Protracted Puberty

THE SEX DIARY OF GERARD SORME (256 pp.)--Colin Wilson--Dial ($4.95).

"Sex sells books," British Novelist-Critic John Wain came right out and announced the other day. He did not, however, examine the corollary proposition (which worried a more censorious generation) that books sell sex. In any case, The Sex Diary of Gerard Sorme seems dedicated by Novelist Colin Wilson to the first of these notions. As to the second, the Diary will not sell sex, since the subject is presented at its worst--neither for play, passion nor procreation, but as a something-or-other that promotes the spiritual development of a prig. It is woeful stuff--the sort of Promethean flimflam that steams up from a painfully protracted puberty. One other question lingers in the mind: How was the author of this stupefyingly pretentious piffle ever mistaken for a young man of genius by London's most eminent critics?

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