If you want a really entertaining story for fall reading try this one. Marcel Martin

THE SYMBOLIC MEANING by D. H. Lawrence. The Viking Press, 1964, 240 pp., $5.00.

There is nothing specifically mentioning homosexuality in these essays on American writers: Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Dana, Dana, Melville, and Whitman. This is literary criticism of a very unique variety, being more that of a creative artist gushing forth his artistic philosophy in a literary frame. Repeatedly Lawrence leaves his subject to mystically and wildly praise "sensual understanding," "myth understanding," "blood understanding," "the great centres of breast and bowels," and the "deep living plexus of the loins."

The few homosexual scenes in Lawrence's fiction indicate he thought of homosexual acts as incidental to, and in addition to, the far more important sexual love between man and woman, and he projects this view in his essay on Whitman. This is understandable, because in his poetry Whitman meticulously played up the man-woman sex. However, Lawrence, unlike others, was not fooled. "But what is woman to Whitman? Not much-muscles and wombs-no more." But he caught that in CALAMUS Whitman "does not shout. He hesitates: he is reluctant, wistful." This is as close as Lawrence comes to mentioning homosexuality. It is a sharp insight into Whitman and his work and one of the first along this line, as Lawrence wrote it in 1918, and it is still being quoted as basic by the best Whitman critics.

A. E. Smith

HONEY FOR THE BEARS by Anthony Burgess, W. W. Norton and Co., N. Y., 1964, $3.95,

256 PP.

This short novel by Anthony Bur-

one

gess is a delightful social satire which takes us into the incomprehensible. world of modern Russia. While most of Burgess' wit and satire is directed toward the U.S.S.R., Great Britain and the United States, too, come in for a bit of spoofing.

Paul Hussey, an antique-shop keeper from Sussex, and his American wife take a vacation trip to Leningrad where, to help out the widow of a dead friend, they hope to raise a fabulous sum of money by selling, illegally, of course, brightly colored synthetic-fiber dresses to the drab and consumer-goods starved citizens of the U.S.S.R. Needless to say, things don't quite turn out as they are supposed to.

In the course of Paul's harrowing adventures, however, he learns a great deal about the Russians and not inconsiderable about himself and his wife. Homosexuality rears its head, but its contrived introduction into the already highly artificial plot of a true tour de force serves little real purpose. Paul loses his wife (not that he cares much) to a Soviet woman doctor, but she could just as well have died of the illness for which the doctor was treating her or run off with some male for all the difference it makes to the plot. Of homosexuality we learn only that it is apt to turn up in the most unexpected ways and among very unlikely people.

Good fun and good reading if you like Anthony Burgess' clipped style. and his particular brand of humor. Marcel Martin

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