when the self is freed of all ties with the world of senses and is ushered into the realm of eternity and infinity.

Now, the value, the great value of the book, lies in this, in the revelation that the love that transcends the senses trancends the senses only when they are shot through with ultimate spasms of supreme voluptuousness, when the body is nothing more than a heap of flickering ashes, and the soul has put on wings and is soaring aloft to sing the paean of victory of the spirit of man.

But that is possible, as Jouhandeau explains, only when homosexual love becomes "Pur Amour," pure love. The question is then: "When does homosexual love become pure love?"

Jouhandeau answers this question in 420 pages of analysis of his instincts, his aspirations, his feelings, and his needs. The instincts and the needs of his body are just as real to him as his aspirations and his feelings. Nay the last are born from the first. The spirit can sing of its freedom only when the body has had its due. A body made for homosexual love can never attain fulfillment without experiencing homosexual love. But, as all things of the earth, this love can be obscene, ignoble, soul defiling; or can be pure, ennobling love. Du Pur Amour shows us the way to heights, heights that heterosexual love has seldom, if ever, scaled. May we all benefit by its reading, for truly, as Dante said. "It is Love that moves the sun and all the stars."

Mario Palmieri

I have just finished reading an amazing book: La Chemise Rouge by Jacques Brosse, Ed. Plon, Paris, France, 1859.

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Purposely I say at the outset "an amazing book" because, having reached the end I cannot but think of the gulf which separates the French homo-erotic literature from the American, and, in a way, also from the English.

American writers seem to write of things palpable, immediate, physical -things with which the mind and soul are very little concerned and in which the heart takes a superficial interest.

English writers, instead, are not so sure that they can make a spiritual adventure out of physical quest, and so they make of it a social one, tying it to the whole social pattern of English life a life which to us Americans seems very quaint, archaic and hackneyed, what with its prejudices, class distinctions, etc.

French writers treat homo-eroticism as if it had already passed in the general consciousness of mankind from the status of sexual expression to a phenomenon of the world of the spirit. Thus Jacques Brosse can fill two-hundred and forty-three pages with an intellectual analysis of an affair that has never gotten beyond the point where the lover comes any closer to the lips of his boy than an inch or so, because the affair is all in the mind: while, as the author makes very clear, it was a physical need, at that particular stage in his growth, that brought the beloved boy to his lover's bedroom.

Two-hundred and forty-three pages filled with admirable disquisitions may be all right for French readers; they are certainly too many for American readers who, rightly or wrongly, demand action rather than a lot of philosophy about non-existent action.

This is not to decrie the literary excellence of the book by any means. M. P.