A gifted storyteller, prone to polemic

I am not thinking tonight of my blue eyes, as the old country song goes, but of a cartoon I came across a quarter of a century ago in a Dallas newspaper: a man cowering half beneath his chair as his own enormous brain hovers in the air above him. For a long time, I remember, I kept that cartoon pinned up over my desk.

Why am I recalling this after so many years?

Because I've been reading Philip Wylie.

Growing up, I knew his name, of course. He'd written, with Edwin Balmer, ''When Worlds Collide," a bestseller that had gone on to become an influential science fiction film. His novel ''Gladiator" was said to be the direct inspiration behind Superman. One of my favorite writers, Theodore Sturgeon, singled Wylie out for praise, which was more than good enough for me. So I sought and read:

''Gladiator," in which Hugo Danner finds that superhuman strength has not made him a helpmate to humanity but displaced him from it;

''When Worlds Collide," in which two planets hurtle toward Earth, one set on a collison course, the other offering the possibility of salvation for a select number;

''After Worlds Collide," in which the political errors of Earth reduplicate on the new world;

Two or three mysteries such as ''The Murderer Invisible";

''The Disappearance," in which, at a stroke, men and women find themselves living in separate worlds;

''Tomorrow!," Wylie's jeremiad on nuclear armament;

And, finally, his two major novels, ''Finnley Wren" and ''Opus 21."

I found that Wylie had been quite the rage in the 1930s and '40s. He'd published literally hundreds of stories, novellas, and novels in the Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, Vanity Fair, and other top slicks. His books sold magnificently. His ''Generation of Vipers," a polemic against American materialism and hypocrisy in which he pilloried big business, organized religion, and sexual repression and pleaded for a return to moral values, had caused a sensation upon publication in 1943. He served as adviser to scientific research facilities, to the Federal Civil Defense Administration, even to the Atomic Energy Commission. Then, it seemed, his time had passed. He continued to publish -- four novels appeared in 1963-69, before his death, in 1971 -- but when he peered beyond the footlights, the vast audience he'd once had was no longer there.

I suspect that few even among inveterate readers recognize his name now, and that far fewer have read his work.

Yet another of many, many chapters in ''The Book of Forgotten Writers," then . . .

Or perhaps not. Dalkey Archive Press has ''Generation of Vipers" back in print. Beginning with ''When Worlds Collide" in 1999, University of Nebraska Press has set itself to reissue Wylie's classic science fiction. ''Gladiator" is just out, and ''The Disappearance" is scheduled for fall.

Partly, no doubt, Wylie's decline is the luck of the draw: It always is, with any writer. Partly, too, that decline resulted from changes in the public taste. But what must not be forgotten is that the decline also had to do with the fact that much of what Wylie wrote about most engagingly -- the perils of nuclear war, religious skepticism, sexual freedom, and freethinking -- had entered the general consciousness. To what degree he was responsible we can never know, but all those hundreds upon hundreds of publications, driving home his concerns and ideas, could hardly have gone without effect.

And therein, perhaps, is the rub: driving home his ideas.

For Wylie all too seldom disentangles himself from a programmed fiction. While he is in many ways a natural storyteller, as evidenced by the popularity and prolificacy of his slick fiction, much of his work struggles between narrative and polemic. He wishes not simply to tell stories, he is driven to expound his notions, to demonstrate, to prove -- to correct.

This predilection he shares with Aldous Huxley, a writer he greatly admired and one who seems to me similarly dated. Huxley, in fact, once wrote to Wylie: ''You suffer, as I have always done, from the difficulty, the all but impossibility, of combining ideas with narrative."

Rarely does Wylie create a freestanding character, or allow the incidents and themes of a novel to find their own form. There must always be points made. Whoever is supposedly speaking, whatever scene runs its course, it is Wylie's presence we sense in the background, and Wylie's voice we hear there, like a ventriloquist's.

So here we are, back to that huge brain hovering over the man and his chair.

Wylie, of course, would not be cowering beneath the chair but standing upon it, declaiming.

All that having been said, Philip Wylie remains a fine and deserving writer. ''Gladiator," published in 1930, holds up wonderfully well; University of Nebraska Press merits commendations for bringing it back to life. One hopes that another publisher will follow suit with Wylie's two major literary novels, 1934's ''Finnley Wren" and 1949's ''Opus 21."

The former, writes Truman Frederick Keefer, author of the sole book-length study of Wylie's work, is one man's ''outraged outcry against those things that outlast all topicality: man's ineradicable stupidity, cruelty, and selfishness; his inescapable burden of suffering, pain, loneliness, and death; and, most of all, the lack of any meaning or explanation of his tragic fate." It is, as well, a display of narrative virtuosity and a book of great affirmation.

Read at age 20, ''Opus 21" was for me a stunner. Seemingly loose-jointed, purporting to follow the activities of a character named Philip Wylie through a weekend in Manhattan, it is in fact closely structured, a novel that looks death in the eye, nods in recognition, then turns to walk back into life.

James Sallis's collection of new stories, ''A City to Equal My Desire," will be out in August from Pointblank/Wildside. His novel ''Cypress Grove" is just out in trade paperback from Walker.