Part 6

PURTSCHER, NORA. _Woman Astride._ Appleton-Century, 1934. Woman spends almost her entire life in male disguise. Offbeat, variant rather than explicitly lesbian.

PYKE, RICHARD. _The Lives and Deaths of Roland Greer._ NY, Boni 1929, (m). Horrifying.

RAVEN, SIMON. _The Feathers of Death._ London, A. Blond, 1959, Simon & Schuster 1960, (m).

RAYTER, JOE (pseud. of Mary McChesney). _Asking for Trouble._ Morrow 1955, pbr Pocket Books 1959. Murder mystery. A mannish, hard-boiled lesbian plays an important part.

REHDER, JESSIE. _Remembrance Way._ G P Putnam's Sons 1956. Retrospective tale in which the heroine recalls a summer in girl's camp, when she was enslaved simultaneously to a domineering director (woman) and her daughter.

REMARQUE, ERICH MARIA. _Arch of Triumph_ Appleton 1945, pbr Signet 1950, 1959.

+ RENAULT, MARY. _Promise of Love._ Morrow, 1939. Novel, in a hospital background, contains variant relationship, lightly treated.

_The Middle Mist._ Morrow, 1945. Excellent, humorous novel, featuring the boyish Leo (Leonora) who, with her friend Helen, lives on a houseboat quite happily ("It only makes sense for the surplus women to arrange themselves one way or another.") This is, beyond a doubt, the wittiest, most refreshing book on the list; the girls have problems, but they have them, and solve them, without any well-of-loneliness agonizing. The story is resolved in Leo's gradual feminization and marriage.

_The Last of the Wine._ Pantheon, 1956 (m; Greek.).

_The King Must Die._ Pantheon 1958, pbr Pocket Books 1959. Minor male and female homosexuality in Cretan setting.

_The Charioteer._ Longmans, 1953, Pantheon hcr 1959. Male, major, femininely delicate. Virtually all of this writer's work contains some reference, though sometimes remote and slight, to variance.

RENAULT, PAUL. _Raw Interludes._ Brookwood, 1957, scv. _No_ relation to Mary Renault; since Renault, Mary, has a double plus, the editors agree we should invent a double minus.

RICE, CRAIG. _Having Wonderful Crime._ Simon & Schuster, 1943. Hilarious murder mystery leads into the byways and gay bars of Greenwich village.

RICHARDSON, HENRY HANDEL. _The End of a Childhood._ London, Reinemann, 1934, hcr N. Y. Norton.

_The Getting of Wisdom._ N. Y. Duffield, 1910. Both are volumes of loosely connected variant short stories.

ROLLAND, ROMAINE. _Annette and Sylvie._ Holt, 1925. The first volume of a trilogy, this deals with an intense attachment between two young (adolescent) half sisters who meet for the first time in their teens.

RONALD, JAMES. _The Angry Woman._ Lippincott 1948, Bantam pbr 1950. A businesswoman keeps a young girl reluctantly captivated until the girl commits suicide.

RONNS, EDWARD. _The State Department Murders._ pbo, Gold Medal 1952, (m) fco.

ROSMANITH, OLGA. _Unholy Flame._ pbo Gold Medal 1952, (m) fco. (But I like this personally very much. A modern Svengali.)

+ ROSS, WALTER. _The Immortal._ Simon & Schuster 1958, Pocket Books Cardinal Edition 1959, (m).

ROYDE-SMITH, NAOMI. _The Tortoiseshell Cat._ Boni & Liveright 1925. An unworldly girl's capture by a predatory lesbian.

_The Island._ Harper, 1930. Sad, tense book about an ugly, unhappy girl nicknamed "Goosey" and a clinging cousin who will neither love her nor let her go.

RUARK, ROBERT. _Something of Value._ Doubleday 1955, pbr Pocket Books 1958. Very minor.

RYAN, MARK. _Twisted Loves._ Bedside Books 1959, pbo, scv.

