Chapter X · FICTION IN ENGLISH (continued)

Sequel to Censorship

Just how specifically the skirmish of censorship and its attendant publicity affected subsequent work is difficult to say. The next few years saw in print nothing more outspoken than translations of Rachilde’s Monsieur Vénus and Colette’s Claudine at School. This can probably be attributed to caution on the part of both publishers and authors. That antagonistic voices, first largely women’s and then men’s, swelled into a full chorus by 1933, might similarly seem a protracted echo of official disapproval. On the other hand, some tolerant treatments of variance were finding publication, and in 1934 it was these which constituted eight out of that year’s ten offerings. As to how much the rapidly augmenting flood—a total of over thirty variant titles in six years—was attributable to 1928’s focusing of attention on the controversial subject, how much merely to an inevitably growing preoccupation with it, no armchair theorizing can safely decide. But that it owed something to the former seems beyond question.

Among this six-years’ crop a handful of more or less negative contributions, all by American women, probably stemmed from Miss Lehmann’s Dusty Answer, whatever impetus they gained from later developments. All were novels of boarding school or women’s college life, all autobiographical in pattern, and none were confined to variant experience. In the first, Wanda Fraiken Neff’s We Sing Diana, the variant passages would seem a deliberate counterattack upon Well of Loneliness except that the two appeared almost simultaneously in 1928. Mrs. Neff’s heroine, an orphan brought up by a passionless spinster, is already conditioned against heterosexual romance by her rearing and adolescent experiences before reaching college. There, during her freshman year, Nora is an inadvertent witness of an emotional scene between two brilliant and respected upperclassmen.

She was conscious of the drooping narrowness of Gwendolyn’s shoulders, the slenderness of her neck, as she threw herself against Minna’s bulky frame.... Nora had a sick memory of the fungi she had studied in botany, the rank growth, forms of life springing up in unhealthy places, feeding on rot....[1]

And of a girl who suddenly embraces Nora, the author says:

There was something about Emily which brought back ... her earliest childhood terror [a quite irrelevant incident involving a cat]. She detached herself violently and avoided the sight of Emily’s darkly flushing face.... Only instinct, like the swift revulsion of a young animal sniffing a poisonous weed ... held her back.[2]

(In reality the terror here is of her own response, and the whole picture, if the author faced it honestly, is that of the potential variant who will suffer infinitely rather than admit her own inclination.) She, like most of her friends, can achieve no adequate relations with men in their limited environment, and Nora herself, after a later somewhat unconvincing fortnight’s liaison terminated by her lover’s sudden death, drifts back via graduate study abroad to be dean in just such a college as she left.

A milder reaction is registered in Against the Wall (1929) by Kathleen Millay, sister of Edna St. Vincent, whose variant publications were by then several years old. The younger Millay’s theme is mainly protest against the restricted position of women, including an arraignment of the women’s college, which should educate its students to be adult, but, while doing so, treats them as children. Her references to variance are belittling. The phenomenon seems confined to a handful of girls on the campus, one of whom is threatened with dismissal by the student president. But the heroine, Rebecca, has overheard during her freshman year that same president sob out her love for a boyish upperclassman, and she now threatens the disciplinarian with exposure unless her present harsh fiat is rescinded. In the course of an inevitable “bull session” after this incident, Rebecca expresses her opinion to timidly questioning fellow students.

“Is anything that doesn’t end in—babies—abnormal, perverted?”

“I suppose so, if you come right down to it.”

“If there’s so much of it I don’t see why it’s abnormal.”

“No,” said Rebecca, “neither do I. Only like a lot of other things, the word has come to be more important than what it stands for. Anyway, I think most women would be more happy with a man for a—best friend—than with a woman. What do you think?”[3]

To this Socratic question there is a chorus of affirmatives from everyone save a member of the suspect group who chances to be present.

Marion Patton-Waldron’s Dance on the Tortoise (1930) is set in a boarding school. A girl just out of college, feeling herself emotionally unready for marriage, seeks greater maturity through a year of teaching, and inauspicious though the chosen milieu might seem, she achieves her goal. She is drawn early into emotional friendship with a French colleague, Helene. A similar bond exists between the headmistress and an older teacher, a pair unseparated since their college days, and Lydia learns that they have been seen passionately kissing; however, she shrinks from similar expression with her friend. Helene becomes involved in an affair with a countryman which ends with her death from induced miscarriage. It is only after this tragedy, the precise cause of which the innocent Lydia only half-guesses, that she wonders whether Helene might not have resisted seduction had she herself been able to give her friend the emotional release so badly needed. But she knows she could never have done so. In her distress she turns to the headmistress, only to find the latter growing overfond of her. In the end she accepts her deferred suitor eagerly:

“These bunches of women living together, falling in love with each other because they haven’t anyone else to fall in love with! It’s obscene! Oh, take me away!”[4]

Apparently she is alone in feeling so. Students and teachers consider the relation between the headmistress and her friend admirable and touching. Like those in Henry Handel Richardson’s Australian school two decades earlier, they are not only without immediate suspicion, but ignorant of any discreditable possibilities. This is very nearly the last work of fiction to claim such innocence for its characters.

In the same year Elisabeth Wilkins Thomas, in Ella, touched on variance so gingerly as to be almost ambiguous. Ella knows but two real drives throughout—one a love of poetry, the other a compulsion comparable to Mary MacLane’s “not to give up my me-ness.” In college she derives an intellectual thrill so keen as to carry strong emotional overtones in the philosophy classes of a casual, tailored, and sardonic woman professor. However, their relation is confined to the classroom. Later as a private-school teacher Ella is closely attached to an older colleague, and though the two speak frankly of loving one another, no passion is admitted between them. Madge has, in her youth, been deeply attached to a younger girl whom she helped and protected when both were students in Germany. When this ex-protégée, now married and a mother, pays a visit to the cottage where Madge and Ella are summering together, Ella finds herself dreading the visit. Her dread grows with Madge’s minute, feverishly excited preparations for her old love’s advent, and unconscious jealousy is clearly at its root. But the young mother and her closeknit little family barely pause for a meal, unaware, in their happy self-absorption, of the disappointment dealt by their refusal to accept further hospitality. Madge, long afflicted with a heart condition, has overexerted herself in preparation, and hidden grief at its futility brings on a fatal attack. Only the depth of Ella’s loneliness after her friend’s death brings home to her how much of her “me-ness” has been jeopardized in this relationship, and she determines to depend thereafter only upon herself and the solacing beauty of poetry. Her solitary orphaned childhood is the apparent explanation of her narcissistic fear of personal involvement.

Mary Lapsley’s Parable of the Virgins (1931) devotes rather more space to variance than its predecessors. Its theme, like theirs, is the failure of women’s colleges to deal adequately with the emotional fevers bred of segregation during late adolescence. Along with a few grave heterosexual crises—one, an abortion which its subject faces without remorse because of the wholesome first-hand knowledge of life she has gained—there are variant entanglements involving half a dozen or more girls, though none of the relations are admitted to be lesbian. Mary, antagonistic to men, is obsessed by passion for Jessica, whom she induces to break a lukewarm engagement. Then Bob, a boarding school product “like a nice athletic boy,” precipitates tragedy by flirting with her adored. Mary’s furious jealousy moves an unsympathetic dean (had the author perhaps known one like Mrs. Neff’s “Nora”?) to separate her from Jessica by telling Mary that the latter is her victim, fearing and hating her but unable to break the unwholesome spell without help. In consequence, Mary hangs herself. Jessica then collapses, and her state is so aggravated by the harshness of the college’s woman physician that an understanding faculty member interferes and introduces a psychiatrist. Like Millay, the author puts her own comment into the mouth of a brilliant student:

If the college had known more about human nature it would ... have said to Mary, “Fight out your own salvation, you have as much right to it as Jessica.” But the college did not believe that, and Mary herself did not believe it.... Whatever one may think of the [homosexual] relation ... one thing is worse: to permit a human being to live in an atmosphere of constant disapproval.... When the moment to resist [suicide] came she was too weakened, too convinced that she had sinned.[5]

The second variant constellation centers about Crosby, “the college poet,” a senior of twenty-four who has already published some volumes of verse. (As Mrs. Lapsley’s college was Vassar, it is impossible not to identify Crosby with Edna St. Vincent Millay.) This histrionic aesthete has had experience with more than one man, but her chief interest is in cultivating “crushes” to bolster her ego. Her favorite, an idealistic freshman, is saved from grave harm by overhearing her cruelty to one or two other victims, and emerges with enough maturity to retain independence and yet not to hate her fallen idol.

* * *

Turning to items outside the college category, the briefest of 1929’s comments on variance was the bitter passage in Theiss’s translated Interlude, in which lesbianism is excoriated and held responsible for the failure of its victim’s first marriage. Equally hostile was Wyndham Lewis’s Apes of God (1930). In substance Lewis’s sophisticated satire is related to those of Firbank in its concern with male homosexuals, and his writing about them has something of Firbank’s zany touch. But his references to a mannish middle-aged spinster are contemptuous, and his chapter “The Lesbian Ape,” in which an equally mannish sculptress keeps a male nude model posing until he faints, and then stands above his prostrate six-feet-two of Greek magnificence and leers asininely with her silly inamorata, is written with undiluted hate.[6]

In the single novel of these two years wholly devoted to variance, Naomi Royde-Smith’s The Island (1929), implicit censure is more impersonal but equally harsh, and the influence of Freud is obvious. In the same author’s Tortoiseshell Cat, it will be remembered, an intellectual London girl narrowly escapes a lesbian attachment. Here the gauche and provincial Myfanwy Hughes succumbs, with distressing consequences. An orphan brought up by a prudish spinster aunt, the girl at nineteen is sent to a farm in Wales for her health. Because she is timid, awkward, and painfully shocked by talk of animal breeding, her uncle dubs her Goosey, a nickname she later tries to shed but never outlives.

