Men Into Beasts

INTRODUCTION

Men without Women

An appraisal by two leading authorities on sexual aberrations and prison life.

THE SEXOLOGIST WRITES:

Poets are frequently unconscious sexologists because sex is the mainspring of poetry. Some poets are consciously students and interpreters of sex and its problems. One of them is that stormy petrel of American literature, George Sylvester Viereck.

Viereck, misled by his complex emotions and rebellious temperament, frequently and most unfortunately dabbled in politics. For this he has been mentally castigated by his friends and jailed by his enemies. In spite of his political vagaries, his perception and instinctive understanding of sexual problems is, as a rule, profound. His personal contacts with great sexologists, like Havelock Ellis, Magnus Hirschfeld, Sigmund Freud, Professor Steinach, and most recently Dr. Alfred Kinsey, have undoubtedly contributed to his sexological knowledge. Therefore, his present book, containing many references to sex life in prison, deserves serious attention.

Viereck’s most important contribution to sexology is the trilogy dealing with The Wandering Jew. Also sexologically interesting are his own lyric autobiography. which he called “My Flesh and Blood,” and a recent novel, “All Things Human,” which is based partly on his personal prison experience.

These works are now supplemented by his factual account of life in various jails. As a sensitive and keen observer Viereck has pictured the sex life in our prisons, with which he came in close contact from within. Few serious students of sex ever had that opportunity before.

Unfortunately, there seems to be no solution for the sex problem in prison, or, for that matter, for the sex problem in general, as long as our laws and our attitudes are dictated by irrational conventions and unscientific prejudices, which have come down to us from the Middle Ages and still tyrannize and enslave the human mind.

HARRY BENJAMIN, M.D.

Distinguished Sexologist

THE PENOLOGIST WRITES:

George Sylvester Viereck has written a notable and illuminating memoir on prison life. He was probably the most celebrated and versatile intellectual in the Englishspeaking world to undergo a prison sentence since the days of Oscar Wilde, and his incarceration was much longer and more rigorous than that of Wilde.

The book provides much insight—at times unique in literature—into the stark realities of urban jail and prison life, and clearly reveals the impact of this unnatural existence upon a sensitive mind and a poetic personality. It also exposes at much length and with brutal frankness the depravity and debauchery associated with the perverted sexual life that prevails in our jails and prisons—an inevitable result of the repression of natural drives, of the demoralizing idleness, and of the lack of recreational facilities and other substitute outlets.

The sooner the public learns of this vicious by-product of our prison regimen, the more quickly we may follow the Latin-American countries and some other enlightened nations in seeking to remedy these shocking abuses. No prison program in the United States, however enlightened otherwise, has ever made any effort to cope with this degrading situation.

Perhaps the most surprising and gratifying characteristic of Mr. Viereck’s book is that it is remarkably free from bitterness and vindictiveness, despite great provocation thereunto by most of the circumstances, from the moment of his fantastic arrest until he was discharged from prison nearly three years after he was eligible for parole. The author sets down his facts and observations and rests content. He avoids all temptation to pose as a martyr.

HARRY ELMER BARNES

Member of American Institute of

Criminal Law and Criminology