CHAPTER X.

FICTION IN ENGLISH (continued)

Sequel to Censorship

Just how specifically the skirmish of censorship and its attendant

publicity affected subsequent work is difficult to say. The next few

years saw in print nothing more outspoken than translations of

Rachilde’s _Monsieur Vénus_ and Colette’s _Claudine at School_. This can

probably be attributed to caution on the part of both publishers and

authors. That antagonistic voices, first largely women’s and then men’s,

swelled into a full chorus by 1933, might similarly seem a protracted

echo of official disapproval. On the other hand, some tolerant

treatments of variance were finding publication, and in 1934 it was

these which constituted eight out of that year’s ten offerings. As to

how much the rapidly augmenting flood—a total of over thirty variant

titles in six years—was attributable to 1928’s focusing of attention on

the controversial subject, how much merely to an inevitably growing

preoccupation with it, no armchair theorizing can safely decide. But

that it owed something to the former seems beyond question.

Among this six-years’ crop a handful of more or less negative

contributions, all by American women, probably stemmed from Miss

Lehmann’s _Dusty Answer_, whatever impetus they gained from later

developments. All were novels of boarding school or women’s college

life, all autobiographical in pattern, and none were confined to variant

experience. In the first, Wanda Fraiken Neff’s _We Sing Diana_, the

variant passages would seem a deliberate counterattack upon _Well of

Loneliness_ except that the two appeared almost simultaneously in 1928.

Mrs. Neff’s heroine, an orphan brought up by a passionless spinster, is

already conditioned against heterosexual romance by her rearing and

adolescent experiences before reaching college. There, during her

freshman year, Nora is an inadvertent witness of an emotional scene

between two brilliant and respected upperclassmen.

She was conscious of the drooping narrowness of Gwendolyn’s

shoulders, the slenderness of her neck, as she threw herself against

Minna’s bulky frame.... Nora had a sick memory of the fungi she had

studied in botany, the rank growth, forms of life springing up in

unhealthy places, feeding on rot....[1]

And of a girl who suddenly embraces Nora, the author says:

There was something about Emily which brought back ... her earliest

childhood terror [a quite irrelevant incident involving a cat]. She

detached herself violently and avoided the sight of Emily’s darkly

flushing face.... Only instinct, like the swift revulsion of a young

animal sniffing a poisonous weed ... held her back.[2]

(In reality the terror here is of her own response, and the whole

picture, if the author faced it honestly, is that of the potential

variant who will suffer infinitely rather than admit her own

inclination.) She, like most of her friends, can achieve no adequate

relations with men in their limited environment, and Nora herself, after

a later somewhat unconvincing fortnight’s liaison terminated by her

lover’s sudden death, drifts back via graduate study abroad to be dean

in just such a college as she left.

A milder reaction is registered in _Against the Wall_ (1929) by Kathleen

Millay, sister of Edna St. Vincent, whose variant publications were by

then several years old. The younger Millay’s theme is mainly protest

against the restricted position of women, including an arraignment of

the women’s college, which should educate its students to be adult, but,

while doing so, treats them as children. Her references to variance are

belittling. The phenomenon seems confined to a handful of girls on the

campus, one of whom is threatened with dismissal by the student

president. But the heroine, Rebecca, has overheard during her freshman

year that same president sob out her love for a boyish upperclassman,

and she now threatens the disciplinarian with exposure unless her

present harsh fiat is rescinded. In the course of an inevitable “bull

session” after this incident, Rebecca expresses her opinion to timidly

questioning fellow students.

“Is anything that doesn’t end in—babies—abnormal, perverted?”

“I suppose so, if you come right down to it.”

“If there’s so much of it I don’t see why it’s abnormal.”

“No,” said Rebecca, “neither do I. Only like a lot of other things,

the word has come to be more important than what it stands for.

Anyway, I think most women would be more happy with a man for a—best

friend—than with a woman. What do you think?”[3]

To this Socratic question there is a chorus of affirmatives from

everyone save a member of the suspect group who chances to be present.

Marion Patton-Waldron’s _Dance on the Tortoise_ (1930) is set in a

boarding school. A girl just out of college, feeling herself emotionally

unready for marriage, seeks greater maturity through a year of teaching,

and inauspicious though the chosen milieu might seem, she achieves her

goal. She is drawn early into emotional friendship with a French

colleague, Helene. A similar bond exists between the headmistress and an

older teacher, a pair unseparated since their college days, and Lydia

learns that they have been seen passionately kissing; however, she

shrinks from similar expression with her friend. Helene becomes involved

in an affair with a countryman which ends with her death from induced

miscarriage. It is only after this tragedy, the precise cause of which

the innocent Lydia only half-guesses, that she wonders whether Helene

might not have resisted seduction had she herself been able to give her

friend the emotional release so badly needed. But she knows she could

never have done so. In her distress she turns to the headmistress, only

to find the latter growing overfond of her. In the end she accepts her

deferred suitor eagerly:

“These bunches of women living together, falling in love with each

other because they haven’t anyone else to fall in love with! It’s

obscene! Oh, take me away!”[4]

Apparently she is alone in feeling so. Students and teachers consider

the relation between the headmistress and her friend admirable and

touching. Like those in Henry Handel Richardson’s Australian school two

decades earlier, they are not only without immediate suspicion, but

ignorant of any discreditable possibilities. This is very nearly the

last work of fiction to claim such innocence for its characters.

In the same year Elisabeth Wilkins Thomas, in _Ella_, touched on

variance so gingerly as to be almost ambiguous. Ella knows but two real

drives throughout—one a love of poetry, the other a compulsion

comparable to Mary MacLane’s “not to give up my me-ness.” In college she

derives an intellectual thrill so keen as to carry strong emotional

overtones in the philosophy classes of a casual, tailored, and sardonic

woman professor. However, their relation is confined to the classroom.

Later as a private-school teacher Ella is closely attached to an older

colleague, and though the two speak frankly of loving one another, no

passion is admitted between them. Madge has, in her youth, been deeply

attached to a younger girl whom she helped and protected when both were

students in Germany. When this ex-protégée, now married and a mother,

pays a visit to the cottage where Madge and Ella are summering together,

Ella finds herself dreading the visit. Her dread grows with Madge’s

minute, feverishly excited preparations for her old love’s advent, and

unconscious jealousy is clearly at its root. But the young mother and

her closeknit little family barely pause for a meal, unaware, in their

happy self-absorption, of the disappointment dealt by their refusal to

accept further hospitality. Madge, long afflicted with a heart

condition, has overexerted herself in preparation, and hidden grief at

its futility brings on a fatal attack. Only the depth of Ella’s

loneliness after her friend’s death brings home to her how much of her

“me-ness” has been jeopardized in this relationship, and she determines

to depend thereafter only upon herself and the solacing beauty of

poetry. Her solitary orphaned childhood is the apparent explanation of

her narcissistic fear of personal involvement.

Mary Lapsley’s _Parable of the Virgins_ (1931) devotes rather more space

to variance than its predecessors. Its theme, like theirs, is the

failure of women’s colleges to deal adequately with the emotional fevers

bred of segregation during late adolescence. Along with a few grave

heterosexual crises—one, an abortion which its subject faces without

remorse because of the wholesome first-hand knowledge of life she has

gained—there are variant entanglements involving half a dozen or more

girls, though none of the relations are admitted to be lesbian. Mary,

antagonistic to men, is obsessed by passion for Jessica, whom she

induces to break a lukewarm engagement. Then Bob, a boarding school

product “like a nice athletic boy,” precipitates tragedy by flirting

with her adored. Mary’s furious jealousy moves an unsympathetic dean

(had the author perhaps known one like Mrs. Neff’s “Nora”?) to separate

her from Jessica by telling Mary that the latter is her victim, fearing

and hating her but unable to break the unwholesome spell without help.

In consequence, Mary hangs herself. Jessica then collapses, and her

state is so aggravated by the harshness of the college’s woman physician

that an understanding faculty member interferes and introduces a

psychiatrist. Like Millay, the author puts her own comment into the

mouth of a brilliant student:

If the college had known more about human nature it would ... have

said to Mary, “Fight out your own salvation, you have as much right

to it as Jessica.” But the college did not believe that, and Mary

herself did not believe it.... Whatever one may think of the

[homosexual] relation ... one thing is worse: to permit a human being

to live in an atmosphere of constant disapproval.... When the moment

to resist [suicide] came she was too weakened, too convinced that she

had sinned.[5]

The second variant constellation centers about Crosby, “the college

poet,” a senior of twenty-four who has already published some volumes of

verse. (As Mrs. Lapsley’s college was Vassar, it is impossible not to

identify Crosby with Edna St. Vincent Millay.) This histrionic aesthete

has had experience with more than one man, but her chief interest is in

cultivating “crushes” to bolster her ego. Her favorite, an idealistic

freshman, is saved from grave harm by overhearing her cruelty to one or

two other victims, and emerges with enough maturity to retain

independence and yet not to hate her fallen idol.

* * * * *

Turning to items outside the college category, the briefest of 1929’s

comments on variance was the bitter passage in Theiss’s translated

_Interlude_, in which lesbianism is excoriated and held responsible for

the failure of its victim’s first marriage. Equally hostile was Wyndham

Lewis’s _Apes of God_ (1930). In substance Lewis’s sophisticated satire

is related to those of Firbank in its concern with male homosexuals, and

his writing about them has something of Firbank’s zany touch. But his

references to a mannish middle-aged spinster are contemptuous, and his

chapter “The Lesbian Ape,” in which an equally mannish sculptress keeps

a male nude model posing until he faints, and then stands above his

prostrate six-feet-two of Greek magnificence and leers asininely with

her silly inamorata, is written with undiluted hate.[6]

In the single novel of these two years wholly devoted to variance, Naomi

Royde-Smith’s _The Island_ (1929), implicit censure is more impersonal

but equally harsh, and the influence of Freud is obvious. In the same

author’s _Tortoiseshell Cat_, it will be remembered, an intellectual

London girl narrowly escapes a lesbian attachment. Here the gauche and

provincial Myfanwy Hughes succumbs, with distressing consequences. An

orphan brought up by a prudish spinster aunt, the girl at nineteen is

sent to a farm in Wales for her health. Because she is timid, awkward,

and painfully shocked by talk of animal breeding, her uncle dubs her

Goosey, a nickname she later tries to shed but never outlives.

Believing herself to be without the power to attract, she substituted

a horror of the physical triumphs of sex for a regret that she could

not hope to take her part in them.[7] [The classic refusal to

compete.]

In the spring a combination of sunshine and physical well-being produces

a momentary emotional release which the author equates explicitly with

mystical religious experience. The transient mood crystallizes upon a

handsome farmer riding by on a stallion, but he is too occupied with his

restive mount to give her a second glance, and this failure to attract

even when aglow with new physical awareness plunges Goosey back into

complete heterosexual frustration.

Now all her thwarted impulses center upon a female summer boarder from

Liverpool, an egomaniac of twenty-four who poses as petite and helpless.

Goosey’s enslavement dates from her chance glimpse of the girl nude to

the waist, but their association stays within an early-teen pattern of

endless confidences and sentimental endearments. After Almond’s

departure Goosey lives only for her letters. The country couple who saw

no harm in the active friendship regards this preoccupation as so

“morbid” that they ship the girl back to her Liverpool aunt to remove

her influence from their daughter. In the city, Almond’s snobbishness

and Goosey’s jealousy of her impending marriage separate the two for a

few years, during which Goosey loses her aunt and is driven by

loneliness to consider the suit of a widower many years her senior. She

covets the prestige of marriage, and one gathers that her physical

distaste for the idea might wane but for her occasional distant glimpses

of Almond. She has reached the point of betrothal when Almond bursts

into her life again, begging sanctuary from a cruel husband, whereupon

Goosey dismisses her suitor and arranges a future _à deux_ with her

adored in the huge ugly house she has inherited. However, at the “cruel”

spouse’s first summons Almond is off again, and there follow decades of

periodic returns made only when she wishes to spite her husband or,

years later, an independent daughter. Goosey’s life is spent in waiting.

Early in this intermittent association the two women became intimate.

For Goosey at first,

Here were no reluctances, no shame, no abashment. This was love

without conditions, maternal in tenderness, marital in strength, but

equal and unfettering.[8]

But as the relation progresses she has misgivings, never more

specifically accounted for than that “now there was something else. They

never spoke to one another about it—even at night. And in the daytime

Goosey pretended it wasn’t true.”[9] Soon tensions and quarrels develop,

and eventually, being left alone for long stretches, Goosey feels

occasional attractions to other women. The strongest attraction is

inspired by a new milliner from London, a charming and competent woman

who, out of pity for her outmoded rival, considers taking Goosey into

partnership. But she is regaled on all sides with well-founded gossip of

Goosey’s long “queerness,” and while her decision is hanging fire,

Almond once more appears and buys a hat in the new shop. Goosey sees

this as not only black disloyalty to herself but as a move to captivate

the new proprietress, and her jealous hysteria alienates both women

permanently.

Now completely solitary, Goosey falls captive to a male evangelist’s

magnetism. This maladjusted celibate labors for social as well as

spiritual reform; his immediate goal is the suburb’s beautification,

which has been hampered by reactionaries. Among them, Goosey had been

one of the most stubborn, but now her religious near-conversion wakes a

sense of guilt concerning her relations with Almond, and she resolves to

give up the hideous house she has kept as a sanctuary for her friend.

She makes an appointment with the revivalist, planning full confession

and the sacrifice of her property, but before this occurs, Almond meets

the man and so ensnares him that he marries her almost at once.

Henceforth, Goosey shuts herself into her dreadful house, willfully

defying love, beauty, and goodness, and ends as a mad old woman.

In _The Tortoiseshell Cat_ the lesbian aggressor was somewhat masculine,

and had herself been seduced when young. In _The Island_ no hereditary

traits are apparent in either woman, nor has either any variant history.

Conditioning is over-labored in Goosey’s case, while Almond is an almost

incredible monster of egotism. Whereas the earlier novel created the

illusion of being drawn from life, this one smacks too strongly of a

case history to come off well artistically.

A milder but scarcely happy picture is painted in _That Other Love_

(1930) by Geoffrey Moss (on internal evidence probably a woman).

Phillida, daughter of a well-born Englishman (who dies while she is an

infant) and a joyously vulgar actress, enjoys ten years of bohemia

before her father’s relatives claim her. The widowed aunt who then

assumes her upbringing is a perfectionist and very possessive. At

sixteen, overprotected, a recluse, and too suddenly launched in the

social life of the Twenties, Phillida is violently revolted by the

advances of a professional seducer. In her panic she clings to a cool

and serene sculptress who rescues her from the drunken party where she

was molested. After some years in art school and an abortive romance

with a man old enough to be her father, she again meets the sculptress

at a seaside resort, is again drawn to her, and wants to paint her

portrait. The older woman will not permit this until they have returned

to the anonymity of London. There they become intimate (though this is

not explicitly admitted), and subsequently live together for four years

in an isolated cottage in Normandy.

Then Phillida becomes convinced of her need for children—“not a man—I

could never love a man as I love you”—and she determines to marry one of

her suitors, all of whom appear either naïve or indifferent to her

variant interlude. The older woman, reluctant from the first to

sacrifice her detached serenity but now as dependent on her young

companion as the girl is on her, stoically accepts the inevitable and

sets about readjusting herself to a life alone.

* * * * *

In addition to the translation of Colette’s second Claudine volume as

_Young Lady of Paris_ (and Mrs. Lapsley’s college story), 1931 produced

an interesting contrast: one novel of highest quality, Dorothy

Richardson’s _Dawn’s Left Hand_, and one, the first of its kind in our

immediate field, which was cheaply sensational. This last, Sheila

Donisthorpe’s _Loveliest of Friends_, may be left for discussion with

others of its ilk. Miss Richardson’s title was tenth in the dozen

comprising _Pilgrimage_, her Proustian chronicle of an English girl’s

development from childhood to maturity. This particular volume contrasts

Miriam’s two simultaneous love affairs, one with a younger woman, one

with a scientific-minded novelist-reformer, Hypo, whom literary gossip

has identified as H. G. Wells. Though chronology is vague in this stream

of consciousness record, Miriam must at this time have reached her

middle or late twenties. By virtue of education and background she moves

among the Bloomsbury literati, but since she supports herself as a

dentist’s receptionist, she must live in an ordinary London boarding

house, and it is against the latter background that the emotional drama

with Amabel unfolds. This charming girl, half-Parisian, half-Irish, is

also involved in a liaison with an Englishman of distinction. A beauty,

and ultra-feminine, it is nevertheless she who takes the initiative in

the rapidly flowering friendship. The quality of the relation is

conveyed in such passages as the following:

... the Sunday following the evening at Mrs. Bellamy’s, where we were

separated and mingling in various groups ... and suddenly met and

were filled with the same longing, to get away and lie side by side

in the darkness ... talking it all over until sleep should come

without any interval of going off into the seclusion of our separate

minds ... [then] waking and seeing with the same eyes at the same

moment ... the wet gray roofs across the way.[10]

There is no suggestion of physical relations, and in another place the

author describes as their most intimate moments the silences in which

they were

suddenly and intensely aware of each other and the flow of their

wordless communion, making the smallest possible movements of the

head now this way now that, like birds in a thicket intensely

watching and listening; but without bird-anxiety.[11]

In recording the affair with Hypo, on the other hand, considerable

physical detail is given, as for example the first time the two saw one

another unclothed:

This mutual nakedness was appeasing rather than stimulating. And

austere. His body was not beautiful. She could find nothing to adore,

no ground for response.... The manly structure, the smooth, satiny

sheen in place of her own velvety glow was interesting as partner and

foil, but not desirable.... It had no power to stir her as often she

had been stirred by the sudden sight of him walking down a garden or

entering a room.[12]

The climax of this affair occurs while Miriam is house guest of Hypo and

his wife, a woman so selfless that she pretends blindness to his

infidelities because they benefit his work. Miriam wakes in the night to

find her host at her bedside, and suffers his possession in

an immense fathomless black darkness through which, after an

instant’s sudden descent into her clenched and rigid form, she was

now traveling alone on and on, without thought or memory or any

emotion save the strangeness of this journeying.[13]

At another time

she demanded of herself whether she cared for him in the slightest

degree or for anyone or anything so much as the certainty of being in

communion with something always there, something in which and through

which people could meet and whose absence, felt with people who did

not acknowledge it, made life at once impossible, made it a death

worse than dying....