Believing herself to be without the power to attract, she substituted a horror of the physical triumphs of sex for a regret that she could not hope to take her part in them.[7] [The classic refusal to compete.]

In the spring a combination of sunshine and physical well-being produces a momentary emotional release which the author equates explicitly with mystical religious experience. The transient mood crystallizes upon a handsome farmer riding by on a stallion, but he is too occupied with his restive mount to give her a second glance, and this failure to attract even when aglow with new physical awareness plunges Goosey back into complete heterosexual frustration.

Now all her thwarted impulses center upon a female summer boarder from Liverpool, an egomaniac of twenty-four who poses as petite and helpless. Goosey’s enslavement dates from her chance glimpse of the girl nude to the waist, but their association stays within an early-teen pattern of endless confidences and sentimental endearments. After Almond’s departure Goosey lives only for her letters. The country couple who saw no harm in the active friendship regards this preoccupation as so “morbid” that they ship the girl back to her Liverpool aunt to remove her influence from their daughter. In the city, Almond’s snobbishness and Goosey’s jealousy of her impending marriage separate the two for a few years, during which Goosey loses her aunt and is driven by loneliness to consider the suit of a widower many years her senior. She covets the prestige of marriage, and one gathers that her physical distaste for the idea might wane but for her occasional distant glimpses of Almond. She has reached the point of betrothal when Almond bursts into her life again, begging sanctuary from a cruel husband, whereupon Goosey dismisses her suitor and arranges a future à deux with her adored in the huge ugly house she has inherited. However, at the “cruel” spouse’s first summons Almond is off again, and there follow decades of periodic returns made only when she wishes to spite her husband or, years later, an independent daughter. Goosey’s life is spent in waiting.

Early in this intermittent association the two women became intimate. For Goosey at first,

Here were no reluctances, no shame, no abashment. This was love without conditions, maternal in tenderness, marital in strength, but equal and unfettering.[8]

But as the relation progresses she has misgivings, never more specifically accounted for than that “now there was something else. They never spoke to one another about it—even at night. And in the daytime Goosey pretended it wasn’t true.”[9] Soon tensions and quarrels develop, and eventually, being left alone for long stretches, Goosey feels occasional attractions to other women. The strongest attraction is inspired by a new milliner from London, a charming and competent woman who, out of pity for her outmoded rival, considers taking Goosey into partnership. But she is regaled on all sides with well-founded gossip of Goosey’s long “queerness,” and while her decision is hanging fire, Almond once more appears and buys a hat in the new shop. Goosey sees this as not only black disloyalty to herself but as a move to captivate the new proprietress, and her jealous hysteria alienates both women permanently.

Now completely solitary, Goosey falls captive to a male evangelist’s magnetism. This maladjusted celibate labors for social as well as spiritual reform; his immediate goal is the suburb’s beautification, which has been hampered by reactionaries. Among them, Goosey had been one of the most stubborn, but now her religious near-conversion wakes a sense of guilt concerning her relations with Almond, and she resolves to give up the hideous house she has kept as a sanctuary for her friend. She makes an appointment with the revivalist, planning full confession and the sacrifice of her property, but before this occurs, Almond meets the man and so ensnares him that he marries her almost at once. Henceforth, Goosey shuts herself into her dreadful house, willfully defying love, beauty, and goodness, and ends as a mad old woman.

In The Tortoiseshell Cat the lesbian aggressor was somewhat masculine, and had herself been seduced when young. In The Island no hereditary traits are apparent in either woman, nor has either any variant history. Conditioning is over-labored in Goosey’s case, while Almond is an almost incredible monster of egotism. Whereas the earlier novel created the illusion of being drawn from life, this one smacks too strongly of a case history to come off well artistically.

A milder but scarcely happy picture is painted in That Other Love (1930) by Geoffrey Moss (on internal evidence probably a woman). Phillida, daughter of a well-born Englishman (who dies while she is an infant) and a joyously vulgar actress, enjoys ten years of bohemia before her father’s relatives claim her. The widowed aunt who then assumes her upbringing is a perfectionist and very possessive. At sixteen, overprotected, a recluse, and too suddenly launched in the social life of the Twenties, Phillida is violently revolted by the advances of a professional seducer. In her panic she clings to a cool and serene sculptress who rescues her from the drunken party where she was molested. After some years in art school and an abortive romance with a man old enough to be her father, she again meets the sculptress at a seaside resort, is again drawn to her, and wants to paint her portrait. The older woman will not permit this until they have returned to the anonymity of London. There they become intimate (though this is not explicitly admitted), and subsequently live together for four years in an isolated cottage in Normandy.

Then Phillida becomes convinced of her need for children—“not a man—I could never love a man as I love you”—and she determines to marry one of her suitors, all of whom appear either naïve or indifferent to her variant interlude. The older woman, reluctant from the first to sacrifice her detached serenity but now as dependent on her young companion as the girl is on her, stoically accepts the inevitable and sets about readjusting herself to a life alone.

* * *

In addition to the translation of Colette’s second Claudine volume as Young Lady of Paris (and Mrs. Lapsley’s college story), 1931 produced an interesting contrast: one novel of highest quality, Dorothy Richardson’s Dawn’s Left Hand, and one, the first of its kind in our immediate field, which was cheaply sensational. This last, Sheila Donisthorpe’s Loveliest of Friends, may be left for discussion with others of its ilk. Miss Richardson’s title was tenth in the dozen comprising Pilgrimage, her Proustian chronicle of an English girl’s development from childhood to maturity. This particular volume contrasts Miriam’s two simultaneous love affairs, one with a younger woman, one with a scientific-minded novelist-reformer, Hypo, whom literary gossip has identified as H. G. Wells. Though chronology is vague in this stream of consciousness record, Miriam must at this time have reached her middle or late twenties. By virtue of education and background she moves among the Bloomsbury literati, but since she supports herself as a dentist’s receptionist, she must live in an ordinary London boarding house, and it is against the latter background that the emotional drama with Amabel unfolds. This charming girl, half-Parisian, half-Irish, is also involved in a liaison with an Englishman of distinction. A beauty, and ultra-feminine, it is nevertheless she who takes the initiative in the rapidly flowering friendship. The quality of the relation is conveyed in such passages as the following:

... the Sunday following the evening at Mrs. Bellamy’s, where we were separated and mingling in various groups ... and suddenly met and were filled with the same longing, to get away and lie side by side in the darkness ... talking it all over until sleep should come without any interval of going off into the seclusion of our separate minds ... [then] waking and seeing with the same eyes at the same moment ... the wet gray roofs across the way.[10]

There is no suggestion of physical relations, and in another place the author describes as their most intimate moments the silences in which they were

suddenly and intensely aware of each other and the flow of their wordless communion, making the smallest possible movements of the head now this way now that, like birds in a thicket intensely watching and listening; but without bird-anxiety.[11]

In recording the affair with Hypo, on the other hand, considerable physical detail is given, as for example the first time the two saw one another unclothed:

This mutual nakedness was appeasing rather than stimulating. And austere. His body was not beautiful. She could find nothing to adore, no ground for response.... The manly structure, the smooth, satiny sheen in place of her own velvety glow was interesting as partner and foil, but not desirable.... It had no power to stir her as often she had been stirred by the sudden sight of him walking down a garden or entering a room.[12]

The climax of this affair occurs while Miriam is house guest of Hypo and his wife, a woman so selfless that she pretends blindness to his infidelities because they benefit his work. Miriam wakes in the night to find her host at her bedside, and suffers his possession in

an immense fathomless black darkness through which, after an instant’s sudden descent into her clenched and rigid form, she was now traveling alone on and on, without thought or memory or any emotion save the strangeness of this journeying.[13]

At another time

she demanded of herself whether she cared for him in the slightest degree or for anyone or anything so much as the certainty of being in communion with something always there, something in which and through which people could meet and whose absence, felt with people who did not acknowledge it, made life at once impossible, made it a death worse than dying....

There was a woman, not this thinking self who talked with men in their own language, but one whose words could be spoken only from the heart’s knowledge, waiting to be born in her.... Men want recognition of their work to help them believe in themselves.... Unless in some form they get it, all but the very few are miserable. Women ... want recognition of themselves ... before they can come fully to birth. Homage for what they are and represent.

He was incapable of homage.... It was his constricted, biological way of seeing sex that kept him blind.[14]

So specific a contrast between the psychology of the two sexes suggests that the whole volume may have been written as a contribution to the current dispute over the value of variant love. During Miriam’s total history (recorded in subsequent volumes) she loves two other men, but without physical intimacy. Neither is conspicuously male in appearance and both are preoccupied with subjective aspects of personal relations. Plainly Miss Richardson, like Mrs. Woolf, feels that between the most sharply differentiated members of the two sexes, the biological act can be the only bond.

Miss Richardson’s novel was sexually frank but took care to imply the absence of physical intimacy between its variant women. In the one acceptable sympathetic study of 1932 Naomi Mitchison employed other means of avoiding offense. “The Delicate Fire” is the title story in a collection of short narratives of ancient Greece. Miss Mitchison, daughter of a schoolmaster, wrote several volumes recapturing the life of the past, possibly designed for her father’s older students, but on an adult level with regard to historic mores. This particular tale covers some months in the late adolescence of Brocheo, daughter of the favorite of Sappho. Since her widowed mother cannot leave the country estate which supports them, Brocheo is sent to an aunt in Mitylene to be prepared for a fitting marriage. Sappho’s open quarrel over her brother’s alliance with the courtesan, Doricha, has inclined conservative mothers to entrust their daughters’ training to the conventional Andromeda, but a passionate friendship between Brocheo’s young cousin and Sappho’s daughter Kleis draws the older girl into contact with the famous poet. The precocious Kleis analyzes as the key to her mother’s temperament a desire to possess utterly anyone she loves, estranging her from one after another of her beloved friends when they marry, and making it difficult for Kleis to have either suitors or close friends. But Brocheo senses genius in Sappho’s intensity as compared to Andromeda’s polite talent, and becomes the great poet’s willing pupil. The story ends discreetly with the beginning of Brocheo’s tutelage, for some given details of a scene between Kleis and her young friend suggest that had it continued into the relation between Sappho and Brocheo it would have sailed in dangerous waters.

