BOOKS

Notices and reviews of books, articles, plays and poetry dealing with homosexuality and the sex variant. Readers are invited to send in reviews or printed matter for review.

FORD

THE YOUNGEST DIRECTOR by Martyn Goff, Putnam & Company Limited, London, 1961, pp. 237, 15s.

It has long been the view of the present reviewer that novelists and dramatists do a better job in dealing with problems of human nature than the professional psychologists who borrow their techniques of research from the natural scientists, abstracting single points or traits from many subjects and treating them statistically. In contrast the former see human beings as wholes in relation to a setting and single traits as belonging to a complex which may and often does determine the character and importance of the trait. It is only in our time that this view has been more generally recognized and here as elsewhere the novelists have been first to see the larger significance of their own work. For example Irving Wallace's The Chapman Report is a terrific satire on the statistical treatment of sex problems. More recently Professor John Wild in a very learned address before the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association elevates the view to a philosophical position distinguishing a Lebenswelt. or world in which we live and die, from what the scientists call the "realm of fact," the former being mussy and diffuse but real, while the latter is neat and precise

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but abstract and remote from life as it is actually lived.

The book, The Youngest Director, while perhaps not a great or profound novel, is still a compact and neatly structured account of the experience of a homophile youth which might well be a case study. The youth, Leonard, faces the three characteristic problems of homosexuals growing out of his love for and persistent loyalty to a young boy much below him in social status (an important point in England where the plot is laid). The problems concern Leonard's relation to his parents and brother, family, to marriage, and finally to his job, a highly placed position with a good company.

The author shows his good taste and sense of reality in avoiding the wild and blood-curdling solutions, so common in homophile novels. Both the family and the company try to force Leonard into a conventional marriage, which of course he cannot accept. He tells the family the truth. His father, a harsh and bigoted man, blows up and orders him out of the house but finally relents in deference to the mother who is more tolerant and understanding; things then go on much as they have always done. A married couple, the husband of which is a homosexual, are both friends of his. When the wife discovers her husband's bent, she plans a divorce, but Leonard advises her that the conse-

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