FIVE MINORITY GROUPS IN RELATION TO CONTEMPORARY FICTION

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he writes on controversial subjects and any treatment of sex is controversial in our schizophrenic society he is hampered at every turn: by public opinion, by such organizations as the Legion of Decency which hasn't yet gotten around to censoring the Bible, by the way -, by criticism ranging from the gentoel articles in the Saturday Review to the tirades of certain newspaper columnists who feel they've been appointed to protect the public morality. I hope none of you missed the article by Jack Mably a year or so ago in which he stated that our teen-agers are boing corrupted by novels dealing with sexual perversion and that our children would never hear about these evil practices if they didn't read the books. It reminds one of Jimmy Walker's comment during the LADY CHATTERLEY hassle, that no girl was ever ruined by a book.

The current issue of Harper's has a thoughtful article entitled "Pornography Is Not Enough" which goes into the question of censorship and also touches on the relation of the homophile to literature, which we'll go back to in the fourth of our five categories this evening.

In addition to these general social attitudes we come up against the publishers' taboos, which vary from house to house, but which are alike in that they're applied spottily and inconsistently, so that we never know where wo stand. I've wrestled with four of these. One is age. A novel of mine was rejected because the heroine was 40 Just after the same publisher put out Vin Packer's 5:45 TO SUBURBIA and shortly before she authorized a reprint of BY LOVE POSSESSED, two books in which the leading characters are between 50 and 60. A second topic is incest. In my THE GIRLS IN 3-B Barby's trauma originally developed after she was raped by her father, a somewhat psychopathic type. The publisher changed it over my protests that little girls are sometimes raped by their fathers, that any social worker can confirm this, and that it was essential to the plot. We finally had Barby assaulted by an old, respectable friend of the family. The moral seems to