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tion writer as a shrewd, mechanical, consciously venal literary worker
should be discarded. What we are faced with are well-meaning au–
thors who write as they please and who are probably genuinely sur–
prised when the dollars roll in. Their surprise and its implications are
much more distressing than the deliberate idealizations of the hacks who
used to do this work for publishers.)
The theme of Charles Jackson's book is homosexuality. Its hero is
a dignified, respectable professor, John Grandin, who after a long period
of coolness toward his wife goes with her on a holiday in which they
hope to recover their lost affection. However, instead of the anticipated
reunion, the professor falls in love with an attractive, unsophisticated
Marine captain, Cliff Hauman. At the end of the holiday the professor
compulsively reveals himself to Cliff, gets beaten up, and faces the
possibility of total disgrace. The problem from the commercial point of
view, and there is no evidence in this book that Jackson has any gifts that
would intrinsically alienate the public, is to make a hero of the professor.
First there is the danger that, in the popular mind, the homosexual would
be considered too sensual, erotic, and decadent to command sympathy.
This is successfully avoided by the fact that Professor Grandin did not
discover his abnormality until the age of forty-four, a happy condition
which probably makes him a bit more pure and undemanding than the
most prudish reader. In addition to his innocence, the professor is the
very opposite of decadent; on the contrary he has been so ascetic and
studious that his very goodness threatens to estrange the popular reader.
Might not the heterosexual public think the professor is weak, effeminate,
lacking in sex appeal and therefore unheroic? This possibility is obviated
by the fact that the hero is the father of two sons and has a wife whose
amorous interest in him is extremely resolute. Oddly enough the hetero–
sexual scenes in the book, between husband and wife, are of such lusty,
sonorous vulgarity that it is a relief to shift to the quieter, more romantic
atmosphere of the homosexual theme . . . One could go on analyzing
the way in which the trick has been turned in
The Fall of Valor,
the way
in which this difficult subject has been made safe and easy. As a result
the humiliating conflicts of the homosexual, his moral ambiguity and
inevitable private equivocations have been stripped of their meaning.
Francois Mauriac's
Woman of the Pharisees
is an untrammeled,
antediluvian novel written during the German occupation of France.
One looks in vain for disguised comment upon the times in which it was
composed, because the Germans have been accused of almost everything
except the problem Mauriac treats: excessive piety. The central character
in the novel is a woman too "good" to be Good, a formidable believer
who takes upon herself a considerable portion of God's right to judge.
This character is rather well known in American fiction because she is,
in her religious individualism and emphasis upon the dictates of her
