BOOKS
BOOKS
BOOKS
Books
BOOKS
Books
BOOKS
The Wayward Ones, by Sara Harris. New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1952, $3.00. The Illusionist, by Francoise Mallet, translated from the French by Herma Briffault. New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1952 $3.00. Also Popular Library, 1953, 25 cents re-titled, "The Loving & The Daring."
The Price of Salt, by Claire Morgan. New York: Coward-McCann, Inc., 1952, $3.00.
The reader who comes to these three novels, all of which deal with the phenomenon of love between women and the culmination of that love in the form of a physical expression, must face two interesting questions. The first is the effort to evaluate a work which has some sociological value but which is of inferior literary quality. This lack of literary merit (in two of the three books, for The Illusionist is handled with a skillful and sensitive pen) is constantly facing the readers of minority, propagandistic, and missionary literature. Most of the writing in Miss Morgan's work, and all of it in Miss Harris's, is so poor that the characters can never come to life and the message that the books were meant to convey is unable to be heard.
However, to examine these three novels at one time-and this is why I have grouped them together-is to become impressed with the size and importance of the body of literature dealing with female homosexuality. Despite the works of Mann, Proust, Gide, and many others, it is doubtful if the literature of attraction between man and man can show advance-guard books that shine with the light of the works of Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, and Anais Nin; a quality of love as convincing as in the early novels of Gale Wilhelm; propaganda as sincere and protest as vociferous as that of Radclyffe Hall. To which we can now add a love story in a strange setting, told in beautiful terms, and with a singular lack of consciousness of sin, guilt, or social ostracism, as in The Illusionist.
The theme of The Illusionist is quite simple. An adolescent girl falls in love with her father's mistress. It is not a sublimated or repressed love; it finds culmination in an act of physical expression, and this act is repeated over a period of
one
page 18