Amateur Messiah

GENERATION OF VIPERS--Philip Wylie --Farrar & Rinehart ($2.75).

Generation of Vipers is a raging and sometimes very funny set of lay sermons about the human predicament as examined in terms of "you--your home and kiddies, mom and the loved ones, old Doc Smith and the preacher, the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Star-Spangled Banner--in short, the American scene" plus the still uglier clutter backstage. Novelist Wylie's high desire is to save the human race from its own worst enemy--itself. Whether he will succeed where such distinguished predecessors as Christ, Dostoevski and Blake have so far failed is open to question.

His religious perceptions, useful as far as they go, are rudimentary. His prose ranges between brilliant neo-Menckenism and embarrassing vulgarity. Too often, when he intends to insult the reader's stupidity, he insults his intelligence instead. But Author Wylie's book might be of far greater importance than its own intrinsic worth if readers in any appreciable numbers would act seriously on his old and central recommendation--"know thyself"--as well as on a thing he fails to recommend--the study of those quieter, subtler, maturer diagnosticians who are casing the same field.

Mom & Cinderella. A good example of Wylie in action is his discussion of the American figments he calls mom and Cinderella. Says he: "Filial duty was recognized by many sorts of civilizations," and filial love and honor have normally been accorded those women who honestly earned it. "But I cannot think, offhand, of any civilization except ours in which an entire division of living men has been used, during wartime, or at any time, to spell out the word 'mom' on a drill field."

Mom is the inevitable result--and creator--of Cinderella. And the American Cinderella, in fiction and in fact, is a perversion of the original myth. In that story the point was that the Prince found his proper wife in the difficult and lowly circumstances which had made her proper. In the U.S. version "we have enshrined, not the earnest search of the Prince, which is a positive force in the story, but the girl's reward. . . . There is, the American legend, tells [her] a good-looking man with dough, who will put an end to the onerous tedium of making a living. . . . The idea women have that life is marshmallows which will come as a gift . . . has defeated half the husbands in America. ... It is as responsible for the absurdity of keeping up with the Joneses as the bare instinct toward conformity. ... It long ago became associated with the notion that the bearing of children was such an unnatural and hideous ordeal that the mere act entitled women to respite from all other physical and social responsibility."

When Cinderella finds that her husband is not much of a Prince after all, the Prince spends the rest of his life trying to make it up to her, and Cinderella, "turning from a butterfly into a caterpillar." becomes "the puerile, rusting, raging creature we know as mom ... a noisy neuter by natural default or a scientific gelding sustained by science, all tongue and teat and razzmatazz. The machine has deprived her of social usefulness; time has stripped her of biological possibilities and poured her hide full of liquid soap; and man has sealed his own soul beneath the clamorous cordillera by handing her the checkbook and going to work in the service of her caprices."

"She is a middle-aged puffin with an eye like a hawk that has just seen a rabbit twitch far below. ... 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 voracity of a hammerhead shark, which cannot see what it is trying to gobble but never stops snapping its jaws and roiling the waves with its tail. . . . She could not pass the final examinations of a fifth-grader. . . ."

Women "possess some 80 per cent of the nation's money (the crystal form of its energy)." Women are "the spenders, wherefore the controlling consumers of nearly all we make with our machines." As for the radio, it is "mom's soul." It "has made sentimentality the 20th-century Plymouth Rock. . . . The most oafish cluck the radio executives can find, with a voice like a damp pillow--a mother-lover of the most degraded sort--is given to America as the ideal young husband. His wife alternately stands at his side to abet some spiritual swindle or leaves him with a rival for as much time as is needed to titillate mom without scaring her."

The radio is, in fact, "mom's final tool for it stamps everybody who listens with the matriarchal brand. . . . Just as Goebbels has revealed what can be done with such a mass-stamping of the public psyche in his nation, so our land is a living representation of the same fact worked out in matriarchal sentimentality, goo, slop, hidden cruelty, and the foreshadow of national death."

That is a fair sample of Author Wylie's prose and of his powers of observation. It is a fair sample, too, of one of the liabilities of this kind of high temper. For whatever Mr. Wylie clamps his talons on --mom; her battered bird dog, the businessman; the "pompous male sluts" whom we elect to govern us; that most precious of Democratic shibboleths, the common man ("common, no-good sons of bitches") ; or even automobiles or sexy advertising--he yanks at it as if, for the moment, he was sure it was the root of all evil. That is why he is at his best when he fixes the blame coldly upon himself and every other individual, and preaches most directly on Christ's magnificent and terrifying text:

All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men; but blasphemy against the spirit shall not be forgiven--whosoever speaketh against the eternal truth in the spirit of men, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come--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.

O generation of vipers--!

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