Part 6

+ _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, ANDRE. _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.

_The Outcast._ Greenberg 1933, Willey Book Co 1948. The sequel to the above, this finds the heroine of _The Scorpion_ living quietly in the country. She undergoes a painful and unsatisfactory affair with Fiametta, a dancer, but when this proves unsatisfactory settles down sadly but peacefully with a couple of sexless men friends.

WEISS, JOE, and Ralph Dean. _Anything Goes._ Bedside Books pbo, 1959. Fast-moving evening waster with a minor lesbian angle.

WELCH, DENTON. _Maiden Voyage._ L. B. Fischer 1945, (m) minor.

_In Youth is Pleasure._ L. B. Fischer 1946, (m) minor.

+ WELLS, CATHERINE. "The Beautiful House" Harpers, March 1912. An idyll of two women ends tragically with the marriage of the younger.

WELLS, KERMIT. _Reformatory Women._ Bedside Books pbo 1959. Surprisingly good for this publisher of rubbish. After escaping from a sadistic lesbian matron in the reformatory, Noreen works as a fake butch in a Greenwich Village Gay bar and tourist trap; later goes to work for gangsters in a roadhouse, falls for a nice boy and goes back to serve her reformatory sentence and marry him when she gets out. Pleasant evening waster.

WETHERELL, ELIZABETH (pseud of Susan Warner). _The Wide Wide World._ Many editions, very easily obtained, a well-known girls story of the 1880s or thereabout, dealing with Ellen, an orphan of twelve. Much of the first half of the novel is devoted to a very innocent, but exceptionally intense, close relationship between Ellen and her beloved "Miss Alice", daughter of the local minister. Good of kind, and distinctly relevant on an adolescent level.

WHEELER, HUGH. _The Crippled Muse._ Rinehart, 1952. A "sparkling comedy" of Capri contains the story of two women who have lived together for ten years; the younger girl is tired of the arrangement, and the older uses her feelings of guilt and shame to hold her captive. In the course of the novel she manages to free herself.

WHITE, PATRICK. _The Aunt's Story._ Viking Press 1948. fco.

WIMBERLEY, GWYNNE. _One Touch of Ecstasy._ Frederick Fell, 1959. A lesbian affair gives "one touch of ecstasy" to a woman's inhibited, unhappy life, allowing her to return to her husband with wakened perceptions.

WILDER, ROBERT. _Wait for Tomorrow._ Putnam 1950, Bantam 1953. A girl's unwilling entanglement with a predatory lesbian, in a romance of an imaginary Balkan country, leads to all sorts of violence and cloak-and-dagger stuff. Good.

+ WILHELM, GALE. _Torchlight to Valhalla._ Random, 1938, pbr tct

_The Strange Path_, Lion 1953, Berkley 1958, 1959. Morgen, rootless and drifting after the death of her artist father, to whom she had been childishly close, is loved by two fine young men, but finds her happiness with a strange young girl, Toni. Major, well known.

_We Too Are Drifting._ Triangle Books 1938-39; Modern Library 1935. pbr Lion Books 1951, Berkley 1957, 58, 59, 60. Probably the major novel of the thirties to deal with lesbians; perhaps the best of all time. In substance it deals with the boyish, but feminine Jan Morale; her struggle to escape a slightly sordid affair with Madelaine, a married woman, and to find happiness, despite family complications, with a young girl, Victoria. Told with fairness, restraint, and skill--not to mention that this is one of the dozen or so books on this entire list to display not only _some_, but _exceptional_ literary merit.

WILLIAMS, TENNESSEE. "Something Unspoken" in _27 Wagons Full of Cotton._ New Directions, 1953. Also in Best Short Plays of 1955-56, Dodd, Mead, 1956. A play; I marked this for fco, received a protest: "Everybody will enjoy this." Compromise; everybody will enjoy this who likes Tennessee Williams.

WILLIAMS, WILLIAM CARLOS. _The Knife of the Times._ Dragon Press, 1932, hcr tct _Make Light of It_, Random House 1950, (m). The title story is in DWCory, _21 Variations_.