There was a woman, not this thinking self who talked with men in

their own language, but one whose words could be spoken only from the

heart’s knowledge, waiting to be born in her.... Men want recognition

of their work to help them believe in themselves.... Unless in some

form they get it, all but the very few are miserable. Women ... want

recognition of themselves ... before they can come fully to birth.

Homage for what they are and represent.

He was incapable of homage.... It was his constricted, biological way

of seeing sex that kept him blind.[14]

So specific a contrast between the psychology of the two sexes suggests

that the whole volume may have been written as a contribution to the

current dispute over the value of variant love. During Miriam’s total

history (recorded in subsequent volumes) she loves two other men, but

without physical intimacy. Neither is conspicuously male in appearance

and both are preoccupied with subjective aspects of personal relations.

Plainly Miss Richardson, like Mrs. Woolf, feels that between the most

sharply differentiated members of the two sexes, the biological act can

be the only bond.

Miss Richardson’s novel was sexually frank but took care to imply the

absence of physical intimacy between its variant women. In the one

acceptable sympathetic study of 1932 Naomi Mitchison employed other

means of avoiding offense. “The Delicate Fire” is the title story in a

collection of short narratives of ancient Greece. Miss Mitchison,

daughter of a schoolmaster, wrote several volumes recapturing the life

of the past, possibly designed for her father’s older students, but on

an adult level with regard to historic mores. This particular tale

covers some months in the late adolescence of Brocheo, daughter of the

favorite of Sappho. Since her widowed mother cannot leave the country

estate which supports them, Brocheo is sent to an aunt in Mitylene to be

prepared for a fitting marriage. Sappho’s open quarrel over her

brother’s alliance with the courtesan, Doricha, has inclined

conservative mothers to entrust their daughters’ training to the

conventional Andromeda, but a passionate friendship between Brocheo’s

young cousin and Sappho’s daughter Kleis draws the older girl into

contact with the famous poet. The precocious Kleis analyzes as the key

to her mother’s temperament a desire to possess utterly anyone she

loves, estranging her from one after another of her beloved friends when

they marry, and making it difficult for Kleis to have either suitors or

close friends. But Brocheo senses genius in Sappho’s intensity as

compared to Andromeda’s polite talent, and becomes the great poet’s

willing pupil. The story ends discreetly with the beginning of Brocheo’s

tutelage, for some given details of a scene between Kleis and her young

friend suggest that had it continued into the relation between Sappho

and Brocheo it would have sailed in dangerous waters.

This was the year in which the German motion picture _Mädchen in

Uniform_ was released and Weirauch’s _Scorpion_ translated. (The

latter’s sequel, _The Outcast_, followed in 1933.) Except for these,

1932 boasted only a pair of titles on a level with Miss Donisthorpe’s

mentioned above, which must wait for later consideration. After this

season in which everything published, no matter what the quality, was

relatively tolerant of variance, the pendulum swung back in 1933, when

but one of five authors had even a moderate word to say for it.

The most nearly sympathetic was Thomas Beer, whose volume of short

stories, _Mrs. Egg and Other Barbarians_, included “Hallowe’en,” written

in 1927 but not, like the others, previously published in magazines. In

this tale the monumental but endearing Mrs. Egg, inveterate eater of

sweets and worshipper of her tall son, Adam, encounters on Hallowe’en

night the striking Bill Sloan, village tomboy, whom she had known before

her marriage and removal to New York some years earlier. Now divorced,

Bill has come back to visit her girlhood chum, wife of a friend of

Adam’s. Mrs. Egg elicits from Adam that Jane’s husband is “out of luck

nights,” and they agree that the fault lies in the girl’s

upbringing—“Jane’s mama was too much of a lady to say drawers in a

King’s Daughters meetin’. I bet the darn truth is Janie’s scared of men

yet.” Anent Bill’s divorce, they recall that

“Dr. Sloan raised Bill peculiar. He believed folks are just—s’perior

kind of animals. No souls or nothin’. I never can get shocked any

about sensible people’s morals.... I just want to say this for Bill.

I bet she don’t do any harm.”[15]

This was written at the height of that psychological season when parents

could do no right; but Beer concedes to the hereditary camp Bill’s

height and absence of hips, and both girls’ tenor speaking voices. Mrs.

Egg is called out from her grandson’s hilarious party for a farewell

from Jane and Bill, who because they admire the wholesome woman

profoundly, want her to be first to know they are leaving—“for good.”

Jane begs Mrs. Egg to look after her husband, against whom she has

nothing save that she cannot endure marriage and “loves someone else

more.” Without protest Mrs. Egg busies herself with lunch for the night

travelers—they are driving—and sends them off, perhaps significantly

just before midnight of the witches’ holiday. But after they have gone

she can say only

“They’re human beings, Dammy. [But] if they’d stayed a minute longer

I’d ha’ screamed. Oh, Dammy, ain’t things peculiar!”[16]

She is consoled by learning that Adam thinks this the only solution for

all concerned and has foreseen tragedy from the moment of Jane’s

marriage.

The next episode, narrowly skirting the sensational level, was included

in _Orient Express_ by the British Graham Greene,[17] who in 1933 was

writing only psychological thrillers. A lesbian journalist, after

supporting for four years a beautiful countrywoman picked up in a

cinema, realizes she is about to lose her love to a man (“How could one

hold her, with only a mouth?”) Philosophically cutting her losses, Mabel

decides to capture Carol, a dancer traveling alone on the Express, and

immediately begins to plan the redecoration of her London apartment in

honor of her new conquest. The plot develops otherwise, however, and

Mabel goes on alone.

In _Entertaining the Islanders_, Struthers Burt’s most sophisticated

effort, he treats the modish theme less gently. After a three-year

liaison with a rather hard woman journalist, the hero falls genuinely in

love during a winter in the Bahamas, and returns to New York to break

with his old flame. Even during their intimacy Marian “had made no

pretense of faithfulness,” but what frees him of any remorse at severing

the connection is his discovery that she is now involved with a married

woman,

a small beautiful bronze young woman with square-cut yellow hair.

Taut, condensed, masterful, engraved.... Her brilliant tawny eyes

looked David up and down without interest. In the jacket of her dark

suit was a white camellia.... Marian was nothing if not up to date,

was she?[18]

He wonders how husbands put up with “childlike little ghosts....

Children making childlike little substitutions for reality ... and

always so proud of their substitutions.”[19] This, of course, is close

to quotation from Freud.

Sinclair Lewis hit even harder in _Ann Vickers_. The chief figure in his

briefly sketched tragedy, Eleanor Crevecoeur, was in an early section of

the novel devoted to the battle for suffrage, and was humorous,

fearless, and intelligent, though “looking all the time like an anemic

Bourbon princess.” Later during World War I she has one serious liaison

with a man and an exhausting list of casual affairs. Then she meets a

sleekly tailored woman executive of a department store with a Ph.D. in

psychology. Dr. Herringdean frightens off the heterogeneous swarm of

males and appropriates Eleanor for herself. But once her prey is caught,

she loses interest, turns pettily cruel, and pursues other women.

Eleanor wastes to a neurotic wraith and finally commits suicide. The

whole episode occupies only ten pages, but is mordant and damning.

The final blow of the year was struck by George Jean Nathan, dramatic

critic for the _American Statesman_, in a slapstick parody offered as a

critique of the current British drama. Nathan had commented earlier

(without special reference to England) on “the increasing number of

women players who are of the sexual disposition of the Aeolian Greek

colonizers,” and on their “freezing” presence on the stage—“all their

emotional scenes are dead.”[20] In this skit, “Design for Loving,” (the

title a jibe at Noel Coward’s _Design for Living_), the cast includes:

Lord Derek, a hermaphrodite; his father, an onanist; his mother, a

lesbian; his sister, a flagellant; Lady Vi Twining, his sister’s

friend, an auto-erotist with tribade tendencies; his servant, a

homosexual and transvestist;[21]

et cetera. Though the dialogue is so caricatured as to mar the wit, it

mentions the many one-sexed couples to be seen in any large hotel or

restaurant, and the negligible action includes “significant” glances and

caresses among the three women. Plays other than Coward’s (if any) that

might have inspired this effort have not been discovered.

If Nathan hoped to purge the current theatre by ridicule, he was doomed

to prompt disappointment. In 1934 a translation of _Mädchen in Uniform_

adapted to the legitimate stage was produced by high-grade amateur

groups in more than one large American city and played to crowded

houses, and late in the year Lillian Hellman’s _The Children’s Hour_

began its successful run on Broadway. This was subsequently taken over

by Hollywood, and readers who saw only the film will wonder at its

inclusion here. The mainspring of the plot was the same in both

versions—the ruin of a thriving boarding school and of the two young

women who own it through vicious slander circulated by a pupil, already

a well-developed paranoiac at the age of twelve. In the film one of the

women is accused of intimacy with her fiancé, the school physician.

In the play as Miss Hellman wrote it the charge is lesbianism between

the two mistresses. This fabrication, fairly sophisticated for a

twelve-year-old, is the fruit in part of surreptitious reading of _Mlle

Maupin_, in part of an overheard quarrel between one of the young women

and an aunt who taunts her with jealousy of her friend’s fiancé. The

dreadful child’s garbled exaggerations galvanize her grandmother into

hasty action. Over-night the school is emptied by horrified parents. The

young women lose their suit for slander through the cowardly flight of

the aunt, their chief witness. The younger woman breaks her engagement

when she sees that her fiancé will never be sure but that a grain of

truth underlay the slander. The other woman is tortured into realizing

for the first time that she has never cared for men, and that unadmitted

passion has in fact underlain her restrained love for her friend.

Feeling irremediably soiled, she shoots herself. As its easy Hollywood

transmutation proves, the core of this tragedy is not the persecution of

variance. It is the destruction of two blameless individuals through

hysterical prejudice, and the lesbian issue is only a super-explosive

detonator of that hysteria. But is the older woman’s suicide a tragic

waste chargeable to the social mores which made her feel so soiled? Or

is it tragic merely because she is physically innocent—that is, does

Miss Hellman, like Mendès, distinguish between light and darkness here

on the strength of technicalities alone? The text provides no answer.

The rest of the year’s offerings were fiction ranging in quality from

that of Henry Handel Richardson, Victoria Sackville-West and Isak

Dinesen to the now frequent sensational penny-catchers. Probably most of

the book of short stories, _The End of a Childhood_, which Miss

Richardson gave to the public in 1934, were written earlier. The title

group consists of fragments related to her _Richard Mahoney_ novels

(1917-1929) which seem rather discards than sequels (as were those in

Galsworthy’s _On Forsyte ’Change_). Another group entitled “Growing

Pains” is more reminiscent of her _Getting of Wisdom_ of 1910. Indeed,

of these eight sketches, six present so integrated an emotional sequence

that although their girls bear different names one wonders whether they

are not bits from a trial flight toward another novel centered about a

woman. A noteworthy feature in all these sketches, as also in _The

Getting of Wisdom_, is the absence of a father and the relative

insignificance or incompatibility of the mother.

In “The Bathe” a beautiful child of six is sickened by the physical

ugliness of two obese middle-aged women who strip and bathe nude, with

self-conscious tittering, on an isolated beach. Until this moment the

child has been eager for adult status, but now “oh never—never—no, not

ever now did she want to grow up.” In “Preliminary Canter” one

twelve-year-old girl adores another and is baffled and furious when the

latter “flirts” with a farm hand. “Conversation in a Pantry” presents

the uneasy efforts of a girl of fourteen to learn from one three years

older what it is one must “take care about” when out with boys. She gets

evasive answers, but they are sufficient to recall her disgust upon

first realizing that married couples sleep in the same bed. On the other

hand, as her informant speaks of her own love, “she had never known

before that Alice was so pretty, with dimples round her mouth and her

eyes all shady. Oh, could it mean that—yes, it must: Alice simply didn’t

_mind_.” “The Wrong Turning” pictures the violent shock to another

fourteen-year-old, invited to go rowing by an interesting new

schoolfellow (male), when the pair blunder on a swimming hole where

naked soldiers are indulging in harmless but rough horseplay, and the

men shout suggestively after the embarrassed youngsters.

“And Women Must Weep” is the aftermath of an eighteen-year-old’s

long-anticipated first ball. She has been a wallflower, and afterwards,

locked in her room,

Oh the shame of it!... not to have “taken,” to have failed to

“attract the gentlemen”—this was a slur that would rest on her all

her life. And yet a small voice that wouldn’t be silenced kept on

saying “It wasn’t my _fault_!” ... She had tried her hardest, done

everything she was told to ... [but] really, truly, right deep down

in her, she hadn’t wanted “the gentlemen” any more than they’d wanted

her: she had only had to pretend to.... She cried till she could cry

no more.[22]

The final and longest sketch, “Two Hanged Women,” gives as it were the

cumulative result of such experiences. The word “hanged,” it should be

noted, is merely a mild and dated Australian expletive equivalent to the

American “darned,” and is applied to a pair of young women by a couple

who find the two in their own favorite spot for petting, but its use in

the title lends a telling _double entendre_. The older girl, nearing

thirty, is tall and thin with straight bobbed hair and a man’s gait. The

other, in her middle twenties, has been urged to marry by a dominating

mother, but is nauseated by physical contact with her beau, Fred. Even

if he sits too close she must “screw herself up” to bear it. On the

other hand, she craves the social status of a regularly courted girl,

and indulges in a brief fantasy of being escorted by the handsome and

devoted man. People are sympathetic to that, she says, and “let us into

the dark corner seats at the pictures as if we’d a right to them. And

they never laugh. Oh, I can’t _stick_ being laughed at!”[23] After the

bitter retort, “Gawd! Why not make a song of it?” her companion claims

that it is the mother who has put these romantic notions into her

daughter’s head. Whenever the two girls are out together the mother is

furious, and “does she need to open her mouth? Not she! She’s only got

to let it hang at the corners and you reek, you drip with guilt.”[24]

The sketch ends with the younger girl shuddering and crying out that she

would “rather die twice over” than submit to Fred’s passion. She clings

to her friend, who holds her in a gentle and maternal embrace. Taken all

together, these half-dozen vignettes present a most convincing etiology

for a homosexual woman.

In Victoria Sackville-West’s _Dark Island_ (1934) the reserved and

elusive Shirin, oldest child in a family best described as philistine,

cultivates defensive reticence. She desires “quietly to remain

unguessed, unknown, and thus to protect oneself from the pain of life.”

During summers on the southwest coast of England she falls in love with

a rocky island a mile offshore, tree-covered and crowned by the romantic

pile of LeBreton castle, because it seems the embodiment of her dreams

of privacy. After a successful decade in London society which includes

marriage and children, she finds her life so pointlessly harried that

she escapes it by a quixotic sacrifice of maternal ties and reputation.

In her thirties she enters upon a second marriage with Sir Venn

LeBreton, owner and virtual overlord of the island of Storn. It is

largely for the sake of his island that she marries him, for to her it

is still the remote and secret sanctuary for which she has hungered all

her life. When, with the intuition of the fiercely proud, Sir Venn

divines her motive, he makes clear at once that the property descends in

the male line, wives are mere consorts and heir-bearers, and Storn is no

more hers than any servant’s. Thus, she has merely involved herself in a

barren and humiliating life imprisonment. Soon she discovers that her

husband is at times a physical as well as a mental sadist, and her

misery reaches desperation unrelieved by the bearing of two children.

Since her teens she has had one constant friend, Cristina, a tall,

powerful and competent woman, but their relation has been so reserved,

so impersonal, that only its persistence has raised it above mere

acquaintance. In her loneliness Shirin turns, though without unburdening

herself, to Cristina; and after his male secretary suddenly dies, she

prevails upon her husband to engage her friend. The latter perceives at

once that Shirin’s life is wretched, but she is vouchsafed no more

explanation than becomes slowly evident to her loving eyes. More and

more as time passes, however, Shirin comes to depend upon her for just

such wordless but complete communion as that between Miriam and Amabel

in _Dawn’s Left Hand_. Sir Venn presently becomes aware of this bond,

and unable to move his wife from her determination that her friend shall

stay with her or she herself will leave, he takes Cristina sailing on a

day of squalls and returns alone with a story of her accidental

drowning. Shirin accepts this story impassively and continues to live

with him, outwardly composed but inwardly in torment. When, some years

later, he taunts her with his having deliberately eliminated Cristina,

she soon contrives his death in return by a long kiss after she is sure

that she is stricken with diphtheria. He dies and she survives, but

since Storn is now his son’s and the son is a replica of the father, she

soon declines to a willful death.

Two points should be noted here: first, the stress laid on the

impersonality of the two women’s relationship until Shirin’s marriage

becomes a torture justifying any human solace; and second, the ingenuity

employed to contrive her ominous situation. Sir Venn and his feudal

domain are the stuff of post-Elizabethan tragedy on gothic romance,

difficult of assimilation into a twentieth-century pattern. But the

island’s isolation sets it apart from the present, just as Shirin’s

withdrawn spirit separates her a little from current reality. Thus the

tenuous variant union can flower without reference to society, and the

triangular drama can be enacted beyond the world’s reach. This latter

portion of the novel is in miniature as much of a _tour de force_ as

Mrs. Woolf’s _Orlando_, and the similarity is particularly interesting

in that the elusive Shirin is hauntingly reminiscent of Clarissa

Dalloway in Mrs. Woolf’s book which her own preface proclaims to be

tinged with autobiography.

