Shall We Join the Ladies?

THE DISAPPEARANCE (405 pp.)--Philip Wylie--Rinehart ($3.50).

Men everywhere had been taking their women for granted for so long that at first they were merely astonished when all the girls abruptly dropped out of sight. But the sense of catastrophe grew rapidly. In the U.S., top scientists were urgently enlisted in Operation Protoprotoplasm--trying to create human life in test tubes. Female impersonators had a field day. So did the manufacturers of the "Miss America Dolls"--life-size models of the human female made of foam plastic.

On the women's side of the great divide, the wives of U.S. Congressmen assumed the responsibility of electing a Mrs. De Wyss Altbee the first woman President of the United States. To President Altbee fell the painful duty of informing her all-female cabinet that the country was about to be attacked by a Russian fleet manned entirely by women. "Our Navy," said Mrs. Weller, the Secretary of the Interior, "will have to steam out immediately and destroy them!" "Who'll steam it?" groaned Mrs. Dwight, the Secretary of Agriculture.

Mrs. Dwight might well groan. For the elaborate joke that makes the wheels go round in Philip Wylie's new novel is that there are no longer any men left in the world (as the women see it) and no more women left in the world (as the men see it). For each sex the other has suddenly disappeared, and the men & women of a world that somehow manages to be simultaneously manless and womanless are faced for the first time with the problem of how to live without each other.

Like everything Author Wylie has written in recent years (Generation of Vipers, An Essay on Morals, Opus 21), The Disappearance has as many flaws as a pot-holed road, as many undigested scraps of thought as a Quiz Kids' program. But even the grotesqueness of the fantasy, and the gaps and snags, do not seriously detract from the book's underlying warmth of heart and crusading fervor. With the aid of a monstrous trick, Author Wylie again lays a stubby forefinger on his favorite theme--the relation of the sexes--and succeeds, at last, in discussing the matter in what, for him at least, is a grave and low-pitched tone of voice.

"Lust-Putty." Hero Bill Gaunt, a Wylie-minded philosopher, suffers much as his fellow men do when, without warning or explanation, all wives and daughters vanish from the face of the earth. A host of domestic chores such as he has never suspected fall into his philosophical lap; his shiny Miami home becomes a filthy, desolate, loveless stew, and Gaunt himself an unkempt, ragged relict in a life that has lost its meaning.

It is a little too late to reflect that "a 'person' is a-man-plus-a-woman; with one or the other absent, there is no person." When Gaunt sees his sex-starved fellow men queueing up for the Miss America Doll (including choice of permeating perfumes), it seems to him that "she" is precisely the "mechanical lust-putty" that they have been hankering after all along--an erotic object chosen solely according to "criteria of eye and ear and nose and touch," devoid of all "personality . . . mind . . . ideas or a soul." It is inevitable, Gaunt thinks, that this lascivious dummy, this triumph of an all-male civilization, should be entitled "Miss": to dub her "Mrs." would be to suggest to youth-worshiping Americans that possession of her "implied responsibility, authority, claims, duties--and age."

Desolate Havoc. Meanwhile, man's injustices to woman come to harvest when the women find themselves alone. They are spared the horrors of the hydrogen bomb (with which the desolate males of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. quickly and furiously make havoc of one another's loveless cities). But for the first time, even the most intelligent women wake up to the extent of their dependence on men, not only for food, shelter and euphoria, but also for self-confidence and the ability to act.

And so, though the women pine for their men at first, their mood soon turns to resentment of the sex that has never let them learn to use all of their minds and muscles. Left to their own devices, driven by necessity out of bargain basements and beauty parlors into machine shops and power stations, the abandoned women of America make a far more courageous and intelligent showing than do their abandoned men.

The Disappearance indicates that if Author Wylie has not entirely forgiven his old whipping girl, "Mom," he has at least come around to the chivalrous belief that the weasel in her life is "Pop." It also indicates that Crusader Wylie takes his new thesis pretty seriously: men & women are already badly divided, and it may be later than the world thinks.

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