WILLIAMS, ISABEL. _Hellcat._ Greenberg 1934, pbr Dell 1952. Unpleasant girl who uses everyone for her own purposes includes a lesbian among her victims.

WILLINGHAM, CALDER. (pseud). _End as a Man._ Vanguard 1947, pbr Signet co. 1957, (m).

WILLIS, GEORGE. _Little Boy Blues._ Dutton, 1947. Concerns the machinations of a lesbian to achieve marriage and motherhood as a "front".

WILSON, ETHEL D. _Hetty Dorval._ Macmillan 1948, fco.

WINDHAM, DONALD. _The Hitchhiker._ Florence, Italy, priv. print. (m).

_Servants with Torches._ N. Y. 1955 priv. print. (m).

_Dog Star._ Doubleday, 1950, (m).

WINSLOE, CHRISTA. _The Child Manuela._ (Trans. Agnes Scott Farrar, 1933.) Motherless Manuela, sent to a strict boarding-school because of supposed misconduct with a boy (actually she was only fascinated with his mother) falls in love with Elizabeth von Bernberg, one of the teachers. The woman's behavior is strictly correct, but her warmth of personality attracts all the love-starved, inhibited children; Manuela, exhilarated and slightly drunk at a school party, babbles of her love for the Fraulein, and is punished so severely that she throws herself from a top-floor window.

_Girl Alone._ (Trans. Agnes Scott). Farrar 1936. A girl in difficulties finds temporary refuge with a lesbian friend.

WINSTON, DAOMA. _The Golden Tramp._ pbo Beacon Books 1959. Evening waster about a woman writer trying it both ways.

WOLLER, OLGA. _Strange Conflict._ Pageant, 1955. Purple-passaged and would-be-horrifying story about a Eurasian hermaphrodite--supposedly as she is because of her mother's intercourse with demons before her birth--who inspires love and brings death to everyone she knows, male or female.

WOODFORD, JACK. _Male and Female._ Woodford Press, 1935.

_Unmoral._ Woodford Press, 1938. Both of these are evening wasters--racy stuff, not bad at all when compared with the current crop of trashy paperbacks. The "lesbian" content, of course, is strictly for fun.

WOOD, CLEMENT. _Strange Fires._ Woodford Press, 1951. "Shipwreck on Lesbos" in his _Desire_, Berkeley n. d. 1958 (copyright 1950, perhaps Woodford Press?) Clement Wood is either a pen name for, or a successor to, Jack Woodford, a popular writer of racy, risque, sexy books of little literary merit but relatively innocuous even for teen-agers ... the trash of the thirties and forties was a very different thing from the scv of the fifties.

WOOD, CLEMENT, and Gloria Goddard. _Fair Game._ Woodford Press, 1949, pbr Beacon 1958. Evening waster about girls coming to the wicked big city, and we all know what happens to such girls in this kind of book. One of them falls in with the dangerous women instead of the dangerous men.

+ WOOLF, VIRGINIA. _Orlando._ _To The Lighthouse._

_Mrs. Dalloway._ All of these are classics easily available in small, medium and large libraries, college bookstores, and the like. The lesbian content is vague and subtle, but good; one of the best woman writers.

WOUK, HERMAN. _Marjorie Morningstar._ Doubleday 1955, pbr 1956. The variant element in this is minor and problematical. In conversation, it occurred to a group of reviewers that the developing relationship between Marjorie and Marsha "resembled a love affair", that Marsha's attack of hysterics at her wedding, and her outcry that all she had ever wanted was a friend, and now she'd always be alone, was of distinct significance. BAYOR.

WYLIE, PHILIP. _The Disappearance._ Rinehart 1951, pbr Pocket Books 1958. Science fiction; for men, all women vanish; for women, all men vanish. The problem of lesbianism arises in the women's world; Wylie, though technically and superficially approving of homosexuality, has his heroine reject it for herself, saying "I'm not a child."