As distinguished as the work of these two British women was _Seven

Gothic Tales_ (1934) by the Danish Isak Dinesen (Baroness Karen Blixen),

whose artistry in English is as remarkable as Conrad’s. She is also

adroit in maintaining a continental outlook without offending her

adopted audience, a feat she achieves by setting her tales in a day when

the Romantic Period had the freshness of youth, and recounting them with

a serene detachment which precludes “reader participation.” No more than

discreet hints of male homosexuality lend flavor to “The Monkey,” and in

“The Roads Around Pisa” the two feminine romances contributing to the

involved plot are seen in retrospect, only one member of each pair

actually appearing in the narrative. The younger of these two women,

Agnese, is a transvestist who has traveled for a year as a man. Her

reasons are disclosed gradually. Her beloved friend, like Lamartine’s

Clothilde, was obliged to marry an elderly Croesus though she was in

love with a young cousin. Afterward, when she occasionally slipped out

to meet her love, her bosom friend, Agnese, allayed suspicion by

occupying her bed, a safe enough favor since the husband was impotent

and took his pleasure in toying with his “lovely pet” by day; at night

merely inspecting her room to know she was there. To keep the world from

guessing his humiliating secret he required a child, and sent a

surrogate of his own choosing to effect that end one night when Agnese

had taken his wife’s place. Already indifferent to men, Agnese was

goaded by this violation to abandon the feminine role altogether and

roam the country as a Byronic gentleman.

The very old lady whom a highroad accident leads to unburden herself to

a fellow traveler while expecting death, has, like Agnese, been averse

to men all her life, but social necessity has made her wife, mother, and

now grandmother. The fact that her daughter died in childbirth has

increased her animus against the male sex, and her granddaughter’s

marrying in the face of her prohibition has estranged them. She tells

her confidant, a melancholy Hamlet, that in her long life she has known

but two passions, one for a girlhood friend from Denmark, the other for

her beautiful grandchild. She cannot die without sending her forgiveness

to the girl, and she extracts from the young Danish listener a promise

to deliver her message. Contrary to her expectations, however, she

lives, is happily reunited with her granddaughter, and through love for

the latter’s infant son at last achieves tolerance for the opposite sex

(cf. _Marie Bonifas_). She also discovers that her Danish messenger is

nephew of her first beloved, who died a spinster. Since both these loves

are recounted by one of their actors, they do not appear on the surface

to have been lesbian, but there are certainly no implications to the

contrary. The two women, young and old, appearing in the story are both

somewhat masculine; of each pair of loving women, one never married; and

for three of the four, the early variant love seems to have been the

most vivid of their lives, surviving marriage or other liaisons.

Another contribution from the continent was the translation of Colette’s

_Claudine s’en Va_ as _The Innocent Wife_. Properly it is fourth in its

series, but it lacks the outright lesbian element of the third, which

awaited publication in the following year. All the Claudine novels, it

should be noted, were issued in the United States, while England risked

no sympathetic treatments more overt than those of Geoffrey Moss, the

two Richardsons, and Miss Sackville-West.

The remainder of the year’s crop were also American, two of good

quality. One was Anthony Thorne’s heartening idyll, _Delay in the Sun_,

in which forty-eight hours’ suspension of bus service in Spain resolves

a variety of emotional conflicts in its English passengers’ lives. The

variant couple are mannish Jean Porteous, daughter of a titled British

family and a rebel against the social existence expected of her, and

Betty Sale-Jones, blonde, helpless and fluttering, from “the plastery

gentility of Kensington.” Thus far their common bond has been the

determination to escape family strictures and win personal freedom. They

are merely good companions with some tentative notions of sharing a flat

in London on returning from their trip. Then their visit to an empty

bull ring moves Jean to mimic with startling verisimilitude the Spanish

performers both have seen.

In the hot Spanish sunlight she played at bull fighting for the sake

of a pretty girl in a yellow dress who sat in the _barrera_. Playing

together, they mocked a dangerous game. And dangerously they entered

a secret world in which they had so great a need of each other.[25]

Later in the moonlight they visit the flower-drenched public gardens and

lie on the warm grass, “fingers still linked as they lay looking upwards

into the sparkling sky.” When they come back to lights and crowds they

fall paralyzingly shy and dare not share their common room and bed.

After a restless night apart, each comes to much the same conclusion:

What had happened to them last night was something beyond their

control. Then let this strange force follow its own law—let it part

them forever or join them forever. It was something too big for their

reason, and too delicate.... Of no use to fight, reason, or

wonder.[26]

And it is without further resolution of their problem that they let the

suddenly-restored bus service carry them away from the scene of their

inarticulate romance. The author has cannily left each reader to supply

what sequel best satisfies his own philosophy, but the lingering mood is

distinctly one of warm tolerance and sympathy rather than disapproval.

In _After Such Pleasures_, on the other hand, Dorothy Parker grazes the

surface of variance with flippant malice. The final story, “Glory in the

Daytime,” sketches the tentative advances of a New York sophisticate to

a newly arrived and naïve little wife with a passion for stage

celebrities. Using the long-famed Lily Wynton as bait, the Gothamite

invites the provincial to tea—to the disgust of the latter’s husband,

who always refers to the predatory Hallie as “Hank” and declares that

all “those women” make him sick. Starry-eyed with anticipation, little

Mrs. Murdock finds her hostess alone, clad in trousers and silk shirt.

She is welcomed with a long kiss and the admonition, “Don’t tell Lily!”

But the famous star on arrival proves to be middle-aged, withered, and

brassy-haired. She is already too drunk to follow the conversation,

demands brandy, and soon dozes off. Mrs. Murdock leaves in sad

disillusion, with a new appreciation of her astringent mate, only to

find that he has gone out in a temper for the first time to pursue his

own ends.

The Worm’s Turning

Since the total count of variant titles in 1934, including the

sensational items not yet touched upon, mounted to ten, it is not

surprising that some public reaction should set in. It will be even less

so after a rapid consideration of those omitted trivia, of which within

as many years some half-dozen accumulated. Because the first was a

fairly obvious rebuttal of _Well of Loneliness_, it deserves more

attention than some others. It was _Loveliest of Friends_ (1931) by

Sheila Donisthorpe, who was reputedly an English actress with a number

of other romances to her credit, but its verbal idiom is not British and

it was published only in New York.

Written with intense sentimentality, it pictures the ruin of Audrey,

introduced as the happy wife of a doting but pedestrian husband whose

hobby of gentleman-farming takes him often out of London. The couple’s

intimate life is described in some detail as ideal, yet Audrey is given

to playing Chopin in the dusk to relieve her unspent emotion. Presently

she is assiduously courted by boyish, impudent and exquisitely-tailored

Kim, similarly blessed with a husband who dotes upon her and allows her

every freedom. Kim’s showers of gifts and passionate telephone calls

intoxicate the inexperienced Audrey. Although the first attempted caress

and Kim’s confession that she is a lover of women are profoundly

shocking, Audrey soon succumbs without reservation. Then she discovers

that there is a former beloved for whose daily letters Kim watches

avidly; next, she learns that several of her own London circle have been

loved and discarded by Kim; finally, a current rival is flaunted to

rouse her jealousy. This cheap blonde American flirt is a transparent

copy of the ex-chorus girl in _Well of Loneliness_, just as a vivid

phrase applied to Kim—“a head so fiercely alive it seemed delicately to

light the air around it”[27]—is lifted verbatim from the description of

Jennifer in Miss Lehmann’s _Dusty Answer_.

Audrey spends several delirious weeks at a shore resort with Kim

(described in detail) of an intensity impossible to support for long,

and when immediately afterward the blonde recaptures Kim by the classic

device of parading a rival—a repulsive caricature of the mannish and

profane lesbian—Audrey’s overstrained nerves give way. A period in a

sanatorium restores her temporarily, but, back in London again, she is

helpless against her passion. After melodramatic incidents involving all

four women, Audrey attempts suicide, and failing to achieve her end, she

leaves home and husband to wander, derelict and outcast, for the rest of

her days. Close to the end the author breaks out in vituperation against

those who clamor for recognition of the sinister group who practice

... these sadistic habits ... crooked, twisted freaks of Nature who

stagnate in dark and muddy waters, and are so choked with the weeds

of viciousness and selfish lust that, drained of all pity, they

regard their victims as mere stepping stones to their further

pleasure. With flower-sweet fingertips they crush the grape of evil

till it is exquisite, smooth and luscious to the taste, stirring up

subconscious responsiveness, intensifying all that has been, all that

follows, leaving their prey gibbering, writhing, sex-sodden shadows

of their former selves, conscious of only one desire in mind and

body, which, ever festering, ever destroying, slowly saps them of

health and sanity.[28]

This effusion is an obvious retort to Miss Hall’s relatively controlled

plea for tolerance at the end of _Well of Loneliness_, and the volume

gives every evidence of being written hastily to profit by whatever

conservative reaction there was against the sympathy aroused among the

literati by Miss Hall’s effort.

The next exhibit was from the pen of the American Tiffany Thayer, writer

of near-erotica, and comprises one chapter in his _Thirteen Women_

(1932). A fragile beauty in whom puritanic sex-repression has induced

tuberculosis is quickly cured by an affair with her Denver physician’s

lesbian wife. The two have in common a hatred of men. The younger

believes their love unique and blessedly free of the uncleanness of sex,

and when, back in New York, she is bawdily enlightened by an old

schoolmate who is now a vaudeville performer, she wastes swiftly to the

death her abortive romance postponed.

Of the same calibre was _The Establishment of Madame Antonia_ (1932) by

one Leyla Georgie, comprising life sketches of the inmates of Hamburg’s

most élite bordello, and supposedly recorded by one of the group. Nearly

all the women are titled or from the top level of European society, but

have been reduced by malign chance. The variant pair are a Russian

princess and a new recruit whom she protects and cherishes. Discovering

that though her protégée loves her, she is unable to return her passion,

the princess introduces the girl to a nobleman who marries her. Natacha

then commits suicide. The whole volume is little more than a

romanticizing of earlier foreign erotica which celebrated more fleshly

relations among prostitutes.

The title of Idabel Williams’s _Hellcat_ (1934) accurately describes its

heroine, who expends her efforts only on such persons as she can steal

from someone else or can live upon without sacrifice on her part. One of

the latter is a lesbian whom she scorns as long as men are handy, but

whose hospitality she finally exploits for a long season, keeping her

victim in a constant fever by pretending an innocence which sees in

lesbians only fit subjects for police court or madhouse.

Gerald Foster’s _Strange Marriage_ (1934) deserves an extra word because

here transvestism basically affects the plot for the first time since

the fantastic German _Weiberbeute_ of 1906. A girl, expelled from

college just before graduation, hides out in a lonely beach shack until

she can go home without revealing her disgrace. Shingled and accustomed

to trousers she lives as a boy for safety, but finds that even boys are

not safe from the lifeguard who seeks her out at night. He is, however,

delighted on discovering her real sex. His masterful possession of her,

outrages her pride, but her body registers traitorous complaisance. In a

fury of rebellion against a woman’s double disadvantage, she resolves to

live as a man. By putting the width of the continent between her and her

past life she contrives to get a college degree on the west coast and a

job in a law office, continuing her studies at night. When the senior

partner’s daughter falls in love with her she reciprocates with warmth,

marries the girl (who is innocent to a degree), and lives as her husband

for several years. Then the coincidental reappearance of the beach guard

not only makes her apprehensive of recognition but revives the response

he was the first to stir. A quick disappearance leaves her wife an

apparent widow, and she marries the man. The bisexual experience here

seems more indebted to earlier French trivia than to current

psychological theory, which taxes unwilling defloration with negative

rather than happy heterosexual results.

As Lilyan Brock’s _Queer Patterns_ (1935) has been revived in two

different paperbound editions since 1950 and is thus easily available, a

short description will suffice. A musical-comedy star tries marriage to

one of those perfect husbands so useful in accentuating indelible

variant leanings. She comes fully to life, however, only under the hands

of a dynamic woman director of serious drama, with whom she enjoys two

perfect years before gossip obliges them to part or face professional

ruin. A long illness induced by the separation and by a subsequent

wealthy husband’s drug-crazed violence provides opportunity for a

trained nurse to fall in love with her. The nurse is driven to suicide

from jealousy of the other woman. The drug-addict husband finally

strangles the star. This is offered as an example of ineradicable inborn

variance.

Quite the most melodramatic of the lot was _Male and Female_ by Jack

Woodford (1935), in which a girl about to be married realizes that her

comparative physical coolness to her fiancé stems from a hitherto

unadmitted attraction to a girl friend. The latter, a brooding introvert

afflicted with frequent migraine, is quite aware of her own feelings,

and thrusts herself between the pair, after they marry, with incredible

temerity. The young couple have a stormy year which would have wrecked

their union—since the wife prefers feminine gentleness to masculine

“brutality” in lovemaking—but for their occasional periods of ecstasy

when the interloper is laid low by her chronic ailment. It finally

appears that this “friend” is virtually a witch (a fictional throwback

of a full millennium). In modern terms, she exercises some hypnotic

power over the wife even at great distances. Since, however, she is not

evil at heart, she finally commits suicide in a burning house by way of

ending her own unhappiness and effectively terminating her fateful

influence.

Virtually the last item of this sort from the point of date was Gawen

Brownrigg’s _Star Against Star_ (1936), pretending to British

authorship, but, like _Loveliest of Friends_, written in American idiom.

It apes _Well of Loneliness_ closely in its dependence upon inheritance

and childhood conditioning, but in this case Dorcas resembles a

hot-blooded mother who has had many male lovers and who virtually

seduces her own daughter at the age of nine or ten. A year in a Swiss

boarding school when she is sixteen ends with the expulsion of Dorcas

and her bisexual American roommate for lesbian intimacy. Two efforts at

affairs with men leave Dorcas cold, and from one man she parts because

he speaks with contempt of “Lezzies.” Later, in Paris, she meets a

beautiful novelist already renowned at twenty-six, and within

twenty-four hours the infatuated pair achieve complete intimacy. They

return to live for a time in England; however, they encounter at once

the same social disapprobation they had met among the British contingent

even on the _rive gauche_. A literary critic warns Dorcas, moreover,

that she will be jealous of Consuelo’s work, and that emotional release

may have an adverse effect upon the latter’s creative powers—an

interesting inversion of Miss Hall’s attributing Stephen Gordon’s

sterility to lack of such release. Both predictions prove all too

accurate, and the union goes completely on the rocks within a matter of

months. Worthless as it is artistically, the novel stresses a detail

previously hinted only in _That Other Love_: it is the younger girl who

disrupts an older woman’s well adjusted and successful life. Also evil

fruit from even completely happy physical expression is at odds with the

Freudian theory which the author elsewhere makes show of accepting.

The final pair of tales have been left until last because of their

direct bearing on censorship efforts which got under way during 1934 and

1935. One was _Love Like a Shadow_, which, although written under the

name of Lois Lodge, exhibits many of the characteristics of male

authorship listed earlier in discussing erotic writing. Of the college

in which it begins, it reports “bull sessions” of crass vulgarity, raw

petting parties and assignations after dances, and lesbian alliances

kept only slightly undercover. In a New York residence club a burgeoning

lesbian coterie includes a cigar-smoking physician who spouts variant

biology and philosophy at every chance, a feminist poet with two

girls—children under ten—whom she has already started on the path to

Lesbos, and a variety of free-living artists, entertainers, and Park

Avenue sensation-seekers. The heroine, Jean, is antagonistic towards men

because of her father’s flaunted infidelities; another girl, because she

was raped at twelve by her uncle. Jean is an idealist in search of a

lasting alliance, but her first love (a college roommate) marries to

scotch “queer” gossip in a midwestern home town; and her second proves

compulsively promiscuous to the point of seducing Jean’s teen-age

sister. Jean finally becomes the wife of her millionaire employer “in

name only” because his fifteen-year-old daughter needs a mother, but she

finds her stepdaughter already bisexually experienced, and the two are

soon united in the Great Love of both their lives—approximately the

fourth affair for each. The father conveniently dies (of extra-marital

excesses) and leaves the pair free to roam the world at will and live

happily ever after. This précis suggests but feebly the hundred-proof

distillate of promiscuity, exhibitionism, hard drinking, wild lesbian

propagandizing, and bad poetry which comprises the original.

Cut from the same cloth was _Mardigras Madness_ (1934) by Davis Dresser,

a gentleman revealed by the Library of Congress catalog as writing under

six pseudonyms, one of them feminine. It is a racy tale of Barbara from

the country, whose aunt is a prude and whose “steady” is too puritanic

to satisfy her ardent needs. The Mardigras season, which she spends with

a girl friend in New Orleans, is a salacious riot including a midnight

ritual orgy worthy of Peladan, but the variant episode occurs during the

day when masquers roam the streets at will. She and her friend are

picked up by two women, a tall harlequin, and a shingled pirate who

says, “I’ll take you captive—before some nasty man beats me to it.” The

women call each other Frankie and Johnny, and even before the party

reaches their modest apartment Barbara senses a mystery, “an indefinable

_something_ which set them apart from anyone she had ever known.”[29] In

the apartment alcohol flows freely, and since Barbara has never before

tasted so much as wine, her confused exaltation discreetly blurs her

impressions of first a “sentimentality” which vaguely bothers her, then

a crescendo of caresses until “the world faded into blackness under

Frankie’s soothing touch.”[30] The whole incident occupies a half-dozen

pages.

