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.

BOD

שוייי: יה יה

VIOLATION OF TABOO, Donald

Webster Cory and R. E. L. Masters, editors; and PATTERNS OF INCEST, by R. E. L. Masters; New York, The Julian Press, 1963, pp. 422 and 406, each $7.50.

These latest productions of the Julian Press' "Library of Sex Research," companion volumes on incest, the first a literary anthology and the second a collection of psychological studies, have as editors and authors two strange bedfellows wellknown to readers of ONE: Masters for his The Homosexual Revolution, and Cory for The Homosexual in America, and, more recently, for a very unfavorable review of Masters' book in the Aug. 1962 issue of ONE.

The anthology includes short stories, dramas, and excerpts from more or less important works of literature having incest as their theme, most of which are easily available in other editions, including paperbacks. Quite unaccountably, the works of the great Romantics are neither included in the collection nor mentioned in the critical introduction, even though some of them-Shelley's The Cenci, Byron's Manfred, and Schiller's Bride of Messina or Don Carlos-are of far greater importance and literary value than most of the works included. But then it is probably a measure of the scholarship of both of these books that Otto Rank's monumental

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work on incest in myth and literature (2nd. ed., 1926) is never so much as mentioned.

The collection of psychosocial studies of incest in the second volume begins with a long essay by Masters himself, continues with articles by various psychiatrists and the like (almost half of which are merely reprinted from recently-published books by the Julian Press), and concludes with two pieces of fiction, one by the infamous Marquis. Both pieces of fiction (the first of which has much to do with homosexuality-as well as sadism and necrophilia) come very close to "hard core" pornography, and since neither is a case history or has any literary value, it is difficult to see the justification for their inclusion. In addition to many incidental references to homosexuality in the discussions and in the case histories, two of the articles focus on homosexuality exclusively: the first repeats with variations the orthodox Freudian doctrine that homosexuality is almost always a defense against repressed incestuous drives, and includes some amusing if somewhat irrelevant discussion of the sex behavior of monkeys; the second essay, on "homosexual incest," by Cory, is very brief and rather desultory: in one paragraph it takes Mr. Cory 85 words to say that a homosexual cannot have incestuous relations with a brother if he has no brother.

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