_Opus 21._ Rinehart 1949, pbr Signet 1952, 1960. The hero, rewriting a book in a hotel during a weekend of crisis, runs across many unusual characters; among them a woman, shaken because her husband is having a homosexual affair, is shamed into tolerance by dallying with a lesbian prostitute. Wylie, again superficially approving, has his hero act in a skirt-withdrawing way, refusing such things for himself at the last minute in every book.

WYNDHAM, JOHN. "Consider her Ways" in _Sometime, Never_, Ballantine 1956-57. Science Fiction; a woman experimenting with strange drugs goes into the future, where all men have perished and society resembles that of the ant. Good.

_The Midwich Cuckoos._ Ballantine, 1957. Science Fiction. Alien visitation from outer space leaves every nubile female in Midwich--married or single, young or old--pregnant. Hilariously funny situations arise; one of the funniest involves a pair of lesbians. Wonderful fun.

YAFFE, JAMES. _Nothing But the Night._ Little, Brown & Co, 1957, pbr Bantam 1959, (m). More fake Leopold-Loeb. Good.

YOURCENAR, MARGUERITE. _Hadrian's Memoirs._ Farrar, 1954, qpb Anchor 1954, (m).

ZOLA, EMILE. _Nana._ Literally dozens of hardcover and paperback editions of a shocker about a street girl who, in addition to all her affairs with men, also has an affair with Satin, a streetwalker.

_A Lesson in Love._ Abridged edition of Pot Bouille. Pyramid, 1959.

ZUGSMITH, ALBERT. _The Beat Generation._ Bantam pbo based on screenplay by Richard Mathesen, (m) minor.

_The Poetry of Lesbiana_

An index of Poems and Poets of interest to Collectors of Lesbiana

_Compiled by Gene Damon_

Briefly, this includes variant as well as overtly lesbian poetry, written in English or available in English translation. The arrangement is chronological, rather than alphabetical. All of these are easily available in public libraries, unless otherwise indicated.

THE ANCIENT WORLD:

_Erinna_--only one fragment left. Available in the Greek Anthology and other miscellaneous collections of that type.

_Nossis_--Various variant poems and fragments. Greek Anthology, Putnam, 1915-26 (5 vol.). Also in similar collections.

_Sappho_--The classic poet of lesbianism. Over 50 editions available in hard covers. New translation by Mary Barnard, University of California Press, 1958, qpb $1.25. An attractive edition is also published for $2.50 by the Pater Pauper Press, on display in most bookstores.

_Juvenal_--Satires. Many editions in hardcover and qpb. (Rolfe Humphries trans. and ed. the Indiana University Press, 1958, $1.50; also number 997 in Everyman's Library, $1.85.) The Sixth Satire.

_Martial_--His "Epigrams" contain various references to lesbians. Cambridge University Press, 1924, $2.75.

THE MIDDLE AGES:

_Ariosto, Ludovico_--Orlando Furioso. London, Bell, 1907.

_Labe, Louise_--Love Sonnets (trans. by Frederick Prokosch), New Directions, 1947, $2.50, still in print.

_Shakespeare, William_--The first 27 of the "Sonnets" are generally adjudged to be male-homosexual in emphasis and are therefore of interest to collectors in this field.

THE ROMANTIC POETS--19th CENTURY:

_Coleridge, Samuel T._--Christabel. Long narrative poem of a curious attachment between a guileless young girl and a female demon; available in virtually every anthology of English literature.

_Rossetti, Christina_--Goblin Market. Lovely and fantastic poem with distinctly variant overtones. See anthologies of English literature.

_Romani, Felice_--Norma. Italian libretto for the opera by Vincenzo Bellini, generally adjudged to be subtly lesbian in overtones. Many translations are available in collections of opera libretti, but most English translations edit out the variant content or alter the emphasis.

_Baudelaire, Charles_--The Flowers of Evil, (trans. from the French of Les Fleurs du Mal by Edna St. Vincent Millay and George Dillon) N. Y., Harper, 1936, also New Directions, pbr, 1958. Many other editions and translations available.

