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.

TWO BOOKS ON HADRIAN

HADRIAN'S MEMOIRS........

...Marguerite Yourcenar

Farrar, Straus & Young ($4) (313 pp)

ROME AND A VILLA.........

Doubleday ($4.00) 1952

..Eleanor Clark

It has long been standard procedure in certain intellectual circles to speak of the "homosexual personality" and to attribute to it certain qualities, varying according to the bias of the critic. A certain excellence in the arts is conceded, ranging from the most "feminine" interior decoration to the more rigorously "masculine" disciplines, more grudgingly conceded, of sculpture and architecture. But as to the "exclusively masculine" activities of statesmanship, military strategy, etc., the critics ask, "Where are the nances here?"

A typical example of this attitude in a not otherwise unintelligent writer is Eric Bentley in "Search for Theatre." In a discussion of Shakespeare's "Richard the Second," which Bentley considers an analysis of homosexuality (so interpreted also of Michael Redgrave and Maurice Evans) he makes a point of the danger to the state of a homosexual monarch, who tends to dissipate revenue and interest of favorites. The elimination of such a monarch (as also in Marlowe's "Edward the Second") is thereby dramatically and logically inevitable. The numerous heterosexual libertines of royal history, Charles II of England, Louis XV of France, are forgotten among the many more respectable heterosexuals, but so are the many more "responsible" homosexuals, to name only those about whom there is least question: Richard the "Lion Hearted" and James I of England; Frederick the Great of Prussia; Charles VII of Sweden. And in purely military achievement, the Prussian Frederick and Swedish Charles and the more modern examples of Lawrence of Arabia and General Gordon of Egypt are not inconsiderable figures.

Which brings us to Hadrian.

The villa in Eleanor Clark's "Rome and a Villa" is Hadrian's and in a prose of great suppleness, sensitivity and style, she devotes an entire section to an astonishing evocation, from its ruins, of its architecture, and therefrom, of the architect. The figure emergent is an extraordinary one. The Empire, at its greatest extent, from Britain to Persia, never before or after enjoyed such a long and peaceful reign: its few wars brilliantly and quickly prosecuted, usually under the Emperor's personal leadership; its legislation for the first time approaching our ideal of enlightened and liberal reform; its art not original, but rich and of a certain style and elegance. Hadrian wrote verse of apparently excellent style, under the Greek influence, making him, after the sturdy prose of the original

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