Gore Vidal of the 1940s
You don’t often hear people referencing Philip Wylie these days, but from the late Twenties through the late Sixties, he was one of the most popular, prolific, influential and at times controversial writers in America. Wylie not only wrote novels, short stories, and articles for everything from the Saturday Evening Post and Popular Mechanics to Harper’s and academic journals, but newspaper columns and screenplays as well. Part of the problem, why he’s so thoroughly forgotten today, may be that even in his lifetime, as ubiquitous as he was, he was almost impossible to pin down. In many ways, he was reminiscent of Gore Vidal, and it’s entirely likely, and for the same reasons, Gore Vidal will be just as sadly forgotten forty years from now.
The son of a Presbyterian minister, Wylie grew up in Montclair, New Jersey and graduated from Princeton in 1923. He began writing science fiction and mystery stories for the pulps, and his 1930 novel Gladiator has long been rumored to have been the central influence on the creation of Superman. Other stories and novels were said to have inspired Flash Gordon and Doc Savage. In the early Thirties he also began writing screenplays, working on both Island of Lost Souls and James Whale’s The Invisible Man. But Wylie was a polymath with a solid working knowledge of psychology, biology, physics, anthropology, sociology and engineering, elements of which would work their way into not only his science fiction, but his social criticism, his writings on policy issues, even articles about deep sea fishing and gardening. A 1952 article on growing orchids led to a nationwide gardening fad. He wrote cleverly and thoughtfully about gender issues, and though grossly misinterpreted at the time as a misogynist, Wylie, as a male writer, was actually decades ahead of his time. He wrote about UFOs and education. He railed against censorship of any kind. He touted the importance of civil defense preparedness years before backyard fallout shelters or duck and cover drills came into vogue. His incredibly popular “Crunch & Des” stories, about the adventures of a charter fishing boat captain in the Gulf of Mexico, resulted in a short-lived 1955 television series starring Forrest Tucker, and his 1933 novel When Worlds Collide was adapted into George Pal’s 1951 apocalyptic sci-fi epic.
His 1945 speculative short story “The Paradise Crater” envisioned the Nazis using Uranium 237 to develop an atomic bomb. Problem was, the Manhattan Project was still underway, the first atomic test was still a few months down the pike, and no one was supposed to know anything about Uranium isotopes, let alone their role in the development of nuclear weapons. As a result, Wylie found himself placed under house arrest until it could be determined he wasn’t a spy. Ironically, his continued interest in the science and sociology of nuclear war (it would be at the heart of several novels and countless non-fiction essays) earned him a job as an advisor to the precursor of the Atomic Energy Commission.
He was also a book editor and the one-time director of the Lerner Marine Laboratory in Florida. Oh, he did every damn thing, but what he did best of all, it seems, was piss people off.
As a sharp-eyed satirist, iconoclast, and social critic, Wylie (to quote Mike Wallace from a 1957 television interview) “ violated taboos by attacking American moral values, Christianity, Doctors, Teachers, and Statesmen, to name just a few.” A number of those attacks can be found among the far-reaching essays collected in his 1942 anthology Generation of Vipers. Apart from When Worlds Collide and its sequel, After Worlds Collide, Generation of Vipers was among the first of Wylie’s books I encountered randomly. I saw a first edition selling for cheap at Gotham Book Mart and dug the title, so picked it up. It was astonishing, not only for the savagery of the prose—which foreshadowed Hunter Thompson—but also his range of targets. How he could publish wicked attacks on American morality, religion, and politics in those early gung-ho years of WWII without being charged with treason is nothing short of amazing. More amazing still, he was skewering the myth of Eisenhower’s America a decade before Eisenhower’s America existed.
Of all the attacks aimed at a fistful of sacred cows, none was more inflammatory, none raised more of a shrill public shitstorm than is attack on what he called “Momism.” To quote just a brief passage:
“"Men live for her, and die for her, dote upon her, and whisper her name as they pass away. In a thousand of her, there is not enough sex appeal to budge a hermit ten paces off a rock ledge. She plays bridge with the stupid veracity of a hammerhead shark. She couldn’t pass the final examinations of a fifth grader.”
Okay, you can attack the government, attack the Catholic Church, attack the schools and the stupidity of the masses all you want and few will raise an eyebrow, but for godsakes the one thing you can’t attack is mom. Fifteen years after its original publication, Wylie was still getting death threats for that essay, and fifteen years later he was still attacking Eisenhower’s America, by name this time, writing “we have gradually become a nation of exalted ignoramuses.” That same year, 1957, he had also just published a screed against organized religion as a whole and Christianity specifically, The Innocent Ambassadors, which was something else you might not want to be doing in 1957. Worse still, he publicly advocated stoning Liberace to death with marshmallows.
At the end of the Wallace interview, when asked if there was anyone he actually admired at the time, he cites a then little-known politician from Massachusetts named John Kennedy.
Wylie died in 1972, and in his final years shifted the focus of his speculative fiction away from the nuclear threat to what he saw as the inevitability of man-made environmental collapse.
Although he published nearly seventy books in his lifetime, only about half a dozen remain in print today. Apart from references to contemporary newsmakers like John Foster Dulles and Robert McNamara, the points Wylie brings up and the arguments he makes remain remarkably timely. So how is it a figure who was everywhere for four decades—on the bestseller lists and in daily papers, in the movies and on television, could be so completely forgotten today? I think there are two primary reasons.
First, not being able to slap a simple confining label on someone just seems to confuse and aggravate most people. As Wylie wrote of himself in 1948, “I am not a Protestant, or a Catholic, or a Jew; I don’t belong to any church or union. I am not and never have been a communist, fascist, leftist, liberal, tory, or Rightist.” So where the hell does that leave people? You couldn’t call him just a science fiction writer, or social critic or screenwriter, and given everything else he did you couldn’t even simply call him a writer. As a result, to most minds Wylie was little more than a vapor, though sometimes an irritating one.
More damning than calculatedly avoiding labels, Wylie’s big curse, from his earliest days—think of Superman, Flash Gordon, the A Bomb, women’s rights, Kennedy and environmental collapse—was being ten minutes ahead of his time. For someone in Wylie’s position—or Gore Vidal’s for that matter—it’s the most damning curse there is.
by Jim Knipfel