Post-Realist Fiction and the Masculine Archetype in 1950S America

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2016-02-05 The Uninteresting Majority: Post-Realist Fiction and the Masculine Archetype in 1950s America

Kriz, Matthew

Kriz, M. (2016). The Uninteresting Majority: Post-Realist Fiction and the Masculine Archetype in 1950s America (Unpublished doctoral thesis). University of Calgary, Calgary, AB. doi:10.11575/PRISM/28406 http://hdl.handle.net/11023/2849 doctoral thesis

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The Uninteresting Majority: Post-Realist Fiction and the

Masculine Archetype in 1950s America

Matthew David Kriz

A THESIS

SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES

IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE

DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

GRADUATE PROGRAM IN ENGLISH

CALGARY, ALBERTA

DECEMBER 2015

“The Uninteresting Majority” is a study of postwar American realist fiction written in the immediate postwar era and about the Second World War and the decade, the 1950s, that immediately followed it. The study views this period, and the novels under examination, as

“post-realist.” The study defines post-realism as a way of defining reality only in terms of the present. In post-realism the past is wilfully ignored in favour of an all-encompassing present. It creates in effect a simulacrum of reality that simultaneously exists because of the past (especially in terms of the Depression and the war) and somehow in spite of it. “The Uninteresting

Majority” observes how this post-realist effect is manifested in literature and how this distinctive way of viewing reality shapes not only past representations of the decade, but current ones as well.

The focal point for both this study and the era as a whole is the archetypal middle-class white male American. It is his transition from soldier and licensed killer in wartime to family man and corporate employee in peacetime, a transition that suggests much dissonance, that sparks the post-realist attempt to foreclose the past. This study’s sections examine different representations of post-realism. The first focuses on texts that suggest its formation during wartime, where the Army’s indifference towards an individual’s background suggests an erasure of the past. The second finds texts that wholeheartedly embrace post-realism as a paradigm, suggesting that history only matters in terms of how it justifies the present. The third examines texts that reject the post-realist ideal and its focus only on present prosperity. The final section, on the television program Mad Men, discusses how the idea of post-realism shapes our current understanding of the 1950s as a period.

ii Acknowledgements

I want to first thank Jeanne Perreault, who guided me swiftly and firmly through the first stages of my PhD, and who helped me get this project started.

Thanks to my supervisor, Michael Clarke, for his ever diplomatic and constructive approach, and for always helping me to push a little farther.

Thank you as well to others in the English Department who have mentored me and helped me throughout my degree, specifically Anne McWhir, Stefania Forlini, Jim Ellis, and

Aruna Srivastava.

Thanks to my classmates and friends from the English Program who helped make this whole process less arduous. Thanks especially to Sungfu Tsai, Drew McDowell, Aaron

Giovannone, Kirsten Inglis, Hollie Adams, Shaun Hanna, Boyda Johnstone, Tyler Hayden, Ryan

Fitzpatrick, and Holly Dupej.

Thank you to my parents, Sharon and Brian, whose early financial support of my seemingly never-ending post-secondary career was worth more than money.

Finally, thank you to my wife, Tiphanie Roquette, and to our sons, Simon and Hugo. I would never have got this far without you, and I’m sorry it took so long to get there!

iii Dedication

To Tiphanie.

iv Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii Acknowledgements ...... iii Dedication ...... iv Table of Contents ...... v Epigraph ...... vi

INTRODUCTION: Post-Realism And The 1950s ...... 1 1950s America, World War II, and Condescending Nostalgia ...... 1 The State of Fiction in the Postwar Period ...... 12 The Emergence of Post-Realism ...... 22 Realism as a Literary Period and Literary Form ...... 29 Realism and Naturalism ...... 35 The War and the Masculine Archetype in the Postwar Era ...... 41

PART I: Modernism, Realism And The Masculine Archetype In The War ...... 58 Chapter 1: War as Escape From the Trap of Domesticity in From Here to Eternity ...... 64 Chapter 2: Realism, Modernism, and the Army’s Denial of Pluralism in The Naked and the Dead ...... 90

PART II: “Shiny Happy People”: Embracing The Post-Realist Paradigm Of Domestic Contentment ...... 109 Chapter 3: The Post-Realist Hero: Trust in Authority and the Evils of Modernist Individualism in The Caine Mutiny ...... 114 Chapter 4: Present-Perfect: Foreclosing the Unpleasant Past in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit ...... 140 The Disappearance of the “Great Man” in the Post-Realist 1950s ...... 169

PART III: “Doomed Willy-Nilly”: Naturalism And The Suburb Novel ...... 179 Chapter 5: What We Have Here is a Failure to Domesticate: Urban Life as Death and Decay in Seize the Day ...... 180 Chapter 6: “A portrait of himself as decent but disillusioned young family man, sadly and bravely at war with his environment”: Frank Wheeler as a Tragic Caricature of 1950s Man in Revolutionary Road ...... 203

CODA: “Whatever it is you’re doing… it’s okay”: Passing, The Enormous Present, And The Pursuit Of Happiness In Mad Men ...... 229

WORKS CITED ...... 261

v Epigraph

“… and one exists in the present, in that enormous present which is without past or future, memory or planned intention, the life where a man must go until he is beat, where he must gamble with his energies through all those small or large crises of courage and unforeseen situations which beset his day, where he must be with it or doomed not to swing.”

Norman Mailer, “The White Negro.”

INTRODUCTION: POST-REALISM AND THE 1950S

1950s America, World War II, and Condescending Nostalgia

1950s America exists as an ever-enduring cliché in contemporary society. We easily recognize the symbols associated with the cliché, be they large suburban homes, men in business suits, wives (not women, but wives in particular) in corseted gowns preparing dinner in elaborate kitchens laden with “modern” conveniences, large automobiles, and smiley, rosy-cheeked children who say things like “golly” and “gee whiz.” Imbedded within these images and figures is a kind of condescending nostalgia. There is both a tendency to yearn for the perceived simplicity and prosperity of the decade and a coinciding desire to mock the impossible naivety on display. The television series Mad Men has since moved on to more serious themes (not coincidentally this more serious turn has corresponded with the show’s movement in time from

1960 to later in that decade), but at its onset it gleefully participated in this condescending nostalgia. The first few episodes revelled in the clothing and the hairstyles of the era, and the attractive cast looked perhaps more so in their crisp business suits and elaborate dresses, but there are many wink-nudge moments in the series’ early episodes. One particular scene that embodies what I am trying to describe here is one where Betty Draper, wife of the series’ dashing protagonist Don Draper, is having a conversation with a fellow suburban housewife. The two women smoke conspicuously—their cigarettes are visible in every shot and at one point

Betty lights a cigarette and blows the smoke exaggeratedly straight up where it lingers like a cloud above her—and gossip disdainfully about a single woman and her son who have moved into a house down the street. Their respective children are introduced to the scene when the

Drapers’ daughter, Sally, comes into the kitchen with a dry-cleaning bag over her head. Betty glares at her daughter disapprovingly, tells her to “come over here this minute” and then, without batting an eye, says, “if the clothes from that dry cleaning bag are on the floor in my closet you’re going to be a very sorry young lady” (“Ladies Room”). The gag is admittedly a cheap one, and it is immediately followed by a scene with Betty driving the couple’s large sedan with their two children joyfully climbing from the back seat to the front. We are meant to laugh at these scenes, obviously, but to do so lightly, rather than reprovingly.

The 1950s (in the case of Mad Men it is actually 1960, but the evocation of the Fifties is deliberate) in our understanding is a simpler time, a sort of simulacrum of the past where everything is exaggerated but where deeper issues are not meant to exist, where “Father Knows

Best” and every day is a visit to Arnold’s for a milk shake and a spin of the jukebox. And yet, this is the same decade that followed possibly the most devastating war in human history, that marked the onset of the Cold War and an ever-present nuclear threat, not to mention that featured the near-hysteria of McCarthyism. The contrast in portrayals of the 1950s and portrayals of

World War II could hardly be more stark, and given the above conceptualization of the 1950s, it is easy to see why such an image is incompatible with our understanding of the Second World

War, which has for its dominant narrative two still unspeakable horrors in the Holocaust and the nuclear bomb. We are presented with a decade that is hard to take too seriously but that is immediately preceded by a war that is impossible not to take seriously.

Of course the Americans who actually lived through the 1950s took the decade quite seriously indeed, but what is interesting, but again possibly not surprising, is that some of the biggest concerns of the era have since been written over. While there was no doubt concern over communist infiltration and the Soviet nuclear threat, many a public intellectual was concerned

with more mundane manners. One of the biggest concerns was with the increasing prevalence of corporate employment and what it might mean for the individual spirit in America. Several sociological studies were published during the period on the phenomenon of the new corporate reality, and all were quite popular. For example, historian James Gilbert writes extensively in his

Men in the Middle on the popularity of sociologist David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd. Gilbert explains that Riesman’s study “was an unexpected best-seller, a small miracle of publishing, and an essay that gripped the imagination of the reading public in the 1950s” (34). While noting that the text was often “badly misinterpreted,” Gilbert argues that The Lonely Crowd was so popular because it “spoke directly and early to a concern that grew exponentially during the 1950s: uneasiness with the advent of mass society and its challenges to the character of man” (34).

These challenges are perhaps best described by this early paragraph in another such study,

William H. Whyte’s The Organization Man. Speaking of the titular figure, Whyte sets the table with concerns about the new corporate reality:

They are all, as they so often put it, in the same boat. Listen to them talk to each other

over the front lawns of their suburbia and you cannot help but be struck by how well they

grasp the common denominators which bind them. Whatever the differences in their

organization ties, it is the common problems of collective work that dominate their

attention, and when the Du Pont man talks to the research chemist or the chemist to the

Army man, it is these problems that are uppermost. The word collective most of them

can’t bring themselves to use—except to describe foreign countries or organizations they

don’t work for—but they are keenly aware of how much more deeply beholden they are

to the organization than were their elders. They are wry about it, to be sure; they talk of

the “treadmill” and the “rat race,” of the inability to control one’s direction. But they

have no great sense of plight; between themselves and the organization they believe they

see an ultimate harmony and, more than most elders recognize, they are building an

ideology that will vouchsafe this trust. (3-4, emphasis in text)

While not quite couched in the language of McCarthyism, we can see one of the main concerns for these corporate men is the distinctly un-American nature of their employment. They work in a “collective” and they are “building an ideology.” The organization is, in other words, changing

America, and not for the better. But most specifically what is being changed is a certain type of figure: the middle-class American man.

It is thus unsurprising that there are a number of masculinity studiesi texts that examine the 1950s. According to critics at the time, the American male was beset on all sides. He faced emasculating corporate employment at work (Mills), was dominated by his wife in the domestic sphere (Schlesingerii), and had turned out “soft” due to overbearing and overprotective mothers

(Wylie). What was more, as Christina Jarvis explains in The Male Body at War, the American male’s masculine self-worth had been eroded by the Depression, but this self-worth had been repudiated by the war. Jarvis focuses on the difference between posters and paintings in the

Depression, where the typical American male looks emaciated and weak, and during the war, where the figures have exaggerated muscles and vigorous sexuality. However, the postwar world told the same men to put this robust masculinity aside. Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray

Flannel Suit, one of the principal novels of study here, reacts to just such an issue, with the main character, Tom Rath, struggling to adjust to life in his business suit. Both James Penner and

Michael Kimmel speak of a similar issue in their respective studies on American masculinity.

There appeared to be much worry that the sort of life that the prosperity of the Fifties was wedded to was in some way incompatible with robust masculinity. “Mass society,” a phrase that

evokes the very lack of individualism that social critics feared, became a kind of catchall phrase to envelop many of the other worries voiced by 1950s intellectuals. These other worries, which were expressed in terms like conformity, consensus, bland uniformity, and “groupiness” by various concerned public figures, grew out of the idea that the price to pay for prosperity was any sense of individuality. Sociologists like Whyte and Mills (both critical of liberal capitalism) argued that corporate employment robbed men of individual essence, cultural theorists like

Dwight Macdonald argued that mass-produced culture robbed America of its potential for developing a cultural elite (we will see more of Macdonald as this study progresses) and political theorists like Daniel Bell (The End of Ideology) worried that political consensus and the anti- communist movement robbed the country of any real political dissent.

These worries were expressed in perhaps their most unusual form by Norman Mailer in his essay “The White Negro.” Mailer was concerned that the conformist culture of the 1950s was creating economic prosperity but causing sexual repression and psychological upheaval. Mailer explains that “the crises of capitalism in the twentieth century would yet be understood as the unconscious adaptations of a society to solve its economic imbalance at the expense of a new psychological imbalance” (357-58). While Mailer’s solution to this psychological imbalance was out of the ordinary—he proposed fighting conformity through violence and unfettered sexual activity—his diagnosis was quite similar to other cultural commentators of the 1950s. His subject, the white male, was also typical and it is likely for this reason—that Mailer depicts the

1950s white male American as being in some sort of sexual and existential crisis—that this essay is inevitably featured in masculinity studies. Everyone, it seemed, was concerned with the plight of the unfortunate, well off, and fully employed middle-class white male in 1950s America.

Thus 1950s America presents itself as something of a contradiction. It was shaped by the war but seemed to want to forget the war’s existence. It was prosperous to a point never before seen in American history, yet uneasy with its prosperity. And there is a sense, and perhaps this is a sense that arises from contemporary representations of the period, although the case studies by

Elaine Tyler May in Homeward Boundiii suggest the same thing, that beneath the polished veneer of happiness that the 1950s seems to display was a hidden rot formed by discontent. This discontent comes from a feeling that something must be missing, that wealth, comfort, convenience, and job security do not in and of themselves constitute existence. This hidden discontent would seem to be borne out by the social upheaval of the 1960s and in that sense serves to validate some of the cultural criticism coming out of the 1950s—people like Mailer seem to have been right that the psychic imbalance would make its way to the surface at some point, although, tellingly, they were quite wrong about the location of the discontent. But, and I here come to the principal question that my study is going to ask, what of those who tried to address all of the above concerns not with social commentary, but with fiction? We have our contemporary portrayals of the era and the condescending nostalgia through which the portrayals are viewed, but it’s difficult to be nostalgic about one’s own era. What’s even more difficult, perhaps, is to be prescient about future concerns. Thus, while it may be tempting to read these texts with a cynical and judgmental eye (and I will admit that there are some eye-rolling moments in a few of these novels), my goal here is to remove the element of condescending nostalgia from my reading. While this is in many ways impossible—Fredric Jameson argues in

The Political Unconscious that “texts come before us as the always-already-read; we apprehend them through sedimented layers of previous interpretations” (9), in other words it is not possible to read a text from the 1950s that is removed from our present understanding of the 1950s—my

intention is to read these texts while keeping our nostalgic view of 1950s America always at the forefront.

In keeping with the idea of viewing the 1950s as writers in the 1950s viewed them, my principal subject in this study is what we might call the archetypal middle-class white male figure whose fate, both in the war and after it, concerned so many. Despite my interest in this figure, my principal interrogation here is not in the domain of masculinity studies (though I am making use of the field and I do have something of an intervention to make). I am less concerned with the fate of this figure, or indeed in how white masculinity would evolve in America—what, in earnest, should we be less concerned about? —than how he was portrayed in a period so invested in these strange worries. To be more specific, my interest here is foremost a literary one, because I have noticed, in first looking at how this figure was portrayed, that one mode of fiction writing becomes dominant in the portrayals, namely realism. I found this curious for a variety of reasons, but the foremost being that many of what could be called the major novels to come out of the immediate postwar period, a period with seemingly endless riches of subject matter and one populated with writers who would have been influenced by many of the great works of modernism, chose realism to represent their subjects. Why, I wondered—I continue to wonder— would these young authors turn to realism for their particular moment? And why would this potential realist resurrection fade away, at least in terms of “serious” writing, almost as soon as it had arrived? Did it have something to do with subject matter itself, with the very subject, that archetypal middle-class male? Or was it merely a placeholder for postmodernism and the larger concerns of the postwar era, concerns that, as Mark McGurl and Werner Sollors argue in their respective studies, were much more reflective of the ethnic reality of postwar America?

Thus, this study operates on something of a fallacy, but one that is nevertheless useful as a framing device. I do not intend for it to be more than that because such an argument would fall somewhat outside the range of this discussion. Let us move on to said fallacy. For framing purposes this study makes the simplifying (and, some may argue, false) assumption that modernism was the dominant twentieth century literary mode before (and, in some cases) during

World War II. It does not assume, necessarily, that modernism ceased to exist when the war ended, and it certainly does not suggest that modernism garnered less critical attention after the war—if anything it elicited more as it became institutionalized. As Jameson argues in

“Postmodernism and Consumer Society” “one way of marking the break between the periods and dating the emergence of postmodernism is precisely to be found there: in the moment (the early 1960s, one would think) in which the position of high modernism and its dominant aesthetics become established in the academy and are henceforth felt to be academic by a whole new generation of poets, painters and musicians” (28). This is by no means a bold claim, as scholars of modernism commonly define modernism’s period of dominance as those years between what was then the Great War and the Second World War, or as Marina MacKay so eloquently puts it in Modernism and World War II, “modernism is … conventionally identified

… with a period book ended by two total wars and institutionalized under the threat of a third”

(16). MacKay actually wishes to argue that modernism continued past its late periodiv to comment on World War II, but she still abides by the conventional dating of the aesthetic. In

Theorizing Late Modernism Tyrus Miller speaks of the difficulties of dating movements such as modernism (and the late modernism on which his study is based):

Period terms tend to suggest, even when this assumption is not made explicit, as an

essential correspondence between “the spirit of the age” (or, for the historical materialist,

the social history of a period) and representative works of art. Modernist works are, in

this view, synecdoches of “the modern age”; postmodernist works likewise express “the

postmodern condition.” But when exactly, sceptics often ask, do these works begin and

end? And why can we find works that seem “postmodern” in the “modern” age or even

earlier? (21)

Miller’s questions are ones this study also struggles with, but in this case my concern with modernism is not with its substance but more with its wake. In fact, if not for the obvious naming confusion an appropriate title for my own study would be “Post-Modernism” with the emphasis on “post” in terms of “after.” All of the novels examined here were written after the supposed end of modernism and they represent, if not a movement, at the very least a concerted effort to do something else. Modernism being such a nebulous category, determining what exactly “something else” could mean would require a study in itself. Rather than attempt such an undertaking, my study instead looks to the specific, so rather than to define what modernism is I am instead looking to what it most clearly is not, namely realist fiction. This of course opens the study to other points of interrogation, not the least of which is what exactly constitutes realist fiction? —for the most part the category is more inclusionary than it is exclusionary—but another being that some of the authors used in this study, Norman Mailer and Saul Bellow to name two, have also been claimed at one point or another to be either modernists or postmodernistsv (thankfully I have refrained from discussing Vladimir Nabokov).

What follows is a discussion based on something of a pastiche of realist novels written in the mid-century United States. Three of the novels, Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead

(1948), James Jones’ From Here to Eternity (1951), and Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny

(1951) are set during World War II. The other three, Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray

Flannel Suit (1955), Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day (1955) and Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road

(1961) all hearken back to the war in some form, but are all situated in or around New York City in 1950s America. What these novels also share, in addition to their style, is a concern with men and masculinity, and an attempt, whether explicit or incidental, to define American masculinity moving into the Cold War. Much as World War II acts as something of an end point for modernism, it also acts, as studies like Penner’s show, as a point where what it meant to be an

American male was experiencing a period of redefinition. This seems hard to fathom, given that the stereotypical 1950s male, he of the grey flannel suit and fedora, of the cigarettes and the whiskey, the large car and the suburban domesticity, is as close to a universally recognized figure in American folklore as the cowboy and the frontiersman. Yet it would also seem hard to fathom that the literary response to something like modernism would choose such a figure as its talisman. I have deemed this figure “the archetype” for 1950s masculinity, as he appears in some form in all of the novels studied here, either as a principal character or as a direct point of reference. Besides this archetypal figure there are also characters that appear to lay claim to their own masculine archetype. In From Here to Eternity the heroes are decidedly working class ones, and theirs is a masculinity that seems incompatible with, for example, suburban and corporate

America. In The Naked and the Dead masculinity is presented as pluralistic, at least outside the

Army. Both Seize the Day and Revolutionary Road look to lampoon this archetypal figure as a would-be martyr of modern corporate capitalism and suburban domestic ideology, speaking in many ways to the sociological studies being conducted during the period which expressed so much worry over this type of figure.

Much like its subjects then, this study is something of a pastiche in terms of its critical focus and methodology. It has literary concerns in terms of form and style, socio-political

concerns in terms of gender and masculinity, obvious historical concerns in terms of the relatively specific time period on which it focuses (by publication dates the works of fiction here span from 1948 to 1961; their own historical concerns usually go back a little farther, to the beginning of World War II) and an awareness of, if not specific interest in, the political climate of the period. The main aim of this study is to examine the literary realism to come out of the postwar period and the portraits of masculinity that these works contain. While it is obviously beyond the scope of such an endeavour to do an exhaustive examination of all the realist novels produced in the United States between 1948 and 1961 (a fool’s gambit to be sure), I hope that the following offers at least a representative sample. I would hesitate to call realism the literary mode of 1950s America, what with the great modernists like Hemingway and Faulkner still publishing and postmodern institutions like Nabokov, John Barth, and Robert Coover all emerging. Andrew Hoberek argues “while American fiction after 1945 had clearly departed from the modernist path … neither did it offer a clear alternative to modernism” (“After

Postmodernism” 234); however I do think it is fair to say that the period after World War II saw something of a renaissance for realism as a style. It had never gone away, but it had somewhat faded into the background. The turning away from modernism and the fact that most of the major war novels to be published within the first few years after the armistice were realist novels served to bring realism back into the foreground, at least in terms of what aspiring young writers were turning to. But, as postmodernism being the default term for postwar fiction shows, the long shadow cast by modernism was very difficult to escape from.

The State of Fiction in the Postwar Period

Thus, the importance of modernism to a study that is not about modernism is not as paradoxical as it may sound. While the movement itself may not have been overly popular in terms of sales figures it was enormously influential in terms of critical evaluation and matters of style. Werner Sollors explains in Ethnic Modernism that, while “in 1910, American literature was still of marginal significance outside the borders of the United States … after World War II this changed dramatically” (9-10). After World War II American cultural production was seen as more important, and as such was of greater concern. Schools of critical thought, both the New

York school with people like Alfred Kazin, Edmund Wilson, and Lionel Trilling, among others, and the New Critics led by John Crowe Ransom and publications like The Sewanee Review, built up a strong following in the 1950s, and these schools had a great deal to say about what literature should and should not do. Both schools were very high on what modernism and its practitioners did. Thus, to be a novelist in the 1950s meant a constant comparison to the earlier, more aesthetically “successful” period. To give just one example we can look at the influence of

Ernest Hemingway, who brought modernist poetic techniques to the novel. As David Trotter argues in “The Modernist Novel,” “no prose writer stuck more closely to imagist principles: terseness, impersonality, attention to the world of objects” (89). In her essay to introduce Saul

Bellow’s Seize the Day Cynthia Ozick notes that Hemingway’s influence on young American fiction writers was so great that “an Army of succinctness-seekers followed in a movement that accommodated two or three generations of imitators, until finally the distinctive Hemingway dryness flaked off into lifeless desiccation” (x-xi) and that the “Hemingway sentence became a kind of ancestral portrait on the wall, and died of too many descendants” (xi). The problem of

Hemingway was such that a writer could be chastised for trying to ape him, but, if the writer chose to write in a distinctly different style, he or she risked criticism for not being Hemingway.

And that one of Hemingway’s major subjects was the First World War was doubly problematic for those who wished to write of the Second World War. It is unsurprising that Hemingway’s name is mentioned in several of the novels in this study, and it is also unsurprising, for writers wishing to find their own voice, that there is very little of Hemingway’s style to be found in any of the war novels here. No author wanted a main character that was merely a cipher Jake Barnes or Frederic Henry.

Of course, Hemingway himself was merely the loudest voice in an already noisy room.

Gore Vidal, in an essay from the early 1950s, laments that critics of his era “tend[ed] to ignore the contemporary writers, not advancing much later than F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose chief attraction is that he exploded before he could be great” (7-8). Vidal adds “of the critics today,

Edmund Wilson, the most interesting and most important, has shown virtually no interest in the writing of the last fifteen years, his talents engaged elsewhere in the construction of heroic sepulchers for old friends” (8). There is obviously a bitterness in Vidal’s remarks (he himself being one of those ignored contemporary novelists) but bitterness aside, he accurately portrays the critical climate that these “post-modernism” novelists had to work in. Thomas Hill Schaub, who studies the New Critics quite closely, notes their concern with the literature of the past.

Even their examination of realism is with the realism of the late nineteenth century, not with, for example, the many realist novels to come out of World War II.

Further confirming the difficulties that younger writers had in stepping out of modernism’s long shadow is John Aldridge’s After the Lost Generation which, somewhat unfairly, compares a group of young writers (Vidal, Paul Bowles and Truman Capote among

them) to their modernist precursors. His conclusion, as one might expect, is not very favourable, and though Vidal gets in a good shot—he calls Aldridge’s study “an amusing novel” (9)—the revered place held by the modernists in the American (and international) literary canon suggests that Aldridge’s argument may have won the day.vi I will come back to Aldridge in a later chapter as I, like Vidal, find him a useful foil, but I want to turn now to the work actually being produced after the Second World War and what about it, if anything, made it so different from modernism; what, in other words, makes it worthy of study in and of itself without all these comparisons to its lofty predecessor?

Modernism and the 1950s are intrinsically linked, but not for the reasons that one would first suspect. When contemporary scholars discuss modernism they usually discuss it as having existed over a certain historical period, roughly between the turn of the twentieth century and the end of the Second World War (Sollors, for example, suggests that “the period from 1910 to 1950 was the age of modernism in literature, art, and music” (1)). With the end of the war and reconstruction efforts commencing, this narrative goes, modernism supposedly died, until it was later resurrected (as early as the mid-1950s) as postmodernism. I want to take some time to discuss this distinction and the problems, as well as possibilities, it provides before moving back to realism.

That modernism is still, despite studies that would argue to the contrary, specifically tied to a historical period can be seen from the introductory summary of it in The Norton Anthology of American Literature’s “Between the Wars” volume. The introduction claims that the term

“modernism,” “used in the broadest sense … is a catchall phrase for any kind of literary production in the interwar period that deals with the modern world. More narrowly, it refers to work that represents the breakdown of traditional society under the pressures of modernity”

(1078). The first definition is so broad as to be almost meaningless—what literary work in the interwar period would not be called modernism under this definition?—and the second definition, while being more focused thematically, says nothing about the actual mode of the writing.vii What makes this problematic is that modernism is also closely associated, perhaps more closely associated, with form, and this definition says nothing of form. The introduction problematizes its own definition in the paragraph that follows the definition by giving examples of modernist works where the most striking aspects are the mode in which they are produced. In terms of novels, modernist novels are distinguished from “Victorian or realistic fiction” (1080) by means of length and point of view and from postmodernism in terms of “coherence and unity” which modernism “desired” and postmodernism “has given up” (1079). As a whole it all sounds rather nebulous, but, as its inclusion in The Norton Anthology would suggest, it is a fairly standard definition of modernism. Yet, however nebulous, modernism as a style is well enough understood that there can be no debating its existence. And while it can be difficult to differentiate that style from the style displayed in postmodernism, there are historical and cultural reasons given for the existence of postmodernism upon which I wish to elaborate. My reason for doing this is that the historical and cultural factors that supposedly contributed to the emergence of postmodernism may have also created a sort of reversion to realism by authors who might have otherwise looked to modernism.

Postmodernism, which we now throw around as a term rather haphazardly, has existed as a term to describe literary works post-World War II for almost as long as works considered postmodern have existed. We can see this phrase emerging as early as 1963, where New York school critic Irving Howe posits the following:

Let us assume for a moment that we have reached the end of one of those recurrent periods

of cultural unrest, innovation and excitement that we call “modern” … if one wishes to

reflect upon some—the interesting minority—of the novels written in America during the

past 15 years, there is a decided advantage in regarding them as “post-modern,”

significantly different from the kind of writing we usually call modern. (“Mass Society and

Post-Modern Fiction” 79)

For Howe this difference had to do with the changes in American society, not so much a breaking down in class divisions as much as the sense that these distinctions were no longer as visible or as easy to delineate. The result, according to Howe, was a mass society, one in which

“certain assumptions concerning modern society, which have long provided novelists with symbolic economies and dramatic conveniences, are no longer quite so available as they were a few decades ago” (84). Howe saw modern, postwar society as different, somehow decentralized with people having more idiosyncratic and personalized concerns. Ironically he saw the public as a mass, but at the same time not as a coherent public, and that made it more difficult to write about a particular theme relevant to modern society. He continues, “the modern theories about society—theories which for novelists have usually been present as tacit assumptions—have partly broken down; and … this presents a great many difficulties for the younger writers (84-

85). Practically, this meant that the world was flatter in an economic sense, without clearly defined classes and as such clearly defined tastes. It was harder, Howe felt, to find a style to capture this time period. He saw emergent postmodernism as the first real attempt, but I would argue that some of the realist works from the 1950s provide an accurate portrayal of the changes he discusses.

A similar contention to Howe’s, one which also looks to the changing society of the

1950s as a social linchpin, can be found in Jean François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition.

Lyotard does not speak much of modernism proper, but rather explains what makes up postmodernism. He notes that in the 1950s there were two competing modes for society: “either society forms a functional whole, or it is divided in two” (11). For my purposes I want to focus on the idea that society forms a functional whole, a so-called mass society. The optimistic viewing of this idea, according to Lyotard, is that it “corresponds to the stabilization of the growth economies and societies of abundance under the aegis of the modern welfare state” (11).

However, contingent to this stabilization and abundance is a belief in deliverance through scientific knowledge. That which can be proved (and subsequently improved) holds favour over that which cannot be proved. The result, again in Lyotard’s explanation, is the decline of narrative, which he argues is “an effect of the blossoming of techniques and technologies since the Second World War, which has shifted emphasis from the ends of action to its means; it can also be seen as an effect of the redeployment of advanced liberal capitalism under the protection of Keynesianism during the period of 1930-60, a renewal that has eliminated the communist alternative and valorized the individual enjoyment of goods and services” (37-38). The valorization of consumerism and demonization of larger ideas like communism is responsible, according to Lyotard, for largely dismantling what he calls “grand narratives.” In Lyotard’s postmodern world, the “grand narratives” that no longer exist are “the dialectic of spirit” and

“the emancipation of humanity” (60). The absence of these grand narratives means that the pursuit of knowledge in order to “free” oneself is no longer seen as a viable pursuit. In Lyotard’s text this death-of-the-grand-narrative model is used to explain the growth of the multi-national corporation and the decline of the liberal arts university, but it is easy to see how the model can

be applied to literature. If modernism was seeking some kind of truth, a “search for moral style”

(76) as Howe puts it, the pursuit of such a truth became impossible in the new society. If we take this, admittedly vague, discussion of the state of a “postmodern” society we can extend it to postmodern literature by noting that it would be a literature which, by definition, has no truth to seek, no grand narrative to pursue (Jameson refers to this as “pastiche”). What is left for it, then, is to undermine the anti-narrative—what in the Fifties was being called “mass society” and what

Jameson would later call “late capitalism”—and to seek not the truth, but rather to expose the lie.

This kind of reading of postmodern literature gives it a more specifically political bent and does seem to differentiate it ideologically from modernism, if it is not possible to differentiate it stylistically. But while this condition may have been responsible for creating postmodern literature, it may have also influenced those authors who turned to realism in order to portray what they saw as a changing society.

The problem with the above narrative of postmodernism—that it somehow arose from the ashes left behind by World War II and modernism itself—is that it looks to ascribe both historical and cultural modes of differentiation onto something that is most easily recognizable as an aesthetic matter. As Hoberek describes in his essay, a theorist like Fredric Jameson

“reject[ed] what he calls ‘merely stylistic’ descriptions of postmodernism in favor of an account that escapes postmodernism’s own predilection ‘for breaks, for events rather than new worlds, for the telltale instant after which it is no longer the same’” (“After Postmodernism” 237), but style remains a major determining factor for describing what a literature is and is not. Hoberek continues: “yet the ‘merely stylistic’ remains crucially important for those of us who teach and write about contemporary fiction and who face a situation in which … the postmodern style epitomized by Pynchon no longer provides a self-evident organizing principle for recent writing”

(237). Hoberek is discussing contemporary literature, but the problem he discusses is very similar to the problem I am addressing here. Postwar fiction is often responding exactly to a

“telltale instant after which it is no longer the same” like Jameson describes—the definitive

“telltale instant” of the twentieth century in fact—but it would be difficult to call those immediate responses stylistically postmodern, or stylistically modern for that matter. More problematic, when it comes to American literature, is the fact that modernism’s popularity has increased ex post facto. William Faulkner toiled in relative obscurity during the period in which he wrote most of his now celebrated novelsviii and The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s most heralded and most distinctively modernist work, was considered a commercial failure. Much of what we now understand modernism to be was developed in a critical sense by literary critics like Leavis, Howe, Trilling and Wilson in the 1940s and 50s. These critics, as one of their contemporaries, Malcolm Cowley, explains, “devot[ed] themselves to authors in one of these three groups: they deal[t] with American classics, with American poets and novelists of the

1920s, or else with European authors in the subjective or symbolist tradition” (22). What these critics also did was to neatly divide up American literature into manageable chunks, with the

American Renaissance period being followed by the American Realist period (and its fraternal twin, the naturalist period) which then gave way to modernism, which eventually gave way to postmodernism, the last of which is now being re-examined as an overarching categoryix. This grouping is what we might call a narrative of dominant modes of writing, and while it works for the purposes of categorization and anthologizing, it is also more likely to ignore works that do not correspond to the dominant mode of their period.

The result of scholarship taking what might best be viewed as modes of writing (or, it could be argued, genres) and turning them into historical periods is something of an ontological

dilemma. How does one write realism or modernism outside of its assigned historical period?

More directly, can an American realist novel exist outside of the American Realist period? The immediate answer to that question is, of course, but the temptation is there to treat such a novel as a historical anomaly, or, in the case of modernism, to reclassify the work as post-modernism.

Whither then the realist fiction of the 1950s? It would be foolish to suggest that realism as a mode of writing has ever gone away. As McGurl argues, it is reasonable to assert that realism has been and continues to be the dominant mode of fiction writing throughout the modern era of the novel. Perhaps a better way of framing these works that exist seemingly outside the dominant mode is to adopt a concept from Raymond Williams. In Marxism and Literature, Williams suggests the tripartite concept of dominant, residual, and emergent, as cultural patterns, symbols, and institutions. The three exist at the same time, but are, as the names suggest, at different phases of their lifespans. “Residual,” according to Williams, “by definition has been effectively formed in the past, but it is still active in the cultural process, not only and often not at all as an element of the past, but as an effective element of the present” (122). Williams uses the church as an example of a residual institution existing contemporaneously with the dominant liberal capitalist ones. “Dominant” needs no explanation, but “emergent” is more complex. For

Williams, “emergent,” can take more than one form: “first, that new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships and kinds of relationships are continually being created. But it is exceptionally difficult to distinguish between those which are really elements of some new phase of the dominant culture (and in this sense ‘species specific’) and those which are substantially alternative or oppositional to it: emergent in the strict sense, rather than merely novel” (125). In explaining how the three elements work together, Williams clarifies,

[W]hat has really to be said, as a way of defining important elements of both residual and the

emergent, and as a way of understanding the character of the dominant, is that no mode of

production and therefore no dominant social order and therefore no dominant culture ever in

reality includes or exhausts all human practice, human energy, and human intention. This is

not merely a negative proposition, allowing us to account for significant things which happen

outside or against the dominant mode. On the contrary it is a fact about the modes of

domination, that they select from and consequently exclude the full range of human practice.

(125)

What this suggests in terms of literary history is that, with a dominant cultural form like modernism or postmodernism that followed it, the selection of works that correspond to the dominant form can exclude works that do not correspond to this form. I have one more piece from Williams before I look to put his theory into practice:

What matters, finally, in understanding emergent culture, as distinct from both the dominant

and residual, is that it is never only a matter of immediate practice; indeed it depends

crucially on finding new forms of adaptations of form. Again and again what we have to

observe is in effect a pre-emergence, active and pressing but not yet fully articulated, rather

than the evident emergence which could be more confidently named. (126)

What I want to suggest is the realist novels I am discussing here are in a way “pre- emergent” in the way that Williams suggests. They are in some ways different not just from the modernist works that precede them and the postmodernist works that succeed them, but from the realist novels of earlier eras. It is quite possible that what they were doing as a literary style never made it out of the pre-emergent stage, but in terms of defining masculinity and defining a new social reality these works are perhaps better indicative of what would become the dominant

postwar mode for each. For, as both literary and cultural scholarship would suggest, dominant

American culture underwent a shift in the postwar era. Jameson, for example, argues that the postwar period marked “the emergence of a new type of social life and a new economic order— what is often euphemistically called modernization, postindustrial or consumer society, the society of the media or the spectacle, or multinational capitalism” (“Postmodernism and

Consumer Society” 15). As the sociological studies of the 1950s argue, the corporate culture that in some ways defines the era was certainly emergent prior to the 1950s, as indeed was the suburban domestic model that also defines the 1950s, but it would be difficult to call either dominant; whereas in the 1950s labelling these models dominant is standard. Other modes, such as that of the self-made man, or the rural community model, were certainly still present, but could start to be looked upon as residual, while the social unrest that characterized the 1960s can be viewed as emergent in various 1950s concerns from juvenile delinquency, to burgeoning feminism, to racial unrest. In literary terms, modernism, as defined by the critics who looked to be shaping literary culture, was still dominant. Realism and naturalism, still very much part of the literary vernacular in the 1950s, could be seen as residual, and postmodernism as emergent. It makes some sense to then label the realist novels to come out of the war and the ones which looked to portray the realities of middle-class existence in the 1950s as residual, but there is enough correspondence between the way the novels are written, the changing shape of American culture and the changing standards of American masculinity that I think another cultural mode can be seen as emergent.

The Emergence of Post-Realism

In order to better qualify this emergent mode, I wish to adopt a term: post-realism. What this term may lack in originality I believe it makes up for in aptness. After all, the novels being studied here are among the first to come out of another large and nebulous “post” categorization in American literature, namely postwar, or fiction after 1945. At this present moment anything in the postwar period is still considered in some sense as contemporary literature, but, as John N.

Duval notes in his introduction to the 2012 Cambridge Companion to American Fiction After

1945, “it is only a matter of time before the profession decides that … we need to close off the postwar period in some definitive fashion” (1). Duval’s suggestion is made somewhat lightly— he explains that one reason for closing off the period is that at some point there will be just too much to teach in one term—but I do think that some of the concerns, both literary and political, of the immediate postwar period are far enough removed from our own that it is worth trying to reclassify the era to aid our examination of it. I have, as such, come to the term post-realism, which, in speaking of jests, I had originally used as something of a joke. The term itself only exists formally in international diplomacyx, but I think it fitting for the 1950s both as a mode of writing and, though this area is not as focal for me, as a view of reality.

I think a term is necessary to help explain what seems to still fascinate us about the

1950s. A scholar like Schaub, for example, is fascinated by the move, by those on the political left away from anything resembling socialist thought and its united anti-communist front. James

Gilbert, a historian, looks with fascination upon the sociological studies of the period that focused on seemingly imaginary problems, like the growth of corporate conformity and the death of the self-made man (although, given the outreach of corporate America, perhaps these early warning signs were worth heeding). And contemporary depictions of the 1950s as an era—this study will look at early Mad Men specifically, but most contemporary depictions of the era share

certain characteristics—show a fascination with both the glossiness of a period known for a vast increase in wealth and prosperity for the middle class, and with the seemingly impossible naivety of those who enjoyed the prosperity. These contemporary depictions often employ what I call condescending nostalgia towards the period—that is, the portrayals show a fondness, or even a longing, for the period, but also a compulsion to judge it at the same time. There is a tendency to treat the 1950s as surreal, as almost a simulacrum, in Baudrillardan terms, but what the works in my study have shown is that that tendency comes from the way the 1950s portrayed itself. In

“Postmodernism and Consumer Society” Jameson speaks of what he calls “the nostalgia mode” and he argues that postmodern society is in many ways incapable of accurately representing the past, that what is instead represented is “cultural stereotypes of the past” (20). As he describes it,

Cultural production has been driven back inside the mind, within the monadic subject: it can

no longer look directly out of its eyes at the real world for the referent but must, as in Plato’s

cave, trace its mental images of the world on its confining walls. If there is any realism left

here, it is a “realism” which springs from the shock of grasping that confinement and of

realizing that, for whatever particular reasons, we seem condemned to seek the historical past

through our own pop images and stereotypes about that past, which itself remains forever out

of reach. (20)

I wish to take two aspects from Jameson’s argument here: the first is that in part our view of

1950s America can be seen to be skewed by the postmodern inability of reaching the past, so that our view of that era becomes determined by pop cultural representations of the era, starting with such films as American Graffiti (which Jameson references) and continuing to this day with a series like Mad Men. The second, which is more of an extrapolation from Jameson, is that the way the decade of the 1950s sought to represent itself, as can be seen in the fiction studied here,

contributed directly to this detachment both from reality and the past. The post-realism of the

1950s was a deliberate attempt to isolate the past from the present, with the consequence being that it created a reality that was somewhat detached from reality. For Jameson this would become postmodernism and pastiche, but in its earlier forms, as can be seen in this study, the nostalgia is not so much for an imagined past as an idealized present, as such creating a reality that is in some ways a post-reality.

What I have found, in studying novels written in the 1950s about the 1950s (or the war that immediately preceded it), is a certain wilful glossing of the past in favour of what might cheekily be called a present perfect. The common thread of most of the novels in this study is an attempt to suggest that the past is not particularly relevant to the present. All the novels feature characters that are in some way haunted by their past, but unlike in a Faulkner novel, for example, this haunting is not something that will eventually subsume the characters, but something that need merely be compartmentalized, or better yet absorbed completely by the present. Character growth occurs, then, not when the past is reconciled with, but rather when the past is successfully forgotten or displaced in favour of the present. In the novels where the characters are unsuccessful in some sense it is because they are unable to relegate the past to a non-space. In Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day in particular, the lead character is in crisis because he is unable to accept his present, holding on instead to past mistakes that have led him to this unacceptable present. In the novels where the characters are successful in living in the present—

Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny are the most straightforward examples—the mistakes of the past prove to be ultimately irrelevant. And this is something strange, both in terms of literary history, and as a way of interacting with history. In Jameson’s view “non-Marxists and Marxists alike have come around to the general

feeling that at some point following World War II a new kind of society began to emerge”

(“Postmodernism and Consumer Society” 29). There are various names for this new society

(Jameson lists a number of them), but my argument is that this new kind of society was being documented in realist texts of the 1950s before it was found in the idea of postmodernism. I will give Jameson’s larger description here for context:

New types of consumption; planned obsolescence; an ever more rapid rhythm of fashion and

styling changes; the penetration of advertising, television and the media generally to a

hitherto unparalleled degree throughout society; the replacement of the old tension between

city and country, center and province, by the suburb and by universal standardization; the

growth of the great networks of superhighways and the arrival of automobile culture—these

are some of the features which would seem to mark a radical break with that older prewar

society in which high modernism was still an underground force. (28)

Most of these features can be found in the works studied here, and one of the common features, as Jameson argues, is a “radical break with that older prewar society.” Part of the way that break was accomplished, these texts suggest, is by acting as if the past did not exist.

