Books

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

OLD ACQUAINTANCE by David Stacton, N.Y., Putnam, 1964, $3.95, 185 pp.

This novel is puzzling in several ways. The story is very slight, yet the author has elected to freight it with a heavy measure of truth. His observation of human character is penetrating and compassionate, yet the fictitious men and women on whom he has chosen to exercise it are hardly as weighty as the butterflies that decorate the novel's dust-jacket. Stacton evidently has not solved some of the most basic problems of grammar and punctuation, yet his book is strewn with the names of minor aristocrats from minor countries in minor centuries, obscure composers, unfamiliar painters, unidentified quotations from little-known poets-in short, the kind of intellectual paraphernalia intended to make the reader gasp in admiration at the writer's eclecticism, erudition and retentiveness.

The class of novelist addicted to this sort of exhibitionism normally has little real ability to tell a story or to make his characters live. Stacton is an exception. As well as a handsome man (his picture covers the back of the dust jacket) he seems to be a warm and understanding one. It is a pity so many readers who might benefit from his knowledge of life on its most meaningful inner levels, will be defeated by the chichi in-

tellectual persiflage of Old Acquaintance.

Because he is writing about a European novelist whose mind is a rattle of such trivia, and because Stacton quite often takes us into that mind in the course of the story, there is an excuse for its being. And the story of Charlie's life and relations with his current young lover, Paul, and his old friend, Lotte, a celebrated singer-actress, is well worth reading, if one can skip the references to:

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"Prince Eugen, Ludwisburg, 1788 a Piranesi world, though not the Carceri . . . that Victorian, Howard Sturges Mrs. de Stael's L'Allemagne a sketch by Domenico . not so good as Gianbattista . . . or do I mean Gian Lorenzo or Longhi? She is more like a Crespi, or a Piazzetta slimmed down Charlie did not have a Tiepolo or a Guardi . . . that left Canaletto, but the Canalettos were either too large or else in Dresden, in which case they were by Belloto. What he did have was a Maulpertsch. He didn't like it much

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he would have preferred a Carlone, or even a Casanova . . a sizeable painting by Slabbinck

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Of course this sort of thing doesn't turn up on every page. It only seems to. And I repeat, if you can put up with it, you will be rewarded by having read a very moving story about two aging human beings, and how

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