This was the year in which the German motion picture Mädchen in Uniform was released and Weirauch’s Scorpion translated. (The latter’s sequel, The Outcast, followed in 1933.) Except for these, 1932 boasted only a pair of titles on a level with Miss Donisthorpe’s mentioned above, which must wait for later consideration. After this season in which everything published, no matter what the quality, was relatively tolerant of variance, the pendulum swung back in 1933, when but one of five authors had even a moderate word to say for it.

The most nearly sympathetic was Thomas Beer, whose volume of short stories, Mrs. Egg and Other Barbarians, included “Hallowe’en,” written in 1927 but not, like the others, previously published in magazines. In this tale the monumental but endearing Mrs. Egg, inveterate eater of sweets and worshipper of her tall son, Adam, encounters on Hallowe’en night the striking Bill Sloan, village tomboy, whom she had known before her marriage and removal to New York some years earlier. Now divorced, Bill has come back to visit her girlhood chum, wife of a friend of Adam’s. Mrs. Egg elicits from Adam that Jane’s husband is “out of luck nights,” and they agree that the fault lies in the girl’s upbringing—“Jane’s mama was too much of a lady to say drawers in a King’s Daughters meetin’. I bet the darn truth is Janie’s scared of men yet.” Anent Bill’s divorce, they recall that

“Dr. Sloan raised Bill peculiar. He believed folks are just—s’perior kind of animals. No souls or nothin’. I never can get shocked any about sensible people’s morals.... I just want to say this for Bill. I bet she don’t do any harm.”[15]

This was written at the height of that psychological season when parents could do no right; but Beer concedes to the hereditary camp Bill’s height and absence of hips, and both girls’ tenor speaking voices. Mrs. Egg is called out from her grandson’s hilarious party for a farewell from Jane and Bill, who because they admire the wholesome woman profoundly, want her to be first to know they are leaving—“for good.” Jane begs Mrs. Egg to look after her husband, against whom she has nothing save that she cannot endure marriage and “loves someone else more.” Without protest Mrs. Egg busies herself with lunch for the night travelers—they are driving—and sends them off, perhaps significantly just before midnight of the witches’ holiday. But after they have gone she can say only

“They’re human beings, Dammy. [But] if they’d stayed a minute longer I’d ha’ screamed. Oh, Dammy, ain’t things peculiar!”[16]

She is consoled by learning that Adam thinks this the only solution for all concerned and has foreseen tragedy from the moment of Jane’s marriage.

The next episode, narrowly skirting the sensational level, was included in Orient Express by the British Graham Greene,[17] who in 1933 was writing only psychological thrillers. A lesbian journalist, after supporting for four years a beautiful countrywoman picked up in a cinema, realizes she is about to lose her love to a man (“How could one hold her, with only a mouth?”) Philosophically cutting her losses, Mabel decides to capture Carol, a dancer traveling alone on the Express, and immediately begins to plan the redecoration of her London apartment in honor of her new conquest. The plot develops otherwise, however, and Mabel goes on alone.

In Entertaining the Islanders, Struthers Burt’s most sophisticated effort, he treats the modish theme less gently. After a three-year liaison with a rather hard woman journalist, the hero falls genuinely in love during a winter in the Bahamas, and returns to New York to break with his old flame. Even during their intimacy Marian “had made no pretense of faithfulness,” but what frees him of any remorse at severing the connection is his discovery that she is now involved with a married woman,

a small beautiful bronze young woman with square-cut yellow hair. Taut, condensed, masterful, engraved.... Her brilliant tawny eyes looked David up and down without interest. In the jacket of her dark suit was a white camellia.... Marian was nothing if not up to date, was she?[18]

He wonders how husbands put up with “childlike little ghosts.... Children making childlike little substitutions for reality ... and always so proud of their substitutions.”[19] This, of course, is close to quotation from Freud.

Sinclair Lewis hit even harder in Ann Vickers. The chief figure in his briefly sketched tragedy, Eleanor Crevecoeur, was in an early section of the novel devoted to the battle for suffrage, and was humorous, fearless, and intelligent, though “looking all the time like an anemic Bourbon princess.” Later during World War I she has one serious liaison with a man and an exhausting list of casual affairs. Then she meets a sleekly tailored woman executive of a department store with a Ph.D. in psychology. Dr. Herringdean frightens off the heterogeneous swarm of males and appropriates Eleanor for herself. But once her prey is caught, she loses interest, turns pettily cruel, and pursues other women. Eleanor wastes to a neurotic wraith and finally commits suicide. The whole episode occupies only ten pages, but is mordant and damning.

The final blow of the year was struck by George Jean Nathan, dramatic critic for the American Statesman, in a slapstick parody offered as a critique of the current British drama. Nathan had commented earlier (without special reference to England) on “the increasing number of women players who are of the sexual disposition of the Aeolian Greek colonizers,” and on their “freezing” presence on the stage—“all their emotional scenes are dead.”[20] In this skit, “Design for Loving,” (the title a jibe at Noel Coward’s Design for Living), the cast includes:

Lord Derek, a hermaphrodite; his father, an onanist; his mother, a lesbian; his sister, a flagellant; Lady Vi Twining, his sister’s friend, an auto-erotist with tribade tendencies; his servant, a homosexual and transvestist;[21]

et cetera. Though the dialogue is so caricatured as to mar the wit, it mentions the many one-sexed couples to be seen in any large hotel or restaurant, and the negligible action includes “significant” glances and caresses among the three women. Plays other than Coward’s (if any) that might have inspired this effort have not been discovered.

If Nathan hoped to purge the current theatre by ridicule, he was doomed to prompt disappointment. In 1934 a translation of Mädchen in Uniform adapted to the legitimate stage was produced by high-grade amateur groups in more than one large American city and played to crowded houses, and late in the year Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour began its successful run on Broadway. This was subsequently taken over by Hollywood, and readers who saw only the film will wonder at its inclusion here. The mainspring of the plot was the same in both versions—the ruin of a thriving boarding school and of the two young women who own it through vicious slander circulated by a pupil, already a well-developed paranoiac at the age of twelve. In the film one of the women is accused of intimacy with her fiancé, the school physician.

In the play as Miss Hellman wrote it the charge is lesbianism between the two mistresses. This fabrication, fairly sophisticated for a twelve-year-old, is the fruit in part of surreptitious reading of Mlle Maupin, in part of an overheard quarrel between one of the young women and an aunt who taunts her with jealousy of her friend’s fiancé. The dreadful child’s garbled exaggerations galvanize her grandmother into hasty action. Over-night the school is emptied by horrified parents. The young women lose their suit for slander through the cowardly flight of the aunt, their chief witness. The younger woman breaks her engagement when she sees that her fiancé will never be sure but that a grain of truth underlay the slander. The other woman is tortured into realizing for the first time that she has never cared for men, and that unadmitted passion has in fact underlain her restrained love for her friend. Feeling irremediably soiled, she shoots herself. As its easy Hollywood transmutation proves, the core of this tragedy is not the persecution of variance. It is the destruction of two blameless individuals through hysterical prejudice, and the lesbian issue is only a super-explosive detonator of that hysteria. But is the older woman’s suicide a tragic waste chargeable to the social mores which made her feel so soiled? Or is it tragic merely because she is physically innocent—that is, does Miss Hellman, like Mendès, distinguish between light and darkness here on the strength of technicalities alone? The text provides no answer.

The rest of the year’s offerings were fiction ranging in quality from that of Henry Handel Richardson, Victoria Sackville-West and Isak Dinesen to the now frequent sensational penny-catchers. Probably most of the book of short stories, The End of a Childhood, which Miss Richardson gave to the public in 1934, were written earlier. The title group consists of fragments related to her Richard Mahoney novels (1917-1929) which seem rather discards than sequels (as were those in Galsworthy’s On Forsyte ’Change). Another group entitled “Growing Pains” is more reminiscent of her Getting of Wisdom of 1910. Indeed, of these eight sketches, six present so integrated an emotional sequence that although their girls bear different names one wonders whether they are not bits from a trial flight toward another novel centered about a woman. A noteworthy feature in all these sketches, as also in The Getting of Wisdom, is the absence of a father and the relative insignificance or incompatibility of the mother.

In “The Bathe” a beautiful child of six is sickened by the physical ugliness of two obese middle-aged women who strip and bathe nude, with self-conscious tittering, on an isolated beach. Until this moment the child has been eager for adult status, but now “oh never—never—no, not ever now did she want to grow up.” In “Preliminary Canter” one twelve-year-old girl adores another and is baffled and furious when the latter “flirts” with a farm hand. “Conversation in a Pantry” presents the uneasy efforts of a girl of fourteen to learn from one three years older what it is one must “take care about” when out with boys. She gets evasive answers, but they are sufficient to recall her disgust upon first realizing that married couples sleep in the same bed. On the other hand, as her informant speaks of her own love, “she had never known before that Alice was so pretty, with dimples round her mouth and her eyes all shady. Oh, could it mean that—yes, it must: Alice simply didn’t mind.” “The Wrong Turning” pictures the violent shock to another fourteen-year-old, invited to go rowing by an interesting new schoolfellow (male), when the pair blunder on a swimming hole where naked soldiers are indulging in harmless but rough horseplay, and the men shout suggestively after the embarrassed youngsters.