Hence post-realism, as a literary mode, is one that is defined by negation and subsumption. One of this project’s earliest concerns was the seeming turn away from modernism by authors of the immediate postwar era. Modernist scholarship is not all that concerned with this turn, as it is concerned more with the factors that put an end to modernism. Those that look to define the literature of the postwar era, people like Andrew Hoberek and Mark McGurl, are interested in altering the narrative (partly espoused by Jameson in the essay I have been quoting above) that postmodernism is the defining mode of writing of that era. I believe that their efforts, as well as efforts of those like Werner Sollors, are well placed and do provide a better

conceptualization of the current state of postwar literature. However, when it comes to looking at the writing of the immediate postwar period it seems to me that there is something of a gap. We could argue that these works are simply works of realist fiction, and given that realist fiction has never really gone away it certainly makes some sense to assert that these writers were following a long-established tradition of writing and concern ourselves, as studies of realism often do, more with the substance of the works rather than the mode in which the novels are written. Yet, I find something about this assumption that realism is so transparent or natural a style as to be unworthy of commentary unsatisfying. It is certainly possible, as some have argued, to insist that a work written today that displays modernist qualities is a modernist work, that is to say that the distinctions between modernism and postmodernism are hair-splitting, but to do so is to ignore the historical and cultural concerns that gave rise to and sustained modernism as a movement.

For this reason modernist scholars like to close off modernism as a period (albeit a seemingly ever-expanding one). Similarly, then, it is my feeling that assuming many novelists of the immediate postwar era simply went back to writing realism in the same way it had been written fifty years prior, or that they simply chose to ignore modernism because that period was over, is assuming a great deal too much. Instead, I will argue, they chose to write a realism that was in many ways new and closely connected to their period of history, and it was a realism that featured an almost surreal detachment from reality, a realism that was not so much unreal as a negation of all earlier realities: a post-realism.

I hesitate to call the early postwar period “liminal” because in many ways it represents not a branch but the trunk of the American tree in terms of the development of modern societyxi, but if we look at trends in literature there is something to be said for the idea that early postwar writing was inhabiting a kind of “third space”xii somewhere between modernism and what would

become postmodernism (or at least what was until recently called postmodernism). This third space includes more than just the realist novels discussed here—it would also produce the Beat movement, and Ralph Ellison’s category-defying Invisible Man—but this study’s interest is more with the opposite of what Irving Howe described as the “interesting minority.” We could call the texts here, which deal with mainstream topics and employ a mainstream format, realism, the

“uninteresting majority,” but what my study finds interesting about them, and the immediate postwar period in general, is the apparent need for calm and stability displayed in some of the texts (The Caine Mutiny, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, and Executive Suite in particular), both in terms of narrative, which often looks for a restoration of order, and in terms of form, which eschews the kind of experimental and disruptive writing that was seen in modernism. And yet this sense of stability seems to give way to unrest and a sense of unease by the end of the decade, and this same sense can be felt in the slightly later and more naturalist-inclined novels of

Bellow and Yates. The symmetry of the literature of the 1950s overall may not be so cut and dried, but the overall pattern that the texts here follow—which would be the chaos of the war, followed by the order of the prosperous society that came out of it, followed by the chaotic disruption of that order—can be seen in the greater historical trends of the 1950s and what follows it. What is more, while all of the novels here employ realism, the way that realism is employed follows the above pattern of chaos/order/chaos. I want now to take a moment to discuss the history of realism in American literature to show what differentiates post-realism from its forebears.

Realism as a Literary Period and Literary Form

Realism as a literary form and its specific relationship to the novel is paradoxical. It seems like it should be straightforward to define a realist novel, but, at least where American literature is concerned, realism not only defines a mode of writing but also a historical period.

Thus, “American realism” usually refers not to realist fiction written by American authors, but as novels from specific authors like William Dean Howells, Henry James, and Mark Twain, from a specific period in history. It is defined in opposition to Romance, and to novels from the

American Renaissance period in the mid-nineteenth century. That the American realist period ended in the early twentieth century works well with the narrative of a turn to modernism, but

American fiction concerned with depicting reality would continue in various iterations into the

1950s. At the turn of the century, for example, there is a split between realist fiction and naturalist fiction. In the 1920s and 30s realism became more closely associated with politics, specifically socialist and union-based politics, and this resulted in proletarian fiction. By the

1950s, this newer form of politically inflected realism was distinctly out of favour with the New

York School and New Critics alike, as Thomas Schaub discusses in his study. For these critics, realism was to be concerned with class, with manners, and with society. Schaub cites James as the model for these critics, noting “discussions of James appeared in the books and articles of

New Critic and New York intellectual alike, where his work is nearly always viewed as an example of what the novelist should emulate” (40). What they were searching for, Schaub explains, is “a form in which a moral culture might be preserved (which is to say, in which a more complex idea of ‘reality’ might be embodied and called to our attention)” (41). What they were against was naturalism and proletarian realism. They disagreed with the overt politicization

of both forms, and with what they saw as the artlessness in this kind of realism. Schaub argues that New Critics viewed “‘naturalistic’ methods [as providing] too little access to how things really are or might be. In its materialism, its assumption of determinate behavior, and its documentary methods literary naturalism relied too much for its truths upon surface detail and failed to provide an adequate portrait of inner life” (43). For fiction to be “realistic,” in other words, it had to be more reflective of the psychological. Both naturalism and proletarian realism were more concerned with societal forces; whereas the works of James focus intently on the psychological. In terms of the above vision of the postwar and postmodern society expressed by

Lyotard this makes a certain amount of sense (though here my interpretation would no doubt differ from the postwar critics, who were looking to literature for an expression of universal truths) given that the individual experience was seen to be valorized and the search for a kind of grander truth or unifying ideology was put aside. In any event, the way realism as a style was interpreted in the 1950s was somewhat different from the way realism was viewed as a style for either the American Realist period of the late-nineteenth century or the proletarian realist period of the 1920s and 30s. It stands to reason, thus, that the kind of fiction to come out of the period would be different as well.

How specifically the realist, or post-realist fiction of the 1950s was different can be linked, I argue, to the desire to break with past. The realism of James and Howells is based on the Victorian idea of progress, either in terms of perfecting the novel as a literary creation or telling the perfect tale; Henry James, for example, was interested in perfecting the novel as an art form. In “The Art of Fiction” he argues that “the only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life,” and further that the tasks of the novelist and the historian are largely the same: “to represent and illustrate the past, the actions of men, is the task of either

writer, and the only difference that I can see is, in proportion as he succeeds, to the honour of the novelist, consisting as it does in his having more difficulty in collecting his evidence, which is so far from being purely literary” (47). We can note here in James the emphasis not only on the perfecting of the craft but also the emphasis on the past, on history. James’ contemporary,

William Dean Howells, was also concerned with perfecting fiction, though he termed it being

“true.” Both Howells and James wished for fiction to be taken more seriously, and for Howells the way to ensure this was to only write what is true. He explains, “for our own part we confess that we do not care to judge any work of the imagination without first applying this test to it. We must ask ourselves before we ask anything else, Is it true?—true to the motives, the impulses, the principles that shape the life of actual men and women?” (“From the ‘Editor’s Study’” 79). What can be seen in both statements above is a desire for the ultimate refinement, to best represent humanity in a way that was as real and as true as possible. There is an ideal, or indeed even a grand narrative here.

The differences between the late-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth century are many, but the principal difference I wish to discuss here is the end of the grand narrative, and the death of the notion of the linear movement of history (though this notion has certainly had its share of resurrections). One of the defining aspects of modernism is the disillusionment with the narrative of continuous progress. If we take Eliot’s The Waste Land as an example, we can see in its fragmentary nature a belief that civilization is a lie, and a lie that the First World War exposed.

With the Second World War, which brought with it even greater horrors in the form of the

Holocaust and the atom bomb, it was nigh impossible for anyone to believe in the linear progress of civilization. With greater civilization, it would seem, came only monstrous horror. As such the realism of James and Howells, which is predicated on idealism that comes with linear

progression, is untenable. What post-realism does instead is that it takes postwar America not only as the beginning of a new era, but as a sort of new beginning point in history. If before was chaos, represented by two world wars and the Depression, but also by the plurality of individual style that is modernism, then the postwar 1950s were order, represented by middle-class prosperity and stable employment. Realism, a style that is orderly to the point where the narrator is almost unnecessary, and which seeks to clarify the narrative, rather than obfuscate it, suggests this kind of order. However, a realism that, as James suggests, “represent[s] and illustrate[s] the past” would necessarily have to introduce chaos into its order. What post-realism does in place of this is an attempt to foreclose the past, to rewrite that which is incongruent with the present narrative (as we shall see in The Caine Mutiny), to subsume it in such a way that it ceases to be relevant (as we shall see in The Naked and the Dead), or, if either of these proves impossible, to simply banish the past altogether, to assert that it is best forgotten and look never to return to it

(as we shall see in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and Revolutionary Road). Post-realism represents a different form of realism because in terms of style it is beholden to the past, but in terms of content it attempts to secede from the past.

Moving past the historical, I want to briefly define what I consider to be a realist novel for the purposes of this study, and what makes the novels presented here post-realist. Realist novels all share a certain number of qualities, and while I do want to make a distinction between realism and naturalism in terms of theme and character behaviour, in terms of form and subject material the two share much. Thus, the novels that I examine here all share certain formal and material concerns. Formally, my main focus is on what narrative theorist Gérard Genette has termed focalization. All the novels discussed here feature a third-person narrator and some kind of limited focalization. What this means is that we are given the perspective of some characters,

but, importantly, not all. This kind of limited focalization can be traced back to Madame Bovary, is evident in Middlemarch, and used to great effect by Henry James. It differentiates the modern realist novel from earlier examples where the narrator could be viewed as truly omniscient, and is a key distinction because quite often in realist fiction what we are not aware of as readers, in terms of the thoughts and motivations of characters, is as important as that of which we are aware. The modern realist novel examines the contemporary, or the very recent past, and it takes for its subject the ordinary, rather than the extraordinary; we can see this extending even to the war novels in this study, as the focus is usually on ordinary, undistinguished figures and the random “everyday” activity of war (with notable exceptions). There is also no subjectivity given to the narrator. The only commentary is provided from the thoughts of the focalized characters.

This is where we can see a distinction between twentieth-century realism and its forebears. The goal with this absence of subjectivity is to present reality clearly, without any kind of narrative filter or mediation. This attempt at clarity sets the realist novel apart from the modernist or postmodernist one, as often the goal in the latter two is to obfuscate reality, and to emphasize subjectivity. However, this is not to say that the drive for clarity in realism makes it an anti-style.

Despite (or perhaps because of) its predominance as the mode of choice for most novelists, realism as a form of writing is often taken for granted as transparent. Its ubiquity allows the critic to focus on content, on the various issues—be they political, sexual, racial, imperial, etc.—that the novel engages with in a way that would not be possible with, for example, a modernist text.

While this method of ignoring the mode of narration for purposes of analysis can be necessary and simplifying, it risks ignoring many of the choices that go into creating a realist text. In a study such as this one that focuses on gender, the issues of perspective and representation are crucial because the perspective of the narrative will shape the perceptions gleaned from the

narrative. For example, in Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt (1922) the predominant perspective given in most of the novel is that of Babbitt himself, in that we are privy to his thoughts and we view the situation from his point of view. Yet, we are distinctly not given Babbitt’s narration. We are given his thoughts, but unfiltered, not in the way they would be presented in a first-person narrative, where the idea of the reader identifying or engaging with the narrator is necessary for the narrative to function. The narrator of Babbitt is more present than the narrator in the novels that make up this study—Babbitt is often made a subject of ridicule by the narrator who points out his constantly contradictory opinions—but in general the Babbitt that we are given is Babbitt as he is viewed by an objective, disinterested observer. The idea, then, is that Babbitt should be a subject of ridicule not because the narrator tells us this, but because his own thoughts betray him.

The question of ridicule is especially pertinent in this case, because most of the novels being discussed here look at an updated version of Lewis’ Babbitt, the white American male who outwardly represents “Americanness” but is uncomfortable in his own skin. The only real difference between the novels, such as The Caine Mutiny and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, that look to end “happily” and the other, more ambiguous texts, is that the feeling of discomfort is resolved in the former two. But what separates most of these texts from the realist works that have come before lies in this idea of post-realism. The principal difference that this study sees between a realist novel and a post-realist novel is the more deliberate attempt in the post-realist to break from, or possibly ignore, the past. I will show throughout how these breaks are accomplished, but they are present, in some form, in every novel here. In The Naked and the

Dead the Army experience itself works much like the metaphorical melting pot, where past experiences and cultural backgrounds are banished and often negated. In From Here to Eternity, which I would argue rejects post-realism in some ways, the past is clung to, both in terms of the

social function of the realist novel and the resistance to middle-class bureaucracy displayed by the two main characters. In The Caine Mutiny the main character’s upper class and Patrician background are wiped away in favour of a new middle-class identity of his choosing. A similar theme is present in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, where the past must be effectively banished in order for happiness in the present to be realized. In the two naturalist (or naturalist- themed) novels—Seize the Day and Revolutionary Road—it is an inability to accept or access the present that proves to be the main characters’ respective undoings. Finally, in the contemporary examination of the period and subject matter, Mad Men, post-realism is present in Don Draper’s ability to reinvent a present for himself that negates his past entirely.

Realism and Naturalism

Now that we have settled upon calling all the texts studied here post-realist works that use realism as a literary mode, I must make a small rejoinder and note that many of the texts studied here could also credibly be called naturalist in theme and in character development. Both

The Naked and The Dead and From Here to Eternity have been described as naturalist novels,

Revolutionary Road is a text mentioned in The Oxford Handbook of American Literary

Naturalism, and I will argue that Seize the Day can also be viewed as naturalist fiction. But, much as I argue that post-realist fiction has different concerns and a different relationship with history than earlier realist novels, naturalist-themed post-realist novels employ naturalism in a different manner. To explain what I mean, it is necessary to briefly review naturalism as a literary concept.

Realism and naturalism are closely linked, and there is much that is contentious about the difference between the two of them. Most parties agree that realism comes first, and that naturalism followed, but even that can be debated somewhat as Emile Zola was writing his naturalist fiction at around the same time that Howells was writing his realist fiction. In

American literary terms, however, it is safe to say that realism emerged first. For the purposes of concision, I will let noted scholar of American naturalism Donald Pizer summarize the debate:

American naturalism, as a concept, has two … channelled approaches to its definition. The

first is that since naturalism comes after realism, and since it seems to take literature in the

same direction as realism, it is primarily an “extension” or continuation of realism—only a

little different. The second almost inevitable approach involves this difference. The major

distinction between realism and naturalism, most critics agree, is the particular

philosophical orientation of the naturalists. A traditional and widely accepted concept of

American naturalism, therefore, is that it is essentially realism infused with a pessimistic

determination. (9)

Pizer, not surprisingly, takes issue with some of the terms of this debate. As I wish to only have a standard definition of American naturalism here, I will give his definition and then explain how I want to apply naturalism to my own research on work that falls well outside the traditional historical period. Pizer argues for a model that shows the naturalistic novel as one that contains two tensions. He notes that these two tensions “constitute the theme and form of the naturalistic novel” (10). The first tension, he explains,

is that between the subject matter of the naturalistic novel and the concept of man which

emerges from this subject matter. The naturalist populates his novel primarily from the

lower middle class or the lower class. His characters are the poor, the uneducated, the

unsophisticated. His fictional world is that of the commonplace and unheroic in which life

would seem to be chiefly the dull round of daily existence … but the naturalist discovers in

this world those qualities of man usually associated with the heroic or adventurous, such as

acts of violence and passion which involve sexual adventure or bodily strength and which

culminate in desperate moments and violent death. A naturalistic novel is thus an extension

of realism only in the sense that both modes often deal with the local and the

contemporary. The naturalist, however, discovers in this material the extraordinary and

excessive in human nature. (10-11)

What is interesting about Pizer’s first tension is that it in many respects corresponds to the difference between the works in my study that I would call naturalist and those which I would not; acts of violence and passion are largely absent from the “happy” novels and yet the world of all the novels here mainly consists of “the dull round of daily existence.” The distinction between the nineteenth-century naturalistic novel and the post-realist naturalistic novel lies in Pizer’s second tension, however:

The naturalist often describes his characters as though they are conditioned and controlled

by environment, heredity, instinct, or chance. But he also suggests a compensating

humanistic value in his characters or their fates which affirms the significance of the

individual and of his life. The tension here is that between the naturalist’s desire to

represent in fiction the new, discomforting truths which he has found in the ideas and life

of his late nineteenth-century world, and also his desire to find some meaning in

experience which reasserts the validity of the human enterprise. (11)

One major difference between twentieth-century writing and nineteenth-century writing in general is this search for the validity of the human experience. Modernism questions that

validity, and some would argue that postmodernism denies its existence. However, the very validity of human experience is something that is up for debate in the naturalistic texts in this study.

At any rate, according to Pizer’s above definition, naturalism was thought to differ from realism in its deterministic view of human life. Where crucial plot points in realism would spring from a certain choice that a given character or characters would make—in other words the character would be in charge of his or her own destiny—in naturalism that choice would be taken away, and events occur because they are fated to happen that way. The “natural” aspect of naturalism is seen to link human behaviour to the natural world and surmises that our lives play out much in the same way that those of animals do. A writer like Jack London, whose stories often focus on humans in hostile natural environments, like the arctic or the wilderness, is a naturalist in this most literal sense, but other authors like Theodore Dreiser and Upton Sinclair, who portrayed urban environments as a sort of kill-or-be-killed jungle, are also seen as naturalists. Much debate has been had over just how determined these novels are—i.e. are the characters’ struggles truly determined by factors beyond their control, be these natural forces or social forces that are a product of an economic system?—however, my interest is not in the degree of determinism but in the difference in outcomes between a novel labeled as “realist” and one labelled “naturalist.” To take two of the earliest and most recognized examples of each genre, the outcome of Silas Lapham is decidedly different from the outcome of Sister Carrie because of the difference in agency that major characters in each novel possess. Silas Lapham saves himself from ruin because he is able to recognize the errors in his behaviour and correct these errors; he is able to choose what his destiny will be. Conversely, in Sister Carrie

Hurstwood’s undoing seems foreordained. He steals money from his company without really

understanding why and everything that happens to him thereafter appears irreversible. He recognizes his error, but can do nothing after the fact to improve his situation. In Silas Lapham society is seen to be basically benevolent to those who are honest and well intentioned. In Sister

Carrie society is at best indifferent and at worst the overlying causal factor in a person’s misfortunes.

Returning then to naturalism as a genre of writing, while works written in and/or written about the 1950s are not often mentioned when the genre is discussed, there is certainly a case to be made that the rather deterministic world view of many social critics of the era lends itself nicely to naturalism’s themes. I want to return to Mailer’s “The White Negro” and a rather emblematic phrase, wherein Mailer claims that to be a modern American is to be a “[s]quare cell, trapped in the totalitarian tissues of American society, doomed willy-nilly to conform if one is to succeed” (339). Within Mailer’s hyperbole is once again this idea of determinism, or at the very least the idea that the path to success is a determined one that requires conformity to societal norms. Mailer, as Schaub argues, was a product of his time, and despite his rather prodigious imagination, his conception of 1950s society is quite indicative of the time. Within the essay, despite all its pronouncements about hipsters and psychosexual liberation, is the idea that the only way to break away from the determined path of existence is a violent way. In other words, without making the kind of radical departure from “normal” society that most would be unwilling to make, there was no path to success other than the same path everyone else was on.

Critics like Riesman and Mills, though less prone to exaggeration than Mailer, were equally concerned with this society of too few options; so while naturalism is not an often used term when it comes to the fiction of the 1950s, it is easy to see how some of its tenets would be attractive to Fifties writers.

Furthermore, naturalism in its early American sense was usually concerned with how societal constructs interfered with what was deemed as a natural way for humans to be living.

Novels that focused more on the economic, like those of Sinclair, tended to discuss the way that inhumane working conditions will inevitably lead to human tragedy, while others, such as Frank

Norris’ McTeague, took the idea that some of humanity was simply too brutish for ordered society, and this brutishness was inherited and as such inescapable. Social critics who worried about the direction of 1950s society were not particularly worried about brutishness, but they did express a great deal of concern over how unnatural the supposed “normal” existence had become.xiii A common element in naturalist fiction, from the works of Zola to Richard Wright’s

Native Son is that a given character may be doomed from the start, but it is a corrupt societal structure that exacerbates and accelerates the doomed character’s decline (for example, in Native

Son, Bigger Thomas’ downfall, which is presented in some ways as inevitable, is enacted by the vast divide between Chicago’s rich white population and its poor black one). What is different about naturalistic texts in the 1950s is that the societal forces are not as outwardly oppressive.

Instead, they are seen as more insidious and seemingly innocuous. Yet when one looks at the social criticism of the period it is possible to see the roots of this criticism in many of the novels discussed here. Concerns over conformity, the sameness of American life and the trap of domesticity are all explored in Revolutionary Road, Seize the Day, From Here to Eternity and even The Naked and the Dead. What each novel also suggests, in different forms, is a certain inevitability in the fate of the characters it portrays.

Because there is no scholarship that suggests a sort of naturalistic renaissance in the

1950s, the texts discussed here have not normally been discussed together in the same way that the works of Norris, Dreiser, and London, for example, would be discussed. Yet they share much

in common that comes, I would argue, from a similar suggestion that much of life is inevitable and that an understanding of what “normal” is only serves to accelerate this inevitably. More specifically, in these novels the everyman character has a spontaneous desire to be normal and to resist this desire. And yet, the seeming inevitability of life, or American life in the war and postwar eras, means that each character will be both defined and, somewhat, undone by his relationship to what it means to be normal. In each case it is the character’s seeming inability to be a proper everyman figure that causes all the trouble.

The War and the Masculine Archetype in the Postwar Era

I want to emphasize that this study, while it examines American novels that were mostly written in the 1950s, wishes to avoid an elision that many of the studies of the 1950s tend to make. Namely, that is to partially avoid discussing the Second World War. I have rectified this elision by discussing three novels specifically about the war and three others—the Fifties suburban novels—that interact with the war in some way. The war and the 1950s are inextricably linked, but scholarship often seems uncertain of what to make of this connection. The most pronounced example of this is how the study of contemporary American literature is often referred to as “postwar,” but the “post” is more emphasized than the war. The novels that come out of the immediate postwar period are much less “post” in their concerns, as many of them are concerned with matters of the actual war, and all carry some residual from that war. As such, I want to make this connection explicit and to note how the mode of writing discussed here, realism, is chosen both by authors who would represent the 1950s everyman and by authors looking to portray the effects of war on that same figure. Not only is the ordinariness of 1950s

America built upon the extremely unordinary occurrence of a massive world war that spanned six years and altered the lives of nearly everyone who was alive during it, but, as noted above, the preferred method of portraying this extraordinary event was the literary form of the ordinary: realism. This seems somewhat paradoxical, and when one remembers that the First World War was the catalyst for the modernist explosion, the choice of realism as a style is even more puzzling. Writing about these realist war novels twenty years later, Alfred Kazin would argue that “one can only say what Whitman said of the Civil War—‘the real war will never get into books.’ No individual experience, as reported in literature, can do justice to it, and the most atrocious common experiences will seem unreal as we read about them” (81). The real war was so horrific, Kazin explains, that it is not actually possible to convey it realistically. Such were the horrors of World War II, Kazin continues, that “by the Fifties, the liberal intellectual’s image of it was demolished” and that with “so many new wars on the horizon, such a continued general ominousness, … ‘the war’ soon became War anywhere, anytime — War that has never ended,

War as the continued experience of twentieth-century man” (81). In Kazin’s argument, this new concept of “War” was the impetus for postmodern writing that dealt with World War II because

“realism about war, observation from the literary sidelines, even one’s own unvarnished experience in a concentration camp, could no longer express ‘War’ as they did ‘the war’” (82, emphasis in text).

As Marina MacKay puts it in her introduction to The Cambridge Companion to the

Literature of World War II “World War II is ‘uncontainable,’ … for reasons of time as well as space” (2). Its meaning continually evolves as we move further away from it in time. MacKay makes a compelling point in discussing the complex relationship that literature has with the war, arguing that “the most important claim literature can make on our historical imaginations is to

show how things felt at the time” (3). We can see from MacKay’s statement how large a role that form could take in this claim. Some of the later, more modernist or postmodernist takes on the war focused much more on the psychic effects of the war; a novel like Catch-22 (1961), for example, focuses on the absurdity of war and the toll that this absurdity could take on an individual. As such, Yossarian’s view is rarely stable, his perspective rarely grounded, and the result is a sense of discombobulation that inhabits the novel for its entirety. Heller’s novel makes no attempt to contain the war; instead it seeks to show the madness inherent in something that is uncontainable. The war novels in this study (The Naked and the Dead, From Here to Eternity, and The Caine Mutiny) approach the task much differently. They do not, I must insist, try to contain the war either, but their attempts to show how the war felt at the time are rooted much more in the larger structure of the war effort; they look in a sense at the culture of the military, and this is a task for which realism and naturalism are well suited. The military is a deterministic social structure for the individual: it tells a person where to go, what to do, how to behave, and even how to die. The worst thing a soldier can do is to defy orders. As such, deterministic naturalism is a very appropriate medium for the representation of an individual’s experience of the war, and Mailer and Jones make full use of this medium. However, because the war effort was successful and regarded as morally just for the United States, the naturalistic social environment of World War II came to be regarded as more just than the naturalistic environment of industrial capitalism at the turn of the twentieth century. There was a greater good involved in the war effort and its subordination of individual freedom, which allows for a different feeling of naturalism. This different feeling, where subordination is “okay” can be seen most emphatically in The Caine Mutiny.

I make no claim that these three novels are particularly similar, beyond that they share an overall realistic style and they were all written within three years of each other and within six years after the war had ended. Wouk’s novel is generally the least considered—typical of a study of American war novels is James Dawes’ four-word summary in The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of World War II of Caine as “prim but somehow irresistible” (56). From Here to

Eternity has seen more attention of late,xiv but again Dawes sums up overall critical reaction when he states that there is “a generally unspoken but nonetheless palpable sense that [American

World War II novels are] a lesser part of the American literary canon” and that From Here to

Eternity and Jones’ other war novel, The Thin Red Line, are “the most perfect embodiments of this characterization” (57). The Naked and the Dead is by far the most heavily studied (Dawes calls it “punishing”), but it is almost always held to the caveat of being Mailer’s first novel, and it is also likely only his third most studied work, behind his ever present “The White Negro” essay and his new journalist masterpiece The Armies of the Night. At any rate, what these novels share despite their differences in literary heft and critical interest is an exploration of the military as a large organizational structure and of the compromises required of an individual within that structure. As an overall war strategy, compromise can make sense, but within the military structure itself compromise is imperative. Any lower ranking member of the military will quickly understand that his rights of a civilian are severely compromised within a military structure, but he agrees to the limiting of his rights in order to work towards the greater goal of winning the war, and a structure that functions cohesively will be one which, in theory, is more likely to achieve this greater goal. The Caine Mutiny agrees with this theory wholeheartedly and the result is a happy compromise that sees the war as, in some ways at least, unproblematic. In all cases, the culture of compromise that inhabits these war novels can be followed almost seamlessly into

America of the 1950s. Similarly, we could see this compromise inhabiting not only the subject matter of the novels, but their style as well. Unlike modernism, where artistic eccentricity is celebrated, where every writer is encouraged to “make it new,” realism discourages individual artistic style. As Mailer would comment much later in a 2007 interview with The Paris Review,

“style is an attack on the nature of reality.” And yet, as much as having a uniformity of style can be seen as accepting aesthetic conformity, we can also see the renewed attention to the real as a resistance to modernism’s emphasis on style. In the same interview Mailer discusses James

Jones: “Now, Jones was one of the most practical novelists I’ve ever met, real Midwestern. He was absolutely solid in his sense of the real and the given and how you dealt with it. His pleasure in life was how you dealt precisely with the difficulties of reality.” In a way, the postwar environment was all about dealing “with the difficulties of reality,” but what is interesting from my point of view is that the post-realist tendency of examining only the present reality can be found in both the novels that portray the war and the novels that portray the suburban environment that followed it. In both cases the willingness to dismiss the past seems to come from the fact that both the prewar and postwar realities of American life are irreconcilable with war reality.

Thus this study attempts to make a transition that is, somewhat surprisingly, often eschewed: namely, it moves from war to postwar while attempting to keep the connection between the two at the forefront. Why such a thing is not usually done seems at once baffling and completely obvious. It is baffling because almost anyone who was a major figure in the

1950s would have experienced the war in some very real form and would have undoubtedly been greatly affected by it. The war novels are all written post war yet concern themselves with the war itself and the novel that seems to typify the 1950s, Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray

Flannel Suit, looks directly at the transition a man must make from soldier in a war to everyday citizen in a civil society. The very term “postwar” suggests that one era is the defining factor for another. Yet, it is completely obvious as to why studies of postwar America focus much more on the “post” part of the equation, and that is because the two eras seem so completely removed from one another. Thus we have studies that look at the Second World War and we have studies that look at the 1950s and move forward from there. James Gilbert’s study of masculinity in the

1950s speaks about “war heroes” but discussion of the actual war that made those heroes is largely absent. K.A. Cuordileone briefly discusses the Second World War in the prologue to his

Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War, noting that “rarely in American history had so much change occurred in so short a span of time; the degree of transformation in the fabric of American life between 1945 and 1960 was immense and arguably second only to the Civil War era” (xv, emphasis in text), but his take on the war is telling. He explains that

America “emerg[ed] from World War II relatively unscathed and prosperous” (xv). The masculinity studies of both James Penner and Michael Kimmel encompass the war and postwar periods, but both studies do something of an end run around the war itself. Kimmel briefly discusses the fallout from the war at the beginning of his chapter on the 1950s but quickly moves into the Fifties proper. Penner spends a bit more time on what the war did for masculinity, noting that it “made hard-shell masculinity more than a state of mind” (72) and speaks of the links between the war and mentalities of hyper-masculinity, but once his study moves to the 1950s the war is left behind. Moving beyond studies of masculinity, Schaub’s American Fiction in the Cold

War similarly discusses the era before the war, but the actual war is notably absent. There are certainly exceptions to this trend, Elaine May’s Homeward Bound being the notable one, but the

tendency to keep the 1950s separate from the war remains. That tendency is derived, I think, at least partially from our contemporary understanding of the 1950s, which I have discussed above.

My original intention for this study was for realist novels to make up a section of a larger examination of 1950s fiction. It was my feeling—though it still is to some extent—that realism was particularly appealing to writers looking to portray the typical or ordinary American experience. Given that 1950s America is known for its aspirations of a universal middle-class, conceivably this ordinary experience could be anyone’s, but of course “ordinary” was more likely to mean a white, corporate-employed man with a nuclear family living in the suburbs. This archetypal figure still has much purchase in modern American myths about their society; it is no coincidence that this figure still remains pivotal for television series, with shows as diverse as

Breaking Bad, The Simpsons, and Modern Family all attempting to subvert the norm by providing different versions of this same character in a way that is somehow deviant from the archetypal norm. What is also interesting about this figure, as my study will show, is his seeming dissimilarity from earlier American archetypal figures that are typically more in the rugged individual vein. It is hard to picture Tom Rath, the man in the gray flannel suit, going on an adventure similar to those enjoyed by Natty Bumppo or Ishmael or other classic figures of

American literature in the Romantic tradition. It is for this reason, or so my original rationale went, that realism is so well-suited to this kind of figure, for its origins as a mode in American literature were as a response to the adventure romance novels that preceded it. Writers like

William Dean Howells, Theodore Dreiser, and, in a somewhat different interpretation, Henry

James sought to write of the ordinary, rather than the extraordinary, and realism, with its emphasis on details and its firm attention to morality, was the style they chose for it. It makes a

great deal of sense, then, that a decade that seems to define ordinary to the point of being banal would see a proliferation of realist works of fiction.

However, and ultimately unsurprisingly, this tidy narrative that I had created didn’t quite fit. As I have noted above, while all of the texts studied here (including the TV series Mad Men) feature what I have been calling a post-realist perspective and style, in that they all look to willingly ignore the past in favour of their own interpretation of the present, not all of the texts view or portray this phenomenon positively. And it is also hard to suggest that the 1950s saw more realist texts than any other decade in the twentieth century without the kind of exhaustive quantitative study that is beyond the scope of this project. Thus, instead of my tidy narrative about the proliferation of realist novels in the immediate postwar period and their similar themes and subjects, I have a parcel of novels, some of which might be labelled naturalistic, that all share certain characteristics and all examine variations of a certain kind of figure. I have chosen these texts then, not because I want to claim that they are the most important texts of the decade, but because they are, in their various ways, indicative and emblematic of some of the dominant themes and concerns of the period. More plainly, rather than asking the question, “what was wrong with middle-class men in the 1950s?” I want to examine texts that felt the need to ask that question. It is my supposition that part of the social unrest that was seen in the 1960s, and indeed some of the problems that surround American society to this day, (racial ones, patriarchal ones,

“family values” ones) can be traced to America asking itself, in a sense, the wrong kinds of questions. In a way it is almost absurd that the focus of countless studies and popular lamentation was the one figure who gained the most from the immediate postwar era: the middle-class white

American male. Yet, focus there they did, and as such my focus is also on this figure. However,

why study him and works that focus on him? What can be gained by giving a voice to he whose voice is already prominent? There are two possible answers to these questions.

The first is that in focusing on those in positions of relative power we can better understand what an ideal of a given society was like. What is quite interesting about 1950s

America is that this ideal standard of living was a somewhat democratic one. Those in a position of wealth and comfort are not the elite, but rather the middle class, and their stories are meant to be ordinary, rather than extraordinary. As such, the ideal of 1950s America is a surprisingly egalitarian one. We can critique it of course for its narrow sense of egalitarianism, in that to benefit from this ideal one had to be white and male, but we can also marvel at its optimism. The second—and the option that I have, for the most part, chosen here, if perhaps only because of my predilection for a deconstructive approach—is to examine how this narrative of dominance is unable to contain itself, indeed how it seems to collapse under its own irresolute foundation. As I have noted above, out of all the texts that are of primary focus here (there are seven in all) only two can be said to treat both their era and their archetypal figure without some sense of irony and foreboding. Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny and Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit both seem to embrace the idea that the past can be separated from the present and foreclosed completely. In both cases the resolution to the novel is contingent upon this successful foreclosure. Yet in both cases there must be a considerable suspension of disbelief, both on behalf of the characters and the reader. As a result, even in these seemingly “happy” novels there is a sense that things could easily unravel. The other, more naturalistic novels in this study spend more time examining this unravelling. Present in all the other texts here is a suggestion that the unravelling is always present, that there is nothing really benevolent about the society or the system that has produced such prosperity for its most fortunate members. Present also in all of

the novels is the idea that the consequences are far worse for those who do not fit into the archetypal role, specifically women who are often the figurative (and in the case of

Revolutionary Road, literal) casualties of the advancement of the archetypal figure.

****

Thus the task of The Uninteresting Majority is a multifocal one. To sum up its concerns here, it looks to examine how post-realism as a literary and cultural term, first, functions as a distinct form from realism (with my contention being that the term operates both as a stylistic and historical marker); second, acts as a precursor to postmodernism, in that many of its concerns—mass and consumer culture, the impossibility of achieving a modernist-like individuality of style, the imminent threat of nuclear war—are shared ones; third, defines the immediate postwar era’s relationship to its past; fourth, marks a kind of normalization of masculinity as father and provider that seeks to supplant other, deviant forms; and finally continues to define our own relationship to the immediate postwar period as an era, as can be evidenced by contemporary portrayals of the 1950s. In the chapters that follow I hope to illustrate how all of the above can be found from a series of fictional representations of the period and its principal subject of concern, this archetypal middle-class white man, most, as I have noted, coming from the period itself, with the final chapter looking at a more contemporary depiction. As my study works its way from texts that look at the war proper to texts that look at successful transitions from the war to ones that look at less successful transitions and finally to a television series that acts as something of a summary of much of this, I have divided the study up into three main sections, with two chapters in each section, and a final coda chapter that looks at the contemporary depiction.

Section One features two war novels that look at the war and at the presumed period that would follow it with some ambivalence. They provide both a glimpse at post-realism as a paradigm and (ultimately unsuccessful) alternatives to it. Both novels in this section are overtly concerned with masculinity and From Here to Eternity looks to define a masculine ideal, with the suggestion that this ideal is, unfortunately, doomed to be rejected in favour of the post-realist archetype. Chapter One looks at James Jones’ From Here to Eternity and that novel’s somewhat anachronistic take on both realism and masculinity. The novel, which is set in Pearl Harbor before America enters the war, focuses on the lives of two Army regulars, Sergeant Milt Warden and Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt, who struggle with the often contradictory demands placed upon them by the non-Army world, which is represented by their respective lovers, and the

Army one, which offers its own pressures. I argue that the novel’s perspective is anachronistic because it is written in the style of a socialist realist novel from the 1930s, with its representation of the regular Army as the oppressed proletariat and the officer class as the elite bourgeoisie. The novel’s perspective is that authentic masculinity can only be found among the working class, and that the middle-class life that both the officer class and the outside (and postwar) world represent is anathema to the heroic masculinity that the work idealizes. Eternity as such argues implicitly that post-realism, which features a break from the past and consequently working-class values, is a threat to America’s future prosperity. Chapter Two explores Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, a novel that shares a similar focus on the class differences within the Army, but which has little of Jones’ socialist ideology. In the chapter I argue that Mailer’s novel represents a transition from modernism to post-realism and that he uses the structure of the novel and the

Army itself to mark this transition. Mailer does not focus on two main characters as Jones does, but instead follows a small company stationed in the South Pacific and the various members,

both of the officer and regular class, that make up the company. The mode of writing in the novel is mainly realist, but in small sections scattered throughout the text it exhibits modernist style.

These sections, referred to as “The Time Machine” within the novel, look at the past, pre-Army lives of a number of characters and are marked by their distinctive voice and more experimental narrative style. Before they enter the Army the various characters are identified as individuals through class, status, race, and even type of masculinity, and the Time Machine segments reflect these differences, but once the individuals become members of the Army all these distinctions, along with the distinct narrative voice, start to blur together. This melting pot, where the past is absorbed and only the present is of any concern, is archetypal post-realism.

Section Two could be subtitled the happy ending section, as it features three novels that most distinctly showcase the present perfect mode of post-realism that I discussed above. While one novel is set during the war and the other two are set in the mid 1950s, all three feature a recognizably archetypal middle-class male figure who succeeds, in many ways, due to his ability to redefine himself for the present. Chapter Three examines Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny, a novel about a Naval officer stationed aboard an anti-mine ship in the South Pacific during the war. Said officer, Willie Keith, uses his experience in the Navy to mature and become the right sort of man, but what is interesting, from my perspective, is just what being the right sort of man entails. Keith essentially learns to become middle class by absolving himself from his layabout patrician upbringing, and learns from the Navy that it is always better to follow orders than to question them. The resulting resolution, which I will not detail here in the introduction, works as a defining example of post-realism. Keith learns that to be successful he need only wilfully ignore unpleasant aspects of the past, and the novel suggests nothing problematic in this approach. Chapter Four looks mainly at Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and at

a similar archetypal figure in the personage of Tom Rath, a former paratrooper who learns to put a past that haunts him in various ways (among them the men he killed during the war, the illegitimate child he fathered at the same period, and a formerly wealthy family whose wealth has largely evaporated). Wilson’s novel is defining of the 1950s in many ways, and I argue here that it is defining of the post-realist perspective as Tom’s happy ending comes when he is able to successfully banish all his past ghosts to the past, never to be spoken of again. Chapter Four also features a small segment on the anti-type to the post-realist archetypal male, the “great man” figure. I explore two such characters, one found in Gray Flannel and the other in another popular novel of the era, Cameron Hawley’s Executive Suite. In this segment I argue that post-realism looks to relegate such a figure, the workaholic C.E.O. or company founder who shuns personal relationships and lives only for his business, to a bygone era. The post-realist present needs well- rounded father figures and such a figure is not to be found in the great man type.

Section Three features two novels that reject post-realism as a viable way of viewing the world. Both novels feature characters that are seemingly archetypal, but both are in some way flawed, and the happy ending available to the characters in the previous section is not within reach of the characters in this one. While both novels comment on the post-realist view prominent in the 1950s, I would argue that both could be seen as naturalistic in terms of their narratives. Chapter five is a discussion of Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day and features a protagonist who appears to be archetypal, but whose failure to succeed in the post-realist 1950s is derived from his inability to live up to his archetypal role. Seize the Day’s Tommy Wilhelm is a figure whose life was Tom Rath-like—he had a successful middle-class class sales position, a wife and two children, and a past in the war that is all but forgotten—but all of that has been seemingly taken from him. In the present (as its title suggests the novel’s action is all in the course of a

single day) Wilhelm lives in a hotel in Midtown Manhattan. His aged father also resides there and Wilhelm, in his forties, sees himself as displaced and dispossessed in the city. He feels he belongs in the suburbs with the kind of existence a man his age should be having. That Wilhelm is prohibited from this existence is portrayed both as and as not of his own doing. The novel itself is, I argue, a comment on the perceived narrow focus of 1950s and the shortsightedness that is post-realism’s desire to break from the past.

Chapter six looks at Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road, a novel that is often grouped with Gray Flannel as one that critiques suburban conformity, but such a categorization is not particularly well suited to either novel. Gray Flannel sees little wrong per se with suburban existence, whereas Revolutionary Road argues that the suburbs function as something of a straw man when it comes to the issues that confront 1950s America. The novel, which is more accurately described as a tragedy (its tripartite structure is that of a Greek tragedy), suggests that the real reason for the downfall of the Wheelers (Frank, the archetypal male with his bland corporate job, April the beautiful housewife, and their two mainly unseen children) is the post- realist tendency to ignore that which is troubling. Revolutionary Road in many ways anticipates the concerns of the 1960s in that what is most troubling about the Wheelers’ existence is their dishonesty about what troubles them. Frank, unsurprisingly, realizes that he benefits greatly from his archetypal existence, while April, whose death is the novel’s tragedy, is a victim of a domestic model that gives her no viable outlet.

Concluding my study is a final coda chapter that is at once a departure from post-realist

1950s fiction and a continuation of it. So while my final text of study, the television series Mad

Men, is neither a novel nor produced in the immediate postwar period, it shares many concerns with both the other texts studied here and the period itself. Mad Men, I argue, is an exemplar of

post-realism in terms of its narrative and depictions. It features an archetypal protagonist, Don

Draper, who has literally cast himself in this role (he has stolen the identity of Don Draper from an officer he served with in the Korean War), and Draper’s profession, advertising, is all about selling happiness in the present moment, an essential part of the post-realist paradigm. My examination of Mad Men focuses only on the series’ first season, which, while being set in 1960, is heavily invested in our contemporary understanding of the 1950s and all that they represent.

