Sex variant women in literature

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:

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

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

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:

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:

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,

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

Lady Glourie quiets her,

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,