The Gray Flannel Suit
My contention has been that the Great American Novel was The Last Hurrah. Perhaps I have erred and it was The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit?
My edition of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit was for 2002 with an introduction by Jonathan Franzen (he is perhaps more famous now). For this edition there is also an afterword by the author, Sloan Wilson. The afterword had been the introduction to a 1983 edition of the book.
I read the book to be informed as to why it was, and has been, regarded as important. Usually it is reported to be of value for what concerns the author had for suburbia and conformism and the significance of gray flannel suits. The latter was taken to be symbolic.
The book was a publishing success and became a movie starring Gregory Peck. Having Peck in the movie would have denoted seriousness. I don't know what seriousness the book had then. In any case, it was seized on as a defining element of "the 50s". (From now on I'll let "the 50s" and "the 60s" assume a diluted corporate status as persons.) I didn't find it to be so. The only outstanding characteristic it touches on, endlessly repeated as the 50s by others, is suburbia. To a lesser extent the book has to do with a quest to do something else, something important, something useful, though most of my sources found that they of the 50s had contentment in what they were doing. They had it made. After the Depression and WWII, "it got real good". Even then, some of them made the success of many into something ugly - "conformism", "consumerism" and corporations as evil. Some whined incessantly and perhaps the lopsided dominance of NYC whiners carried the day.
The whiners of the novel are weakly done as Tom and Betsy, husband and wife. Betsy is far removed from actuality. This is not a great fault of a genre, but are their actions to be believed? She doesn't like dullness. She is discontented and wants escape from what was to be a temporary residence and from neighbors who indulge in alcohol nearly ad libitum. Any contentment by residents of the area is regarded as contemptible. She mourns the loss of the short-term pre-WWII puppy love. But believably she suddenly turns the family around what with a self-improvement regimen of less TV, less dogs and burgers, church attendance, and puts the hated house up for sale. She easily accepts Tom's wartime screw in Italy who now needs money for Tom's boy. Betsy also gets active about converting land that comes with the mansion they inherit into a big profit and paves the way with helping to convince locals to pay more taxes to finance a new school that the present kids now need and the future kids, whose parents will have paid for and built on mansion land, will also need. Betsy and Tom have had struggles with lack of money that are soon to be overcome.
Tom never overcame his activities as a paratrooper in WWII. After the war, he wanted money but was not willing to give up weekends to get it. His status as a former paratrooper does not help with this. It would have been better had he died in the war or stayed in the Army. Korea was not an opportunity. He was committed to reading about that war on a train. There is no accounting for why he returned to civilian life. Tom's flashbacks and ruminations about his WWII jaunts verge on becoming mental illness issues. He never regarded his adventure with Maria as being a mistake. He accepted his wartime activities of killing. It was warfare and killing happens and so, apparently, do Marias. Actually Tom found the war to be incomprehensible and should be forgotten yet he was far from doing so. The memories persisted, remembered and lived again, and he countered by thinking he must be tough, such toughness being part of the 50s ethos.
Aiding him in dealing with his difficulties are his encounters with a local judge as a good guy, a villain who wants the mansion but who quickly folds his tent and is whisked away, and an estate developer who isn't a crook. But then there is the elevator operator in the United Broadcasting building (what a coincidence! oh please say it isn't so) where Tom works, who was a WWII warrior and was with Tom in the war and knows all about Maria, that false impossible life provided for as an asset of participation in WWII. This elevator guy can and does contact Maria in Italy.
There is the buildup developing - Maria is back, become a United Broadcasting gopher, low paid blandness at his current job, his wife's pressing changes of behavior, money worries, his preoccupation with WWII, his Dad, shell-shocked by WWI, had executed a deliberate car crash as a suicide; and Tom’s grandma's estate is threatened by claims of the housekeeper - all could have been momentum for a much different novel. A novel it could have been that connected Tom's mind to the complexity of his existence. Such a course received no support from the author. But all of these concerns are quickly sentence by sentence or by short paragraph by paragraph resolved without detritus, no chads hanging, and no clumsy, awkward truthful residue.
There is acknowledgement within the novel that Tom has four worlds - grandma, WWII, United Broadcasting, and his family. His WWII experiences are the core for him but not of the book. This is a fundamental falsity the author ignored or did not admit to perpetrating.
Along the lines of missed opportunities, only from my perspective, I realize long past the author's creative concerns then dominant, is a slight mention of United Broadcasting showing programs as bad as radio, only in it for the money and not to improve people's minds. Ah, echoes of very long ago and very lost times when some TV programming had to have documentaries and educational content with no glory in rape, murder, torture, and the like; with an FCC chairman declaring that the programming was a vast wasteland. But then the author tossed off this comment about United Broadcasting when his tongue was how far from his cheek? Another lost opportunity here, its effect not-on-Tom added to the list enumerated above. A great novel it might have been.