While the series is often in on the joke, so to speak, in that it is aware of the wilful banishment of unpleasantness displayed in 1950s texts, its condescending nostalgia towards the period always speaks to our own tenuous relationship to history. If the post-realism of the 1950s suggested that the past no longer mattered, or at least that all but the most favourable interpretations of the past could be foreclosed, then our present portrayals and understanding of the period suggest that that same act of foreclosure has been performed on the way we are able to view the period. It is my hope that this study, and the texts it examines, will be able to reopen the immediate postwar era for interpretation.

i Gilbert’s Men in the Middle focuses on the 1950s, as does K.A. Cuordileone’s American Manhood in the Cold

War. Michael Kimmel’s Manhood in America features a substantial section on the Forties and Fifties, as does James

Penner’s Pinks, Pansies, and Punks. Roel Van Den Oever’s Mama’s Boy looks into the peculiar concept of

“Momism” and its place in postwar American culture. ii James Gilbert explains that Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. in “The Crisis of American Masculinity” (1958) worried about ambiguity of the contemporary male role; it had, apparently, “‘lost its rugged clarity of outline,’” and he believed one of the main causes of this to be “aggressive women” (62-63).

iii In interviewing a number of young couples that were married before or immediately after the war, May reveals a large amount of puzzled discontent in all facets of the couples’ lives. The men were often dissatisfied with their employment and felt removed from their children. The women often felt trapped and isolated in their domestic settings, and the couples often experienced relationship troubles. iv Tyrus Miller’s Theorizing Late Modernism suggests that Late Modernism be viewed as its own distinct literary movement, (which began in the late 1920s and continued into the war years) and he uses the concept to suggest a more coherent transition between modernism and postmodernism. v Many of Bellow’s works have been labelled postmodern. Mailer’s New Journalism work was seen as being a postmodern approach to journalism and his 1967 novel Why Are We in Vietnam? would be difficult to categorize as anything other than postmodern. vi Aldridge himself continued to rail against postwar literature late into his career. In The Program Era Mark

McGurl notes that Aldridge lamented the rise of the writing program “for the damage it had done to the originality of the individual authorial voice” (104). This is largely the same argument he makes about the writers who follow the Lost Generation. vii Cf. Susan Friedman’s “Planetarity: Musing Modernist Studies” and “Periodizing Modernism” for more discussion on the categorical confusion surrounding the meaning of “modernism.” viii Sollors notes that “by 1945 virtually all of Faulkner’s seventeen books had slipped out of print; even the plates had been recycled during the war years” (5). ix Cf. the two recent issues in the journal Twentieth-Century Literature that discuss the state of American literature

“after postmodernism.” x The term can be found in the study Post-Realism: The Rhetorical Turn in International Relations (1996) with the premise being that the realist politics of figures like Henry Kissinger had been replaced by a new kind of rhetorical mode of altered reality. The second Bush era can be seen as a post-realist regime. xi For a very thorough exploration of what I am intimating, see David Halberstam’s exhaustive The Fifties, which shows just how much of modern America—McDonald’s, the interstate system, the Holiday Inn—came out of the

1950s.

xii Cf. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture. xiii Cf. James Gilbert’s “A Feeling of Crisis” (62-80) in Men in the Middle which discusses the many ways that social critics and popular magazines lamented the way that corporate culture was dangerously disrupting gender norms and “natural” masculinity. xiv In that there are two relatively recent (2011 and 2013) scholarly articles published on it and a recent dissertation by Jacqueline Grindrod studies the (intriguing) female characterization in the novel.

PART I

MODERNISM, REALISM, AND THE MASCULINE ARCHETYPE IN THE WAR

One of the questions that initially served as an organizing principle of this project was what relation realism had to the literary scene in the 1950s, and one of the strange things I discovered about this question is that not many people have spent much time discussing it. Part of the reason for this may be that realism is considered something of a default mode of writing— in other words, if a novel is not experimental in some way it must therefore be a realist novel, and as such any study of it would focus on any number of factors unrelated to how it was actually written. In this sense realism is the absence of style, or the “everystyle,” which would actually make it quite fitting for a period that is associated with being all-encompassing, in that it looked to create a universal middle class. This connection between realism’s seeming universality and the 1950s’ universal middle-class is enough to warrant further investigation, but

I think the connection is more complicated than that. As I note above, realism did not simply disappear at the end of the American Realist period where it was replaced by modernism. It was, however, seen as outmoded, initially by those who wished to make new innovations in fiction

(namely modernists) and later by critics, like the New Critics and the New York School, who favoured modernism.i Schaub explains that novelists and critics alike in the 1950s believed that modern life could not be portrayed through “naive realism and naturalism” (55), the kind of which the socialist realist novels of the 1930s and the Henry James-style novel of manners exemplified. But the Fifties novelists found themselves in something of a double-bind, for not only could they not resort to this “naive realism” but they had critics like Aldridge stating that the kind of ground-breaking work found amongst the Lost Generation was also impossible for

them. The eventual “answer” seems to be postmodernism, with the 1950s being a period of necessary razing that allowed the postmodern novel to be birthed.

Thus, paradoxically while the Second World War acted as a rebirth for American society it was seen as a death notice for the American novel. Schaub attributes this pessimism towards literary efforts to another death, that of the Old Left as a legitimate political movementii. This death, Schaub argues, was the result both of the atrocities committed by the totalitarian regimes that the pre-war Left had supported and of the general consensus culture in the United States that had come out of the war. Groups like the New York intellectuals found dissent to be impossible in such a political climate and as such they perceived it to be nearly impossible for postwar novels to be profound statements in the same sense that the pre-war modernist works could be.

Critics like Malcolm Cowley lamented that “during the 1920s writers were trying to create a new tradition in American literature because the older one had broken down or couldn’t be accepted.

Now, in the middle of the century, most American writers are trying to develop a tradition that already exists” (42). Yet, in another paradox, novelists of the late 1940s and early 1950s were met with a subject, World War II, that seemed to be begging for some kind of profound statement that would define it, both as an event in and of itself, and as a shaper of American

(masculine) identity. The problem would be in how to represent an event of such monumental proportions.

The answer to that problem, at least for the first wave of authors to attempt to portray the war, was to write an enormous realist or naturalist novel about a relatively small group of combatants in an individual platoon or Naval vessel. The two novels discussed in this section both stretch past the 700 page mark, Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny, discussed in the third chapter, is well over 500 pages and other works not discussed in detail here (Cozen’s Guard of

Honor and Shaw’s The Young Lions, for example) all feature prodigious page counts. Donald

Pizer discusses this phenomenon of length in “‘Maggie’ and the Naturalistic Aesthetic of

Length.” According to Pizer, naturalistic novels (and he counts The Naked and the Dead amongst these) are so long because of three basic formulations: “One is the connection between the naturalist's wish to compel us to accept the premise that environment is destiny and the aesthetics of imitative form” (60). Pizer discusses the “fullness of the representation” of an environment and the need for a long and detailed description of the environment to make for a proper mimetic experience. As such, much of the work in both From Here to Eternity and The

Naked and the Dead is in realistically building an environment that can contain the lives of its inhabitants. Destiny is contained in the island of Anopopei and on the base at Pearl Harbor, so we must have detailed descriptions of both these places. “A second naturalistic assumption,”

Pizer continues, “related to fictional length is the belief that the mass is of greater significance than the individual, or, stated another way, that our lives are contingent on the lives of those around us and that the notion of an individually shaped and responsible destiny is a romantic illusion” (60). We can again see this idea in both novels. Individual destiny within the Army is made to be a romantic fallacy, and as we shall see, in From Here to Eternity this fallacy costs

Prewitt (one of the main characters) his life. For his third formulation Pizer argues that the “final aspect of the naturalistic state of mind which contributes to fictional length is that of the importance of the narrative voice in naturalistic fictional aesthetics” (61). By this Pizer means that the narrative should be bound by an idea or ideology. He continues,

[m]ore than most novelists, naturalists write out of a conscious ideology, even if they

often deny that they are doing so consciously … and even if their ideas in specific works

differ from their ideas expressed elsewhere … The naturalist therefore is not satisfied

with the modernist assumption that ideas have no overt place in fiction; he wishes to

expand on the implications of his characters' natures and lives in order to enforce upon us

the premise that individual fates can be explained and that they also illustrate general

principles of life as a whole. (61)

In each of the war novels studied here, there is very much an attempt to use individual fates to explain a greater premise (although in Mailer’s case this may be about the meaningless of existence). In any event, there is a distinct difference in both the length of war novels to come out of World War II and their expressed purpose. If one of the hallmarks of modernist style (and this is debatable) is brevity then these war chronicles share more with the Victorian realist novels than with their modernist precursors. In matters of form the novels are (with the exception of

Mailer, as we will discuss in chapter two) more linear in terms of narrative than the notoriously fragmentary style of modernism. Whatever else they be, it is hard to call any of these novels experimental in the way that many modernist texts are. They are also not, importantly, documents of intimate and private experiences in some way removed from the conflict that surrounds them, but rather, as Pizer argues above, documents of how individuals are shaped by larger circumstances. There is no escape from the war in any of these novels—indeed those who try to escape it are invariably drawn back in—and perhaps more importantly there is no escape from the other individuals alongside whom one is meant to fight the war.

Writing in 1971, Alfred Kazin discusses American attempts to novelize the Second World

War and argues that “no individual experience, as reported in literature, can do justice to it, and the most atrocious common experiences will always seem unreal when we read about them”

(81). Of the novels mentioned above Kazin only comments at length on those of Mailer and

Jones, deeming the others examples of “war as liberal tourism” (81), and as unrepresentative of

the “real” war. For Kazin, who has the benefit of hindsight, the “real” war is impossible to describe, and this impossibility is reflected in the much darker works that would come after the first wave of realist novels. Kazin argues that what the war truly meant was understandable only after considerable time had passed, so that sense of never being alone that I have described as being characteristic of the early realist novels about the war is replaced by “the sense of oneself not as a soldier in a large protective group but as an isolated wretch doomed to die unaccountably” (85, emphasis in text). Kazin’s suggestion that this first wave of war novels lacked a vital understanding of the war’s larger meaning is echoed by Erin Mercer’s Repression and Realism in Post-war American Fiction, which examines the repression present in novels like

The Naked and the Dead. Taking a psychoanalytical approach, Mercer notes many occurrences of the uncanny in Mailer’s novel and is suggestive of a presence that goes unaccounted by both the soldiers in the novel and the novel itself. Implicit in Kazin’s and Mercer’s work is the idea that realism and naturalism, which after all attempt to accurately portray events as they are in reality, are inadequate forms through which to try to represent World War II. Kazin argues that less conventional novels like Heller’s Catch-22 and Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five are somewhat more successful at capturing the sense of no-sense that comes out of World War II, and this success is due to these works’ deliberate detachment from reality.

Given this idea that a realistic novel about World War II is a project that is doomed from the beginning, why then did so many of those who chose to write about it choose this route? For the three war novels that I am discussing here the reasons are all different, but in each case I think the reasons are rooted both in American literary history and in the societal changes brought about by the war. For the novel that is by far the most conservative of the three, The Caine

Mutiny, there is much more of a 1950s cultural imprint present, and it is for that reason that I will

discuss it separately. Caine is both more forward-looking and further in the past in terms of its literary influences and thematics. The two novels discussed in the following two chapters have much more in common with their immediate historical predecessors. For James Jones the heaviest influence is that of the socialist realist authors of the 1900s and 1930s. In Mailer the socialist realist influence is present, but so too is the spectre of modernism. The way all of this plays out within the structure of The Naked and the Dead is quite fascinating, and the way these seemingly clashing styles fit together is the subject of the bulk of my analysis. First off, however,

I want to look at the more straightforward From Here to Eternity, a novel that seems almost already anachronistic for its period, but which is most reflective of the changing political landscape in American society and the place of realism in the American literary scene.

Chapter 1

War as Escape From the Trap of Domesticity in From Here to Eternity

Despite the fact that, as Malcolm Cowley repeatedly points to, the New Critics of the

Forties and Fifties preferred modernist works for their subjects of discussion, one of the most popular movements of the 1930s was socialist realist fiction. Often dismissed by the New Critics as being cloying and nakedly political, this type of novel had its backers amongst the literary critics of the 1930s, in people like Mike Gold. In Pinks, Pansies, and Punks James Penner explains how in the 1930s the focus was taken away from what he calls “the genteel tradition”

(of which Silas Lapham is representative) to a “populist shift toward genres that were considered anti-elitist (the social protest novel, proletarian fiction, hard-boiled fiction)” (33). Penner’s focus is on gender and on the hard/soft binary that informs 1930s literature and criticism and some of his readings are quite useful lenses through which to view Jones, but for now I want to call attention to this populist shift, as it is very much in evidence in From Here to Eternity.

What makes From Here to Eternity stand out as a war novel is that it is not, for the bulk of its narrative, technically a war novel. The climactic point of the novel is the Japanese attack on

Pearl Harbor, where the novel is set, but this attack occurs near the very end of the book and there is never the sense, as there is in The Naked and the Dead, for example, of being entrenched in war. What From Here to Eternity is instead is a novel of occupation, or more specifically of labour, and while that occupation happens to be that of a soldier in the Army, a soldier here is much more a member of the oppressed proletariat than he is a heroic freedom fighter. He is in many ways made by his environment in the way that Pizer describes is typical of naturalistic texts. There are heroes here, but they are very much working-class heroes and this is displayed both in the way the narrative operates and the way that the characters are portrayed.

From Here to Eternity acknowledges its roots in Depression-era writing at the novel’s onset. Despite its being set in Hawaii, a place normally evocative of palm trees, lapping waves, and tropical rain, the word “dust” appears twice in the first three paragraphs. We are met with one of the novel’s two central characters, Prewitt, “brushing the dust from his hands” and looking out the window “through the heat haze and the thin mid-morning film of the parched red dust” (5, my emphasis). The description seems incongruous and the adjective “parched” recalls the “scarred earth” from the opening of The Grapes of Wrath. There is much dust at the beginning of Steinbeck’s Depression epic:

Every moving thing lifted the dust into the air: a walking man lifted a thin layer as high

as his waist, and a wagon lifted the dust as high as the fence tops, and an automobile

boiled a cloud behind it. The dust was long in settling back again. (211)

Passages like the above are so typical in Depression writing as to be clichéd and “dust” is almost synonymous with the Depression. Without making too much of a single word, its usage here, at the very beginning of the novel, is certainly a reminder that we are not very far removed from the

Depression period. It lingers not only in the dust, but also in the minds of the soldiers. When we first meet Robert E. Leeiii Prewitt he is preparing to leave his regiment because of a dispute over his position in the Bugle Corps (Prewitt’s pride and stubbornness are a recurring theme in the novel, so the opening is essentially foreshadowing his end). His friend “Red” is trying to convince him to reconsider his decision to leave and explains the Army-as-employment schema that From Here to Eternity employs. The following conversation ensues:

“… We get the gravy because we got special ability.”

“The crafts on the outside aint been gettin gravy. They been lucky if they had jobs at

all.”

“That aint the point,” Red said disgustedly. “Thats the Depression—why do you

think I’m in the goddam Army?”

“I dont know. Why are you?”

“Because.” Red paused triumphantly. “Same reason as you: Because I could live

better on the Inside than I could on the Outside. I wasnt ready to starve yet.” (9)

In discussing Eternity, Kazin notes that the novel treats the Army as “just another government work project” (79). Most of the men in the book are in the Army not because of the war, but because of the fact that jobs were scarce on “the Outside” and at least this way they would get paid and fed. That there is very little in the book that portrays employment in the Army as heroic, redeeming, or even useful is an indictment of the whole system, Kazin argues. He writes that the bulk of the regular Army members, “tough morsels,” he calls them, “are ultimately a judgment on a society whose men have no real work, whose skills are the real lament of the book. Men are employed by the Army, but they are not used” (79, emphasis in text). This issue, the lack of meaningful work, is not the fault of the Army, but the fault of the larger society that has come to this point. “Jones’s great theme,” Kazin argues, is “‘naturalness’” by which he means the sense that Prewitt and Warden (the other main character) have of “their ‘maleness’” or “need” which is

“aggressive, sexual, honorable, and indefatigable” (78). Both these ideas, “maleness” and Army- as-employment, are, I think, keys to the novel, and also, more importantly, what make this novel a dividing line between the America of the Depression and postwar America. What follows is an examination of how this novel draws that line.

In his study, James Penner notes how what he calls “macho criticism” informed the socialist realist texts of the 1930s. The focus, for many of these texts, was on the physique and physicality of the working class male. Penner argues that this focus was an attempt to

remasculinize the left both as a locus of criticism and a political movement, and it was done so in contrast to a literary elite (characterized by people like Thornton Wilder) that was portrayed as effete and averse to physical labour of any kind. Macho criticism idealized Hemingway because of his very macho size and stripped down method of writing. It sought for realist fiction the same kind of robust masculinity that Hemingway represented. The male body was to be presented as strong and forceful, rather than weak and passive. Approaching the same subject from a slightly different angle, Christina Jarvis shows how the war was used to bring a sense of masculine self worth to the American male, especially the working class figure whose sense of masculine self- worth, along with his confidence in his own body, she argues, had been eroded by the depression.

Jarvis shows the contrast in a series of posters and paintings from the Depression, where the typical American male is portrayed as emaciated and weak, and posters from the war effort, where the portrait is instead of an American male with exaggerated muscles and vigorous sexuality (9). The commonality in both arguments is the emphasis on the physical body and its connection to political movements. In both studies physical weakness is associated with femininity and in turn associated with unfavourable political viewpoints. Michael Kimmel’s sociological research in Manhood in America also speaks to these trends.iv

From Here to Eternity sits at the intersection of these arguments. As Kazin’s wording above suggests—that the novel’s theme revolves around “maleness”—the novel is very invested in its own idea of masculinity, and this masculinity has rather explicit political connotations. As noted above, because most of the novel takes place in the regular Army before the war, the focus is much more on how the Army functions as a place of work, rather than on the trials of war. The novel is, in that sense, much more about the individual versus the system, but the individual here is rather a specific case, and the system that oppresses him is oppressive because of the class

model on which it functions. In critiquing the military, Jones is not criticizing the order and structure that is the core of a military system; he is instead condemning the class divisions that such a structure invites. Jones portrays the Army in essentially Marxian terms, with a proletariat made up of regular soldiers and a bourgeois elite made up of officers. In such a Marxian model it is thus no surprise that the novel sides with the proletariat, but in this particular case the masculinity of this proletariat is especially emphasized.

The emphasis on a type of heroic working-class masculinity can be found in a few different forms. The most obvious of these is that the novel has two protagonists, Prewitt and

Warden, who are both, explicitly, non-officers, and that the crisis that both face revolves around a removal from their working-class positions within the Army. I will direct more attention to this crisis of class in a moment, but first I want to talk about the novel’s form and the relationship that this form has with the class conflict in the Army. In plainest terms, the novel’s form is that of realism, but as I discussed in the introduction, by itself the term realism is almost meaningless.

The specific realism that Jones employs is, for the most part, the kind of high realism used by

Flaubert and refined by James, but with a very naturalistic bent. This kind of naturalist realism which can be seen in Steinbeck is characterized by a third-person narrator that is not omniscient, if indeed such a thing is even possible, but which instead employs the technique that Genette calls focalization on a limited number of characters. By itself this kind of focalization is not particularly interesting—it is merely the idea of making the narrator transparent in the attempt to provide the impression of a character’s unmediated view of his or her situation—but what is interesting, especially in a novel that allows multiple characters to be the subjects of focalization, is to whom this focalization is given. Unlike a first-person novel, or a novel such as Babbitt where, generally, only one (albeit skewed) perspective is given, a novel with multiple

focalization treats perspective as a privilege. Some characters are allowed this privilege but others are not and in a novel that has an ideology in mind, and which is preoccupied with class, who does and who does not receive such a privilege can be quite telling. In a novel like The

Naked and the Dead, which portrays both officers and regular soldiers, this privilege is fairly evenly distributed, but in From Here to Eternity the privilege rests almost entirely on the side of the Army regulars. For the most part we are given the perspective of one of the two main characters, but in the instances where a different perspective is offered it is either that of another

Army regular (such as the mess cook Stark or the unfortunate suicide Bloom) or of an outsider to the Army (Warden’s paramour Karen Holmes). When the privilege of focalization is given to an officer, Captain Dana “Dynamite” Holmes in this case, it is used more in the sense of Babbitt, in that Holmes’ own thoughts are meant to betray him. I will speak more of focalization in later chapters, but I want to highlight its importance to this novel.

If “maleness” is a key theme of From Here to Eternity the purpose of the novel is to reveal this “maleness” in its ideal form. Because such a thing is an ideal it can never be fully realized—as Kazin explains, Prewitt and Warden “can never get their way. They can never see the world itself as anything but a limitation” (78)—but the novel is nevertheless a struggle to attain such an ideal. As such, in rather the form of an epic, the novel sets out a lofty goal and then places numerous trials for the characters to overcome in order to reach that goal. That they do not quite succeed is beside the point—if we are keeping with the epic theme, Prewitt plays Achilles to Warden’s Odysseus—the pursuit itself is what is of value. While this discussion of epics and ideals may seem abstract, the masculine ideal that Jones seems to be outlining is quite grounded in the practical and he has very specific ideas about class, labour and gender roles, all of which

are congruent with the historical period. What follows is a discussion of the different facets of the masculine ideal, according to Jones.

One of the key aspects to this masculine ideal is physicality. Every time Warden is described physically in the novel, there is some remark made on his form. Jones introduces

Warden’s physical features rather cagily, revealing a bit at a time, but each feature appeals to a specific type of manliness. We have Warden’s “light blue eyes wide under the bushy brows and black hair” (34, my emphasis), another mention of “his heavy brows” with the repeated emphasis on the heaviness and hairiness of his brows seemingly indicating robust masculinity and then, under the gaze of his future lover Karen Holmes, “black silky hairs on the thick wrists and muscled forearms. In the tight shirt the round bunches of muscle bulged at the tips of his shoulders, and they rippled tautly as he moved” (35). The description is befitting of a Harlequin romance and is, in this context, overtly sexualized, but the aim here is that Warden is distinctively manly—it should be noted that when Karen Holmes is the subject of focalization it is often to provide a deliberately sexualized image of Warden’s maleness. Jarvis argues that the normative American male body underwent a transformation for the war effort, and she contrasts how the body was depicted during the depression—a thin, weak struggling figure—to how it was redrawn for the war effort—the weak figure has been replaced by an exaggeratedly bulky soldier with rippling muscles. The comparison to Warden here is obvious, and also interesting is Jarvis’ observation of the sexual nature of these war images—in one of them she points out the phallic imagery of a bare-chested naval man loading a shell into a large gun (8-9)—in that when we are first invited to gaze upon Warden it as an object of sexual desire. As a soldier, Warden represents the ultimate fantasy image: he is virile, rugged, and heroic, the epitome of what Penner terms

“hard”v masculinity. But what is also interesting about him is that he is also a figure of

resistance. Rather than being a picture of the new American male, he is a throwback to an earlier model, the kind which Penner notes was celebrated by 1930s critics like Gold and Philip Rahv, and who is distinguishable for his hyper masculine characteristics.

What the novel’s two principal characters have in common, despite their difference in stature (as opposed to Warden’s exaggerated bigness, Prewitt is a small man) is their overt physicality. They are both men of action, capable athletes and reluctant to step away from physical confrontation. In both cases, the men are defined in the novel by their physical actions.

In Prewitt’s case this means physical feats that belie his small stature. He engages in an unofficial boxing bout with Bloom, the company’s much larger prizefighter, and the focus is on his defiance of his size. During the fight we are told of “his punch which had always been remarkable for so light a man,” (486) and his efforts are described as “intellectual” (487). Once sent to the stockade, Prewitt again proves himself through physical exploits, especially through his participation in “the game.” I will quote its initial description in its entirety because it reveals much on how physicality is valued in the novel.

They played a game in the Stockade. In the evening after chow the mattress from an

empty bunk would be hung on the chain mess grid across the center window in the back

wall with strings of knotted shoelaces. Then one man, usually the smallest unless there

was a volunteer, would stand with his back against the mattress and the rest would line up

at the far end of the aisle according to size with the smallest first and, one at a time, run at

the man against the mattress and hit him the belly with their shoulders like a fullback

throwing a checkblock at the end on an offtackle shoot, except that in this case with the

mattress behind him there was no place to fall back to and it was up to the belly muscles

to protect themselves. (626)

The game the men play is symbolic of the special order that is created in the Stockade’s number two ward. The special order is bizarre in that it is a strict and orderly structure operating amongst men who were sent to the stockade for their failure to adhere to the military’s strict and orderly structure. The difference, in the novel’s understanding, is that while the Army’s structures are designed to break men of their individuality and will to resist—Prew is confined to the stockade because he finally succumbs to “the treatment” where he is singled out for a number of cruel and usually mundane and physically punishing tasks because he refuses to go out for the squad’s boxing team—the structures within the number two ward are designed to foster that will to resist.

The ward’s leader, the mysterious Jack Malloy, preaches Ghandian passive resistance, and the game is a technique for teaching that resistance. Physical strength and size are key, but also crucial is the learning of resolve. The only way to “win” the game is to resist, to stand up to an ever-increasing onslaught of physical punishment and to do so passively, letting the punishment come and using one’s own resolve to resist it. The emphasis on the “belly” or stomach is also significant in that the game seems to be designed to teach men to “stomach” a punishing or repugnant system. The game suggests that the gut or stomach (rather than the head, or the heart) is the key to surviving in a system designed to tackle a man.

Prewitt is obviously heroic according to the novel’s conception of heroism, so it is no surprise that he is able to win the game, proving himself worthy of Malloy’s trust and as such making himself privy to the basis for Malloy’s system. What is interesting in Malloy’s case is the political background for his methods, a politics that would seem at odds with those of the war effort and, perhaps more importantly, counter to the middle-class resurgence that the Army represents for unemployed or under-employed men. Again, From Here to Eternity shows its roots in the labour movements and protest novels of the 1930s. Malloy is an interesting figure

because he is physically large, like Warden, but shuns violence where Warden revels in it. The novel is rather ambiguous as to whose philosophy it values more—its climactic moment is, after all, a battle scene in war—but Malloy is of definite value to Prewitt. What is interesting about

Malloy’s story is that it is one steeped in movements that are anathema to 1950s America. Not only does he take his method of passive resistance from Gandhi, but he fights against the organization of the Army due to a youth spent in the service of “The Wobblies,” the unofficial name for the Industrial Workers of the World union that achieved significant popularity before the first World War, but was also notably quite radical and anti-capitalist.vi As Malloy recounts to

Prewitt, “the Wobblies had taught him to read” (634) when he had met them while they were locked up in his father’s jail. His relationship with the Wobblies led him to further reading.

Malloy explains that “he studied, and came to love, the memory of Jack London and the old group of Socialists in Frisco, George Sterling, Upton Sinclair, and the rest” (637), and it is here that we see where Jones is looking more to naturalistic writers, rather than nineteenth-century realism. Rather than looking to James or Howells for a model, he looks to the socialist writers of the early twentieth century. While Malloy flirts with but later rejects “Sinclair’s leftover brand of

Socialism” (637) he identifies greatly with Sinclair’s ideals and cause. Most importantly, all of

Malloy’s influences are strictly working class ones.

With Malloy, and subsequently Prewitt, and the emphasis the novel places on robust physicality and rugged manliness, Jones aligns himself closely with the socialist realists of the early twentieth century. In looking at 1930s literary criticism, James Penner identifies a genre he calls “macho criticism.” Penner advances this argument by looking at the literary criticism of

Mike Gold, which, Penner argues, “rests on the premise that one’s social class is necessarily reflected in one’s masculine identity …. The idea of masculine toughness is personified in the

working-class male who performs hard labor and possesses robust vitality” (2). Critics like Gold favoured authors who wrote “proletarian realist” (Penner’s term for socialist realism) novels, and they also lashed out against what they perceived as softness. The parallels between Malloy and

Gold are quite striking. Penner notes that, for Gold “Whitman is considered to be the grandfather of proletarian literature” and that “the explicitly social dimension of Whitman’s literary works is conveyed through the absorption of working-class energy (‘instinct’) and manliness” (28). When

Malloy is telling his story to Prewitt, he mentions that “the first book he had bought for himself, with the first money from the first job, was Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass … and since that first copy he had worn out ten others” (635). He also notes that one of the Wobblies “gave him a copy of Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class” (635).

Veblen also has a close connection to Gold, as Penner explains: “Gold’s heavily gendered readings of literature are largely based on his misreading of Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the

Leisure Class” (29). The “misreading” to which Penner refers has to do with the conflating of leisure culture with the feminine, and subsequently with homosexuality. “The nonnormative male subject,” Penner argues, “becomes the personification of Veblen’s notion of ‘conspicuous inutility’ because he supposedly does not produce wealth or offspring, but lives only for idleness, pleasure, and beauty. Thus, the homosexual is a parvenu, an upper-class phenomenon and the degenerate product of a corrupt economic system” (30). While there is no mention of homosexuality in the stockade, it does play a significant role in From Here to Eternity. If Prewitt idolizes Malloy and the model of robust, heterosexual masculinity that he represents—as an aside in his history Malloy tells Prew that “he had loved every kind of woman from bony Jap geisha to featherbed German barmaid” (638)—he finds an equal amount of contempt for

Malloy’s opposite, the “queer” Hal.

The role of homosexuality in From Here to Eternity is surprisingly pronounced, and also surprisingly overlooked. Christina Jarvis mentions it briefly in her study, but her focus is more on the physiological and psychological. She argues that the “queer investigation” undertaken by the military police is an attempt to “safeguard its men and the national body politic from

‘perverse’ sexuality and sexual diseases by screening for homosexuality and venereal disease with many of its screening methods relying on physical bodily markers for classifying sexual identity and behavior” (73). Jarvis’s observation suggests a definite correspondence between the military theory and Gold’s theorizing as outlined by Penner. Unfortunately she goes no further with her analysis, because in Jones’s novel it is rarely the military’s point of view that is portrayed as the correct one. The actual investigation, though indicative of general military behaviour, is mostly a plot device; it is Prewitt’s observations and actions that are more telling.

For the most part, homosexuality occupies a strange liminal space in the novel. The frequenting of prostitutes is met with approbation—another indication of the novel’s belief in the robust virility of the working class soldier—but as the soldiers are generally without much money it is more or less accepted to “visit the queers,”—i.e. members of the local gay community. Presumably (the novel is never explicit about this) these visits to the “queers” often involve sexual acts, but this is looked at as acceptable because of the men’s aforementioned excess sexual energy that must be allowed to vent. The distinction is that the soldiers do not pay for these sexual aspects; rather the soldiers themselves are often paid, if only in the form of drinks at the bar. Thus, the novel establishes a line of demarcation between those who merely practice homosexual acts and those who are homosexuals. For example, Prewitt’s friend Maggio frequents the queers, but there’s never any question about his sexuality; whereas Private Bloom who behaves much like Maggio, becomes suicidal over the idea that he himself might be queer.

However, the novel saves its real condemnation for what it views as the dangerous kind of homosexual, and it is here that we can again make the connection to Penner’s study. For most of the novel, Prewitt acts as the moral compass. Warden may become the novel’s last hero standing by the end of the novel, but Prewitt’s values are pure and unflappable from the novel’s first page up to his martyr-like death. Prewitt’s take on “queers” is consequently final judgment as far as the novel is concerned. When he goes with Angelo to meet Hal, the two first have a discussion regarding “queers.” I will quote a portion of it here that is particularly indicative of how the novel balances the subject:

“I dont like them,” Prew said thoughtfully. “But I dont hate them. I just dont like to

be around them.” He paused. “Its just that they, well for some reason they make me feel

ashamed of something.” He paused again. “I dont know what of.”

“I know,” Angelo said. “Me too. I spent a lot of time trying to figure it. They all say

they were born like that. They say they been that way ever since they can remember.”

“I wouldnt know,” Prew said. (366-67)

What is important to take away from this exchange is that both Prew and Maggio recognize their own prejudice towards homosexuals, and realize that it is a prejudice without real foundation.

This is not important so much in that it suggests any kind of enlightened view on Jones’ behalf but more that it typifies how Prewitt responds to unfamiliar situations. The measured conversation the two have is contrasted to the driver of the cab they are taking. Interjecting himself into their conversation, the driver says, “You keep runnin around with them long enough and you’ll be queer too. Thats what they want. They like to take young guys like you and make them queer too. They get a charge out of that. I hate the bastards. I’d kill every one I seen” (367).

The debate becomes one of nature versus nurture, and the irrational fear displayed by the

driver—that a man can be made a “queer”—can be viewed as a proxy for the view of the military, which as Jarvis notes wishes to keep soldiers away from homosexuality in order to safeguard them from “perverse sexuality.” The cab driver is clearly blinded by his prejudice and hatred and it is understood that his position is not the novel’s position. All of this is important in setting up Prew’s final judgment of “queers”—we need to know that his judgment is motivated by the correct factors.

When Hal is subsequently introduced, it is noticeable that he fits into the parameters, as articulated by Veblen, as a member of the supposed leisure class. Though he works, it is as a

French teacher, and the connotation of anything French in an American setting often has a distinctive effeteness to it. He is described as “tall and very slender with a tiny grey moustache and close clipped grey hair and very bright eyes” (369) and he speaks “in a clipped voice that sounded foreign” (369). Through this description Hal is immediately dissociated from the military men who make out most of the novel’s cast. Though tall, he is “very slender” and displays a certain delicacy evident in the “tiny moustache” and “close clipped” hair. He comes across immediately as fastidious, but intelligent, yet also affected and foreign, somewhat unknowable. It is no surprise that Hal is othered by the novel—we are never allowed his perspective—but he is not dismissed either. He is, based on this brief description alone, the opposite of Warden: quiet where Warden is loud, slender rather than muscular, and reserved rather than boisterous. What is also clear is that Warden seems to represent the ideal of masculinity, so Hal, his opposite, must represent something else.

What Hal would seem to represent is the leisure class homosexual that Penner discusses.

He is somewhat like the character of Bromfieldvii Corey from Silas Lapham, but while Corey is viewed mostly as harmless—he is cynical and anachronistic, but he is also good-hearted and

really just wishes his son to be happy—Hal’s homosexuality seems to make his views more serious, more dangerous. The danger, however, comes not from any sexual act, but from what the whole culture attributed to homosexuality is made to represent: decadence. In looking at Hal,

Prew is reminded of the time when he “picked up an artistic broad down in Greenwich Village”

(374) who had taken him to the Metropolitan Museum. Hal’s face reminds Prew of a Greek statue he had seen at the museum: “no dent in the nose bridge and high cheekbones with softness under them, inbred looking, with over all the face that air of softness, of proud pain, and of conscious aimless beauty. In a word, he thought, decadent. Is America going to go decadent in the next election?” (374). Prew’s concern here is not surprising because the dangers of decadence have already been well established in the novel. Much earlier we learn that Prew used to date a society girl from whom he contracted a venereal disease. The implications behind this are fairly clear, and the clear distinction the novel makes between officers and soldiers—the officers attend catered functions and live in a rather decadent fashion, while the soldiers live in barracks and even when they have leave they must be back at six am the next morning for reveille—works along a similar theme. In establishing Prew as the heroic rebel, the novel must find oppositions against which he can rebel. The foremost of these opponents would appear to be the Army, but

Prew’s repeated affirmation that he loves the Army suggests that the true opponent is the leisurely decadence that the officers allow themselves. This decadence takes its most distinct face in Hal.

Hal becomes a suitable opponent for Prew because he is intellectually worthy, but there is never any real suggestion that Hal’s views should put Prewitt’s into contention. The novel suggests that associating with “queers” is not the same for Prew as it is for Maggio. While

Maggio has a “wonderful simplicity”—he is “as clear as glass” (374) according to Hal—Prew is

decidedly opaque. It is perhaps for this reason that the narration never takes on Maggio’s perspective—his thoughts are supposedly too transparent to need voicing, but this simplicity also makes him incorruptible. The sense is, that for Prew to be with a “queer” he would have to accept it in an intellectual capacity, and homosexuality’s association here with decadence means this is of grave consequence. Thus, when Prew, engages in a lengthy discussion about homosexuality with Hal that discussion becomes one of philosophy that looks to define America, and consequently masculinity. Once they are back at Hal’s place, it is Hal who actually voices the concerns associated with the homosexual “lifestyle.” He explains, “‘I believe though, truly, that all homosexuality is the result of frustration and disappointment in life. The more topheavy and abortively respectable a society becomes, the more homosexuals it produces. Decadence, they call it” (378). He adds to his argument, saying that “homosexuality breeds freedom, and it is freedom that makes art. But, alas, with the coming of freedom the topheavy society always collapses. Falls into dust. Is gone. Destroyed. Utterly” (378). While Hal says this flippantly the novel sees it as a real concern, and uses the encounter to take a moral stand. Seizing on Hal’s suggestion that homosexuality is acquired, rather than innate, Prew admonishes him for his supposed glorification of sin:

“If you guys like being queer, why dont you be queer with each other? Instead of all the

time trying to cut each other’s throat? If you believed the crap about true love you been

putting out, why do you get your feelings hurt so easy? Somebody’s always hurtin your

feelings. Why do you always pick up somebody who aint queer? Because if you’re with

another queer, you dont feel evil enough, thats why.” (387)

Prew’s rhetoric here is in line with the argument that homosexuality is predatory, but his concern is not with the prey, but the predator. He had explained to Maggio earlier that “queers” make him

uncomfortable, and he has now understood why. It is not, as one might have thought, because of his own latent homosexuality, but it is apparently due to the self-loathing they possess, a self- loathing that disguises itself as bravado and arrogance. Looking forward to The Naked and the

Dead, a similar case can be found in General Cummings, whose latent homosexuality Mailer makes apparent. In pointing out this self-loathing and denial behind the philosophy of decadence,

Prew is able to effectively refute it. His point of view is further reinforced by the text’s own moral code, which says that a man is only worth anything if he has the courage of his convictions. Thus, when a drunken and half-naked Maggio stumbles out of the apartment and into the streets, Hal reveals himself to be cowardly, unwilling to risk his own way of life to save

Maggio from being picked up by the military police. He tells Prew, “‘I’d go get him. Truly I would. You dont know what the little fellow means to me. But if I was picked up, I’d be ruined

… I’d be thrown out of my tutoring, thrown out of here.’ He waved his arms around the room.

‘Thrown out of my home’”(389). By asserting that he values his comfort and possessions above all else, Hal, in the novel’s logic, undermines his own argument. When real sacrifice is needed, it is only the staunchly working-class Prew who is willing to make one.

Yet, despite taking this stand against the decadence of homosexuality, Prew must withstand one more trial, and once again it is a sort of decadence against which he must fight.

This time, however, the decadence comes from his being forced into a domestic situation.

Intriguingly, the logic here is much along the lines that Elaine Tyler May explores in Homeward

Bound. May discusses the idea of domestic containment, and how wartime aggression could be contained by the domestic environment. For the novel’s understanding this kind of containment must be resisted. As with Warden, with whom this section will finish, domesticity in From Here to Eternity is what keeps the robust male from his avowed purpose. In the case of Prew, that

purpose is to fight with the Army, but his own sense of honour prevents that from happening.

Briefly, an incident of particular cruelty in the stockade that leaves one of the inmates dead has

Prew vowing revenge on the meanest and most belligerent of the jailers. Prew vows to kill the man, a sergeant, once Prew’s own stay in the stockade is finished, and makes good on his plan, besting the sergeant in a knife fight, but is undone when he himself is stabbed and is consequently unable to return to the barracks. His only recourse is to go to his girlfriend Alma’s luxurious apartment and allow himself to heal there. During his convalescence, Prew finds himself living life as a kept man. Alma and her roommate, Georgette, go off to work and Prew enjoys his existence as a man of leisure. In an average day “he would play through all the records, and run through all the books, and go around feeling the furnishings, and feel the tile floor and the Jap mats on the porch with his bare feet” (686). The emphasis on the sensory and the tactile is telling in that it evokes a sense of decadence. In the absence of manly pursuits, Prew becomes focused on his own pleasure and enjoyment. He takes to drinking scotch-and-soda that he is “finally beginning to like the taste of” (686). He has “all the time in the world” and, he believes “it was, all of it, as near to being a full-fledged 24-carat civilian as any thirty-year-man ever could get” (686). It is rather strange that Prew equates his life of leisure with civilian existence, but when his view of civilian life is taken into account, it makes sense. Prew is espousing something akin to the frontier rhetoric that assumes civilization to have a feminizing effect on menviii. His domestic situation, though necessary for his health, is highly detrimental to his effectiveness as a man.

The remainder of the days that Prew spends with Alma becomes a record of his descent into decadence. He goes on a “reading jag” (715) where he reads every book in the house, then starts asking Alma to bring more in for him, his days as a man of letters accompanied by an

increasing alcoholism. He becomes irritable and indolent, and his relationship with Alma, once passionate and inspiring, deteriorates to one of minimal conversation and petty squabbles. In denying himself his Army existence, Prew is denying himself his own masculine identity. When the climactic attack on Pearl Harbor finally comes, after a chapter on Warden’s heroism, we are informed that “Prewitt slept through the entire attack” (756). His despondency at not being able to participate in the war results in a protracted drinking binge, where he catatonically downs glass after glass of scotch while listening to the radio. He becomes an “obdurate presence sitting silently on the divan … not drunk and not sober, not happy and not unhappy, not conscious and not unconscious” (765) and continues in this catatonic state for eight days. He comes to the realization, it seems, that that which makes him a man has been irrevocably lost to him. The novel agrees with him in this sentiment, as it is only through his martyr-like death in an attempt to get back to his platoon that his masculine identity can be redeemed. He explains his rationale to Alma thusly:

“What do I want to go back for?” Prewitt said wonderingly. “I’m a soldier.”

“A soldier,” Alma said inarticulately. “A soldier!” Through the fast-drying tears on

her face she began to laugh at him wildly. “A soldier,” she said helplessly. “A Regular.

From the Regular Army. A thirty-year man.”

“Sure,” he said, grinning uncertainly like a man who does not get the joke, “a thirty-

year-man. Then he grinned genuinely. “With only twenty-four years to go.” (773)

Prew’s explanation, which is incomprehensible to Alma, makes perfect sense within the logic of the novel’s view of masculinity. What Alma looks upon with contempt—“A Regular. From the

Regular Army”—is in fact the heart of Prewitt’s working-class identity. In its very regularity, and in the suffering and humility that this existence entails, is where the value lies for Prewitt. This

kind of existence allows no room for luxury and decadence, but that is exactly the point. Their commitment to the Army ensures that they can never get too comfortable, but it also ensures that they cannot become, as in Prewitt’s case, beholden to any woman. Alma and Prewitt could be read as star-crossed lovers, doomed from the very beginning, but the reality of Prewitt’s masculine identity means that any co-dependent relationship he enters is bound to fail. The Army does not represent such a relationship because, while he needs the Army, it does not need him.

He is eminently replaceable and all that is demanded of him is obedience. Ultimately, the novel says, the path to a stable domestic situation is the path to decadence. And lest we be led to believe that the only issue here is Prewitt’s emasculation—he is essentially confined to the house while his girlfriend, a prostitute, is the breadwinner—the case of Warden serves to explain that any kind of domesticity is a trap.

