Reflections of a stormy petrel

I would say that the vanity comes out pretty well in a passage that struck me, when he brags of having manipulated the shrinks into thinking him both homosexual and impotent. The fact that that statement shows him to be deficient in a much deeper sense does not seem to strike him. And yes, I think I praised him upthread just for seeing paedophilia coming from the chaos of demeaning societal influences at work in the fifties, two decades before it became an issue. That certainy does not mean that he liked the idea: quite the contrary, especially if you consider the unpleasant, shallow or damaging associations that go with everything he describes in his anti-hero and anti-heroine's journey.