+ MURDOCH, IRIS. The Bell. N. Y. Viking 1958, (m). A fine, occasionally funny novel of an Anglican lay church-community centers around Michael Meade, a man of honor, intelligence, and integrity—and a homosexual. His hopes of being ordained as a priest were destroyed when, as a schoolteacher, he became entangled with young Nick; Nick’s appearance at the community destroys Michael’s peace of mind thoroughly, and an obliquely handled relationship between Nick, Michael and a guileless youngster, Toby, spending the summer at the community, eventually destroys the community entirely. But it isn’t all gloom and doom; the level of the writing is highly competent, sometimes wildly hilarious, and through all his difficulties Michael is able to realize that eventually he will “experience again ... that infinitely extended requirement which one human being makes on another.” A book which emphasizes the triumph of love, and one of the recent best. ((Editor’s note; why are the best novels of male homosexuality written by women? Mesdames Renault and Murdoch are giving their best to the men. Is it a question of detachment?))
MURPHY, DENNIS. The Sergeant. Viking 1958, pbr Crest 1959, (m).
MURRAY, WILLIAM. The Fugitive Romans. pbo, Popular Library 1955. Brief variant episode among a Hollywood location crew abroad.
NEILSEN, HELEN. The Fifth Caller. Morrow, 1959. Dr. Lillian Whitehall, metaphysician, is murdered; as each of her five callers is interviewed to find the guilty party, it develops that the dead woman was a cruel, domineering repressed lesbian. Well written, though unsympathetic.
NEFF, WANDA FRAIKEN. We Sing Diana. Boston, Houghton 1928. Story of a girl too inhibited to face her own nature.
NILES, BLAIR. Strange Brother. N. Y. Liveright 1931, pbr Harris Publications 1949, pbr Avon 1952, 1958, 1959.
NIN, ANAIS. Winter of Artifice. Paris, Obelisk Press 1939, also in Under a Glass Bell, Dutton, 1948. The first edition has 100 pages or so, not included in later editions, in which she recounts her liaison with a famous American writer and[43] his wife, all disguised, of course. (All of this writer’s work seems to be vaguely tinged with variance.)
Ladders to Fire. Dutton, 1945, 1946.
NORDAY, MICHAEL. Stage for Fools. Vixen Press 1955. pbr tct Strange Thirsts, Beacon 1959. Evening waster about a lush actress making a comeback on a college campus, who revenges herself on an indifferent male by entrapping his girl into a drunken lesbian episode and inviting him to watch the show. A shocker.
Warped. Beacon pbo 1955, 1960. Very apt title; evening waster about a crooked fight game. One sympathetically portrayed lesbian character in the many mixed affairs.