Prewitt’s case is the most dramatic example of this attitude towards domesticity, but the same principles are at work in Warden’s narrative. His relationship with Karen Holmes is equally as taboo as Prew’s with Alma—a married woman taking the place of a prostitute—but his situation is in some sense graver than Prewitt’s, because of the real possibility of it turning into domestic stability. His love for Karen Holmes makes him contemplate a domestic situation, but his explaining of the perils that surround it are what I want to focus on. I quote the following rather lengthy passage because I feel it illustrates the novel’s philosophy quite nicely:

“All my life, from the time my goddam brother became a priest, I’ve fought their

beef-eating middleclass assurance. I fought everything it stood for. I’ve made myself

stand for everything they were against.

“Who do you think put Hitler up? The workers? No, it was the same middleclass.

Who do you think gave the Communists Russia? The peasants. No, the Commisars. That

same goddam middleclass. In every country everywhere that same middleclass holds

every rein. Call it Fascism or call it Individual Initiative or call it Communism, and you

still dont change it any. Each country calls it by a different name so they can fight all the

other countries that look liable to get too powerful. I’ve stood against all of that, I’ve

stood up for me Milt Warden as a man, and I’ve made a place for myself in it, by myself,

where I can be myself, without brownnosing any man, and I’ve made them like it.

“And now I’m supposed to go on and become an Officer, the symbol of every

goddam thing I’ve always stood up against, and not feel anything about it. I’m supposed

to do that for you. (616)

The novel’s antagonistic relationship to the middle class comes fully to bear in Warden’s tirade, but there are two statements that I want to focus on specifically. The first, “I’ve stood up for me

Milt Warden as a man” speaks to the conception of masculinity that the novel holds, and the second, “I’m supposed to do that for you,” speaks to the dangers of domesticity that the novel warns against.

The first statement is strangely contradictory for a novel that focuses on an organized structure like the Army. It suggests that Warden views himself as something of a rugged individual in the tradition of the frontier and characters from a James Fenimore Cooper novel, and it would seem that a place like the Army, with its bureaucracy, rigid hierarchy and exaggerated formality would be the last place for such a rugged individual to exist comfortably.

The Army is very much a place for the “team player” that Anthony Rotundo identifies in

American Manhood as the characteristic masculine type of the middle decades of the twentieth century, and Warden does not appear to be such a figure. Yet, the conception of the Army that

From Here to Eternity has is somewhat different. It does not work as a well-organized machine

with the officers acting as the operators of that machinery. Rather it operates as a very elaborate game that the officers control and in which the regular Army men participate without much awareness of the rules. This is evidenced by the value the officers place in the actual games

(sports) over which they are responsible. Captain Holmes, whom Warden both works under and is cuckolding, is much more concerned with his unit’s success in boxing and baseball than he is with any practical Army concerns. Prew’s subjection to “the treatment” is also a result of this focus on sports. It is fairly obvious that the novel sees this focus as misplaced, and, as the heroes of the novel are so clearly drawn as such, we are meant to view Warden’s philosophy as the correct one.

From Here to Eternity, despite its setting at the start of a war that at least one of its combatants does not survive, and as Pizer explains, as most naturalistic novels are, is a novel of ideals, but of ideals that are somewhat incongruent with the America of the Depression and postwar America. The robust masculinity of the two main characters could be seen as a way to combat the passiveness that James Rorty asserted was the foundational condition of American masculinity during the Depression. Rorty argued that men of the Depression “did not even know the name of the disease from which they were suffering; did not know its causes let alone its treatment and cure. The word ‘despair’ did not describe their condition. Despair implies consciousness and they were too far gone for that” (qtd. in Pells 199). There is much of that unconsciousness in the pre-war Army, and so it is their very consciousness that makes Prewitt and Warden heroic, but to remain conscious they have to remain committed to their ideals. For the novel, these ideals are separate from middle-class comfort and domestic contentment. For a man to remain conscious he must rid himself of comfort and stability: two of the qualities that

1950s America is most known for.

I explained above that From Here to Eternity feels anachronistic when compared to the other novels in this study. What I mean by this is that it has an ideology that shares little with the dominant ideology of the 1950s, one defined by suburban domesticity and stable employment as much as it was defined by McCarthyism and the military industrial complex. It is an ideology defined by socialism and union ideals, but also by the power of the rugged individual. Nowhere is this more in evidence than in the novel’s climactic scene, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

In a scene that in many ways mirrors the mutiny scene within The Caine Mutinyix, Warden must disobey orders in order to save the base and his fellow men. As the attack was unexpected, the regulars on the base have no access to live ammunition. The ammunition is locked in a storage locker and the only keys are held by a soldier who refuses to disobey the orders of his superiors.

Warden responds to the situation accordingly:

“That’s my orders, Sergeant,” Malleaux said irrefragably.

From the southeast corner of the quad a plane came over firing, the tracers leading

irrevocably in under the porch and up the wall as he flashed over, and the knot of men

dived for the stairway.

“Fuck your orders!” Warden bawled. “Gimme them goddam keys!”

Malleaux put his hand in his pocket protectively. “I cant do that Sergeant. I got my

orders, from Lt Ross himself.”

“Okay” Warden said happily. “Chief, bust the door down.” To Malleaux he said, “Get

the hell out of the way.” (742)

What follows is a madcap battle scene, with Warden and the other Army regulars clambering up to the roof to fend off the Japanese planes with light machine guns. There is no hope to actually shoot the planes down, but the base itself can be saved. But what is indicative of the novel’s

ideology is the way the scene unfolds. The protocol of the Army which has the ammunition locked up would have resulted in the base’s demise, if not for Warden’s disobedience and disregard for the offices of the Army. What is also notable is Warden’s elation, both in the way he disobeys orders above, and within the actual battle. He becomes hyper-masculinity personified in the battle scene, shooting at planes with an inferior weapon while drinking whiskey:

Warden lowered his BAR,1 his belly and throat tightening with a desire to let loose a high

hoarse senseless yell of pure glee. This is my outfit. These are my boys. He got his bottle

from between his knees and took a drink that was not a drink but an expression of feeling.

The whiskey burned his throat savagely joyously. (745, emphasis in text)

The novel’s understanding of war here is that only war, and only the spontaneous onset of war that the attack on Pearl Harbor represents, allows men to truly be themselves. Warden’s sense of glee here is not only from the thrill of battle, but also from his sense of camaraderie, of brotherhood, with his fellow soldiers. This is not war as fought in backrooms by plotting generals with graduate degrees, but war as a spontaneous outpouring of masculine essence in its basest, most savage form. Of all the texts in this study, From Here to Eternity is the only one that allows for this kind of unchecked masculinity to exist for any length of time.

Yet, the novel’s resolution does not suggest that this unchecked masculinity will win the day. It does suggest that war can be a solution for the unmanning that the Depression represented, but it does not suggest that this kind of war in its purest form is sustainable. As I have noted above, From Here to Eternity can be viewed as a naturalistic novel, and as such is one that views man as being beholden to his environment. Despite his triumph in the Pearl

1 Browning Automatic Rifle

Harbor attack, Warden is still faced with the choice of becoming an officer and, in a sense, becoming middle-class and domestic, or going back to his existence as a high-ranking regular.

And while he chooses the latter path, it feels like his “escape” is only temporary given the other signs the novel provides. The decadent existence that Warden equates with fascism surrounds the novel, from its depiction of queer culture to the soirées and petty sports competitions that preoccupy the officer class. This, the world of decadence that is less about solidarity and individual resolution than it is about working within a system and seeking comfort, is the world that awaits once the war is over. Prewitt is unable to escape this world and Warden, even as he ends the novel visiting a brothel, can seem to only stave it off temporarily. Seemingly he will either perish or eventually allow middle-class existence to subsume him. The female characters fare no better. Both Alma and Karen Holmes are forced to leave Hawaii altogether, with Alma losing the independence that her profession ironically had bought her and Karen losing in her quest to domesticate the undomesticatable Warden.

What From Here to Eternity leaves us with, then, is first a snapshot of a previous era, but also the suggestion that this previous era is not recoverable. In that sense, the post-realist mode of the 1950s which does not appear to be present in the novel’s action—the characters all cling to a past ideal rather than believing in a present one—manifests itself in the novel’s conclusion. The middle class is seen as inescapable, and the Army and the war present no more than a temporary reprieve from it. It is perhaps a peculiarity of Jones’ political ideology that all of this is viewed so negatively, but it is also quite remarkable that even in a novel that presents a world that is very much alien from the typical 1950s suburban domestic model—a world filled with loud and drunken men, with unchecked violence and debauchery, a world bifurcated between supreme order and supreme chaos—the overwhelming sense is that the action of the novel is something of

an elegy for this lost world. The novel begins before the war had even started, but it is already prepared for what will come after the war ends.

i Cf. Schaub, “The Politics of Realism: Novelistic Discourse in the Postwar Period” (25-49). ii Cf. Barth’s “The Literature of Exhaustion” for more on cultural deaths. iii No doubt Prewitt’s (almost never used) first name is a hint that his fate is sealed, but I am hesitant to read too much into the name as he is almost always referred to as “Prew” or Prewitt throughout the novel. iv Cf. especially Part III “The New Man in a New Century” (127-72), which focuses on the 1920s-50s and the increased attention to gender roles and masculine and feminine traits. v Penner describes hard masculinity as “celebrat[ing] traditional masculine concerns and phallic potency” (2). Both of these traits are abundant in Warden. vi Cf. Eric Chester’s Wobblies in Their Heyday: The Rise and Destruction of the Industrial Workers of the World

During the World War I Era (2014). vii Corey represents the typical leisure class figure in Lapham. His money is all inherited, he shuns work of any kind, spends all his time reading, and wears a monocle. viii Cf. Nina Baym’s “Melodramas of Beset Manhood” and its argument on the prevalence of this narrative in

American romances. The Army is Prewitt’s frontier in that it resists the feminizing effects of civilization. ix But with dramatically different conclusions. Cf. Chapter 4.

Chapter 2

Realism, Modernism, and the Army’s Denial of Pluralism in The Naked and the Dead

In transitioning to The Naked and the Dead it should be noted that the two novels (Naked and Dead and From Here to Eternity), while both about the Second World War and both set in the South Pacific, actually have very little in common. There is in Mailer a similar sense of class conflict to the one that plays out in Jones, but with Mailer the lines are blurrier and the ideals buried. What the novels seem to have most in common, beyond the obvious, are their critical reputations. They are the most highly regarded of the early war novels. In the case of Jones that is probably because of the very detailed and involved world that Jones builds. In Mailer’s case it is more likely for the work’s literary qualities, qualities that are impossible to separate from the narrative content of the novel. Another key difference is that in Jones much is invested in finding a kind of masculine ideal, whereas in Mailer no such ideal seems to exist, nor does it seem to be of any great concern.i As such, the discussion of Mailer’s novel will focus much more on literary issues and will require revisiting some of the earlier discussion surrounding modernism.

What is always problematic about classifying forms and genres in fiction is that there is always a grey area. Thus, while a novel like From Here to Eternity is obviously realist in terms of form and content, a novel such as A Farewell to Arms can be called both realist and modernist depending on whom one asks. Of all the early novels to come out of World War II, the one that is most distinguishably experimental—and therefore at least potentially subject to the term

“modernist”—is John Horne Burns’ The Gallery. Burns’ novel is shorter in length and is made up of a series of vignettes of different individuals participating (in some way) in the war on the

Italian front (the gallery in question is the Galleria Umberto in Naples). Some of the perspectives are told in third person, some in the first, and the fragmentary nature of the narratives is certainly

evocative of modernism. The novel stands out amongst the other war novels because it is so unlike them. Its relative uniqueness may also be a reason that it has not been studied more frequently—though Burns’ death in 1953 may also have contributed to the lack of critical attention.ii The Gallery reads like a conscious effort at an artistic statement and as such feels less like, in this context, a war novel. The passages feature soldiers removed from battle (much like

Hemingway) and for the most part outside of the war itself. The war is, of course, always present, but the novel’s goal seems to be to represent how people attempt to function in spite of it.

I mention The Gallery for what makes it anomalous among the other war novels and for the purposes of a comparison to Mailer’s more elaborate and drawn out work. If The Gallery is decidedly modernist in its aesthetic and narrative form, and From Here to Eternity is realist in both of these respects, The Naked and the Dead bridges the gap between the two, but it does so in a very particular way, one that, rather strangely, has not received much commentary. Mailer’s novel is essentially made up of two narrative streams. The main stream, what we might call the plot, takes place on the island of Anopopei in the South Pacific and moves forward in a relatively linear fashion, following the actions of a particular Army platoon as they carry out an assault on the island. In terms of point of view the main stream is quite complicated as we are given the perspective of at least a dozen characters, most of them Army regulars within a small company that is involved in the bulk of the novel’s battle scenes, but also the platoon commander, General

Cummings, and his one-time protégé the Harvard-educated liberal Lieutenant Hearn. In the first half of the novel the main stream is split into two narratives: the relationship between Hearn and the General, and the day-to-day life of the small company. The narratives merge, like two branches of a larger river, when Hearn is sent to command the small platoon. I am not as

concerned with the main narrative here, but what I do want to note is that, even when the two parts of the stream are separate, they are still moving forward in a more-or-less linear fashion and that, temporally-speaking, they exist synchronically. The second stream, which would more aptly be called a collection of tributaries, is largely unconnected to the first and exists outside the time frame of the first stream. These tributaries are a collection of vignettes, much like in The

Gallery, only the actors in the vignettes are the characters that we meet in the main stream.

Mailer calls these passages “The Time Machine” and only one character is featured in each Time

Machine passage (hence the tributary metaphor). As the title would suggest, The Time Machine passages go back into the past of the individual characters, looking at their lives, usually from a very young age, up until the time that they entered the war. I want to take some time now to look more closely at these passages, especially their connection to modernism, but also at what their removal from the main stream tells us.

One of the things that the Time Machine passages do explicitly is set up a class dynamic within the novel. The Second World War is commonly credited with taking America out of the

Depression, as it revitalized a stagnant economy. It also provided employment for those who had been without, as we have seen in From Here to Eternity. Many of the soldiers who made up the infantry had either been unemployed or marginally employed before the war started. They also were more likely to have had a low level of education, given the necessity of going out to find work at an early age in order to help provide for the family. Therefore, the class divisions that existed before these men entered the Army are reinforced by the explicit class divisions that exist within the structure of the military. The Naked and the Dead works with these existing class divisions by noting the privileged upbringings of Cummings and Hearn and contrasting them with the various hard luck stories of the enlisted men. In their respective Time Machine passages

both Hearn and Cummings are portrayed as growing up in large houses, attending social functions and interacting with wealth and privilege. Contrasted to this are men like Red Valsen, who grows up working in the mines in Montana and then spends the better part of a decade riding the rails in between various menial labour jobs; Wilson, the illiterate southerner who spends his life in pursuit of a “good time,” which consists of drinking and sleeping with different women; and Gallagher, an Irish-American from Boston who again has little education and ends up becoming involved in a reactionary political movement.

As noted above the Time Machine serves to break the frame of the novel’s realist structure, where everything unfolds chronologically. There are not so much multiple plot lines as multiple perspectives, but they all exist concurrently. The Time Machine narratives are thus disruptive, in that they feel deliberately out of place and “unreal” within the context of this realist novel, but at the same time their very artificiality allows for a detailed study of a number of the characters’ pre-Army lives that a simple flashback could never do smoothly. They also act, as I mention, to reinforce the class divisions with which the novel seems to be preoccupied. I want to look briefly at these narrative breaks from a stylistic view before returning to a discussion of class, specifically looking at the modernist tendencies of these passages.

I say modernist because of the distinctly different narrative frameworks that the novel employs depending on which character is being portrayed. In the main plot line, the narrative voice is fairly consistent, changing slightly in diction depending on which character is the subject of focalization, but generally maintaining a constant voice. That voice, slightly formal, but what might best be described as neutral, is completely different from the voices on display in the Time

Machine sections. I will include two brief examples. The first is from the section on Lieutenant

Croft, a Texan, and the platoon’s leader. It begins with the following:

No, but why is Croft that way?

Oh, there are answers. He is that way because of the corruption of-the-society. He

is that way because the devil has claimed him for one of his own. It is because he is a

Texan; it is because he has denounced God.

He is that way because the only woman he ever loved cheated on him, or he was

born that way, or he was having problems of adjustment. (156, emphasis in text)

We can contrast this with the opening of the section on General Cummings:

The town had existed for a long time in this part of the Mid-west, more than seventy

years by 1910, but it has not been a city very long. “Why, not so long ago, they will say,

“I can remember when this here town was nothin’ much more than a post office and the

school house, the Old Presbyterian church and the Main Hotel. Old Ike Cummings had

the general store then, and for a while we had a feller barbered hair, but he didn’t last

long, move on some’er else. And then,” with a slow evaluating wink, “they was a town

whoor who used to do business in the county.” (403)

The contrast between these two sections is rather stark. The first, with its cryptic question as to the nature of Croft, and its clipped, contradictory responses, is very different from the rest of the novel, which features, as I note above, detailed descriptions that are very much in the narrative present. The initial paragraphs of the Croft section are distinctly outside of the narrative. They operate on a premise that is possibly unknowable—what is this “way” that Croft supposedly is?

—and a series of answers that range from the vague to the acute, but which again exist outside of time in terms of the novel. Exactly when any of these things has occurred is unknown to us, which is again in stark contrast to the rest of the novel, in the thick of the action where the

“when” is always “now.” The opening to the section is particularly strange in that it begins by

suggesting that this figure, Croft, is likely unknowable, even if the section’s supposed goal is to shed more light on, to provide a background for, these characters who exist only in the murky

“now” of the present action. Whether these few paragraphs are modernistic in style, by whatever criteria one chooses to use, is certainly contestable, but what I would argue is that it certainly drifts away from the realm of standard realism. However nebulous a category it is, realism is normally associated with a certain level of narrative clarity; it suggests, one could say, that the reader is not to be tricked or played for a fool, and what mysteries it might suggest will be resolved in good time. The narrative voice here is also tricky. While realism is not traditionally associated with narrative point-of-view—i.e. there are many novels that are purportedly realist novels that are told from a first-person perspective—narrative subjectivity is not usually in question. In the case of third-person narration, the perspective is almost always that of a particular character, and when there is no internal perspective the narration tends to act as a camera in a film, suggesting details and outward reaction without the suggestion of any personal, or singular, point-of-view. The voice here is different. It is obviously not Croft, but it does not seem neutral, either. It is not entirely clear as to whether the narrator should be trusted, again a characteristic more commonly associated with modernism than with realism. Clearly Mailer is doing something else here.

When we move to the Cummings section, we see something entirely different. There are no existential questions with enigmatic responses, but instead what reads like the opening to an historical novel. That the section belongs to Cummings is only hinted at by the mention of a possible relative. The description associates the nameless town with the once-frontier, but suggests that those days are long passed. Its narration and language bear resemblance to the Go

Down, Moses collection of stories by William Faulkner, with the naming of Cummings’s

grandfather (as we later learn) as “Ike” being perhaps a wink to Faulkner’s Ike McCaslin. The style is also meandering and unhurried, in the place of the glib and cryptic responses in the Croft section. The implication here seems to be that Croft and Cummings require two different kinds of narration to tell their story. It also tells us that place is of primacy when looking to understand

Cummings, but that with Croft it is but one of many factors—“it is because he is a Texan”—that

Croft’s identity comes primarily from internal factors. In terms of tone, there is a warmth in this initial paragraph from the Cummings section, found in the languidness of the description and the local dialect and sly winks, that is absent from the Croft section and equally missing from the principal narrative. Of course Mailer as an author has certain stylistic tendencies, so there is certainly some consistency in each section; nevertheless it is clear that the sections are meant to read differently, one from the next, with these being but two examples. I am not concerned so much with why Mailer chose to do this as what this means in terms of representation for the novel’s characters.

Returning, in a roundabout way, to how class is portrayed in the novel, we can learn several things from the Time Machine sections. One of the principal arguments in Walter Benn

Michael’s Our America is that American modernism was deeply invested in identity, specifically in determining just what exactly would constitute American identity and what, conversely, did not. Describing something he calls “nativist modernism” (2) Michaels argues that xenophobic definitions of American identity were prevalent in modernist texts. The idea is that “what people and things do or mean is a function of what they are” and that “identity [is] the determining ground of action or significance” (1). We can see this at work in the Time Machine segments.

Characters behave the way they do because of a deep-rooted identity. Class divisions are clear and emphasized throughout each individual section. Despite their differences in narrative tone

and voice, each section (there are ten in all) starts in one of the two ways quoted above. They either start, in the case of Croft, with a focus on the character himself, or they focus, as in the case of Cummings, on the city or town of the character’s birth. Most of them start with a description of the place, and how this is done is telling. Both Cummings and Hearn come from privileged backgrounds, and this is felt in the descriptions. For Cummings we get a sense of his deep roots in a Midwestern town, and with Hearn, who comes from Chicago, the focus is on the city’s importance. The section begins with a series of contrasting paragraphs, first a single sentence that focuses on this importance, and then a larger descriptive paragraph. The effect is at once expansive and claustrophobic. The sentences are as follows: “In the center is the city, lashing at one’s senses”; “The nexus”; “The immense ego of city people”; “And in the humus around the mushroom stem grow the suburbs” (328). Hearn himself is often described as being massive, and everything in this initial description seems to build on that. Hearn’s class position makes him automatically a person of importance, something formidable, and his section begins that way.

Looking at the section for Red, one of the infantrymen, the difference in description is clear. In place of the immensity of Chicago, the novel gives us the claustrophobia of a Montana mining town. The section begins: “the horizon is always close. It never lifts beyond the hills that surround the town, never goes past the old wood of the miners’ houses or rises above the tops of the mine shafts” (222). While in Hearn’s section the sensation that the city is the centre of everything, that it is open to all possibilities, the intro to Red’s is just the opposite. In the small mining town there are no opportunities beyond the mine. The end of the first paragraph emphasizes this feeling of being trapped, stating bluntly that “all the horizons end at the mine elevator” (222). It is not surprising, then, that Red’s section focuses on his escape from this life,

riding the rails, sleeping in parks, running from anything that looks to be a definite end, while

Hearn’s section finds him railing against the opportunity presented to him, wanting to make something for himself rather than take what is handed to him. Yet the result in each case is exactly what would be expected: Hearn attends Harvard and enters the Army as an officer, as a member of the elite, while Red moves from dead-end job to dead-end job and comes to the Army as a sort of last resort. In each case the men’s actions seem to be defined by their class origins and their environment. It is a very deterministic conception of identity.

The implications of the Time Machine sections to the larger novel are many. The conscious break in the narrative style is disruptive, injecting modernist stylings into the cold realism of the main plot line. Added to the changes in narrative tone are strange changes in perspective. In the Croft section, an interview is apparently conducted with Croft’s father, who speaks of his son as if for a documentary and is more than a disembodied voice but apparently a live figure who makes gestures and spits emphatically. Yet the senior Croft is something of a phantom as he speaks seemingly out of a vacuum to an absent interviewer. The sections feature other strange narrative tics: the featured character serves as the “normal” narrative focus in that we are privy to that character’s thoughts and views on the scene being presented, but there are also a number of parenthetical statements that serve to either contradict the given perspective or, perhaps are meant to represent the character’s id, lashing out with unfiltered emotional responses. In Croft’s section, his unstable psyche is represented by a seething rage towards the officers’ wives he beds, as they remind him of his unfaithful ex-wife. The section ends with two comparative narrative statements: “His ancestors pushed and labored and strained, drove their oxen, sweated their women, and moved a thousand miles” and “He pushed and labored inside himself and smoldered with an endless hatred” (164). It then finishes with a series of

parenthetical statements and the reader is left to wonder if these are Croft’s conscious thoughts or indeed manifestations of this smouldering hatred:

(You’re all a bunch of fuggin whores)

(You’re all a bunch of dogs)

(You’re all deer to track)

I HATE EVERYTHING WHICH IS NOT IN MYSELF. (164)

The narrative technique employed here allows Mailer to portray Croft differently than the style of the main plot line would allow. The Time machine sections are composed of fragments, a series of incidents, sometimes unrelated, that are described in minute detail and are quickly abandoned. In Croft’s case the idea is to attempt to answer the initial question asked at the beginning of the section, but the answer still seems to be that Croft, just like all the other characters, cannot escape his own essence, which seems to be something that has been passed down to him, either as a genetic trait or as a product of his environment, or (most likely), both.

Again, the Time Machine sections are stylistically modernist, but thematically naturalist.

In her chapter on The Naked and the Dead Erin Mercer speaks of the characters as being a strange collection of automatons that often act more like machines than thinking, feeling human beings. Mercer points out how the Army and the war are constantly described as being unreal, and how the actions of the men seem predicated on an understanding that their actions are not fully their own, there is again the deterministic angle. While I think at times Mercer makes too much of this argument,iii her observations of the soldier’s automaton-like behaviour sheds further light on the distinction between the Time Machine segments and that of the main narrative. There is a suggestion that the plurality of character-types seen in the Time Machine sections does not exist within the structure of the Army. Thus, modernism, which Michaels

closely associated with pluralism—he explains, “in pluralism, what we do can be justified only by reference to who we are; it is only once we know who we are that we will be able to tell what we should do” (15)—is the mode of choice for the sections that are very much concerned with the question of “who we are.” In the rest of the narrative, where these questions of identity seem not to matter, the more monochromatic mode of realism is used.

I do not wish to make such a sweeping generalization as to say that the bulk of the novel contains not characters but ciphers, and it is only in the modernistic fragments of the time machine segments where true character is developed. First of all, not every character who features prominently in the main narrative is given a Time Machine segment, and for a few of these, notably Minetta and Roth, much space is devoted to developing their characters. Secondly, it would be completely false to say that their individual personalities are not on display within the main narrative. Hearn and Cummings play a tense game of psychological chess and the motivations for both are suitably complex. Similarly, Wilson’s gregariousness would be evident without any allusion to his past, and Red’s mistrust of authority apparent without further contextualization. There is, however, the suggestion that these individual characteristics are somewhat neutralized in the melting pot of the Army. In their pre-Army lives the soldiers are allowed their individual stories, and these stories are allowed a certain degree of stylistic freedom in the their telling. Similarly, class determinism is everything in the time machine segments. Gallagher’s anger comes from his lack of education, his lack of opportunity in poor urban Boston; Goldstein’s continued deference to anyone claiming authority comes from a life governed by necessity: the necessity of working to support his family, first as a son, then later as a father, where his own ambitions are always secondary. On the opposite end of the class spectrum, Cummings and Hearn are formed by the fact that a choice is possible—the fact that

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their life has afforded them the opportunity to choose makes paramount the necessity of making the right choice. For each of the men, these external factors that contribute to their upbringing have substantial say in the person they become (with the possible exception of Croft, and it is for this reason that Croft’s section is the most stylistically distinct). Yet, once they enter the Army all these external factors have much less sway. Gallagher may have grown up in an environment where hatred towards Jews was not only accepted but encouraged, and he may still freely spout invectives against them while in the Army, but he still must work alongside Jews, would have to take orders from one if a Jew were his superior officer. The men may all fear and hate Croft, and someone such as Red can know with certainty that in his non-Army existence he would have fought Croft, whatever the consequence, but he and they still obey Croft out of a greater fear of what disobeying an order would mean. They are still the individuals as described in their Time

Machine segments, but something about the Army dulls that individuality.

In terms of masculinity, war, along with the military structure that arises as a result of it, makes a series of fairly rigid demands. Not to belabour a point, but once again The Naked and the Dead provides a contrast between the kind of masculinity allowed within and without a military structure. The Time Machine segments posit that a man is somewhat defined by his social class, environment, and even ethnicity, but beyond that he is defined by a select number of other factors. Among these are his ambitions, his choice (or at the very least direction) of occupation, and his relationship to women. The structure of the military, the novel suggests, removes many of these factors. Women are notably absent, of course, but also absent is the automatic distinction afforded by social class, ethnicity, and to some extent, education. The military has a strict structure and operates as a class system in this regard, however the class distinctions that operate here are at once more rigid and more open than they are outside the

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Army. Cummings makes much of the necessary division between the officers and the infantry, insisting to Hearn that the men must be uncomfortable to fight well, and in the elaborate chess metaphor that defines their relationship he views the infantry as pawns, but in the larger scheme of things the standard Army makes up the bulk of the population. In The Naked and the Dead the members of the standard Army, again through sheer numbers, also make up the bulk of the narrative. What this means is that, while there may be a definite elite class within the military, it is so proportionately small that, for the most part, the men are surrounded by their relative equals, and their contact with the elite is fleeting and largely without consequence. As such, a man in the Army is valued for a small number of identifiable qualities, among them the ability to follow and execute orders, to have a certain amount of physical strength and endurance, and a particular type of courage: a courage that reacts in the face of danger, but one that is prudent and deferential enough that the other members of a given platoon are not endangered by it. Beyond these, and other like requirements, the Army asks for very little. It is, in this sense, quite egalitarian, which at the same time allows it to be viewed as lacking much in the way of distinctiveness. We thus can see how the Army experience is anticipating the 1950s experience

(or at least the common portrayal of it). Everyone seemingly has the same job and the same basic existence to the point where distinctiveness, if we use Lyotard’s understanding of modern culture, can only be sought through consumption. In the Army, even this ability to purchase is removed, so even the illusion of choice is non-existent. It therefore makes sense that, much like in From Here to Eternity, the realist narrative of The Naked and the Dead is a decidedly naturalistic one.

The Naked and the Dead is distinct among the early novels to come out of the Second

World War for its intrusion of modernist tendencies into its realist narrative, but as I have shown,

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the subject matter of those modernist tendencies is intriguing. The novel suggests that a plurality of backgrounds requires a plurality of techniques, whereas a group of people entrenched in an unvarying situation requires a single technique. That is not to say that the realism of Mailer is the same as the realism of Jones or Wouk. Mailer, in contrast to the other two authors, is far less concerned with morality, order, and even the valour of the war effort. Instead, what befalls the characters is mostly due to chance and chaos. The campaign is won, not because of Croft’s quixotic quest to climb the mountain, nor due to Cummings’s extensive machinations, but rather from the ill-informed decision of a bureaucratic officer. The attack that wins the campaign is not narrated at all, and none of the characters portrayed in the novel participates in it. Similarly, the many quests of the individual characters prove to be either futile or fatal, and even death seems to be more random than causal. This fatalism is why some like Pizer have suggested that the novel be seen as naturalist more than realist, but since the distinction between those two is thematic, rather than stylisticiv, I want to close with a comment on style.

Realism, as I have noted above, tends to be more closely associated with morality, with the pursuit of truth, with didacticism, with, by and large, any number of thematic factors.

Stylistically, however, one of its most common traits is the removal of the narrator as conscious and conscience. Characters are to be judged by this supposedly objective view of their actions, and the narrative mode gives the reader a sort of god-like perspective on the characters and events. The way it works in The Naked and the Dead is that the objective narration lets the chaos and chance unfold without judging the rightness of it. We are given the perspectives of different characters by means of focalization, but we always know that the perspective is that of a given character and not the narrator. Therefore, the narration happens, or at least that is the perceived effect, and there is no sense that anyone has any control over its happening, or knows what the

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result will be. This can be seen most acutely with the death of Lieutenant Hearn, who makes perhaps the most compelling case for the novel’s “true” protagonist until his death happens. The reader is given the following, with Hearn as the subject of focalization:

. . . As they moved along out of the hollow he felt good; it was a new morning and it was

impossible not to feel hopeful. The dejection, the decisions of the previous night seemed

unimportant. He was enjoying this, but if he was, so much the better.

Quite naturally he assumed the point and led the platoon toward the pass. (602)

The above ends the passage with Hearn as the focalization subject, and there is a gap between it and the following paragraph, which is narrated externally, in the style of a film camera: “A half hour later, Lieutenant Hearn was killed by a machine-gun bullet which passed through his chest”

(602). In one simple, declarative sentence written in the passive-voice, Hearn is removed as an actor from the narrative. The effect is startling because of the reasons mentioned above: there is no foreshadowing of the event, and the switch is made so abruptly from Hearn as observer, as active, to Hearn as observed, as passive—note that he is “killed by a machine gun”; there is no active character who kills him. The effect is also heightened by the obscuring of perspective.

Hearn’s removal is complete and irrevocable, but the narration continues along without him.

There are other moments in the novel that operate in the same sort of way, but this is the most effective example of how the novel’s style conveys its view of the war.

Thus with The Naked and the Dead, more so than with the other two war novels in this study, the way the novel is written is its portrayal of American identity before and during the war; in other words, its shifts in style depict a shift in the way an individual is viewed. The Time

Machine passages allow for individuality, for comments on class, ethnicity, and regional differences, and the contrasting narrative styles of these different segments emphasize these

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differences. Within the main action, where everyone is involved in the war, those distinctions are blurred, just as the style becomes more uniform. The men, Mailer is saying, cannot escape their fate once they enter the war. Hearn’s death is no different from Roth’s or Wilson’s, no matter their difference in rank or their social status outside of the war. Just as Mailer’s narrative allows no one character to dominate the story in terms of perspective, it does not allow any character to dominate in terms of significance to the war effort. Croft commands the men, and they fear him, but his mission is as futile as it is foolhardy,v rendering his power inconsequential. Cummings commands the whole operation, but his planning amounts to nothing and the mission is completed through incompetence and luck. In the world of The Naked and the Dead every character can be the hero and the fool because of the way the military is depicted. It is in this way that naturalism is such a fitting mode for the novel. According to Mailer’s depiction, the

Army is such a determined environment that all other determining factors in an individual’s life become meaningless. While it is difficult to call the characters of the novel members of the middle-class, they are equals in a strange way, and in a way that they were not before entering the Army. And while Mailer may present the Army as chaotic, sinister and a possible breeding ground for fascism, his ultimate depiction of it is surprisingly egalitarian. This uniformity anticipates 1950s America.

****

Thus we have two realist novels about the Second World War that reach rather dramatically different conclusions, yet both are in agreement that the war is bringing something of a change. From Here to Eternity looks to resist this change, and its robust, working-class heroes seem to go against everything that the 1950s has come to represent. As a narrative, Jones’ work looks to the immediate past, rather than the future, but again its ideals are very

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ideologically specific. Despite his individual heroism Warden’s triumphant moment at the Pearl

Harbor invasion is an example of group solidarity—he notes with glee, “This is my outfit. These are my boys”—and Prewitt’s downfall comes from the fact that he follows the model of Henry in

Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms—in looking to escape the war and the group he finds only despair and, eventually, death. To call From Here to Eternity a novel of dissent is to project too much, but it is certainly possible to call it one that is ideologically at odds with the much discussed postwar consensus, in that its union-focused ideology is decidedly outside the one being expressed by both political parties at the time, and it greatly resists the idea of a middle- class utopia. But, as Kazin suggests, Jones’ heroes are doomed to fail because their ideals, their

“maleness,” are at odds with what society was becoming. Thus, rather than being part of a pre- emergent form of the post-realist novel, From Here to Eternity reads like the last gasp of both a mode of writing, socialist realism, and an ideal, union-centred socialism, that lived its most vivid years during the Depression. It is not surprising that the characters and ideology of the post- realist novel of the 1950s are presented much differently.

The Naked and the Dead, as I have noted many times, is a more complicated read. It is possible to read the novel, as many have, as fatalistic, nihilistic even, devoid of both the idealism of Jones’ novel and the optimism of some of the early Fifties novels. Yet, as I have pointed out above, it does offer a reading of the transition that took place during and after the war. It is too much to insist that Mailer was anticipating the move towards a supposed “universal” middle- class in the 1950s, but it is certainly possible to assert that the novel views the Army as a sort of melting-pot that removes many class and race distinctions and that treats men equally in triumph and defeat (or death). That it suggests this not only through narrative but through form and style marks another kind of transition—again one that it would be impossible to say Mailer was

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anticipating—from realist and naturalist narratives that focus on class and social situations to a post-realist one that assumes both of these concerns belong to the past.

i Given Mailer’s preoccupation with robust masculinity throughout his career—from his attempts to imbue white masculinity with the “essence” of black masculinity in “The White Negro,” to his hyper-sexualized and violently aggressive male characters in his Sixties novels An American Dream and Why Are We in Vietnam?, to his long- standing passion for boxing—it is ironic that he does not appear to be searching for an ideal of masculinity in this novel. He certainly suggests a kind of degeneracy in Cummings’ latent homosexuality, and his focus is often on the past sexual exploits of his soldiers, but there is nothing in the novel that suggests one type of masculinity is ideal or aspirational. ii There are three entries in the MLA bibliography that use The Gallery as a principal work of study. One is a four- page article, one is a dissertation from 1972, and the other a chapter in a book about masculinity. iii Mercer interprets Cummings’ lack of recognizable expression as making him “alienated from what is human” and calls him a “vacant cipher,” (45) when I would argue that Cummings’ attempt to maintain the utmost control of his emotions at all times is a distinctly human problem, as displayed in the way he is deeply troubled by his relationship with Hearn. iv Cf. my discussion above on Pizer’s Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Pizer and others leave little doubt that there is a distinction between realism and naturalism, but that distinction is based on subject matter, the relationship to determinism, and the social class of the characters. It is not a stylistic or formal distinction. v Croft decides that the only way the platoon can achieve its mission is by climbing the mountain in the middle of island. The climb is nearly impossible and its tactical value is negligible. The climb seems to be only about Croft himself, but unlike in his earlier, pre-Army existence, his stubborn will and determination are ultimately of no consequence.

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PART II

“SHINY HAPPY PEOPLE”: EMBRACING THE POST-REALIST PARADIGM OF

DOMESTIC CONTENTMENT

There is a pronounced shift in tone from the novels of the previous chapters to the three,

Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny, and

Cameron Hawley’s Executive Suite, that are featured in this section. While the tone in Mailer and

Jones is rather difficult to describe—one could possibly call it sombre, or uncertain, or perhaps grim—the tone of the three novels featured in this section is undoubtedly optimistic. All three novels feature unabashedly happy endings and all place a trust in American society and the structures that make up that society that is nowhere to be found in the novels from the previous chapter. The optimism is so pronounced that I have subtitled this section “Shiny Happy People,” but despite the subtitle I want to, if possible, resist the overly cynical reading that these novels invite. Rather than viewing them cynically I want to look at these novels as cultural markers. The optimistic tone on display is reflective of the general optimism of the 1950s and the values that the novels embrace represent the values that were widespread in the 1950s “consensus culture.”

While many observers and commentators of the period were aghast at what they saw as unthinking conformity, my goal in this section is to show that conformity is manifested in fiction, both in regards to how this conformity reflects on the conception of American masculinity and how it is portrayed stylistically and formally.

Nevertheless, I feel it would be remiss (not to mention uncharacteristic) if I did not retract this statement at the moment of its making and speak first about the cynicism that greeted the three novels discussed here. All of The Caine Mutiny, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, and

Executive Suite were bestsellers, all were made into successful films, and all enjoyed at least

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some critical success—Caine won the 1952 Pulitzer prize—yet each was seen as symptomatic of something that was inherently wrong about 1950s America. What exactly this wrongness was is difficult to pinpoint, but there were many words and phrases thrown about to describe it.i It was an issue of consensus, and conformity, of other-directed men, organization men, and “dough faces,” of bland suburban unliving, mindless consumerism, and mass culture. Despite, or perhaps because of the prosperity that the decade is known for, many contemporary commentators found something decidedly empty in the lives and pursuits of everyday Americans. Of course, by

“everyday Americans” these commentators usually meant middle-class Americans, but one of the principal characteristics of the 1950s is the widely held belief that soon everyone in America would be middle-class.

The novels in this section share that assumption, which is one of the reasons I find them so relevant for the purposes of this study. While they feature protagonists who are at different stages in their careers and who have achieved different levels of success within large organizations, there is a decided attempt to emphasize their commonness and humanity (as such it is not surprising that the authors here employed realism for their stories and that literary critics of the era, who largely preferred modernism, found the novels uninteresting at best). There is a sense of belonging, both within an organization and a larger community, that emanates from each of the novels. This sense differs from a novel such as From Here to Eternity in that it is not based on class—i.e. it is not a case of group solidarity—but rather it is based on the idea that most people (aside from a few bad apples) have basically the same goals and ideals and will reach the same conclusions given the proper perspective. Put that way it really does sound like a culture of consensus, or at the very least one of naivety, and no doubt the memory of the war— and even the Depression before that—and the fear of another one contributed to this need for

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security and reassurance in the validity of shared beliefs. But again, rather than criticizing this view—there are many who do just that at any rate—I believe there is much to be gained from examining how it is represented.

A word first about these representations. The strange thing about each of these novels is that, while none has ever been considered a great work of art, neither were they condemned as outright trash. Herbert Gold, whose Hudson Review sendup of this trio of novels was the inspiration for this section, concedes that “these novels are neither crude nor tasteless except in their implications. They are written by intelligent men. There is an educated restraint about their language” (586). As noted above, Caine was awarded the 1952 Pulitzer Prize, and Wilson considered himself a serious author, noting in the Afterword, “while I was writing [Gray

Flannel] I like many beginning novelists fancied that I was rivalling War and Peace.” All three were bestsellers and made into Hollywood films, but the same can be said for the two war novels of the previous section. Yet there is a definite distinction to be made between the novels of this chapter and those of the last and that distinction is felt both thematically and stylistically. If we wanted a term that describes that difference we could perhaps call these novels “Midcult,” a term coined by Dwight Macdonald in his 1960 essay “Masscult and Midcult” which he described as a mixture of “mass culture” (Masscult) and high culture—tellingly, Macdonald does not call this

“Highcult”—and which he found particularly insidious for its artifice. Macdonald actually mentions Wouk in a list of “Midcult novelists” (37) and describes the phenomenon as such:

This intermediate form—let us call it Midcult—has the essential qualities of Masscult—

the formula, the built-in reaction, the lack of any standard except popularity—but it

decently covers them with a cultural figleaf. In Masscult the trick is plain—to please the

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crowd by any means. But Midcult has it both ways: it pretends to respect the standards of

High Culture while in fact it waters them down and vulgarizes them. (37)

For Macdonald, Masscult is obviously reprehensible in its bald-faced catering to the lowest common denominator, but its lack of pretence somehow makes it less egregious than Midcult, which “pretends to respect the standards of High Culture.”ii While Macdonald comes across as snobbish from this passage his main concern is with cultural production and the insufficient means for producing High Culture in contemporary American society. He decries Midcult for getting in the way, so to speak, but my interest is more in his distinction of what exactly makes these novels Midcult, and more importantly what these Midcult novels tell us about 1950s

America and novel writing during it.

Of the conditions that gave rise to Midcult, Macdonald has this to say, and I think his statement gets more directly to the core of the matter:

The west has been won, the immigrants melted down, the factories and railroads built to

such effect that since 1929 the problem has been consumption rather than production.

