BOOKS

NOBLESSE OBLIGE, and so forth.

by JAMES (BARR) FUGATE'

DURING Christmas Holidays when URING Christmas Holidays when I was nine or eleven, (it couldn't have been when I was ten for that was the year I owned my first horse,) I remember reading a gift copy of Ben Wallace's BEN HUR with the feverish excitement that can only be compared to the seizure of a disease.

...

Being an extremely tense child, my family, while seeing that I got the necessary food and sleep, waited patiently for the seizure to end with the book's last page, and me to return to more normal nine-year-old activities. Doubtlessly I did, but my taste for historical literature seems, to have crested with that brief early encounter. To this day I can remember nothing of the detail of that book, not even the famous chariot race. Not that I lost my taste for historyfar from itbut the difference between fact and fiction has always seemed to me the difference between a tantalizing steak hot and bloody black from the broiler and a herd of cattle I've never seen somewhere in Texas.

I have just read Marguerite Yourcenar's prize winning novel, "HADRIAN'S MEMOIRS." (Hadrian's in magenta, Memoirs in yellow, beneath the gray picture of a curly marble head and a few lopsided Rohan coins.) My first impulse upon putting the book down a few minutes ago was to don a sweat suit and go to the country for five miles of hard road work, which is probably what I did (without knowing why) after finishing BEN HUR. It is a good way to expel the acid of certain seductions from the mind rather than le them remain to eat into the determination of clear-sighted practicality.

The back of this book's dust jacket glitters with the newly minted words of the critical world's master designers: Orville Prescott, Lewis Gannett, Sterling North, Geoffrey Bruun, Gerald Sykes, Harrison Smith and W. G.

mattachine REVIEW

Rogers. I remember being duly impressed when I unwrapped the book yesterday. Some friends have cited this reception as a clear-cut victory for the qualified acceptance of homosexuality against the usual hostile attitude of critics. I wonder to what extent this is true.

It is true that the homosexuality of this Roman emperor, (described by reference texts as the greatest between Augustus and Diocletian, which still may not be saying much,) is treated with utmost sympathy by the author, but the fact remains that the characters and their practices are at the safe distance of 1850 years. One wonders how violently the critics would react if the same author had told the same story of, say, a fictional American Secretary of Cabinet Rank, or a Supreme Court Justice, or the head of a Federal Bureau, or even some jolly little junior Senator from the Great Lakes area. One can imagine that the "prize" won by the author in this instance would be a term in a Federal Prison, carefully muffled in the appropriate legal gags of the time, of course, even though such a proposed story-and certainly such an inevitable end-cannot be completely within the realm of sheer fantasy. If one can judge by the screams of rage that poured from the back doors of some official quarters on The Hill upon publication of my first novel in 1950, the author literally takes his life in his hands by daring to come out of the Never-Never land of history with tales of such perversions.

Miss Yourcenar's story, (and condescendingly we are told not to mistake it for a historical novel-though it is) which concerns the life and career of P. Aelius Hadrianus, is a series of long, beautifully composed letters to his adopted grandson, Marcus Aurelius. The story is a simple one, but told in a style reminiscent

of the Latin classics which makes it seem more complicated and important than it is. One often has the feeling that "Hadrian" is surreptiously copying at a furious rate or perhaps only paraphrasing-from his famous library of great writers,. so easily do the ideas and phrases roll off his stylus onto the wax. Cicero, Epictetus, Seneca, and a few more who hadn't quite lived yet, have not been lost on him, and in a few instances, we almost see the feet sticking out beneath the gorgeous folds of this great tapestry of words.

In the same manner we are cheated of few fleshly' details of our hero's passions for the lovely Greek youth, Antinous, though one is apt to be enchanted with the sound that the sense is lost in this carefully packed void. You might hear the same tale told today by a refined, but aging auntie, and suffixed with, "Of course, it's all in the way these things are done, you know, my dear. NOBLESSE OBLIGE, and that sort of thing, you understand?" One can almost feel the fragile Spode in one's hand and scent the faint Morocco' of fine bindings stretching up and up to the ceiling on all four sides. From such lips, one feels even a bloody police raid of Finoccio's would take on the mellifluous patina of charm and respectability.

But perhaps I am being too harsh in expecting a practical value here; worse, it may be that I am ungrateful to Miss Yourcenar. If her cup of fragrant Jasmine does not measure up to the smoky personal satisfactions of my dark and acrid Lapsang Suchong, I've no right to discredit her taste as coy or ineffectual. Without question, her novel is a step in the right direction, and our leading critics of two continents have hailed it as an effort worthy of praise in spite of its many sexual aberrations. Still, one can only wish that for a sub-