This title had a significant publishing history. In 1938 the same firm

issued _One Reckless Night_ by Peter Shelley, one of Dresser’s many

tags. Except that in this later volume the heroine and her friend bear

different names, its text is that of the 1934 narrative verbatim, save

for one alteration and a scant two percent deletions. The latter

comprise vivid and specific bits of heterosexual detail. But the

important change is the transmutation of the lesbians into a pair of

men, “a striking couple, both extremely tall, and they carried their

costumes with a swagger.”[31] They pick the girls up in a magnificent

foreign roadster, the scene of the drinking party is a patio of

corresponding grandeur, and as the heroine lapses from consciousness she

dreams that it is her fiancé who possesses her. The obvious purpose of

both versions, as of _Love Like a Shadow_ and the same grade of purely

heterosexual writing, is to convince the callow reader that “everybody’s

doing it, it’s smart in the Big Cities.” No matter how much one may

deplore censorship in principle, one can hardly deny its justice in such

cases as these. Actually, the second version of Dresser’s tale is no

better than the first in moral impact, and the fact that the only change

in plot required to make it acceptable for publication was the

alteration of the lesbian episode, throws light upon the chief target of

the snipers.

To be sure, variant fiction was not alone in its flamboyance, nor was it

alone under attack. The heterosexual frankness in works of high quality

during the twenties had been followed by lesser and lesser efforts, and

finally by pseudonymous volumes such as _Naked Escape_, _Innocent

Adulteress_, and _Born to be Bad_. Male homosexuality, as well, was

represented in a handful of dubious volumes culminating in _Scarlet

Pansy_. Non-fiction also took advantage of the open market with hastily

penned volumes on sexual psychology and perversions, and revivals or new

translations of Krafft-Ebing, Stekel, and lesser lights of the preceding

half-century. A crop of short-lived presses—“Eugenic,” “Anthropological”

and “Physicians”—sprang up to profit by the open season. Reaction was

inevitable. Since earlier battles to prevent publication had, as we have

seen, been lost in this country, censoring groups now trained their guns

upon sales agencies wherever they had sufficient influence. In one city

a single sale of a blacklisted item might lay a bookseller open to

prosecution and seizure of all contraband stock. In another, supplying a

title specifically requested by a patron might be safe, but having the

same volume visible even on inconspicuous shelves within the shop was

penalized. In a third it might be that no restrictions were imposed, as

for example Atlantic City, where the excursionist from Boston or

Philadelphia was apt to find all the books banished from his own city

lavishly displayed in boardwalk windows. This uneven but increasing

restraint was soon sufficient to make the production of sensational

items a gamble instead of a sure profit; the fly-by-night presses

withered as suddenly as they had grown, and what little trash was issued

had to seek vanity publishing.

Above Reproach

Variant fiction of quality, however, suffered no very great check. In

1935, for instance, this country saw the publication of two sympathetic

translations, Christa Winsloe’s _Girl Alone_ and Colette’s _The

Indulgent Husband_, and also of Gale Wilhelm’s _We Too Are Drifting_.

This last was a brief first novel by a young woman pictured frankly on

the dust jacket as shingled and tailored, who was a stylistic disciple

of Ernest Hemingway (by then a major influence). Her prose had a lean

economy worthy of her master, and the grudging acclaim her novel

received would certainly have been warmer and more voluminous except for

her subject.

Her central figure is Jan Morale, an artist of thirty whose woodcuts

have already merited a one-man showing. Jan’s childhood was pinched and

sordid; the brother who always hid behind her skirts ended by being

hanged; and she herself might have starved as a printer’s devil but for

a helping hand from the established sculptor Kletkin. He would like to

marry her, but recognizes that no man can hope to possess her. For she

is the model for his prize-winning _Hermaphroditus_, and is more

convincingly masculine in temperament than even Miss Hall’s Stephen

Gordon. The disgraced brother was her twin, and effeminate, which

implies heredity as the cause of her variance. At the opening of the

story Jan is entangled with a society beauty who has raised marital

deception to a fine art in the interests of her predatory lesbian

habits. Jan has been no more than physically captivated; she is already

restive, and tension increases when she falls romantically in love with

the serene innocence of Victoria, just out of college and living with

her conventional suburban family. Jan’s meticulous restraint in refusing

to sweep the younger girl off her feet, and the slow development of

their complete intimacy, are presented delicately but without evasion.

The relationship survives the married woman’s jealous efforts to destroy

it and persists for a time, but with increasing strain. For Jan holds to

a lifelong rule against intruding her bohemian eccentricity upon

conventional households, and Victoria finds frequent absences hard to

explain at home. Victoria is an only child not only loved but loving,

with all the pliant passivity of Verena Tarrant in _The Bostonians_. In

her placid life the need for evasion or struggle has never before

arisen, and they are alien to her now. Therefore the two girls’

long-nursed plans for a holiday together go down before a suddenly

projected family trip. Jan, furtively hidden, must watch a

transcontinental train pull out bearing her beloved, accompanied by her

parents and the “nice boy” they wish her to marry. Here again, as in

_Star Against Star_, the older and well-established woman is the one to

suffer from a consuming intimacy.

The British contribution of the year was a brief section of Francis

Brett Young’s _White Ladies_, in which the now familiar pattern of

_Regiment of Women_ is discernible. Bella, descended from two

generations of independent and passionate women and virtually orphaned,

is sent to boarding school at sixteen because she is too much the tomboy

to be manageable by her grandparents or the mistresses of her private

day-school. The “first passionate devotion of her life” for a music

mistress she outgrows upon discovering that the woman is a facile

sentimentalist, but she falls at once into “instinctive adoration” of a

crisp and ironic headmistress, who seems the antithesis of her former

love. On closer acquaintance the contained Miss Cash reveals a “protean”

range of mood, from childlike gaiety to “spiritual incandescence,” but

her astringent scorn of admitted love preserves Bella’s illusion of

emotional detachment through five years as pupil, teacher and

secretary-companion. Then Miss Cash offers hysterical opposition to

Bella’s associating with men, and this brings the girl to see her at

last as

a faded middle aged woman of imperious and uncertain temper,

pathetically nursing an illusion of emancipated youth and freedom and

daring in what was really the arid life of a confirmed old maid.[32]

Later, in the company of a man she loves, Bella meets Miss Cash on the

street with another worshipful young girl and recognizes a sinister

element in these consuming attachments. When the man observes that

though the schoolmistress has the face of an old woman she still moves

like a girl, Bella replies that she is ageless because she is a vampire,

living on young blood. Neither of the women here appears at all

masculine, though Miss Cash is a feminist and a man-hater and Bella has

a man’s practical intelligence and drive. Bella’s loves are substitutes

for family ties, and the older woman is again the egotist in need of

constant adulation.

In 1936 Rosamond Lehmann skimmed variance fleetingly in _Weather in the

Streets_ with a dialogue between a divorcee of boyish appearance and her

one-time schoolmate who plainly has suspicions about the cause of her

marital difficulties;[33] the suspicions are, however, unfounded. Marcia

Davenport gave her prima donna in _Of Lena Geyer_ just such a faithful

adorer as Allie Wentworth in Huneker’s satiric _Painted Veils_, but she

is careful to specify that though gossip attributed a lesbian color to

the relationship it was actually blameless.[34] (One suspects that there

may have been living models for both authors’ couples of singer and

satellite in the New York musical world of the early century.)

The year’s most important item was the British edition (the American

followed in 1937) of _Nightwood_ by Djuna Barnes, a young American of

the Paris group of expatriates following more or less in the literary

footsteps of Gertrude Stein and James Joyce. Fortunately Miss Barnes’s

work is intelligible without a key, her kinship being perhaps closer

with T. S. Eliot, who wrote the preface for this, her first full-length

narrative. On initial reading, the first hundred pages of _Nightwood_

may seem only a crowded canvas of figures romantic in their eccentricity

and linked by little save Left Bank geography. Gradually one perceives

that their dual axis is a pair of young women, one an American. Nora

Flood owns a decaying homestead near enough New York to be crowded,

whenever she is there, with the gifted bohemians her hospitality

welcomes. The scene of _Nightwood_, however, is mainly Paris, where Nora

acts as publicity agent for a small circus. Of the enigmatic Robin Vote,

who moves through the story in a kind of somnambulism, one learns little

save that sometimes she breaks absently into fragments of debased song

in any of a half-dozen languages, and exhibits a compulsive lesbian

promiscuity, the two together suggesting a dubious background. At twenty

she drifts into marriage with a wealthy Jew, but childbirth wakes her

violently to the knowledge that neither marriage nor motherhood is

tolerable to her.

She and Nora are drawn to one another on sight, wander about the

continent happily together, and settle for some years in Paris. But

Robin is increasingly involved in transient contacts, though she suffers

them without volition and is happy only on return to Nora. Then a fading

and greedy widow captures and attempts to hold her, and Robin is so torn

between her two emotional poles that her always precarious stability is

destroyed. The occasion of Nora’s first meeting her was a circus

performance from which the girl fled in inarticulate panic because the

animals were magnetically drawn to her side of their cages, and a

lioness stretched paws through the bars and fixed her “with brimming

eyes of love.” The book ends with Nora’s tracing Robin’s final headlong

flight from Paris to her own American country place, where she finds the

deranged girl engaged in poetically beautiful but spine-chilling play

with Nora’s great dog. The volume _in toto_ is a tragic prose poem of

the lost—all those whose sole métier is instinct and emotion, misfit and

outcast in a culture whose law is social regimentation.

Perceptibly related in style, although far inferior in artistry, is

Helen Anderson’s _Pity for Women_ (1937). In this story, an

over-sensitive motherless girl attempts to make her way alone in New

York, living in a residence club more sinister in its inbred hysteria

than any woman’s college dormitory. The hysterical manifestations are

not only variance but the reckless struggles of older girls to capture

men. The “blind dates” to which Ann submits, the drinking and

promiscuity and aftermaths of abortion and suicide which she sees among

her housemates, so sicken her that when she acquires a roommate to

assuage her loneliness, she clings to the cool and serene Elizabeth as a

savior. The two girls enjoy a period of innocent friendship precious to

both, but it is jeopardized when an older woman galvanizes Elizabeth

into passionate tension. This imperious Judith soon brings Ann also

under her spell. She then drops the more contained Elizabeth, and takes

Ann as her housemate outside the club. This move estranges the two girls

and also terminates a promising acquaintance between Ann and the one man

whose company she has been able to enjoy.

There is at first the usual period of honeymoon ecstasy between the two

housemates but then bit by bit Ann pieces together Judith’s crowded

history, one only to have been expected, but prostrating to the naïve

Ann. She is particularly shaken by the story of Judith’s dearest love, a

girl as young as herself, whose marriage for the sake of a child drove

Judith to attempt suicide. She also suffers from their social isolation,

which is complete save for Judith’s still adoring older friends. No new

contacts on Ann’s part are permitted. From an agony of jealousy Ann

wastes so alarmingly that Judith, to reassure her, goes through a

species of marriage ceremony, using the familiar passage from the _Book

of Ruth_. But this gesture is worse than futile. Ann’s state has been

induced not by need of permanence but by unconscious terror of it, which

warred with her passion. As she feels the fetters closing, her mind

gives way. Of the three women depicted, Judith is an innate homosexual

and the two younger girls are diverted from normal orbits by contact

with her. Elizabeth has stamina enough to regain her balance, although

had she remained Judith’s choice the outcome must have been dubious. The

immature and unstable Ann is wrecked beyond hope of recovery.

After these two studies, ultra-modern in manner and somewhat morbid in

substance, to read Elisabeth Craigin’s _Either is Love_ (1937) is to

step back into another century. The almost expository narrative moves

against a background in which horses still provide the means of

transportation, and there is little to indicate that it is not the

discreetly disguised autobiography which it claims to be. Indeed its

prose style suggests an already established reputation in fields of

non-fiction. It covers a decade in the life of its author, beginning

with her late twenties. An employee of the federal government, she is

singled out by a younger colleague who shows her the small attentions

normally proffered by a man. As the acquaintance develops, its emotional

tone disturbs Elisabeth, who recognizes it as what would ordinarily be

called “falling in love.” (However, as she explains, in the United

States at that time the only available literature on psychology was

written by William James; Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis were barely

heard of, and even the feminism of Olive Schreiner and Ellen Key was

“only for the very emancipated.”) For two years the pair struggle

against circumstance, the need for secrecy, and their own increasing

passion. To the young Rachel, the experience of variant (if not lesbian)

love is not wholly new. Heretofore her friends have been attracted by

her boyishness, but now Elisabeth is averse to any travesty of a

heterosexual relation. Theirs must be an honest love between two women.

Finally some months together abroad give them a typical interlude of

complete and perfect union.

Then family complications separate them, and the brief periods they can

snatch together are fevered by the effort to crowd too much ardor into

too little time. During a long stretch with the width of the Atlantic

between them, Rachel falls back into her youthful pattern of responding

to the dynamic reaction she involuntarily rouses in other women. This

infidelity to what is still her great love induces loss of faith in

herself, and finally she suffers so acute a sense of guilt that she

turns against all physical expression and follows the lead of a new

friend (a mystic enamored of self-abnegation) into the church. Elisabeth

could have foregone intimacy if that was required to preserve their

friendship; but Rachel’s retroactive conviction that their whole

association was wrong seems to her sheer sacrilege. She feels that the

Rachel known to her is dead, and a decade passes before she is able to

enter upon another emotional relationship.

This second love is heterosexual, and the other half of the volume

records its course, terminating in marriage. The two experiences, though

different in detail, are subjectively identical and quite justify the

title, _Either is Love_. The author’s final comment upon variance is

well-considered enough to warrant quotation:

I do not even now understand the expression “sinful” as I hear it in

connection with love between women.... I should think sin was

something that did harm in some form, to other people or, of course,

to oneself.... Lust demoralizes both participants.... Married life

does not preclude it, God knows, and there are great numbers of

extra-marital forms. I can understand how lust might develop between

women, and if that exists it is deplorable enough. But because incest

occurs, is all family life vicious? Because there are brothels, is

all sexual life unclean? A so-called Lesbian alliance can be of the

most rarified purity, and those who do not believe it are merely

judging in ignorance of the facts.[35]

This special pleading, more philosophic than Miss Hall’s, is so much of

a piece with the rest of the text that it is not obtrusive, and the

volume raised no outcry in our press.

Nevertheless, in the same year the imported French film _Club de

Femmes_, its story by Jacques Deval, was drastically cut for New York

showing. The review in _Time_ said:

Manhattan censors promptly spotted Sapphic overtones ... in the

character played by beauteous Else Argall, Deval’s wife. Censorship

deleted her best scene, which shows her successfully fighting the

urge to join the girl of her desire.[36]

This latter is the central figure, who is seduced by a man and bears his

illegitimate child. “Considered fit for Manhattan cinema-goers was the

shot in which [the lesbian] poisons the procuress telephone operator.”

If, as Ernst and Lindey claim in _The Censor Marches On_, the deletion

of the “best” scene left an implication that the lesbian yielded to her

desires, then as revived in 1948 the film must have been still further

cut (as indeed a certain incoherence suggests), for all that it then

showed was the older woman’s maternal solicitude for the naïve newcomer.

In 1938 the important contributions came from Gale Wilhelm and Kay

Boyle. To be sure, Dorothy Baker in _Young Man with a Horn_ hinted, in

passing, at an alliance between a light-skinned Harlem beauty and the

white graduate student who later proves so unsatisfactory a wife to the

hero. Ernest Hemingway also, in “Sea Change,” one of the briefest pieces

in _The Fifth Column and the First Forty-nine Stories_, shows a lesbian

interlude breaking in upon a satisfactory heterosexual affair. The man

tells his errant partner, “It’s a vice.” The girl, promising to return

to him, denies the charge. “We’re made up of all sorts of things. You’ve

known that. You’ve used it well enough.” But neither of these treatments

was very important, and there seem not to have been others.

Miss Wilhelm’s second novelette, _Torchlight to Valhalla_, resembles her

first in length and style, but differs in that both its girls are

masculine in little more than attire, and variant largely through

conditioning. The older is even more closely bound to her father than

was Gillian in _The Tortoiseshell Cat_. In her desperate loneliness

after his death, she yields to a young musician (male) who seems an

ideal partner, but finds herself frozen and shamed by the experiment.

The younger girl has been forced since the age of fifteen to assume a

man’s responsibility for herself and her once distinguished aunt, now a

bemused alcoholic. The two girls immediately find in one another the

answer to their needs and achieve a union which promises lasting

happiness. There is nothing here like Jan’s bohemian existence in _We

Too Are Drifting_ or her barren entanglement with the married woman.

Despite these seeming efforts to placate the prejudiced, Miss Wilhelm’s

second title fared no better at the hands of reviewers than her first.

Kay Boyle, then another of the American literary expatriates in France,

was already a writer of established reputation when she entered the

variant field in 1938 with two titles. Earlier, in _Gentlemen, I Address

You Privately_ there had been hints of male homosexuality. Incorporated

in _Monday Night_ there is a much more explicit lesbian episode, seen in

part through the eyes of an eight-year-old boy whose father is serving a

life sentence for a crime of which he is innocent. The rather pathetic

wife and mother enjoys a summer interlude with a _soi-disant_ Russian

princess, fugitive from the Revolution of 1917. This Baya,

world-vagabond, automobile racer and aviator, even masquerades on

occasion in the father’s World War I uniform,

the visored cap ... tipped on the side of her head, even the boots

seeming to fit exactly, and the crop stuck under her armpit, and the

face small, tough and reckless ... “His uniform, his wife, his kid,

the life he can’t live handed me like a present,” she said scarcely

aloud, the casual rakish smile neat as a boy’s.[37]

Then the other woman shows interest in a man, and after some stubborn

haunting of the apartment, Baya slams out, “banging the hall-door behind

her so that the pictures jumped on the walls.”