“And Women Must Weep” is the aftermath of an eighteen-year-old’s long-anticipated first ball. She has been a wallflower, and afterwards, locked in her room,

Oh the shame of it!... not to have “taken,” to have failed to “attract the gentlemen”—this was a slur that would rest on her all her life. And yet a small voice that wouldn’t be silenced kept on saying “It wasn’t my fault!” ... She had tried her hardest, done everything she was told to ... [but] really, truly, right deep down in her, she hadn’t wanted “the gentlemen” any more than they’d wanted her: she had only had to pretend to.... She cried till she could cry no more.[22]

The final and longest sketch, “Two Hanged Women,” gives as it were the cumulative result of such experiences. The word “hanged,” it should be noted, is merely a mild and dated Australian expletive equivalent to the American “darned,” and is applied to a pair of young women by a couple who find the two in their own favorite spot for petting, but its use in the title lends a telling double entendre. The older girl, nearing thirty, is tall and thin with straight bobbed hair and a man’s gait. The other, in her middle twenties, has been urged to marry by a dominating mother, but is nauseated by physical contact with her beau, Fred. Even if he sits too close she must “screw herself up” to bear it. On the other hand, she craves the social status of a regularly courted girl, and indulges in a brief fantasy of being escorted by the handsome and devoted man. People are sympathetic to that, she says, and “let us into the dark corner seats at the pictures as if we’d a right to them. And they never laugh. Oh, I can’t stick being laughed at!”[23] After the bitter retort, “Gawd! Why not make a song of it?” her companion claims that it is the mother who has put these romantic notions into her daughter’s head. Whenever the two girls are out together the mother is furious, and “does she need to open her mouth? Not she! She’s only got to let it hang at the corners and you reek, you drip with guilt.”[24] The sketch ends with the younger girl shuddering and crying out that she would “rather die twice over” than submit to Fred’s passion. She clings to her friend, who holds her in a gentle and maternal embrace. Taken all together, these half-dozen vignettes present a most convincing etiology for a homosexual woman.

In Victoria Sackville-West’s Dark Island (1934) the reserved and elusive Shirin, oldest child in a family best described as philistine, cultivates defensive reticence. She desires “quietly to remain unguessed, unknown, and thus to protect oneself from the pain of life.” During summers on the southwest coast of England she falls in love with a rocky island a mile offshore, tree-covered and crowned by the romantic pile of LeBreton castle, because it seems the embodiment of her dreams of privacy. After a successful decade in London society which includes marriage and children, she finds her life so pointlessly harried that she escapes it by a quixotic sacrifice of maternal ties and reputation. In her thirties she enters upon a second marriage with Sir Venn LeBreton, owner and virtual overlord of the island of Storn. It is largely for the sake of his island that she marries him, for to her it is still the remote and secret sanctuary for which she has hungered all her life. When, with the intuition of the fiercely proud, Sir Venn divines her motive, he makes clear at once that the property descends in the male line, wives are mere consorts and heir-bearers, and Storn is no more hers than any servant’s. Thus, she has merely involved herself in a barren and humiliating life imprisonment. Soon she discovers that her husband is at times a physical as well as a mental sadist, and her misery reaches desperation unrelieved by the bearing of two children.

Since her teens she has had one constant friend, Cristina, a tall, powerful and competent woman, but their relation has been so reserved, so impersonal, that only its persistence has raised it above mere acquaintance. In her loneliness Shirin turns, though without unburdening herself, to Cristina; and after his male secretary suddenly dies, she prevails upon her husband to engage her friend. The latter perceives at once that Shirin’s life is wretched, but she is vouchsafed no more explanation than becomes slowly evident to her loving eyes. More and more as time passes, however, Shirin comes to depend upon her for just such wordless but complete communion as that between Miriam and Amabel in Dawn’s Left Hand. Sir Venn presently becomes aware of this bond, and unable to move his wife from her determination that her friend shall stay with her or she herself will leave, he takes Cristina sailing on a day of squalls and returns alone with a story of her accidental drowning. Shirin accepts this story impassively and continues to live with him, outwardly composed but inwardly in torment. When, some years later, he taunts her with his having deliberately eliminated Cristina, she soon contrives his death in return by a long kiss after she is sure that she is stricken with diphtheria. He dies and she survives, but since Storn is now his son’s and the son is a replica of the father, she soon declines to a willful death.

Two points should be noted here: first, the stress laid on the impersonality of the two women’s relationship until Shirin’s marriage becomes a torture justifying any human solace; and second, the ingenuity employed to contrive her ominous situation. Sir Venn and his feudal domain are the stuff of post-Elizabethan tragedy on gothic romance, difficult of assimilation into a twentieth-century pattern. But the island’s isolation sets it apart from the present, just as Shirin’s withdrawn spirit separates her a little from current reality. Thus the tenuous variant union can flower without reference to society, and the triangular drama can be enacted beyond the world’s reach. This latter portion of the novel is in miniature as much of a tour de force as Mrs. Woolf’s Orlando, and the similarity is particularly interesting in that the elusive Shirin is hauntingly reminiscent of Clarissa Dalloway in Mrs. Woolf’s book which her own preface proclaims to be tinged with autobiography.

As distinguished as the work of these two British women was Seven Gothic Tales (1934) by the Danish Isak Dinesen (Baroness Karen Blixen), whose artistry in English is as remarkable as Conrad’s. She is also adroit in maintaining a continental outlook without offending her adopted audience, a feat she achieves by setting her tales in a day when the Romantic Period had the freshness of youth, and recounting them with a serene detachment which precludes “reader participation.” No more than discreet hints of male homosexuality lend flavor to “The Monkey,” and in “The Roads Around Pisa” the two feminine romances contributing to the involved plot are seen in retrospect, only one member of each pair actually appearing in the narrative. The younger of these two women, Agnese, is a transvestist who has traveled for a year as a man. Her reasons are disclosed gradually. Her beloved friend, like Lamartine’s Clothilde, was obliged to marry an elderly Croesus though she was in love with a young cousin. Afterward, when she occasionally slipped out to meet her love, her bosom friend, Agnese, allayed suspicion by occupying her bed, a safe enough favor since the husband was impotent and took his pleasure in toying with his “lovely pet” by day; at night merely inspecting her room to know she was there. To keep the world from guessing his humiliating secret he required a child, and sent a surrogate of his own choosing to effect that end one night when Agnese had taken his wife’s place. Already indifferent to men, Agnese was goaded by this violation to abandon the feminine role altogether and roam the country as a Byronic gentleman.

The very old lady whom a highroad accident leads to unburden herself to a fellow traveler while expecting death, has, like Agnese, been averse to men all her life, but social necessity has made her wife, mother, and now grandmother. The fact that her daughter died in childbirth has increased her animus against the male sex, and her granddaughter’s marrying in the face of her prohibition has estranged them. She tells her confidant, a melancholy Hamlet, that in her long life she has known but two passions, one for a girlhood friend from Denmark, the other for her beautiful grandchild. She cannot die without sending her forgiveness to the girl, and she extracts from the young Danish listener a promise to deliver her message. Contrary to her expectations, however, she lives, is happily reunited with her granddaughter, and through love for the latter’s infant son at last achieves tolerance for the opposite sex (cf. Marie Bonifas). She also discovers that her Danish messenger is nephew of her first beloved, who died a spinster. Since both these loves are recounted by one of their actors, they do not appear on the surface to have been lesbian, but there are certainly no implications to the contrary. The two women, young and old, appearing in the story are both somewhat masculine; of each pair of loving women, one never married; and for three of the four, the early variant love seems to have been the most vivid of their lives, surviving marriage or other liaisons.

Another contribution from the continent was the translation of Colette’s Claudine s’en Va as The Innocent Wife. Properly it is fourth in its series, but it lacks the outright lesbian element of the third, which awaited publication in the following year. All the Claudine novels, it should be noted, were issued in the United States, while England risked no sympathetic treatments more overt than those of Geoffrey Moss, the two Richardsons, and Miss Sackville-West.

The remainder of the year’s crop were also American, two of good quality. One was Anthony Thorne’s heartening idyll, Delay in the Sun, in which forty-eight hours’ suspension of bus service in Spain resolves a variety of emotional conflicts in its English passengers’ lives. The variant couple are mannish Jean Porteous, daughter of a titled British family and a rebel against the social existence expected of her, and Betty Sale-Jones, blonde, helpless and fluttering, from “the plastery gentility of Kensington.” Thus far their common bond has been the determination to escape family strictures and win personal freedom. They are merely good companions with some tentative notions of sharing a flat in London on returning from their trip. Then their visit to an empty bull ring moves Jean to mimic with startling verisimilitude the Spanish performers both have seen.

In the hot Spanish sunlight she played at bull fighting for the sake of a pretty girl in a yellow dress who sat in the barrera. Playing together, they mocked a dangerous game. And dangerously they entered a secret world in which they had so great a need of each other.[25]

Later in the moonlight they visit the flower-drenched public gardens and lie on the warm grass, “fingers still linked as they lay looking upwards into the sparkling sky.” When they come back to lights and crowds they fall paralyzingly shy and dare not share their common room and bed. After a restless night apart, each comes to much the same conclusion:

What had happened to them last night was something beyond their control. Then let this strange force follow its own law—let it part them forever or join them forever. It was something too big for their reason, and too delicate.... Of no use to fight, reason, or wonder.[26]

And it is without further resolution of their problem that they let the suddenly-restored bus service carry them away from the scene of their inarticulate romance. The author has cannily left each reader to supply what sequel best satisfies his own philosophy, but the lingering mood is distinctly one of warm tolerance and sympathy rather than disapproval.

