Cause of Tolerance

Too Much to 'Take for Granted'

By Ruth Bauerle

We should all agree with Dodie Smith's vigor and grace!

After an indifferent acting career, she wrote moderately successful plays in her mid 30s. At 52 she produced her first novel; at 60, her first children's story, "A Hundred and One Dalmatians." Now 71, she had written her fourth novel on the very modern subject of homosexuality. It Ends with Revelations (Atlantic-Little, $5.95) considers homosexuality in a domestic setting and, less prominently, in its larger social context.

Brown;

The story fails at this level because Jill never decides-Miles and Thornton decide for her. Her failure to develop into a believable person weakens the book seriously, Thornton similarly fails to develop. Having

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THE NOVEL deals first with Jill Quentin's dilemma: to remain with her homosexual-husband Miles, whom she has loved deeply though not physically for over a decade: or to leave Miles for heterosexual Geoffrey Thornton, M.P., widower of a dipsomaniac-nymphomafor understanding acceptniac wife. ance of homosexual, but fails again. Once more the failure results from a weak portrayal of the characters arguing for acceptance. Thornton, for instance, comically claims

made one disastrous mar-

riage, he now allows his precocious daughters to push ~ him toward another.

Her decision is complicated by a child actor's effort to blackmail Miles, and by Jill's guilt feelings at believing the child's lies.

AT THE PUBLIC level the book attempts to plead

that because he was educated at an English public school, he feels no revulsion or superiority toward homosexuals. Yet he betrays feel-

ings of superiority in his ac-

tions.

Even Miles' pleas for tolerance fail; for he asks that homosexuality be 'taken for granted, as if we'd simply

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been born with club feet..." Yet neither parents nor physicians of a baby so handicapped: would take it for granted.' They would do everything possible to correct the deformity.

Miss Smith takes her title from Oscar Wilde, to whose work and life there are several references within the novel. Yet the hints that she intended it as a kind of Wilde comedy remain only hints.

In sum, one admires Miss Smith for trying, but hopes that with her usual vigor she will go on to write something better next time.