Alex Comfort (1920–2000)

The title and author conjure two VERY different memories. I’m not a gamer, but the original Lemmings is one of only three computer games I’ve ever been hooked on, and Alex Comfort wrote the seminal and educational The Joy of Sex: A Gourmet Guide, complete with its sexy-but-coy, and very hirsute, line drawings. Consequently, I had no idea what to expect from this story.

Image: Composite image of a Lemmings game and the cover of Comfort’s “gourmet guide”

The story

The narrator has show more travelled far to witness a spectacle on a remote island, overseen by the clerical collar-wearing Keeper who has “supernatural influence over his charges”, after fifty years there.

It turns out to be just what you’d expect from the title, if not the author. Dull and heavy-handed, as well as factually inaccurate.

The moral

Don’t sacrifice life to follow the leader or the crowd. And humans don’t need animal fur.

Read Kafka instead

This is one of a sequence of stories in Manguel’s anthology that takes an anti-violence stance. However, I was more immediately reminded of Kafka’s In the Penal Colony, which I reviewed HERE: a solitary, probably crazy, uniformed islander proudly explaining deadly procedures to an outsider, and apologising for the infrastructure being poorly-maintained.
“Confidence [of carrying a truncheon]... is my major joy in life.”

Short story club

I read this in Black Water: The Anthology of Fantastic Literature, by Alberto Manguel, from which I’m reading one story a week with The Short Story Club, starting 4 September 2023.

I can’t find a legit online copy of this story to link to, but I don't recommend the story anyway.

You can join the group here. show less

Tetrarch is a very interesting novel deserving addition to my Gnostic Catholic "Section 2" reading list ("Other books, principally fiction, of a generally suggestive and helpful kind"). It is a slightly didactic through-the-magic-door fantasy, like C.S. Lewis' Narnia, but definitely for adults. Instead of hokey Christian allegory, it offers reifications of William Blake's prophecies, Bohmian quantum mechanics, systems theory, transpersonal psychology, imaginary language, and encounters with show more historical personalities. The whole stew is pretty heady, and some prior familiarity with the prophetic works of Blake will help to avoid getting disoriented: the protagonists are supposed to be versed in them already, and the reader is given many allusions to them without further exposition.

Author Alex Comfort is, of course, best known for his book The Joy of Sex, and there is plenty of sex happening in Tetrarch, where the customary greeting is, "Have you loved well?" Narrator Edward and his partner Rosanna are preposterously enlightened in their sexuality: quite free of jealousy and compassionate about others' hang-ups. It's not porn; there's none of the sort of graphic detail that makes porn work, but the sexual vision--utopian and otherwise--is rather inspiring.

Thelemites may note the names Edward and Rosanna as corresponding closely to those of the scribe and seer of the Cairo Working. There is a lot of magick in this book, and learning among adepts is its principal preoccupation. It's nothing like Hogwarts, though, with the exception of the university of the Foursquare City described in the second part of the book--an institution in which the protagonists do not enroll. The central adepts of the story are initiated by pareunogenesis, a process of attainment by sexual contagion.

The "Tetrarch" of the title is Edward's steed in the visionary world, named after the champion Irish thoroughbred who beat all comers in 1913. Here, the Tetrarch is not a horse, however; it is rather a giant chalicotherium, from a family of ungulate mammals that prospered during the Eocene period. The exotic fauna of the Fourfold World are an interesting mix of the paleontological, the legendary, and the speculative. The Klars are a special treat: an idyllic race of Überbonobos.

The endpapers feature an attractive map of the Fourfold World, and appendices provide information on Losian language and religion. The latter is in a tabular form that reminds me of the correspondences chart appended to Gunther's Initiation in the Aeon of the Child. There is one evident error in the table, though: it needs initiated review before practical application!

I stumbled on this book entirely by accident in a used book store, and my 1980 first-edition copy is pretty worn, but it is attractive: a hardcover with a marbled dustjacket, its cover illustration showing Edward and Rosana on the Tetrarch, in a style that reminds me of paintings by the Scottish surrealist Fergus Hall. Although long out of print, it appears to be easy enough to find used online for reasonable sums. show less

When I first surreptiously read this book as a teenage virgin, it seemed to me to be the very epitome of every daring and breathless thought that passed through my hormone-addled brain. The explicit pen drawings seemed so much more raunchy than photos, much more so even than the Playboy posters I had secretly stashed in my room. I only had to look at the book's (fairly innocuous) cover to be instantly swept into fantasies I hardly yet knew the meaning of. Now looking at it 30 years and an show more infinite amount of life experience later, it seems so disappointingly humdrum.. The world has moved, sex has moved on, and the drawings which were so arousing then now look like examples of 70's kitsch (beards and long hair, please!). However that doesnt take anything away from the book's enormous significance in its era. It was a revoiution, so controversial, so ground-breaking for many couples. Still in print, and still selling well, humdrum or not, it still rates as one of the most important books of the later 20th century. show less

Quite possibly the first erotica I ever read. I had no idea what it was when I checked it out of the New York Public Library in the mid 80s! The next time I went back to find it again, it was gone -- I wonder why?

It was quite eye-opening for a teenager from a sheltered background -- this book included explicit sex, and no one was ashamed of what they were doing, or who they were doing it with. It may very well have been the start of my path into writing erotica. I just ordered a used copy, show more and I can't wait to read it again! show less