the entire erotic preoccupation of the novel is homosexual, not merely in the relationship between Guy and Ralph but also in their relationships with the rest of the school. Both are given opportunity to reject baser or less "virile" forms of homosexuality. Guy recoils at the thought of holding "salons" for students in the manner of the effeminate Dr. Sour, considering them "more than a little incestuous." Ralph ventures out of sheer loneliness into the circle of student effeminates but apparently finds them not to his taste. Nevertheless, we are not allowed to forget that the physical attraction is there, no matter how base. Both Guy and Ralph are linked in an obscure way with Ralph's crude roommate, Buddy Brown. Guy frequently pores over a pornographic etching, never completely described but apparently showing three nude male figures locked in some kind of sexual embrace. One night when Buddy visits him with the evident aim of trading his physical favors for a look at the history examination, Guy orders him out of the room, but then, taking out the etching, is "afraid to understand" the similarity between Buddy and one of the etched figures. He is interrupted in this reverie by Ralph, who gets a full view of the picture. The implied similarity between the triple relationship of these three characters and the etching is completed a few pages later when we are told that Buddy, pajamaclad (as in his visit to Guy) and with his toothbrush in his mouth, often wrestles with his weaker roommate and then sits on his chest "longer than his triumph warranted him," a maneuver that Ralph does not resist. All these incidents seem intended to show that the attraction which exists between Guy and Ralph is of a higher and purer sort than the homosexual situations all around them, but that they reach this higher sort by a positive effort.

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Further, it seems to be implied that when they are given the opportunity for heterosexual outlet, they have reached an even higher and purer sexual state. They are now what they should be. Yet Guy's consummation. with Betty Blanchard is in a condition. of semi-drunkenness as he abuses her with obscene epithets, and Ralph's consummation is with a girl to whom he is "indifferent." The conversions themselves lack conviction, and the tacit assumption at the end that homosexual feelings have been forever left behind seems utterly inconsistent with the previous history of both characters, just as it violates clinical experi-

ence.

In A Cry of Children, David Murray, the young concert pianist, seems at first glance to be a fairly conventional. heterosexual hero. He takes as mistress the parasitic but spirited Isobel Joy, and he eventually marries Mary Desmond, whose musical understanding and Catholicism provide a refuge from the Bohemian world that has hitherto dragged him down. He steadfastly rejects the continual advances of Isobel's kindly brother Fred, the proffered car-rides of the effeminate dancer Harry Korchinski, the implied overtures of a hospital intern, and the blunt proposition of an Irish laborer in a homosexual bar. Yet many incidents and circumstances call all in doubt.

Even the most explicit of these incidents is clouded in circumlocution. After his first estrangement from Isobel, David goes on a concert tour which is also "a callously planned career of infidelities." "In the three months I was away from the West End," he declares, "I had anyone I wanted from Portland to Atlanta." At first this seems crudely clear. But when he comes to enumerating these conquests, he speaks of them rather deviously as "circles" in which he

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