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BOOKS

Through LESBOS Lonely Groves....

FEW

WE WALK ALONE by Ann Aldrich, New York, Gold Medal Books (Faw cet Publications, Inc.), 1955. 143 pages: 25 cents. Non-fiction report on the love that dwells in twilight, the "love that can nover be told." by a woman who has travelled the path herself. Reviewed here by Wes Knight, the book is recommended for its content, and not because it is so rare for a new work on the subject to sell initially for two bits.

EW, IF ANY, authors have been so bold as Ann Aldrich in taking a headlong plunge into the hushhush subject of lesbianism on a pop. ular, non-fiction plane. The result, startlingly frank and complete, is practically a female version of Cory's . "Homosexual in America."

After introducing the subject and touching the background of female homosexuality, Ann Aldrich takes the reader on an interesting, if sometimes seamy, trip to a smart Manhattan gay party, through Greenwich Village homosexual hangouts, through gathering places in Paris,

without pulling any punches in description or narrative.

Look at her," says the fly leaf of this remarkable 25-cent seller on paper back bookstands, "and she i cannot be distinguished from her more normal sisters. Examine her 30

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background, and she comes from the smoky slums of Pittsburgh; the the exclusive homes of Oak Park, Ill.; the sprawling campuses of Cornell, Radcliffe, Michigan; the boxedin lower East Side of New York.

"She is undersexed and oversexed, man-hungry and man-hating; a repressed homosexual with a husband and children; a divorcee with nymphomaniac tendencies; a society matron, a widow, a teen-aged high schoolgirl, a prostitute.

"I have seen her in all the Greenwich Villages from Los Angeles to Paris. I have seen her in boarding schools, at lavish parties, in gay bars.

"I have stared at the wholesomelooking, twentyish blonde in the creamy polo coat. The ersatz Tallu-

lah Bankhead in dark glasses and a shaggy fox jacket. The graceful old-

mattachine REVIEW

er woman with the impeccable English accent. The ugly, deformed creature in the man's overalls.

"I have seen them all the good, the frightened, the beautiful, the bad. "I have seen them and I am one: of them; yet I never have been able to pick a lesbian out of a crowd. There is no definition, no formula, no paitern that will accurately characterize the female homosexual-for she is any woman."

Miss Aldrich, in a very ordinary way, has focused her attention on herself and others, "who walk alone through Lesbos' lonely groves" in a manner which must be regarded as an important milepost on the long road from darkness which has long surrounded her subject, and the subject of all sexual inversian, for that matter. She includes much authorita-

TIRADE by Harvey Breit

HE other week a full-scale Life Magazine editorial did a flip on the state of our fiction. We are, the editorial declared, the most powerful nation in the world, yet we are "producing a literature which sounds sometimes as if it were written by an unemployed homosexual living in a packing-box shanty on the city dump while awaiting admission to the country poorhouse." We deserve, Life proceeds, "better literature than the papaya-smelly, overripe school of the Truman Capotes, or the obscenity-obsessed school of 'new realism' exemplified by a parade of war novels which mostly read like the diary of a professional grievance collector with a dirty mind and total recall."

One hardly knows how to start to debate this abyss of a position. It is a mishmash based on a total misconception of what art is. The editorial is a

tive data from the findings of experts who have studied the male, and to, a lesser extent, the female homosexual. Of particular interest is a synopsis of

the laws of each state and their reference or lack of it-to lesbianism. Remarkably, she points out, many legislators and jurists in the past

have failed to make lesbian sexual partly, no relationships illegal doubt, because the males who enact and interpret the law, have been > able to view, only one side of the coin they regard so spuriously.

"We Walk Alone" will draw more than ordinary" attention on the bookstands, it appears safe to predict. The astute publisher, in distributing it initially in big cities, placed stacks of copies out where no one could miss them. Few other books on the subject, regardless of price, have had it so good.

THE NEW YORK TIMÉS BOOK REVIEW demagogic, anti-esthetic tirade, calculated to make common war on all that, as Nietzsche put it, "is rare, strange, or privileged." It niggardly overlooks what the great Gerard Manley Hopkins celebrated:

Glory be, to God for dappled things ***

All things counter, original, spare, straige; Whatever is fickle, freckled

(who knows how?) What Life fails to understand

is (1) you have to leave writers alone or you get no literature; (2) writers have proven

to be our best ambassadors, our most popular export; (3) America is a democracy and writers are not political pawns; (4) homosexuals are people, includ~ ing Marcel Proust, or do we now have to make the phrase "regardless of race, creed, color or sex"? (5) demand a spę, cific literature and you a specific mediocrity.

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