As They Reveled

by Philip Wylie

A torrid story about four wives, four husbands--and Claudette!

Paperback

Published January 1, 1951

About the author

Born in Beverly, Massachusetts, Philip Gordon Wylie was the son of Presbyterian minister Edmund Melville Wylie and the former Edna Edwards, a novelist, who died when Philip was five years old. His family moved to Montclair, New Jersey and he later attended Princeton University from 1920–1923. He married Sally Ondek, and had one child, Karen, an author who became the inventor of animal "clicker" training. After a divorcing his first wife, Philip Wylie married Frederica Ballard who was born and raised in Rushford, New York; they are both buried in Rushford.

A writer of fiction and nonfiction, his output included hundreds of short stories, articles, serials, syndicated newspaper columns, novels, and works of social criticism. He also wrote screenplays while in Hollywood, was an editor for Farrar & Rinehart, served on the Dade County, Florida Defense Council, was a director of the Lerner Marine Laboratory, and at one time was an adviser to the chairman of the Joint Congressional Committee for Atomic Energy which led to the creation of the Atomic Energy Commission. Most of his major writings contain critical, though often philosophical, views on man and society as a result of his studies and interest in psychology, biology, ethnology, and physics. Over nine movies were made from novels or stories by Wylie. He sold the rights for two others that were never produced.

Reviews

[Karl Kraus · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I first started reading Philip Wylie – this was in the 1980s -- I had no difficulty finding his works in used book stores; now they’re almost impossible to find without using the familiar online aggregators. I can’t imagine people have been intrepidly snapping them up, and instead harbor a dark suspicion that the stores discreetly pulp slow-moving stock that wouldn’t fetch antiquarian prices. Heck, my local used book store has built floor-to-ceiling pillars out of books the owner figured would never sell, which is amusing when one considers how many superfluous copies of Ken Follett, Sue Grafton, etc. etc. there are in the world, and mildly horrifying when I found that a Russian edition of *Master and Margarita* had been glued into one such pillar about a foot above my head. That is, until I actually read *Master and Margarita* (see my review of that grotesquely overrated book). But I digress.

So I was pleasantly surprised to find a copy of Wylie’s *As They Reveled*, hardly one of his better-known works, in a used book store in my nearby metropolis. A cheap mass market paperback edition whose pages constantly threatened to fall out or crumble as I read them, the cover promising a salacious potboiler – “a torrid story about four wives, four husbands – and Claudette!” (this last name underscored) – but at least also promising to be complete and unabridged.

Of course, this is all false advertising meant to sell copies of a novel that hadn’t sold all that well in hardcover. The back cover tells us that “[w]ives were free to consort with each others’ husbands; Husbands met freely with each others’ wives; UNTIL *Claudette turned the ‘moderate sin’ into brazen harlotry*.” In mathematical terms this would be 2(Bob + Carol + Ted + Alice) + Claudette, only with a heavy dose of near-porn. But what Wylie does here is dead serious. Ever the social critic, he takes up the subject of the Seven-Year Itch and hurls it against the growing realization in modern Western society that committing to lifelong fidelity is much easier said than done, and more than arguably unnatural as well. It’s not just that desires of the flesh are confronted with responsibilities: this theme is almost too easy, and Wylie for the most part ignores it. Only one of the four couples has children, for instance, and Wylie makes mention of the issue of actually having children in a sexually “liberated” scenario only once and entirely in passing. Instead, Wylie investigates the depth to which a commitment to sexual liberation, or for that matter a desire to try it out, is confronted by traditional mores that, in the case of most of the characters, is much more deeply internalized than they realize, as well as the great potential for misunderstandings and good old natural human jealousies. This conflict manifests itself differently among the various characters, and if I attempted to elaborate, I would end up paraphrasing at length much of the the novel . . .

. . . which is, I suppose, as good as any index of the tautness of the novel’s construction. And having recently read Wylie’s *Triumph*, I was struck by how badly his writing had deteriorated in the intervening decades (*As They Reveled*, 1935; *Triumph*, 1963). In this earlier novel, Wylie does a minimum of forcing speeches into the mouths of his characters (note to PW: do clean up Chapter IV a bit!); leaden modifiers are conspicuous by their absence. There is the occasional unevenness of tone where Latinate eloquence intrudes (compare the following two sentences, describing how one character stalks a burglar: “His vital organs were in a state of gross perturbation. His hands quivered along the thick carpet”) – but again, this is not the constant annoyance such as plagues *Triumph*. And perhaps best of all, any moralizing is at best implicit. At no point does Wylie seem to condemn the desire for sexual freedom or even the attempt at such; his interest is instead to demonstrate through his characters the difficulties encountered in exercising it in the world we live in, especially if one wishes to maintain a degree of honesty, self-respect, and empathy toward others.

There is admittedly one noticeable weakness in the novel's execution. Wylie relies overmuch on the third-person omniscient narrator to explain the thoughts and motivations of his characters; ideally these could have been rendered more effectively by constructing incidents to illustrate these, or employ more dialogue (although this latter poses inherent dangers as well, as Wylie does have a tendency to make character dialogue into so many sandwich boards for ideas). On the other hand, when one considers that Wylie found it necessary to juggle nine different (and differentiated) characters, and needed to do so in less than epic length, it's difficult to imagine how he could've avoided a high degree of narrative intrusion.

In short, this is a serious and formidable work and, considering its intended (i.e., middlebrow) audience, a somewhat daring one for its time as well. Four stars.

(Errata: A few jarring typos/misspellings, some of them possibly from Wylie’s typewriter and not caught by the copy editor, worst of all being Stu’s addressing Alice three times as “Jessica”. Oops!)

[Caroline · Rating 3 out of 5]

What was that ending? So dated and subversive at the same time, overall.