It is amazing how fresh are the conversations; how penetrating and timeless are the epigrams. I do not remember when I read the book last. It was before I was aware of Wilde's nature ... and my own. We studied his plays and poems in school; but I don't remember what we were told about his life.

Just how much of personal experience and conviction is contained in the books containing homophile material? Some is obvious, of course. Some writers are certainly sympathetic if not experienced; perhaps the rest work as did Gertrude Atherton: when a friend of mine told her where his home was, she said she'd like to visit that part of the country; she'd written so many stories about it! It is said too that Edna Ferber was never on a showboat, nor ever visited Texas or Alaska.

But William Maxwell could not have written The Folded Leaf from hearsay. This is a classic in any field. All of Maxwell's work shows wonderful understanding of young people's emotional life. (His one book FOR children would not be much understood by them. The recent stories in The New Yorker, I don't understand.) Neither of the protagonists in The Folded Leaf is aware of any homosexuality; but nowhere have I read a more beautiful evocation of the joys of youthful companionship. The devotion of Lymie to his athletic friend is love; and if it is often unrequited it is not unrewarding. Spud's need of Lymie is for more than help in the gymnasium and the carrying of messages to his girl friend. How their lives became entwined is remarkably well traced. Whether Spud marries Sally, whether Lymie marries Hope or discovers his homosexual inclination, the reader knows neither will forget the other.

I found that I had remembered only the ending of The City and The Pillar by Gore Vidal. I had thought it weak and unfocused, but it is a good book. I think the story would have been more satisfying if we had been spared the picture of Jim's drunken remorse at the beginning and his murder of Bob at the end. His memory of the boyhood idyll could have been destroyed as effectively without such melodramatic device.

CALLING SHOTS (Continued from page 21) someone picked up a magazine and read it."

"This literature is an irrelevant issue," he said, suggesting that, instead of suppressing magazines and books, it would be better to devote energies to helping younger people develop comfortable attitides toward

their sexuality." Besides there are other impulses as harmful as the sexual, he said. He cited extreme feelings of aggression and violence which he noted in the comic strip, "Little Orphan Annie.”

"It scares me sometimes," he said. "In March, Orphan Annie was inciting people not to pay income taxes." mattachine REVIEW

From reading the fiction on the subject, one should think that most homophile men are not searching for a lover but for a brother or a father. In the Vidal book, Jim's desire is for the long-lost "brother"; but Matthew, in Finistere by Fritz Peters, needs a father. His search is not wholly conscious; it is more an unhappy yearning. His naivete when he finds his substitute father is made believeable though one suspects the author is not always sympathetic. Matthew's suicide is inev itible too. In fact, one can see no other alternative: it was not the knowledge of his being "perverted" that drove him to it, nor his being discovered by those close to him. He could no longer endure to live surrounded by these people whose essential dishonesty had been revealed: the father who cared more for the comforts of a second wife; the mother who was interested only in her divorce and her new husband; the stepfather who married his mother's purse; the old friend of the family who was more concerned about what the world would think of him than for a little boy's love and need for him; and not least, the lover whose failing was to have loved him too much.

Another characteristic of the homophiles in fiction is that they all profess to admire only the masculine types. Just nobody wants a "queer". This. is the "message" in Blair Niles' Strange Brother. It has been reported that Mrs. Niles wrote this as a memorial to her own brother. It is an amazing report, dated and without literary style, but based on thorough and sympathetic research. If it is not so absorbing as her novel about Devil's Island, it is because it is a bigger project; there are more kinds of misery to consider.

This is not a classic because it is among the best but because it is among the first. Some of us will always be grateful to Mrs. Niles in spite of her short-comings. Her book was our first encounter with our selves in fiction; and it was about the only one for nearly fifteen years. The Nellies and Ricos showed up in the novels of the depression and war years but not so importantly as in more recent writings about those years.

Two war novels I liked are The Cross of Iron by Heinrich and The Friend by Wolff, though neither is notable for its homophile content. My Favorite however, is Look Down In Mercy by Walter Baxter. Nothing else I've read about the camaraderie of soldiers, their need and love and trust for each other, is so convincingly portrayed. The story is set in the ignominious retreat of the British in Burma during the Japaneșe invasion. The events are not important or even very interesting in themselves; but we are absorbed in their effects on Captain Tony Kent and his batsman, Anson. Tony is more appalled by his growing need, desire and love for Anson, than he is at evidences of his cowardice,