Checklist Part 13

+ WILHELM, GALE. _Torchlight to Valhalla._ Random, 1938, pbr tct

_The Strange Path_, Lion 1953, Berkley 1958, 1959. Morgen, rootless and drifting after the death of her artist father, to whom she had been childishly close, is loved by two fine young men, but finds her happiness with a strange young girl, Toni.

Major, well known.

_We Too Are Drifting._ Triangle Books 1938-39; Modern Library 1935. pbr Lion Books 1951, Berkley 1957, 58, 59, 60. Probably the major novel of the thirties to deal with lesbians; perhaps the best of all time. In substance it deals with the boyish, but feminine Jan Morale; her struggle to escape a slightly sordid affair with Madelaine, a married woman, and to find happiness, despite family complications, with a young girl, Victoria. Told with fairness, restraint, and skill-not to mention that this is one of the dozen or so books on this entire list to display not only _some_, but _exceptional_ literary merit.

WILLIAMS, TENNESSEE. "Something Unspoken" in _27 Wagons Full of Cotton._ New Directions, 1953. Also in Best Short Plays of 1955-56, Dodd, Mead, 1956. A play; I marked this for fco, received a protest: "Everybody will enjoy this." Compromise; everybody will enjoy this who likes Tennessee Williams.

WILLIAMS, WILLIAM CARLOS. _The Knife of the Times._ Dragon Press, 1932, hcr tct _Make Light of It_, Random House 1950, (m). The t.i.tle story is in DWCory, _21 Variations_.

WILLIAMS, ISABEL. _h.e.l.lcat._ Greenberg 1934, pbr Dell 1952.

Unpleasant girl who uses everyone for her own purposes includes a lesbian among her victims.

WILLINGHAM, CALDER. (pseud). _End as a Man._ Vanguard 1947, pbr Signet co. 1957, (m).

WILLIS, GEORGE. _Little Boy Blues._ Dutton, 1947. Concerns the machinations of a lesbian to achieve marriage and motherhood as a "front".

WILSON, ETHEL D. _Hetty Dorval._ Macmillan 1948, fco.

WINDHAM, DONALD. _The Hitchhiker._ Florence, Italy, priv. print.

(m).

_Servants with Torches._ N. Y. 1955 priv. print. (m).

_Dog Star._ Doubleday, 1950, (m).

WINSLOE, CHRISTA. _The Child Manuela._ (Trans. Agnes Scott Farrar, 1933.) Motherless Manuela, sent to a strict boarding-school because of supposed misconduct with a boy (actually she was only fascinated with his mother) falls in love with Elizabeth von Bernberg, one of the teachers. The woman's behavior is strictly correct, but her warmth of personality attracts all the love-starved, inhibited children; Manuela, exhilarated and slightly drunk at a school party, babbles of her love for the Fraulein, and is punished so severely that she throws herself from a top-floor window.

_Girl Alone._ (Trans. Agnes Scott). Farrar 1936. A girl in difficulties finds temporary refuge with a lesbian friend.

WINSTON, DAOMA. _The Golden Tramp._ pbo Beacon Books 1959. Evening waster about a woman writer trying it both ways.

WOLLER, OLGA. _Strange Conflict._ Pageant, 1955. Purple-pa.s.saged and would-be-horrifying story about a Eurasian hermaphrodite-supposedly as she is because of her mother's intercourse with demons before her birth-who inspires love and brings death to everyone she knows, male or female.

WOODFORD, JACK. _Male and Female._ Woodford Press, 1935.

_Unmoral._ Woodford Press, 1938. Both of these are evening wasters-racy stuff, not bad at all when compared with the current crop of trashy paperbacks. The "lesbian" content, of course, is strictly for fun.

WOOD, CLEMENT. _Strange Fires._ Woodford Press, 1951. "s.h.i.+pwreck on Lesbos" in his _Desire_, Berkeley n. d. 1958 (copyright 1950, perhaps Woodford Press?) Clement Wood is either a pen name for, or a successor to, Jack Woodford, a popular writer of racy, risque, s.e.xy books of little literary merit but relatively innocuous even for teen-agers ... the trash of the thirties and forties was a very different thing from the scv of the fifties.