The work week has shrunk, real wages have risen, and never in history have so many

people attained such a high standard of living as in this country since 1945. College

enrollment is now well over four million, three times what it was in 1929. Money, leisure

and knowledge, the prerequisites for culture, are more plentiful and more evenly

distributed than ever before. (36-37)

What Macdonald’s statement points to rather neatly is the fact that the 1950s, while they may now be remembered as a kind of kitschy suburban pastoral, were in fact a time unlike any other in American history not only in terms of overall economic prosperity, which has been well documented, but also in terms of education and leisure time. For many Americans the world of

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1955 was indeed a very different place from the world of 1940, probably a world so different that we would have no proper comparison from our own time frame, with both the war and the

Depression that preceded it playing large factors. Following along Macdonald’s line, people had the time to start thinking about what they wanted out of a culture and the education to be able to do that thinking. What Macdonald seems to be expecting is a cultural renaissance, so it is unsurprising that he would be disappointed in say, a realist novel about settling down in the suburbs and finding comfortable middle-class employment. Of course as we know now, that cultural revolution would come in the following decade, but what came before it seems oddly, well, content. Without further build-up, I want to examine just what exactly that contentment looks like, and then, hopefully, to offer some explanation as to just how this came to be.

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Chapter 3

The Post-Realist Hero: Trust in Authority and the Evils of Modernist Individualism in The

Caine Mutiny

Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny has done a lot for its author. The novel was a best seller and won the 1952 Pulitzer Prize. It was made into a movie, and Wouk himself adapted it into a successful play, The Caine Mutiny Court Martial. What the novel has not done is establish

Wouk as a canonical author of the 1950s, the way Norman Mailer almost certainly is and the way even James Jones arguably could be. There is almost no critical scholarship on the novel and using Wouk’s name in academic conversation will draw mostly blank stares.iii There are likely several reasons for the perhaps wilful ignorance of The Caine Mutiny in academic circles, one of them possibly being that the novel is not “serious” in the way that the heady works by

Mailer and Jones are (its tone is decidedly lighter than either of those two works). But it is the speculation of this writer that Wouk’s novel has been ignored critically because it reads as the most dated of the three, and it is in its very datedness that its intrigue rests, for this study’s purposes anyway. Quite simply, The Caine Mutiny reads as dated because of its unambiguous and sincere happy ending, and for this reason it seems quintessentially, almost unbelievably, of its time, with a hero that seems to be such an archetypal Fifties man that he is almost a caricature—one would expect him to grow up and become Ward Cleaver. How this happy ending is formulated, how the hero becomes archetypal, and indeed what constitutes “happy” is the subject of this chapter’s investigation.

Before beginning this investigation in earnest I want to take off my scholar’s cap and replace it with that of a book critic. There is something bothersome about this novel that is not as true of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit or even the fluffier Executive Suite. The novel operates

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as something of an elaborate con, and while I would not go so far as to call it dishonest, I would liken it to a drawn out magic trick, in that all along the reader’s attention is being drawn away from the trick that is actually being performed. As a reader I feel somewhat cheated by Wouk’s trickery, but I can understand why he performs it, and I can even admire his understanding of the historical myths and themes of American literature that helps him to pull the whole thing off.

The trick itself is straightforward enough: The Caine Mutiny presents itself as one kind of novel, one that readers of American fiction are quite familiar with, and then reveals itself to be another sort by the time the plot has been sewn up. To be less obtuse, I will summarize things a little bit to explain what I mean by this. In the vein of classic novels like Huckleberry Finn and Moby

Dick, The Caine Mutiny presents itself as an adventure novel, where one somewhat naive individual, in this case a young college graduate named Willie Keith, sets off on some kind of adventure in order to escape civilization and wherein he meets a cast of colourful characters and where, eventually, he will learn something important about himself (with apologies to Melville and Twain scholars for this hatchet job of these two very significant novels). There is a little bit of the madcap found in Huck Finn in Wouk’s novel, but the comparison to Moby Dick is much more evident and the subsequent turn taken by Caine thus the much more noticeable. Briefly, much like the Pequod in Moby Dick, the Caine is presented as a strange and alien vessel whose customs and mores are much different than those on land. Keith is not our narrator in the same sense that the first-person Ishmael is, but most of his initial time on board the Caine is presented from Keith’s perspective, so we still get to experience this alien world from his eyes. And much like Moby Dick the alien world aboard the Caine is presented as a form of savagery, making both its otherness and removal from civilization apparent. Keith can be viewed as Ishmael, trying to understand the behaviour of the ship’s cast of savages. He is taken aback by the near nudity of

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most everyone onboard the ship. When he first encounters his future mentor, Lieutenant Keefer,

“dressed in nothing but an athletic supporter,” it occurs “to Willie that the conventions of modesty aboard the Caine were simpler than those among the Iroquois Indians” (72). Keith soon learns, like Ishmael, to find charm in the ship’s distance from civilization. He becomes something of an amateur anthropologist, going on deck to “enjoy the cursing of the sailors. He had never heard anything like it. There was a fine dithyrambic sweep to Caine obscenity in hot moments” (103). Like Ishmael, Willie quickly comes to understand the customs of his vessel and adapts to them. There is, however, an important distinction between the two ships and circumstances, and this distinction makes all the difference in terms of the novels’ respective resolutions.

The Pequod is, of course, a whaling vessel; its mission is to capture whales for commercial purposes and beyond this objective things on board are left up to the captain’s discretion. Things go astray in Moby Dick because of Captain Ahab’s mad obsession with the white whale that bears the novel’s title, and the relative order (such as it is) of a whaling ship is disrupted and eventually undone completely by Ahab’s monomania. The book is in that sense one man’s account of another man’s doomed quest, and despite the cast and crew that make up the Pequod the quest is ultimately an individual one and the lessons learned also individual in nature and application. This focus on the individual is what makes Moby Dick, despite its many quirks, a quintessential work of American fiction, which has a long history of celebrating individual triumphs and bemoaning individual tragedies. The Caine Mutiny is different because it ends with the sense that the individual matters less than the whole (the whole in this case being the Navy and its rules and regulations) because this whole is both representative of and essential for American society itself. It is America, The Caine Mutiny says, that won the war, and not any

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individual effort. Thus, while the novel ends with Willie Keith growing as a man and learning something about himself, the lesson that he learns is much different than the lesson that one would take away from Moby Dick, or Huck Finn for that matter. While in both of the latter novels authority is at least meant to be questioned and at most meant to be disregarded completely, in Wouk it is authority that has the last word, and as such the most important lesson that Keith learns is that he was in fact wrong to question authority in the first place.

How this plays out is that Caine takes a very obvious cue from Moby Dick and provides the Caine with a mad and rather Ahab-evoking skipper, Captain Queeg. Queeg’s madness is initially apparent in small gestures—most tellingly he has a pair of metal balls that he takes from his pocket and rolls together in the palm of his hand whenever he’s faced with a difficult decision—but becomes more acute as the pressures of being involved in a war mount. He makes at first unpopular, then almost sadistic decisions, barring the crew from taking showers for something as trivial as a sailor having his shirt untucked and then staging an absurd witch hunt to find a supposed thief who stole strawberries from the ship pantry (the book critic would point out that the sublimely ridiculous strawberry investigation is probably the most enjoyable moment of the book). Queeg’s madness becomes so apparent to the crew that one of the officers, Lieutenant

Maryk, who will be discussed more further on, starts up a log to build a sort of psychological profile of the commander and his incidents of madness, and even attempts at one point to take the log to the Naval authorities. So much of a case has been built up against Queeg, who seems not only crazy but also mean and incompetent, that when the titular mutiny finally takes place it seems both unsurprising and entirely justified. The mutiny occurs when the ship encounters a storm and the indecisive Queeg first fails to make any sort of decision as to how to navigate the storm then stubbornly insists to follow Naval protocol even when it appears that following said

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protocol will result in the ship’s capsizing. After trying to reason with Queeg and failing, Maryk decides to take command of the ship, placing Queeg under arrest. Under Maryk’s direction the ship escapes the storm and even manages to rescue the crew of another vessel that had capsized.

Maryk appears to be a hero and Keith, who aids him in righting the ship, appears to have become the man he is supposed to be.

Where the novel takes its strange turn is in what follows the mutiny. Maryk is put up for court martial, which is not a surprise given Naval regulations, and is eventually granted a discharge with no time served due to the brilliant efforts of his court-appointed lawyer, who paints Queeg as a bumbling idiot in the trial and makes a mockery out of the psychoanalysts who had declared Queeg to be mentally sound after the staging of the mutiny. The crew goes out to celebrate and invite the lawyer, Greenwald, to come along with them. When asked to give a speech, a drunken Greenwald grudgingly obliges and proceeds to upbraid the lot of them for getting away with the mutiny, informing them that they were wrong to have done it and that

Queeg was merely a bad commander, but one who nevertheless should have been obeyed.

Greenwald’s role seems to be mostly what Gérard Genette calls the “ideological function.” Traditionally, this function could be fulfilled by the narrator whose “interventions, direct or indirect, with regard to the story can also take the more didactic form” (256), but, as

Genette makes clear, in more sophisticated works much care is taken by “great ideological novelists like Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Mann, Broch, Malraux … to transfer to their characters the task of commentary and didactic discourse” (257). I will stop short of calling Wouk a “great ideological novelist,” but I do think The Caine Mutiny is meant to function as an ideological novel, and Wouk is certainly careful with how he gets his ideological message across. No realist novel in the 1950s was going to feature a narrator speaking directly to the reader, so it makes

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sense for Wouk to have a character not directly involved in the main plot to serve as narrator by proxy. Thus, when Greenwald chastises Maryk’s actions and calls Queeg a hero, he is making an ideological statement. “Yes, even Queeg,” he tells the dumbfounded crew, “poor sad guy, yes, and most of them not sad at all, fellows, a lot of them sharper boys than any of us, don’t kid yourselves, best men I’ve ever seen, you can’t be good in the Army or Navy unless you’re goddamn good. Though maybe not up on Proust and Finnegan’s Wake and all” (482).

Greenwald’s point is that America was ready to fight and win the war because of the men who were already in the Army and Navy, who had been training all along and were prepared for such a circumstance. Constituent to this pronouncement is the idea that the structures put in place by organizations like the Navy, which include following the protocols that Queeg was following and not committing mutiny as Maryk does, are sound and righteous structures that are bigger than any individual. In pulling this trick, which, to this reader at least, was not apparent upon first reading, Wouk effectively tells the reader that he or she has all along been wrong in believing what the novel, up until the point of the trial, was telling the same reader to believe. As

I said above, as a critic of the novel I find this gesture rather disingenuous, but in terms of analyzing the text I find the conclusion fascinating. Authority has been wronged and an individual has managed to cheat a righteous system that probably should have brought him to justice, and a man portrayed throughout the entirety of the text as a buffoon at best and an ogre at worst is seen to have been in fact in the right because of his position as a figure of authority. The ramifications here are many, and while my focus here will be on Willie Keith and how his time on board the Caine acts as his real education, I wanted to begin by highlighting the way in which the novel seems to sneak its ideology in.

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What is interesting is that, as a war novel The Caine Mutiny is hardly alone in being an ideological novel. From Here to Eternity could also fit this description, with its emphasis on working-class values and its stand against military decadence and the suburban middle-class ideal. Wouk’s novel seems to take the completely opposite stance, and politically this makes a good deal of sense given the era. If Jones, and, to a lesser extent, Mailer, has their political roots in the New Deal and Depression-era—if they are ideologically to the left in other words—then

Wouk is much more aligned with the politics of the 1950s that saw the Democrats and their New

Deal legacy shuffled out of power and the socialist thought on display in the other two war novels expunged from the American consciousness. His realism, as I will discuss at the end of this chapter, is decidedly post-realism. It is for this reason that Wouk’s war novel is situated in this section, rather than the previous one, and while his work may lack something in academic vigour it works better as a representative piece of the era.

So, in this representative novel I want to put the main focus on its most representative figure: the young officer Willie Keith. What makes Keith stand out as a hero is his rather lack of anything noteworthy. He is not large and swarthy like Warden, or principled and tragically flawed like Prewitt or Hearn. Keith’s closest comparison in terms of hero-as-everyman is his fellow Mid-Cult protagonist, Tom Rath, but even Rath is not the best comparison because

Keith’s problems are much more superficial: at its heart, the issue with Keith is that he is one sort of man in a world that is looking for a different sort. The Caine Mutiny can thus be read as the story of one’s man transformation into this right “sort” of individual. I am being vague again here, but it is not without purpose, for a “sort” of character is really all Keith is meant to be. If we had to classify him further we might call him “successful middle-class figure in 1950s

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America” who proves, in a post-realist fashion, that the past has no real bearing on the present.

Just how he becomes this figure, exactly, I hope will become clearer as my discussion unfolds.

Seeing as how The Caine Mutiny can be viewed as a coming-of-age story for Willie

Keith, there must be some sort of character progression therein. As I note above this character progression is in Keith going from one sort of man to another, but more specifically he starts off with one kind of ideology and finishes with a different one, and interestingly this ideology manifests itself in the way it depicts his physical specimen and occupation. We have seen this earlier, with the working-class strongmen in From Here to Eternity representing the robust and virile masculine ideal that underwrites Jones’ working-class solidarity. What is different about

Keith in terms of American literary history is that he is neither a working-class figure nor a self- made man; he is an officer meant to obey orders, a sort of middle-class hero if one wants, and as such overt physicality is not as pronounced. What is pronounced, however, is the transformation he makes from the beginning to the end of the novel. Like most characters defined as “weak” he starts off the novel characterized as being quite “soft.”

James Penner does a lot of compelling work with the differences between “hard” and

“soft” masculinity, and one of the things he notes in his study is how “hard” masculinity was initially used by those on the left of the political spectrum in order to promote the vigour and vitality of working-class men but how this hard-typing was gradually co-opted by those on the right. Penner notes that this scheme was particularly successful when it came to branding

Democrats as being “soft” on communism, and how the famous Hiss-Chambers trial of the late

1940s was crucial in this rebranding of left-wing masculinity. Penner argues that the trial

“signifies the historical moment when the stereotype of softness became manifest and culturally embedded. Effeminate masculinity is no longer simply proof of one’s privileged background;

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instead, it becomes shorthand for the nexus of softness, queerness, and the specter of Communist subversion” (95). We see little of this “specter” in Caine, but what we can infer from Penner’s explanation is that at the time of the novel’s publication a heroic character could not possibly be perceived as “soft.” Thus, when the novel presents us with the soft Willie Keith of the first part of the story, embedded within his softness are the ideological implicationsiv of which Penner speaks.

When we are first introduced to Willie Keith he is described as a kind of upper-middle- class faux-bohemian. As the novel states matter-of-factly on the first page, Keith

… was of medium height, somewhat chubby, and good looking, with curly red hair and

an innocent, gay face, more remarkable for a humorous air about the eyes and large

mouth than for any strength of chin or nobility of nose. He had graduated from Princeton

in 1941 with high marks in all subjects except mathematics and sciences. His academic

specialty had been comparative literature. But his real career at Princeton had consisted

of playing the piano and inventing bright little songs for parties and shows. (2)

In comparison to the other two war novels, Keith’s ivy-league education places him in similar company only to Lieutenant Hearn, but he has neither Hearn’s convictions nor physical presence.

His credentials are somewhat similar to those of Alger Hiss. Physically, Keith is “chubby” and

“innocent” and received high marks in all subjects except for those considered as the most serious. The mention of his “real career” seems to be mainly to discredit it as anything serious, as

“bright little songs” hardly carry any repute. Comparing Keith to another musician, Prewitt, the difference is marked by the gravity with which each man holds his musical talent. For Prewitt, his art is significant enough to him that he will cease to do it altogether rather than perform it in a compromised way, whereas for Keith the very fact that what he produces is referred to as “little

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songs” suggests compromise is at the heart of any performance. This compromised performance is confirmed by the second chapter’s revelation of the songs Keith produces: “His songs were of the order known as cute, rather than witty or tuneful” and most of “his works leaned heavily on such devices as rhyming ‘plastered’ and ‘bastard,’ and ‘twitches’ and ‘bitches’—but instead of saying the off-color word, Willie would smile at his audience and substitute a harmless one that didn’t rhyme” (9). There is nothing to suggest gravity here and the mention of Keith’s “slender talent” only further confirms the sentiment that he is playing at life on his family’s money. In the same chapter it is also noted that Keith has had “multiple romances” over the summer after finishing his degree, which would indicate further frivilousness. The novel does not go so far as to outright question his values, but instead suggests that he does not, in any meaningful way, possess any. A child of relative privilege, Willie Keith does not, at first, represent the new middle class in terms of ambition, values, or contribution to society. He is rather closer to a member of the leisure class, and both his chubbiness and lack of professional ambition reinforce this association. In and of itself Keith’s softness is not dangerous, but at the beginning of the novel he is clearly not the right sort of individual for winning the war or for the new era that would follow it.

To further reinforce Keith’s inherent softness he is burdened with the sort of parents who would seem to foster effeteness and leisurely living. His father is a doctor, but one who has prioritized money over career aspirations and now regrets it and has had no real relationship with his son. Keith’s mother, on the other hand, has possibly had too much of a relationship with her son. In his dying letter to his son Dr. Keith notes that Willie’s mother “regards [him] as a hopeless baby who will have to be coddled through life” (64). We are given a direct example of this coddling earlier in the novel when we see Mrs. Keith accompanying Willie to the Naval

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academy, and what is more we also are given this physical description of her, which plays in interesting relief to that of her son. Mrs. Keith was

… a large, wise, firm woman, as tall as her son, and well endowed with brow and jaw.

This morning she was wearing a fur-trimmed brown cloth coat instead of her mink, to

match the austerity of the event. Beneath her mannish brown hat her hair showed the

dominant red strain that had reappeared in her only child. Otherwise there was little

resemblance between mother and son. (2)

It is safe to say that Mrs. Keith from this description is made out to be more manly, and certainly harder than her son, but what is also of interest is how the description of Mrs. Keith bears some resemblance to the description of the universal “Mom” as described satirically by Philip Wylie in his Generation of Vipers. Wylie’s “Mom” figure is

… a middle-aged puffin with an eye like a hawk that has just seen a rabbit twitch far

below. She is about twenty-five pounds overweight, with no sprint, but sharp heels and a

hard backhand which she does not regard as a foul but a womanly defense. In a thousand

of her there is not sex appeal enough to budge a hermit ten paces off a rock ledge. She

none the less spends several hundred dollars a year on permanents and transformations,

pomades, cleansers, rouges, lipsticks and the like—and fools nobody except herself. If a

man kisses her with any earnestness, it is time to feel for her pocketbook, and this

occasionally does happen. (189)

Mrs. Keith is not nearly as exaggerated as Wylie’s caricature, but the sentiment that a domineering mother figure is somehow damaging to her son seems evident in Wouk’s description. Both Penner and Dutch scholar Roel Van Den Oever make the argument that

“Momism,” as Wylie’s characterization would come to be known, was feared to lead to

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homosexuality in young males. “[O]f all the conditions a Mom was believed to cause her son,”

Van Den Oever explains, “homosexuality was generally considered to be the worst” (23). The spectre of homosexuality does not appear to be present in Wouk, but the trope of the overbearing and commandeering mother—Mrs. Keith’s departure in the opening scene is marked by her slipping $100 in “spending money “to the Navy chief who admits Willie (4)—is a card played early and often in the novel’s initial scenes. If the young Willie Keith goes into the Navy as a soft and naive layabout, the novel strongly suggests that this softness is a result of parental largesse and over-mothering.

I discussed earlier how Wouk employs a bit of trickery in the way the novel’s resolution unfolds, but in retrospect there is a rather large tell in Keith’s initial character. While the third- person narration is told from a number of perspectives, Keith’s is the dominant one, especially for the beginning chapters. However, the early Keith is given something of the Babbitt treatment, in that the reader is invited to interrogate this perspective. Thus, some of the early choices that

Keith makes and, more importantly, the people he chooses to respect the most, can be questioned. Keith’s growth as an individual is then reflected in the shifts in his understanding of the world and his alliances with certain characters. Woven into this changing of perspective and understanding is the novel’s ideological thread. I spoke about this somewhat at the beginning, but I want to show exactly how Wouk merges the values that Keith comes to embody with the values that the 1950s became known for, how, in other words, the novel works as a post-realist text. It is no surprise then that the novel’s ideology is also its biggest source of criticism. The novel places great value in the large organization and in the rightness of this kind of structures and suggests a faith in the supposed “consensus culture” with which critics in the 1950s were so troubled.

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As Thomas Hill Schaub argues almost throughout the entirety of Popular Fiction in the

Cold War, critics in the 1950s were very concerned with the insidiousness of “consensus culture.” Perhaps the most artful (and outlandish) take on this culture of consensus is Mailer’s

“The White Negro,” wherein he laments that “one was doomed willy-nilly to conform if one was to succeed” (339), but he was hardly alone in railing against this perceived threat. MacDonald saw it in mass and midcult, Riesman, Mills and Whyte saw it in white-collar employment, and people like Daniel Bell saw it in political culture. It is thus no surprise that its cropping up in novels like Caine and Man in Gray Flannel was seen as further sign of America’s growing problem with conformity. Both Caine and Wouk himself were subjects of this critical contempt.v

This contempt is very much in evidence in Herbert Gold’s 1956 article, which also features The

Man in the Gray Flannel Suit as a companion in mockery.

Gold’s article, entitled “The New Upper-Middle Soap Opera” both defines this “upper- middle soap opera” and bemoans its existence. His issue with this type of novel can be summarized in the second paragraph of his review, which I will quote in its entirety:

As we are seen in the upper-middle soap opera, Americans no longer seek the girl, the

adventure, the career, or the prize of self. Now we need to get the Belongingness. Groupy

man is the New American. Faith, defined as trust in a given society, becomes the prime

mover. Plot, a direction of growth in time, a movement made possible by significant risks

and commitments, gives way to plot defined as an anthology of cautionary anecdotes.

The hero learns just how right it is to be right. Already secure in advance, a reader

watches the protagonist join the company of men by the curious process of getting to be

at one with the reader's own moral evasions. (585)

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It is tempting to use this paragraph to comment on its author’s obvious biases and literary preferences. What is intrinsically valuable about writing a quest to “seek the girl, the adventure, the career, or the prize of self,” and what does this seemingly arbitrary list exclude? But Gold’s concerns are indicative of the concerns of others like him, and we can find in his tongue-in-cheek reprisal many echoes of Aldridge’s thesis in After the Lost Generation, as well as another rejoinder against Riesman’s “other-directed man.” What is also interesting about Gold’s critique here is that, as with Aldridge and Macdonald it is a critique both of contemporary literature and of the larger society from which it emerged. It stands to reason, then, that the novels it discusses

(or dismisses) are themselves good indicators of both 1950s literature and its larger society.

What stands out in this excerpt is the concern for the loss of the individual. We can see echoes in

Warden’s resistance to becoming an officer in From Here to Eternity. In Warden’s case, becoming an officer means becoming “groupy man,” who does what he is told because it helps his career, and ultimately he cannot allow this. If From Here to Eternity were structured like The

Caine Mutiny, the crucial scene where Warden breaks down the door to get at the ammunition would possibly result in his being justifiably court-martialled. While the tone of Gold’s article is mocking, his description of the driving plot forces in The Caine Mutiny is largely accurate. The most important lesson that Willie Keith learns is that he should trust the Navy as an organization, and that if he does so a comfortable middle-class existence is his reward. The same comfortable middle-class existence that Milt Warden flees is the one Willie Keith happily falls into. That such contrasting conclusions can come out of two novels written at approximately the same time about the same war speaks to the fact that, at the beginning of the 1950s at least, the idea of what

American masculinity was supposed to be was up for debate. Gold’s suggestion is that Wouk and his ilk would end up winning that debate.

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However, to say that The Caine Mutiny is simply, as Gold asserts, a narrative of belongingness is to miss its philosophical implications. Yes, trust in an organizational structure is imperative to the novel’s resolution, but that resolution is satisfying—or is meant to be—because it rewards the right kind of values. I have been calling Wouk’s novel an ideological one, and at its heart, The Caine Mutiny is a novel of values, what we might call “solid middle-class values” and its entire plot line works at portraying just what these values are, who represents these values, and, just as importantly, who does not. What is perhaps strange in all of this, and what made critics like Gold take pause, is that these values are seen to be inherent to a large structure like the Navy. This certainly puts Wouk’s text in opposition to those of Mailer and Jones—in the other two novels the large structure is at best immoral, while it is the men whose values are judged, or at least put on display so that the reader may judge them (as I noted above, in Jones there are clear heroes and as such their values are put in the fore, and in Mailer values are largely absent, or at the very least always compromised)—but it also furthers the advancement of what would become the middle-class values of the 1950s.

By “middle-class values” I mean in a sense what historian David Halberstam describes when he writes that “these were more puritanical times” (199), and Caine is very reflective of this changing moral current. There is a deep concern with morality, and morality in an almost

Victorian sense. Here is more evidence of what I mean by post-realism in Wouk’s novel. Not only is the traditional mistrust of the large organization reversed, but there is an attempt to retrench moral values from a bygone era in such a way that what came immediately before did not happen. Post-realism takes from the past what it wants, but is never tied to it. This has something to do with, I suspect, relegating the war safely to the recesses of history. This may seem contradictory, given that the novel itself is about the war, but it is a war whose reality

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seems far different from the actual war. Again, this sanitized reality is the biggest contrast between Caine and the other two war novels discussed previously. In The Naked and the Dead the men swear constantly (Mailer famously used “fug” in place of “fuck” to please his publisher) and much time is given to recounting their sexual histories. In Eternity, euphemisms like “fug” are foregone entirely and the characters swear with impunity. What is more, they all frequent prostitutes and many of them engage in gay sex, and while the last is seen as at least morally ambiguous, there is no sense that Warden is somehow morally bankrupt either because of his affair with Karen Holmes or because his last appearance in the novel is inside of a brothel. The

Caine Mutiny is much different in this case. Profanities exist only in reported speech, and then only in this manner, where a sailor “blasphemed and cursed for a couple of minutes” (72).

Sexuality is an even touchier subject. There is certainly no description of actual sex in the novel, but even when sex is suggested there is a deep moral implication. When Willie and his girlfriend

May sleep together during a shore leave it nearly ends the relationship, and while they are not ultimately punished for it, the novel is clear in implying that the act was sinful and regrettable.

What is more, the novel implies that the immorality of the act comes from books. In the

“morning after” scene is the following narration:

It was the familiar story: the young man back from the war, eager for his love, impatient

of the cautious rules of peacetime; his girl no less eager for him, and ready to do anything

to make him happy; and so, good-by rules! Willie had never tried to force May to yield to

him. He had feared the entanglement more than he wanted this last intimacy, and their

relationship had been full of sweetness without it. Nor did he force her that night. It

happened; and it happened the more easily because they had both read a lot of books

which dismissed the rules as pretty primitive taboos and asserted that all morals were

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relative to time and place. Willie, floating in a daze of well-being, was certain at this

moment that the books contained true wisdom. May, for some reason, wasn’t so sure.

Anyway, the deed was done. (206, my emphasis)

The moralizing in the passage is obvious, from strange euphemisms about May “yielding” and

“last intimacy” to an implied sense that wartime makes for hasty and foolish decisions; it is clear that the narrative tacitly disapproves of the action. The interesting seed planted here, and the one

I want to focus more on, is the idea that the pair was morally compromised from books. Books, according to the novel, can be dangerous if they espouse the wrong kind of ideology, and moving from this line it can be surmised that the only thing more dangerous than an immoral book is the author of one, and Caine provides just such a figure in the character of Tom Keefer.

An interesting study could be made to see how many times a modernist author acts as the villain of what might be called an adventure novel, but I suspect the study would be a short one.

It seems strange, at first, that Wouk would make an author the villain of the piece, but when the novel is read as a case in values, the picture starts to complete itself. Keefer is at first set up as a mentor for Willie Keith. He sympathizes with the young officer’s bewilderment at the strange methods of Captain DeVriess (the Caine’s first captain; Queeg is his replacement), he respects

Keith’s intelligence, and he quickly becomes the leading questioner of Queeg’s fitness for captaincy, not to mention his sanity. Add to this that Keefer is writing a novel while onboard the

Caine and it becomes easy to understand that someone like Keith, who studied comparative literature in college, would look up to Keefer. That Keefer becomes, both for Willie and for the reader, less and less trustworthy as the novel progresses—to the point where he can be regarded as villainous by the novel’s end—is Wouk’s cleverest narrative trick. As the source of focalization, Keith is initially not particularly trustworthy. His arrogance and naivety put his

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views into question, and the narrative cleverly lets his own thoughts betray him. He questions his orders at all times, and continually makes mistakes and idiotic gestures like using the ship’s communication beacon to say hello to his friend on another ship. He thinks of the ship’s first

Captain, Captain De Vriess, as a “complete lout and a moron” (93) and respects Keefer more than he respects the job he has been assigned. When another officer questions Keefer’s dedication to his post, noting that Keefer spends more time working on his novel than he does decoding messages, Willie defends his idol, stating that if Keefer “brings a great novel off the

Caine … it’ll be a far greater contribution to America than a lot of decodes” (103). The naive

Keith of the early part of the novel makes this statement, but the mature Keith at the end of the novel would wholeheartedly disagree with it. The change comes from Keith’s changed values, and it comes at the expense of Keefer’s character.

Fittingly, in a novel that finds its climax in a trial, the case against Keefer is built up meticulously from the time he is first introduced. When Keith first meets the author he is impressed by the latter’s book collection: “it was a like a college list of the Hundred Best Books, somewhat heavy on the modern side with the works of Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Proust, Kafka, Dos

Passos, and Freud, with several books on psychoanalysis and a few that bore Catholic publishing house imprints” (78, my emphasis). The emphasized commentary on Keefer’s bookshelf seems insignificant at the time, but it becomes extremely important as the case against Keefer mounts towards the end of the novel. Keefer’s status as a modernist puts his character into question because modernism, in Wouk’s terms, represents a disregard for authority and structure, and both those facets are of vital importance to the effective functioning of the war effort. On the other hand, realism, the technique that Wouk employs is very structured and relies on the authority of an (largely) all-seeing narrator. If modernism seeks to obfuscate reality, realism, in Wouk’s

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understanding, portrays it transparently, and this would seem to be the morally correct form of narrative. Furthermore, Keefer’s use of psychoanalytic theory vouchsafes the novel’s assertion, at its conclusion, that the seemingly justifiable and necessary mutiny was in fact unnecessary and foolhardy. I discussed Keefer’s role in the mutiny above, but I want to reframe the issue somewhat and examine not so much Keefer’s villainy as his unsuitability as a role model for young Willie Keith.

If we take the Willie Keith that we meet at the novel’s onset, the rosy-cheeked “soft” young man who has played his way through life and college, we can assert with reasonable certitude that he is not being held out as an exemplary young American. He has, as we have seen, a somewhat absent father and an overbearing and smothering mother, and he has in no way prepared himself for any kind of gainful employment. His enlistment in the Navy seems to be an individualist search for adventure more than a display of responsibility or duty to his country. He enters the Navy unprepared for what awaits him and unwilling to, as it were, learn his place and keep quiet about it; Keith believes, in the moment that he steps onboard the Caine, that he knows more about how to run a ship than do the people who have been on it for years. He is classically arrogant and naive, and none of this is surprising. It is thus unsurprising that he takes for a mentor the one person aboard the ship who seems to share this attitude. As noted above, Keefer does not take his duties aboard the ship at all seriously. When Keith first arrives on the Caine his job is to decode ship communication, and Keefer is his supervisor. Keefer is very talented at decoding; a fellow officer explains to Keith that Keefer “can work those damn decoding gismos ten times faster than anybody in the wardroom. He spent six months on the beach studying them”

(102), but he neglects his duties in order to work on his novel. The result, as the officer continues, is that the other inefficient officers “are clearing ninety percent” of the decoding

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traffic, even though Keefer “could clear up the whole traffic in a couple of hours a day” (102-

03). Though the example is rather simple, its implications are clear: Keefer is not a “team player” in that he values his own work far above the work being done on the ship. I want to briefly comment on a few of Keefer’s other undesirable characteristics before concluding this segment with some thoughts on what Keefer’s villainy means to the novel’s ideology, and the prevailing ideology of the 1950s.

Keefer’s most obvious failing is the one that comes at the end, when Maryk initiates the mutiny that Keefer masterminds and Keefer chooses to stand aside, thus absolving himself of any responsibility for Maryk’s action. The novel, through its moral voice Greenwald, makes it clear that not only does Keefer abandon his friend, he in fact dupes him into committing the mutiny in the first place. In his initial interview with Maryk Greenwald calls Keefer “your sensitive friend” and “the villain of this foul-up” (386) but it is the way that Greenwald paints

Keefer as a character that is most telling. Class does not hold the same position in Caine as it does with the novels of the previous section, largely because most of the principal characters are officers; there is essentially no focalization given to non-officers, so there is no conflict between the officer class and the enlisted men in the form we see in the other two novels. As I have noted above, the real conflict here is with those who seem to embody the values of 1950s America and those who do not. As such Keefer’s most threatening trait is his intellectualism, which the novel treats with suspicion. When Greenwald goes to visit Maryk he is “astonished” by Maryk’s appearance. Throughout the novel Maryk is identified as an honest working-class type making his way towards middle-class respectability. Maryk is described as a “husky, bullet-headed, blunt-faced officer” (382) befitting stereotypes about the robust vitality of the working class. He does not fit, however, with the image that Greenwald had in mind, which is “slight, thin,

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nervous, dark, and with the self-satisfied expression of a petty intellectual” (382). Greenwald expects Maryk to be “Bill Pellham, a loud-mouthed Marxist of his college days, in a naval uniform” (382). Stereotypes abound here, but the important point is that Caine is using the same type of stereotypes that Republicans would use to turn around their party fortunes, painting the left as cynical intellectuals with questionable masculinity and communist-leanings. This type of individual, both are saying, is not to be trusted. Greenwald’s suspicions are of course confirmed when he learns of Keefer’s involvement in the mutiny, and when Maryk mentions Keefer’s novel

Greenwald has this to say of it:

I’m sure that it exposes this war in all its grim futility and waste, and shows up the

military men for the stupid, Fascist-minded sadists they are. Bitching up all the

campaigns and throwing away the lives of fatalistic, humorous, lovable citizen-soldiers.

Lots of sex scenes where the prose becomes rhythmic and beautiful while the girl gets her

pants pulled down. (385-86)

What is humorous in Greenwald’s hypothesis about Keefer’s novel is that it describes both The

Naked and the Dead in the first sentence about war being futile and wasteful and carried out by incompetent fascists, and From Here to Eternity in the sentence about the sex scenes full of purple prose. Wouk is probably having a little fun at the expense of his fellow war novelists, but it is also clear through Greenwald’s disapproving description that these novels are the wrong type of novels in the same sense that Keefer is the wrong type of man. This is confirmed by

Keefer’s behaviour throughout the novel. The novelist has nothing but contempt for the Navy and its authority, cares little if at all for the cause of the war and engages in various “immoral” activities as the novel progresses. What is more, beyond his masterminding the mutiny and cowardly backing away from it, the novel in its denouement gives Keefer a final moment to

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show his true colours, where the Caine, now Keefer’s to command with the dismissal of Queeg, is hit by a suicide bomber. The passage is especially important in terms of Keith’s coming-of-age narrative, for it is he who acts bravely and decisively to save the ship; but for Keefer it is simply further evidence of his lowly character. While Keith is fighting to save the ship, Keefer, who is in command, tells the crew to abandon ship and, being sure to first grab the manuscript for his novel, jumps overboard, only to be later rescued by Keith when the ship is saved.

Making Keefer so reprehensible as a character makes sense when considering Caine’s status as an ideological novel. While his exact political views are never made clear, he appears to share many of the traits belonging to members of the country’s left-wing intellectual elite. Keefer is not only suspicious of authority, he displays outright contempt for it, and the frequent mention of the graphic sexuality of his novel suggests he is at odds with the more puritanical standards of the 1950s. But rather than writing some sort of tract against this kind of viewpoint, Wouk presents Keefer the dishonest coward, a man without values or morals who would let a man who is supposedly one of his best friends hang to protect his own interests. In making Keefer, rather than Queeg, the novel’s true villain, the novel asserts that it is far more dangerous to have someone with dissenting political views in a position of authority than an incompetent tyrant who blindly follows the rules. It is easy to see why a novel that makes this kind of assertion would be called out by critics like Gold, but it is also easy to see, I would argue, why such a novel would be written in the early 1950s.

When the political mood of the early 1950s is discussed two elements are usually keyed on: anti-communism and political consensus. Schaub argues that these two elements are very closely related, in that neither party wanted to be seen as sympathetic towards communism, and both wanted to claim ownership of the system that had brought America so much economic

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prosperity in the years after the war. The 1952 American presidential election was one of the least noteworthy in history, with the common belief being that the Democrats had been in power for too long and that the Republicans deserved a chance to govern. Even Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson admitted that he had no chance to win the election (Halberstam 236).

The common sentiment seemed to be, “we’re in this together,” and Wouk’s novel reflects that sentiment. Queeg may have been a terrible commander, but as Greenwald explains, he was there to serve his country at a time when it was necessary. If the American dream was to really to come to fruition in the 1950s—and by this I mean the American dream as it is now still understood, consisting of wealth, marital bliss and home ownership—it would come through following the rules and putting up with the Queegs of the world. It would not come from the kind of political dissent that Keefer represents.

If the previous section struggled with questions of mode of writing, with questions of realism versus modernism and the reasons that postwar authors seemed to, at least initially, favour the former, the novels of this section look to render the question moot. While the critics of the period felt the need to recognize modernism as a superior aesthetic form, and indeed to shun the contemporary novelists, authors like Wouk appear to be shunning this criticism. Thus, The

Caine Mutiny is definatly realistic; its ideological stance seems to mandate its form because the all-important moral of the tale is tied so closely to the plot and to the development of the characters. Clarity and “real” characters are as such placed at a premium. We know this not only because of the novel’s obvious moral stance, but also because of what Keefer represents. Wouk is using Keefer to represent both modernism as a literary (and especially novelistic) mode, as he seemed to find it immoral and obscene, and too focused on individual achievement, but also the critics on the political left like Howe, Kazin, Trilling, and Wilson who so praised works from the

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modernist movement at the expense of almost everything else. These critics were more likely to have been critical of the war at first, and likely always critical of the military. What is more, one of the most defining characteristics of modernism: that of its focus on the individual and personal, the interior and the experiential, is completely at odds with Caine’s assertion that individual achievement is always a secondary goal. Thus the very thing for which Gold upbraids a novel like Caine—the fact that Keith’s greatest achievement seems to be learning how to belong in a group—is exactly what the novel is suggesting. Keefer could never be content with comfortable domesticity and good honest work (though Caine does stipulate that work need be meaningful, which puts it somewhat at odds with our next novel), but Keefer, while he might produce a great artistic achievement, would surely lose the war. As far as The Caine Mutiny is concerned, that “right” sort of man is the one who understands this distinction, as such Willie

Keith, the layabout child of privilege who learns to be the everyman, becomes the hero for an everyman sort of time.

And yet, there is, just as Gold complains in his critique of the novel, something that feels slightly amiss here. While Schaub argues that there was a relative political consensus among literary critics—Schaub himself seems to be lamenting the demise of socialism as a viable political alternative in the 1950s—there seems to be little actual consensus around modes of writing. The critics preferred modernism and, as both Gold’s review and Macdonald’s treatise suggest, they certainly did not see much in the way of value in Wouk’s kind of realism. There was also, as has been noted repeatedly, much concern over the type of conformity to the norms of a large structure that Wouk is here advocating. Stranger still is that the seemingly right- leaning Caine Mutiny is arguing for an almost totalitarian structure at the very time that

McCarthyism was searching out advocates of totalitarianism on every corner. It is certainly

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reasonable to argue that Wouk’s advocating of supreme deference to authority in the name of winning the war would not translate into that same kind of deference once the war was over, but nevertheless the principal lesson that Keith learns, what “makes him a man” in the narrative’s terms, is a trust in authority and a faith in both convention and the moral righteousness of a large military organization. One senses that in Wouk’s version of the War of Independence the loyalists would (rightly) prevail.

Jokes aside, The Caine Mutiny’s willingness to celebrate authority, orderliness and the company-made man sets it distinctly apart from not only American history, but American literary tradition, be it a major tradition like F.O. Matthiessen recognizes in the American Renaissance, a more scattered but nevertheless distinctive one like the somewhat fatalistic modernist works of

Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner, or even one that it closely resembles: American realism.

The realist tradition features self-made men like Silas Lapham, and it also features tragic cases like Lily Bart, but it does not feature anyone quite like Willie Keith. Keith is, after all, a sort of immoral elitist who learns to completely disavow this past, including past loyalties (to Keefer) and principles (his mistrust of authority, and especially of Queeg, comes from a certain righteous indignation for how those subject to authority are mistreated) to become a loyal company man.

What is more, he is to marry a free-spirited Broadway actress who, apparently, will happily give up her promising career in order to become his wife. His narrative would almost sound absurd were it not also the narrative of 1950s America. As such, The Caine Mutiny is exemplary of what

I am calling post-realism not only because of its willingness to foreclose the past, but also, and perhaps more importantly, by virtue of its being a war novel that leaves almost no impression of the actual war. For post-realism, as our next novel will explore more fully, the war is something that best be forgotten.

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i Beyond the sociological studies mentioned in the introduction, there was also Dwight Macdonald’s vexation with the artistic vapidity of publications like Time and The Saturday Evening Post, Paul Goodman’s study of the

“frightening” levels of juvenile delinquency in Growing Up Absurd, and even Eisenhower’s departing address where he seems to bemoan the rise of the “military industrial complex.” ii Interestingly, Macdonald’s definition of midcult sounds similar to what Mark McGurl calls lower-middle-class modernism (to be found in the works of Oates, and Carver, among others) which plays somewhat with the lower classes both in terms of characterization and language. It appears that Macdonald may have been anticipating this with his designation of midcult, but he was mistaken about the eventual direction (in terms of class at least) that this kind of writing would take. iii It’s not even commonly known how to pronounce his name. I had to look up the pronunciation for a conference where I gave a paper on The Caine Mutiny. For the record, it is pronounced as “Woke.” iv We can also note these ideological implications in Hal in From Here to Eternity, but since Hal is seen as homosexual first and “soft,” second his softness is less threatening than Keith’s patrician background. v I gave a paper about The Caine Mutiny in October of 2012 at SFU in Vancouver, and I distinctly recall Jerry

Zaslove, a retired SFU professor and former student of Herbert Gold’s, commenting that for the left in the 1950s,

“Wouk was a joke.”

