is not without bearing on her needling of THE LADDER, much of which was aimed at the fiction.

Miss Aldrich doesn't admit to writing fiction horself. Even if hor three volumes on gay life in NYC read a good deal like it, they are sufficiently literal reportage to have got her boycotted by several gay bars in that city the patrons don't oare to be used as copy. However, it's a matter of general knowledge that she is also Vin Paokor, who has written above a dozen Gold Medal paper-back originals, perhaps a quarter of them known to me. What these reveal is superlative early training in Writing to Sell, and something like diarrhea of the pon. She can take anything from campus panty raids to juvenile delinquents to St. Malo rosorters, and rip off something to keep one's eyes on the page for half an evening and, I suspect, put enough coins in the piggy bank to live better in NYC than I could. (So this is sour grapes?)

Now, by a "literary explicator's" comparison of style, background, names, allusions, etc., one may in addition infer beyond reasonable doubt that she is also Ann Bannon, parent of the Laura-Beth series: ODD GIRL OUT, I AM A WOMAN, WOMEN IN THE SHADOWS, and JOURNEY TO A WOMAN. (Don't all these WOMEN mean something, Dr.

Froud?)

So what? Well, 1) the gal is so acrobatically slick that the pore li'l amateur short-shorts for THE LADDER seem pretty rough-hewn to her. (Bo comforted. The best comp teacher I over knew said: "Anybody can say something in 1000 words. When you can say it in 100 you'll be there.") However, for psychological reasons she attacks the matter, not the manner. Why? 2) Purely hypothetical but plausible: Packer's SPRING FIRE and Bannon's quartet are fruits of some young but searing experience(«?) which somebody has had to write out of her system. Thon she got herself psyched or maybe omployed Horney's "self-analysis" and decided to Grow Out of It. Saw a lot of life at first hand and paid hor way by using it as fictional copy. Also doubtless got plenty of chanoes to quit being "emotionally arrested" in the Freudian sense. Whether she took them or how

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