women ends tragically with the marriage of the younger.

WELLS, KERMIT. Reformatory Women. Bedside Books pbo 1959. Surprisingly good for this publisher of rubbish. After escaping from a sadistic lesbian matron in the reformatory, Noreen works as a fake butch in a Greenwich Village Gay bar and tourist trap; later goes to work for gangsters in a roadhouse, falls for a nice boy and goes back to serve her reformatory sentence and marry him when she gets out. Pleasant evening waster.

WETHERELL, ELIZABETH (pseud of Susan Warner). The Wide Wide World. Many editions, very easily obtained, a well-known girls story of the 1880s or thereabout, dealing with Ellen, an orphan of twelve. Much of the first half of the novel is devoted to a very innocent, but exceptionally intense, close relationship between Ellen and her beloved “Miss Alice”, daughter of the local minister. Good of kind, and distinctly relevant on an adolescent level.

WHEELER, HUGH. The Crippled Muse. Rinehart, 1952. A “sparkling comedy” of Capri contains the story of two women who have lived together for ten years; the younger girl is tired of the arrangement, and the older uses her feelings of guilt and shame to hold her captive. In the course of the novel she manages to free herself.

WHITE, PATRICK. The Aunt’s Story. Viking Press 1948. fco.

WIMBERLEY, GWYNNE. One Touch of Ecstasy. Frederick Fell, 1959. A lesbian affair gives “one touch of ecstasy” to a woman’s inhibited, unhappy life, allowing her to return to her husband with wakened perceptions.

WILDER, ROBERT. Wait for Tomorrow. Putnam 1950, Bantam 1953. A girl’s unwilling entanglement with a predatory lesbian, in a romance of an imaginary Balkan country, leads to all sorts of violence and cloak-and-dagger stuff. Good.

+ WILHELM, GALE. Torchlight to Valhalla. Random, 1938, pbr tct

The Strange Path, Lion 1953, Berkley 1958, 1959. Morgen, rootless and drifting after the death of her artist father, to whom she had been childishly close, is loved by two fine young men, but finds her happiness with a strange young girl, Toni. Major, well known.

We Too Are Drifting. Triangle Books 1938-39; Modern Library 1935. pbr Lion Books 1951, Berkley 1957, 58, 59, 60. Probably the major novel of the thirties to deal with lesbians; perhaps the best of all time. In substance it deals with the boyish, but feminine Jan Morale; her struggle to escape a slightly sordid affair with Madelaine, a married woman, and to find happiness, despite family complications, with a young girl, Victoria. Told with fairness, restraint, and skill—not to mention that this is one of the dozen or so books on this entire list to display not only some, but exceptional literary merit.

WILLIAMS, TENNESSEE. “Something Unspoken” in 27 Wagons Full of Cotton. New Directions, 1953. Also in Best Short Plays of 1955-56, Dodd, Mead, 1956. A play; I marked this for fco, received a protest “Everybody will enjoy this.” Compromise; everybody will enjoy this who likes Tennessee Williams.

WILLIAMS, WILLIAM CARLOS. The Knife of the Times. Dragon Press, 1932, hcr tct Make Light of It, Random House 1950, (m). The title story is in DWCory, 21 Variations.

WILLIAMS, IDABEL. Hellcat. Greenberg 1934, pbr Dell 1952. Unpleasant girl who uses everyone for her own purposes includes a lesbian among her victims.

WILLINGHAM, CALDER. (pseud). End as a Man. Vanguard 1947, pbr Signot co. 1957, (m).

WILLIS, GEORGE. Little Boy Blues. Dutton, 1947. Concerns the machinations of a lesbian to achieve marriage and motherhood as a “front”.

WILSON, ETHEL D. Hetty Dorval. Macmillan 1948, fco.

WINDHAM, DONALD. The Hitchhiker. Florence, Italy, priv. print. (m).

Servants with Torches. N. Y. 1955 priv. print. (m).

Dog Star. Doubleday, 1950, (m).

WINSLOE, CHRISTA. The Child Manuela. (Trans. Agnes Scott Farrar, 1933.) Motherless Manuela, sent to a strict boarding-school because of supposed misconduct with a boy (actually she was only fascinated with his mother) falls in love with Elizabeth von Bernberg, one of the teachers. The woman’s behavior is strictly correct, but her warmth of personality attracts all the love-starved, inhibited children; Manuela, exhilarated and slightly drunk at a school party, babbles of her love for the Fraulein, and is punished so severely that she throws herself from a top-floor window.