_Swinburne, Algernon Charles_--Poems and Ballads, 2 vols, London, Chatto & Windus, 1893, 1895. Many of the poems in this series are explicitly or implicitly lesbian. In the interests of space limitation, only the major titles will be listed for those who want to sift through anthologies; Anactoria, Fragoletta, Sapphics, At Eleusis, Sonnet with a copy of Mlle. de Maupin, The Masque of Queen Bersabe, Erotion. The entire series of Poems and Ballads is available in hcr no. 961, Everyman's Library, Dutton, 1940, 50, for $1.95.

_Louys, Pierre_--Songs of Bilitis. Many editions available, the most easily located probably being the Liveright "Collected works of Pierre Louys", $3.50. There is also a paperback edition, Avon Red and Gold Library, no date. The "Songs" have been published singly in numerous privately printed and illustrated editions, some of which are very beautiful collector's items.

_Bronte, Emily_--Complete Poems. N. Y. Columbia University Press, 1941 (still in print at $4.00). A scattering of these poems are (or can be interpreted as) vaguely variant.

_Mencken, Idah Isaacs_--Infelicia. Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1875. (Rare, and expensive.)

_Field, Michael_--(pseud. of two Englishwomen.) Entire work of lesbian interest and a "must" for completists. Most medium to large public libraries have some of their work.

_Dickinson, Emily_--Bolts of Melody. N. Y. Harper, 1945. Also variant poems are scattered throughout her earlier editions. (Selected Poems, Modern Library, 1948, $1.65.)

THE MODERN POETS:

_Lowell, Amy_--No one volume of her work can be singled out; her poems are perhaps the most openly variant of any of the English or American poets. Her "Complete Poetical Works" is still in print; Boston, Houghton & Mifflin Co., 1955; Introduction by Louis Untermeyer, $6.00.

_O'Neill, Rose_--The Master Mistress. N. Y., Knopf, 1922. The creator of the "Kewpies" also was the writer of these sensitive, occasionally erotic poems. Perhaps a dozen are explicitly lesbian.

_Hall, Radclyffe_--Poems of the Past and Present, London, Chapman & Hall, 1910. Songs of Three Counties, Chapman & Hall, 1913. The Forgotten Island, London, Chapman & Hall, 1915. Sheaf of Verses, London, Chapman & Hall, 1905. Twixt Earth and Stars, London, Chapman & Hall, 1906.

These poems by the author of "Well of Loneliness" are so overt that it is almost unbelievable that they were printed at all, but they were, and I have the books to prove it ... she managed to get away with it, I guess, because she talks in these poems as if she were a man, writing to a woman.

_Millay, Edna St. Vincent_--Collected Poems, N. Y., Harper, 1956, $6.00. This is the favored anthology of Millay for this purpose, since it contains everything of hers which is variant in tone. However, there are many single volumes of her poetry available, and also pbrs; Collected Lyrics (Washington Square, 50c), and Collected Sonnets (Washington Square, 50c).

_Sackville-West, Victoria_--King's Daughter, N. Y., Doubleday, 1930.

_Sterling, George_--Strange Waters. Privately printed, n.d., also in American Esoterica, N. Y. Macy-Masius, 1927. Lengthy narrative poem of supposed incestuous lesbianism ... shocker.

_Doolittle, Hilda (H.D.)_--Red Roses for Bronze, London, Lord, Chatto & Windus. Also the Grove Press qpb, Selected Poems of H.D., 1957; this, however, does not contain the best-known of Sappho paraphrases, "Fragment Thirty-six". Also "Collected Poems", Liveright, $2.50.

_Pitter, Ruth_--English poetess, whose work is rather difficult to locate in this country. Many of her early poems are tinged with variance and well worth the effort of locating them in large libraries.

_Smith, Alicia Kay_--Only in Whispers. Privately printed; Falmouth, Rockport, Maine. This is the hardest book on this list to obtain, and of course, the most overt. Ardently but in good taste, this tells of a lengthy and beautiful lesbian affair. A "must" book for serious collectors who like poetry.

_Wright, James_--The Green Wall. Yale University Press, 1957, $3.00. Two overt poems in an excellent and sensitive collection.

_Variant Films_

compiled by LauraJean Ermayne and Gene Damon