WOOD, CLEMENT, and Gloria G.o.ddard. _Fair Game._ Woodford Press, 1949, pbr Beacon 1958. Evening waster about girls coming to the wicked big city, and we all know what happens to such girls in this kind of book. One of them falls in with the dangerous women instead of the dangerous men.

+ WOOLF, VIRGINIA. _Orlando._ _To The Lighthouse._

_Mrs. Dalloway._ All of these are cla.s.sics easily available in small, medium and large libraries, college bookstores, and the like. The lesbian content is vague and subtle, but good; one of the best woman writers.

WOUK, HERMAN. _Marjorie Morningstar._ Doubleday 1955, pbr 1956.

The variant element in this is minor and problematical. In conversation, it occurred to a group of reviewers that the developing relations.h.i.+p between Marjorie and Marsha "resembled a love affair", that Marsha's attack of hysterics at her wedding, and her outcry that all she had ever wanted was a friend, and now she'd always be alone, was of distinct significance. BAYOR.

WYLIE, PHILIP. _The Disappearance._ Rinehart 1951, pbr Pocket Books 1958. Science fiction; for men, all women vanish; for women, all men vanish. The problem of lesbianism arises in the women's world; Wylie, though technically and superficially approving of h.o.m.os.e.xuality, has his heroine reject it for herself, saying "I'm not a child."

_Opus 21._ Rinehart 1949, pbr Signet 1952, 1960. The hero, rewriting a book in a hotel during a weekend of crisis, runs across many unusual characters; among them a woman, shaken because her husband is having a h.o.m.os.e.xual affair, is shamed into tolerance by dallying with a lesbian prost.i.tute. Wylie, again superficially approving, has his hero act in a skirt-withdrawing way, refusing such things for himself at the last minute in every book.

WYNDHAM, JOHN. "Consider her Ways" in _Sometime, Never_, Ballantine 1956-57. Science Fiction; a woman experimenting with strange drugs goes into the future, where all men have perished and society resembles that of the ant. Good.

_The Midwich Cuckoos._ Ballantine, 1957. Science Fiction. Alien visitation from outer s.p.a.ce leaves every nubile female in Midwich-married or single, young or old-pregnant. Hilariously funny situations arise; one of the funniest involves a pair of lesbians. Wonderful fun.

YAFFE, JAMES. _Nothing But the Night._ Little, Brown & Co, 1957, pbr Bantam 1959, (m). More fake Leopold-Loeb. Good.

YOURCENAR, MARGUERITE. _Hadrian's Memoirs._ Farrar, 1954, qpb Anchor 1954, (m).

ZOLA, eMILE. _Nana._ Literally dozens of hardcover and paperback editions of a shocker about a street girl who, in addition to all her affairs with men, also has an affair with Satin, a streetwalker.

_A Lesson in Love._ Abridged edition of Pot Bouille. Pyramid, 1959.

ZUGSMITH, ALBERT. _The Beat Generation._ Bantam pbo based on screenplay by Richard Mathesen, (m) minor.

_The Poetry of Lesbiana_

An index of Poems and Poets of interest to Collectors of Lesbiana

_Compiled by Gene Damon_

Briefly, this includes variant as well as overtly lesbian poetry, written in English or available in English translation. The arrangement is chronological, rather than alphabetical. All of these are easily available in public libraries, unless otherwise indicated.

THE ANCIENT WORLD:

_Erinna_-only one fragment left. Available in the Greek Anthology and other miscellaneous collections of that type.

_Nossis_-Various variant poems and fragments. Greek Anthology, Putnam, 1915-26 (5 vol.). Also in similar collections.

_Sappho_-The cla.s.sic poet of lesbianism. Over 50 editions available in hard covers. New translation by Mary Barnard, University of California Press, 1958, qpb $1.25. An attractive edition is also published for $2.50 by the Pater Pauper Press, on display in most bookstores.

_Juvenal_-Satires. Many editions in hardcover and qpb. (Rolfe Humphries trans. and ed. the Indiana University Press, 1958, $1.50; also number 997 in Everyman's Library, $1.85.) The Sixth Satire.

_Martial_-His "Epigrams" contain various references to lesbians.

Cambridge University Press, 1924, $2.75.

THE MIDDLE AGES:

_Ariosto, Ludovico_-Orlando Furioso. London, Bell, 1907.