Part 10 (2/2)
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 relations.h.i.+p, 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 refres.h.i.+ng 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 h.o.m.os.e.xuality 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 Tortoisesh.e.l.l 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.
s.h.i.+rin is the over-emotional, unconventional wife of Venn, dour owner of the ”dark island”, Storn. He treats s.h.i.+rin so badly that she seeks companions.h.i.+p, 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 heteros.e.xual 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.
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