ard and Cass (both white). Richard publishes a novel that brings him renown and money, but which is an abject compromise of the literary values that he and Cass once cherished in common. This forces them to re-evaluate all else they think that they love and share, including each other. They discover that, essentially, all that is left them are their children born of the time when he and she did love each other.

Eric's brief affair with Cass was his attempt to realize the fullness of his heterosexual needs without rejecting his homosexual needs. Perhaps, Mr. Baldwin meant to imply that bisexuality transcends both homo and hetero sexuality?

Regardless of the peculiar limitations of Mr. Baldwin's vision, his consumate ability to transmute ideas and emotions into words lifts Another Country onto the level of the first rate novels of our time.

Chuck Stanley

THE DARK SIDE OF VENUS by Shirley Verel, Bantam (paperback) 1962.

To my taste, this is the finest lesbian novel since Price Of Salt.

About half the novel is of the hesitant courting between Judith, a 28 year old divorcee who despite youthful flings only recently has faced the fact that she is homosexual, and the young Diana. On their honeymoon ("homosexual marriage" is used and it is plain they intend to make it such) they are stumbled on by a horrified heterosexual friend in a position so obviously flagrant delicto they know there can be no doubt. Julian, the discoverer, gets very Christian and worried about their souls and insists they part. He threatens to spread the word to Diana's family and to the business associates of Judith, who is a topflight London business executive. When the women are adamant, he actually does it — piously insisting,

one

of course, that it is for the women's own good. Diana's family descends and, finally, she is harassed into a heterosexual marriage. Months later, Judith is summoned by the desperate bride who hysterically blurts out her loathing of the maleness of her husband. She also reveals that she had been blackmailed into leaving Judith by her family and Judith's business associates threatening to heap great public scandal and harassment onto Judith. Judith thereupon changes jobs, and the two women go back to living together, shaken, and a bit uncertain of the future.

The novel overflows with superb scenes and cameo portraits of very real (and real real, not literary real) people, and a synopsis does it injustice. The style is clear and crisp and should appeal to all tastes.

Alison Hunter.

ALL THE SAD YOUNG MEN

All the Sad Young Men is a paperback novel published anonymously by Wisdom House. Other Wisdom House titles are I Confess, Sexual Behavior Among Teenagers and Peeping Tom. As one would expect All the Sad Young Men is an expose type of novel, revealing lurid aspects of the gay world. It is also an entertaining story of a middle-aging bisexual's discovery of the real thing, that is, the attraction for a superbly endowed young homosexual. On the back cover we are told that the author is "a well known TV and Hollywood actor, though not a star" who was "trapped in the world of the homosexual, the world of all the sad young men who are neither men nor women, only lost souls.' This is somewhat misleading. The narrator of the story, who is presumably the author, finds his soul when he finds Gerry. The lost souls in the short novel are the auntie dress designer, the marijuana-addicted beatnik, and the well-heeled young maso-