Miss Boyle’s second narrative, “The Bridegroom’s Body,” did not appear

in book form until 1940 when it was included in the volume _The Crazy

Hunter_, but the _Southern Quarterly_ printed it in 1938. Here Lady

Glourie, thirty-five but emotionally naïve as a child, is mistress of an

isolated manor with a swannery dating from the sixteenth century, and

wife to a man whose only interest is sport. He and his cronies spend

their days with rod and gun and their nights in carousal from which she

is excluded, so that she feels herself isolated in a world of men given

over to nothing but killing. When illness in the swanherd’s family makes

it necessary to import a nurse, Lady Glourie anticipates the company of

another woman with pathetic eagerness. The arrival of a young and

beautiful Irish girl is a blow, the more bitter because Lord Glourie is

instantly smitten. There is also a handsome farmer on the place, reputed

to be irresistible to women; so when Lady Glourie learns that Miss

Cafferty is given to long walks by night as well as by day she infers

the worst. The Irish girl’s shyly professed admiration for herself she

takes as a studied attempt at ingratiation.

It is the swans’ mating season and the perennial battle is on between

old warriors and young cobs. On a night when the nurse is neither in her

room nor with her patient, Lady Glourie is called from her bed to deal

with a battle to the death between a young “bridegroom” and the fiercest

of the old cobs. Thinking she may be in time to save the young swan, she

wades out waist deep to the rescue and narrowly escapes dangerous attack

by the old one. She emerges from the icy water with the dead swan to

find Miss Cafferty there, softly hysterical, pouring out a torrent of

endearment. She learns that from the first the girl has been interested

in her alone, fighting off the men because she too hates their predatory

cruelty. Her long walks she has taken

“to think about you here, alone where there might be something left

of you ... some mark of you on the ground. I couldn’t sleep in the

room, I couldn’t bear closing the door after I’d left you.... I’ve

walked the country alone ... talking out loud to you night and day,

asking you to give me everything I haven’t, peace and strength and

that look in your eyes ... one hint of what it is you have that

nobody else has, just one weapon to fight the others ...”[38]

Lady Glourie quiets her,

but these were things she had heard once or once imagined.... She

stood waiting, scarcely breathing, waiting for the words to start

again. The chill she had not yet felt on her flesh entered her heart

for the instant that the words abandoned this anonymous but exact

description of love.[39]

When the girl does speak again it is to beg Lady Glourie to come away

with her, escape from the manor, continue to “lend me what you can

spare.” The surcharged moment is interrupted by the noisy arrival of

Lord Glourie with a lantern, demanding “What’s up?” and annoyed to find

them both drenched to the skin. “Lady Glourie looked down at her own

strange flesh and suddenly she began shaking with the cold.” Here the

narrative ends, and as in _Delay in the Sun_, the reader must supply for

himself the ultimate outcome.

Nineteen-thirty-nine saw the publication of two dissimilar novels, the

American and anonymous _Diana_,[40] and _Promise of Love_ by a new

English author, Mary Renault. Of the latter, the main theme is the

struggle of a nurse and a laboratory pathologist to work out

satisfactory heterosexual relations against the odds of hospital

discipline and of their individual homosexual interests. Vivian closely

resembles a brother of uncommon charm, irresistible to both sexes but

disinclined to take his relations with either seriously. Thus Mic, who

has enjoyed a transient intimacy with the brother and seen his interest

fade, is wary of allowing Vivian any hold upon him. She, for her part,

is being gracefully courted by a fellow nurse, tall, tailored and

debonair, and there are discreet intimations of her momentarily

succumbing. One of the factors inclining Vivian toward Mic is Colonna’s

sudden and much deeper attachment to a new supervisor of nurses, and the

completeness of this connection and the perilous professional risks it

entails are left in no doubt. Vivian’s growing intimacy with Mic

narrowly escapes disaster when, in a spirit of deviltry, she dresses in

men’s clothes and gets the abrupt and brutal reaction the experiment

invites. In the end, the two weather all storms and marry. The

supervisor also accepts a male suitor, and Colonna is left to face the

fact that as she grows older her Maupin pose will be less becoming and

her conquests fewer.

_Diana_ is an autobiography almost of the “true confession” type, though

it carried a preface by Dr. Victor Robinson endorsing at least its

subjective authenticity. Diana grows up the only girl in a household of

brothers and she is very close to her father until his death. When in

early adolescence she falls in love with a high school chum and

recognizes her feelings as those of a boy, her reaction is one of shame

not alleviated by an older brother’s introducing her to the works of

Havelock Ellis. In college she avoids friendships with women and evades

one girl’s advances by pretending ignorance. Delighted to find the

attentions of a male graduate student acceptable, she is engaged to him

for a couple of years, but an unsuccessful trial of intimacy eliminates

marriage from her future plans.

During a year of study abroad, initiation by another American girl shows

her where her fulfillment lies; this contact, however, is broken at once

by the reappearance of an earlier flame of her new friend. Wounded and

angry, Diana is ripe for a less sophisticated alliance with a girl who

is shocked by lesbianism and refuses to recognize anything of it in

their love. When intimacy finally develops, it is not too satisfactory,

since Jane’s scruples preclude any intelligent effort on her part to

meet Diana’s needs. Nevertheless, the two attempt for a year to live

together after their return to the States. In the women’s college where

Diana teaches, their rooming off-campus stirs so much gossip that for

the next year Diana must choose between Jane and her position.

Diana’s second conscientious effort, in a coeducational college, to

become interested in men is unsuccessful. Somewhat later she finds a

young woman graduate student with whom she achieves happiness after a

period of meticulous restraint reminiscent of _We Too Are Drifting_.

Suspense is supplied by Leslie’s mother’s denouncing the pair and

disowning her daughter, and by the reappearance of Jane, who attempts to

capture Leslie out of wanton spite. Diana and Leslie are so eminently

suited to one another, however, that they finally come through even more

closely united. This narrative is certainly no literary masterpiece, and

perhaps its strongest point is Diana’s honest analysis along the way of

the arguments against, rather than for, her chosen way of life. Since

homosexuals need not fear pregnancy or assume responsibility for a home

and family, they are free to make and break connections lightly.[41]

Only true sympathy, loyalty, and dedication to their unions can restrain

them from snatching at facile satisfaction, and human nature being what

it is, no lesbian alliance has more strength than the weaker of its two

partners. These observations are not particularly original, of course,

having often enough been demonstrated by example in a half century’s

fiction. Even the precepts themselves had appeared by 1939 in a good

many hortatory manuals of sex psychology. Heretofore, however, they were

voiced by strenuous opponents of homosexual intimacy. For a defender to

present them with cool logic, and, in spite of them, to justify the

calculated risk, marks an advance in psychological perspective since

Radclyffe Hall’s wholly emotional plea for tolerance a decade earlier.

Another War’s Shadow

For the next three years the preoccupations of war—plus the paper

shortage—crowded variant fiction almost completely from the market, and

even after readers and publishers once more hit a modified stride, the

bulk of such fiction remained condemnatory for the rest of the decade.

Angela DuMaurier’s _The Little Less_ (1941) reports effects as

devastating as those in _The Island_ from a long variant enslavement,

even though in this case there is no physical intimacy. Toward the end

of the book a spasm of lesbian debauchery marks one woman’s repudiation

of her Catholic faith in defiance of a deity who permitted her child to

die. The orgy is followed by her suicide. In Fanny Hurst’s _Lonely

Parade_ (1942), the picturesque trio of bachelor girls are solaced by

mutual devotion of a variant cast, though never actually lesbian; but

their unwedded lives are not especially happy.

The inexplicable burst of five titles in 1943 was largely damning, the

minority report being Dorothy Cowlin’s in _Winter Solstice_, a thinly

disguised case history of a paralytic whose eight years’ invalidism, of

hysterical origin, is cured by a sudden emotional interest in a woman

aviator. The relationship is brief and innocent, and is followed by

marriage for both women. Craig Rice used the lesbian advances of an

eccentric heiress to a Greenwich Village “poet” as a neat red herring in

her murder mystery _Having a Wonderful Crime_, in which the heiress is

the victim. In Jane Bowles’s _Two Serious Ladies_, an inhibited Brooklyn

housewife finds her first experience outside the States so inebriating

that she defies her husband and lingers in the prostitutes’ quarters of

Colon, determined to “learn all the things she didn’t know,” even though

she realizes they will not make her happy.

On a level to be taken seriously, Arthur Koestler in _Arrival and

Departure_ conveyed, through his hero’s contact with a woman

psychoanalyst, his estimate of both the good and the bad in an

all-tolerant psychiatric viewpoint. Peter, heroic political refugee

shattered by his ordeal in the hands of the enemy, is taken in and cared

for in a neutral European city by his countrywoman, Dr. Bolgar. He falls

in love and has a restoring liaison with a young girl who frequents the

doctor’s apartment, and he plans to follow Odette to the United States

when a passport can be secured. His relapse into neurosis upon her

leaving him without notice or farewell Dr. Bolgar repairs by a swift and

skillful analysis of his lifelong martyr complex. Chance, however,

reveals to Peter that the doctor is Odette’s real love and he but a

passing fancy. So, instead of following the girl, he returns to his

perilous but “real” underground activities. The doctor is described as

tall, full-blown, and masterful; Odette, as childishly slender, with a

“boyish” unpainted mouth. In the end,

Above all he felt a sadness ... and pity for Odette, with her vacant

look, her slimness and vulnerability—Odette the victim, drowned in

the carnivorous flower’s embrace.[42]

Certainly best-known of the year’s titles is Dorothy Baker’s _Trio_, on

which a play was based, since its stage history virtually duplicated

that of _The Captive_ seventeen years earlier. Its opening in

Philadelphia was well attended and reviewed, and the play ran on

Broadway for a little more than a month before being closed through

pressure from a combination of religious interests. One of the _New

Yorker_ staff interviewed various signers of the petition for its

withdrawal, and found that several had neither seen the play nor read

the novel from which it was made before lending their names to the

protest.

The story presents the struggle between a Frenchwoman on an American

university faculty and a young art photographer for possession of a girl

who is departmental assistant to the former. Pauline Maury has just

published a brilliant study of the _fin de siècle_ French decadents,

notably Verlaine and Rimbaud. Like them, she is an advocate of exploring

the limits of sensibility under all possible stimuli from alcohol to

sexual passion, with veiled hints at drugs and flagellation, but

naturally this aspect of her life is well concealed. The girl Janet, at

first a passionate intellectual and emotional devotee, has been reduced

by intimacy with Pauline to the limit of stability when a whirlwind

courtship by Ray Mackenzie and a wholesome heterosexual liaison with him

save her from further exploitation. Though Ray reacts with blind rage

and contempt to her confession of her past relations with Pauline, there

is at least a chance that he will come around enough to marry her when

he has cooled. The defeated and frustrated Frenchwoman shoots herself.

This is the essence of the drama, artistically in need of no

accessories, but probably to avoid elaboration of its morbid emotional

elements Mrs. Baker added an offense more permissible of stress. The

substance of Pauline’s monograph was stolen from the dissertation of a

married friend to whose premature death her own relations with the woman

contributed, and the widowed husband retaliates by exposing her

plagiarism. This disgrace provides adequate motivation for the suicide

which makes so effective a dramatic climax, but it lessens the power of

the whole. Pauline as a self-defeating decadent is an unsavory but

convincing personality. With the added onus of literary theft she too

nearly degenerates into mere villain. Of this century’s four widely

circulated dramas, then—_The Captive_, _Mädchen in Uniform_, _The

Children’s Hour_, and _Trio_—only the German film succeeded in being

good theatre without blurring in some way the variant theme.

Two passing references in 1944 were Erskine Caldwell’s single flippant

paragraph in _Tragic Ground_: a bartender’s account of discovering his

wife at play in the back room of her beauty salon with two of her young

patrons,[43] and Jean Stafford’s vignette in _Boston Adventure_ of a

Back Bay dowager who fawns upon each season’s debutantes without once

suspecting her own motivation. The heroine, however, bearing scars still

unhealed from her childhood under the spell of a neurotic mother now in

a sanatorium, is literally sickened by the woman’s fulsome caresses.[44]

In 1945 Nora Lofts inserted in her historical novel _Jassy_ a

disparaging middle section, “Complaint from Lesbia,” involving a

triangle of two middle-aged school mistresses and the romanticized title

figure, then a kitchen maid of thirteen. From girlhood the now-widowed

Mrs. Twysdale has worshipped her intellectual cousin, Katherine, and in

youth chose as husband the suitor who most resembled her. The two women

have jogged along undramatically enough for twenty years in their joint

school enterprise when the advent of the remarkable Jassy moves

Katherine to unadmitted passion and Mrs. Twysdale to vengeful jealousy.

It is the precocious Jassy herself, now a favored student through

Katherine’s efforts, who at fifteen accepts unjust dismissal without

protest because she recognizes that Katherine will ultimately be better

off keeping her lifelong business partner. Here Mrs. Twysdale, pettily

feminine and feline, is alone identified with “Lesbia,” (semantically

unrelated to Catullus), while the other two exhibit traits implied by

Miss Lofts to be masculine.

In the same year Mary Renault in _The Middle Mist_ provided a tonic

relief with a variant portrait as piquant as any since _Mlle de Maupin_.

Leo (christened Leonora) can, at twenty-five, be mistaken for a teen-age

boy even by her own sister after a long separation. She makes a good

living by writing “westerns,” lives on a houseboat within commuting

distance of London, and avoids situations requiring feminine costume.

For seven years she has maintained a comfortable domestic ménage with a

nurse who once saved her life. Neither girl’s single brief experiment

with a man was happy, and both find their common life wholly satisfying.

Still they do not avoid the company of men, and a good part of the story

is concerned with the growth of Leo’s friendship with a fellow author

into a love which leads finally to marriage. Her difficult choice

between her two very real loves, determined largely by her desire for

children, is movingly presented.

Her initial attempt at masculine independence was occasioned by

intolerable friction between her parents, and her own temperament made

it a success. When her younger sister, kept feminine and helpless by a

doting mother, follows Leo’s pattern of flight, she simply presents

herself on Leo’s doorstep and stays for a long season without realistic

thought of who is paying for her keep. Her own adolescent means of

escape from family tension has been a steady diet of cheap fiction, and

she can see her future only in its sugary terms. When real heartbreak

ends a stupid little romance built on nothing more than wishful

dreaming, she creeps back to the parental nest, where one imagines her

withering into bathetic spinsterhood, haunting rental libraries in

search of more stories with happy endings. The parallel development of

the two sisters’ lives constitutes a strong argument in favor of lesbian

intimacy as against inhibited Victorian romancing. One of the most vivid

features of _The Middle Mist_ is its humor, a quality hitherto

conspicuously lacking in variant fiction. (Gautier, Gunter, Bennett and

Mackenzie are the exceptions.) Leo’s taking a conceited young doctor

down a notch by flirting successfully with the nurse he brings to a

party and then neglects for other women would be hilarious in any

setting. In a variant novel it gleams as an unmatched gem.

Second Crescendo

The end of the war produced no such immediate effect on variant fiction

as did the beginning, but gradually quantity increased with the

accelerating speed of a geometric progression. Consequently, many of the

thirty-odd novels which appeared from 1946 through 1954—all still

relatively accessible—must receive short shrift. Brief and disparaging

variant or lesbian passages were included in Remarque’s _Arch of

Triumph_ (1945 in English), Edmund Wilson’s _Memoirs of Hecate County_

(1946), Felix Forrest’s _Carola_ (1948), Philip Wylie’s _Opus 21_ (1949)

and _Disappearance_ (1951), Theodora Keogh’s _Meg_ (1950), Robert

Wilder’s _Wait for Tomorrow_ (1952), Joan Henry’s _Women in Prison_

(1952) and Maurice Druon’s _Rise of Simon Lachaume_ (1951; in English,

1952). Characters varied from prostitutes to socialites; action, from

sentimental philandering to a jealous knifing.

Longer derogatory treatments were presented by an equal number of

authors. In 1946 Jean Paul Sartre’s _No Exit_ (a translation of _Huis

Clos_, 1945) had a brief but unchallenged run in New York. Its three

characters, impounded in a small room in hell, are: a cowardly political

traitor who has also heaped every humiliation on a devoted wife; a woman

who has broken several men for her own amusement and killed her unwanted

child; and a manhating lesbian who has stolen her cousin’s wife and then

talked her victim into a joint suicide pact. Since the lesbian’s sins

seem less heinous than those of the other two, her emotional anomaly

must be viewed as evening the balance.

Christopher LaFarge’s _The Sudden Guest_ (1946) is concerned with a

colossal egotist who closes her doors against victims of a New England

hurricane. Desperation emboldens them to enter despite her, but she is

untouched by their several stark tragedies. Only one handsome and

cultured woman is welcome, for reasons half snobbish, half emotional.

This Mrs. Cleever has with her an infant son, but is indifferent to his

welfare because of her grief at the drowning of his nursemaid, with whom

she was obviously infatuated. The last waifs to arrive are a low-class

boy and a girl of fifteen whom he has saved from drowning and carries

naked in his arms. Galvanized from her stupor, Mrs. Cleever snatches the

beautiful figure from him and, unassisted, carries the girl off to her

room. Later the spinster-hostess finds the two sleeping nude in each

other’s arms, and this alone has the power to move her—but only to

jealousy and self-pity for her own loneliness.

