Wayland Young (1923–2009)

I haven't read this book, but I thought the author's response in 1964 to a review written of his book during the same year in the New York Review of Books would add some color to anyone thinking of reading the book.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1964/sep/10/eros-denied-1/?pagination=f...

To the Editors:

I don’t propose to take general issue with Mr. Muggeridge’s grotesque review of Eros Denied, the motives for which are as obscure to me as I dare say they are to you and your readers. But one distortion I must take up. I wrote in the book “It seems…likely to me that there will next be a time of perfect sexual freedom, by which I don’t mean everybody laying everybody else regardless, but perfect freedom for anyone to live in the manner he has been conditioned to by chance and society” etc. Mr. Muggeridge, quoting this sentence, suppresses without indication the passage in italics in order to suggest that “everybody laying everybody else regardless” is just about what I do mean and advocate.

I put that clause in, and many similar ones throughout the book, because I know that there are people who cannot help taking anything friendly one may say about sex as a call for total license. It had not occurred to me that a reviewer would go so far as to remove one clause out of a sentence in quotation, and I should like your readers to know it was there.

May I also let it be known through your columns that I am not responsible for, and disapprove of, the way Eros Denied is being advertised by its publisher, Grove Press? The advertising is sometimes factually incorrect, and in my opinion it appeals to a salacious interest which the book itself is not designed to arouse.

Wayland Young

London… (mehr)