Gertrude's off-Fifth palace in New York, Larry is properly brought out by the attractive decorator who re-did the house (the decorator is a very unstereotyped finely-drawn character). Then there's the affair with a dragqueen (whom Larry brings home in drag for a lark-and who incidentally turns out to be the son of one of Gertrude's most admired patrician friends). Then there are the prep schools Larry is sent to and kicked out of when "caught❞—and for a real odd touch, a sort of nudist reform school where the excess of bare male flesh fails to have the anticipated negative effect on Larry.

Finally, Gertrude and Larry, her favorite child despite everything come to work out a wonderful arrangement. Larry, who has just fallen in love with an 18-year old Adonis, is sent to Paris, with his lover, as correspondent for mother's Manhatter. The job and the affair last through most of the 1930s. Then the lover dies at about the time of World War II, and Larry becomes a hero of the Maquis. After the war, he is picked up in the Paris streets by a handsome youth who discloses a shocking identity, and becomes both Larry's lover and assistant, until Gertrude brings the youth, Don Noble, to New York to help her own son Don at the Manbatter.

With all the background now filled in, the story is brought back to the present as Gertrude's "Royal Progress" is halted by a fatal heart attack in Columbus, Ohio. All the family, including Don Noble and the spouses of Gertrude's son and daughter, are brought for a final dramatic farewell scene staged by the grand old ham. Unwilling to be upstaged by anyone, she reveals that she's always known Don Noble's big secret: his boss is his father, his lover is his uncle and Gertrude is really grandma-it seems Don Noble was sired by Don Donner during the honeymoon of his mother with her impotent (or homosexual?) husband.

The three principle homosexual characters, Larry Donner, Don Noblę, and the decorator, Lucius Carey are all treated in this book with sympathy and sense. As regards the most unusual element in this area, there is no reference to the question of a taboo within a taboo (i.e.,` a homosexual incestuous taboo within the general homosexual taboo) that might have come up in the affair between Larry and his nephew. Is there any such taboo-withina-taboo?

BERGLERY: HOW ORAL CAN YOU GET?

THE FROG POND, by Joyce Maclver. New York: George Braziller, 1961. 412 pp, $4.95. Also in paperback. Reviewed by Noel . Garde.

"Meanwhile, Dr. Portzweig went ahead full blast, expounding his theories and relating all of my problems to them, always proving how right they were. mattachine REVIEW

22

The reason for all my trouble was that I was still reacting to having found out how my mother's breast really belonged to her instead of me, as a result of which I wanted to devour the poor woman and thus appropriate the whole works. There it was again, I thought. Oh, to be eating Mother, now that April's here. And here I. was, all dressed up to resemble an adult, sitting at my typewriter chewing up words and spitting them out on paper, just to spite this poor woman for removing her tit from my mouth before I was done." (p. 231) `

These few lines present in one paragraph a summary of the psychoanalytic quackery of a fictitious neo-Freudian, Dr. Portzweig. It is no secret that in all but name, Dr. Portzweig is the late Dr. Edmund Bergler, the darling of the homosexual-baiters (pseudo-intellectual branch).

This penetrating novel, involving the pseudonymous author's seven-year adventure in the New York world of the modern witch-doctors and their cultists, is set in the 1940s. At that time Dr. Bergler had not yet latched on to homosexuals as the focal point for his paranoiac rantings, but the amazing thing is that for all the previous subjects of his dogmatic quackery-the impotent, the frigid, the anxiety-neurotic, the professional writer (all of which were pertinent to the author), the basic formula has been the same. What might be called Dr. Bergler's compulsive obsession with his "lactation fixation" has been unchanged through the years. Each successive model of a supposedly new, original psychiatric theory has used the same basic formula, with only a little colored additive, or a seasoning of "psychic masochism" tied in with the lactation bit. The most recent model is of course the "real-lowdown-on-homosexuals" one, with which Bergler at last hit the self-promotional jackpot.

Although the author's case had no homosexual implications at all, and Dr. Bergler at the time she saw him had only the most incidental interest in homosexuals (this was his real-low down-on-writers period), the two chapters on Bergler (26 and 27) contain material that is almost 100% applicable to his more familiar and more recent period. Here are some excerpts: "Sometimes, as he explained this or that point in his theory of the 'mechanism of orality' in terms of what his patients had done or were doing, he spoke with a peculiar anger and impatience, as if these very acts were performed in a spirit of vengeance against him." (p. 224)

"The fact that here was a human being in distress meant little to this particular scientist: distress had been investigated already, the 'mechanism of creation' had not... He talked continuously, explaining the very compli cated scientific points, so there were times when I felt fenced in with these theories of his and even exhausted by the complications, As I began to un fold the story of my early life, I noticed the learned man had a decided ten dency to brush away certain outstanding incidents if they conflicted in any