since the Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter. And, it may also be that those who believe in reincarnation will hold that Casimir Dukahz is the 20th Century's Petronius!

Bruno Vitale

A CASE OF HUMAN BONDAGE, by Beverley Nichols, Secker & Warburg, London, 1966, 153 pp.

frankly

This little book is sensational. If ever the word bitchy is appropriate, it would apply to author Nichols' trading upon his long friendship with Somerset Maugham and the brilliant circle in which Maugham moved, to write an exposé of the famous man's homosexuality.

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Whatever one's moral reservations about the exploitation of the great by sycophants, book undeniably makes for fascinating reading, as the tragic drama of Maugham's long-suppressed, or long-dissembled, homosexuality spewed into public view through a series of tempestuous battles between Maugham his boyfriend, Gerald Haxton, & Syrie, Maugham's wife.

The divorce which finally followed, the scandals, the society brawling and gossip-mongering which seems to have been the way of life of this particular, and somewhat unpleasant little in-group, reveal, in Nichols' flamboyantly epicene prose the bare backsides of a facade of greats and near-greats, some of whom are still living. Those no longer so can consider themselves lucky!

Nowhere more clearly than in Maugham's case is the price society exacts from the homosexual more clearly shown. Not only did Maugham attempt to hide his true self from the world but, far more disastrously, for half a life and more he tried to hide it from himself, and that is where the toll was taken. Out of such shiftiness came the surface glitter, the inability (or unwillingness) to penetrate into his characters to the depth of which he might have been capable, that left behind a stun-

ted literary career, and made Maugham's last years cynically embittered. If he can justly be said to have sold his life for a mess of pottage he might himself have put it, for a mess that is what Beverley Nichols so aptly describes in A Case of Human Bondage.

UND

VALENTINO, by Brad Steiger and Chaw Mank. New York, 1966, Macfadden Books (paperback), 192 pp., 75%.

If it is as faithful to life as it seems, this fast-paced biography deserves a more substantial medium of publication than its present paperback form. It gives the impression of thorough research, and reviews both the legends and the facts of The Great Lover's childhood and frustrated adolescence, his almost monastic existence as a professional ballroom dancer in New York, his meteoric screen carreer, his two (apparently unconsummated) marriages, his tortured struggles to keep up the "Great Lover" image in spite of his vague and perhaps inverted sexuality, his untimely death in 1926, and the unbelievable deluge of morbidity, superstition, and sentiment that followed and which continues into the present day.

Whether Valentino was or was not homosexual (whatever that means) becomes rather incidental when compared with the stresses of his life and his career as a whole, the latter set chiefly in the milieu of Hollywood's filmdom during the roaring Twenties when names like Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, John Gilbert, Bebe Daniels, Vilma Banky, the Talmadge sisters, etc. were making cinematic history along with fantastic incomes for their owners. He certainly seems to have had more-than-mere brushes with Hollywood's homosexual cliques. At any At any rate, among the numerous conmemorative services for him on the first anniversary of his death, one is said to have been held at a Hollywood gay bar, at which two men (one in drag) danced the famed Argentine tango which Rudy had popu-