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Chapter 4

Present-Perfect: Foreclosing the Unpleasant Past in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

As strange as it may sound, Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit can be considered the pièce de résistance of this project. In the scant 350 pages the novel encapsulates

1950s America and the issues surrounding American masculinity in the 1950s. Tom Rath, the novel’s protagonist, begins the novel as a face in the lonely crowd, working at an anonymous job, living in an anonymous house in an anonymous suburb. His domestic situation is so typical of 1950s suburbia that he could have been a subject in the Kelly Longitudinal Study that Elaine

Tyler May uses to great effect in Homeward Bound. Rath married young, before he went off to war, and upon his return immediately started a family, which consists of three children at the time of the novel’s action. His wife, Betsy Rath, is a homemaker and throughout the novel is seen to support her husband’s efforts as the family breadwinner in the sacrificial yet loving manner that many of the participants in the Kelly study describe. The Raths, like other typical

Fifties couples, have little that bonds them with their neighbours. Their neighbourhood,

Greentree Avenue is described thusly:

Almost all the houses were occupied by couples with young children, and few people

considered Greentree Avenue a permanent stop—the place was just a crossroads where

families waited until they could afford to move on to something better. The finances of

almost every household were an open book. Budgets were frankly discussed, and the

public celebration of increases in salary was common. The biggest parties of all were

moving-out parties, given by those who finally were able to buy a bigger house … On

Greentree Avenue, contentment was an object of contempt. (109)

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One can almost picture Dwight MacDonald shuddering at the above description, but that the fictional Greentree Avenue is so typical of the striving middle class makes it an ideal representation of Fifties America and its emphasis on materiality and upward mobility. Gray

Flannel is indeed a novel about materiality and upward mobility—after all it concludes with the

Rath family moving into a bigger house, buying a new car and with Tom at a better paying job— but the route that it chooses to reach these shiny prizes is one that is filled with stops at many different historical class and literary markers. Tom Rath’s journey is thus symbolic in that in order to attain the status of typically middle-class he must bury his upper-class roots. Likewise, the novel’s realist style becomes comfortable with itself only when the past, with its traces of

Hemingway and the Gothic, are dispensed with. It is post-realism encapsulated.

I do not wish to suggest that Wilson is doing all of this on purpose and in general I find his usage of different styles and techniques much less deliberate than in Wouk. Whereas Wouk clearly knows what he is doing when he indicts modernist philosophy as being complicit with cowardice (at best) and his winks and nods to Moby Dick are carefully placed, Wilson’s homages seem to be more happenstance, but that also makes them more contextually interesting, at least from a historical perspective. Gray Flannel is a pastiche of styles that attempts to be one coherent style, again a metaphor for the middle-class melting pot of the 1950s.

In terms of focalization, Gray Flannel is again a pastiche. Shifts in focalization are clearly delineated, unlike the attempted omniscience in Executive Suite (to be explored at the end of this chapter) or the largely plot-driven shifts in The Caine Mutiny. Changes in point-of-view occur only with new chapters, and they are not done for the purposes of exposition, or didacticism, but rather, it would seem, to broaden the novel’s perspective. There are very few secrets in Wilson’s novel because most of the characters in whose perspective we might be

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interested are allowed the privilege of focalization—the one exception, that of Caesar Gardella whose thoughts are always withheld from the reader, is likely employed for the purposes of suspense. To generalize, with the exception of Tom himself, all of the characters that become subjects of focalization have nothing to hide. Tom’s journey throughout the course of the novel then is to become more like these others, but to do so he must deal with the many ghosts in his past. In banishing these ghosts Tom must deal with the war, class anxiety, psychological issues regarding his father, and the limits of his own ambition. In tone The Man in the Gray Flannel

Suit is conservative, and if we were to give it a sensibility we could borrow from Macdonald and call it a Midcult sensibility, but while for Macdonald the term is pejorative, in Wilson’s novel it represents just the sort of compromise where the most fulfillment and happiness can be found.

My reading of the novel will attempt to explain how this philosophy of compromise is achieved and how it works to define post-realism both as an emergent mode of writing and as a cultural signifier.

Ironically, or perhaps fittingly, a novel that strives for contentedness begins rather discontentedly. When Tom and Betsy Rath are introduced to the reader we find them in that stereotype of the 1950s, the suburban home, but instead of a pastoral description of the comforts of domesticity in suburban Connecticut we find the couple in a house they “detest.” The Rath home features a “ragged lawn and weed-filled garden” and the interior marred by “a big dent in the plaster near the floor, with a huge crack curving up from it in the shape of a question mark”

(1). The question mark could be interpreted in a variety of ways, and Wilson offers no obvious interpretation, but its symbolism feels obvious. Catherine Jurca in White Diaspora has argued that the house, “far from nurturing the inhabitants … is ‘a trap’ from which they may never escape” (133) and the novel indeed does pose some rather existential questions for the couple at

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its onset. These questions, though perhaps not philosophically dense are nevertheless ones that most typical couples in the Raths’ situation in 1950s America would have to face. They also provide the novel, more or less, with its organizing principles in such a way that answering them serves to drive both the plot and provide a moral. These questions, which are of course implicit but which I shall outline explicitly for the purposes of analysis, are as follows: 1) Are we safe? 2)

If we’re safe, then what are we supposed to do? 3) Once we’ve done that, is that all there is?

I have made these (admittedly cheeky) questions so vague because the novel deals with such broad themes. As scholars of the 1950s like Gilbert and Cuordileone have noted, security was an understandably large issue for those who had just come out of world war and the

Depression. While the novel makes no specific mention of the bomb, its presence can be felt in

Tom’s worry that another war may be upon them at any moment. Though the novel is set in

1954, the war is still very much present for Tom, as the novel’s frequent flashbacks to Tom’s combat days make clear. The novel is also clear that this hold the war has on Tom is what is keeping him from moving forward with his life, and as such the small suburban home in

Westport, the commuter train Tom takes to work every day, and his anonymous Manhattan office become the rotating but essentially interchangeable locations of his postwar purgatory.

The movement of the novel’s plot, which takes the form of Tom’s new job at United

Broadcasting and the death of his grandmother, serves to shift him out of his purgatory in order for him to consider the other two questions above. Before looking at the other two questions I want to first look at these several locations of purgatory in context of Tom’s own view of them— he calls them “completely unrelated worlds”—as these “worlds,” while split into four segments, represent both different views of reality and, in some senses, different modes of writing. The merging of the worlds that occurs at the end of the novel represents then the merging of these

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disparate views of reality, the embracing of a singular literary mode (realism) and the answering of those existential questions.

The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit is, in its own way, working towards an ideology that is reflective of the family-focused domestic ideology of 1950s America. Tom’s conception of his

“worlds” hints at this ideology early on in the novel. He views them as such:

There was the crazy, ghost-ridden world of his grandmother and his dead parents. There

was the isolated, best not-remembered world in which he had been a paratrooper. There

was the matter-of-fact, opaque-glass-brick-partitioned world of places like the United

Broadcasting Corporation and the Schanenhauser Foundation. And there was the entirely

separate world populated by Betsy and Janey and Barbara and Pete, the only one of the

four worlds worth a damn. (22)

That Tom considers his family world “the only one of the four worlds worth a damn” is very telling of the novel’s philosophy, but my concern here is more with how these other three relegated worlds are represented. It is not so much that they simply cease to exist, as Tom moves into his grandmother’s house, moves up in terms of employment and comes to a certain

“acceptance” (more on the scare quotes later on) of his combat days, as how they are compartmentalized and assimilated into the domestic ideology that the last world represents. I will comment briefly on Tom’s corporate experience now, but my focus will be on the first two worlds which, tellingly, exist largely in the past.

For the most part, Tom’s corporate existence serves as confirmation of what Fifties sociologists David Riesman, C. Wright Mills, and William H. Whyte were writing about the new corporate model of American business. Tom’s business existence is largely an anonymous one, where he works in a large glass and brick tower surrounded by other glass and brick towers

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alongside other men clad in gray flannel. These men, the large majority of whom work in some sort of mid-level position, likely know by name only a small number of their colleagues and have possibly never met the men at the top of the organizations who run the companies for which they work. They are, in Riesman’s terms, the famous “other-directed” men who make up the lonely crowd of corporate America, and nothing about their experience seems particularly noteworthy or even worth describing—the nature of Tom’s work at the Schanenhauser foundation is not described in any detail. It is thus not surprising that when Tom decides to apply for a job with the

United Broadcasting Corporation his interest is solely in the increase in salary that the job would represent, and he expresses no concern with the nature of work that he would be doing. For a novel that is ostensibly about work, Gray Flannel spends quite a small proportion of its time describing that work in any detail. (It should be noted that this emphasis on the uninteresting nature of work is one that is not present in Hawley’s novel). Employment for Tom is mostly a means to an end and, despite a brief flirtation with a more storied career, this is as much the case at the novel’s end as it is at its beginning.

The other two worlds prove significantly harder for Tom to compartmentalize, but they also provide for much riper analytical fruit. If the business world is a necessary evil that enables

Tom’s supposedly blissful domestic existence, in other words his need to inhabit it can be easily explained, the other two worlds seem much less under Tom’s control. He is, in fact, haunted by both of them. Thoughts of the war pop up for him unexpectedly, triggered by a face or a reaction to a stressful situation, and his past as a child of upper-class privilege comes back to him every time he must visit his elderly grandmother. In a novel that strives for progression, not so much in terms of upward mobility, though that also occurs, but more in terms of truly keeping the past in the past, the biggest obstacles towards this progress are the two worlds that haunt Tom. They

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keep him rooted in the past, in a different era but also, perhaps more importantly, with a different perspective. Tom’s past worlds make it impossible for him to, as strange as this may seem, conform, to live the contented domestic life that the middle class of 1950s America are supposed to live. What is interesting is how these past worlds are represented differently: the style is different and masculinity is different. For much of the novel, despite how the title has been treated as a cliché of the Fifties, Tom is not really the man in the gray flannel suit in that he is unable to function as a middle-class business executive in the 1950s supposedly functions. As strange as it seems, his journey in the novel is towards becoming what his suit represents and that can only be done if the past is put firmly in its place.i

Like Willie Keith before him, Tom Rath attempts to make the strange journey backwards from his rather patrician upper-class background to middle-class achiever. But while the journey for Keith is a fairly seamless one—he goes from an idle producer of disposable Masscult fluff to a conscientious and responsible war hero whose return home is a triumphant one—Tom is unable to translate his war experience into his domestic life and unable to reconcile his own nuclear family situation with the one that birthed him. I want to begin with Tom’s family history, if only because it is dispensed with somewhat more easily, and then turn towards his past in the war, a turn which also serves as a turn in this project away from the war and towards the particular concerns of the 1950s.

Tom’s past, then, is probably as atypical as his present is supposed to be typical. His family was upper-class eastern seaboard, and the artificially inflated accomplishments of his ancestors are particularly grating for Tom. His grandmother refers to Tom’s late grandfather and father as “the senator” and “the major” respectively. Tom regards this as a “terrible projection of the past into the present” (19, my emphasis) and bemoans her “elaborate myth about the family’s

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accomplishments” (19). Though Tom’s grandfather was indeed a senator, he had only “served one term as a State Senator in Hartford during his early youth and … had spent most of the rest of his life doing absolutely nothing” (19). Tom’s father, a second lieutenant in the First World

War, is “a great military hero” in the eyes of Tom’s grandmother, “and over the years she had advanced him by her own automatic laws of seniority to the rank of major” (20). Again, the truth is much less clear, but the actual facts in this case do not matter so much as his grandmother’s distortion of them. For Tom, his grandmother’s biggest fault is that she remains fixed in the past, with her notions of her former upper-class glory. As noted above, for Tom this is “a terrible projection of the past into the present” which he sees as more a “deliberate refusal to face change than a passive acquiescence to senility” (19). Tom finds his grandmother’s refusal so upsetting because he sees his grandmother’s view of the world as antiquated, but also because he sees himself as being somehow trapped by this view. Tom cannot fully assume his middle-class existence while being constantly reminded that he is the son of a major and the grandson of a senator—especially given that his grandfather’s existence is so far removed from that of a middle-class Fifties man that he “used to ride [his polo horse] for an hour almost every morning”

(19). Yet it is more than his grandmother’s fixation with the past that haunts Tom; the mansion in which she resides and the town of South Bay itself prove just as haunting for Tom, and it is here that the novel takes a rather strange turn towards the Gothic.

As Charles Crow explains in American Gothic, the Gothic has a long tradition in

American literature. Crow calls the Gothic, in an American context, “the imaginative expression of the fears and forbidden desires of Americans” (1). Crow notes that the gothic appears across genre and is still very much present in contemporary fiction from the likes of Joyce Carol Oates,

Stephen King, and Anne Rice, and can also be seen in science and detective fiction. Key to the

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discussion here is Crow’s explanation that “the Gothic exposes the repressed, what is hidden, unspoken, deliberately forgotten, in the lives of individuals and cultures” (2). Also key to an understanding of the Gothic is the terminology that surrounds it. Crow notes that there are three crucial terms that are used in describing the Gothic: the sublime, the uncanny, and the grotesque

(5). I will take a moment to explain how they operate before looking at the role of the Gothic within Gray Flannel. Of the sublime, Crow explains that it “replaces comfortable beauty with a beauty that mingles awe and even fear” and argues that the sublime is found in the Gothic obsession with ruins (6). The grotesque, which Crow defines for literary purposes as “the strange, distorted, or monstrous, usually as applied to human characters” (6) is less relevant in this discussion, but it can be argued that Tom’s grandmother is, in some way, a grotesque figure for Tom. The uncanny plays a larger role, as we can note from Crow’s description: “The essence of the uncanny is a sense of weirdness, created when something that seemed safe and familiar suddenly becomes strange, or something that should have remained hidden is revealed” (7).

Crow also notes that the uncanny, which comes from Freud, is unheimlich in German, where

Heim is home: “Thus Freud’s term contains the idea of a haunted house: the place that should have been comforting, home-like, revealing something ominous or threatening” (7). It is thus with Tom’s uncanny former home that I will begin my discussion of the Gothic in a novel that is seemingly far removed from such notions.ii

While such Gothic elements may seem out of place in a 1950s novel about corporate work life and the suburbs, it is actually quite fitting if we take Tom’s view of his family’s dynasty into consideration. When we are first introduced to Tom’s grandmother and the town of

South Bay the novel’s Gothic element is immediately apparent. First there are elements of change that seem unwelcome and in some way uncanny. Tom finds “brightly painted one-story

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houses [that] filled the field where Tom had hunted rabbits as a boy, and even the old nine-hole golf course had miraculously become something called ‘Shoreline Estates,’ in spite of the fact that it was a good two miles inland” (16). Jurca points out Tom’s disillusionment with the changes “seems to reflect a belief that land and house ownership are not anchors anymore”

(143), but it also adds to the sense of the uncanny that inhabits everything in South Bay. The town has both the air of permanence, represented by Tom’s grandfather and the houses and landscape that have existed for Tom’s entire life, but also a sense of inevitable change and decay.

Much like in The Sound and the Fury, (a work filled with Gothic elements) where a golf course triggers a series of memories for Benjy that make it hard to differentiate the past from the present, South Bay and its surroundings are disorienting for Tom. The difference, of course, is that in Faulkner’s novel the golf course represents the Compsons’ loss of affluence and the changing shape of the South, whereas in Gray Flannel the now-departed golf course represents the intrusion of the middle class into this once upper-class neighbourhood. But like Benjy, Tom’s view of the past and present is confused. He equates the old with stability, ignoring, as Jurca notes, that “the old mansions are dilapidated” (143), and instead muses that “they still seemed comfortable, solid, and much more permanent than the recently built structures on the golf course” (17). Tom has mixed emotions about his past, but he is equally trepidatious about the present. The gothic elements do not stop at this change, however.

As Tom continues his drive “down memory lane” we see elements of the sublime as he goes up a steep hill where “there were two sharp turns in the road made necessary by massive outcroppings of rock which gave the hill the appearance of a mountain. It was on the second of these turns that Tom’s father, Stephen Rath, had been killed thirty years ago, before Tom was old enough to remember him” (17). We can see elements of the sublime here, as mountainous and

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rocky outcroppings are often seen in Gothic descriptions (Crow 6). We now learn that South Bay is even more haunted for Tom, with his father’s death not only being sudden but mysterious, as

“Tom had never found why his father had been driving down that narrow road so fast at such an odd hour” (17). At this point, as Tom drives up the top of the hill towards his grandmother’s house, a “tall Victorian structure with a tower at one end that had been designed to appear even larger and more grandiose than it was [where] the wind that almost always blew there seemed full of voices,” (18) we seem to have moved completely out of the world of 1950s America and its suburban monotony into some earlier, more sinister time. We can see another element of the sublime in the awe and fear that the old mansion evokes. I want to quote one more passage at length before moving the discussion towards what exactly all these gothic elements are doing.

The passage appears just as Tom is entering his grandmother’s driveway and it acts as a summation of his mind’s regression to things past as he makes the drive:

Stone posts topped by iron urns three feet high marked the entrance to the driveway of his

grandmother’s house. Beyond them were the carriage house, which itself was bigger than

Tom’s home in Westport, and the rock garden in which his mother and he spent so many

sunny mornings long ago. In the corner of the rock garden stood a heavy stone bench,

now almost entirely surrounded by bushes which had once been kept neatly trimmed.

Tom was beset by the same old mixture of emotions from which he always suffered when

he visited the place, as though each object there were possessed of a special ghost which

leaped out at him as soon as he passed through the gates. His mother had spent countless

afternoons sitting on the bench and watching him as he played. Once, when he was about

seven years old, he had noticed two lines of verse carved in bold script across the back of

the bench. With his forefinger he had traced out the letters grooved in the warm stone and

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had asked his mother what they meant. Now, almost thirty years later, he could still

remember the bitterness in her voice as she read: “The lark’s on the wing; the snail’s on

the thorn: God’s in his heaven—all’s right with the world!” (17)

This passage is one of the densest in the novel and contains within it elements of both the sublime and the uncanny that haunt Tom and much that differentiates his past life from that of his present life. The stone and iron at the entranceway is again evocative of the Gothic and provides a large contrast to the typical suburban picket fence. What is next noticeable is the expansiveness of the estate; it takes time to pass down the driveway and there is a carriage house

“bigger than Tom’s home in Westport,” and a rock garden. The estate is incongruous with both the cramped suburban space of Tom’s family life and, with its openness, natural surroundings and general sense of being aged, with the shiny newness and hardness of the Manhattan skyscrapers of Tom’s work life. But there is no comfort to be taken from this openness: the yard is overgrown with bushes and what should be pleasant memories of a childhood spent playing in a sunny rock garden are sullied by the understanding that Tom’s mother was very unhappy in the setting; thus, the sense of the uncanny is very present here. The inscription itself, which is taken from Robert Browning’s verse play Pippa Passes, has typically been used as something of an inspirational quotation, but clearly it is read by Tom’s mother in a more ironic fashion. Its current situation, inscribed into a likely faded and unused bench that is overrun with bushes, adds to the sense of irony and is somewhat evocative of Shelley’s “Ozymandias”—a poem with its own Gothic elements—for that very reason.

Thus, the novel presents this rather brief trip between two Connecticut suburbs as a journey back through time, across class boundaries and into something of a supernatural realm.

Tom is haunted by two dead parents, one of whom died in a mysterious accident and the other

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who seemed to resent everything that the place in which she lived represented. Added to this is an aging and delusional grandmother who seems to live in a world largely of her own fabrication and an aging gothic mansion that Tom is set to inherit, but which seems to have little value. This last problem, which is a monetary one, is the one that most connects to the rest of Tom’s life, and it is through this avenue that Tom is eventually able to banish the ghosts of South Bay, but it takes some doing for him to get there. As Jurca explains, Tom exhibits a “perverse failure to perceive the commercial value of the land [his grandmother’s house] sits on” (143). She attributes this failure to Tom’s understanding that property ownership is not seen as an asset, which can be seen in the way he and Betsy feel trapped by their own house, but I would argue that this failure also stems from the associations that Tom has with the house and the surrounding neighbourhood. He is trapped within his own Gothic narrative, and cannot see anything in his grandmother’s world but old ghosts and decay, things he attributes to a sort of dying aristocracy.

His salvation comes in his embracing of the new middle-class paradigm, not only in the realization that he has not so much descended the social ladder as that the ladder has been removed altogether, but also in Betsy’s willingness to bring the middle-class paradigm to this worn out aristocratic neighbourhood.

In his introduction for the 2002 publication of the novel, Jonathan Franzen states that “the first half of the book is by far the better half” and makes this claim because, in his view, “the

Raths are attractive precisely because many of their sentiments are not.” Jurca’s argument, though much more elaborated, is similar in that she points out how the Raths’ discontentment is what makes the novel such an effective portrait of suburban life, and much of the discontentment occurs in the first half of the novel. What makes the second half of the novel less interesting, at least in terms of its attractiveness as a story, is essentially Tom’s transformation into the titular

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character in body and mind. One of the things he must accomplish for this transformation is to subdue the Gothic elements mentioned above. The way this is accomplished in many Gothic texts, or texts that have Gothic elements, is through revelation. In Jane Eyre, for example, the

Gothic element exists in the form of the famous mad woman in the attic, and the presence of this element blocks any possibility of real happiness for Jane and Rochester. It is only after the mad woman is revealed, her story told and she herself killed, that the novel is able to set off on its final course towards a happy ending (i.e. that Rochester and Jane are able to marry). Even in less straightforward texts like Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! where a “happy” ending is precluded from the start, the revelation that the ghostly Henry Sutpen still resides in his familial mansion, and the subsequent destruction of that mansion, allows for some sense of closure for Quentin and

Shreve in their reconstructed narrative. For Tom Rath, a similar revelation is necessary to assure his happiness, but it takes a rather different form. Some elements, however, remain the same: a destruction still must take place, even if the destruction is more practical than calamitous.

There are actually two ways that the novel dispenses with its Gothic elements. Once

Tom’s grandmother dies the house threatens to engulf Tom even further in its resurrected demons. He learns, as he had long suspected, that his grandmother’s estate is of little value. He is informed by Sims, his grandmother’s lawyer—another ghost, in a sense, as the lawyer’s existence was unknown to Tom until his grandmother was on her deathbed—that the estate consists of the house itself, which has a ten thousand dollar mortgage on it, and about twenty thousand dollars worth of securities, which of course will have to cover the mortgage, an inheritance tax and some sort of retirement package for his grandmother’s lone remaining servant. Sims explains to Tom, “when the estate is completely settled, I don’t think you’ll have much except for the house” (52), and given Tom’s rather tempestuous relationship with the

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house itself this is bad enough, but worse is the revelation of his father’s past. Sims served with

Tom’s father during the First World War and he reveals to Tom that “during the first few weeks we were overseas, he was the best officer I’ve ever seen. He was the last man I’d ever expect to have a nervous breakdown, but that’s what happened. In those days we called it shell shock.

They sent him home, and … he spent a few months in a hospital” (52). Another typical element of the Gothic is madness. Tom sees some of this in his grandmother and her conflation of the past with the present—this is what makes her, in a way, a grotesque element for him; she is distorted in her inability to recognize the present around her—but he attributes it to a desperate need to cling to a class position which she no longer holds. The madness of his father is obviously different. Tom learns from Sims that his father was the one responsible for losing most of the family’s fortune. After the war he is unable to work at the prestigious job in a brokerage firm that is handed to him because he “couldn’t concentrate on anything and sometimes he got so nervous during conferences that he’d have to get up and walk out of the room” and he is eventually asked “to take some time off and try to get himself under control” (52-53). After losing his employment and residing with his wife in his mother’s house where, “the idleness didn’t do him any good” (53), Tom’s father asks to handle the estate and ends up losing most of it. Worse, as Sims reveals, he becomes maniacal about getting the money back, playing the market relentlessly and illogically—“getting back all the money he had lost seemed a matter of life and death with him”—finally his grandmother decided “she had to take what was left of her estate out of his hands. The night she told him that, he started driving off somewhere and was killed” (53).

There is, again, much to haunt Tom here. He learns of his father’s possible madness, which came from serving in the war, something that Tom also did, and how his father was in fact

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responsible for the mishandling of the family’s estate that Tom had always attributed to his grandmother, that his father was financially emasculated by having the control of the estate taken away from him—it could be argued that Tom’s insistence on making a good income and supporting his family comes from this sense of unmanning that his father’s financial difficulties represent to him—and that all these factors resulted in a possible suicide. In this case, revelation does not help to banish the ghost so much as make it more palpable, more uncanny. Sims tells

Tom, “there’s nothing to be ashamed of. He was a fine man” (54) and Tom seems to believe this, but the knowledge that his father, a “fine man,” could be so changed by the war, could possibly lose his mind and severely hamper his family’s security, must have ramifications on Tom’s own self-perception. And even though the war appears to be responsible for his father’s downward turn, it is the fact that he was confined to the house and an idle life that seems to cause his ultimate demise. We can see a similar situation occur with Prewitt in From Here to Eternity, but while idleness and decadence are to blame in Prewitt’s case, Man in Gray Flannel places the uncanny Victorian mansion in a more central role. The house then, as Jurca also argues, becomes symbolically even more significant. The only solution seems to be to part with it.

The way in which the novel banishes Tom’s gothic ghosts is similar to the way that The

Caine Mutiny moves away from being a rebranded Moby Dick to a much less sinister and fantastic sea tale: it embraces the 1950s notion of Mass culture, believing in the strength and solidarity of a less individualistic outlook. Thus, much as Caine resists making the crucial plot points the story of one man’s madness by making said man merely a weak but replaceable link in a never-ending chain, Man in Gray Flannel uses a standard process of the corporate environment to solve the problem of a hulking and haunted old mansion and estate: breaking it, literally, and subdividing it into manageable chunks in the form of a new suburban development. This trick,

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for it really is a trick in that it resolves almost all of Tom’s problems at once, is remarkable because its completion represents the completion of Tom’s journey from a child of lost privilege to a comfortably middle-class man. The house and all of its Gothic elements are laid to rest alongside Tom’s grandmother as relics of a no longer relevant era, and consequently Tom’s uncanny past can no longer haunt him. Yet, as I mentioned above, it is not enough that Tom banishes these ghosts of the past, for his upper-class upbringing is only one of the elements that he must conquer in order to complete his adjustment. A more complex, and thus far unexamined, aspect of the novel is Tom’s past in the war and the strangely existential view of life that it gives him.

As I noted in the introduction, critics who look at 1950s America still have some trouble with the role that the Second World War plays in the shaping of that decade. Even the era we study is generally called “Postwar American fiction” with the “post” confining the war ever to the past. Part of this overlooking, I suspect, has to do with the changing of the narratives that surround the war. Thus, while the original works of American fiction that came out of the war focused on Army units and the general experience of being at war, this type of narrative has been largely (and probably justifiably) overshadowed by those of the Holocaust and the atomic bomb.

Both of these enormous events have ramifications that are still not fully understood, and they are without a doubt the most significant events of the Second World War. What they are not, however, is the focal point of the war for many a typical American soldier. Few, if any,

American soldiers stationed in the Pacific would have seen the effects of the atomic bomb, and even the soldiers in Europe were largely ignorant of the scale of the Holocaust. As the early war novels show to great effect, most soldiers were too busy worrying about the fragility of their own existence to be able to view the war in greater terms.

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What has always struck me as one of the strangest aspects of the 1950s is the fact that a period that is so synonymous with normalcy, with almost bland contentedness and ordinariness of life, came immediately after a period of great upheaval, a period with a sizeable population who had seen people killed right in front of them and had probably killed people themselves. The juxtaposition of the immediacy of life and death in the war with a suburban commuter existence would have to feel unreal, and while the actual percentage of the male population involved in exactly this type of experience is undoubtedly lower than it is now perceived, any kind of transition from war time to peace time could not possibly go as smoothly as the popular narrative of the 1950s suggests. What seems different about the American experience is that there did not seem to be a commonly felt existential crisis in the aftermath of the war. Existentialism as a philosophy came out of Europe, and this seems unsurprising, as Margaret Chatterjee explains in

“Introducing Existentialism”:

Everyone knows that the post-war period has been called the age of anxiety. The

generation that experienced the Depression, the Germany of the Weimar Republic, the

Spanish Civil War, is the generation that produced existentialist philosophy. The

devastation of war, the collapse of values, the prevalence of injustice, the rise of

totalitarian systems—all this took place between 1918 and the outbreak of the Second

World War. The dehumanizing effect of advanced industrialized economies, the

anonymity of bureaucratic structures, the cries of the tortured, the smoke of the terrible

chimneys … Political realities spread a pall of terror … Sartre was a prominent member

of the Resistance Movement. Camus faced the realities of French colonialism. It was not

a century for seeing men sub specie aeternitatis. Man clearly lived sub specie mortis. (22-

23)

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Prominent in Chatterjee’s description is a sense of both helplessness and pointlessness with regards to human existence. The American twentieth-century feels different in a way, but it is worth considering if this sense of despair was only masked by economic prosperity. For a portion of its narrative, Wilson’s novel makes this consideration.

For all its faults as a novel—or at the very least for its deus ex machina happy ending— what The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit does better than most novels of the Fifties is to attempt to portray a man struggling to understand the difference between his current life as an office worker and father of three with his past life in the war. The Tom Rath we meet at the beginning of the novel is living what he considers to be a surreal existence. When asked to write a mini autobiography as part of his job application for the United Broadcasting Corporation, Tom considers his past life and the “unreal-sounding, probably irrelevant, but quite accurate fact that he had killed seventeen men” (12). The novel matter-of-factly points out this absurdity of postwar existence. Tom has killed seventeen men, which in most circumstances would put him in prison for life, but in this case is not only accepted but “probably irrelevant” to anything in his current life. Though the year of Tom’s job interview, 1953, is only eight years removed from the end of the war, the war and its horrors have no place in the present. As Tom reflects: “it was no longer fashionable to talk about the war, and certainly it had never been fashionable to talk about the number of men one had killed” (12-13). What Tom determines instead is that his past in the war should probably just be forgotten, that “it wasn’t always easy to forget, but it was certainly necessary to try” (13).iii The rest of the novel unfolds in such a way as to largely agree with

Tom’s sentiment, but not with his method of forgetting. What makes Tom as a character decidedly counter to the prevailing 1950s narrative is again something that he must overcome in

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order to embrace that narrative. To go along with his past filled with ghosts and Gothic imagery,

Tom’s war experience has left him viewing the world in an existential manner.

It may seem a stretch to call anything in a 1950s realist novel about corporate employment and suburbia “existentialist” and I doubt Wilson saw Tom Rath as an existentialist, but his reaction to many situations fits surprisingly well with the philosophy. Existentialism, stemming mainly from the writings of French philosophers/authors Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert

Camus and evident in the plays and novels of someone like Samuel Beckett, insisted that there was no higher truth to dictate what is right and wrong, that existence, such as it was, was all that life contained. It was, as Chatterjee explains, a particularly anti-Hegelian philosophy (19).iv In the works of all three of the authors listed above this manifested itself in the absurdity of life and daily existence and the absurd attempts of people to find meaning in any of it. If we look at

Tom’s above assessment of the relevancy of the number of men he has killed to a job application for a job that does not interest him, there is definitely a sense of absurdity in all of it. The absurdity does not take place, as it does in many works considered to be postmodern, in narrative technique, but both Tom’s situation and his responses to it can be described as absurd. One could certainly also make the argument that speaking of a higher meaning to human existence after the

Holocaust and the atomic bomb is absurd.

But if it were only Tom’s situation that hearkened to existentialism I would likely be making too much of it. What add credibility to the theory are Tom’s thoughts and actions at the beginning of the novel. While in the war, Tom realizes (as any sane individual would) that jumping out of a plane and landing in enemy territory is a rather crazy proposition. If one thought about it rationally, one would be inclined not to do it at all. Thus before a jump Tom would start thinking about his own death and then the “sharp image of a compound fracture of

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the right thigh” which had happened to a man beside him during his first combat jump where “a long jagged splinter of bone had come through the trouser leg, and the man had sat there staring at it until someone had given him a shot of morphine” (68). Such images could have a paralyzing effect, so Tom’s seemingly incredible solution becomes the following, which I will quote at length to give the proper context:

It was at such times that this silly sentence would come into his mind and he’d start to

relax.

“It doesn’t really matter.”

The words had a marvelous effect on him. He had often repeated them to himself

until they began to sound like some kind of revelation. By the time it had been necessary

to stand up and walk toward the open door of the airplane, he had always been able to

move as casually as though he were just going to step into the next room.

“Geronimo!” a lot of men used to yell as they jumped, trying to sound fierce as hell.

Tom used to yell it too when it was expected of him, but what he was really thinking,

with a curiously comforting air of detachment was, “It doesn’t really matter.” And then,

just as Tom went through the door into the prop blast, the second part of the charm had

always come to him: “Here goes nothing.” And when the parachute had opened with its

terrific wallop at the back of his neck, and he found himself floating down in that curious

moment of complete quiet and calm which immediately precedes a combat landing, the

third part of his incantation had always come to him: “It will be interesting to see what

happens.” (69)

That Tom views his “silly sentences” as a revelation is telling; the moment before he jumps out of the plane serves as his existential awakening, in a sense. We can see an echo here of Camus’

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Meursault in L’étranger who cares not whether he is promoted in his job, whether his girlfriend loves him, nor even if he was right to kill the man he shoots. Chatterjee argues that “a peculiarity of existentialist philosophy … is the way in which each thinker regards a certain set of experiences as key to the human condition.” She explains further that “the existentialist, like the romantic, sees experience in terms of intensity, and so each writer witnesses to what he experiences most intensely” (26). For Tom, this particular experience becomes key to his understanding of life and how he “writes” his own life. In these moments Tom decides that existence is essentially meaningless, so anything that happens to him, including his immediate death, “doesn’t really matter.” The third part of Tom’s rehearsed lines is also consistent with existential philosophy—if the present is the only thing that matters, then each new situation presents a new possibility for a defining experience: “it will be interesting to see what happens.”

I want to take a brief sidebar here to talk again about Norman Mailer’s famous search for the “American existentialist” in his essay “The White Negro.” In this 1957 essay, Mailer lamented a 1950s America where one was “doomed willy-nilly to conform if one was to succeed” and longed for a man who “lived in the enormous present, following the needs of his body.” Mailer also posited that this American existentialist would exhibit a kind of raw sexual energy and a capacity for violence and violent responses to a given situation. Though Mailer was criticized for (among other things) the essentialism in his depictions—his prototypical existentialists were stereotypes of young African-American men—what is interesting is how the characteristics he describes apply to Tom’s attitude toward his life, both during the war and when faced with the challenges of his new job. One of Mailer’s fascinations in the essay is with the idea of the psychopath. Mailer’s definition of a psychopath is somewhat murky, in that he seems to conflate the psychopathic personality with the 1950s hipster and the young African-American,

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but one aspect he identifies as being essential to psychopathy, and which he sees as necessary for an existential point of view, is the negation of the past in favour of the present. As Mailer explains:

What characterizes almost every psychopath and part-psychopath is that they are trying to

create a new nervous system for themselves. Generally we are obliged to act with a

nervous system which has been formed from infancy, and which carries in the style of its

circuits the very contradictions of our parents and our early milieu. Therefore, we are

obliged, most of us, to meet the tempo of the present and the future with reflexes and

rhythms which come from the past. It is not only the ‘dead weight of the instructions of

the past’ but indeed the inefficient and often antiquated nervous circuits of the past which

strangle our potentiality for responding to new possibilities which might be exciting for

our individual growth. (345)

Essentially what Mailer is saying is that the “psychopath” is unburdened by standard rules of societal decorum that have been handed down through generations and which, almost necessarily, contain within them many contradictions. The result, for the average person, is an inability to respond originally to a potentially original situation. Mailer sees this as stifling, obviously, but within the larger context of the essay he provides reasons for why he thinks that psychopathy may become increasingly prevalent. Elsewhere in his essay, Mailer cites those familiar narratives of the Second World War, the Holocaust and the atomic bomb, as contradictions in those “instructions of the past” that may become too much for many to bear, resulting in a psychopathic-like break from standard behaviour. The overlap between existential and psychopathic behaviour in this should be, I hope, evident. I want to now move from Mailer back to Tom Rath to show how some of his behaviour fits with Mailer’s—admittedly vague—

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definition of existential behaviour. Of course, Tom’s wartime situation is an exceptional one, so his existential behaviour can be looked at as a response to the exceptional situation of jumping out of an airplane. When faced with a situation that belies any logical learned response, Tom invents a new response that treats his jumps as opportunities to learn something about a new experience, and he uses this experience as a guide for future unfamiliar experiences. We could call this a coping mechanism, but where it becomes more interesting is when Tom is presented with a situation different in its immediacy from a jump.

The first of these is a wartime love affair with a young Italian named Maria. In a scenario straight out of Hemingway, Tom and his platoon are given seven days of leave in Italy before they are supposed to be reassigned to Japan. During this time Tom meets Maria in a bar and spends a passionate week with her, “shunning everyone he knew, and in that week he and Maria had built a small, temporary world for themselves, full of delights and confidences, a completely self-sufficient world, packed with private jokes, and memories, a whole lifetime with silver and gold anniversaries, Christmases and birthdays, fifty years compressed into a week” (81). Tom’s behaviour with Maria is consistent with Mailer’s idea that an existentialist need create “a new nervous system” unburdened by mores of the past. Nothing in Tom’s upbringing or the societal standards of early twentieth century America would suggest that it is appropriate for him to commit adultery with a quasi-prostitute, and even then, the tacitly accepted wartime behaviour with prostitutes is not to create a separate domesticated existence with them.v What is also different about Tom’s situation with Maria is the absence of guilt, and again this absence can be attributed to Tom’s breaking from his previously learned behaviour. Where the situation becomes more clearly existential in character is after the seven days have expired and Tom goes back to his unit. He is told, “transportation wasn’t available yet and that he could live wherever

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he wanted as long as he checked in, or at least telephoned headquarters, every morning at eight o’clock” (81). Tom’s situation is something that could be seen in a play by Beckett or Sartre, where instead of waiting for the never arriving Godot or in a never altering hotel, Tom will be doomed to a purgatory that involves phoning in every morning at eight o’clock where the orders to ship out are never given. The difference of course is that his purgatory only lasts for forty-nine days and that his existence is rather blissful during this time. Nevertheless, the uncertainty of when the orders will come in means that Tom and Maria feel compelled to spend every day together as if it is their last one, certainly a very existential way of viewing life.

It is only after Tom receives his orders that time appears to pass normally again. Tom starts to worry about his seemingly imminent death and Maria informs him that she believes she is pregnant, yet even this revelation does little to alter their bubble-like existence. Maria asks nothing of Tom and he gives her five hundred dollars that he has scrounged together from his friends. Tom then leaves on a flight for the Pacific, resuming his paratrooper existence, and it is as if his time with Maria had never happened. It is only in writing his mini-autobiography for his job interview that his past with Maria reappears in his consciousness. The novel makes it unclear as to whether this memory is a repressed one for Tom, or whether he simply chooses deliberately not to think of it, but the recollection of it seems to be triggered when Tom recites the above incantation—“it doesn’t really matter”—before embarking on his new job. The trigger for the response itself is intriguing. Tom’s home life has been rearranged. He has inherited his grandmother’s house, and Betsy has made plans to sell their existing house and move into the old gothic mansion. As well, she has chosen that morning to implement a new regime, waking Tom up an hour earlier than usual, cooking more elaborate meals, getting rid of the television in favour of “sit[ting] in a family group and read[ing] aloud” (66), and going to church every

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Sunday. This shake up in his home life—which Betsy describes as “living sanely” (65, emphasis in text)—is compounded by the news in the daily paper Tom reads as he rides the train to work.

The paper discusses the ongoing war in Korea and “when Russia would have hydrogen bombs to drop on the United States” (67). It is at this precise moment, riding the train to work, that Tom reverts back to his wartime coping mechanism. His response to the state of existence of the organization man in 1950s America is the same as it is to jumping out of an airplane.

Tom’s turn to existentialism is revealing because it suggests a larger repression taking place in the general population after the war. Tom’s past seems so incompatible with his current life, because, as he continually notes to himself, there is no place for a body-strewn past in a world of office towers, suburban commutes and nuclear families. Tom rationalizes:

The trick is to learn to believe that it’s a disconnected world, a lunatic world where what

is true now is not true then; where Thou Shalt Not Kill and the fact that one has killed a

great many men mean nothing, absolutely nothing, for now is the time to raise legitimate

children, and make money, and dress properly, and be kind to one’s wife, and admire

one’s boss, and learn not to worry, and think of oneself as what? (98)

In making Tom the kind of man who follows most of the above tenets without irony the novel never actually answers Tom’s final question, nor does it address the disconnection between the past of war and the present of personal industriousness. If there is a single passage that encapsulates what I am trying to get across as post-realist culture, it is this one. This seeming contradiction creates a dilemma for Tom: if the past, even if it is viewed as necessary, is supposed to be so thoroughly segregated from the present, then it is hard not to live as if the present is the only thing that matters. Tom simply takes this one step further. He decides that the present, in terms of his job and his social connections outside his family, does not matter either.

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Money, which Tom views as “an island of order in a sea of chaos” (164) is necessary, but how one makes it is unimportant (within the confines of ordered society; Tom’s existentialism still adheres to a certain social structure). Tom’s job becomes nothing more than a means to an end, a potentially interesting experience, but not something to give any meaning to. The issue that the novel seems to take with this attitude is that it is impossible for Tom’s family life to be meaningful if he is unable to find meaning in anything else. We see echoes of the psychopathic behaviour Mailer discusses in Tom’s passing thoughts about doing violence to one of his bosses—Tom has a “sudden, immediately controlled impulse to kill Ogden. He knew just how to do it—he’d clench both hands together, raise them high above his head, and, using the full strength of his back, bring them down hard on Ogden’s neck” (113)—and Tom’s increased cynicism towards everything in his life threatens to cost him his marriage and family, the only things he claims to care about.

It is here, if we want to take the point of view of Franzen (and Jurca, to a lesser extent) where the novel fails. As I have noted above, the entire resolution of the problems is a deus ex machina. As Franzen puts it:

Wilson asks you to believe that if a man will only show true courage and honesty, he’ll

be offered a perfect job within walking distance of his home, the local real estate

developer won’t cheat him, the local judge will dispense perfect justice, the inconvenient

villain will be sent packing, the captain of industry will reveal his decency and civic

spirit, the local electorate will vote to tax itself more heavily for the sake of

schoolchildren, the former lover overseas will know her place and not make trouble, and

the martini-drenched marriage will be saved. (n. pag.)

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Given this description, the novel sounds absurd, and it is a mostly accurate description. As I noted, the more existential questions surrounding the war remain, problematically, unanswered, and Tom sheds his existential attitude much like the sloughing off of a reptile’s skin. Other than a confrontation with Betsy, which does admittedly bring together the elements of the war, the

Gothic and Tom’s detached view of life, the end of the novel is relatively free of conflict. That confrontation, which features Betsy charging off in the Rath’s rickety car after Tom reveals his past with Maria, has Betsy drive off down the fateful road that saw Tom’s father possibly take his own life some thirty years earlier. In a novel that stayed true to its Gothic mode history would likely repeat itself, but there is no danger of that happening here and Betsy is found later by the police on the side of the road, the car having only run out of gas. The confrontation does still serve, however, as a final hurdle for Tom to clear, and beyond it there is nothing to stop the happy couple and their family thereafter. As a reader, I do agree with Franzen that this kind of ending is somewhat unsatisfying, but as a document of post-realism both as a cultural movement—i.e. one that separates itself from the unpleasantness of the past—and as a mode of writing—i.e. one that forecloses on prior literary influences in favour of a style that looks to represent reality only as it now exists—I find the ending fascinating. But I do not wish to get caught up in the sense of satisfaction that the novel’s ending does or does not bring. Instead, I want to wrap up this section by taking a look at that shedding of the existential skin.