SABATIER, ROBERT. _Boulevard._ (Prix de Paris award novel, trans. from French by Lowell Blair). David McKay 1958, pbr Dell 59, (m). marginal.

SACKVILLE-WEST, VICTORIA. _The Dark Island._ Doubleday, 1934. Shirin is the over-emotional, unconventional wife of Venn, dour owner of the "dark island", Storn. He treats Shirin so badly that she seeks companionship, love and affection from Christina, her husband's secretary; through jealousy (not unmixed with pure sadism) Venn arranges for Christina to be drowned in a boating "accident". Haunting.

+ SALEM, RANDY. _Chris._ Beacon pbo, 1959. The plus indicates good of kind, not intrinsic merit. An interesting story of a lesbian triangle--Chris, Dizz, and young Carol. One reader commented that this story was a sort of lesbian dreamworld--these women seemed to live in a society, and a world, completely unmixed with ordinary life at all. Certainly they are all treated as quite the ordinary thing, and there are almost no hints that there is a heterosexual world outside the gay one, which must be taken into account. Certainly it makes no incursions into the novel. Chris, a conchologist, her life complicated by her frigid girl-friend Dizz, suffers and drinks too much and sleeps around until Carol, one of her random pick-ups, decides to stick to her, and eventually frees Chris from this attachment. Good but unreal.

+ SANDBURG, HELGA. _The Wheel of Earth._ McDowell, Oblensky 1958. Roughly a third of a long novel of Midwestern rural life deals with the lengthy attachment between Frankie Gaddy and an older woman, Genevieve.

SARTON, MAY. _A Shower of Summer Days._ Rinehart, 1952.

SARTRE, JEAN-PAUL. _No Exit._ Knopf 1947, qpb Vintage 1955. Play.

SAVAGE, KIM. _Girl's Dorm._ Vixen Press 1952.

_Baby Makes Three._ Vixen, 1953. No reports on either of these, but in view of the publisher they are probably evening wasters at best.

SAYERS, DOROTHY L. _The Dawson Pedigree._ Harcourt 1928, fco.

+ SCHIDDEL, EDMUND. _Girl with the Golden Yo-Yo._ pbo Berkley 1955, 1959, (m). Also contains some brief analysis of lesbian jazz circles in Germany after WWI.

_The Other Side of the Night._ pbo Avon 1954-5, Berkley 1959, (m).

SCHMITT, GLADYS. _Confessors of the Name._ Dial, 1952, pbr Permabooks ca. 1953-55. A relatively minor lesbian character in a long novel of ancient Rome, with explicit lesbian scenes during a Saturnalia orgy.

_A Small Fire._ Dial 1958. (m.) minor.

_Alexandra._ Dial 1947, pbr Pocket Books 1949. Very vague and minor threads of contact in a novel of intense friendship between two women. Emotionally high.

SCOTT, LES. _Twilight Women._ Arco 1952, pbr Beacon 1956. Evening-waster suspenseful adventure story of a chase-type kidnapping: Rance, the hero, pleasantly entangled with two beautiful Polynesian girls, who eventually take him to a Utopian tropical island where he happily marries both of them. The contact between the girls is incidental and included simply to heighten excitement for male readers, but it's good fun in a Sax Rohmer-ish way.

_Three Can Love._ Arco, 1952.

_Touchable._ Arco, 1951. Probably much the same as above.

SCULLY, ROBERT. _A Scarlet Pansy._ N. Y., Faro, 1933, Hesor 1937, hcr. Reprinted and completely rewritten by Royal, no pub. no date, Baltimore, Oppenheimer, 30s and 40s. In 1950, D W Cory called this "the low point of the homosexual novel". A lot of trash has been written since, which makes this look simply silly. (m). A confusing novel of the "gay" world, including some butchy and peculiar lesbians.

SEELEY, E. S. _Sorority Sin._ Beacon pbo, 1959. scv.

