‘Polymath: The Life and Professions of Dr. Alex Comfort, Author of The Joy of Sex’
By Eric Laursen
AK Press, 969 pages

“Polymath” is almost too limited a word to describe Alex Comfort, the physician, scientist, novelist-poet with what you might call subspecialties in gerontology and sexology — not to mention that a profound commitment to anarchism undergirds virtually all of his work. 

Perhaps the place to begin with Comfort is his belief, aligned with the Romantics, that the individual is paramount. Whatever we learn about the world begins with understanding that power and knowledge emanate from the self. When the self cedes authority to the state, tyranny results.

Thus “The Joy of Sex” is an anarchist text, even if the word, let alone the doctrine of anarchism, never holds forth in the best-selling book that made Comfort, for the first time, known to a popular audience. “The Joy of Sex,” modeled after the renowned “The Joy of Cooking,” became so famous — and, to some, so infamous — that Comfort came to regard it as his albatross.

What made “The Joy of Sex” so liberating for generations of couples is that it stripped sex of moral sanctions while at the same time providing a practical guide to sexual positions and the game playing that Comfort thought essential to what it meant to be a free human being.

Eric Laursen handles “The Joy of Sex” with extreme care, situating it not only in the realm of Comfort’s scientific and political thought, but also within the culture that both celebrated and decried the book. Mr.  Laursen puts forth the arguments for and against “The Joy of Sex” emanating from left and right, from feminist to traditionalist, with impeccable honesty and lucidity.  

This biography includes a frank account of Comfort’s own sex life, his adultery and two marriages, even as his importance grew in the scientific community as he took on a range of subjects, including quantum physics and many branches of the natural sciences. His pioneering work in gerontology was set back by the refusal of granting agencies to fund an overall approach to the aging process, preferring to support piecemeal projects addressing specific diseases that affect the aged.

Mr. Laursen, a fine literary critic, assesses Comfort’s forays into historical fiction, science fiction, and social satire. The biographer makes no great claims for these books, but not reading them, he implies, means losing out on not only valuable insights into Comfort’s life and art but also to miss how Comfort challenged the way certain genres have been commonly understood and practiced.

A case in point is Comfort’s novel “Imperial Patient: The Memoirs of Nero’s Doctor.” This revisionist fiction portrays the emperor as a misunderstood and calumniated artist. This approach exemplifies not only Comfort’s originality but his desire to use the genre of historical fiction to challenge traditional nonfiction narratives, which, as Mr. Laursen points out, have begun to parallel Comfort’s unorthodox approach.

This is a long biography and it is hard to see how it could be otherwise — not only because of Comfort’s wide-ranging interests and accomplishments but because the biographer, as his acknowledgments demonstrate, has interviewed and read just about everything an ideal Comfort biographer is required to undertake.

The Acknowledgments are not just a series of thank yous but instead present a revealing journey into how this biography was put together — with the aid, for example, of Comfort’s son, who exercised no control over the biographer but provided the kind of access to crucial events and records that make this book authoritative.

If Mr. Laursen returns in his conclusion to Comfort’s anarchism, it is because all along his friends and opponents — such as George Orwell, who was both — wondered how you could have any sort of organized society based on the principles of anarchism. What would hold everyone together if state power is refused allegiance?

Mr. Laursen shows that Comfort never did have a fully thought out political program — political scientist was one title the polymath never pursued. Yet anarchism’s critique of power, Mr. Laursen shows, is indispensable if the individual is to retain a moral compass and a sense of the self that so much of state power seems determined to take away. 

Alex Comfort deserves nothing less than a polymathic biography, and now he has one.

Mr. Rollyson is the author of “Reading Biography.”