AT THE WHIPPING POST by

james douglas margin

Every now and then, some journalist, straining for smart effect in his writing, uses the word "homosexual" to conjure an image of abject decadence. Happily for America's millions of homosexuals, other writers. clear-thinking, fair-minded, and articulate continue to nail this use of the term for what it is: a vicious (or perhaps just ignorant) inaccuracy.

Life Magazine, for instance, recently blasted the state of U.S. fiction, declaring it sometimes read as if it were written by an unemployed homosexual living in a packing-box shanty on the city dump. The editorial said the reading public deserves something better than the papayasmelly, overripe school of the Truman Capotes and the obscenity-possessed school of 'new realism.' The latter, Life added, is exemplified by a parade of war novels that mostly read like the diaries of professional grievance collectors with dirty minds and total recall.

Harvey Breit, distinguished staffer for The New York Times, called the piece a mishmash based on a total misconception of what art is. He said the editorial was a demagogic antiesthetic tirade and that it was calculated to make war on all that, as Nietzsche put it, "is rare, strange, or privileged."

Mr. Breit then made five observations:

First, that you have to leave writers alone or you get no literature; second, that writers have proven to be our best ambassadors and most popular export; third, that America is a democracy and writers. are not political pawns; fourth, that homosexuals are people, including Marcel Proust ("or," he interposed, "do we now have to make the phrase 'regardless of race, creed, color or sex'?"), and fifth, that when you demand a specific literature, you get a specific mediocrity.

Mr. Breit also quoted the great Gerard Manley Hopkins:

Glory be to God for dappled things

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled

(who knows how?)

This answer to Life's spurious judgement was too neatly turned to need additional comment. Had Mr. Breit so desired, however, he could have pointed out one more interesting fact: that the undisputed leader of all war novels from the obscenitypossessed school is "From Here to Eternity" by James Jones author that Life enthusiastically endorsed with with an almost unprecedented (and favorable) publicity boost in its issue of May 7, 1951.