His best known book is a shrill, vituperate, uncompromising, honest, prophetic jeremiad. But Generation of Vipers (1942) is largely forgotten today except for its short screed damning a certain type of middle aged club ("a solid term") woman whom he famously called, "Mom," For five decades he was a hugely popular writer of fiction and non fiction on subjects ranging from deep sea fishing to psychology to the physics of nuclear weaponry to ecology. His writings in science fiction were pioneering. He is the writer who has had the most influence on my world view.
Philip Gordon Wylie was born May 12, 1902, in North Beverly, Massachusetts, and died October 25, 1971, in Miami, Florida, his home since the late 1930s. He began writing as a teen and never stopped. A complete bibliography of his writings is virtually impossible to compile because, as a free lancer, he wrote about nearly anything for almost anybody. Two biographies exist: Philip Wylie: The Man and His Work, by Robert Howard Barshay; Philip Wylie, by Truman Frederick Keefer. Both provide selected bibliographies.
Wylie's legions of critics scoffed at his "pulp fiction," which he could churn out at the incredible rate of a novel a weekend, but it paid the bills. Best of that genre was his Crunch and Des stories, technically accurate yarns about deep sea fishing off Florida which ran in the Saturday Evening Post before being assembled into books. He scorned those critics that he called the Liberal Intellectual Establishment (LIE), whom he first encountered during the initial years of The New Yorker. They repaid him with an enduring silence. His serious work was seldom reviewed in the reigning critical publications they controlled, except to pan it.
Wylie was no doctrinaire conservative, however. He scorned the business first conservatives of his day -- and the junk they persuaded us to buy -- in no less apocalyptic words than he used to excoriate the Marxist enthused liberals. What he would have made of today's Tea Party ignoramuses can only be dreamed of. He was too much the iconoclast to even cling to the psychoanalytic theories he espoused. For Philip Wylie thought always as a scientist does. His views were always tentative, ready to be trumped instantly by new facts. The years between the plausible fiction of Gladiator to the mature philosophy of The Magic Animal show steady growth in the depth and breadth of the man in tandem with the proliferation of science and its methods in the world.
Wylie's best (In order of publication):
Gladiator (1930, Fiction)
Who has not dreamed of bringing overwhelming physical strength to bear on the wrongs of the day, whether caused by society's bullies or world hunger. Wylie's Hugo Danner was such a man. A decade before Superman debuted in the comics of the day, Wylie gave Danner all the attributes of the Man of Steel. Despite the similarities, Superman's creators say Gladiator did not influence them, but many reviewers and critics aren't sure.
Unlike Superman, Danner came to realize that all of the world's ills would not yield to overwhelming physical strength. And that his "gift" precluded him from both a normal life and happiness within his world. He appeals to the only higher power than himself and at the end is granted a releaving thunder bolt.
Where did his strength come from? His father, a chemist, experimented with the mechanisms of life in his home lab, his only refuge from a dour, fanatically religious wife. In his enthusiasm for the potential of his lab results, he asserts his "rights" one more time with the indifferent but yielding lady and then drugs and injects her. Hugo is on his way.
Finley Wren: His Notions and Opinions (1934, Fiction)
Not a conventionally plotted novel, but a fictional narrative as told episodically to "Phil Wylie" by Finley Wren over a weekend of slightly drunken, occasionally libidinous, slyly philosophical, goings on with sundry friends and acquaintances of Finley. It begins in mid conversation and ends in mid sentence.
Phil and Finley meet by accident in a speak easy, hit it off and Finley declares, "I am going to tell you the story of my life." We are first introduced to Gordon Wren, Finley's father and a doctor, a rather malignant character, cold, even cruel, and logically illogical in most matters -- a professional facade.
We next learn of a bastardy case which the under age girl successfully pins on Finley, who indeed among others has known her biblically, but not not when fatherhood could have resulted in this particular child. It was a time when all involved, even tangentially, with births out of wedlock were punished, including the child. This episode channels a similar incident in Wylie's life.
After his false conviction for fathering a child with a child, Finley ships out as the lounge pianist aboard a cruise ship to Europe. A twenty-four hour romance with an older woman leads him to his advertising career and happy wedlock with the lady's daughter. Hope. He is quite a success financially in this career, and happy until Hope dies in his arms after a fire. Here Wylie paints a vivid and tragic scene.
Finley writes fables as a relief from his day job. They are strewn haphazardly throughout the book. The best of a brilliant breed is the saga of the 1,000 mile man who takes a pit stop just off New York City from a journey among the stars -- an occasion for imaginative pandemonium. We will meet this literary device again in Opus 21.
Devastated and lonely after Hope's death, Finley meets and marries Helen, a superficially dazzling bitch on wheels from the smart set of New York in the 1920's. Helen destroys everyone and everything she touches, especially Terry, her prior husband. It had been Finley's turn just two days before he and Phil had met.
