Less Joy

By Paul Gray

COME OUT TO PLAY by ALEX COMFORT 182 pages. Crown. $7.95.

Down but not out in Paris, Dr. George Goggins and his mistress Dulcinea decide to found a sex clinic for dissatisfied couples. Why not? Goggins is a biologist specializing in human fertility, and Dulcinea is:--well, skilled and nubile. Before they can say Kama Sutra, a throng of tense American and English twosomes have assembled for lessons. Soon odd things are happening. The shrill, squeaky voices of the wives turn plush and throaty. The husbands, mostly NATO officials, lose their interest in rocketry and war. One way and another, their marriages bloom as never before.

After rejuvenating the wedded bliss of a couple very high in the English establishment, Goggins is rewarded with a title, an honorary degree from Oxford, and enough sex-education projects to make him rich for life. Oddly, something very like this improbable conclusion has happened to Goggins' creator--Alex Comfort, 55, a writer-biologist-philosopher of some note, whose useful work on the aging process was carried out in modest obscurity until he unleashed The Joy of Sex and More Joy (TIME, Oct. 7) upon the do-it-by-the-book decade. Odder still, Comfort published Come Out to Play in England in 1961, long before he emerged as the Baedeker of bodily contact.

Fruit Flies. "The book," says Comfort, sounding more and more like a sociologist, "started to be simply a comic novel. I think now it was the manifesto of which The Joy of Sex commences the implementation." To have read Come Out to Play is like having witnessed an apple fall on Sir Isaac Newton's head: a ho-hum incident at the time but noteworthy in hindsight. As a sex book without a single sex scene, it is a tame reminder of how things have changed since 1961. And as the story of a sex clinic conceived before the advent of Masters and Johnson, it is a fine instance of low-grade art that life so often shamelessly imitates.

Time has been considerably kinder to Comfort's ideas than to Come Out to Play. Its fey style and potty names (Fossil-Fundament, Sir Frank Pus) seem as ephemeral as fruit flies. Worse, Goggins' description of monogamous marriage as the act of buying "meat in unopened cans" is enough to make celibate vegetarianism seem downright appealing.* Paul Gray

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