Word: sexuality
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Before publication, a section of the book dealing with sexual depravity was printed by an obscure leftist monthly. Dolci was arrested, found guilty of publishing obscenities and sentenced to two months in jail. Leftists, intellectuals and even progressive businessmen such as Typewriter Tycoon Adriano Olivetti leaped to his defense; pro-Dolci committees were organized in ten major cities...
...Maids was written by Jean Genet, whose notoriety is far more abundant than his talent as a writer. He is reputed to be a man with a past full of most imaginative sexual contacts, and less imaginative jail sentences. As a playwright he draws on his acquaintance with the part of mankind most easily mistakable for rats, and adds a grotesque imagination to depressing subject matter. Occasionally, pure ugliness achieves dramatic effect via shock. Often it is simply ugly...
...Greek character, which form his book's most engaging part. Politeness demands that a Greek be asked three times before he accepts anything. However poor, he never begs, except for cigarettes. No one hawks pictures of the Parthenon or dirty postcards to tourists ("The Greek approach to sexual matters is so direct that perhaps they cannot imagine the possibility of vicarious lechery"). The tutelary Greek deity is Narcissus: a Greek cannot resist being photographed and will disgorge photos of himself on the slightest pretext...
...anti-prep piece has the one saving grace of criticizing the medium and the audience for which it is written, in short, the Ivy myth. Aside from this quality, the author shows little concern with the disciplines of a private school education, and places too much emphasis on the sexual ineptitude of its products. The writer, however, gets off one classic generalization which almost makes his effort worthwhile: "In addition the society serving as the basis for the New England preparatory schools--th upperclass, urban East--cannot help but be classified as a decadent society in a decadent region...
...FEAST OF LUPERCAL, by Brian Moore. A book which proves that Novelist Moore's excellent first, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1956) was no accident. Malice, spite, envy and sexual frustration at a boys' school in Ireland add up to ignorance triumphant-and pathos on every page...