known, whether the result is urbane or rough-hewn, a pleasant song or a grimace of pain, he has the right to have it judged as an expression of life without the gratuitous insult of being asked to make allowances for the times. The time is always out of joint for the writer and if he conforms, he inevitably has to hobble his genius and in the long run achieves less than nothing. I have seen complaints that John Rechy's City of Night is also bad propaganda, yet, while I am aware that in unenlightened countries homosexuality per se is reason for banning a novel, I have not found that any difference is made because of reticence (incidentally my own country, under a new censorship law, has released Another country, without disturbing the ban on A way of love) so that supporting any censorship on the grounds of expediency is to play into the hands of the authorities, confirming their right to suppress and dictate. For so many years the human race, or at least the white part of it, and particularly the AngloSaxon segment, has crowded pleasant knowledge out of consciousness that it has become a habit to do so, even when appearing consciously to accept the burden of freedom and truth. Here I admit to using "truth" in a vague sense to mean something like the acknowledgement and recognition of existence. But it is just this, and not the acceptance of romanticised and wishful world-picture, that is needed in so many fields, whether politics, sheer continued existence or sex. The articles by Cory and LeRoy in the same issue of ONE plead for a willingness to face facts, among them the facts of what the varied homosexual world is like, what treatment may or may not be possible and desirable, even perhaps to admit that there may be links between homosexuality and crime which could be different from those which operate in

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heterosexuals, even the facts of sanity and realism in a world neither sane nor real. The essence of a work such as Genet's is to show how the world is changed subtly by the inevitable operation of memory and fantasy, to point up the hypocrisies that infest all living, the treasons within us all that destroy us as surely as any betrayal from without, even the final inconsistency of our continuing to live. While crime, or homosexuality. or the act of betrayal all cross the bounds of conventional morality and light up from behind the inadequacies of those conventions, it is in the final desire of death that all these feelings are gathered together. Perhaps this comes from his having been condemned, forced to live with the thread of his life interrupted. But whatever its source his intense preoccupation with death, even its procurement, changes that death into a kind of preservation. In effect, if we love something intensely, our greatest possible achievement is to destroy it utterly, before it can change and decay, and thus death is the greatest gift of all when offered in mid-life and the presence of death gives life its meaning. His poems say this explicitly. In his Marche funebre Genet identifies himself with the young murderer Maurice Pilorge, so closely that he seems to suffer and to die with him. The words, whether of love or death. imply identity, and such a literary manner will undoubtedly offend some readers but for those who can share this leap of imagination the poem will explain much about this enigmatic author. He describes the horrors of death and its mystery, made believable as he tells how he entered into the death of his lover-the symbol of a rose presents the beauty and the terror of death-and on the other side found preserved for ever in the "endless season" the "waters of loneliness" the "strangely affecting fields"

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