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.

& ART

MY DAYS AND DREAMS by Edward Carpenter, Scribner's 1916.

Nothing could have brought more forcibly to my mind the diversity among homosexuals than did the reading of this charming autobiography, written over 50 years ago which I sandwiched in between reading books on Wilde. The contrast between two contemporaries (though they never met) is startling. They both had the best education English universities could offer, but how differently they used it and how differently they viewed life, including the homosexual life! Carpenter bought a farm, where he lived with his lover, George Merrill, and unselfishly spent his energy writing and lecturing, not only on "homogenic love" but on his wide humanitarian interests, such as women's rights and, mostly, socialism.

Mainly, Carpenter's views on homosexuality will be found elsewhere, in his "The Intermediate Sex" and in his pamphlets, but this book will interest anyone curious about the life of this important forerunner of our current homophile movement. It also affords glimpses of other homophiles of that period, such as those who belonged to the "Whitman Club" that met and celebrated his birthday each year, of Mrs. Havelock Ellis, and of

Lowes Dickinson, author of the fine "Greek View of Life".

A. E. Smith

HISSING TALES by Romain Gary, N.Y., Harper and Row, 1964, 186 pp., $4.95.

Romain Gary, French diplomat and ex-fighter pilot, has a considerable gift for story telling. That he has also an extraordinary imagination multiplies the merit of this book. Most important of all, however, he has intelligence, and while he looks sardonically upon human frailty and fatuity, he is never cruel, and even where he cannot be compassionate he is always just. Many of these stories are funny, some moving, some terrifying-some all of these things at the same time. This is attributable to the humanness of the characters.

Some of the stories are grotesque. "The New Frontier" deals with a world a few generations in the future, where science has tampered with the evolutionary process in man in the hope that laboratory-produced mutations will accellerate the capabilities of homo sapiens in the space race, but has succeeded only in creating clawed and scaly monstrosities whose human mentalities are jeopardized by the hideousness of their appearance, and whose offspring seem to be taking on

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