it may popularize the expression "double-gaited" for the bi-sexuals in our midst since this is what our hero is alleged to be, mainly on the strength of a prep-school gang-bang involving a Cuban boy and a lot of junior grade experimenters. The second reason is that the character of Marty Ruskin, playwright-producer, invites our sympathy, despite his essential unloveableness, because he is a mixed-up homosexual, smitten, first, with Hubert Ward, who treats him badly, and then with a starlet, whom Ward casually takes away from him, and who, as a result, first fails to kill Ward, and then turns his gun on himself and the girl.

Had O'Hara concentrated on Marty Ruskin rather than on Ward, whom he really fails to depict, this book might have been as rewarding as anything O'Hara has ever written.

-James Colton

THE VIGIL OF EMMELINE GORE by Rudolph von Abele, Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1962, 263 pages, $4.00.

The late distinguished French man of letters, André Gide, was a self-acknowledged homosexual. In early youth he married his first cousin, Emmanuele, a girl of almost saintly qualities. In this novel, Rudolph von Abele has told the story of a marriage paralleling that one. He names his characters Andrew and Emmeline Gore. The setting is not France but New England. Andrew is a composer rather than a writer. There are other minor differences. But essentially this is a story Gide himself told several times, writing in a style renowned for its exquisite simplicity and clarity. What, then, is author von Abele's excuse for retelling it? Evidently to give us the wife's view. And this is a good idea. The trouble is that von Abele's style is windy and obscure.

Emmeline Gore is in her sixties and

Cone

dying of leukemia. Through endless pages of massive and intractible paragraphs she re-lives in recollection her entire life, seeking an understanding of it. By means of this somewhat creaky theatrical device we learn, with immense difficulty, really quite a simple story. At fifteen Andrew proposes marriage to his cousin, with the plea, "If you don't marry me, I'll never be able to be good." Aware of his rejection of God and Christ, she hopes by marrying him to redeem him, more or less accepting his estimation of her as a saint. She does not know, nor does she learn until after their marriage, that he is a homosexual, has, in fact, no knowledge that any such phenomenon exists. That Andrew makes no sexual advances to her she accepts with only the mildest surprise. And when she chances, during their Zurich honeymoon, to come upon Andrew in bed with an apprentice waiter in the hotel, she never reveals to him what she has seen, and forces the whole episode from her mind, refusing to accept it.

In like manner, she refuses to think about the reasons behind Andrew's dismissal from the music conservatory where he has been teaching, though she knows of his attachment to a certain male student. And later. when Andrew adopts the gifted thirteen-year-old son of an impoverished clergyman friend, she can only, for a long time, resent the boy without realizing why. Ultimately, and vaguely, she acknowledges to herself the nature of Andrew's relations with Anthony. And here we have a description of the boy:

He merely looked at her and smiled, but it was a sly and knowing smile, depraved, introspective, watchful; the smile of one who has come into possession of unspeakable sources of self-indulgence, the smile of one who has been damned . .