Three comparatively mediocre works of 1947 were equally severe. George

Willis’s _Little Boy Blues_ recounts the machinations of a lesbian to

achieve marriage and motherhood as a “front” to protect her reputation

and as a means of securing her future. She then deserts her victim and

uses the child as a financial hold upon him while pursuing her own

inclinations, until he is goaded into killing her. Ethel Wilson in

_Hetty Dorval_ pictures the near-capture of a Canadian girl of eighteen

by a courtesan on vacation from her profession and posing as a

respectable woman in Vancouver. In _Not Now but NOW_, Mary F. K.

Fisher’s chief figure is a woman as ageless as Orlando and a ruthless

egomaniac in all eras and settings. It is in a small Ohio town during

the Twenties that she involves a college girl in a lesbian scandal.

The title figure in James Ronald’s _The Angry Woman_ (1948) externally

resembles Sinclair Lewis’s Dr. Herringdean, and, like her, is a

successful business executive. Her hold upon Fern Oliphant dates from a

bedridden year in the latter’s teens and continues till her suicide a

decade later. Lesley uses every means to increase Fern’s dependence upon

her, and tries first to prevent and then to break up a marriage arranged

by the girl’s mother. Unlike Lewis’s unalloyed monster, however, this

woman insists she has never been a lesbian. Her own marriage failed on

its first night (cf. the French _Méphistophéla_), and her passion for

the girl has also gone unfulfilled. She sees her own fondness as the

only truly maternal devotion Fern has ever known. To everyone else it

wears the aspect of subjective cannibalism.

A more complex case appears in Margaret Landon’s _Never Dies the Dream_

(1949). But for its expressed horror of variant passion this novel would

belong among the favorable studies, for its mainspring is a love as

constructive and as delicately presented as that in the _Book of Ruth_.

Like its author’s now famous _Anna and the King of Siam_, it is laid in

Siam, but in this work the heroine is an unmarried American missionary.

India gives sanctuary in her mission school to a countrywoman a decade

her junior, widow of a Siamese of high rank, because the girl is in

danger of violence from her husband’s relatives and of sexual

molestation by a European. When India isolates herself with the girl to

nurse her through an attack of typhoid, she is accused by a rival

mission teacher of being “enamored” of her patient. Agonized

soul-searching forces her to admit she feels Angela to be “bone of her

bone, flesh of her flesh,” but she can find nothing blameworthy in her

love. The maternal element is further stressed when Angela, upon

returning to America, leaves her most treasured possession as a parting

gift to “my mother-in-love.” It should be admitted that passion of any

sort is regarded darkly in the volume—quite justifiably in view of its

uglier recorded manifestations—but one can only regret an astigmatism

which sees so vividly the beauty of a selfless passion (for its

incandescent intensity is undeniably passionate) and is still blind to

its essential nature.

Hugh Wheeler’s _The Crippled Muse_ (1952) does not condemn lesbianism

per se so much as one of the personalities involved. This is another

sparkling comedy of Capri. The three figures significant here are all

Americans. Liz Lewis is a wealthy and domineering shrew of apparently

innate masculinity, whose record as a finishing school teacher was as

technically immaculate as Clare Hartill’s in _Regiment of Women_, until

her dismissal at perhaps thirty. This was occasioned by the conspicuous

infatuation of a student in her late teens after the girl was violently

orphaned. At the time of this story these two have lived together for a

decade and the younger, Loretta, is more than tired of the arrangement;

yet she stays because she feels responsible for their plight. A

sympathetic young professor induces her to break away and marry him. He

is not shocked by her history but is hotly antagonistic to the woman who

has so long exploited her sense of guilt to hold her captive.

(Incidentally, Liz had used Christina Rossetti’s _Goblin

Market_ in her original capture of Loretta by stressing their

parallelism—unconvincing—to Lizzie and Laura).

Less tolerance of lesbianism marks Sara Harris’s _The Wayward Ones_

(1952), a social worker’s study of homosexuality in a reform school.

Termed “the racket” by the adolescent inmates, it at first terrifies and

repels a sixteen-year-old girl committed to the institution for

unmarried motherhood. She sees, however, that the pairing of “moms” and

“pops” brings solace and a sense of belonging to many of the girls

involved, and that the authorities make no effort to check the practice,

to which they remain questionably blind. When at last she “marries” one

of the “pops” to gain protection from an unbalanced housemate who has

attempted to kill her, her assumption of the new status marks the

beginning of rapid deterioration. She becomes a ruthless liar and

schemer, and makes plans to become a “call girl” for both men and women

when she is released from the school.

Perhaps the most virulent attack was launched by Simon Eisner in _Naked

Storm_, another paper-backed original of the same year. A predatory

woman novelist, on the eve of departing for California, first seduces a

young art student whom she leaves ill with self-loathing. On the

transcontinental train she repeats the experiment with an older woman,

who is highly intelligent but emotionally starved. This woman is also

courted by a shy and unhappy man, but his rival’s expert sophistication

rapidly reduces his chances. At this point an ex-war correspondent

decides to play _deus ex machina_. Moved by savage hatred of all

lesbians and this arrogant specimen in particular, he takes advantage of

a sixty-below-zero blizzard which stalls the train for some thirty hours

in the Donner Pass, goads the self-sufficient lesbian into going out

into the night for snow to ice her liquor, and furthermore, manages so

to confuse her that she loses her bearings in the arctic blackness and

freezes to death. The author plainly enjoys this dénouement as much as

Belot enjoyed killing off Mme. Blangy.

The latest condemnation is incorporated in _Strange Sisters_ (1954), a

pot-boiling murder story by a writer who calls himself “Fletcher Flora.”

Opening with the knifing of a man by a girl who has led him to embrace

her but then finds her sexual revulsion unconquerable, it flashes back

to the causes of her inhibition. The earliest was childhood idolatry of

the more or less innocently seductive aunt who raised her (cf. the

mother-daughter relation in _Star Against Star_). The second was

deliberate seduction by a women’s college instructor when the girl was a

lonely and maladjusted freshman; the third a repetition with a

department store personnel manager as agent. Each of these older women,

in increasing degrees, was interested only in her own emotional needs

and not at all in her victim’s welfare. The girl ends with complete

mental breakdown and suicide.

All these condemnatory treatments were balanced by as many mildly or

strongly sympathetic studies. The briefest of these are two short

stories, one “Orestes” in Rhys Davies’s _A Trip to London_ (1946), in

which a lesbian waitress frees a middle-aged bachelor from his

paralyzing mother fixation precisely because her attitude toward him is

so free of feminine seduction. The other is Isabel Bolton’s “Ruth and

Irma” (1947), a reminiscent and gently ironic sketch of an infatuated

pair of girls roaming the Riviera during the Twenties, which lays their

histrionics directly to their saturation with that decade’s fiction. A

more important role is assigned to lesbianism in Lucie Marchal’s

prize-winning French novel of 1948 translated in 1949 as _The Mesh_, a

Freudian study of a domineering woman’s influence on the lives of her

son and daughter. The son’s marriage to a timid widow proves a fruitless

gesture of defiance. The daughter, always jealous of the mother’s

preference for her brother, is gradually liberated from her own fixation

by an increasing interest in the pitiful and helpless young wife. In the

end her protective impulses become passionate and she takes the girl

away to live with her. It is plain, however, that she, like her mother,

will soon tyrannize over her captive as stringently as she herself has

been dominated.

Another paper-backed original was _Women’s Barracks_ (1950) by Toreska

Torres (according to _Publishers Weekly_ the pseudonym of an established

author). This purports to be a description of life in the London

headquarters for women recruits of the Free French forces; however, it

is not a translation. An important thread in the meandering plot is the

love of a shy girl of seventeen for a much older woman, wholesome and

maternal though vulgar, who has consoled herself while married to a

“pansy” by intimacies with both men and women. One or two completely

lesbian couples in the house refuse to recognize Claude as one of

themselves—“She’s a pervert, a curiosity seeker.” Nevertheless her

influence on Ursula is beneficent. Soon the girl turns to men, the

lesbian interlude having cracked the shell of her naïve reserve and

matured her for other experience.

Easily the eeriest of all references to variance is Shirley Jackson’s in

her remarkable study of late adolescence, _Hangsaman_ (1951). Here a

girl, as precariously balanced as Ann in _Pity for Women_, is inhibited

by a father fixation, and driven farther from normal experience by a

cryptically-described incident, perhaps actual assault, but more likely

only heavy petting, by an older man at a cocktail party in her own home.

In a “progressive” college, quite unsupervised, she becomes more and

more solitary and withdrawn until her sudden friendship with an ideally

sympathetic girl companion. This alter ego, whose allure she finally

recognizes as physical and fights off, proves actually to be only the

other half of her own split personality. In other words, the drama in

_Hangsaman_ is that of an abnormally sensitive girl’s narrow escape from

schizophrenia.

In the same year Whit and Hallie Burnett included in _Sextet: Six Story

Discoveries_ John Eichrodt’s “Nadia Devereux,” which its author

describes as a feminine “parody” of Thomas Mann’s _Death in Venice_. It

need not, then, be further discussed than to say that it treats

understandingly the secret infatuation of an internationally-renowned

woman lecturer on international law for an exquisite girl on the

clerical staff of the United Nations. Like its model, it follows the

older woman’s gradual disintegration and death from the violence of her

inhibited yet undisciplined passion.

Appearing also in 1951 was a sensational trifle reminiscent of the worst

of the 1930s, _Strange Fires_ by Jack Woodford. This is a sexual riot

with lesbian action prominent, in which, as in _Love Like a Shadow_, one

girl is essentially “monogamous” in spirit. Rhoda and her

finishing-school roommate, both initiated by their physical education

teacher, “marry” one another and are briefly happy. But the discovery

that her partner and Miss Pat are continuing their relation wounds Rhoda

deeply, and their taking her to an “orgy” in a Park Avenue socialite’s

apartment completes her disillusion. She finally marries a man (implying

that she is still “normal”), and the two other young women continue in a

mutually free alliance.

A sympathetic treatment which bows to orthodox standards by ending

tragically is presented in _Spring Fire_ (1952), paper-backed original

by Vin Packer, admitted pseudonym of an established male author. Here a

lonely boyish co-ed in a midwestern university is willingly seduced by

her sorority-house roommate and finds the lesbian relation a happy one

as long as it remains secret. It is the seducer, neurotic daughter of a

promiscuous widow, who feels guilt and carries on simultaneously an

excessive affair with a man to prove herself normal. The unsophisticated

Mitch is urged to do likewise, but she cannot follow through her two

squeamish efforts, and she reacts with loathing to drunken violation by

a fraternity man. When suspicion of lesbianism falls on the two girls

the neurotic accuses her victim of having been the seducer. Mitch is

expelled from the sorority, and only the understanding dean of girls and

the college physician avert disaster. In his naturalistic picture of

campus sex life in general the author treats the lesbian aspect with

comparative sympathy and attributes its destructive effects to the

neurotic girl’s sense of guilt. This is induced by her mother’s

influence and ripens into a full-blown psychosis. She ends in a mental

institution.

Two much happier episodes were featured in novels of 1952. In Fay

Adams’s paper-backed original, _Appointment in Paris_, an American

orphan in her teens is matured sufficiently to weaken a spinster aunt’s

dominance through her intimacy with a wholesome, if irresponsible,

French courtesan living in a neighboring apartment. She then enjoys a

liaison with a Frenchman and later happily marries an American. Both men

know her history. May Sarton’s infinitely superior novel, _A Shower of

Summer Days_, includes the brief infatuation of an American girl,

half-through college, for her Anglo-Irish aunt. Sent abroad by her

mother to terminate an undesirable romance at home, she at first

truculently resists her aunt’s overtures and her own impulses toward

friendliness. The aunt, once a great beauty, childless, and still bound

to her husband by mutual passion which has survived two decades of

marriage, is an irresistible personality and comes to exert great

influence on the girl. As with Lily Briscoe in _To the Lighthouse_, it

is partly the relation between wife and husband which fascinates the

girl; however, her emotions crystallize upon the woman. Her aunt

recognizes the unmistakable signs of passion, and far from being

shocked, even wishes it were possible for her to respond. By the end of

the summer the girl is cured, not only of her callow heterosexual

obsession, but of the variant love also, and emerges with adult

appreciation of what married love can be.

There remain a half-dozen novels in which variance plays so large a part

that they should not be ticked off too briefly. The first is _Ladders to

Fire_ (1946) by Anaïs Nin, a stylistic disciple (in some measure) of

Gertrude Stein. There is a minimum of action, the work being not so much

a plotted narrative as a series of character analyses in poetic prose.

The author states her theme in a prologue: woman’s struggle to

understand her own nature. Hitherto, she says,

Action and creation, for woman, was ... an imitation of man. In this

imitation ... she lost contact with her nature and her relation to

man. Man appears only partially in this volume, because for the woman

at war with herself he can only appear thus.... Woman at war with

herself has not yet been related to man, only to the child in man,

being capable only of maternity.[45]

Of such “incomplete” women there are five in the novel. One, a cinema

star with heterosexual experience, is still subjectively imprisoned

within herself. A second, Lillian, is successively involved with three

others. This woman drifts on the current of conventional existence into

marriage and motherhood without once finding emotional fulfillment for

her passionate temperament. Her first true outlet is her friendship with

Djuna, whose difficult youth has disciplined and matured her but left no

time or strength for emotional experience. Each personality finds its

complement in the other, and their relationship is fruitful for a time,

but it achieves no expression because in Lillian “sensuality was

paralyzed.... She was impaled on a rigid pole of puritanism.” Soon

Lillian becomes so jealous of any woman Djuna looks at that the

friendship perishes of its own intensity. At one point Djuna sees that

she wants something of me that only a man can give her.... She has

lost her ways of communicating with man. She is doing it through

me.[46]

The association with Djuna so alters Lillian’s perspective that she

separates from her family and finds a man sufficiently immature to call

out her maternal instincts. She humors and bears with him through all

manner of vicissitudes, including his many transient affairs with other

women. Cured now of her fear of sensuality, she plays the man with one

of his flames whose influence she fears may be lasting, in order to

distract her rival’s attention from him. She succeeds only too well, and

must finally terminate the affair to free herself of a second emotional

dependent.

Once again she had worn the man’s costume ... to protect a core of

love. [The man] had not made her woman, but the husband and mother of

his weakness.[47]

To one of his later fancies, a woman who “lived according to her

caprices” and, like a man, refused to be “in bondage to the one,”

Lillian falls captive also, again, as with Djuna, loving in the other

the opposite of all she is herself. This affair reaches physical

completeness; even so, it does not bring the pair the unity both crave.

Instead it makes them aware that they are lovers of the same man, and

their one night together, though more satisfying than either has known

with him, ends in a jealous quarrel. Thus the author diagnoses four

degrees of emotional incompleteness: lowest is the inability to escape

from self; next, the capacity for subjective but not overt abandon;

third, the power only to imitate man’s role, whether with man or woman;

and last, freedom to play the woman but only with another woman. Just

this relative rating of maturity appears original with Miss Nin.

A little later Josephine Tey, who with Dorothy Sayers and Ngaio Marsh

raised British psychological mysteries to the level of serious fiction,

made variance the key to two successive plots. In _Miss Pym Disposes_

(1948) the title figure goes as visiting lecturer to a college of

physical education where a formerly worshipped school friend is

principal. Her interest is caught at once by an inseparable pair of

seniors who lead their class, of whom an older foreign classmate says:

That David and Jonathan relationship—it is a very happy one, no

doubt, but it _excludes_ so much. _Nice_, of course, quite

irreproachable. But normal, no.[48]

“Beau,” tall, beautiful and boyish, is the headstrong darling of wealthy

parents. Mary is a reserved and sensitive introvert, only child of a

struggling country physician. She is the logical recipient of the best

position open for the following year, but the principal arbitrarily

assigns the post to a fawning satellite of her own.

While practicing for a gymnastic exhibit, this favored candidate is

fatally injured by the collapse of some heavy apparatus. Police

investigation indicates accidental death, but a bit of circumstantial

evidence discovered by Miss Pym points to Mary as being responsible for

the accident. Her knowledge of Mary precludes such an idea, so she calls

Mary in for an explanation. This interview is a masterpiece of reticent

indirection. However, Miss Pym gets a seeming admission of guilt—though

she is assured that death was never conceived as a possibility—and a

promise that Mary will spend her life in self-sacrificing atonement.

Since a conviction of manslaughter would not only destroy Mary but

shatter her friend, her family, and the school, Miss Pym shoulders the

heavy responsibility for keeping her secret and so becomes an accessory

after the fact.

A bit later she discovers that it was not Mary but “Beau” who had

tampered with the apparatus, and “Beau” is apparently little disturbed

by the dire consequences. Mary has therefore sacrificed her life plans

to save her friend. But she terminates the friendship. Murder or sudden

death resulting from variance is not new in fiction. Miss Pym’s and her

author’s circumventing its melodramatic consequences is distinctly

original.

The same author’s _To Love and Be Wise_ (1950) again connects variant

passion with murder, although this time the crime is unachieved. A

disturbingly beautiful young American, Leslie Searle, inveigles his way

into a literary household near London for the announced purpose of

meeting England’s best-loved radio broadcaster. Almost everyone in the

book—and the cast is large—finds this young man irresistible, but they

also sense that he is, in some way, uncanny. To one, he recalls certain

milder legends of demonology; another is certain that “he must have been

something very wicked in ancient Greece.”[49] His presence breeds

complications in both household and community.

