In those searching and experimental days I was as passive as the leaf a bird fouls upon. I frequented places where advances would be made to me, I sitting on a bench by the river and seeming just to have happened there. And I was never alone very long.

What's a goodlookin kid like you doin alone of a Sattiday night? Aintcha got a date?

Wanna fool around? Twon't mean nothin' and if we see each other again, don't speak to me, unnerstand?

-My hubby's dead drunk, but you'll do just as well. Even better. The sex of the third speaker is clear, but that of the first two is not. Nor is Burns willing to be any more explicit, later referring to these persons as "the companions of my pleasure."

This passivity in sexual approach is another clue to David's nature, and it extends even to his relationship with Isobel. "I'd lie on the sofa with coffee, and she would come to me, aggressive as a man, and begin to play with me demandingly, until I warmed to her." When he recoils from the vulgarity of the house-warming party, he does so by what he calls "a species of feminine withdrawal."

For a young man who scorns bodybuilders ("the Messrs. America") as "monstrous homosexual symbols of the age." David inconsistently places himself in positions to be approached homosexually. He enters two bars in the course of the story, both catering to homosexuals (though, characteristically, neither bar is identified in so many words). Homosexuals flutter around him like moths around a flame. altogether too many of them to make their primary role the provision of local color. In every instance, it is carefully noted that David rejects the advances, but the strange thing is that the author has seen fit to include these

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incidents in the first place. It is interesting, too, that apart from his mother, two priests, and Mary Desmond, the homosexuals are about the only decent persons David associates with.

Thus, Burns gives the reader every reason to believe that David's problems are homosexual in origin, though he seems also to deny that David is a homosexual or that his stormy relationship with Isobel is in any way af fected by his sexual orientation. At the very least, this concealment of motive limits the depth to which the novelist can analyze his characters. At worst it may result in a distortion of reality.

This summary of both novels should make it evident that the problem of homosexuality was strongly, if not primarily, on the author's mind, but that he was unwilling to deal with it openly. This circumstance had a vitiating effect upon his work. In the first place it caused him to expand themes in which he was not especially interested, in order to cover up the forbidden theme. His first novel, The Gallery. with its powerfully felt picture of Naples under the American occupation, had supported the burden of frequent homosexual innuendo because its unifying theme was the need of everyone, including homosexuals, for love and understanding, a message which Burns could expound wholeheartedly. In Lucifer with a Book, on the other hand, the dominant ideathe reaction of a worldly-wise veteran to a viciously provincial school for boys-only very awkwardly makes connection with the underlying theme of Guy Hudson's sexual ambivalence. The result is that neither theme is treated successfully. The satire upon the school never comes to life, and Guy's last-act stand against the introduction of a military program on the campus becomes merely a device to ring down the curtain. In turn, the sexual theme dies of malnutrition, not