an evil book, a scurrilous book, a profane book, a scatological book
and an exasperating book

   What this sprawling, squalling overwritten book needs above all is
to have its mouth washed out with lye soap. It reeks of decay and
filth and perversion

Nowhere in this whole disgusting book is there a trace of kindness
or sincerity or simple decency.

It is a sneering, snarling, foul-mouthed attack on Protestantism,
Catholicism, modern medicine, the "middle-class" virtues, repre-
sentational art, our economic system, our educational system,
motherhood, fatherhood, sympathy, faith, devotion, birth, death, art
criticism, literary cr[i]ticism, sobriety and any other form of balance
or order that you can name.

                                            * * *

   It is also, and with more reason, an attack upon abstract art,
homosexuality, the moral and physical filth of some parts of New
York's Greenwich Village, the posturing of the Left Bank in Paris,
the stupidity and futility of Bohemianism, the disgusting aspects of
drug addiction and alcoholism, the illiteracy and corruption of
Central America, the bigotry of Spain, the simple-minded violence of
Hemingway, the complex and intentional obfuscations of Gertrude
Stein, the latent witch-burning tendencies still vestigial in New
England, and self-love (so embarrassingly apparent in every sen-
tence the author writes).