Like much in the novel, how Tom moves away from his existential outlook is quite simple, but like much else in the novel, its simplicity does not preclude it from making a statement about the prevailing attitudes that existed in America at the time of the novel’s publication. Much like in The Caine Mutiny, what is at once quaint and remarkable about the novel’s resolution is its faith in a system. In the case of Caine this system is a large organization,

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the Navy, and the notion that this organization is much bigger than any one man—in this sense

Willie Keith is an exceptional hero in the fact that there is very little that is exceptional about him; he is simply an upstanding young man who will make an upstanding citizen in an upstanding society. In the case of Man in Gray Flannel the system is not so much an organization—the United Broadcasting Corporation is not really exceptional for anything other than perhaps its president, whom I will discuss at the end of this chapter—as the larger society that has produced the organization, the suburban development that the Raths plan to build, and— and this is key—the idea that behaving “courageously and honestly” are enough to get ahead in life. Thus while Franzen regards the novel’s honesty motif with (justifiable) suspicion, Tom’s realization that he can get ahead by being honest serves as an ideological reawakening. His existentialism is founded on the idea, gleaned from the War, that nothing makes sense, that life has no purpose beyond what you can make of it immediately, and that the only certainty is death.

As I have argued above, Tom spends at least half the novel viewing his 1950s world through the lens of his wartime ideology, in part to insulate himself from the world around him, but also in part because he believes the world to be chaotic. It is only when Betsy is able to convince him to behave honestly and when that honesty, much to his surprise, is actually rewarded, that Tom changes his outlook on things. Thus, much as Tom is able to move out of the Gothic nature of his past by removing the central elements (i.e. the house and his grandmother) he is able to move away from his existentialism by removing the idea that the world is a place without order. That everything magically falls into place in the novel’s fairy-tale ending is proof, in the novel’s understanding, of this order. The result from all of this is a novel that, much like The Caine

Mutiny, hearkens to its literary antecedents, but makes the conscious choice to leave them behind.

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The Disappearance of the “Great Man” in the Post-Realist 1950s

Before leaving this chapter and its sense of happiness and contentment behind, I want to take a bit of time to discuss a figure who would be most at home in an Ayn Rand novel, but who, in these novels that look to create a new man for a new era, is seen as something of a relic. If

Tom Rath and Willie Keith are meant to be representatives of the everyman—they are exceptional only in their understanding that to be exceptional is not what they wish—this other figure, I will call him the “Great Man” as this is the exact moniker bestowed upon Ralph

Hopkins before Tom has even set eyes on him, is exceptional because he is not like other men.

The “Great Man” in this case is not really a trope in American literature—as I noted, aside from being the obvious choice of protagonist for someone like Ayn Rand, the Captain of Industry figure has not historically been of great interest to American authors, and even a character who aspires to greatness like Silas Lapham proves to be much more comfortable, both to the reader and himself, as an everyman figure.vi The two characters I want to briefly discuss here, Ralph

Hopkins from Gray Flannel and Avery Bullard from Cameron Hawley’s Executive Suite, are decidedly not everymen, but they are also decidedly not the protagonists of either novel, and in both cases they are figures who are deemed necessary, indeed vitally necessary, but who are nevertheless depicted as cautionary tales, and a type being phased out in the new economy and mentality of the 1950s.

If we stick with the vernacular of the 1950s, it is probably most accurate to describe both

Bullard and Hopkins in David Riesman’s terms as “inner-directed” men who provide a contrast to the other-directed men we see in both Gray Flannel and Caine. Executive Suite is somewhat

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different, and its difference in this regard, as well as its different literary aims—both Wouk and

Wilson are more ambitious in terms of scope and style than is Hawley—are the reasons that it is not given the same space here as the other two novels. For the most part, the characters in

Executive Suite are of a different type than most others looked at in this study: they are older, have a higher income, and seem to have little connection with the war. The novel itself is also plotted somewhat differently, in that while there may be one character who we could conceivably call the protagonist, there is so much shifting of focalization and the passage of time in terms of the main plot line is so limited that it is impossible to engage with any given character the same way that one could engage with Tom Rath or Willie Keith. To put it bluntly, most of the novel is rather forgettable, but its take on the “Great Man” is, I feel, worth mentioning here because of the similarities between the case of Hopkins and the contrast it makes against a Tom Rath or a Willie Keith. In speaking of the shift from inner-direction to other-direction, Riesman, as James Gilbert notes, “stated on many occasions that he did not favor the dynamic ‘inner-direction’ associated with nineteenth-century capitalism” (35). Yet as Gilbert explains, “most readers understood him to favor exactly that, and so interpreted the descriptions of other-direction as a critique of present-day conformity” (35). If Riesman was read in such a way, I wonder what the same readers would make of the inner-directed man as presented by

Wilson and Hawley? What I find noteworthy in these two inner-directed characters is that, while in some ways they appear to be superior personalities, superior businessmen, they are quite clearly inferior men in so many other ways. I will discuss Bullard first and then come back to

Hopkins, who is of course a direct contrast to our everyman of everymen, the man in the gray flannel suit himself.

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What makes Bullard the most compelling character in Executive Suite is that, almost from the very beginning, he exists more as a mythic figure than an actual person. The novel opens by describing Bullard’s death at “a minute or two after two-thirty on the afternoon of the twenty- second of June,” of a cerebral haemorrhage, noting that, “after fifty-six years, somewhere deep within the convoluted recesses of his brain, a tiny artery finally yielded to the insistent pounding of his hard-driven bloodstream” (1). We thus learn, before we learn anything else at all, that

Bullard has literally worked himself to death. What follows is not, as might be expected,

Bullard’s life in retrospect—a narrative that goes back to his early childhood and then moves forward in a more or less linear fashion until we reach this same moment as described on the first page—but rather an almost real-time account of the twenty four hours that follow Bullard’s death that focuses on the search for his replacement as the president of the Tredway Corporation. The novel then proceeds on something of a merry-go-round of focalization, shifting from one character to the next as a way of introducing each of Tredway’s five vice presidents as a potential replacement. The eventual winner, Don Walling, a trained architect in his forties who is among the youngest of the executives, eventually wins out against the seemingly villainous accountant Lauren Shaw, a man who appears to be so blinded by the raw numbers that it is impossible for him to see the human side of the corporation. In keeping with the spirit of the

1950s, Shaw proves to be not so villainous in the end and is so taken with Walling’s impassioned candidacy speech that he checks his own seemingly unbridled ambition and agrees with all the other (older) executives that Walling is indeed the true successor, another happy 1950s consensus. It may lack the number of dominoes that Tom’s happy turnaround knocks over, but the effect is the same, and I mention it here only to provide context.

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What I find in the character of Bullard that is of more interest for this study than the rest of Executive Suite is the sense given in the novel that he, or someone of his type, was necessary during the period leading up to the present, but that he both cannot and more importantly should not be replaced. I want to look at the contrast between the beginning of the novel, which features

Bullard, and the end which features new president Don Walling. After the first paragraph entailing Bullard’s death, the narrative moves backwards to replay Bullard’s final two hours.

These two hours see Bullard clandestinely interviewing a potential executive vice-president (the man who would be the next president of the corporation) and almost instantaneously determining that this man will not do, then making the snap decision to head back to company headquarters in

Pennsylvania. The final two pages that describe the living Bullard have him “broad- shoulder[ing] his way through the lobby crowd, driving himself with the self-perpetuating fire of his enormous energy,” with the further assertion that “as he passed, men and women looked up at him, not with recognition but because there was something in his face that commanded attention” (4). Everything about Bullard is meant to stand out, and everything he does has urgency. His eyes are “quick-roving,” ideas “flash” in his mind and he makes “brusque” commands (5). It is not surprising that his death comes in an instant as well.

Despite the fact that the actual death comes so early in the novel, its shadow, or more specifically Bullard’s shadow, hangs over the narrative until almost the very end. It becomes clear that it is impossible to replace Bullard with another such “Great Man,” conceivably because such a man no longer exists, but also, significantly, because the era can no longer support such a figure. Loren Shaw, the faux-villain of the novel, describes Bullard as an outmoded type of executive, one more concerned with control and the nuts and bolts of selling and manufacturing than with the financial matters that are the heart of the modern corporation. Shaw is, of course,

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far from wrong in this assertion, but the novel has no interest in making a hero out of a heartless bean counter when there is a daring young architect with a vision for an alternative. Thus Don

Walling gives the real eulogy on the Great Man in what can only be called his triumphant campaign speech. Walling explains that

[t]here was one thing that Avery Bullard never understood … He never realized that other

men had to be proud, too—that the force behind a great company had to be more than the

pride of one man—that it had to be the pride of thousands of men. A company is like an

Army—it fights on its pride. You can’t win wars with paychecks. In all the history of the

world there’s never been a great Army of mercenaries. You can’t pay a man enough to

make him lay down his life. He wants more than money. (335)

It is easy to see how Herbert Gold could make sarcastic comments about the rise of “groupy man” from such a speech, but what is also telling is the comparison to the military. Much as the

Navy of The Caine Mutiny is more than any individual, no matter how heroic or manly, a corporation is more than simply a “Great Man.” Executive Suite tries to have this both ways somewhat in that it suggests that Walling himself is a kind of “Great Man” figure—much more so than either Tom Rath or Willie Keith—but Walling’s difference from Bullard is still marked.

What is most clearly seen to be missing, indeed as deficient, in Bullard’s abruptly ended life is any semblance of balance. It is not coincidental that Bullard dies alone and that his death goes unremarked for several hours. We learn as the plot advances that Bullard has had a failed marriage, some kind of tumultuous and uncomfortable affair with the daughter of the former company president, and was very close with his secretary but had made no romantic overtures towards her. In a decade that places so much emphasis on domestic matters, it would appear that such things did not exist for Avery Bullard. The difference between Bullard and Walling, the

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novel is careful to emphasize, is that Walling has that stable domestic situation. He is happily married with children, and, as I alluded to above, the final scene of the novel presents a stark contrast to the opening scene, with Bullard’s abrupt and anonymous death. The novel’s end features Walling, but the focalization is actually given to his wife, Mary, and this appears to be done to emphasize her place in her husband’s life. Walling confides in Mary, giving her a

“boyish grin of confession” (345) and fittingly his first time spent in Bullard’s former office as the new president of the Tredway Corporation is with his wife at his side. The novel ends with the two “walk[ing] out together into the dark corridor” (346) and the contrast with Bullard is solidified. Perhaps only in the 1950s could a novel that is purportedly about “the competition, the challenges and the rewards that drive men to the top in American business” (back blurb) end with an affirmation of domestic contentment, but what is certainly apparent is that it is more appealing to be a Don Walling than it is to be an Avery Bullard.

The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit gives us neither a Don Walling nor an Avery Bullard, but it does give us another Great Man in the personage of Ralph Hopkins. Hopkins is in many ways Bullard’s antithesis: he is quiet and unassuming where Bullard is loud and domineering; he is deferential and polite to a fault where Bullard is brusque and somewhat rude; physically,

Hopkins is a very small man, dwarfed by someone like Tom Rath, whereas Bullard is bulky, and, well, bull-like. Yet Hopkins is nevertheless the same kind of figure as Bullard in that his entire identity is based upon what he does. Bullard is the Tredway Corporation and Hopkins is the

United Broadcasting Corporation, and many of the personal failures attributed to Bullard we can also see in Hopkins. Unlike Bullard, Hopkins is still married, but the marriage appears to be something of a sham. Mrs. Hopkins spends most of her time abroad or in the family’s South Bay residence, whereas Hopkins spends most of his time at his Manhattan apartment—an apartment

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which doubles as a second office, meaning Hopkins effectively never leaves work. As with

Bullard, the novel holds Hopkins in considerable esteem—he is clearly good at what he does and the novel argues that he deserves the money he makes—but, just as in Executive Suite, it is also clear that Hopkins is not to be emulated. Gray Flannel Suit makes this explicit when Tom is actually given the chance to do so. I want to examine one particular scene related to this and then will conclude this segment.

When Tom’s honesty bet pays off, it not only allows him to abandon his existentialist viewpoint, but also ingratiates him towards Hopkins. Hopkins seems so impressed with Tom’s direct approach that Tom soon receives a promotion, becoming Hopkins’ personal assistant.

Hopkins appears to be grooming Tom as his replacement, telling him, “a job should always keep you straining at the limits of your abilities. That’s the way men learn” (224). This is Hopkins’ philosophy, and the one, in the novel’s understanding that has made for Hopkins’ success in business. Yet Tom’s lukewarm response—he replies, “I guess it is”—is also telling. Hopkins offers to make Tom over in his own image, but Tom is unsure of the appeal of such a thing. He explains to Betsy: “I’m not a very good administrator … I never will be, and the main reason is, I don’t want to be. This sounds a silly way to put it, but I don’t think you can be a top administrator without working every week end for half your life, and I’d just as soon spend my week ends with you and the kids” (227).

This statement, which calls for a balance between work and domestic life, but which more importantly stakes identity on something other than business success, is the defining characteristic of Wilson’s novel and is, I would argue, the idea that lies behind the caricature of the gray flannel-suited man. While the caricature served to define and stereotype the anonymous business executive of the era, all the suit really is, as Tom muses to himself in the early stages of

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the novel, is “the uniform of the day,” and while that uniform helps to identity Tom’s occupation, it does not define its wearer’s identity. Tom, in his refusal to emulate Hopkins, is refusing to have his attire be more than a uniform. When Tom notes early on that of his four worlds, the one that includes his family is “the only one worth a damn” he is stating it in a somewhat wishful fashion. In turning down Hopkins’ offer for a more powerful business position, Tom is legitimating this earlier claim.

Thus, in some ways the novel’s climactic moment comes when Hopkins proposes to give

Tom a heady position in Los Angeles. Tom flatly refuses, telling Hopkins “I’m just not the kind of guy who can work evenings and week ends and all the rest of it forever … I’m not the kind of person who can get all wrapped up in a job—I can’t get myself convinced that my work is the most important thing in the world” (251). What is so striking in Tom’s honesty is not so much that Tom is admitting his lack of ambition, but that he is saying this to Hopkins, a man for whom work is the most important thing in the world. Tom is essentially reproving Hopkins for living his life with work as the only priority and the novel—which puts Tom’s happy family life in relief of Hopkins’ sham marriage, gadabout socialite daughter, and Hopkins’ own failing health—reinforces this condemnation. Hopkins strikes back, shouting, “Somebody has to do the big jobs! … This world was built by men like me! To really do a job, you have to live it, body and soul! You people who just give half your mind to your work are riding on our backs!” (252, emphasis in text). Tom agrees with Hopkins on this, but the outcome of the narrative—again look to the quotation from Franzen above—would seem to disagree. Tom is able to be successful and content in his life not despite his refusal to be like Hopkins, but seemingly because of it. It is certainly possible that someone had to do the big jobs in the past, but in an era of organization

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men and other-directed men, this may no longer be true. As such, the Great Man who sacrifices everything for his business is respected as an historical figure, but his way is not the 1950s’ way.

In terms of the post-realist paradigm, what is interesting about this rejection of the Great

Man narrative is that it really does suggest a striving for a universal middle class. It suggests that structure, such as within a corporation or an organization like the military, is an effective replacement for the striving individual. We can see this not only in the two texts mentioned here but also in two of the war novels. In The Caine Mutiny the bumbling Queeg’s horrible leadership is ultimately insignificant, as the system will simply replace him with someone more competent.

While Keith makes a good final captain of the Caine there is no suggestion that his suitability for captain is due to anything beyond general competence. And given that Keith plans to leave the

Navy after the war it is clear that no special sacrifice is being demanded of him. Even in a more deterministic novel like The Naked and the Dead the narrative of the Great Man is rejected.

Cummings’ machinations come to nought and Hearn, who briefly plays Tom to Cummings’

Hastings, rejects the implied offer to become the general much as Tom rejects becoming

Hastings in favour of, effectively, middle management. Hearn is certainly not rewarded for his choice in the way that the other characters discussed above are, but the pattern of our archetypal character rejecting the earlier model of success holds. For the post-realist 1950s there is nothing all that great about being a Great Man. However, the suggestion that not working too much is the secret to success is put into question by the novels in the following section.

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i The enduring image of the man in the gray flannel suit may come from the movie of that title as much as from the novel, and the movie, as movies are wont to do, provides a simplified version of the events in the novel. ii As Crow’s larger study suggests, almost no genre of American fiction is all that far removed from the Gothic.

Crow traces elements of the Gothic forward from Poe to Hawthorne and Melville, points out that the Gothic also features prominently in the realism of Howells and Twain, makes an obvious presence in the modernism of

Faulkner, in the poetry of Plath, and in the noir fiction of Hammett, Chandler and Ross Macdonald. iii It should be noted that for a novel that speaks a good deal about mental health, the mental health of its principal character goes largely unexamined. The novel has something of an antagonistic relationship to psychoanalysis

(much like The Caine Mutiny), and much work could be done on the psychology of characters like Tom Rath and

Ralph Hopkins. While this is not the direction I intend to take here, I do want to call attention to it. iv Chatterjee argues, “[i]t is from Hegel, however, that the more immediate history of existential thought finds its take-off point, and by way of rebound. Hegel, or rather how they saw him, represented all that the existentialists decried, that is, seeing logic as the key to reality assuming that the real is rational, adhering to a form of idealism which saw nature as the objectification of sprit, a view of history which seemed to justify the actual course of events, an immanenentist philosophy which apparently nullified individual effort” (19). v Again, if we look to From Here to Eternity, we can see the perceived folly in trying to create a normalized existence from this kind of relationship. vi There are, of course, exceptions. Theodore Dreiser was interested in a Great Man (Frank Cowperwood) in his

Financier series.

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PART III

“DOOMED WILLY-NILLY”: NATURALISM AND THE SUBURB NOVEL

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Chapter 5

What We Have Here is a Failure to Domesticate: Urban Life as Death and Decay in Seize

the Day

With the possible exception of The Naked and the Dead, Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day is the most critically discussed novel in this study. Critics have focused seemingly on every aspect of the short text, from Jewish traditionsi to the novel’s place in Bellow’s greater oeuvre.ii There has even been some suggestioniii of Bellow’s employment of naturalism. But my interest in the text lies not in the mysterious figure of Dr. Tamkin, nor, primarily, on Tommy Wilhelm’s dysfunctional relationship with his father (the focus of much of the criticism on the novel), but rather on Wilhelm’s complex and ambivalent relationship with the suburban domestic ideal. It is my contention that the novel’s naturalism lies in its suggestion that, no matter how much

Wilhelm desires the kind of domestic contentment that Tom Rath is able to achieve, his status as an outsider to mainstream middle-class masculinity is incompatible with such a scenario.

Tommy is a tragic figure because there is no place in modern American society for him: he cannot regain access to the suburban ideal and his Manhattan existence finds him amongst relics and decay. In terms of the post-realist narrative that we have seen in the novels from the previous two chapters, Wilhelm would like nothing more than to banish his past to irrelevance, but his inability to fit into the post-realist mould will not allow him this deliverance. He is, then, the opposite of the everyman in that he is the nowhere man.

It is worth briefly going over the plot and gambit of Seize the Day to explain exactly what makes Wilhelm this nowhere man figure. Seize the Day is a pun on the cliché of its title, as the entire novella takes place, with the exception of the occasional out-of-time flashback, in the course of a single day. During this one day we follow the rather pathetic existence of Tommy

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Wilhelm, a laid-off salesman who “had once been an actor—no, not quite, an extra” (1) but who now resides in the Hotel Gloriana where his father also lives. As the novel describes, “most of the guests at the Hotel Gloriana were past the age of retirement [and] among these old people at the Gloriana, Wilhelm felt out of place, in his middle forties, large and blond, with big shoulders; his back heavy and strong, if already a little stooped or thickened” (1-2). This idea of “out of place” will quickly become the central theme of the text with Wilhelm’s firm belief that where he belongs is in a sort of suburban domestic environment with others of his generation, but what

I argue is that Wilhelm is in fact out of place in every situation, unwanted where he desires to be, and unfit for where he is. Wilhelm’s lack of fit is reinforced in the early description above. His girth and apparent youthful vigour (even if he is in his middle forties) are a stark contrast to the geriatrics that surround him, but they also belie his character, which does nothing to suggest strength. Unlike the various other large male figures that we have seen in this study (from

Mailer’s Wilson to Milt Warden to Tom Rath) there is nothing in Wilhelm that suggests power or robust masculinity. Despite his “striking looks” (4) his Hollywood career had been a failure— once the process went beyond the superficial Wilhelm’s lack of talent became apparent.

At the beginning of the novel, after the initial description of Wilhelm being a physically imposing figure is given, Wilhelm regards himself in a glass cupboard. The image he sees is telling:

A wide wrinkle like a comprehensive bracket sign was written upon his forehead, the

point between his brows, and there were patches of brown on his dark-blond skin. He

began to be half amused at the shadow of his own marveling, troubled, desirous eyes, and

his nostrils, and his lips. Fair-haired hippopotamus!—that was how he looked to himself.

He saw a big round face, a wide, flourishing red mouth, stump teeth. And the hat, too;

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and the cigar, too. I should have done hard labor that tires you out and makes you sleep.

I’d have worked my energy off and felt better. (4)

What is interesting about Wilhelm’s view of himself is how it is unclear and disjointed. He seems unable to view himself in any sort of completeness; instead we get bizarre close-ups of certain facial features: nostrils rather than a nose, a mouth with stump teeth. Even the conclusions that Wilhelm draws from this self-examination are inconclusive. He calls himself a fair-haired hippopotamus and hints that this unflattering portrait has been accomplished from a lack of proper labour—perhaps we could see him as Milt Warden domesticated—but the associations he makes are too obtuse to properly determine much from them. What is immediately clear, however, is Wilhelm’s considerable self-loathing. This in and of itself is not so different from what we see at times from Tom Rath or Prewitt, but something about

Wilhelm’s self-loathing feels deeper-seated, as if it is not merely a problem to be overcome; it is, rather, an inevitable consequence of just who Wilhelm is.

Just who Wilhelm is appears to be the novel’s central question, and as I have noted above it appears that he is no one, a figure who exists somehow outside of his surroundings. Perhaps the closest the novel comes to establishing a definite identity for Wilhelm is in his attempted career as an actor. Wilhelm is recruited by a sort of sham-agent (further establishing the vulnerability to hucksters that proves to be his undoing by the novel’s end) named Maurice

Venice. The recruitment is based entirely on Wilhelm’s good looks—Venice notes he takes

“quite a remarkable picture” (17)—, but when Venice tries to determine the type of role Wilhelm is suited for, he can only list types that Wilhelm would not fit. Wilhelm is “not a George Raft type … those tough, smooth, black little characters” nor is he “that flyweight type, with the fists from a nightclub, and the glamorous sideburns, doing the tango or the bolero” (17). Venice

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continues, “thinking aloud;” Wilhelm is “not Edward G. Robinson either … or the Cagney fly- in-your face role, a cabbie, with that mouth and those punches” (17). After even more descriptions of what Wilhelm is not, Venice finally settles upon the proper type:

I have you placed as the type that loses the girl to the George Raft type or the William

Powell type. You are steady, faithful, you get stood up. The older women would know

better. The mothers are on your side. With what they been through, if it was up to them,

they’d take you in a minute. You’re very sympathetic, even the young girls feel that.

You’d make a good provider. But they go more for other types. It’s as clear as anything.

(18)

There are a few things to take away from this description. One is that Wilhelm is again defined by what he is not, and for what he is unable to maintain. Another is the reference to mothers, and as we know from Philip Wylie and “Momism,” being closely associated with “mom” puts one’s masculinity into question. But the final assertion, that Wilhelm would “make a good provider” is an interesting one, because it looks to define him in very Fifties terms. We see Tom Rath as being principally motivated by this idea of providing for his family, and we will see the struggle that Frank Wheeler has with this idea of no longer being the family provider. That Wilhelm is seen to suit this role would suggest that he makes a typical 1950s everyman character, but the key here is in the conditional. Wilhelm would make a good provider, but the problem is that he loses the girl (he gets divorced) while still having to provide for her. Once again the novel places

Wilhelm in a double bind where he is ill suited for what he wishes to obtain, and what he conceivably could obtain is withheld from him.

In the present of the novel, where most of its action takes place, Wilhelm blames his

Hollywood experience for his current troubles, believing that it held him back in getting the start

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in life he needed—and given that Wilhelm is in his forties there is something to be said for this idea of delayed development. Yet, within Wilhelm’s recollection of his Hollywood period we see the same issue present itself. He looks the part of a Hollywood actor, but a screen test quickly betrays him. He has a stammer that comes off badly on film and moreover “the film showed that he had many peculiarities, otherwise unnoticeable” (20). It is as if being filmed reveals

Wilhelm’s true deficient self, rather than affirms his perceived strength and presence. On film,

“the vault of his chest was huge, but he really didn’t look strong under the lights. Though he called himself a hippopotamus, he more nearly resembled a bear. His walk was bearlike, quick and rather soft, toes turned inward, as though his shoes were an impediment” (20). Again there are many contradictions apparent here. Not only is Wilhelm huge without being strong, he is somehow able to resemble a bear but convey no strength; instead his resemblance to a bear most emphasizes the idea of his being out of place, a bear in shoes made to act like a man. Hollywood is often used as shorthand for superficial, but in this case Wilhelm’s attempt to make it in

Hollywood reveals the superficiality of his own identity.

That superficiality is revealed in Wilhelm’s very name, which he changed to Tommy

Wilhelm when he moved to Hollywood. Wilhelm’s familial last name is Adler, which speaks to his Jewishness (something I will discuss at the end of this chapter), and to his father. Wilhelm is his first name, however, he is not known to his father as Wilhelm or Tommy, but rather as

“Wilky”. Wilhelm discusses his decision to cast off his identity as Wilky in a revealing passage that I will quote at length:

Wilhelm had always had a great longing to be Tommy. He had never, however,

succeeded in feeling like Tommy, and in his soul had always remained Wilky. When he

was drunk he reproached himself horribly as Wilky. “You fool, you clunk, you Wilky!”

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he called himself. He thought that it was a good thing perhaps that he had not become a

success as Tommy since that would not have been a genuine success. Wilhelm would

have feared that not he but Tommy had brought it off, cheating Wilky of his birthright.

Yes, it had been a stupid thing to do, but it was his imperfect judgment at the age of

twenty which should be blamed. He had cast off his father’s name, and with it his father’s

opinion of him. It was, he knew it was, his bid for liberty, Adler being in his mind the

title of the species, Tommy the freedom of the person. But Wilky was his inescapable

self. (21)

Again, leaving the important question of Wilhelm’s Jewishness to the side for the moment, what comes across strongly from this passage is this sense of the unattainable. Wilhelm makes the choice, it would appear, to “cast off his father’s name,” which is apparently successful as it serves to detach his father from him, as is made manifest within the plot. He succeeds, then, in removing one aspect of his identity, the Jewish, hereditary one that should be his by birthright, but he fails, in his inability to “feel like Tommy” to replace this lost identity with his chosen new one. He remains only Wilky, a nickname with neither a proper given name nor a surname. This once again reinforces Wilhelm’s non-identity, for a Wilky appears to not be a person so much as a character trait: a fool, a clunk, a Wilky.

Further reinforcing the idea that Wilhelm is the no-man figure is the fact that he is estranged from everything that the 1950s everyman can claim as his by the very fact of his existence. If we were to look at these characteristics as the three pillars of domestic contentment, they would be work, home, and family. The conflict in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit is in creating equilibrium between these three facets of a man’s life, and the novel’s ending is able to be a happy one because Tom is successful in achieving this equilibrium. These three pillars also

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feature prominently in Revolutionary Road, but their role in Seize the Day is unique because

Wilhelm, rather than struggling for balance between the three instead finds that he is cut off from all of them. Each estrangement further reinforces his non-existence in the world that surrounds him, and the fact that he is so completely cut off from what he feels should define him threatens to consume Wilhelm. Because of this estrangement from where he should be, he finds himself where he does not belong, with the result being that he is playing a game without any knowledge of the game’s rules.

I want to look at Wilhelm’s relationship to each of these pillars separately before finishing with some surmises on what Wilhelm’s permanent displacement is saying both about

1950s culture and about the place of a non-WASP character within it. The least complex of these relationships, as often seems to be the case in these stories, is the one Wilhelm has with his work.

Much like Willy Loman, Wilhelm was in sales, but his job is somewhat less pathetic.iv He was the northeastern salesperson for the Rojax Corporation, a manufacturing corporation that makes, as Dr. Adler describes, “kiddies’ furniture. Little chairs, rockers, tables, jungle gyms, slides, swings, seesaws” (31). While Wilhelm’s job in sales suggests something other than the lonely crowd anonymous office worker—he spent his time on the road making sales calls—his position within the corporation becomes compromised because of the same kind of corporate politics that

Whyte feared in The Organization Man. Wilhelm explains to his father’s friend that he and the corporation “parted ways” through a dispute over his territory. According to Wilhelm, “the rationalization was that it was too big a territory for one man. I had a monopoly. That wasn’t so.

The real reason was that they had gotten to the place where they would have to make me an officer of the corporation. Vice Presidency. I was in line for it, but instead this son-in-law got in”

(32). Wilhelm’s understanding here is that he loses his job over a matter of principle, and that he

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is a victim of nepotism, but what is also evident here is his failure to understand how the organization works. What Tom Rath understands is that there is a place for everyone within the corporation as long as one knows where one belongs, and that one is imminently replaceable.

The idea behind the faceless man in the uniform of the gray flannel suit is that he is interchangeable. Wilhelm somehow believes that he can resist the corporation, that he is not replaceable and of course because of this belief he is replaced. His being replaced serves only to compound his problems, however, in that in and of itself his lack of employment is not the main issue.

All Wilhelm’s problems are connected, and they are all to do with his forced displacement to New York. The issue of his lack of employment is compounded by his estrangement from his wife, who places many demands on Wilhelm for money. I will speak more of Wilhelm’s domestic estrangement in a moment, but I want to look first of all at his haphazard plan for making money: playing the stock market. Seize the Day takes an interesting view of the market, in that it is not portrayed as a sight of frenetic activity as is usually the case, but rather it is portrayed, like the rest of Midtown Manhattan, as a place of gradual but unrelenting decay. Wilhelm’s removal to New York appears to present him with a fortuitous opportunity to escape this entanglement through playing the market, but it is quickly revealed that a “fellow in [his] position” is ill-suited to the stock market.

When Wilhelm visits the market with Dr. Tamkin we are at first greeted with the usual descriptions of the New York Stock Exchange. The two enter “the narrow crowded theater of the brokerage office” which “from front to back … was filled with the Broadway crowd” (74). The office is extremely busy, there is a bustle to the activity, but Wilhelm’s focus is on the inhabitants who least resemble him. He sits down with Tamkin and sees “an old Chinese

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businessman in a seersucker coat. Smooth and fat, he wore a white Vandyke” and then “two women in their fifties, supposed to be sisters, shrewd and able money-makers” (75). Wilhelm sits

“between Mr. Rowland, who was elderly, and Mr. Rappaport, who was very old” (76).

Wilhelm’s focus within the market is mainly on the age of those around him, the “elderly, and the “very old,” and with how their situations are completely removed from his own. Mr.

Rowland has apparently “followed the market for the rest of his life” and is “without dependents” (76). Mr. Rappaport, whom Tamkin calls “the Rockefeller of the chicken business” and who had “retired with a large fortune” (81) is nearly blind and appears to Wilhelm to be in a state of active decay. Wilhelm remarks to himself: “How old—old this Mr. Rappaport was!

Purple stains were buried in the flesh of his nose, and the cartilage of his ear was twisted like a cabbage heart. Beyond remedy by glasses, his eyes were smoky and faded” (82). For Wilhelm,

Rappaport represents the inescapable paradox of modern existence. The man is practically an invalid, nearly helpless and seemingly too fragile and vulnerable to even be in a place like

Manhattan. Yet Manhattan is very much Rappaport’s domain in the way it can never be for

Wilhelm. Wilhelm explains the paradox as he is forced to accompany Rappaport to a store to buy cigars:

He barely crawls along … His pants are dropping off because he hasn’t got enough flesh

for them to stick to. He’s almost blind, and covered with spots, but this old man still

makes money in the market. Is loaded with dough, probably. And I bet he doesn’t give

his children any. Some of them must be in their fifties. This is what keeps middle-aged

men as children. He’s master over the dough. Think—just think! Who controls

everything? Old men of this type. Without needs. They don’t need therefore they have. I

need, therefore I don’t have. That would be too easy. (97)

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Much of what Wilhelm is musing on in this passage pertains to fate and his belief that it is against him, but what is also evident is his belief that the market is not for people like him. It is, rather, restricted to the aged “without needs,” who understand its codes. For the middle-class

“organization” men—and interestingly there are no entries in Whyte’s The Organization Man for

“stock exchange,” “market,” or “Wall Street”—the market is a foreign and unfriendly place that they may visit but never feel at home within. It is unsurprising that Wilhelm fails in playing the market because of his insistence that he is out of place within it. His resistance to being what he apparently should be, the organization man, becomes a futile effort because of his complete failure to find another source of income. We can see the naturalistic qualities of the novel here, as the middle-class corporate existence seems to be an inevitability, and we can also see the post- realist foreclosing of anything that does not fit with its dominant narrative.

As I noted above, employment is but one of the three pillars of the middle-class everyman existence from which Wilhelm is cut off. The second of these is the nuclear family.

Wilhelm has two sons and an estranged wife still living in the suburbs. He pays child support to his wife, but his interactions with his sons are now more like limited visitations. If we recall from

Tom Rath’s four worlds, the one that Rath held in the most esteem, indeed the one that he called

“the only one worth a damn” is the familial world. If we continue with the comparison to Tom

Rath, the balance that Rath is able to achieve is predicated on keeping his Manhattan corporate existence (which by the end of the novel has been cut out entirely as Tom is somehow able to work blocks from his suburban home), entirely removed from his existence with his wife and children at a home. For Wilhelm, who has no employment, there is no chance for such a separation. Worse, in Wilhelm’s case, his domestic family is replaced by his aged father who expresses only contempt and a slight amount of pity for his son.

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The relationship between Wilhelm and his father, Dr. Adler, comes up in most scholarship on the novel.v What is interesting from the perspective of Wilhelm’s position as an everyman is how it reverses the position someone like him would normally be in. In the 1950s model of suburban domesticity, the husband works and the wife stays at home with the children—in every novel in this study we see some variation of this model; even in The Naked and the Dead the Time Machine sequences often hearken back to some kind of domestic scene— with the husband’s task being to provide for his family. Yet Wilhelm finds himself, with no job, unable to provide for his family and worse a supplicant to his own father. He comments himself on this unnatural situation, interpreting his father to be telling him, “why are you here in a hotel with me and not at home in Brooklyn with your wife and two boys? You’re neither a widower nor a bachelor” (24). Once again what is emphasized is what Wilhelm is not; he is defined by negation. Rather than being a head of household within a suburban domestic environment,

Wilhelm lives with his father in an urban hotel setting. His room is his own, but its function appears to be something like a child’s room within his parents’ home. We have a telling description of Dr. Adler’s visit to “Wilky’s” room:

Only once—and never again, he swore, had he visited his room. Wilhelm, in pyjamas and

stockings had sat on his bed, drinking gin from a coffee mug and rooting for the Dodgers

on television. “That’s two and two on you, Duke. Come on—hit it, now.” He came down

on the mattress—bam! The bed looked kicked to pieces. Then he drank the gin as though

it were tea, and urged his team on with his fist. The smell of dirty clothes was outrageous.

By the bedside lay a quart bottle and foolish magazines and mystery stories for the hours

of insomnia. Wilhelm lived in worse filth than a savage. When the doctor spoke to him

about this he answered, “Well, I have no wife to look after my things.” (33)

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Evident in this passage is the doctor’s disapproval of Wilhelm’s behaviour and his lifestyle. He sees his son as a slovenly teenaged boy who will not amount to anything. Dr. Adler disapproves not only of Wilhelm’s unkemptness but also of his choice of leisurely pursuits: “foolish magazines” and a frivolous interest in baseball. The out-of-control drinking also suggests a teenage lack of self-restraint. Also telling is Wilhelm’s assertion that he lives this way because he has no wife to look after his things. The middle-class man removed from his domestic environment and family responsibilities, the novel suggests, reverts to adolescent slovenliness.

Yet, much like Wilhelm seems not to understand his place in the corporate world—in that he believes himself to be in a much better bargaining position than he is—he misunderstands his place as head of the family. His desperate attempts at a quick financial fix are motivated by his ex-wife’s demands that he support her and the couple’s sons. This inability or unwillingness to comprehend the reality of his situation, and the futility of his resistance to the corporate-domestic model, is perfectly voiced in the conversation Wilhelm has with his ex-wife near the end of the novel. His wife suggests that Wilhelm go back to his old job with the Rojax Corporation.

Wilhelm responds, “Rojax take me back? I’d have to crawl back. They don’t need me. After so many years I should have got stock in the firm. How can I support the three of you, and live myself, on half the territory? And why should I even try when you won’t lift a finger to help”

(108-09). The answers to Wilhelm’s questions appear to be: I cannot and I should not. By leaving his firm and separating from his wife, Wilhelm has abandoned the successful model followed by Tom Rath. Wilhelm’s admission that his job would offer him less now than it did when he left is an admission that he never should have left. He cannot support his family and

“live [him]self” on what he would make, which suggests that it was folly to think that he could live a life separately from his family. The inflexibility of this domestic model is reinforced when

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Wilhelm suggests that his wife get a job. She responds, “absolutely not. I’m not going to have two young children running loose” (109). The idea here is that it is unthinkable for a family in their situation to have the mother working. Thus, the 1950s values that seem to work to build up the middle class are the ones that repress Wilhelm. His inability to escape from the model (if that is even what he wants, as we shall explore further on) results in his forced habitation in

Manhattan, which he likens to captivity in a strange and alien world.

The strange and alien world of Manhattan is likely the most striking in the novel’s defamiliarization of certain American familiarities. While the New York that Tom Rath works in is filled with hurried businessmen going from office to lunch to meetings, Wilhelm’s is filled with the aged and the decaying. Even though he inhabits the place, he is unable to see it as anything familiar. He tells his father, “I’m not used to New York any more. For a native, that’s very peculiar, isn’t it? It was never so noisy as now, and every little thing is a strain” (29). While

Wilhelm notes that it is “peculiar” that he no longer feels at home in New York, it is in keeping with the idea that men in his position do not belong in the city. The city is either for the young hoodlums or the old. For the middle, the suburbs are home. Wilhelm’s perspective that he is meant to be in the suburbs, rather than the inner-city, is interesting in that it contrasts with the ideas of people like Riesman and Whyte, who bemoaned the growth of suburbia at the expense of the inner-city, and contrasts to the Wheelers in Revolutionary Road, and, to some extent, even to the Raths. As Jurca explains, the suburbs are usually portrayed as a place from which to escape, rather than a place to which one escapes. Wilhelm tells his father, repeating an earlier refrain, “I can’t take city life any more, and I miss the country. There’s too much push here for me. It works me up too much. I take things too hard. I wonder why you never retired to a quieter

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place” (41). Again, the sentiment here is that Wilhelm does not belong in the city, that it is at once too young and too old for him, while somehow it works for the older generation.

In laying out how Wilhelm is displaced from the suburban domesticity that he feels is his right I have deliberately avoided discussion of literary naturalism within Seize the Day. I have done this because I do not wish to belabour the point, nor do I wish to insist that every element of the novella falls into the realm of naturalism. The story itself seems torn between blaming

Wilhelm’s own poor decision making—or perhaps his fatalistic tendency to make the wrong decision at every important juncture—and blaming the larger societal forces that have placed

Wilhelm in this situation, with his Jewish identity playing a large role in this element. In concluding this section I want to look at both of these perspectives, arguing that naturalism is always in the background of what occurs.

Looking at Wilhelm’s poor choices first, there are really four specific incidents that the novel suggests lead to his complete emotional breakdown by the novel’s end: the first is the decision to go to Hollywood and try to be an actor; the second is his decision to leave his wife and children behind in the pursuit of another woman; the third is his decision to part with the

Rojax Corporation over a territory dispute; and the fourth is his decision to entrust Dr. Tamkin with his remaining savings in order to play the commodities market. I have deliberately used the word “decision” in all cases because the novel does portray Wilhelm as the author of his own demise. In each case, Wilhelm seems to weigh the odds on each decision and, perversely, makes the wrong choice. An example of this can be seen when Wilhelm reflects on his decision to go to

Hollywood:

Still, for three months Wilhelm delayed his trip to California. He wanted to start out with

the blessings of his family, but they were never given. He quarreled with his parents and

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his sister. And then, when he was best aware of the risks and knew a hundred reasons

against going and had made himself sick with fear, he left home. This was typical of

Wilhelm. After much thought and hesitation and debate he invariably took the course he

had rejected innumerable times. Ten such decisions made up the history of his life. He

had decided it would be a bad mistake to go to Hollywood, and then he went. He had

made up his mind not to marry his wife, but ran off and got married. He had resolved not

to invest money with Tamkin, and then he had given him a check. (19)

What is interesting about Wilhelm’s decision-making process is that it defies rationality.

Wilhelm consciously rejects the course of action that considered thought tells him to be correct.

The novel offers no real explanation for why Wilhelm does such things, other than a suggestion that he lets his emotions control him—he speculates that his father refuses to loan him money in order to teach him that “a grown man should be cured of such feeling” and that “feelings got me in dutch at Rojax. I had the feeling that I belonged to the firm, and my feelings were hurt when they put Gerber in over me” (53, emphasis in text). There is then a case for the classic/romantic dichotomy and that it is Wilhelm’s romanticismvi that causes him to make these poor choices.

The novel’s very title, Seize the Day, is a very romantic notion, but its use is quite ironic.

Wilhelm is in fact the kind of individual for whom it is impossible to “seize the day,” and as such there is a suggestion that something more than the classic/romantic dichotomy is at play here.

I want to take a brief aside here to look at some of the discourse surrounding naturalism’s place in what I will hesitatingly call the postmodern era. When naturalism as a mode of writing is said to have originated in Europe in the mid-nineteenth century it took its cues from Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species with the idea that much in human behaviour is biologically determined, and as such free will is largely an illusion (Lehan 47). As Louis Budd points out in “The

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American Background,” American naturalist authors took to these ideas, and the interpretation of them by Herbert Spencer, and looked to incorporate them into their works of fiction, believing in

“a system of interrelated ‘forces’ [which] guides an evolutionary sweep upward” (29). What separated naturalists like Dreiser and Norris from exponents of realism like Howells was their interest in this pseudo-scientific system of forces. Without belabouring the point, I want to note the biological emphasis in the early naturalist novels. While naturalism is, I think correctly, defined both as an historical period and as a mode of writing, the way a text works as naturalistic certainly evolves over time. Richard Lehan makes this argument while also suggesting that naturalism ended with World War II. As he explains:

[A] theory of modes helps us to see the limits within which the literary imagination

works: it moves the focus away from the idea of the creative genius and the total

subjectivity of the critic to the idea of a literary “reality” which precedes the text. Such an

effort, I believe, cannot be transhistorical … but must be firmly historical, showing

precisely how literary naturalism emerged from its culture as an idea and became one of

the shared assumptions of the time. It must show what cultural needs brought it into being

and what changing cultural needs allowed it to die. (50)

Leaving Lehan’s assertion about the death of literary naturalism aside for the moment, I want to focus on this idea of a mode emerging from its culture. My study is obviously very invested in this idea (in terms of post-realism’s emergence in postwar American society and literature), but what my study also wants to emphasize is that a literary mode does not so much die and have something new take its place as much as cultural changes cause the mode to adapt and change to fit better with its time. As such, it makes sense that we will not find works of literary naturalism obsessed with biological determinism coming out of 1950s America, where such a topic was not

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exactly de rigeur. I do not think, however, that a work needs to be principally interested in biological determinism in order for us to call it a work of naturalism. There is a certain sense of the inevitable that naturalist texts display, as well as a sense that the individual is not entirely, or even minutely, the shaper of his own destiny, that I think is shared in these works of the 1950s. I also think it is possible to say that some of the shared assumptions of the 1950s—as displayed by the glut of sociological studies dedicated to conformity and the organization—suggest a certain degree of determinism in regards to how an American life was supposed to play out. I want to look at one more comment from Lehan before bringing this all back into context with Seize the

Day.

