Part 7 (1/2)
”Palm Sunday” ss in collection _The Sunnier Side_, pbr Berkley nd and others, also in Cory, _21 Variations_.
+ JACKSON, s.h.i.+RLEY. _Hangsaman._ Farrar, 1951. Frightening, macabre story of a lonely girl who conjures up a thrilling companion-who looks and acts like a boy but is clearly a girl.
They meet secretly and engage in wild conversation and loveplay, and only slowly, with dawning horror, does the reader realize that the child is a split personality and the two girls are one and the same.
_The Haunting of Hill House._ Viking, 1959. During the investigation of a reputed ”haunted house”, two of the investigating party-Theo, an admitted lesbian, and Eleanor, a lonely, inhibited spinster-go through a curious, subtly delineated relations.h.i.+p wavering, with the intensity of the ”haunting” of the house, from attraction to intense love to unexplained revulsion. Macabre; good of its kind.
JAMES, HENRY. _Turn of the Screw._ Macmillan 1898, hcr Modern Library n d, Pocket Books and other editions. Available everywhere. Some authorities consider subtle and understated lesbianism to be the mysterious motivations behind the scenes of this curious psychological ghost story of the struggle of a governess for the souls of two young children.
_The Bostonians._ Century Magazine 1885, hcr Dial 1945.
JOHNSON, KAY. _My Name is Rusty._ Castle Books, 1958. Allegedly a novel of a woman's prison, complete with glossary of ”prison slang”-but if the author has ever been inside a woman's prison, or even done any authentic research, your editors will eat a copy of the book, complete with cover jackets. Brief plot; butchy Rusty makes a pa.s.s at prison newcomer Marcia, in order to share her commissary credits. When Rusty gets out of prison she marries and goes straight and Marcia kills herself. Read it and weep.
JONES, JAMES. _From Here to Eternity._ Scribners 1951, pbr Signet ca. 1952, (m).
KASTLE, HERBERT D. _Koptic Court._ Simon & Schuster 1958, pbr tct _Seven Keys to Koptic Court_, Crest 1959, (m).
KEENE, DAY and Leonard Pruyn. _World Without Women._ pbo Gold Medal, 1960, Science-fictional evening waster; all the women in the world die off, except a few, who must be carefully protected as potential mothers of the human race. One episode involves all the surviving lesbians, who barricade themselves in a prison. Good of type.
KENNEDY, JAY RICHARD. _Short Term._ World, 1959. This one is just out; reviews indicate some lesbian content, but this could be anything from a paragraph to three chapters. BAYOR.
KENT, JUSTIN. _Mavis._ Vixen Press 1953, pbr Beacon 1960. scv.
”Mavis is married to a lush, so she dallies and so does he, and they are really a pair of dillies dallying....”
+ KENT, NIAL. (pseud of William LeRoy Thomas) _The Divided Path_, (m). Greenberg 1949, Pyramid pbr 1951, 1952, 1959. For once the plus is used to promote personal prejudice; various authorities call this book overly sentimental. But when this hardened reviewer finds herself in tears, she's apt to think there must be something to it. Childhood, adolescence and manhood of Michael, a young h.o.m.os.e.xual, and his long-continued, scrupulously self-denying relations.h.i.+p with a boyhood friend who does not suspect his friend's ”difference”.
KENYON, THEDA. _That Skipper from Stonington._ Messner, 1946. A juvenile novel, strangely enough, found in a high school library.
The hero runs away to sea as a small boy and is protected by a man who is obviously h.o.m.os.e.xual, though the boy does not know it; the other men on the s.h.i.+p, suspecting that this relations.h.i.+p is unhealthy (it isn't) hound the boy's protector to suicide.
KEOGH, THEODORA. _Meg._ Creative Age Press 1950, pbr Signet 1952, 1956. Sublimated lesbianism in a very young girl.
_The Double Door._ Creative Age 1950, pbr Signet 1952, (m).
KESSEL, JOSEPH. _The Lion._ (trans. from French by Peter Green).
N. Y. Knopf 1959. One editor saw subtle variant emotion in the mother's attachment to a school friend.
KING, DON. _The Bitter Love._ Newsstand Library Magenta Book, 1959. Rather good evening waster about a supposed double murder, gradually solved by the slow revelation of the affair between Brenda and her 16 year old stepdaughter.
KING, MARY JACKSON. _The Vine of Glory._ Bobbs-Merrill, 1948. This won a prize as the best novel on race relations by a Southern writer for its year. A repressed, inhibited, small-town girl, Lavinia, at the mercy of elderly tyrannical relatives, forms a close friends.h.i.+p with a Negro man who was her only childhood friend. The friends.h.i.+p between Lavinia and Augustus is purely platonic; she attends a school he has set up for colored girls who wish to improve themselves, and he helps to find her a job; but enraged small-minded bigots bring on a lynching. Early in the book a preparation is laid for Lavinia's lack of friends of her own s.e.x and status by her unfortunate friends.h.i.+p with Dixie Murdoch, teen-age daughter of a Holy-roller preacher. While spending the night, Dixie attempts to make h.o.m.os.e.xual advances to the younger girl, and Lavinia becomes hysterical. The episode is brief, condemnatory and very realistic.
KIN, DAVID GEORGE. _Women Without Men._ Brookwood, 1958. The author calls this ”True stories of lesbian life in Greenwich Village”. It represents a roundup of a dozen or so famous literary and artistic figures, presented as case histories. They are presented, picture after sordid picture, without a glimmer of understanding or real insight, though he sometimes shows smug sympathy for a few he claims to have reformed by something he calls ”cultural therapy”. He baldly states in the preface: ”I take my mental hygiene from Moses, rather than Freud, and have the Mosaic horror of h.o.m.os.e.xuality”. Despite this vicious slanting, the book is explicit, funny in places, and presumably verifiable-but certainly makes h.o.m.os.e.xuality look like a Fate Worse Than Death. The writing is straight from the tabloid newspapers.
KINSEY, CHET. _Kate._ pbo, Beacon 1959. scv.
KOESTLER, ARTHUR. _Arrival and Departure._ Macmillan 1943. A man makes the most important decision of his life on the rebound of disillusion after discovering that a woman who risked her life to save him is a lesbian.
+ KRAMER, N. MARTIN (pseud. of Beatrice Ann Wright). _Hearth and The Strangeness._ Macmillan 1956, pbr Pyramid 1957. An excellent novel of the fear of inherited insanity in a family. The youngest child, Aliciane, becomes a lesbian; this is one of the few realistic and unromanticized portraits of the factors in the development of h.o.m.os.e.xuality from childhood.
_Sons of the Fathers._ Macmillan 1959, (m).
LACRETELLE, JACQUES DE. _Marie Bonifas._ (trans. from the French of La Bonifas) London & N. Y., G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1929. Cla.s.sic novel of feminine variance. Exclusively lesbian characters are rare in French literature (although bis.e.xual women are relatively common), and this was one of the best known; it follows the heroine from childhood to old age.