In After Such Pleasures, on the other hand, Dorothy Parker grazes the surface of variance with flippant malice. The final story, “Glory in the Daytime,” sketches the tentative advances of a New York sophisticate to a newly arrived and naïve little wife with a passion for stage celebrities. Using the long-famed Lily Wynton as bait, the Gothamite invites the provincial to tea—to the disgust of the latter’s husband, who always refers to the predatory Hallie as “Hank” and declares that all “those women” make him sick. Starry-eyed with anticipation, little Mrs. Murdock finds her hostess alone, clad in trousers and silk shirt. She is welcomed with a long kiss and the admonition, “Don’t tell Lily!” But the famous star on arrival proves to be middle-aged, withered, and brassy-haired. She is already too drunk to follow the conversation, demands brandy, and soon dozes off. Mrs. Murdock leaves in sad disillusion, with a new appreciation of her astringent mate, only to find that he has gone out in a temper for the first time to pursue his own ends.

The Worm’s Turning

Since the total count of variant titles in 1934, including the sensational items not yet touched upon, mounted to ten, it is not surprising that some public reaction should set in. It will be even less so after a rapid consideration of those omitted trivia, of which within as many years some half-dozen accumulated. Because the first was a fairly obvious rebuttal of Well of Loneliness, it deserves more attention than some others. It was Loveliest of Friends (1931) by Sheila Donisthorpe, who was reputedly an English actress with a number of other romances to her credit, but its verbal idiom is not British and it was published only in New York.

Written with intense sentimentality, it pictures the ruin of Audrey, introduced as the happy wife of a doting but pedestrian husband whose hobby of gentleman-farming takes him often out of London. The couple’s intimate life is described in some detail as ideal, yet Audrey is given to playing Chopin in the dusk to relieve her unspent emotion. Presently she is assiduously courted by boyish, impudent and exquisitely-tailored Kim, similarly blessed with a husband who dotes upon her and allows her every freedom. Kim’s showers of gifts and passionate telephone calls intoxicate the inexperienced Audrey. Although the first attempted caress and Kim’s confession that she is a lover of women are profoundly shocking, Audrey soon succumbs without reservation. Then she discovers that there is a former beloved for whose daily letters Kim watches avidly; next, she learns that several of her own London circle have been loved and discarded by Kim; finally, a current rival is flaunted to rouse her jealousy. This cheap blonde American flirt is a transparent copy of the ex-chorus girl in Well of Loneliness, just as a vivid phrase applied to Kim—“a head so fiercely alive it seemed delicately to light the air around it”[27]—is lifted verbatim from the description of Jennifer in Miss Lehmann’s Dusty Answer.

Audrey spends several delirious weeks at a shore resort with Kim (described in detail) of an intensity impossible to support for long, and when immediately afterward the blonde recaptures Kim by the classic device of parading a rival—a repulsive caricature of the mannish and profane lesbian—Audrey’s overstrained nerves give way. A period in a sanatorium restores her temporarily, but, back in London again, she is helpless against her passion. After melodramatic incidents involving all four women, Audrey attempts suicide, and failing to achieve her end, she leaves home and husband to wander, derelict and outcast, for the rest of her days. Close to the end the author breaks out in vituperation against

those who clamor for recognition of the sinister group who practice ... these sadistic habits ... crooked, twisted freaks of Nature who stagnate in dark and muddy waters, and are so choked with the weeds of viciousness and selfish lust that, drained of all pity, they regard their victims as mere stepping stones to their further pleasure. With flower-sweet fingertips they crush the grape of evil till it is exquisite, smooth and luscious to the taste, stirring up subconscious responsiveness, intensifying all that has been, all that follows, leaving their prey gibbering, writhing, sex-sodden shadows of their former selves, conscious of only one desire in mind and body, which, ever festering, ever destroying, slowly saps them of health and sanity.[28]

This effusion is an obvious retort to Miss Hall’s relatively controlled plea for tolerance at the end of Well of Loneliness, and the volume gives every evidence of being written hastily to profit by whatever conservative reaction there was against the sympathy aroused among the literati by Miss Hall’s effort.

The next exhibit was from the pen of the American Tiffany Thayer, writer of near-erotica, and comprises one chapter in his Thirteen Women (1932). A fragile beauty in whom puritanic sex-repression has induced tuberculosis is quickly cured by an affair with her Denver physician’s lesbian wife. The two have in common a hatred of men. The younger believes their love unique and blessedly free of the uncleanness of sex, and when, back in New York, she is bawdily enlightened by an old schoolmate who is now a vaudeville performer, she wastes swiftly to the death her abortive romance postponed.

Of the same calibre was The Establishment of Madame Antonia (1932) by one Leyla Georgie, comprising life sketches of the inmates of Hamburg’s most élite bordello, and supposedly recorded by one of the group. Nearly all the women are titled or from the top level of European society, but have been reduced by malign chance. The variant pair are a Russian princess and a new recruit whom she protects and cherishes. Discovering that though her protégée loves her, she is unable to return her passion, the princess introduces the girl to a nobleman who marries her. Natacha then commits suicide. The whole volume is little more than a romanticizing of earlier foreign erotica which celebrated more fleshly relations among prostitutes.

The title of Idabel Williams’s Hellcat (1934) accurately describes its heroine, who expends her efforts only on such persons as she can steal from someone else or can live upon without sacrifice on her part. One of the latter is a lesbian whom she scorns as long as men are handy, but whose hospitality she finally exploits for a long season, keeping her victim in a constant fever by pretending an innocence which sees in lesbians only fit subjects for police court or madhouse.

Gerald Foster’s Strange Marriage (1934) deserves an extra word because here transvestism basically affects the plot for the first time since the fantastic German Weiberbeute of 1906. A girl, expelled from college just before graduation, hides out in a lonely beach shack until she can go home without revealing her disgrace. Shingled and accustomed to trousers she lives as a boy for safety, but finds that even boys are not safe from the lifeguard who seeks her out at night. He is, however, delighted on discovering her real sex. His masterful possession of her, outrages her pride, but her body registers traitorous complaisance. In a fury of rebellion against a woman’s double disadvantage, she resolves to live as a man. By putting the width of the continent between her and her past life she contrives to get a college degree on the west coast and a job in a law office, continuing her studies at night. When the senior partner’s daughter falls in love with her she reciprocates with warmth, marries the girl (who is innocent to a degree), and lives as her husband for several years. Then the coincidental reappearance of the beach guard not only makes her apprehensive of recognition but revives the response he was the first to stir. A quick disappearance leaves her wife an apparent widow, and she marries the man. The bisexual experience here seems more indebted to earlier French trivia than to current psychological theory, which taxes unwilling defloration with negative rather than happy heterosexual results.

As Lilyan Brock’s Queer Patterns (1935) has been revived in two different paperbound editions since 1950 and is thus easily available, a short description will suffice. A musical-comedy star tries marriage to one of those perfect husbands so useful in accentuating indelible variant leanings. She comes fully to life, however, only under the hands of a dynamic woman director of serious drama, with whom she enjoys two perfect years before gossip obliges them to part or face professional ruin. A long illness induced by the separation and by a subsequent wealthy husband’s drug-crazed violence provides opportunity for a trained nurse to fall in love with her. The nurse is driven to suicide from jealousy of the other woman. The drug-addict husband finally strangles the star. This is offered as an example of ineradicable inborn variance.

Quite the most melodramatic of the lot was Male and Female by Jack Woodford (1935), in which a girl about to be married realizes that her comparative physical coolness to her fiancé stems from a hitherto unadmitted attraction to a girl friend. The latter, a brooding introvert afflicted with frequent migraine, is quite aware of her own feelings, and thrusts herself between the pair, after they marry, with incredible temerity. The young couple have a stormy year which would have wrecked their union—since the wife prefers feminine gentleness to masculine “brutality” in lovemaking—but for their occasional periods of ecstasy when the interloper is laid low by her chronic ailment. It finally appears that this “friend” is virtually a witch (a fictional throwback of a full millennium). In modern terms, she exercises some hypnotic power over the wife even at great distances. Since, however, she is not evil at heart, she finally commits suicide in a burning house by way of ending her own unhappiness and effectively terminating her fateful influence.

Virtually the last item of this sort from the point of date was Gawen Brownrigg’s Star Against Star (1936), pretending to British authorship, but, like Loveliest of Friends, written in American idiom. It apes Well of Loneliness closely in its dependence upon inheritance and childhood conditioning, but in this case Dorcas resembles a hot-blooded mother who has had many male lovers and who virtually seduces her own daughter at the age of nine or ten. A year in a Swiss boarding school when she is sixteen ends with the expulsion of Dorcas and her bisexual American roommate for lesbian intimacy. Two efforts at affairs with men leave Dorcas cold, and from one man she parts because he speaks with contempt of “Lezzies.” Later, in Paris, she meets a beautiful novelist already renowned at twenty-six, and within twenty-four hours the infatuated pair achieve complete intimacy. They return to live for a time in England; however, they encounter at once the same social disapprobation they had met among the British contingent even on the rive gauche. A literary critic warns Dorcas, moreover, that she will be jealous of Consuelo’s work, and that emotional release may have an adverse effect upon the latter’s creative powers—an interesting inversion of Miss Hall’s attributing Stephen Gordon’s sterility to lack of such release. Both predictions prove all too accurate, and the union goes completely on the rocks within a matter of months. Worthless as it is artistically, the novel stresses a detail previously hinted only in That Other Love: it is the younger girl who disrupts an older woman’s well adjusted and successful life. Also evil fruit from even completely happy physical expression is at odds with the Freudian theory which the author elsewhere makes show of accepting.

