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BOOKS

PLAYING THE GAME FROM THE GRANDSTAND

THE FLAMING HEART by Deborah Deutsch. Boston: Bruce Humphries, Inc., 1959. 271 pages, $3.75. Reviewed by Jack Parrish.

"The Flaming Heart" is about halfway between Jay Little (Maybe Tomorrow) and Eve Linkletter (The Gay Ones). It is not quite as effectively salacious as the first and not quite as submoronic as the latter.

The writer's techniques suggest that she was weaned on a diet of Dickens and James Jones. She has a bad habit of interrupting the action with monologues of sometimes two pages long, and constantly makes her own personal comments on the action. It's distracting and takes you away from the story. Dickens and Thackeray did it, but it's not done any more.

I am puzzled as to how a woman could have written it since much of the picture given of homophile life could only have been obtained by one who had lived it..

The reasoning is sometimes infantile,' preachy, and once in a great while perceptive. She tries to be heroic, especially in a long sermon one of the characters makes at the end, and fails to ring true.

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She has little knack for making the figures of the characters stand out sharply for the reader. When I say the characters don't stand out, I mean that she doesn't cut away unessential material from around them so that they stand out sharply the way a painter leaves space around the figures in a painting. There is remarkably little description of people or things, it consists mostly of narration of events in chronological sequence and person after person talking with other people. I would say it's written by someone who's never done any writing before but has strong views on the subject. Curiously enough, she makes fun of homophilic novels with their usual violent endings of suicide or murder, but page 251 ends her own story with the wife trying to kill her homophile husband and then shooting herself.

The story could have been a good one, but the ending isn't convincing. It's as if she didn't know how to end it, and so resorted to the wife's act of violence. There are also some errors in the proofreading, as on page 171 where the hero feels deeply sorry for his wife and the sentence states, "He often pitted her" rather a strange thing to do to someone you care for!

If the writer's name weren't a woman's, I'd say it had been written by someone who had once been some sort of a belle or else lived a wild life. He is quite proud of his sexual prowess, is proud of the way he's lived and yet tries to be moral and preach to people.

Unfortunately, he's gotten rather deeply embedded with an artificial way of living, perhaps by too many years of being in the wrong set. So, like Jay Little, even when trying to be moral and speak of the essential injustice of the way of life he can't say anything that really strikes home to the reader. Nor can he think clearly about reality, though he tries. You can't have your cake and eat it; if you want to write truthfully you have to start living it. Or, at the very least, you have to learn something of the techniques that go into good writing, as with Truman Capote.

Calling Shots

UNEXPURGATED 'CHATTERLEY'

NOW PUBLISHED IN U. S.

An unexpurgated version of "Lady Chatterley's Lover" is to be published May 4 in a clothbound edition by Grove Press of New York. This will be the first complete version of the D. H. Lawrence classic to appear in the country. Lawrence wrote the final edition of the novel in 1928; it was privately printed in Italy, but there has never been a comparable edition printed in either the U. S. or England. In 1930 the first of several abridged editions was printed in New

York and London. More recent paperback versions have drawn from these. Dial Press of New York printed Lawrence's first version in 1944, but the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice seized it.

A movie version of the story is currently the subject of an important case pending in the U. S. Supreme Court to determine the constitutionality of movie censorship in advance of distribution. The film has been condemned by the New York State Regents.

Grove's edition will be heralded by

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