work is rooted in the realities of life. To this may be added an easily flowing style and a gift for evoking the atmosphere of very varied backgrounds.

The homosexual theme in the book, though basic to the plot, somehow strikes one as being in a minor key, and is presented with the utmost delicacy. Though I enjoy them, I cannot say that I really approve of novels which treat this subject as it were in vacuo, leaving the reader with the vague impression that, in the particular world inhabited by their protagonists, the heterosexual is certainly rare, and probably not indigenous. It is a pleasure to find a book such as this one in which this fault is wholly avoided and yet which can justly be described as a contribution to what is loosely called homophile literature.

B. E. J. G.

"BY CECILE" by Tereska Torres, Simon & Schuster, N.Y., 1963, $3.95.

Publishers and their hacks have formed a Burke and Hare alliance. To satisfy the greedy prurience of the public, they have ransacked the graveyards of the centuries. The disjointed bones, desiccated flesh and bloody cerements. are pawed over by the amateur anatomists of greatness who, having found that only these sad remnants remain, conclude that as in death, so in life, the record of the flesh is all there is.

Tereska Torres is only one of many literary ghouls who wire together a few bones of fact, draps them in ragged swathes torn from the partly autobiographical works of a dead author, and label the product "a novel based on the life of." By means of this phrase, every exig. ency is covered. If they are attacked for presenting some eminent author as no more than a bed-hopper, hetero-, or homo-sexual, they can reply

that this is a novel. Should plagiarism be the charge, they can reply that they have taken the part ripped from the famous author's fiction to be autobiographical and hence available for a slightly "fictionized" biography.

Such books as "By Cecile" and The Vigil of Emmaline Gore are no more than reverse hagiographies. All that Gide or Colette labored to leave as witness to their having lived is buried in these books under such a list of sexual "acts", condensed into so few pages, as to give the casual reader an impression of an activity only attainable by monkeys.

Surely the time has come for homosexuals to boycott such books

these books that reduce the image of the most eminent homosexual artists to the stereotype of the "queer." The publishers and their hacks have depended in no small part for their sales on those homosexuals who point to the personal lives of the famous to justify their own usually messy lives. No one's life is the justification of another's, and the avid he-tooers of this world, who are among the loud-

est

screamers when their personal lives are spread out before the nonhomosexual, should remember that the listing of every homosexual from Caesar to Cocteau will not mitigate by one iota the resentment of the narrow-minded.

Tereska Torres, in "By Cecile," has written an adolescent schoolgirl's pastiche of the Claudine cycle of Colette, with the heaviest obligation owed to Claudine Married. The ohso-sensitive prose is so marred by the repetition of mannerisms that Colette, at her best, was able to control, that the result is almost laughable. As to characters-let none feel slighted, from the very minor Madame Sainte-Albe of Claudine Married, now Mlle. Angelique in "By Cecile", to Claudine's husband Re-

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