BAR

BUNDYWALLY

BOOKS & PUBLICATIONS

Notices and reviews of books, articles, plays and poetry dealing with homosexuality and the sex variant. Readers are invited to send in reviews or printed matter for review.

THE HEART IN EXILE.

Rodney Garland

First American Edition, Coward-McCann, Inc., New York . . . 1954

This novel will, without doubt, rank among the foremost modern contributions. to homosexual literature. It presents, in a sympathetic and touching fictional form, the same profound problems and the same diversified situations and types as are presented, by expository and critical methods, in Cory's THE HOMOSEXUAL ÎN AMERICA. These two books, in fact, complement each other in many remarkable ways.

The author, writing in the first person, represents himself as a homosexual psychiatrist who, for various personal reasons, takes it upon himself to investigate the suicide of Julian Leclerc, his one-time lover and an acquaintance of many years. The plot unfolds with several ingenious twists of circumstance, which take the reader from the most opulent salons and clubs of London into the most tawdry hangouts of the homosexual "underworld". In an unexpected denouement, the psychiatrist finally discovers the person most immediately responsible for Leclerc's self-destruction.

Two or three important features make this book much more than just an interesting story. First of all, it ends happily, which is quite a shock to anyone familiar with conventional treatments of the homosexual theme. Secondly, it contains many very keen psychological observations of homosexual behavior, which are introduced unassumingly, and which are unconfused by technical language. Thirdly, it reflects sound philosophical and moral attitudes, which, stated against the background of much worldly knowledge and experience, are plainly free from hypocrisy and insincerity. The author, evidently too wise to regard homosexuality, per se, as a disease, does not bore the reader by harping upon "cures." Of the homoerotic attachment, he concludes that "It isn't it's barrenness and sterility that kills it in the end, but the hostility and condemnation of a minority which for all we know may turn out to be smaller even than the (homosexual) underground. The real normal world is as neutral towards us as nature itself."

Whether homoerotic attachments are necessarily "barren and sterile", except on the physiological level, is a point which THE HEART IN EXILE does not resolve. The general tone of the book suggests that they are not-rather, that homoerotic inclinations and behavior can become a means of much spiritual productivity and usefulness on the part of those to whom homoeroticism is necessary.

ROBERT GREGORY

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