pornography's actual effects. (Does it really have the magical educative powers so direly attributed to it?) Mere anecdotal reports of the case history variety-"this guy murdered this girl, and he admits he used to read dirty books"—are of scant value in determining a general pattern of causality. He strongly believes that public outcries against porn are more injurious than pornography itself.

Dom Denys Rutledge, wryly observing that this very symposium is technically pornographic, maintains that pornography matters whenever it threatens to corrupt-and what will corrupt varies between persons and times. In Christian tradition, he says, the human body and its sexuality are good, not evil, and as such are fit subjects for art and literature. (Readers who know more of local puritanisms than of theological history will be astonished at this.) The pornography -an affront to human dignity and a travesty on love-derives not from the sexual subject matter, but from its irresponsible treatment. The state should indeed protect the weak. but only with the minimum of control necessary.

Several subsidiary explorations will interest ONE's readers: various odd views of the aetiology of "perversions", and the argument that a little "hardcore" porn is less corrupting than a steady diet of merely trashy popular literature. All contributors accept the polite fiction that everyone finds "hardcore" pornography revolting and not at all stimulating.

Since few cultured persons today would be caught publicly espousing either censorship or pornography, most of the contributors slip ultimately into some variation of Dr. Gosling's frank view: wanting to have a lot of personal freedom, including a little pornography, and (for other people's benefit) a wee bit of censorship. Dal McIntire

THE EVOLUTION OF WALT WHITMAN: THE CREATION OF A PERSONALITY (VOLUME ONE); THE CREATION OF A BOOK (VOLUME TWO) by Roger Asselineau, Harvard University Press, 1960 & 1962. This two-volume evaluation of Whitman, both as to his personal life and poetry, is excellent. Not surprisingly, it is by a foreigner, the Professor of American Literature at the Sorbonne. Whitman has always been downgraded by most U. S. critics. It embarrasses them that he is considered by foreigners our greatest poet.

Homosexuality plays a large part in this embarrassment. Asselineau's treatment of it is refreshingly lengthy and unembarrassed. He believes Whitman was 100% homosexual but "leans to" the view it never came to an overt experience (which view, I think, comes from a lack of intimate acquaintanceship with homosexuals and how they live). Asselineau differs from others who have this sublimation theory by not trying to prove at least some heterosexual activity and also by pointedly mentioning that two important critics, Malcolm Cowley (close friend of the openly homosexual poet, Hart Crane), and Mark Van Doren, have sharply differed and believe Whitman was an active homosexual. (Since these two are the only ones who have written on this sexual point and made sense to me, I consider it a pity neither has written a book, instead of merely articles, on Whitman.)

This sexual point on Whitman is important. It is as Sir Kenneth Clark says of da Vinci, that the biographers who portray him as a sexual eunuch with no urge at all or a sublimation to no sexual play at all, "have a strange idea of doing service to his reputation." In Whitman's case, it has caused much unhealthy and fuzzy material to be written on him and so he is little read.

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