Does it represent the 50s? Hardly. It touches on suburbia. There are ashtrays in the offices. All the secretaries, but one, are extremely good looking. A tough, tough Betsy pushes the book to conclusion, relieving the author of, shall I say, a writer's duty, to get it going on another, undoubtedly for him, a difficult, complicated, messy plane. The head of United Broadcasting speaks the obvious with exclamation points, example - Glad you could make it!, to a mandatory company meeting. The calm and quiet punched up, business-speak of the time in contrast to becoming calm and quieter via a near lisp of a whisper like the early Jacqueline Bouvier or a recurring character on "Dobie Gillis". They, and anyone else, of the 50s-60s-70s-80s could succumb to greed, not conformism or consumerism. An excess that came too fast, unearned, a fallout of manna.
The novel has specifics about the gray flannel suits of NYC rushing around in frantic paths going nowhere and getting more money. Tom takes off the gray flannel suit when he decides to be honest with Hopkins of United Broadcasting and his wife. He resolves to be an optimist. At least the 50s were more optimistic than later decades. New found early money is imperiled by pessimism.
Such is not a concern of the author as he relates in the afterword that the gray flannel suit goes on - presumably that enduring symbol and the take away for many in the next decade. The author was surprised about where the appreciation of his book was placed. He thought the book had been largely autobiographical. But Norman Cousins and Orville Prescott had a differing view of WWII's aftermath devolving into conformity and suburbia. Somehow others got the idea that Tom was an ad man. The campus and street authorities of the 60s thought Tom was a "square".
The author recognized the suit was of a type, correctly, but incorrectly then the lessons of the book or the lessons put there by some reviewers and others, who must not have read the book, were that WWII problems (Tom’s problem came down to a kid in Italy) were repeated in Korea and Nam. The author characterizes his book as being about youth, not of an era, of a person that was a very angry man. But the youth, ill-thought out though they were, of the 60s ignored Korea and were dominated by the war in Nam too such an extent as to fuel anger, greed, and irrationality to forge an era dominated by Youth. The author readily accepts what the book was not about.
There was no mention of Youth by Franzen in the introduction. He thought Tom's suburban world was one of reassurance like Imperial Street in St. Petersburg and Victorian London - both quite a stretch. The features of Tom's world and of those of his associates are, for Franzen, taken up by quiet streets, commuters in fedoras, trains, and martinis by the pitcher, ugly domestic fights, and sexual activities that smell. Except for the fedoras, these features are found before and beyond the 50s. All eras, ages, decades - what have you - have their similar performances. The pretensions of the 60s cant took pains to show that they were removed from 50s conformism, as defined by those of the 60s, or seized upon by whiners, into their own conformism and also into their ever more feverish consumerism. They whined louder as they denied contentment. They became political as a social definition and discarded society as community. Tom was asleep, but with no dreams of career, improvement, or ideals. It was dull, no wartime edge, peace, domesticity, the purpose of the everyday and carrying on regardless never entered his agenda nor of those anti-Toms who didn't identity, like Tom, what was being lost but known in a chain, broken at times, of American life back to the Puritans.
Puritans and others had no Freudian umph! to offer pretended progress for engagement with daily living. From them, jumping into the gray flannel suit, Franzen saw a lack of household harmony when households were going to be in short supply and solitary pursuits of the self, divorce proceedings as often as changing socks, and the end of attempts at participating in truth, patriotism, justice, God, work, and fun -never mind harmony - were gone.
Franzen thought the nuclear family to be a cult, and the politics then was quiet, and, others said, elitism was going to be dissolved by activism. They, of the 60s, "won" in the social sense. And to the victors go the spoils. What was spoiled was what the 60s said was rotten. No effective defenders for the 50s, all were liberals. Money got to be a god-awful solution to all social problems, repudiated as "selling out" but buying equality, opportunity, and integrity.
Franzen wrote that the 50s gave the 60s its idealism and rage. Really, the 60s took the rage. The 60s and its minions wanted no obligation to the 50s and its minions. There was an erroneous homegrown idealism. There and then it came to be. To protect themselves from the worth of the 50s, they got it sealed off using the accusative plaster of hypocrisy, so many stereotypes came out of the pavement, and they became harassed and hassled and hustled.
One hustle was the universal acceptance of disgust, if not hatred, toward suburbia, which is now, our experts say, in decline. At long last, it, as it was, has the decency to expire. I am not one of them, of the 50s and 60s, though I knew both. I carry on alone that concern they gave more lip service to in the 50s, the last time, honesty, harmony, decency, truth, and accuracy were socially attempted. Like them, I am imperfect, all the stones to be the first to cast are too heavy and such is an allusion to the Biblical commonality in community that we lost. We forgo the realization of the obvious lack of enough intelligence we can command to explain. Either don't explain, and live the consequences, or realize God.
The real 50s as perceived by the 60s would be, I presume, Britain, its post WWII experience was much different from ours, the 60s outburst more intensive and concentrated at first. Many books by the Brits have documented the 50s and the explosion thereafter. Truly not our 50s, theirs, not our 60s, theirs (early on). Their religion, decency, honesty, conformism, consumerism, hypocrisy, and so on?
So outside the American 60s contract of criticism of the American 50s, it would be better applied to the Great Britain of the 50s, conceptually of course, and only in that sense. One could do so only for a short time since the Brits didn't wage war in Vietnam.