BOOKS

Notices and reviews of books, articles, plays and poetry dealing with homosexuality and the sex variant. Readers are invited to send in reviews or printed matter for review.

THE SEX DIARY OF GERARD

SORME by Colin Wilson, The Dial Press, Inc., New York, $4.95, 256 pages.

Gerard Sorme was looking for "a life in which consciousness is no longer a feeble flame," and when the reader finishes his diary, he knows that Sorme was still looking. Cunningham, with his weird faith in magic, especially his orgiastic faith in the magic of sex, had no answer. He only moved the book, which is a novel written with the wit and excellence to be expected of Colin Wilson, to its inevitable climax of trouble.

Gerard Sorme was a very heterosexual young man, and most of his friends or collaborators had the same tendency. So anybody who expects to find this a homosexual story will be disappointed. But Cunningham was anything and everything, so the accounts of his behavior in the small society with which this diary deals can only prove interesting.

Šorme was a thoughtful guy, given to philosophizing, and Colin Wilson has made him the sort of young man whose anxieties, perplexities, and conclusions are thought-provoking. As when he puts it down that "the sexual illusion" is "a false notion that the being of the other person conceals a reality that you lack." The diary deals mainly with illusions. It leaves a reader hugging his, rather more comfortable that he is not alone. It leaves him feeling slightly superior-just slightly -to illusions. L. F.

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THE WORLD, THE FLESH, AND MYSELF by Michael Davidson, Arthur Barker, London, 1962, $5.00, 354 pp.

This autobiography of an English journalist is a shallow rambling and mostly a frantic listing of myriad relatives and acquaintances and explanations of who they are. Even the frank homosexuality (a passion for only pre-bearded boys) is uninteresting. A few items are of interest, such as the author falling in love with the 16-yearold W. H. Auden, or getting pinched on the behind by a spry 80-year-old Edward Carpenter.

A. E. Smith.

MORE LOVES THAN ONE, The Bible Confronts Psychiatry, by Stuart E. Rosenberg, Nelson, New York & Toronto, 1963, $3.95, 190 pp.

This lively book argues for the validity today of the Old Testament as a moral, ethical and psychological guide. The author lands many a telling point in the hides of the Freudians, and those theologians who have arranged a marriage of convenience between Freud and Calvin.

Dr. Rosenberg, modernist minister to Canada's largest Jewish congregation, passionately attacks the view that the Old Testament is harsh and loveless. Yet his main propositions seem to keep shifting disconcertingly about.

The average homosexual reader will at first feel cheated. Certainly, the author has wasted a very good title.

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