rides happily off to Boston with a shapely waitress whom he has promised to get a job, because he knows the manager of a large restaurant there. (A man-of course-who is a complete stranger to him.)
BRIGHT DAY, DARK RUNNER is a real novel, not just a book. It's happily filled with real people, impossible situations, wild humor, deep tragedy, and happy circumstances. Mr. Cuomo looks at an absurd world and embraces it-in all its absurdity. Let's give him a hand.
Bob Waltrip WAITING FOR THE END by Leslie A. Fiedler, Stein & Day, 1964.
In his latest book, the key to famed literary critic Fiedler's view of homosexuals is found in this phrase: "... the homosexual, pursuing the phantom of youth and immune to the responsibilities of a family ...
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This is the Freudian idea, also in the book that made Fiedler famous. LOVE AND DEATH IN THE AMERICAN NOVEL that homosexuals have not graduated to "adult" life. Many believe that proportionately there are just as many hetero's as homo's who are pursuing the phantom of youth and immune to responsibilities. We are not homosexuals because we want an "easy" life (a laughable idea to homosexuals). Perhaps Mr. Fiedler wasn't rolling in riches and had to scrape a little on the meager salary of a university professor (20 years at Univ. of Montana) while raising a family (the book is dedicated to 3 sons). Oh, my the rough life of the heterosexual! Tough titty.
But one thing you can't say of Fiedler-and about the only thing that hasn't been, even in that scathing article in the 7/9/64 N.Y. REVIEW OF BOOKS-is that he is dull and reticent. On homosexuals, he certainly calls a spade a spade (or, as another anti-homosexual wit once put
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it, "Let's call a spayed a spayed"): "James Baldwin, however, precisely because he is a homosexual as well as a Negro..
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the Effete Dandies or Homosexual Decadents, from Truman Capote to Tennesse Williams . . "Allan Ginsberg is, moreover, an urban Whitman . . . and he is, like that prototype, a homosexual, though, unlike Whitman, he has abandoned all subterfuge and disguise."
Fiedler's knowledge of literature is encyclopedic, and this coupled with his obsession with homosexuality certainly makes him important in our field. Who else on earth would ever have found a lesbian section in an American novel written in the 1790's by Charles Brockden Brown and known enough of the author to call him probably homosexual? Fiedler's premise that American literature is drenched with homosexuality is silly when compared with, say, the French, with their homosexual literary giants, but if you're interested in the literary you can't afford to miss Fiedler's arguments for that premise.
A. E. S. THE GOVERNORS AND THE GOVERNED by William A. Robson, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1964, $3.00, 68 pp.
There is a saying that great things come in small packages. This work is not monumental, but The Governors and the Governed discusses probably the most important problem in America today, the conflict between the people and the "government" or the bureaucracy that supposedly serves the people. The Republican candidate for the Presidency, Goldwater, is basing his campaign upon the claim that there is too much interference in the private lives of Americans by the federal government. The southern states are pleading for more "states rights," although some
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