Girl Alone. (Trans. Agnes Scott). Farrar 1936. A girl in difficulties finds temporary refuge with a lesbian friend.

WINSTON, DAOMA. The Golden Tramp. pbo Beacon Books 1959. Evening waster about a woman writer trying it both ways.

WOLLER, OLGA. Strange Conflict. Pageant, 1955. Purple-passaged and would-be-horrifying story about a Eurasian hermaphrodite—supposedly as she is because of her mother’s intercourse with demons before her birth—who inspires love and brings death to everyone she knows, male or female.

WOODFORD, JACK. Male and Female. Woodford Press, 1935.

Unmoral. Woodford Press, 1938. Both of these are evening wasters—racy stuff, not bad at all when compared with the current crop of trashy paperbacks. The “lesbian” content, of course, is strictly for fun.

WOOD, CLEMENT. Strange Fires. Woodford Press, 1951. “Shipwreck on Lesbos” in his Desire, Berkeley n. d. 1958 (copyright 1950, perhaps Woodford Press?) Clement Wood is either a pen name for, or a successor to, Jack Woodford, a popular writer of racy, risque, sexy books of little literary merit but relatively innocuous even for teenagers ... the trash of the thirties and forties was a very different thing from the scv of the fifties.

WOOD, CLEMENT, and Gloria Goddard. Fair Game. Woodford Press, 1949, pbr Beacon 1958. Evening waster about girls coming to the wicked big city, and we all know what happens to such girls in this kind of book. One of them falls in with the dangerous women instead of the dangerous men.

+ WOOLF, VIRGINIA. Orlando. To The Lighthouse.

Mrs. Dalloway. All of these are classics easily available. in small, medium and large libraries, college bookstores, and the like. The lesbian content is vague and subtle, but good; one of the best woman writers.

WOUK, HERMAN. Marjorie Morningstar. Doubleday 1955, pbr 1956. The variant element in this is minor and problematical. In conversation, it occurred to a group of reviewers that the developing relationship between Marjorie and Marsha “resembled a love affair”, that Marsha’s attack of hysterics at her wedding, and her outcry that all she had ever wanted was a friend, and now she’d always be alone, was of distinct significance, BAYOR.

WYLIE, PHILIP. The Disappearance. Rinehart 1951, pbr Pocket Books 1958. Science fiction; for men, all women vanish; for women, all men vanish. The problem of lesbianism arises in the women’s world; Wylie, though technically and superficially approving of homosexuality, has his heroine reject it for herself, saying “I’m not a child.”

Opus 21. Rinehart 1949, pbr Signet 1952, 1960. The hero, rewriting a book in a hotel during a weekend of crisus, runs across many unusual characters; among them a woman, shaken because her husband is having a homosexual affair, is shamed into tolerance by dallying with a lesbian prostitute. Wylie, again superficially approving, has his hero act in a skirt-withdrawing way, refusing such things for himself at the last minute in every book.

WYNDHAM, JOHN. “Consider her Ways” in Sometime, Never, Ballantine 1956-57. Science Fiction; a woman experimenting with strange drugs goes into the future, where all men have perished and society resembles that of the ant. Good.

The Midwich Cuckoos. Ballantine, 1957. Science Fiction. Alien visitation from outer space leaves every nubile female in Midwich—married or single, young or old—pregnant. Hilariously funny situations arise; one of the funniest involves a pair of lesbians. Wonderful fun.

YAFFE, JAMES. Nothing But the Night. Little, Brown & Co, 1957, pbr Bantam 1959, (m). More fake Leopold-Loeb. Good.

YOURCENAR, MARGUERITE. Hadrian’s Memoirs. Farrar, 1954, qpb Anchor 1954, (m).

ZOLA, EMILE. Nana. Literally dozens of hardcover and paperback editions of a shocker about a street girl who, in addition to all her affairs with men, also has an affair with Satin, a streetwalker.

A Lesson in Love. Abridged edition of Pot Bouille. Pyramid, 1959.

ZUGSMITH, ALBERT. The Beat Generation. Bantam pbo based on screenplay by Richard Mathesen. (m), minor.