Shortly Searle disappears, and Scotland Yard suspects murder. In the end

it turns out that the young Searle is a woman, who for years has lived

intermittently as a man, and for many of those years nursed an obsessive

passion for her cousin, a British actress whom she saw only

sporadically. The latter, once a fiancée of the broadcaster, committed

suicide after he jilted her, and Leslie has come to England with a

well-laid plan for eliminating him in revenge. In the course of her

association with his friends, however, and in particular with one who

had opportunity to know her cousin better than she did, she discovers

that her adored idol was largely a figment of her own imagination, the

real woman having been ruthless and destructive.

In consequence, Leslie has abandoned her purpose, and merely escaped

into her alternate feminine role. Despite the intuitive questions Leslie

Searle raises in everyone’s mind (somewhat overstressed in aid of the

plot), she is presented as a wholly sympathetic character, and can take

her place with the medieval Ide and Mlle de Maupin as a successful

transvestist and charmer. It is Miss Tey’s engaging Inspector who brings

home to her the basic immaturity of her protracted disguise, and, one

infers, converts her to a more adult pattern of life.

In the year between Miss Tey’s two volumes an anonymous _Olivia_ (1949)

was so reminiscent in style of _Either Is Love_ as almost to suggest

identical authorship. It too is an autobiographical record of experience

long past, that of a Victorian adolescent suddenly transplanted to a

finishing school on the outskirts of Paris. The Gallic freedom and

gaiety of her new life release the girl’s nascent emotions, and she

falls deeply in love with one of the two French headmistresses. The

book’s value lies in the fidelity and vividness with which it pictures

this first innocent passion. Narrative interest is supplied by tension

between the two mistresses, who have lived happily together for fifteen

years until a scheming newcomer on the staff turns one against the other

for her own ends. Mlle Julie, Olivia’s beloved, has always had favorites

among the students whom Mlle Cara has somewhat resented, but only now,

while Olivia is Julie’s chosen, does Cara’s jealousy reach the point of

hysteria. After an accumulation of petty grievances magnified by the

newcomer, Cara dies of a overdose of sedative almost certainly

self-administered. Beside her deathbed Julie cries out, “She is the only

one I have ever loved!”—a cry prostrating to Olivia, who has had reason

to believe herself also cherished. Later Julie provides some comfort by

telling the girl that she has always been “victorious” over the

emotional temptations presented by students, but that now she wishes she

had yielded. This shows her cry to have meant that with Cara alone she

was physically intimate. She predicts that Olivia will not be victorious

under similar circumstances, and as at the outset of the story Olivia

has said, “I don’t pretend that this experience was not succeeded by

others ... but at that time I was innocent,” it is obvious that Mlle

Julie’s understanding of her nature was accurate.

A less innocent adolescent record written by Françoise Mallet, a married

woman of twenty, was published in Paris (1951) as _Le Rempart des

Béguines_, in New York (1952) as _The Illusionist_, and in paper-covers

(1953) as _The Loving and Daring_. This evidence of wide popularity

makes it necessary to say little here save that it describes the

initiation of a French girl of fifteen by her father’s mistress, a

Russian woman twenty years older with a certain masculine hardness

sometimes approaching sadism. The latter is captivated by Helene’s

resemblance to a young English girl whom she once adored and whose

defection left an unhealed wound. As long as Tamara is independent and

masculine, Helene is her slave, cutting school, deceiving her father,

even reluctantly accompanying her adored to a lesbian night club. Then

Tamara becomes Helene’s stepmother, and, relaxing at last under the

influence of security, she becomes much more feminine. Consequently,

Helene ceases to worship and looks forward to taking the dominant role

herself, her weapon the lesbian relationship which her preoccupied

father has believed merely an innocent “good influence.” Though the

experience is hardly constructive _in toto_, both Helene and her author

consider it beneficial inasmuch as it brings the lonely adolescent out

of a phase of erotic reverie into wholesome contact with reality, and so

has a maturing effect.

A last sensational and ill-written item of the penny-dreadful type was

Carol Hales’s _Wind Woman_ (1953). Here a psychoanalyst treats incipient

neurosis induced in a young composer by her passion for a woman who will

permit no caresses, and her resultant frustrated longing for an ideal

lesbian relationship. In Laurel’s history, as revealed to Dr. Frances

Garner, the author heaps Pelion upon Ossa in the matter of anti-male

conditioning, not without purpose. For in the end the beautiful young

analyst proves more than understanding; she makes no effort either to

dispel her patient’s prejudice or to terminate her transference, and on

the final page of the volume she comes as near to open proposal of

intimacy as an author could risk without being sued by the psychiatric

profession.

The final tale to be considered, Claire Morgan’s _The Price of Salt_

(1951), while occasionally understated, still gives a convincing account

of love between a married woman approaching thirty and a girl a decade

younger. At eight Therese was consigned to an orphanage when her widowed

mother remarried; she has since felt more alone than a true orphan.

Ambitious to become a stage designer, she earns her keep in New York by

temporary jobs and studies art at night. When the book opens, she is

involved in a physically complete but unsatisfactory affair with a male

art student whom she will not marry. She has had other male attention,

and refuses a second offer of marriage before the story closes. Carol

Aird is in process of divorcing an incompatible husband (and his

domineering family), and negotiations are dragging over the custody of a

seven-year-old daughter now with his family. The two women meet in a

department store where Therese is employed as a seasonal “extra,” and

across an unromantic toy counter they are smitten with an infatuation as

sudden as Gillian’s in _Tortoiseshell Cat_. The older woman’s reaction

is less obvious, but within a day or two she has taken the girl to lunch

and invited her to spend Christmas in her suburban house. Presently she

suggests a motor trip to her family home on the west coast. Therese

without hesitation closes the doors on her own life and accompanies her.

Intimacy develops perhaps a week after they set out and a month after

their first encounter. Another week of happiness ensues before they

discover a detective trailing them. Through pique at her leaving him,

Carol’s husband is bent on evidence which will give him full custody of

the child. Even so, in their new intoxication the two women find

amusement at first in eluding their shadow, and make a game of searching

each new room for recording devices. When Carol finally attempts to buy

the detective off, she is told that several incriminating records have

already been sent to New York and that she had best get back to protect

her interests. Promising to return in a fortnight, she leaves Therese in

South Dakota to wait for her. But Carol’s return is repeatedly

postponed, and she finally writes that in order to see anything of her

child hereafter she must promise to break with Therese entirely. She

begs the girl to give her up and start afresh. “I would be

underestimating you to think you could not.”

In reaction to the shock, Therese feels not only abandoned but betrayed,

as though Carol’s picking her up and dropping her had been a coldly

deliberate game. Stunned and adrift she stops to work for a time in

Chicago until circumstances necessitate her return to New York. She

means not to see Carol again, and though news that Carol has been ill

moves her, it does not weaken her resolve. Her immediate efforts toward

employment in stage designing now meet with prompt, if modest, success,

for even her brief association with the more cultured woman has

increased her savoir-faire, and the emotional experience has given her

self-confidence such as none of her contacts with men had ever done. She

finally goes to an unavoidable meeting with Carol, dreading the strain

but unafraid of yielding, and even when she learns that Carol has

repudiated her husband’s humiliating list of conditions and thus

forfeited all hold upon her child, Therese still refuses her offer of a

shared apartment.

Therese has placed a design for a stage set and is on her way to a

theatrical cocktail party to celebrate. She meets a British actress

there in whose eyes she sees a swift flash of interest comparable to her

own reaction on meeting Carol. Invited at once by the star to an ensuing

private party she accepts, feeling herself now quite able to handle any

foreseeable developments. But in the moment of its birth this new sense

of adequacy precipitates its own sequel. Knowing herself no longer

helplessly subject to Carol, she feels free to rejoin her at will. She

slips away without a word to her potential conquest and returns to her

early love.

Featuring as it does two women who have both had heterosexual

experience, and ultimately bringing them through many more tensions than

are indicated here, this narrative offers as strong an argument for the

validity of variant love as _Diana_. In a letter to Therese after a

legal session, Carol summarizes the essence of the argument:

The rapport between two men or two women can be absolute and perfect,

as it can never be between man and woman, and perhaps some people

want just this, as others want that more shifting and uncertain thing

that happens between men and women. It was implied yesterday that my

present course would bring me to the depths of human vice and

degradation.... It is true, if I were to go on like this and be spied

upon, attacked, never possessing one person long enough so that the

knowledge of the person ... [could be more than superficial]—that is

degradation. Or to live against one’s grain, that is

degeneration....[50]

This takes no account of the Freudian charge of immaturity against the

easier unisexual rapport, and its failure to do so cannot be laid in

this day and time to ignorance of Freud. It has rather the sound of

indifference, if not defiance.

The majority of favorable treatments of variance since the beginning of

World War II have been little concerned with avoiding overt lesbianism,

just as other fiction over an even longer period has been tolerant of a

certain amount of heterosexual freedom. This fact, along with the rapid

quantitative increase of variance in current fiction, may point, as has

been suggested, to its gradual acceptance as a legitimate area of human

experience. On the other hand it is precisely toward such casual

acceptance that censoring groups have directed their fire. Prize-winning

or widely acclaimed works with foreign settings such as _The Mesh_ and

_The Illusionist_ have not been heavily attacked; neither have

condemnatory treatments even of such low calibre as _Naked Storm_ and

the reprint of _Queer Patterns_. But blacklists have lumped _Spring

Fire_, _Appointment in Paris_, and _Women’s Barracks_ with the

heterosexual excesses of Mickey Spillane for censure (justified, if at

all, only in the case of the first book), and these titles seem to have

been withdrawn from sales-racks. Even if the pendulum swings back to

greater conservatism, however, as it has done periodically in the course

of literary history, its new position will not be identical with any

earlier one. The overworked metaphor of spiral progress may apply here

as to all other historical trends. To those who have witnessed changing

attitudes toward homosexuality since 1900, it is a matter of regret that

the ultimate swing of the new cycle must extend beyond our ken.

CONCLUSION

Periodic fluctuations in quantity, substance and style of variant

writing have already been summarized in the sections sketching its

history. It is now time to review certain more subjective aspects of the

long record. For example, does variant literature lend support to

hereditary theories of variance? At first glance, one recurrent physical

type seems to do so: the woman fitted by nature to play the man. Tall,

long of limb, narrow-hipped, wide-shouldered, direct-eyed, this figure

has persisted from the dim era in which the Greeks conceived Artemis to

1950 when an Englishwoman created Leslie Searle. But the figure appears

also in many settings other than variant literature. We meet it in the

pages of romance and on the walls of galleries, on the silver screen and

in élite advertisements. And, of course, many knights-errant, courtiers,

dandies, athletes, matinée idols and swift-shooting cowboys are built on

a similar pattern. Here the militant feminist will observe bitterly that

in this man’s world even our ideal of beauty is male. But the figure is

not so much male as intermediate, and above all youthful. Many of the

attributes catalogued above are those of adolescence just arrived at

adult stature. In combination with adult savoir-faire they are appealing

enough in the young man whose advantage is merely aesthetic. In a young

woman, for whom the statistical norm of height and strength falls short

of her brother’s, they represent also superiority to her own kind in

power and, therefore, in independence.

Because this type so captivates the general imagination, its appearances

in variant literature are impressive out of proportion to their

frequency. A complete count, from the valiant Ide to the undaunted Leo

or Leslie, numbers roughly a score, and when one has subtracted those

like Bradamante and Rosalind to whom lesbianism was never really

attributed, the tally is reduced to a round dozen—hardly three percent

of the variant total. Among the remainder, of whom a good many played a

comparatively positive emotional role, no marked type recurs often

enough to have any significance. A few figures are stocky and strong,

but others may cast “a shadow thin as a blade;” some are voluptuously

feminine. Nor does any one physical trait—except possibly

height—accompany variance with any regularity. In fact, beyond the

skeletal proportions already noted, the only somatic attributes

mentioned in describing boyish women (and these not often) are deep

voices and underdeveloped breasts. Other unfeminine details such as a

striding gait or a brusque address, though they may owe something to hip

articulation or vocal register, are usually mere mannerisms; that is,

they are imitative rather than inborn. Of course these fictional data

will not support conclusions as valid as those based on scientific

observation, since beside the license natural to creative writing one

must allow also for the reluctance of disapproving authors to provide

their _mauvais sujets_ with any hereditary excuses. Still, the long

procession comprises variants individually convincing enough to give

weight to their physical diversity. It is clear that the majority of

variant or lesbian women observed by the writing fraternity are not

masculine in physique.

Does sexual behavior, then, fall into patterns which might argue for

some uniformities in endocrine balance? Again, it is impossible to

classify the majority honestly, even by the simplest divisions into

active and passive, homosexual and bisexual, and feel confident that the

operative factors are innate. One may separate those whose passion is

masculine in violence from the cool, the gentle, the maternally tender;

but among the last may fall such conspicuously masculine figures as

Stephen Gordon and Jan Morale. Or the aggressive Maupins or Leos may

prove bisexual, the gentle Mettas and Miss Caffertys immutably set upon

their own kind, and a petite and delicate Flordespine or Almond may be

bold in her sexual advances. It is, however, possible to detect certain

rough patterns not in physique or in sex behavior but in psychological

attitude. There are masterful spirits who need to prove themselves the

equal of any man, or to dominate rather than follow. There are rebels

and lone wolves who defy authority or public opinion and are usually

jealously possessive of the few they love. There are the more detached

egotists and narcissists who see others only in terms of their own

advantage and abandon themselves to no one. There are the shy and

clinging who crave protection. And there are the maternal types,

forgetful of self and eager to cherish and support.

If not heredity, what explanation does literature offer for these

variants? Sometimes none. Lyric poets in particular simply register

their sentiments and leave readers to search elsewhere for explanations

of the enigma. In a different fashion the same is true in unsympathetic

narratives, and those where interest lies in plot alone. In these cases,

too, variants are presented, as it were, Minerva-born, but are assumed

to be a recognized type sure to generate dramatic tensions. Usually,

however, as in more conventional fiction, authors supply some personal

history for main characters and often directly or implicitly hold it

responsible for their anomalies. This last is, of course, especially

noticeable in recent years since the spread of Freudian psychology. Even

where no notion of causality seems to exist in the author’s mind, the

same sort of background may recur in more than one narrative. Thus it is

possible to identify a number of conditions, some fairly universal, some

characteristic of their period, which appear repeatedly as antecedents

or accompaniments of variance.

Of the universal class the most prevalent factor is some degree of

negative reaction to men. In psychiatric casebooks this is often the

result of sexual violation in childhood or adolescence, or of the

witnessing of intercourse at an early age, which is almost equally

traumatic. But such experiences and their sequelae of neurotic antipathy

are rare in fiction. There a less compulsive aversion may result from

rough or undesired caresses, or from their antithesis, pointed physical

repudiation. Or it may grow from social neglect or slighting by men, or

from deliberate indoctrination by a puritanic guardian. It may also stem

indirectly from conjugal discord at home or elsewhere, through

observation of a hated man’s unfaithfulness or cruelty, a beloved

woman’s frigidity or suffering.

The next most frequent causal factor comprises a large and varied

constellation of troubled family relations. Among our hundreds of

variant women, those who enjoyed the sort of family life that social

psychologists now exhort all parents to provide could be counted on one

hand. Even those living with both parents on any terms would not

multiply the number many times. Most often, the mother is found wanting

in some way; indeed, the percentage of outright motherless girls is

impressive. But, it may well be asked, what about the number in ordinary

fiction? In novels of psychological cast dealing with the vicissitudes

of young unmarried women the count is certainly high. The margin in

favor of variant novels is further narrowed when one considers that few

of these are literary masterpieces, and that minor fiction has, from its

beginnings, capitalized heavily on the orphaned or motherless heroine.

The reasons are obvious: a girl thus deprived can be a sympathetic

character despite unconventional conduct; this conduct affords the

reader escape-through-identification; and the author is guilty of no

profanation of the revered mother image. Nevertheless, after all these

allowances are duly made, a lack of maternal tenderness and

understanding bulks large among influences leading to variant behavior.

The comparable lack of a father is seldom stressed. Paternal harshness

appears rather oftener than the same trait in the mother, and the father

is also sometimes a party to general parental indifference or neglect,

but by and large the variant girl actively mistreated by either or both

parents is fairly rare. A father fixation, on the other hand, though

infrequent, is significant when it does occur, and Balzac’s Seraphita

bears witness that it is not confined to the Freudian twentieth century.

The badgering of a lone girl by a parental surrogate—stepmother,

relative or guardian—is featured now and then, as in _The Scorpion_, but

this sympathy-begging device is less overworked in variant than in other

minor fiction. The influence of siblings in producing either sexual

fixation or aversion is negligible, unless their conspicuous absence is

significant, for a considerable number of variant girls are presented as

actually or virtually “only” children.

All this wide variety of subjective situations apparently contributes to

the equally diverse range of variant experiences; yet none in the two

lists is so consistently paired as to establish certainty of explicit

cause and effect. In fact, more than one family factor and a measure of

sex antagonism often occur simultaneously or successively in the same

narrative.

In addition to subjective influences there remains the category of

external circumstances which encourage variance. And while the

psychological situations remain fairly constant from one period to

another, environmental factors vary considerably with time. The more

strictly convention limits a woman’s activities, the more certain is her

mere overstepping its bounds to produce significant results. From

medieval times through the nineteenth century, to wear men’s clothing

was taboo. Therefore, when Clémentine or Fragoletta assumed man’s dress,

grave emotional consequences were inevitable. Today the donning of

slacks or hunting costume produces little emotional impact. Similarly in

nineteenth-century France or early twentieth-century England, when

modesty forbade revealing the feminine body, a glimpse of uncovered

breasts might stir a woman to passion, or Proust’s Albertine and her

friend might enjoy a half-hour’s dalliance in a beach cabin because they

had undressed together. Today, when beach, pool and gymnasium showers

are communal affairs, their dressing-cubicles are unlikely to be the

scene of tender passages. Furthermore, in days when woman’s sphere was

definitely the home, girls who claimed independence outside it exerted a

strong imaginative appeal. Artists, actresses or mere bachelor girls

attracted one another as strongly as they fascinated more sheltered

women. But how many such “bohemians” have aroused general excitement

since the 1920s? Few, certainly, in fiction.

