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.

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

(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.

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:

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:

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.

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,

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:

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

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:

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

At another time

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

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

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,

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:

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,

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.