Finley tells much of his story at the Dwyers home on Long Island, where multiple experiments in human relations are afoot. Finley has been a frequent guest for weekends with other sundry people, who accept Phil as okay because they all like and admire Finley.
That's enough. Summarizing the book isn't working. The sweep and brilliance of Philip Wylie's prose infuses the bare bones of the narrative, and imputes his characters, with life. In this example Finley is talking:
When the air becomes hazy and the sun warm at an abnormal period in the solstices, it is difficult to maintain a certain realism about yourself and your life. Such a day recalls others. I remember an afternoon long ago in New York. It was January. But by some necromancy the thermometer rose abruptly to seventy-two. Hope and I got on a bus without coats and hats. We rode to a place where neither of us had ever been and we had tea at a restaurant we had never seen. It was two stories high and filled with curios. I'm reasonably sure that it existed in space and time only that one day. The proprietor looked Irish but he spent most of the time were there reading a book printed in Japanese. The upper region of the place contained innumerable canaries which sang incessantly -- even though we never saw any of them.
Though a stylistic experiment conducted early in a young writer's life, Finley Wren is considered by some to be Wylie's best novel. Many of the literary conceits and philosophical views for which he became famous are embryos herein.
Generation of Vipers (1942, Non Fiction)
This most famous of Wylie's works is a series of splenetic essays scribbled in haste and biblical rage.
The title is from Matthew 12 34:
"33. Either make the tree good and his fruit good;or else make the tree corrupt and his fruit corrupt: for the tree is known by his fruit.
"34. O generation of vipers, how can ye, being evil, speak good things? for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh."
"Vipers . . .was written -- I should say it was dashed off -- between the twelfth of May and the fourth of July in 1942. That was the year after Pearl Harbor . . . but the period of "phony war" prevailed in Europe, action in the Pacific had hardly begun and the American people were apathetic. I had come home to Miami Beach after a stretch in "government war information"--ill, discouraged and frustrated. This book represented private catharsis, a catalogue of what I felt to be wrong morally, spiritually and intellectually with my fellow citizens." (From the 1955 annotated edition.)
The philosophical heart of Vipers is found in the psychoanalytic theories of Carl Gustav Jung, with whom Wylie studied and corresponded over a period of years. With Jung, he contended that the yin and yang of archetyptical memories of primitive humans suffused our mental states at both the conscious and unconscious levels. In simple summary, we instinctively feel and call it thinking. We believe and defend opposing myths. There are the few exceptions, but today's mentalities are still mired in the hunter gatherer eras.
From this base he attacked the myopia of doctors (half of the physical symptoms that present themselves have an undiagnosed mental origin), the perversion of the Cinderella myth (virtue seeking virtue for its own reward vs seduction of the prince for dominance and gain), the sanitizing of American history ("No teacher, for the past generation, has greeted her roomful of fresh young morning faces with the words: 'It is almost inevitable that a goodly proportion of you will die for your country; arrange your thinking to suit that fact.'"), and other of our icons: the church, the military, doctors ("With a few notable distinctions, the medicos have merely bellowed wrathfully at progress, and there is in the sound of their voices too much of the tone of a baby bereaved of its candy."), businessmen, statesmen, professors, Congressmen, the common man ("'God,' the saying might also read, ' must hate the common people because he made them so common.'"), sexual attitudes and of course, "Mom."
"Mom, however, is a great little guy. Pulling pants onto her by these words, let us look at mom.
"She is a middle-aged puffin with an eye like a hawk that has just seen a rabbit twitch far below. She is about twenty-five pounds over weight, with no sprint, but sharp heels and a hard backhand. . . In a thousand of her there is not sex appeal enough to budge a hermit ten paces off a rock ledge. . . If a man kisses her with any earnestness, it is time for mom to feel for her pocketbook, and this occasionally does happen."
No wonder that Wylie is considered the greatest misogynist of our times. That he was talking about one variant of the species, and that he loved women in general and certain women in particular, did not spare him the wrath of a great many women desperately striving for independence and equality.
Eventually he talked of Jesus, the "Man on the Cross."
"The one great positive idea which Christ repeatedly tried to express, was the thought that no individual human being could know himself unless his inner honesty was complete. . . The light to which he so often made reference, was the light of truth -- inner truth. . . .
"Christ asked only that you set truth first ahead of all other fealties, and that you examine yourself, not your brother, with its light. Whenever the door of hell opens, the voice you hear is your own. Darkness congeals around us where we stand and it is too late to put a nickel on the drum."
Finally, in a concluding chapter, he lifts the veil on what could be if we but only embrace the twin virtues of a passion for democracy and a fealty to free expression of man's inner truth honestly arrived at.
Night Unto Night (1944, Fiction)
An Essay on Morals (1947, Non Fiction)
Opus 21 (1949, Fiction)
The Disappearance (1951, Fiction)
The Answer (1955, Fiction)
The Magic Animal (1968, Non Fiction)
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