SELA, LORA. (pseud of Carol Hales) _I Am a Lesbian._ Saber pbo, 1959. Would-be shocker about a poor innocent girl being pushed into love affairs with brutal boys, raped, etc, by cruel relatives and friends, when all that God wants of her, according to the author, is for her to be a Happy Well-Adjusted Noble Lesbian. This isn't even scv, since the writers of sexy trash usually know something about sex or trash or both. Read it and snicker.

SETON, ANYA. _Katherine._ Houghton, 1954. (m. minor)

SHAW, WILENE. _The Fear and the Guilt._ pbo, Ace, 1954. Softball-playing Ruby brings sweet-leech Christy to her Tobacco Road home. There, to disarm suspicion, Christy allows herself to be first seduced, then married, by Ruby's father. Sympathetic for a shocker, but oh, my!

SIDGWICK, ETHEL. _A Lady of Leisure._ Boston, Small, 1914. A passionate, but quite innocent, attachment between women in their twenties.

SIMENON, GEORGES. _In Case of Emergency._ Doubleday 1958, pbr Dell 1959. A common theme--a good man enslaved by a worthless girl--is treated here by a very good European writer. A subplot deals with the attachment between the girl and her maidservant.

SINCLAIR, JO. (pseud. of Ruth Seid) _Wasteland._ Harper Bros. 1946. This is the excellent and heavily lauded Harper prize novel of that year. Told on the psychiatrist's couch, it concerns the failure of Jewish Jake Braunowitz to live up to his manhood ... which forces this job onto the shoulders of his sister Debbie, a lesbian. The psychiatrist discovers that he ran from his responsibilities in the first place due to feeling weaker than the masterful intelligent Debbie; then, after forcing her to take a man's role in the family, he turns around and feels guilt and shame at her adjustment to the situation. Excellently done.

SPEERS, MARY. _We Are Fires Unquenchable._ Murray and Gee, Hollywood 1946. fco. A badly written, almost illiterate novel, the first few scenes of which are laid in a girl's college swarming with luridly treated lesbians and in an assortment of Bohemian settings.

+ SMITH, ARTEMIS. _Odd Girl._ Beacon pbo, 1959. The blurb reads "Life and love among warped women", but don't let it scare you. This is one of the better and more serious approaches to the writing of a serious novel of lesbians through the stereotyped pattern of the paperback novel. The basic plot concerns Anne, and her experiences in trying to find out for herself, the hard way, whether she is a lesbian or whether she can successfully adjust to life as a normal woman. The story ends with the surprising, but growingly popular affirmation that "adjustment" is not always to be desired at all costs. The cover also calls this a story of "society's greatest curse", meaning homosexuality; but for once it isn't treated that way.

_The Third Sex._ pbo, Beacon, 1959. Most of the remarks made above also apply to this one, though the heroine is Joan, a college girl who fears that she is becoming a lesbian, and fights it by redoubling her affairs with men. Slightly more sensational than "Odd Girl", but well written, well thought out and generally excellent.

SMITH, DOROTHY EVELYN. _The Lovely Day._ N. Y., Dutton, 1957. Interesting novel of an English village on a choir outing, contains a minor but funny account of an unconscious lesbian's decisions.

SMITH, SHELLEY. (pseud. of Nancy Bodington.) _The Lord Have Mercy_, Harper 1956, pbr tct _The Shrew is Dead_, Dell 1959. English mystery story; a major subplot involves a pair of lesbians.

SNEDEKER, CAROLINE DALE. _The Perilous Seat._ Doubleday, Doran 1929, marginal (m) in a juvenile of ancient Greece; the hero, being sold into slavery, attempts to disfigure himself to escape "the fate of handsome boys among the Persians."

STAFFORD, JEAN. _Boston Adventure._ Harcourt, 1944.