The final pair of tales have been left until last because of their direct bearing on censorship efforts which got under way during 1934 and 1935. One was Love Like a Shadow, which, although written under the name of Lois Lodge, exhibits many of the characteristics of male authorship listed earlier in discussing erotic writing. Of the college in which it begins, it reports “bull sessions” of crass vulgarity, raw petting parties and assignations after dances, and lesbian alliances kept only slightly undercover. In a New York residence club a burgeoning lesbian coterie includes a cigar-smoking physician who spouts variant biology and philosophy at every chance, a feminist poet with two girls—children under ten—whom she has already started on the path to Lesbos, and a variety of free-living artists, entertainers, and Park Avenue sensation-seekers. The heroine, Jean, is antagonistic towards men because of her father’s flaunted infidelities; another girl, because she was raped at twelve by her uncle. Jean is an idealist in search of a lasting alliance, but her first love (a college roommate) marries to scotch “queer” gossip in a midwestern home town; and her second proves compulsively promiscuous to the point of seducing Jean’s teen-age sister. Jean finally becomes the wife of her millionaire employer “in name only” because his fifteen-year-old daughter needs a mother, but she finds her stepdaughter already bisexually experienced, and the two are soon united in the Great Love of both their lives—approximately the fourth affair for each. The father conveniently dies (of extra-marital excesses) and leaves the pair free to roam the world at will and live happily ever after. This précis suggests but feebly the hundred-proof distillate of promiscuity, exhibitionism, hard drinking, wild lesbian propagandizing, and bad poetry which comprises the original.

Cut from the same cloth was Mardigras Madness (1934) by Davis Dresser, a gentleman revealed by the Library of Congress catalog as writing under six pseudonyms, one of them feminine. It is a racy tale of Barbara from the country, whose aunt is a prude and whose “steady” is too puritanic to satisfy her ardent needs. The Mardigras season, which she spends with a girl friend in New Orleans, is a salacious riot including a midnight ritual orgy worthy of Peladan, but the variant episode occurs during the day when masquers roam the streets at will. She and her friend are picked up by two women, a tall harlequin, and a shingled pirate who says, “I’ll take you captive—before some nasty man beats me to it.” The women call each other Frankie and Johnny, and even before the party reaches their modest apartment Barbara senses a mystery, “an indefinable something which set them apart from anyone she had ever known.”[29] In the apartment alcohol flows freely, and since Barbara has never before tasted so much as wine, her confused exaltation discreetly blurs her impressions of first a “sentimentality” which vaguely bothers her, then a crescendo of caresses until “the world faded into blackness under Frankie’s soothing touch.”[30] The whole incident occupies a half-dozen pages.

This title had a significant publishing history. In 1938 the same firm issued One Reckless Night by Peter Shelley, one of Dresser’s many tags. Except that in this later volume the heroine and her friend bear different names, its text is that of the 1934 narrative verbatim, save for one alteration and a scant two percent deletions. The latter comprise vivid and specific bits of heterosexual detail. But the important change is the transmutation of the lesbians into a pair of men, “a striking couple, both extremely tall, and they carried their costumes with a swagger.”[31] They pick the girls up in a magnificent foreign roadster, the scene of the drinking party is a patio of corresponding grandeur, and as the heroine lapses from consciousness she dreams that it is her fiancé who possesses her. The obvious purpose of both versions, as of Love Like a Shadow and the same grade of purely heterosexual writing, is to convince the callow reader that “everybody’s doing it, it’s smart in the Big Cities.” No matter how much one may deplore censorship in principle, one can hardly deny its justice in such cases as these. Actually, the second version of Dresser’s tale is no better than the first in moral impact, and the fact that the only change in plot required to make it acceptable for publication was the alteration of the lesbian episode, throws light upon the chief target of the snipers.

To be sure, variant fiction was not alone in its flamboyance, nor was it alone under attack. The heterosexual frankness in works of high quality during the twenties had been followed by lesser and lesser efforts, and finally by pseudonymous volumes such as Naked Escape, Innocent Adulteress, and Born to be Bad. Male homosexuality, as well, was represented in a handful of dubious volumes culminating in Scarlet Pansy. Non-fiction also took advantage of the open market with hastily penned volumes on sexual psychology and perversions, and revivals or new translations of Krafft-Ebing, Stekel, and lesser lights of the preceding half-century. A crop of short-lived presses—“Eugenic,” “Anthropological” and “Physicians”—sprang up to profit by the open season. Reaction was inevitable. Since earlier battles to prevent publication had, as we have seen, been lost in this country, censoring groups now trained their guns upon sales agencies wherever they had sufficient influence. In one city a single sale of a blacklisted item might lay a bookseller open to prosecution and seizure of all contraband stock. In another, supplying a title specifically requested by a patron might be safe, but having the same volume visible even on inconspicuous shelves within the shop was penalized. In a third it might be that no restrictions were imposed, as for example Atlantic City, where the excursionist from Boston or Philadelphia was apt to find all the books banished from his own city lavishly displayed in boardwalk windows. This uneven but increasing restraint was soon sufficient to make the production of sensational items a gamble instead of a sure profit; the fly-by-night presses withered as suddenly as they had grown, and what little trash was issued had to seek vanity publishing.

Above Reproach

Variant fiction of quality, however, suffered no very great check. In 1935, for instance, this country saw the publication of two sympathetic translations, Christa Winsloe’s Girl Alone and Colette’s The Indulgent Husband, and also of Gale Wilhelm’s We Too Are Drifting. This last was a brief first novel by a young woman pictured frankly on the dust jacket as shingled and tailored, who was a stylistic disciple of Ernest Hemingway (by then a major influence). Her prose had a lean economy worthy of her master, and the grudging acclaim her novel received would certainly have been warmer and more voluminous except for her subject.

Her central figure is Jan Morale, an artist of thirty whose woodcuts have already merited a one-man showing. Jan’s childhood was pinched and sordid; the brother who always hid behind her skirts ended by being hanged; and she herself might have starved as a printer’s devil but for a helping hand from the established sculptor Kletkin. He would like to marry her, but recognizes that no man can hope to possess her. For she is the model for his prize-winning Hermaphroditus, and is more convincingly masculine in temperament than even Miss Hall’s Stephen Gordon. The disgraced brother was her twin, and effeminate, which implies heredity as the cause of her variance. At the opening of the story Jan is entangled with a society beauty who has raised marital deception to a fine art in the interests of her predatory lesbian habits. Jan has been no more than physically captivated; she is already restive, and tension increases when she falls romantically in love with the serene innocence of Victoria, just out of college and living with her conventional suburban family. Jan’s meticulous restraint in refusing to sweep the younger girl off her feet, and the slow development of their complete intimacy, are presented delicately but without evasion. The relationship survives the married woman’s jealous efforts to destroy it and persists for a time, but with increasing strain. For Jan holds to a lifelong rule against intruding her bohemian eccentricity upon conventional households, and Victoria finds frequent absences hard to explain at home. Victoria is an only child not only loved but loving, with all the pliant passivity of Verena Tarrant in The Bostonians. In her placid life the need for evasion or struggle has never before arisen, and they are alien to her now. Therefore the two girls’ long-nursed plans for a holiday together go down before a suddenly projected family trip. Jan, furtively hidden, must watch a transcontinental train pull out bearing her beloved, accompanied by her parents and the “nice boy” they wish her to marry. Here again, as in Star Against Star, the older and well-established woman is the one to suffer from a consuming intimacy.

The British contribution of the year was a brief section of Francis Brett Young’s White Ladies, in which the now familiar pattern of Regiment of Women is discernible. Bella, descended from two generations of independent and passionate women and virtually orphaned, is sent to boarding school at sixteen because she is too much the tomboy to be manageable by her grandparents or the mistresses of her private day-school. The “first passionate devotion of her life” for a music mistress she outgrows upon discovering that the woman is a facile sentimentalist, but she falls at once into “instinctive adoration” of a crisp and ironic headmistress, who seems the antithesis of her former love. On closer acquaintance the contained Miss Cash reveals a “protean” range of mood, from childlike gaiety to “spiritual incandescence,” but her astringent scorn of admitted love preserves Bella’s illusion of emotional detachment through five years as pupil, teacher and secretary-companion. Then Miss Cash offers hysterical opposition to Bella’s associating with men, and this brings the girl to see her at last as

a faded middle aged woman of imperious and uncertain temper, pathetically nursing an illusion of emancipated youth and freedom and daring in what was really the arid life of a confirmed old maid.[32]

Later, in the company of a man she loves, Bella meets Miss Cash on the street with another worshipful young girl and recognizes a sinister element in these consuming attachments. When the man observes that though the schoolmistress has the face of an old woman she still moves like a girl, Bella replies that she is ageless because she is a vampire, living on young blood. Neither of the women here appears at all masculine, though Miss Cash is a feminist and a man-hater and Bella has a man’s practical intelligence and drive. Bella’s loves are substitutes for family ties, and the older woman is again the egotist in need of constant adulation.

In 1936 Rosamond Lehmann skimmed variance fleetingly in Weather in the Streets with a dialogue between a divorcee of boyish appearance and her one-time schoolmate who plainly has suspicions about the cause of her marital difficulties;[33] the suspicions are, however, unfounded. Marcia Davenport gave her prima donna in Of Lena Geyer just such a faithful adorer as Allie Wentworth in Huneker’s satiric Painted Veils, but she is careful to specify that though gossip attributed a lesbian color to the relationship it was actually blameless.[34] (One suspects that there may have been living models for both authors’ couples of singer and satellite in the New York musical world of the early century.)

The year’s most important item was the British edition (the American followed in 1937) of Nightwood by Djuna Barnes, a young American of the Paris group of expatriates following more or less in the literary footsteps of Gertrude Stein and James Joyce. Fortunately Miss Barnes’s work is intelligible without a key, her kinship being perhaps closer with T. S. Eliot, who wrote the preface for this, her first full-length narrative. On initial reading, the first hundred pages of Nightwood may seem only a crowded canvas of figures romantic in their eccentricity and linked by little save Left Bank geography. Gradually one perceives that their dual axis is a pair of young women, one an American. Nora Flood owns a decaying homestead near enough New York to be crowded, whenever she is there, with the gifted bohemians her hospitality welcomes. The scene of Nightwood, however, is mainly Paris, where Nora acts as publicity agent for a small circus. Of the enigmatic Robin Vote, who moves through the story in a kind of somnambulism, one learns little save that sometimes she breaks absently into fragments of debased song in any of a half-dozen languages, and exhibits a compulsive lesbian promiscuity, the two together suggesting a dubious background. At twenty she drifts into marriage with a wealthy Jew, but childbirth wakes her violently to the knowledge that neither marriage nor motherhood is tolerable to her.

