BOOKS

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

THE PRISON LIFE OF HARRIS FILMORE by Jack Richardson, New York Graphic Graphic Society, Conn., 1963, $3.95, 223 pp.

Here, for my money, is a real masterpiece in the languishing art of true comic literature. I would accept that this little book may well not be just anybody's dish of tea; but I heartily recommend it to all those with a relish and taste for the rare bit of savory. And what a dish! The loveliness of the style, alone, is worth the price of the book. Its statements are all so deliciously and delicately made that one seems never to be aware of their having been made. Like so much gentle rain falling upon earth that makes the flowers grow.

The only objection that I might see a justification for on the part of some readers, would be regarding the very, very oblique handling of the homosexual aspect of the theme. Where, in other works, this is done for cheap titillation, and I am first to raise an outcry of wounded rage, here I accept it without question. It becomes in this a muted, lovely music, that we all too often forget it is and can be, heard from just beyond the next hill tinkling faint fairy pipes of pan calling to the heart of every man.

The title of the book tells the bare bones story of the book. That to outline and detail here could only make it seem a banality, which it

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never, never is! The quality of characterization is up to all the rest of its parts, especially Rosario's pigeon with a broken leg. Oh, do watch out for that bird! And for this young author, Jack Richardson. He is a cool one, dad!

-p. e. britton

BEHIND THE MIRROR by Robin (Lord) Maugham, Longmans, Green, London, 1955.

This is a dryly humorous novel, not without a certain depth of passion, about a young film script writer's journey to Tanganyika in search of the true story of a famous love affair. In the beginning, all he is concerned with is to get the permission of Norman Hartleigh, a onetime diplomat whose name had been linked with that of the famous actress Daphne Moore, for publication of their story. But before he has had time to adjust himself to the unfamiliar background he learns two things the story of this love is not at all what it had seemed to be, and a new drama is in any case unfolding before his eyes in this remote corner of Africa.

These twin themes work out together, as bit by bit the past is revealed and the reader comes to see how the tragedy of the present is rooted in it. The author's great merits, to my mind, are an ability to make his characters full-rounded and alive and the solidity with which his

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