which are inherent in all of us, albeit carefully covered up by our social-protection veneer. None of us could afford to own up to sensations akin to those evidenced in Divine and Mimosa for fear of destroying himself in the eyes of those around him. But each of us experiences, I am sure, the unsocial and even anti-social emotions which Genet has made concrete in his characters. He has peopled his novel with the half-hidden phantasies and forgotten nightmares which all of us have known, giving them a wild life of their own. And his style again aids in this creation of a sublimated microcosm, expressing as it does the convoluted emotionality which exists in each of us.

Every one of his characters wears a nickname, a mask which he flaunts like a plume or jewel, and which sets him apart from all the others. But under each of these masks exists a pair of individuals: the person of the outwardly masculine childhood at first, and, superimposed upon that, the pseudo-woman of the present. This latter is dazzling in her dream life, but sordid and despairing in reality. Her lot is the unending hunt for the perfect mate, the search which always ends in a bitter fight over petty nothings, only to be followed by another affair differing from its predecessor only in name. Genet has captured all too vividly the duality of much of homosexual life; this contrast between the carefully treasured moment of ecstasy and the hopelessness of actuality. Granted that not all homosexuals live like this, but the seed is there somewhere in each of us. It is only that his characters never had the opportunity or the intellect to go beyond the limitations of their psychological development. They are not pretty people, and many readers may find identification with them impossible, but they do attain a reality through this brilliant style and this acute insight.

It is this combination of acute psychological understanding and stylistic skill which gives THE GUTTER IN THE SKY its fascination. Although the novel deals with the sordid life and warped individuals who inhabit a minority segment of the homosexual world, as a novel it rises far above most fictional treatments of the invert. It is not attractive, nor is its outlook happy, but it is unquestionably the work of a literary genius, and thus worthy of thoughtful reading by anyone who values good writing, regardless of subject matter. I heartily recommend it.

ROBB MCKENZIE

THE UNIVERSAL MAN

a review of

HUMBOLDT, The Life and Times of Alexander von Humboldt, 1769-1859, Explorer, Naturalist & Humanist, by Helmut de Terra, Knopf, New York, 1955, 386 pp, $5.75.

There occasionally appears in history a man so much the master of the knowledge of his time as to seem as if he were the incarnate mind of his age, and so much ahead of his time as to seem a prophet-like Aristotle, Leonardo, Bacon -a man who, as Emerson said of Humboldt, "was one of those wonders of the world . . . to show us the possibilities of the human mind, the force and range of the faculties, a universal man."

Humboldt was certainly such a man. Raised in the court of Frederick the Great, resisting his mother's urging toward an official career, he soon made a

one