STEIN, GERTRUDE. _Things as They Are._ Banyan Press, Pawlet, Vermont. (Very rare; $25 and up second hand.) A novel by the well-known surrealist poet ... possibly her only coherent work ... dealing with lesbianism.

STONE, SCOTT. _The Divorcees._ Beacon pbo 1955, released 1959 Evening waster about a racketeer who specializes in quick divorces, and his girl-friend who flirts with all the women as he disengages them from their husbands.

_Margo._ Beacon pbo 1955, released 1959. scv.

_Blaze._ Berkley pbo or pbr, n. d. no data except "trash".

SOUBIRAN, ANDRÉ. _Bedlam._ Putnam 1957, pbr Pyramid 1959, (m) minor.

STONEBRAKER, FLORENCE. _Sinful Desires._ pbr Bedside Books, 1959. (previous paperback, publisher unknown, ca. 1951). Silly novel about a married woman briefly captivated by a stereotyped lesbian.

+ STURGEON, THEODORE. (pseud. of Edward Hamilton Waldo). "Affair with a Green Monkey". Venture Science Fiction May 1957; also in _A Touch of Strange_, Doubleday 1959.

"The Sex Opposite". in _E. Pluribus Unicorn_, Abelard 1952, Ballantine pbr 1953.

"The World Well Lost" in _E Pluribus Unicorn._ Many of Sturgeon's other short stories and novelettes touch on extremely strange, offbeat relationships.

+ SWADOS, FELICE. _House of Fury._ Doubleday 1941, pbr Lion 1955, Berkley 1959. One of the better paperbacks, dealing with racial tensions and muted lesbian attachments in a girl's reformatory.

SWINBURNE, ALGERNON. _Lesbia Brandon._ Falcon Press 1952, edited and annotated by Randolph Hughes. A famous incomplete novel by the well-known poet, for students rather than readers. Really only a handful of scattered chapters, too scrappy to judge; see also poetry supplement.

SYDNEY, GALE. _Strange Circle._ Beacon Books pbo 1959, 1960. Grace Garney, feeling unwanted, gets a job with Mrs. Flocke, a repulsive lesbian, and repels a pass; this, however, revives childhood memories, and during a rift in her affairs with a man, she has a brief affair with Inez, a friend with an unsatisfactory husband. Evening waster.

SYKES, GERALD. _The Center of the Stage._ N. Y., Farrar 1952, pbr Signet 1954. Witty novel of the theatre, with a minor lesbian character.

TAYLOR, DYSON. _Bitter Love._ orig. copyright 1952, Pyramid 1958, (m). Worldly woman marries a homosexual who wants her for a "front".

TAYLOR, JOHN. _Shadows of Shame._ Pyramid 1956, 1959, (m).

TAYLOR, VALERIE. _Whisper Their Love._ Crest pbo 1957. Unsympathetic college novel of a girl suffering through a lesbian affair while all around her the other girls suffer through rape, incest and abortion. Over-written.

_Girls in 3-B._ Crest pbo 1959. One of three young girls who come to the city to find jobs or careers, Barby drifts into a lesbian relationship, mostly out of revulsion against two unfortunate experiences with men. Excellent, sympathetic.

+ _Stranger on Lesbos._ Crest pbo 1959. A married woman with a grown son and indifferent husband, returning to college for work on a college degree, is ripe for an affair with "Bake", a confirmed lesbian. The affair is told with sufficient skill and restraint to make it believable; even Frankie's eventual return to her old life is not a cliche "happy ending" but well prepared and well characterized. Remarkably good; the degree of progress from the first to the third of these novels makes your editors anxious to see where Miss Taylor goes from here.

TELLIER, ANDRÉ. _Twilight Men._ Greenberg 1931, pbr Lion 1950, 52, 56, Pyramid 1959, (m). Well known.

