The two novels are permeated with homosexual situations and innuendoes, most of which seem intended either to establish the normality of the hero (by his negative role) or to cast doubt upon it. Their total effect is to do both, creating a cloudiness of purpose and necessarily preventing any very deep character analysis.

Guy Hudson, the hero of Lucifer with a Book, is a battle-scarred veteran of World War II who has taken a position as history instructor in a prep school for boys. The plot develops upon two levels, related, vet each sunporting a different atmosphere, almost a different set of conventions of reality. On one level Guy reacts against the pettiness and hypocrisy of most of the school administration. faculty, and students. finally provoking his own dismissal. Here the story is satirical, the characters are almost caricatures of the evils they represents, and the incidents are stagey and unreal. On the second level a physical and mental attraction grows between Guy and his most intelligent student. Ralph Du Bouchet. The instructor fights successfully against this inclination and eventually falls in love with Betty Blanchard, a teacher in an affiliated school for girls. Upon this personal, sexual level the novel achieves noticeably greater subtlety and sense of reality. It seems as though the writer, ostensibly concerned with society's evils, is really more deeply interested in the sexual drives of his hero. And it is in this area that the strange dubiousness of purpose occurs to which Aldridge refers.

At the outset, Guy is given a deliberately ambiguous sexual history, with the strong implication that it is homosexual. Nowhere in this exposition does the author take the simple clarifying course of saying that Guy has once slept with a woman. Rather, the

hero wishes for a "lover" and reminisces upon "companions of . . . pleasures." He remembers "how in Europe. he used to watch the sunrise with his companion for the night." Departing for New York for the Christmas vacation, he anticipates a carousal with old army friends, when he will once more be "the satyr." And when he returns. we are told."For three weeks he hadn't slept alone." Later he thinks about the vacation and his "bed companions for the night." If the writer had wanted to convey the idea that these were heterosexual or even bisexual adventures, it would have been simple to do so.

Despite these indications. Burns carefully lays the groundwork for an interpretation of Guy's feelings towards Ralph as those of a normally heterosexual man too long separated from women. "He had to have it." we are told inelegantly on his first morning at the school, "and it didn't matter much with what or with whom.". Later, as he becomes aware of his developing feeling toward Ralph, he is made to analyze the motivation of both of them: "Each of you is sensual, with no true outlet for your desires. Consequently, when Betty Blanchard. finally consents to provide the true outlet, Guy appears to have completely freed himself from his attachment to Ralph.

Ralph, as the ambivalent eighteenyear-old, makes his own decisive break with homosexuality during spring vacation by the simple expedient of having sex relations with a girl. “That night . . . Ralph passed forever out of his boyhood. She shattered the ties that bound him to his mother. to the ambivalence of his feeling for Guy Hudson." Later he is able to think of his earlier feelings as an adolescent "crush."

It is significant that, for both men, the conversion to heterosexuality comes late in the story, for virtually

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