She and Nora are drawn to one another on sight, wander about the continent happily together, and settle for some years in Paris. But Robin is increasingly involved in transient contacts, though she suffers them without volition and is happy only on return to Nora. Then a fading and greedy widow captures and attempts to hold her, and Robin is so torn between her two emotional poles that her always precarious stability is destroyed. The occasion of Nora’s first meeting her was a circus performance from which the girl fled in inarticulate panic because the animals were magnetically drawn to her side of their cages, and a lioness stretched paws through the bars and fixed her “with brimming eyes of love.” The book ends with Nora’s tracing Robin’s final headlong flight from Paris to her own American country place, where she finds the deranged girl engaged in poetically beautiful but spine-chilling play with Nora’s great dog. The volume in toto is a tragic prose poem of the lost—all those whose sole métier is instinct and emotion, misfit and outcast in a culture whose law is social regimentation.

Perceptibly related in style, although far inferior in artistry, is Helen Anderson’s Pity for Women (1937). In this story, an over-sensitive motherless girl attempts to make her way alone in New York, living in a residence club more sinister in its inbred hysteria than any woman’s college dormitory. The hysterical manifestations are not only variance but the reckless struggles of older girls to capture men. The “blind dates” to which Ann submits, the drinking and promiscuity and aftermaths of abortion and suicide which she sees among her housemates, so sicken her that when she acquires a roommate to assuage her loneliness, she clings to the cool and serene Elizabeth as a savior. The two girls enjoy a period of innocent friendship precious to both, but it is jeopardized when an older woman galvanizes Elizabeth into passionate tension. This imperious Judith soon brings Ann also under her spell. She then drops the more contained Elizabeth, and takes Ann as her housemate outside the club. This move estranges the two girls and also terminates a promising acquaintance between Ann and the one man whose company she has been able to enjoy.

There is at first the usual period of honeymoon ecstasy between the two housemates but then bit by bit Ann pieces together Judith’s crowded history, one only to have been expected, but prostrating to the naïve Ann. She is particularly shaken by the story of Judith’s dearest love, a girl as young as herself, whose marriage for the sake of a child drove Judith to attempt suicide. She also suffers from their social isolation, which is complete save for Judith’s still adoring older friends. No new contacts on Ann’s part are permitted. From an agony of jealousy Ann wastes so alarmingly that Judith, to reassure her, goes through a species of marriage ceremony, using the familiar passage from the Book of Ruth. But this gesture is worse than futile. Ann’s state has been induced not by need of permanence but by unconscious terror of it, which warred with her passion. As she feels the fetters closing, her mind gives way. Of the three women depicted, Judith is an innate homosexual and the two younger girls are diverted from normal orbits by contact with her. Elizabeth has stamina enough to regain her balance, although had she remained Judith’s choice the outcome must have been dubious. The immature and unstable Ann is wrecked beyond hope of recovery.

After these two studies, ultra-modern in manner and somewhat morbid in substance, to read Elisabeth Craigin’s Either is Love (1937) is to step back into another century. The almost expository narrative moves against a background in which horses still provide the means of transportation, and there is little to indicate that it is not the discreetly disguised autobiography which it claims to be. Indeed its prose style suggests an already established reputation in fields of non-fiction. It covers a decade in the life of its author, beginning with her late twenties. An employee of the federal government, she is singled out by a younger colleague who shows her the small attentions normally proffered by a man. As the acquaintance develops, its emotional tone disturbs Elisabeth, who recognizes it as what would ordinarily be called “falling in love.” (However, as she explains, in the United States at that time the only available literature on psychology was written by William James; Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis were barely heard of, and even the feminism of Olive Schreiner and Ellen Key was “only for the very emancipated.”) For two years the pair struggle against circumstance, the need for secrecy, and their own increasing passion. To the young Rachel, the experience of variant (if not lesbian) love is not wholly new. Heretofore her friends have been attracted by her boyishness, but now Elisabeth is averse to any travesty of a heterosexual relation. Theirs must be an honest love between two women. Finally some months together abroad give them a typical interlude of complete and perfect union.

Then family complications separate them, and the brief periods they can snatch together are fevered by the effort to crowd too much ardor into too little time. During a long stretch with the width of the Atlantic between them, Rachel falls back into her youthful pattern of responding to the dynamic reaction she involuntarily rouses in other women. This infidelity to what is still her great love induces loss of faith in herself, and finally she suffers so acute a sense of guilt that she turns against all physical expression and follows the lead of a new friend (a mystic enamored of self-abnegation) into the church. Elisabeth could have foregone intimacy if that was required to preserve their friendship; but Rachel’s retroactive conviction that their whole association was wrong seems to her sheer sacrilege. She feels that the Rachel known to her is dead, and a decade passes before she is able to enter upon another emotional relationship.

This second love is heterosexual, and the other half of the volume records its course, terminating in marriage. The two experiences, though different in detail, are subjectively identical and quite justify the title, Either is Love. The author’s final comment upon variance is well-considered enough to warrant quotation:

I do not even now understand the expression “sinful” as I hear it in connection with love between women.... I should think sin was something that did harm in some form, to other people or, of course, to oneself.... Lust demoralizes both participants.... Married life does not preclude it, God knows, and there are great numbers of extra-marital forms. I can understand how lust might develop between women, and if that exists it is deplorable enough. But because incest occurs, is all family life vicious? Because there are brothels, is all sexual life unclean? A so-called Lesbian alliance can be of the most rarified purity, and those who do not believe it are merely judging in ignorance of the facts.[35]

This special pleading, more philosophic than Miss Hall’s, is so much of a piece with the rest of the text that it is not obtrusive, and the volume raised no outcry in our press.

Nevertheless, in the same year the imported French film Club de Femmes, its story by Jacques Deval, was drastically cut for New York showing. The review in Time said:

Manhattan censors promptly spotted Sapphic overtones ... in the character played by beauteous Else Argall, Deval’s wife. Censorship deleted her best scene, which shows her successfully fighting the urge to join the girl of her desire.[36]

This latter is the central figure, who is seduced by a man and bears his illegitimate child. “Considered fit for Manhattan cinema-goers was the shot in which [the lesbian] poisons the procuress telephone operator.” If, as Ernst and Lindey claim in The Censor Marches On, the deletion of the “best” scene left an implication that the lesbian yielded to her desires, then as revived in 1948 the film must have been still further cut (as indeed a certain incoherence suggests), for all that it then showed was the older woman’s maternal solicitude for the naïve newcomer.

In 1938 the important contributions came from Gale Wilhelm and Kay Boyle. To be sure, Dorothy Baker in Young Man with a Horn hinted, in passing, at an alliance between a light-skinned Harlem beauty and the white graduate student who later proves so unsatisfactory a wife to the hero. Ernest Hemingway also, in “Sea Change,” one of the briefest pieces in The Fifth Column and the First Forty-nine Stories, shows a lesbian interlude breaking in upon a satisfactory heterosexual affair. The man tells his errant partner, “It’s a vice.” The girl, promising to return to him, denies the charge. “We’re made up of all sorts of things. You’ve known that. You’ve used it well enough.” But neither of these treatments was very important, and there seem not to have been others.

Miss Wilhelm’s second novelette, Torchlight to Valhalla, resembles her first in length and style, but differs in that both its girls are masculine in little more than attire, and variant largely through conditioning. The older is even more closely bound to her father than was Gillian in The Tortoiseshell Cat. In her desperate loneliness after his death, she yields to a young musician (male) who seems an ideal partner, but finds herself frozen and shamed by the experiment. The younger girl has been forced since the age of fifteen to assume a man’s responsibility for herself and her once distinguished aunt, now a bemused alcoholic. The two girls immediately find in one another the answer to their needs and achieve a union which promises lasting happiness. There is nothing here like Jan’s bohemian existence in We Too Are Drifting or her barren entanglement with the married woman. Despite these seeming efforts to placate the prejudiced, Miss Wilhelm’s second title fared no better at the hands of reviewers than her first.

Kay Boyle, then another of the American literary expatriates in France, was already a writer of established reputation when she entered the variant field in 1938 with two titles. Earlier, in Gentlemen, I Address You Privately there had been hints of male homosexuality. Incorporated in Monday Night there is a much more explicit lesbian episode, seen in part through the eyes of an eight-year-old boy whose father is serving a life sentence for a crime of which he is innocent. The rather pathetic wife and mother enjoys a summer interlude with a soi-disant Russian princess, fugitive from the Revolution of 1917. This Baya, world-vagabond, automobile racer and aviator, even masquerades on occasion in the father’s World War I uniform,

the visored cap ... tipped on the side of her head, even the boots seeming to fit exactly, and the crop stuck under her armpit, and the face small, tough and reckless ... “His uniform, his wife, his kid, the life he can’t live handed me like a present,” she said scarcely aloud, the casual rakish smile neat as a boy’s.[37]

Then the other woman shows interest in a man, and after some stubborn haunting of the apartment, Baya slams out, “banging the hall-door behind her so that the pictures jumped on the walls.”

Miss Boyle’s second narrative, “The Bridegroom’s Body,” did not appear in book form until 1940 when it was included in the volume The Crazy Hunter, but the Southern Quarterly printed it in 1938. Here Lady Glourie, thirty-five but emotionally naïve as a child, is mistress of an isolated manor with a swannery dating from the sixteenth century, and wife to a man whose only interest is sport. He and his cronies spend their days with rod and gun and their nights in carousal from which she is excluded, so that she feels herself isolated in a world of men given over to nothing but killing. When illness in the swanherd’s family makes it necessary to import a nurse, Lady Glourie anticipates the company of another woman with pathetic eagerness. The arrival of a young and beautiful Irish girl is a blow, the more bitter because Lord Glourie is instantly smitten. There is also a handsome farmer on the place, reputed to be irresistible to women; so when Lady Glourie learns that Miss Cafferty is given to long walks by night as well as by day she infers the worst. The Irish girl’s shyly professed admiration for herself she takes as a studied attempt at ingratiation.