+ TEY, JOSEPHINE. (pseud. of Elizabeth MacKintosh.) _Miss Pym Disposes._ Macmillan 1948; also in _Three by Tey_, Macmillan 1954. Slowly built-up, excellently constructed mystery of a girl's school, where a close attachment between two seniors provides solution and motivation for a murder. The level of mystification is so high that even on the last page the reader is gasping with the final, shocking surprise.

_To Love and be Wise._ Macmillan 1951. Another well done mystery, with a variant attachment also providing motive and solution and a high level of suspense and surprise.

TESCH, GERALD. _Never The Same Again._ G P Putnam's Sons 1956, pbr Pyramid 1958, (m). Not for the squeamish, but a well-done novel of an affair between a teen age boy and an older man.

+ TIMPERLEY, ROSEMARY. _Child in the Dark._ Crowell 1956. Two of the three stories in this book involve intense attachments, variant but not explicitly lesbian, between an English schoolmistress and a young girl.

THAYER, TIFFANY. _Thirteen Women._ Claude Kendall, 1932. Mildly nasty shock-story of a murder, involving thirteen women, one mixed up with a lesbian; she eventually commits suicide.

_Thirteen Men._ Claude Kendall 1930, (m). Much the same stuff as above only masculine in emphasis. Thayer is a good writer, but not everyone's choice.

THOMPSON, JOHN B. _Girls of the French Quarter._ Beacon pbo 1954.

_Frenzy of Desire._ Encore Press 1957. Evening wasters.

THOMPSON, MORTON. _Not as a Stranger._ Chas. Scribner's Sons, 1954 pbr Pocket Books 1955. fco, very minor episodes.

+ THORNE, ANTHONY. _Delay in the Sun._ Literary Guild, 1934. A "heartening idyll" of two friends who, during a long stopover in Spain, resolve their relationship.

+ TORRES, TERESKA. _Woman's Barracks._ Gold Medal pbo 1950, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59 and probably every year from now on, for a while anyhow. Gold Medal's most popular title so far is the story of a group of women with the Free French women's army, at loose ends and disassociated from family, friends and personal attachments. Among the many threads of the plot is the story of naive young Ursula, who, through her relationship with warm, tough, friendly Claude is helped to maturity and eventually to readjustment to normal life.

_Dangerous Games._ Dial 1957, pbr Crest 1958. A married woman, discovering her husband is having an affair with her closest friend, briefly becomes infatuated with her too.

_Not Yet._ Crown 1957, pbr Crest 1958. The story of four young girls in a French school; not children but "not yet" women, and their adjustment to life and love. The narrator, the least mature, is as yet infatuated only with Mother Nathalie, her teacher; no overt behavior is implied except kisses, but the nun's reaction when the heroine begins to be interested in boys brings this under the scope of the study.

_The Golden Cage._ Dial 1959. (trans. from French by Meyer Levin). A group of refugees in wartime, waiting for visas in Portugal, undergo various transient attachments. Among the group are several lesbians, treated with sympathy and sensitivity.

TRAVIS, BEN. _The Strange Ones._ Beacon pbo 1959, (m). Evening waster about a young no-good who earns his living as a paid escort/gigolo and relaxes with boy friends but still loudly insists he is normal. Your editor enjoyed this out of sheer perversity; usually novels treating of male homosexuality engage the subject with deadly seriousness, while the paperback originals reek with drooling voyeuristic strip-teases about lesbians, for the sake of men who like to enjoy pipe-dreams about lesbians making love, and about some Big Handsome Hero who eventually converts the girls to "normality" with some secret formula of caresses. So it is a nice change to see the gay BOYS getting the in-and-out-of-the-sheets treatment for once.

TRYON, MARK. _The Fire that Burns._ Berkley pbo 1959 scv.

_Take it Off._ Vixen Press 1953, Modern Press 1956, scv.

UNTERMEYER, LOUIS. (Editor). _The Treasury of Ribaldry._ Doubleday 1956, pbr Popular Library 1959 (v. 1). This contains Lucian's "Dialogues of Courtesans", entitled in this translation "The Lesbian" and "A Curious Deception". The hardcover edition also contains some of the Songs of Bilitis.

