UNCOMMON MEN by Kemper

Simpson, Agathon Press, Washington Bldg. 454, Washington 5, D. C., 1963, pp. 201, $5.00.

Socrates, Sappho, Leonardo Vinci, Michael Angelo, Shakespeare and Marlowe "great" figures shimmering in an aura of speculation, about whom volumes have been written. What new thing can be said about them?

Surprisingly, each of these figures moves in an ambiguous light-due to the efforts of scholars and critics to accommodate them to bourgeois concepts of the culture-hero. The glory of their art has dazzled the world, but their private lives are an embarrassment. "As if to see beneath the maquillage," Kemper Simpson has sought to illuminate the hidden life whose intimate relationship with the art is indisputable.

I can find nothing to quarrel with in his evocation of the atmosphere of ancient Greece and Lesbos, of Renaissance Italy and Elizabethan England. The subjects have been thoroughly researched, and Mr. Simpson's views on the psychological makeup of his six geniuses are plausible. Sappho's idealization of what has been called Lesbian love, her rivalry with an opposing academy of young women for the prize beauties, her "romance" in later years with the unlettered nineteen-year-old sailor Phaon-it is a life worthy of a Colette or a Tennessee Williams, and Mr. Simpson presents it cunningly.

He contrasts the effeminate da Vinci with the more "butch" Buonarrotti-the former somehow protected from the persecution which his overt behavior might have provoked; the latter compensating for his small stature with the projection of heroic if somewhat androgynous nudes in his art. These are types which are not too difficult to locate in our midst today. And it is easy to recognize a

one

certain American species in a Shakespeare whose romantic love-image was basically masculine, but who for reasons of politics or expediency perhaps, conformed to the heterosexual pattern.

I regret that the author cast his views in verse rather than prose. Robert Graves has declared that any poem of more than thirty lines runs the risk of frightening away the majority of modern readers. This is not to argue that Kemper Simpson is difficult to read or lacking in a talent for direct statement that is the essence of some of our great poetry (Wordsworth's, for instance). But the novel or fictionalized prose biography suggest themselves as more appropriate forms for the present material.

Kemper Simpson, however, proceeds in his own way. He has printed his book on good paper, given it a substantial binding, and, with uncommon faith in its mission, has sent it forth into the indifferent world. Who is to say that his trust is mistaken? -Paul Cordell

UNLIKE OTHERS by Valerie Taylor, Midwood-Tower Paperback F3111, 50c.

Josephine has just lost Karen to a straight marriage but ends up "bringing out" Betsy, a divorcee who couldn't enjoy sex with a man. Easy reading but too much chopped. up by we-are-not-all-nellie-queensand-butches propagandizing asides for the hetero's to be a good novel. Has some small and excellent portraits, such as Mag, an elderly, famous lesbian columnist, and Stan, a hetero hopelessly dominated by mama. This author is such a strong personality that she can't keep herself out of a story and should stick to non-fiction (which, if my guess is correct, she does write excellently under another pseudonym).

K. O. N.