One objective setting, however, has for decades remained basically

constant as a hotbed of variance—those institutions which restrict young

women to the company of their own sex. Until well into the nineteenth

century, convents or convent schools were the segregating agency. After

1850, secular boarding schools took over the role, without the

occasional compensating outlet of religious emotion. With the spread of

higher education in our own times, women’s colleges joined the list, and

the latest additions have been reform schools, military barracks,

sorority houses and metropolitan residence clubs. The results of a

cloistered existence, then, might seem to argue for environment as a

cause of variance just as strongly as recurrence of the “Maupin” type

argued for heredity. But we have already seen that when many women wear

men’s clothes at one time or another, the effect of even the most boyish

is less pronounced than it used to be. As for environment, excepting

disciplinary and military quarters, twentieth-century cloisters allow

their residents so much more freedom than their predecessors that

variant or lesbian developments within them can no longer be laid wholly

to pressure of circumstance.

Thus, it appears that literary testimony from a score of centuries

confirms the current psychiatric verdict: variance is one possible

solution of pressing emotional problems; but arrival at this particular

solution depends upon so many variables that as yet no certain

predictive formula has been derived.

An aspect of the current scene not yet duly recognized in literature is

the relation of variant experience to gainful employment. In the heyday

of feminism a good deal of concern was voiced by anti-feminists lest

women’s financial and social independence might breed lesbianism on a

grand scale. But a comparison of French fiction from 1870 to 1900, when

women were still dependent, with the English and American record since

World War I suggests that the fear was unjustified. The issue at stake

in our own time is not the influence of earning upon variance but the

reverse effect of variance on a woman’s capacity to hold a paid

position. Before 1900 it was normal for the unmarried girl or the

estranged wife to be supported by her parents or her long-suffering

husband. For the last fifty years more and more women have been obliged

to earn their own livings in ordinary unromantic jobs, and to this trend

fiction has not done full justice. To be sure, creative license has

always allowed the freedom of an independent income to more persons than

are so favored in everyday life. It is true also that in recent variant

novels a good many occupations have at least made an appearance. We have

met actresses, modiste’s assistants, novelists, interior decorators,

social workers, a number of teachers, a trio of nurses, a department

store executive and a minor clerk, and several girls employed in

business offices. But in general these positions have served only as

realistic backdrops for action which did not impinge upon them. In less

than half a dozen cases has variance interfered with earning capacity.

It gravely affected the actresses in _Queer Patterns_; the

schoolmistresses in _The Children’s Hour_; a college instructor in

_Diana_; and it constituted a serious risk for nurses in _Promise of

Love_ and government employees in _Either is Love_. This meagre

proportion, especially at the level of mere risk, does not reflect

“things as they are” according to factual evidence in psychiatric

literature, and the failure of variant fiction to come to grips with

this aspect of reality is a count against it. It is also a waste of one

fertile potential source of dramatic tension.

There remains a final ticklish question which leads straight into

controversial territory, but to which a wide range of possible answers

must be considered: why are variant belles-lettres so generally ignored?

When so much has been written on the theme, why has it been slighted in

library collections, histories of literature, and bibliographic records?

One immediate answer will be that it is generally inferior, which is to

a certain extent true; but it is not inferior to a deal of ordinary

literature which has not been so slighted, notably that by the same

authors who have produced variant titles. According to their generation

or to their more considered convictions, different persons will explain

this comparative neglect by claiming that variance is immoral, or

abnormal, or the concern of an eccentric few and of no importance or

interest to humanity at large. None of these claims can be summarily

dismissed as negligible.

Without going deeply into what the term “abnormal” connotes in different

intellectual fields, it may be stated categorically that many

psychiatrists no longer regard ordinary homosexual experience as

pathological. Nor is the phenomenon too remote even from a statistical

norm. In addition to literary evidence, anthropology and uncensored

history and biography indicate that homosexuality has existed if not

flourished in all times and places; and Dr. Kinsey’s quantitative

studies show that twenty-eight percent of women now living have

experienced “sexual arousal” by their own kind at some time in their

lives. Only rarely in either literature or life are women who have known

this experience distinguishable from their fellows, and many who are

perceptibly masculine in physique and temperament have never known it.

Variants, then, are fairly numerous, not “abnormal” in an alienist’s

sense of the term, and not perceptibly eccentric.

The moral charge is less simply disposed of because it is so generally

and often so unthinkingly advanced. It should be stated at once that in

this discussion the morality of a course of action is referred to its

effect upon the actor and his social group, as social anthropologists

believe it was referred originally in the shaping of moral codes now

regarded in some quarters as absolute. It should also be said, and

underlined, that marriage and motherhood, despite the frequent failure

of the one and the heavy burdens imposed on women by the other, appear

more ultimately satisfying to the majority of women than other emotional

experiences, and are certainly more beneficial to society. They are

therefore the goals toward which personal and social effort should be

directed, and obstacles to their success should be minimized. To what

extent is variance such an obstacle and how pernicious is it in other

respects?

Since human survival depends upon childbearing, if any large number of

women should substitute homosexual relations for marriage and

motherhood, the long range results would be socially deleterious. But

heterosexual and maternal drives seem an effective guarantee against any

such eventuality, and as long as numerous groups are advocating birth

control as a check to overpopulation, this sociological argument against

variance operates only in the realm of pure abstraction. As to

conventional strictures upon all sex activity save legitimate

intercourse, their apparent function is to curtail the social dangers of

heterosexual license. Since even the most active lesbianism cannot be

the cause of illegitimate offspring or of abortion, there is no valid

case against variance on this score. A more practical argument stems

from the now generally admitted psychological bearing of early upon

later sexual experience. A number of marriage counselors, for instance,

maintain that extensive pre-marital petting and homosexual activity are

handicaps to later marital adjustment, and are therefore harmful to the

young. So far as is known this claim has not been unquestionably

validated by quantitative evidence, and certain authorities pronounce it

a rationalization of unadmitted prejudice, but it must be recognized as

the consensus of a good many popular advisors. For married women also,

of course, lesbian relations or merely a consuming variant passion can

prove as detrimental to marital happiness as similar heterosexual

infidelities. On the other hand, for women deterred from marrying by

lack of opportunity, financial or family burdens, inadequate sex appeal,

or invincible disinclination, variant attachments may provide the sole

chance for the experience of passionate love, and some psychiatrists

consider such fulfillment preferable to lifelong deprivation.

Clearly, then, variance is not, like sadism for example, a limited

aberration consistently destructive per se. It seems more nearly a

lesser category of emotional experience parallel to the heterosexual and

capable of as much variety. If governed by the standards of moderation,

integrity, and mutual consideration which should prevail in all

passionate relationships, it should not be harmful oftener than

heterosexual passion. But in actual experience utopian conditions seldom

prevail. We have heard from “Diana” some reasons why variant passion,

unregulated by any legal or social codes of its own, is apt to be

irresponsible and impermanent. Working against it also is the negative

influence of sweeping social condemnation. Most neuroses among variant

women have resulted from the conflict between their impulses and

feelings of anxiety, guilt, or even sin. Thus the forces which would

control variance are often responsible for making it a destructive

experience.

* * * * *

Here actually is an important reason for such inferiority as variant

literature exhibits. The age-long prejudice against variance, deriving

as it does from religious taboo, retains something of the hysteria which

motivated witch-burning and inquisition. For this reason the whole

subject is surrounded by a surcharged atmosphere to which no sensitive

mind is impervious. Even the best authors are scarcely able to free

their work of all controversial overtones, and partisanship in creative

writing has never made for artistry. As we have seen, lesser writers on

both sides of the issue may descend to outright zealotry. Fervent

antagonists choose variants who would be hateful without emotional

irregularity, and who, with it, become monsters, usually the more

dangerous for being picturesque to the eye or otherwise seductive.

Negative writing of better quality presents less-sinister characters,

but manipulates circumstances to the end that variant experience shall

always prove disastrous. In _Mme. Adonis_ and _Die Schwester_ the

relatively sympathetic title figures meet violent death; in

_Méphistophéla_, _The Island_, _The Captive_, and _Pity for Women_, they

end in madness or severe neurosis. In minor French tales of the last

century, variant couples destroy one another by excessive physical

indulgence, and in virtually all censorious novels they bring much harm

or suffering to those with whom they are associated.

Frank champions of variance are guilty of parallel artistic offenses.

Some make society the villain and variants its romanticized victims, and

become shrill in denunciation of the one and defense of the other. Even

_Diana_ and _Either is Love_, temperate as they are in tone, would be

artistically disqualified by their inclusion of outright argument even

were they more excellent than they are. The subtler defenders are also

no better than their opponents. Fearing public opinion too much to

betray unqualified sympathy, they, too, strain circumstance to prevent

their appealing characters from enjoying happiness. Granted that in life

popular prejudice makes the chance of happiness precarious, case studies

and other factual records show no such proportion of suicide and tragedy

as do tolerant variant novels of the minor sort. Even writers of power

sometimes fall into similar tragic exaggeration, as for example Miss

Sackville-West in _Dark Island_ or Masefield in _Multitude and

Solitude_.

There are, however, a fair number of works guilty of no gross

shortcomings, and a few of outstanding excellence. When their authors’

total output merits serious literary study, critics as far as possible

ignore those titles in which variance figures. Where no inclusive

critical appraisals of an author are made, reviewers of individual

variant works are apt to exercise less restraint, praising them

grudgingly for their manner but deprecating their matter with

disapproval, regret, or—what is worse—ironic or patronizing superiority.

It has already been remarked that sympathetic literary treatments of

variance are seldom written by men. Now the parallel circumstance must

be noted—most literary criticism and the majority of book reviews are

masculine work. It is only natural that men should react negatively to

writing so oblivious of their own kind as is much variant literature.

And this reaction must not be viewed as mere prejudice; its roots go

deeper. Statistical studies of the reading done by some 20,000 persons

have established the fact that the prime factor affecting reading

interests, more basic than education, occupation or age, is sex.[1] The

personality inventories constructed by psychologists and derived from

probably even more numerous observations show that sex also determines

many other interests and attitudes.[2] Thus men and women live to a

certain extent in different subjective worlds—a fact recently dramatized

by Philip Wylie in _Disappearance_.

With regard to variant literature, this means that men, who pass some

nine-tenths of the judgments upon it, are attempting to evaluate a realm

of experience in which first-hand knowledge is impossible to them.

Naturally, they do best in rating variant material written by men, and

next best with unsympathetic works by women. Some few project themselves

with comparative success into tolerant studies by women whose mental

idiom and emotional outlook is somewhat masculine. Djuna Barnes, Henry

Handel Richardson, Mary Renault, and even Gail Wilhelm in her first

novel, fared rather well at the hands of reviewers. In contrast,

pertinent titles by Rosamond Lehmann, Elizabeth Bowen, Dorothy

Richardson, Helen Anderson, Anaïs Nin and Kay Boyle, were either

slighted or treated with unjustified harshness considering the admitted

quality of their authors’ other work. “Thin,” “nebulous,”

“unconvincing,” “insignificant,” “futile,” “overwrought,” and

“hysterical” were among the evaluative terms applied to these titles by

male reviewers.[3] Women on the other hand had much to say in their

favor, the most significant and frequent comment being that they were

peculiarly sensitive and accurate in emotional interpretation.

Neither group of critics should be labeled “right” and the other

“wrong.” To most women and to such men as are endowed with unusual

imaginative sensibility, perceptive and well-written variant works will

always seem good literature. And they _are_ good by the established

canons of truth to experience, sound character analysis, artistic

structure, convincing background, vivid objective detail, and beauty of

expression. To most men and—for a different reason—some women, such

works will seem bad in varying degrees from non-essential to

intolerable. They _are_ bad, then, in that they lack universality of

appeal. For the same reason much non-variant fiction written by men—work

predominantly objective in plot and violent in action, full of casual

and unimaginative sex activity—is uninteresting or distasteful to the

majority of women, though it too may fulfill the other requirements of

good literature.

Variant fiction is of course not alone among feminine efforts in being

disparaged by the opposite sex. The battle over the quality of feminine

writing is old; to do it full justice would require a small volume in

itself. But a brief comment is required to conclude this long

discussion. Male critics (who comprise better than nine-tenths of the

whole) can be roughly divided into three schools of opinion. The least

charitable maintain that women lack creative power in all artistic

fields because nature has designated them for biological creation alone.

(Otto Weininger[4] is the extreme example of this school, but he is not

alone in his opinions.) The largest group make the point that women’s

artistic efforts are almost exclusively imitative rather than original,

and, without investigating reasons, they argue that this fact

demonstrates patent creative inferiority. A few—Nathaniel Hawthorne was

among the first—feel that

Generally women write like emasculated men and are only to be

distinguished from men by greater feebleness and folly; but when they

throw off [imitative] restraints ... and come before the public stark

naked as it were—then their books are sure to possess character and

value.[5]

Hawthorne did not, however, live up to his convictions; he gave up

writing fiction in the 1850s and fled the country because it was full of

“damned scribbling females.” The average quality of the scribbling

perhaps justified his flight, but his apostasy was symbolic of his sex.

The women who began in the mid-nineteenth century to write like women

were writing also largely _for_ women, and on a level to be printed in

newspapers and in the newly born “home” magazines. They wrote from the

limited conventional experience that was known to them and their

numerous audience; sentimental religious exaltation and dreams of

romantic love supplied the only emotional color in their lives. The

common lot of marriage brought mainly domestic drudgery and constant

childbearing, with the loss of so many children that even the universal

experience of the death of a child lost its keen edge. Had such lives

been presented with the austere truth to experience demanded of good

literature, the results would have been read no more widely than are

starkly realistic novels at any time. And most of those women authors

needed to earn money. Thus, feminine fiction concentrated upon blameless

romantic passion, took wild liberties with reality, and was altogether

unrelated to art. But it sold in the hundreds of thousands, and it set a

style in popular feminine narrative which has altered in detail from

decade to decade but has not yet gone out. Until well after 1900 few

women authors rose above this level save those who more or less

successfully imitated men, and chiefly such men as Dickens and Trollope.

This sentimental tide has always been completely alien to men, both as

individuals and as critics, and it has done much to solidify the

majority male opinion that women are not creative artists. Even those

men who achieve some intellectual appreciation of the best feminine

writing find that, in general, they, like Hawthorne, cannot accept it

completely. One might say that, beginning with Dorothy Richardson and

Katherine Mansfield, women have attempted to raise essentially feminine

writing to a level of absolute quality. No pretense will be made here to

trace this growing trend, or to separate the more from the less

“feminine” authors. The trend has run to more and more subjective

content, as is evident in such current authors as Shirley Jackson and

Jean Stafford.

Variance is, of course, more than any other subject, exclusively

feminine. Had it not suffered the handicap of taboo, probably more

literature of high quality would have grown up around it. Indeed, had

such inhibited spirits as Emily Brontë, Emily Dickinson and Rose

O’Neill, to mention only the most obvious, been less paralyzed

emotionally, they might have had richer experience from which to write

as well as more courage to write about it. This is not a plea for the

cultivation of either homosexual experience or variant literature. It is

simply a suggestion that if those women who are irremediably so

constituted, and who happen also to be artists, were less shackled, the

world’s literature might be by that slight degree the richer. Before

that comes to pass, of course, two changes must occur: public opinion in

general must come closer to the most lenient psychiatric evaluation of

variance. And men must become aware of the unconscious prejudice in

their literary evaluation of all, and particularly of variant, feminine

writing. If they cannot surmount this prejudice, they should leave the

variant field to feminine critics. Also, more women should enter the

field of literary criticism.

* * * * *

To conclude: we have seen that feminine variance has persisted in human

experience since the beginning of literary records. It has repeatedly

aroused sufficient interest to be the subject of literature, some of it

good enough to have survived through many centuries against all odds.

The odds have been of two very different sorts—religious taboo and

masculine distaste. The first operated stringently from the beginning of

the Christian era to the Renaissance, and is not yet dead. The second

was apparent in classical times and has been especially evident whenever

the neo-classical spirit prevailed, for that spirit exalts objective and

intellectual experience, stresses the physical aspects of sex, and is

contemptuous of subjective emotional preoccupation. In Romantic periods

when emotion was glorified—that is, when essentially feminine values

prevailed—variant literature has at least comparatively flourished. In

our own day the ancient religious taboo has weakened and psychiatric

values have to some extent been substituted. Now immaturity rather than

sin is the socio-ethical argument against variance. To each age its own

new wisdom seems a social panacea more cogent than all that have gone

before, but none has ushered in Utopia. Momentarily, however, we have

attained—or at least it seems to us that we have attained—to somewhat

more tolerance than the elder moralists. If variance is to be always

with us, calm acceptance of that fact may become as prevalent as the

recognition of human evolution has come to be. And since variant

literary expression appears equally persistent, it may conceivably

become a narrow but similarly recognized field, permitted to come to

fruition according to its own laws, and to contribute the best of which

it is capable to the total sum of world literature.

NOTES

Notes refer to items in the bibliography by letter and number only.

Foreword

1. An earlier edition of C 72

Introduction

1. C 111

2. C 153, C 154

I. Ancient Record

1. A 250

2. A 251

3. B 199

4. A 213

5. A 251:15

6. A 250 & B 199, notes

7. A 251:67

8. _ibid._:39

9. _ibid._:97, 3

10. _ibid._:90

11. A 250

12. B 174:134; B 199:319