VAIL, AMANDA (pseud. of Warren Miller). _The Bright Young Things._ Little, Brown, 1958. pbr Crest 1960.

In a story of two worldly young college girls experimenting with life and love, a subplot involves two of their friends, lesbians. Minor but fun.

VANEER, WILLIAM. _Love Starved Wife._ Bedside Books Inc, 1959. scv.

VAN HELLER, MARCUS. _The House of Borgia_, Paris, Olympia Press, 1957. Volume #16 in The Traveler's Companion, straight scv.

VAN ROYEN, ASTRID. _Awake, Monique._ Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1957, pbr Crest 1958. Astrid, an orphaned child in some unnamed European country (Holland, Belgium, Sweden?) is sent to live with her uncle Rainier; she lives upstairs with Rainier (eventually with a Lolita-like intimacy) while Rainier's wife lives downstairs with a lesbian friend, Dini. Despite a "broadminded" plea for understanding, Rainier strictly forbids Astrid to have anything to do with the girls. The book is well-written, tasteful, and certainly candid.

VAUGHAN, HILDA. _The Curtain Rises._ N. Y., Chas Scribner 1935. A young girl, Nest, in London, falls in with a fiftyish spinster with a reputation for aiding young and pretty girls who also have talent. Miss Fremlyn invites Nest to live with her as her companion, showering her with education, attention and restrictions; Nest is naive, Miss Fremlyn unaware, at least consciously, of her own emotions. They travel and live together for some time, but the affair breaks up when Nest, who has always kept in touch with her boy friend, is discovered with him and Miss Fremlyn, considering this a betrayal, dismisses her. Explicit, well done.

VERNE, CHARLES. _The Wheel of Passion._ N. Y., Key 1957. scv.

VIDAL, GORE. _The City and the Pillar._ E P Dutton 1948, pbr Signet ca. 1950, (m).

_The Season of Comfort._ E P Dutton 1949, (m).

WAHL, LOREN. _The Invisible Glass._ Greenberg, 1950, pbr tct _If This be Sin_, Avon 1952, pbr tct _Take Me as I Am_, Berkley 1959, (m).

WALFORD, FRANK. _Twisted Clay._ Claude Kendall, 1934. fco. A young girl, a psychotic sadist ... is bisexual and has one big affair with an older woman. It must be marked for people with very complete collections only; it is depressing, inaccurate, etc. "The writing, etc, are excellent, but oh my, what a plot!"

+ WARD, ERIC. _Uncharted Seas._ Paris, Obelisk Press 1937. (Fairly easy to obtain second hand, and not at all like most of the sexy trash tagged Paris elsewhere in this list.) An excellent, perceptive and controlled story of Diana Bellew, a young married woman with children, a childish husband and too much money and time on her hands, and her successive affairs with three women. The writing is unusually good for male authorship.

WEBB, JON EDGAR. _Four Steps to the Wall._ Dial 1948, pbr Bantam 1953, (m). Prison novel.

+ WEIRAUGH, ANNA ELISABET. _The Scorpion._ Greenberg 1932, Willey Book co, 1948, pbr Avon Books 1957, complete; pbr tct _Of Love Forbidden_, greatly abridged, 1958. Well-known novel of well-bred German girl, Metta (in some translations, Myra) who, in her late teens, falls in love with a worldly lesbian, Olga, who does much to free her from her stuffy background, but repudiates her painfully in a family crisis. After Olga's suicide Metta seeks for her real self and real destiny, first in the Bohemian drink-drugs-sex merrygoround of Berlin between the wars, then hides from life in a stuffy middle-class setting; when even here she finds herself pursued by a lesbian tease, Gwen, who flirts with Metta to inveigle her into a sordid party _a trois_, Metta resolves to go away and come to terms with her own soul.