boy told playmates that one of them had molested a little girl in the woods. The others promptly beat up the supposed molestors. As the writers show, the student's remarks show that he was accusing the other boy of what he himself really wanted to do. The Kronhausens comment:

minorities, for persecution by displac Ing onto them their own guilty impulses or fantasies.

The entire book is written in the Kronhausens' usual clear, lucid style. The one complaint to be made is that they give no percentages on the social backgrounds of their interviewees, or how many of them were from the

Perhaps we can learn from the child. city, suburbs, or country. Apart from this one objection, they have produced hood example how adult men and wocan single out individuals or an exceptionally illuminating and valgroups, such as racial or political uable work.

men

NOT ALL CRUSHES ARE PLATONIC

QUAINT HONOUR. Roger Gellert. London, Secker & Warburg, 1958. Available through Dorian Book Service. $2.95. 'Reviewed by Jack Parrish.

It would be a wonderful thing if this play about schoolboy homosexuality in an English boarding school were to be given in this country. It is probably the only one of its kind published in English. It is both witty, amusing and yet deeply moving. There is a hilarious scene in the first act in which a fifty year-old Housemaster instructs two young boys in the facts of life, while one of them who has forgotten more than the Housemaster will ever leam, manages to keep a straight face and ask seemingly innocent questions. The characters are all completely convincing and consistent in their de velopment. The young school official who informs on his best friend's intrigue with a fifteen year-old boy out of a mistaken sense does so out of the highest motives, because he is the sort of person he is. The young boy who responds to the young man's advances is both pitiful and ludicrous

in his innocence, whereas his sexually highly experienced friend of the same age is outrageously funny in his precocious worldliness. The scene in which the young man who has been involved with the boy desperately explains to the Housemaster when he may be expelled for not being sorry that he cannot pretend to himself that what had happened was wrong, is especially moving.

It would be a great step forward in terms of a healthier attitude toward sexual matters if this play were to be presented on the boards in this country. That "crushes" and strong attachments constantly occur among the students in both boys' and girls' schools is well-known. What else can be expected with youngsters whose sexual impulses are just beginning to deve lop who have practically no contact at all with the opposite sex? That the attachments sometimes cease to be

mattachine REVIEW

purely emotional may be deplored by some, but it is a fact and facts continue to exist even when they are deplored.

Though privately discussed this knowledge is publicly ignored. Most experts agree that experiences of this sort have little, if anything, to do with individuals becoming homosexuals later in life, though this does not give any adult the right to seduce minors, of course. However, if the actual state

of affairs were acknowledged and faced a great many young people who undergo much inner anguish because of having to face such problems unaided would be spared considerable internal agony. Mr. Gellert's play is excellently stageworthy. Nowhere do you have any feeling of any attempt to sensationalize or shock. He simply shows things as they are. His play has been shown in London. Are we yet mature enough to show it in this country?

LOVE IN A CONVENT SETTING

I WILL NOT SERVE. Eveline Mahy ere. Translated by Antonia White. E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., New York, 1960. 164 pages. $3.00. Available through the Dorian Book Service. Reviewed by Jack Parrish.

Some things cannot be argued with. Thereis little that is unique about the plot of this novel. Sylvie, a seventeen year-old girl studying in a French convent, falls in love with Julienne, her twenty-five year-old mathematics teacher. Sylvie is expelled. She be sieges Julienne.with despairingly entreating letters.

For a while they meet outside the convent, purely as friends. "I love you, Julienne," says Sylvie, "and you mean to destroy that love... We're told we've got to love our neighbor as ourselves, and when, for once, we think we've at last managed to do it, we're demanded to renounce this much vaunted love and put an end to it." "We definitely can't understand each other," replies Julienne at the end of their argument. "The most we can do

She breaks off the relationship and enters the religious order. Sylvie kills herself.

What is so inarguable about the book is its passionate intensity. An extraordinary power of strong feeling pervades it like something electrical.

It could be pounted out that Sylvie's problems are partially of her own making. For her life is either absolute darkness or absolute light. She cannot accept anything in between. In the end it is not so much Julienne as her own incapacity to adapt that kills her.

But the power of the book remains no matter what you say. It has the wal lop of a world heavyweight champion and an impact that stays in your mind long after you've read it. It was its author's first novel and it is deeply regrettable that she committed suicide shortly after it was accepted for publication. She had an unusual talent "Love each other!" that many far more sweetly reasonable Julienne resists her own feelings. writers lack completely.