It is the swans’ mating season and the perennial battle is on between old warriors and young cobs. On a night when the nurse is neither in her room nor with her patient, Lady Glourie is called from her bed to deal with a battle to the death between a young “bridegroom” and the fiercest of the old cobs. Thinking she may be in time to save the young swan, she wades out waist deep to the rescue and narrowly escapes dangerous attack by the old one. She emerges from the icy water with the dead swan to find Miss Cafferty there, softly hysterical, pouring out a torrent of endearment. She learns that from the first the girl has been interested in her alone, fighting off the men because she too hates their predatory cruelty. Her long walks she has taken

“to think about you here, alone where there might be something left of you ... some mark of you on the ground. I couldn’t sleep in the room, I couldn’t bear closing the door after I’d left you.... I’ve walked the country alone ... talking out loud to you night and day, asking you to give me everything I haven’t, peace and strength and that look in your eyes ... one hint of what it is you have that nobody else has, just one weapon to fight the others ...”[38]

Lady Glourie quiets her,

but these were things she had heard once or once imagined.... She stood waiting, scarcely breathing, waiting for the words to start again. The chill she had not yet felt on her flesh entered her heart for the instant that the words abandoned this anonymous but exact description of love.[39]

When the girl does speak again it is to beg Lady Glourie to come away with her, escape from the manor, continue to “lend me what you can spare.” The surcharged moment is interrupted by the noisy arrival of Lord Glourie with a lantern, demanding “What’s up?” and annoyed to find them both drenched to the skin. “Lady Glourie looked down at her own strange flesh and suddenly she began shaking with the cold.” Here the narrative ends, and as in Delay in the Sun, the reader must supply for himself the ultimate outcome.

Nineteen-thirty-nine saw the publication of two dissimilar novels, the American and anonymous Diana,[40] and Promise of Love by a new English author, Mary Renault. Of the latter, the main theme is the struggle of a nurse and a laboratory pathologist to work out satisfactory heterosexual relations against the odds of hospital discipline and of their individual homosexual interests. Vivian closely resembles a brother of uncommon charm, irresistible to both sexes but disinclined to take his relations with either seriously. Thus Mic, who has enjoyed a transient intimacy with the brother and seen his interest fade, is wary of allowing Vivian any hold upon him. She, for her part, is being gracefully courted by a fellow nurse, tall, tailored and debonair, and there are discreet intimations of her momentarily succumbing. One of the factors inclining Vivian toward Mic is Colonna’s sudden and much deeper attachment to a new supervisor of nurses, and the completeness of this connection and the perilous professional risks it entails are left in no doubt. Vivian’s growing intimacy with Mic narrowly escapes disaster when, in a spirit of deviltry, she dresses in men’s clothes and gets the abrupt and brutal reaction the experiment invites. In the end, the two weather all storms and marry. The supervisor also accepts a male suitor, and Colonna is left to face the fact that as she grows older her Maupin pose will be less becoming and her conquests fewer.

Diana is an autobiography almost of the “true confession” type, though it carried a preface by Dr. Victor Robinson endorsing at least its subjective authenticity. Diana grows up the only girl in a household of brothers and she is very close to her father until his death. When in early adolescence she falls in love with a high school chum and recognizes her feelings as those of a boy, her reaction is one of shame not alleviated by an older brother’s introducing her to the works of Havelock Ellis. In college she avoids friendships with women and evades one girl’s advances by pretending ignorance. Delighted to find the attentions of a male graduate student acceptable, she is engaged to him for a couple of years, but an unsuccessful trial of intimacy eliminates marriage from her future plans.

During a year of study abroad, initiation by another American girl shows her where her fulfillment lies; this contact, however, is broken at once by the reappearance of an earlier flame of her new friend. Wounded and angry, Diana is ripe for a less sophisticated alliance with a girl who is shocked by lesbianism and refuses to recognize anything of it in their love. When intimacy finally develops, it is not too satisfactory, since Jane’s scruples preclude any intelligent effort on her part to meet Diana’s needs. Nevertheless, the two attempt for a year to live together after their return to the States. In the women’s college where Diana teaches, their rooming off-campus stirs so much gossip that for the next year Diana must choose between Jane and her position.

Diana’s second conscientious effort, in a coeducational college, to become interested in men is unsuccessful. Somewhat later she finds a young woman graduate student with whom she achieves happiness after a period of meticulous restraint reminiscent of We Too Are Drifting. Suspense is supplied by Leslie’s mother’s denouncing the pair and disowning her daughter, and by the reappearance of Jane, who attempts to capture Leslie out of wanton spite. Diana and Leslie are so eminently suited to one another, however, that they finally come through even more closely united. This narrative is certainly no literary masterpiece, and perhaps its strongest point is Diana’s honest analysis along the way of the arguments against, rather than for, her chosen way of life. Since homosexuals need not fear pregnancy or assume responsibility for a home and family, they are free to make and break connections lightly.[41] Only true sympathy, loyalty, and dedication to their unions can restrain them from snatching at facile satisfaction, and human nature being what it is, no lesbian alliance has more strength than the weaker of its two partners. These observations are not particularly original, of course, having often enough been demonstrated by example in a half century’s fiction. Even the precepts themselves had appeared by 1939 in a good many hortatory manuals of sex psychology. Heretofore, however, they were voiced by strenuous opponents of homosexual intimacy. For a defender to present them with cool logic, and, in spite of them, to justify the calculated risk, marks an advance in psychological perspective since Radclyffe Hall’s wholly emotional plea for tolerance a decade earlier.

Another War’s Shadow

For the next three years the preoccupations of war—plus the paper shortage—crowded variant fiction almost completely from the market, and even after readers and publishers once more hit a modified stride, the bulk of such fiction remained condemnatory for the rest of the decade. Angela DuMaurier’s The Little Less (1941) reports effects as devastating as those in The Island from a long variant enslavement, even though in this case there is no physical intimacy. Toward the end of the book a spasm of lesbian debauchery marks one woman’s repudiation of her Catholic faith in defiance of a deity who permitted her child to die. The orgy is followed by her suicide. In Fanny Hurst’s Lonely Parade (1942), the picturesque trio of bachelor girls are solaced by mutual devotion of a variant cast, though never actually lesbian; but their unwedded lives are not especially happy.

The inexplicable burst of five titles in 1943 was largely damning, the minority report being Dorothy Cowlin’s in Winter Solstice, a thinly disguised case history of a paralytic whose eight years’ invalidism, of hysterical origin, is cured by a sudden emotional interest in a woman aviator. The relationship is brief and innocent, and is followed by marriage for both women. Craig Rice used the lesbian advances of an eccentric heiress to a Greenwich Village “poet” as a neat red herring in her murder mystery Having a Wonderful Crime, in which the heiress is the victim. In Jane Bowles’s Two Serious Ladies, an inhibited Brooklyn housewife finds her first experience outside the States so inebriating that she defies her husband and lingers in the prostitutes’ quarters of Colon, determined to “learn all the things she didn’t know,” even though she realizes they will not make her happy.

On a level to be taken seriously, Arthur Koestler in Arrival and Departure conveyed, through his hero’s contact with a woman psychoanalyst, his estimate of both the good and the bad in an all-tolerant psychiatric viewpoint. Peter, heroic political refugee shattered by his ordeal in the hands of the enemy, is taken in and cared for in a neutral European city by his countrywoman, Dr. Bolgar. He falls in love and has a restoring liaison with a young girl who frequents the doctor’s apartment, and he plans to follow Odette to the United States when a passport can be secured. His relapse into neurosis upon her leaving him without notice or farewell Dr. Bolgar repairs by a swift and skillful analysis of his lifelong martyr complex. Chance, however, reveals to Peter that the doctor is Odette’s real love and he but a passing fancy. So, instead of following the girl, he returns to his perilous but “real” underground activities. The doctor is described as tall, full-blown, and masterful; Odette, as childishly slender, with a “boyish” unpainted mouth. In the end,

Above all he felt a sadness ... and pity for Odette, with her vacant look, her slimness and vulnerability—Odette the victim, drowned in the carnivorous flower’s embrace.[42]

Certainly best-known of the year’s titles is Dorothy Baker’s Trio, on which a play was based, since its stage history virtually duplicated that of The Captive seventeen years earlier. Its opening in Philadelphia was well attended and reviewed, and the play ran on Broadway for a little more than a month before being closed through pressure from a combination of religious interests. One of the New Yorker staff interviewed various signers of the petition for its withdrawal, and found that several had neither seen the play nor read the novel from which it was made before lending their names to the protest.

The story presents the struggle between a Frenchwoman on an American university faculty and a young art photographer for possession of a girl who is departmental assistant to the former. Pauline Maury has just published a brilliant study of the fin de siècle French decadents, notably Verlaine and Rimbaud. Like them, she is an advocate of exploring the limits of sensibility under all possible stimuli from alcohol to sexual passion, with veiled hints at drugs and flagellation, but naturally this aspect of her life is well concealed. The girl Janet, at first a passionate intellectual and emotional devotee, has been reduced by intimacy with Pauline to the limit of stability when a whirlwind courtship by Ray Mackenzie and a wholesome heterosexual liaison with him save her from further exploitation. Though Ray reacts with blind rage and contempt to her confession of her past relations with Pauline, there is at least a chance that he will come around enough to marry her when he has cooled. The defeated and frustrated Frenchwoman shoots herself.