Title: Sex! Success! Screwed!
Author: William Bryant
Publisher: XlibrisUS
ISBN: 978-1-5245-6564-0
Pages: 360
Genre: Non-Fiction / Memoir
Reviewed by: J.W. Bankston
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Pacific Book Review
Because even the youngest of our living World War II veterans are fast approaching their 90s, first person accounts from this “Greatest Generation” will become increasingly rare. In the near future, most books about the lives they lived will be based on recorded interviews, diaries, newspaper stories and the recollections of their children. This is why a book like “Sex! Success! Screwed!” is so valuable. The title alone should be enough to inform potential readers that author William Bryant has crafted a particularly personal and frank memoir.
Bryant grew up in a West Virginian mining town, the son of a manager. His father’s relatively lofty position did not shelter the young boy from the Depression’s deprivations. Nor did it protect him from witnessing some of the horrors endured by coal miners. Yet as difficult as his life could be, Bryant’s inner turmoil is what drives this story. For despite the creative efforts of several willing women, he was disinterested in the opposite sex. Even his own sex was something of a mystery. He was almost an adult before a younger boy helped him with the basic mechanics.
The writer’s accounts of World War II are vivid and well told. He managed to conceal his color blindness, becoming a Navy combat pilot in the Pacific theater. The combat and Bryant’s own conflicted feelings are equally well-described. His teenage experimentation didn’t make him any more certain or comfortable when a senior officer singled him out for special attention. Although the author says he “always looked much younger than my age and was a prime target for gay men,” not all of his encounters are exploitive. The book’s accounts are nuanced; by the 1950s he seems far more ambivalent toward his wife than he was toward men. As he grew older, young men increasingly propositioned him. He was interested but repressed. This seems motivated by self-preservation. Bryant’s life and times, after all, resembled the world of “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit,” with the added burden of sexual despair. Even a posh home and local political success didn’t mitigate the pain.
I’ll admit to initially objecting to the author’s stylistic decision. Bryant has written his memoir in the third person. The choice seemed both odd and off-putting. Yet the more I read, the more I understood. Just as he had to distance himself from his true feelings, he has chosen to distance himself from his recollections –– describing his own encounters as if they happened to a stranger. I suspect similar books are most often read by the writer’s contemporaries, readers nostalgic for accounts of days gone by. With “Sex! Success! Screwed!” I hope Bryant attracts a demographically larger audience. Anyone who has come of age during the last quarter century or so will be astonished by the writer’s struggles. The depiction of the U.S in the 1950s and 1960s will show readers how far we have come. Bryant’s own stylistic reticence suggests how far we have to go. Either way, it’s a compelling book.