According to Lehan, when literary naturalism “died” at the end of World War II it gave way to postmodernism, which was concerned with culture in a new way. He argues that “as a way of seeing, postmodernism undoes the naturalistic emphasis upon the biological while delimiting the notion of environment to a system of institutions held together by constructed forms of power” (67). For Lehan this attention to constructed forms of power is incompatible with the focus on nature that exists within naturalism, but what I want to argue is that these

1950s texts that I am defining as naturalistic represent an intersection of the two. If we look at how Lehan describes the naturalistic hero we can see something of the intersection I am talking about. “The naturalistic hero,” Lehan explains, “is usually inarticulate, devoid of deep subjectivity and moral reflection, subject to poverty and suffering, the product of his biological makeup and immediate environment, and the victim of an inevitable sequence of events usually triggered by mechanistic forms of chance” (66). What is interesting about Lehan’s description is that it both does and does not describe Tommy Wilhelm. Wilhelm is subject to poverty and suffering, seems to be the product of his biological makeup and immediate environment, yet is

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filled with deep subjectivity and moral reflection. He also seems to be the victim of a sequence of events, but the text suggests that he is perhaps the orchestrator of said events. His position and his downfall are both products of his time and it would suggest that Seize the Day as a novel might be called “postmodern naturalism”vii if one were so inclined. I am not going to call it that, but I do want to point out that the naturalistic elements contained within it feature a distinctive

1950s inflection.

As I have argued above, most everything that seems inevitable about Wilhelm’s fall has to do with his going against what could be called the natural flow that leads to success as defined in 1950s America. He inhabits a place that is ill-suited for him; it is not his natural environment, and he tries to earn income in a way that is also far from natural to him, as can be seen in the contrast between those who make money in commodities and Wilhelm. Wilhelm longs so much for his life “in the country,” which is how suburban living is described, that he sounds almost like a creature in a zoo longing to escape. Even Wilhelm’s frequent berating of himself often takes animal form, as he shouts “Ass! Idiot! Wild Boar! Dumb mule! Slave! Lousy, wallowing hippopotamus!” (52) at himself in frustration. He is like an animal, driven by feelings and blind passions and unable to do what is rationally best for him. Yet, what must also be remembered is that this natural flow that Wilhelm goes against is of course a societal construct. The large organization and the way it operates and operates upon those who work within it are twentieth- century constructions, as is the idea that the middle class should inhabit the suburbs. What Seize the Day seems to be implying with Wilhelm’s fall is that the societal forces at play in making up the norm for American society are so strong that trying to go against them is not only unnatural but also virtually impossible. We are reminded once more of the line I have quoted repeatedly from Mailer’s “The White Negro,” that one is doomed willy-nilly to conform if one is to

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succeed. For Tommy Wilhelm, the irony is that he wishes to conform, but somehow his own nature prevents it. Within this inability to conform may be a comment about Wilhelm’s somewhat disguised “Other” status.

Wilhelm’s “Other” status is in the background throughout the novel. His overly emotional state sets him apart from the masculine ideal of the time, as Michael Glenday argues in “Some Versions of the Real.” Commenting on Wilhelm’s tears in the novella’s final scene,

Glenday says that the tears “at the end are an expression of his inability to live within a reality that is contemptuous of their shedding” (193). Glenday sees the novel as commenting on “the crisis afflicting American reality. Wilhelm’s ‘reality’ is made up of despair, confusion, loneliness, and failure; this is his ‘real reality,’ the bottom line, ‘obvious and palpable’ in the suffering it inflicts upon him” (196). Thus, the reality of 1950s America has no place for someone like Wilhelm to exist within it. But, and this is the question that the novel, and its particular place in history, asks: who exactly is someone like Wilhelm and what about him makes him “Other”? As I have noted above, there are many articles that make note of Wilhelm’s

Jewishness and Bellow’s own relationship to Jewish tradition, but it is unclear whether

Wilhelm’s Jewishness on its own gives him “Other” status. At this particular point in history

Jewish Americans appeared to be undergoing something of a transitional period.viii In To Be

Suddenly White Steven Belluscio discusses “the well-documented racial in-betweenness of

Jewish Americans and Italian Americans” and he argues that this in-betweenness was “as much a barrier as a motivator to assimilation” (7). However, Belluscio also argues that “both ethnic groups would fully join the ranks of white America in the increased social, educational, and economic opportunity of the post-World War II era” (7, my emphasis). While I think there can be some debate over whether these groups would fully “join the ranks of white America” in the

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immediate postwar era, if we look at Wilhelm in terms of just the factors that Belluscio lists—

“social, educational, and economic opportunity”—there is little to suggest that Wilhelm’s

Jewishness has adversely affected him in any of these areas. He has had opportunity, he has achieved some level of monetary success, and his wife is a gentile. Yet, what seems to affect him, what seems to make him out-of-place, is his symbolic rejection of his Jewish identity.

I say symbolic because there is much scholarship that suggests Wilhelm does indeed have a Jewish identity. S. Lillian Kremer describes him as a “schmiel,” a “stock comic figure in

Yiddish literature and drama” an “awkward bungler, behaving in a foolhardy manner, accruing mishaps as he drifts from situation to situation” (158). Gaye McCollum Simmons describes the day in question as “Tommy Wilhelm’s decidedly Jewish experience of atonement” (170) and notes how the atonement Wilhelm seeks has to do with his “experience as a Jew in exile” (172).

Simmons also makes an argument that I wish to appropriate for my own purposes here. Wilhelm himself describes his rejection of his father’s name “his first great mistake” (17) and Simmons keys on this mistake, arguing that “by exchanging his name for stardom, he has chosen to separate himself again and again from any kind of community. In leaving his family (mother, father, sister, wife, and sons) and walking away from both college and a job, Tommy has abandoned any opportunity to find a place within a community of fellow human beings” (172-

73). What Simmons is arguing here speaks to the symbolic rejection of Wilhelm’s Jewish identity that I mention above. His chosen name is nothing but a façade, a shell with no contents.

As such it is not Wilhelm’s Jewishness that makes him other, but rather his lack of any kind of identity whatsoever. Yet, there is something paradoxical about all of this when it comes to the

1950s narrative, and it speaks to the naturalistic element of Bellow’s novel and a lack of faith, so to speak, in the post-realist narrative.

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If we look at most of the previous novels in this study (From Here to Eternity being something of an exception) the post-realist narrative seems to favour Belluscio’s notion of assimilation, but it extends beyond just ethnicities to include social class (though not race), and, of course, past traumatic events like the war and the Depression. All of this seems to get swept away in the present perfect, where, for men at least, stability and prosperity are available in the corporate work environment and in the suburban domestic home. I have argued above that what seems inevitable about Wilhelm’s predicament is his rejection of these elements that lead to prosperity—and we can see a similar claim made by Simmons—the novel suggests, in other words, that rejecting the post-realist paradigm will result only in failure and ruin. However, when we add Wilhelm’s symbolic rejection of his Jewishness (and by extension history and tradition) to all of this we have a suggestion that past identity is still relevant, perhaps even crucial, to this time. Seize the Day is in that sense itself a rejection of the post-realist paradigm. Wilhelm cannot, as Tom Rath does, banish the ghosts of his past to the past because, as he realizes throughout the novel, they are crucial in understanding his current self.

i Cf. Patrick Costellos, “Tradition in Seize the Day” which argues that Dr. Adler (the father of protagonist Tommy

Wilhelm) is abandoning Jewish tradition in, basically, abandoning his son.

Ralph Ciancio in “The Achievement of Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day” also discusses the role of Jewish heritage in the novel.

See also Lillian Kremer’s “Seize the Day: Intimations of Anti-Hasidic Satire.”

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ii For example, Ciancio argued in 1969 that the novel is “Saul Bellow’s supreme achievement so far, and … a masterpiece of the first order” (127). iii Pizer sees a large naturalistic element in Bellow’s writing and bemoans the fact that it “is almost always dismissed as an irrelevant and distracting characteristic of [his] work” (Realism and Naturalism 42). iv If nothing else, Wilhelm’s lack of self-awareness does not reach Willie Loman-like levels. v See Costellos above. Ciancio argues that Wilhelm’s “estrangement from the contemporary urban world” is epitomized by Dr. Adler (134). In that sense, Adler is the apotheosis of the world that Wilhelm cannot reach.

Gaye McCollum Simmons in “Atonement in Bellow’s Seize the Day” argues that Wilhelm is “alternately seeking reconciliation and … turning to Dr. Tamkin as a surrogate” (175). She thus suggests that Wilhelm actually has two fathers in the novel and two different problematic paternal relationships. vi Simmons (1993) notes that most criticism of Seize the Day had focused on an “admittedly fruitful discussion of

American Romanticism and the dangling existential man” (170). vii One of the most recent studies of Seize the Day, “Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day: A Modernist Study” (2011) looks to read Bellow’s novel from a modernist perspective, so clearly the very literary mode in which the novel is written remains contentious. viii This transitional period for Jewish and Italian American figures can be seen in several of the novels studied here.

Belluscio argues that the postwar period was a period of assimilation for these ethnic groups, but the novels here suggest that the assimilation was not yet complete at this time. In The Naked and the Dead the Jewish soldiers Roth and Goldstein are both subject to racist remarks from some of their fellow soldiers, and the Italian Minetta seems to fulfill a stereotypical shiftiness that was applied to Italian Americans. In From Here to Eternity private Bloom is bothered for his perceived homosexuality, but his Jewishness also seems to suggest an implicit otherness. In The

Man in the Gray Flannel Suit the Jewish Judge Bernstein’s opinion “had a weight in the town more than that of any other man” but “he and his wife were rarely asked to cocktail parties or dinners” (135). The Italian Americans

Caesar Gardella and Antonio Bugala are also portrayed as respectable but obviously “different” characters. In any event, only in Seize the Day is the main character a Jewish American, and only in Seize the Day is the main character constantly portrayed as out of place.

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Chapter 6

“A portrait of himself as decent but disillusioned young family man, sadly and bravely at

war with his environment”: Frank Wheeler as a Tragic Caricature of 1950s Man in

Revolutionary Road

Among the texts in this study, Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road is the only “domestic” novel that is not set in some type of nebulous present. Written in 1961, the novel takes place in

1955, and while those six years may mean little in terms of historical era, they mean a great deal to a novel that is very deliberately a commentary on the 1950s. Revolutionary Road, unlike the other novels in this study, looks back on the 1950s as something that happened, rather than something that is happening, and this difference in perspective is felt in the novel’s tone. The tone is difficult to accurately describe—it is almost condescending with a touch of paternalism to it—but it is similar to the one found in Babbitt in the way it often uses the main subject’s thoughts against him. But while Babbitt acts like the portrait of a modern American type—and a type to be lampooned—Revolutionary Road acts more like a reflection on a type and an era whose time has already passed, and it is uncertain whether we are meant to lament or celebrate this passing. Thus, while The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and The Caine Mutiny look to have their main characters transition successfully from accomplished war heroes to middle-class family men, and From Here to Eternity and The Naked and the Dead suggest war as an end in and of itself, Revolutionary Road finds nothing to learn from the war and only emptiness and despair in the middle-class existence that follows it. The only question that remains is whether this emptiness is an indictment of the period in general, or of Frank Wheeler as the period’s

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archetype. That the novel ends as an unmitigated tragedy suggests that the answer is bleak, whatever the question.

Whatever the question, Yates’ novel is in this study because of the grim view it takes of the kind of archetypal figure that many of the other novels have been lauding. Revolutionary

Road has no heroic figure, and unlike Wilhelm in Seize the Day it does not even have a sympathetic figure, at least not a masculine one. It is possible to find Frank Wheeler, with his shallow vanity and harmful obliviousness, as reprehensible, but such a strong sentiment would likely be granting his character more heft than it deserves. To take a line from the novel’s tragic figure, April Wheeler, who reflects that “she couldn’t possibly hate [Frank]. How could anyone hate him? He was—well, he was Frank” (319, emphasis in text), Frank Wheeler is not a character who invites strong enough feelings to be worthy of hate, but this is because he is a charming shell of a man in nice clothes, rather than an irresistible presence who could command love or hate. Revolutionary Road ends in tragedy, but tragedy that occurs both as an inevitability—I will speak of its naturalism further on—and as a result of a lack, a lack of purpose and meaning that sinks April Wheeler and indicts an era and a type, the type that Frank

Wheeler represents, that could produce such a tragedy. Or at least that is how the novel could be read. I have some reservations about this reading, which I will detail as my examination of the novel progresses, for I also believe that the novel can be read as a critique of the 1950s critique of 1950s America.

Before beginning my examination of the novel, it is necessary to give a brief outline of how the novel operates. It is written in three parts, or acts, like a Greek tragedy, and as in tragedy the first part outlines the principal players and establishes the ground upon which the tragic event will occur. The second part offers a brief period of happiness for the principals but leads up to

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the singular event that will provoke the tragedy. The third part is the tragedy itself and the aftermath of it. The novel’s arc in fact works almost exactly in reverse to that of Man in Gray

Flannel, in that in Wilson’s novel the third part seeks to resolve the problems that had appeared so irresolvable in the second part. The tragedy itself in Revolutionary Road is the possibly accidental suicide of April Wheeler as she forcefully miscarries the baby that had ruined the couple’s plan of moving to Europe to escape the inescapable trap of middle-class American life.

The novel’s irony is that both this unwanted child and Frank’s well paying and anonymous job are things from which to flee, according to the sentiment expressed by the Wheelers, and according to the cultural critics who looked on with disdain at middle-class America, but Frank himself has no desire to escape them. As both readers and observers of the 1950s America represented here, we are left with ambiguity. We might ask: a) Is Frank wrong for finding some satisfaction in his job and the money he receives from it? b) Should he be condemned for his wife’s fate? or, c) are the very critiques of suburban America meant to be condemned? This chapter’s rather unsatisfactory answer will likely be: d) all of the above, but that does make for a fitting end point to this study. We have in Frank Wheeler what at last might be the perfect archetype of the period: he is handsome, self-assured, charming and witty; he is college- educated, participated in the war, moved from the city to the suburbs and commutes daily; he is also empty, a hollow shell with no discernible interests, calling, or even personality. He is Frank and that means everything and nothing at the same time. We can neither condemn him too greatly nor admire him despite himself. He is, then, the portrait of 1950s man both in the way he views himself and in the way we view him, and if Revolutionary Road is making a cultural critique that critique perhaps can be found in the discrepancy between these two portraits.

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Before looking more closely at Frank Wheeler, however, I would like first to speak a little bit about how the novel is set up in terms of narrative. Most of the novel is told from Frank

Wheeler’s perspective, and there are times when he appears to be an updated version of Babbitt, in that the introspective narration allows his own thoughts to betray him, but Frank is not quite as self-deluding and the narrative itself is not as openly satirical. What the novel also does, much like the others in this study, is to shift perspectives at critical junctures. Thus we do not only see the Wheelers’ life from Frank’s eyes, but also from their neighbours, and, in one of the pivotal final chapters, from April herself. But I am not so interested in these perspective shifts, as they are clear and well delineated, as I am in the way the novel opens. The entire first part is narrated from Frank’s point of view, with the very notable exception of the opening chapter. I want to look closely at that opening chapter before moving on to discussing Frank Wheeler and his place among this study’s archetypal figures.

As Catherine Jurca’s study makes very clear, in American literature the suburbs are almost always a place of ridicule. No one save a Babbitt would actually want to live there, so most stories set within the suburbs feature characters who both hate where they live and hate the people who live around them. As Jurca points outs, we can see evidence of this behaviour in the early parts of Man in Gray Flannel, where the Raths express contempt for their house and their neighbours. In Revolutionary Road the contempt is taken to satirical levels, especially when the narrative is following Frank Wheeler’s point of view, but what is intriguing is that the very beginning of the novel looks to speak for the suburbs themselves. The opening of the novel is told from no one’s particular point of view, but that is not to say it is told with zero focalization, or that the narrative acts as a camera observing exterior actions and speech acts. Rather, it takes the perspective of the participants in the Laurel Players, a community theatre group that is about

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to put on a performance of The Petrified Forest. The narrative reflects the anxieties and the hopes of this small group of suburbanites. And what seems to be at stake, from this perspective, is the kind of community that the suburbs can create.

The idea that the Laurel Players represents is an important one not only to the novel but also to the idea of the suburbs themselves and the possibility of culture within them. The suburbs are forever associated with mass culture, with kitsch, and crass materialism. Jurca describes the typical literary suburb as “promoting a fantasy of victimization that reinvents white flight [from urban centres] as the persecution of those who flee, turns material advantage into artifacts of spiritual and cultural oppression, and sympathetically treats affluent house owners as the emotionally dispossessed” (8-9). Jurca obviously takes issue with the idea of the suburbs being a cultural black hole, but the “fantasy of victimization” she describes is very much present in

Revolutionary Road. Also present is this statement found in Mills discussing the leisure pursuits of the middle class. Mills asserts:

The amusement of hollow people rests on their own hollowness and does not fill it up; it

does not calm or relax them, as old middle-class frolics and jollification may have done;

it does not recreate their spontaneity in work, as in the craftsman model. Their leisure

diverts them from the restless grind of their work by the absorbing grind of passive

enjoyment of glamour and thrills. To modern man leisure is the way to spend money,

work is the way to make it. When the two compete, leisure wins hands down. (238)

Implicit in Mills is that the leisure activity of “modern man” is passive and mindless; there is nothing redeeming or intellectually rewarding about it. The suburban home, which is separate from the working environment, is not the site of culture but rather just further removed from culture. Whyte devotes an entire section of The Organization Man to suburbia and the key term

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that he uses to describe its inhabitants is “transients.” It is hard to imagine a community defined by a transient population as being a place for culture to develop.

What the opening of Revolutionary Road and its focus on the Laurel Players does is to take all these anxieties and tropes about suburbia and its antithetical relationship to high culture and let them play out in a single performance of a stage drama. Opening with the final rehearsal before the group’s first performance of The Petrified Forest, the novel lays out what is at stake for the group and the community at large:

The year was 1955 and the place was a part of western Connecticut where three swollen

villages had lately been merged by a wide and clamorous highway called Route Twelve.

The Laurel Players were an amateur company, but a costly and very serious one,

carefully recruited from among the younger adults of all three towns, and this was to be

their maiden production. (4)

The idea is to make an amateur, suburban theatre company like the Laurel players seem serious and credible. The three villages may be connected by a freeway and the residents may only be connected by the fact that the men commute daily to Manhattan, but their connection to culture is meant to be more permanent. Thus, when the director tells his cast “we’re not just putting on a play here. We’re establishing a community theater and that’s a pretty important thing to be doing” (5), he is in a sense understating the importance of the idea. For if the suburbs can be viewed as something other than a series of clichés about bland middle-class anonymity and rootless corporate drones, if they can instead be viewed as a legitimate site of cultural production, then the narrative surrounding them and those who reside within them can be changed. Thus, when the first performance is a flop, it sets the tone for the rest of the novel and suggests that it would be foolish to try to make suburbia more than it could be; the only solution

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is escape. But, and here is where a case could be made for the novel as a work of literary naturalism, the kind of man Frank Wheeler is makes it certain that escape is impossible.

****

I argued above that the discrepancy between the way Frank Wheeler views himself and the way the novel portrays him can be seen as a critique of the 1950s masculine archetype. What

I mean by this is that Frank’s delusions about himself, from his position amongst his peers, to his perception of his own intelligence, to his complete inability to empathize with his own wife, can be viewed as an indictment of a larger cultural pattern. If we can argue that the novel is a tragedy and that that tragedy is the death of April Wheeler, one of the biggest reasons that the tragedy occurs is Frank’s complete misreading of his wife’s view of their situation. When April proposes, earlier in the novel, that the family should move to Europe, the reason she gives Frank for their doing it is so he can “discover” himself. She tells Frank,

Don’t you see? Don’t you see that’s the whole idea? You’ll be doing what you should’ve

been allowed to do seven years ago. You’ll be finding yourself. You’ll be reading and

studying and taking long walks and thinking. You’ll have time. For the first time in your

life you’ll have time to find out what it is you want to do, and when you find it you’ll

have the time and the freedom to start doing it. (114)

There is a fair amount to take from this quotation, so I want to look at it quite deliberately. What

April is describing here is a kind of bohemian lifestyle for Frank, and his search for bohemia outside of America would fit with Irving Howe’s idea, in his 1954 “The Age of Conformity” that

“today … the idea of bohemia, which was a strategy for bringing artists and writers together in their struggle for the world—this idea has become disreputable” and that furthermore, “those feelings of loneliness one finds among so many American intellectuals, feelings of damp

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dispirited isolation which undercut the ideology of liberal optimism, are partly due to the breakup of bohemia” (29). The Wheelers talk often, early in the novel, about moving to Europe because there is nothing left for them in America. If Frank is indeed the intellectual figure he pretends1 to be, then he must go and find his bohemia. Therefore, April’s plan that the family go off to Europe so that Frank might find himself, so that he can “find out what it is that [he] want[s] to do,” would seem to be perfectly in line with this thinking. As a would-be intellectual, he is orphaned in America. This is how Frank chooses to see April’s statement, and while he has a moment of self doubt as to if he is worth her sacrifice—“he had a quick disquieting vision of her coming home from a day at the office—wearing a Parisian tailored suit, briskly pulling off her gloves—come home and finding him hunched in an egg-stained bathrobe, on an unmade bed, picking his nose” (114-15)—he never doubts that April’s intention is indeed to give him this time. A less charitable way of looking at April’s above statement is that she is merely flattering

Frank’s over-inflated sense of self worth, that she gives him this explanation for their moving to

Europe because it is one he will find acceptable, while what she is in fact doing is much more radical. For what she proposes is that she would work in his place, a most radical idea in 1950s

America.

In many ways, April’s should be the more interesting story in the novel. It is never clear how much she believes at any given point in Frank’s supposed genius, as we only gain access to her perspective at the end of the novel, and Frank’s own perspective is so narcissistic—I will discuss his near constant gaze at himself in the mirror further on—that there is very little insight

1 I mean for there to be some slippage in the usage of pretend here, in that I want it to have both the French sense of the word, which is more to claim, and also the vernacular English sense.

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into what April actually thinks. I will argue in the conclusion to this chapter that this lack of insight is on purpose, as it leaves her as an enigmatic figure in both life and death, but it is also fitting to the supposed role of married women in 1950s America. April is both forever present and forever in the background, almost never allowed to speak with her own voice and always defined in relation to her husband. As much as the failure of the Laurel Players to establish a reputable community theatre can be seen as a denial of suburbia’s attempt to become a real community, the failure of April to transcend the mediocrity of her fellow performers—the opening narrative notes that in the play April “was working alone, and visibly weakening with every line” (9), and by the play’s second act her “performance was as bad as the others, if not worse” (10)—is a denial of her chance to be defined as something other than a housewife. Thus the plan to escape to France is as much, if not more, about April trying to escape the narrative of the American housewife as it is about Frank trying to escape from being the Organization Man.

All that being said, however, the narrative’s focus is indeed on Frank rather than April, and his inability or unwillingness to exist as something other than an Organization Man is a fitting conclusion for this study.

I wrote at the beginning of this chapter that Frank Wheeler could be seen as a parody of the 1950s masculine archetype in the same way that George Babbitt is a parody of the 1920s businessman, and I think the comparison fits well because of the combination of narcissism and self-delusion that both share. What differentiates Wheeler from Babbitt though is that, while

Babbitt takes an exaggerated pride in his worth as a business professional, Wheeler has an exaggerated pride in the worthlessness of his employment. This contention that Frank holds, that his job is both meaningless and valueless, is what lends to his character this idea of parody. For

Frank’s views on the organization man and the organization itself mirror the kind of viewpoints

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being espoused in studies like Riesman’s and Whyte’s and by critics like Howe and Mailer.

Frank sees himself as in the organization but not of it, and casts himself in the role of social critic, both of the organizational structure under which he works and the suburbs in which he lives. When April’s first pregnancy compels Frank to search for stable employment, he chooses to work for a large organization because its very blandness cannot possibly change his essence.

He explains, “the thing I’m most anxious to avoid is any kind of work that can be considered

‘interesting’ in its own right. I want something that can’t possibly touch me. I want some big, swollen old corporation that’s been bumbling along making money in its sleep for a hundred years, where they have to hire eight guys for every job because none of them can be expected to care about whatever boring thing it is they’re supposed to be doing” (78-79). Frank sees his job as a joke, but not so much in the sense that he does nothing and is paid to do (or not do) it, but in the sense that he is an enemy hidden in plain sight within the corporation, some sort of sleeper cell or covert agent who cleverly supports his subversive attitude and lifestyle with the corporation’s money. He finds solace in “the absurd discrepancy between his own ideals and those of Knox Business Machines; the gulf between the amount of energy he was supposed to give the company and the amount he actually gave” (81). Frank seems to view his job as a sort of protracted Dadaist experiment that only he and those who share his ideals could understand. The novel of course suggests that this is delusion, but before we disabuse Frank of his delusion I want to look at just what he believes his ideals to be.

These ideals, which as I noted above could loosely be described as Bohemian, are spattered throughout the novel in conversations Frank has with April and with their friends the

Campbells. While Frank is neither a decorated scholar, nor has he any identifiable artistic traits, he is a gifted orator, and he finds his calling, so to speak, in alcohol-fuelled discussions where he

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becomes the focal point of the conversation through the forcefulness and eloquence of his discourse. A typical speech is the one that follows, where Frank’s words could be taken right from “The White Negro”:

It’s as if everybody’d made this tacit agreement to live in a total state of self-deception.

The hell with reality! Let’s have a whole bunch of cute little winding roads and cute little

blue houses painted white and pink and baby blue; let’s all be good consumers and have a

lot of Togetherness and bring our children up in a bath of sentimentality—Daddy’s a

great man because he makes a living, Mummy’s a great woman because she’s stuck by

Daddy all these years—and if old reality ever does pop out and say Boo we’ll all get busy

and pretend it never happened. (68-69)

Frank’s critique here is typical of the running commentary against 1950s suburban living. There is the critique of conformity, “Togetherness,” against sentimentality, of the domestication of life in general (the focus on “Mummy” and “Daddy”), and the shot at consumerism and the kitsch of pastel-coloured houses and artificially windy roads. There is in a sense nothing original about

Frank’s critique—as Schaub notes in his study, everyone in the Fifties was worried about conformity and sentimentality—but that there’s nothing original in the critique is what makes

Frank so emblematic a figure. His speech is in response to the gossip being spread about the son of the Wheelers’ realtor, who supposedly escaped from a sanatorium and held his parents hostage for days. But when the Wheelers themselves meet the young man, and he, eventually, calls Frank out for not being nearly as different as he claims, Frank would like nothing more than to “pretend it never happened.”

This discrepancy between what Frank thinks he stands for and what he actually does is, as I have argued above, the novel’s main comment on his character. His railings against the

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hypocrisies of suburban life are almost always ironic because of his own hypocritical behaviour.

He is, by and large, a completely unexceptional man whose defining quality is his belief in his own exceptionality. One of the defining questions to ask of Revolutionary Road is just how emblematic of his time Frank is supposed to be; or to put it another way: just how archetypal is he? This question is worth further exploration, because in some ways that depends on just what goes into making the archetypal middle-class man in 1950s America. One element that this study has certainly emphasized is the role of the war in the shaping of this archetype, and while it is nigh impossible to say something definitive about this role, one constant is the ambivalence that men who went to war seem to have towards that experience. We have seen this ambivalence in all of the novels studied here (even in The Caine Mutiny, if we ignore that novel’s rather triumphalist ending), both in texts that focus on the experience of the war itself and those that look more at its aftermath. Yet for Frank his time in the war seems to only be a necessary part of shaping his character. In an early reflection he remembers that “the Army had taken him at eighteen, had thrust him into the final spring offensive of the war in Germany and given him a confused but exhilarating tour of Europe from year to year before it set him free” (22). He seems, perhaps because of his youth when he was in the Army, perhaps because of his natural approach to life experience, to not have fully processed what his time in the Army meant. He uses it as a crutch in late night conversations with the Campbells, noting that “humorous talk of the Army and the war had more than once turned out to be the final salvation of evenings with the

Campbells. There was nothing Shep seemed to relish more, and though the girls might laugh in the wrong places and jokingly insist they would never fathom the interests and loyalties of men, there was no denying their listening faces would shine with a glow of romance” (70). The war, in this case, is seen as an essential aspect of 1950s masculinity; it produces camaraderie and

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fellowship between men and romantic reverence for the women who were not there. Frank performs his war experiences, which he does to reinforce the authenticity of them—it can be seen as akin to belonging to an exclusive club and Frank is able to display the legitimacy of his membership by properly reciting a song about the infantry (71)—while at the same time displaying the same kind of ambivalence that I discuss above. The ambivalence in this case comes from the uncertainty of just what exactly the war has meant to Frank. It seems to be just another part of his identity to be rehearsed.

This idea of performing or rehearsing an identity is a constant in Frank’s distorted self- image. And self-image is a fitting term, because Frank spends a good deal of time performing for himself. He is constantly gazing at himself in the mirror, and while the narcissism in such a gesture is evident, what is also interesting about this gazing is how he uses it to help himself in performing the image he wants to be projecting. At the beginning of the novel, after the unsuccessful performance of the Laurel Players, Frank is trying to console April and finds himself gazing at his own reflection in April’s dressing room mirror: “He looked at himself in the mirror, tightening his jaw and turning his head a little to one side to give it a leaner, more commanding look, the face he had given himself in mirrors since boyhood and which no photograph had ever quite achieved” (16). Here Frank is performing a more attractive image of himself, but what is significant is the ambiguity present here. It is unclear whether Frank is shaping his face to make himself his most attractive out of vanity or in an attempt to mask his truer, less attractive self. Is the Frank that others see this performance of attractiveness, or is it the unguarded, slightly less attractive Frank? This performance at once captures Frank’s vanity and insecurity, but also his lack of consideration for anything outside himself; he is after all there

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to console his wife, and the above passage ends with Frank’s gaze interrupted “with a start [as] he found that she was watching him” (16).

These mirror performances continue throughout the novel but they take on a greater significance in the final section when the couple’s Europe plan is threatened by April’s unexpected pregnancy. April wants to terminate the pregnancy and Frank, newly engaged with his job and his effectiveness at it, wants to prevent this termination. April’s abortion method, which involves a large rubber syringe whose discovery ends the temporary bliss of the novel’s second part, is time sensitive and can apparently only be safely done at the end of the third month of the pregnancy. This gives Frank a deadline that is “more than four weeks away” (227) before which he must convince April not to perform the abortion. He likens it to a courtship, but also calls it a campaign. During the campaign he must carefully plan his speech and actions, but a good part of this performance has to do with his appearance. Frank believes his plan to be working when “he began to be aware at odd moments that she was covertly watching him through a mist of romantic admiration” (231). This romantic gaze, which we saw above during

Frank’s performance of Army stories, is key both to Frank’s design for his campaign, in that he operates under the assumption that with women you must play to emotion, and to the archetypal image of the modern American man that the novel is playing with. Thus the following description of Frank’s efforts at performance is an encapsulation of the contrivance that is this archetype:

These moments were not always quite spontaneous; as often as not they followed a subtle

effort of vanity on his part, a form of masculine flirtation that was as skillful as any girl’s.

Walking toward or away from her across a restaurant floor, for example, he remembered

always to do it in the old “terrifically sexy” way, and when they walked together he fell

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into another old habit of holding his head unnaturally erect and carrying his inside

shoulder an inch or two higher than the other; to give himself more loftiness from where

she clung to his arm. When he lit a cigarette in the dark he was careful to arrange his

features in a virile frown before striking and cupping the flame (he knew, from having

practiced this at the mirror of a blacked-out bathroom years ago, that it made a swift,

intensely dramatic portrait) and he paid scrupulous attention to endless details: keeping

his voice low and resonant, keeping his hair brushed and his bitten fingernails out of

sight; being always the first athletically up and out of bed in the morning, so that she

might never see his face lying swollen and helpless in sleep. (231)

Frank is here performing the idea of a man for April in order to convey strength and confidence and to mask all signs of weakness. What’s interesting here is the mix between being physically attractive and alluring and this emphasis on strength and hiding weakness. His campaign is ostensibly to prevent April from aborting the child, but given the larger matter that is at stake— the couple’s plan to move to Europe—there is more to be gleaned from these emphases. In his chapter about the 1940s and 50s, Michael Kimmel discusses the importance of family to the middle-class, corporate-employed man. If such a man felt somewhat passive and out of control of his own fate in his working environment, if he was, in other words, “other-directed,” it was his role in the family, where he was head of the household and a masculine role model for his son or sons, that he could assert his masculinity. He would not only be a provider for his family, but he would ensure a strong masculine presence was there in the home. Kimmel explains that this emphasis on a masculine role model was caused by the absent father figure of the war era and exacerbated by Philip Wylie’s concerns over Momism; in other words one of the aims of fatherhood was to ensure that there was not too much of a feminizing influence on the children

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(and especially the sons) from their mother (Kimmel 147-69). In Frank Wheeler’s case, April’s potential abortion and the corresponding move to Europe are doubly threatening when looked at from the perspective of these arguments. The aborting of the child robs Frank of another opportunity to exert a masculine influence on his family—April is in a sense robbing him of his agency within his household. The loss of his role as provider takes away what should be his masculine responsibility. In Europe he would be living something of a life of leisure, or at the very least a life that could be considered that of an effete intellectual. As a lifestyle, it smacks of decadence, and we have already seen the various negative associations that decadence has in terms of 1950s masculinity. Ironically then, Frank’s seemingly emasculating corporate job, removed as it is from robust physical labour or the risk-taking assertiveness of self-made masculinity, becomes associated with strong masculinity. His portrayal of this impermeable masculine figure to April is as such reinforcing this idea. The joke, of course, is that just like everything else Frank pretends to be, the strong and secure breadwinner pose is all merely an act.

I have discussed above how Revolutionary Road ends tragically, and that tragedy could be seen as the ultimate failure of Frank’s campaign. April eventually sees his front as exactly that and her decision to perform an unsafe abortion on herself can be seen as a realization that there is no foreseeable escape from this sham existence. There is another way to interpret April’s death, and that is as an inevitability which speaks to the naturalist bent of the novel, and I will discuss that at this section’s close, but before doing so I want to first examine what April’s death does to

Frank’s illusion that he is someone other than the corporate-employed suburban family man he appears to be. As is seemingly compulsory for every novel from this era, mental illnessi plays a fairly substantial role in Revolutionary Road. There is the suggestion that April is mentally unwell, but there is also the actual mental patient, John Givens. As is also the case with many

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novels, the role of Givens here appears to be that of the crazy person who is the story’s only real sane character, and so it is fitting that he reveals the “truth” to Frank about himself that Frank has failed to see on his own. When the Wheelers first entertain John Givens he appears to be taken by their realness; he calls April “female” and asserts that “I’ve only met about half a dozen females in my life, and I think you’ve got one of them here” (201), and tells Frank “come to think of it, that figures. I get the feeling you’re male. There aren’t too many males around, either” (201).ii John is also very taken with a statement Frank makes about “the hopeless emptiness of everything in this country” (200) and suggests that “maybe it takes a certain amount of guts to see the emptiness, but it takes a whole hell of a lot more to see the hopelessness” (200).

These assertions, both the idea that Frank and April are somehow essentially male and female in a society that has robbed humanity of its animal essence, and that Frank has bravely identified a dark truth about this society, reinforce for Frank his own exceptionality. That this exceptionality is false becomes evident as the novel progresses, but Frank is largely unaware of it. The final time he sees John Givens, however, the mental patient reveals to Frank the truth. When the

Wheelers tell John that they have cancelled their plan to move to Europe, John replies, “What happened? You get cold feet, or what? You decide you like it here after all? You figure it’s more comfy here in the old Hopeless Emptiness after all, or—Wow, that did it! Look at his face!

What’s the matter, Wheeler? Am I getting warm?” (301). Here John is merely revealing to Frank what Frank had implicitly understood his campaign to mean, but hearing the idea spoken by someone else proves too much for Frank and April to be able to sustain. John’s remarks provoke a final fight and April’s eventually fatal decision to abort their child. While the novel’s resolution is a chaotic one and could be seen as the dissolution of the myth of domestic contentment at its

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tragic extreme, its comments on Frank’s supposed exceptionality can be applied in a broader context.

If we look at the book in terms of focalization, an intriguing claim can be made with regards to Frank’s view of his own exceptionality. As I have noted above, for the most part the novel is told from Frank’s perspective. Part I, save for the opening sequence, is entirely in

Frank’s perspective, Part II features what might be called cameo narration from characters other than Frank, but the bulk of the narrative is still told from Frank’s perspective. The final part has more of these cameo perspectives in the first six chapters, but the end of the sixth chapter also marks the end of Frank as the subject of focalization. Chapter Seven is the only one told from

April’s perspective and the final two chapters are told again from the perspectives of the

Wheelers’ neighbours. In terms of narrative perspective, Frank essentially ceases to exist well before the novel finishes. In the final chapter, set several months after April’s death, the neighbourhood has effectively absorbed the death into itself as if nothing happened. A new couple has moved into the Wheelers’ home and they establish a friendship with the Campbells and April’s death becomes merely a suburban legend. Frank’s final appearance in the novel is as an absence, as the brave survivor of a tragedy who outwardly looks fine but whom Shep

Campbell views as a “walking, talking, smiling, lifeless man” (347). From Shep’s observation it could be taken that Frank’s perspective ceases before the novel’s end because there is nothing from which to observe, that indeed Frank has become the very subject of his own mockery, an empty shell in the form of a business suit and an anonymous corporate job. I would like to argue something slightly different, however.

The fundamental assumption that sustains Frank’s narrative for himself is the belief that he is somehow exceptional. When reminiscing about first encountering April he describes

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himself, without any irony, as “an intense, nicotine-stained, Jean-Paul Sartre of a maniii” (23) and tells himself that “he could even be grateful in a sense that he had no particular area of interest: in avoiding specific goals he had avoided specific limitations. For the time being the world, life itself, could be his chosen field” (23). That both of these statements sound at once nonsensical and self-delusional is in keeping with how Frank’s character is presented, and speaks to the ongoing theme of the novel, which is Frank’s belief in his own exceptionalism, despite all evidence to the contrary. He is a corporate-employed married man of thirty with two children and a house in the suburbs. He takes the train from his Connecticut home into his Manhattan office every day, performs a nondescript job whose exact purpose is unclear, and engages in a loveless affair with a secretary from his office. He is, in other words, the man in the gray flannel suit, and the little elements of his life that do not quite fit this picture could merely be seen as shades of that gray. Yet Frank continues to see himself as removed and separate from others of his ilk throughout the narrative. What I want to argue is that what sustains this self-delusion is, ironically, Frank’s stable domestic situation, and what finally causes it to collapse is the breaking down of that stability.

Social criticism in the 1950s, in its various forms from Riesman to Howe to Mailer to

Goodman,iv focused overwhelmingly on the figure I have been discussing here: the educated, middle-class white man. In essence this focus made sense because such a man was seen as the all important next generation—someone like John F. Kennedy, although clearly not middle-class, would be a member of this generation, and part of his legacy may lie in the fact that he was the first leader from this postwar generation, the first of his generation to exceed mediocrity—he was seen, in other words, as the future. The most obvious problem with this focus is how much of the rest of the country it ignores; certainly it ignores those men who were not white and/or

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middle class, but it also ignores women entirely. What is more, it makes the somewhat bizarre assumption that women would find satisfaction in keeping house and being good wives and mothers. Men with stifling, uninspiring jobs, this was problematic, but women whose days were filled with intellectually unchallenging chores and conversations with young children, this was perfectly natural. I am obviously not pointing out anything new here, as likely more has been written about this problem than has been written about the “problems” of middle-class men in the 1950s, and Elaine May’s study has this problem as its underlying thesis. I am bringing up this issue here, however, because of its importance in Revolutionary Road, and the fact that this novel alone of the ones included in the study is concerned with the problemv—Betsy Rath actually manages to covertly get around this issue by subtly becoming a housing magnate, seemingly without anyone noticing. As I have noted above, the tragic figure in Revolutionary Road is not

Frank, but April Wheeler, but before her actual death she serves as a figurative martyr for

Frank’s supposed exceptionality, and this figurative martyrdom is the novel’s most interesting argument about the “problem” of the middle-class man in the 1950s. The argument is that the problem is really the nature of the suburban domestic setting and the unequal partnership between husband and wife that it fosters.

The novel explores this unequal relationship in two ways, both of which can be found in narrative perspective. The first is by not using April as a subject of focalization until the very end of the novel. I have argued in previous chapters how focalization, especially in realist fiction, is used as a privilege to suggest the importance of a character to the narrative, but in this case its use seems to be to deliberately de-subjectify April. Because we mainly have Frank’s understanding of her, we nearly always have an incomplete picture of a woman whom Frank almost never understands. We have hints about her thoughts and feelings in Frank’s unease at her

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body language and in her speech that seems to convey more than what is directly spoken, but most of our conclusions about April have to come from our distrust of Frank’s perspective. What we know of her from Frank is that when he met her he considered her a “first-rate girl” and that she told him “you’re the most interesting person I’ve ever met” (25) on that first meeting. The second way the unequal relationship between the two is explored is directly related to the first: it is that Frank, in his narrative perspective, gives voice to what he believes April thinks about him and his life. More than simply withholding the privilege of focalization from April, in giving that privilege to Frank the novel denies her independent importance other than as she relates to other characters, most often to Frank. The principal way that this functions within the novel is in how

Frank uses his perceived understanding of April to justify his own actions. I want to look more closely at how this understanding functions and draw some conclusions on what it says about suburban domesticity in the process.

In speaking of the novel, Jurca writes, “Revolutionary Road brilliantly defines the postwar suburbanite as the anti suburbanite, whose existence is a protest against everyone else’s putative conformity” (148). This idea of existence as a protest against everyone else’s putative conformity is an apt description of Frank Wheeler, who defines himself largely in terms of what he is not, but Jurca makes the mistake of lumping April, again whose thoughts we are mainly not privy to, in with Frank. Jurca asks, “[j]ust who are the Wheelers? It isn’t exactly clear, except that we know that they are not really suburbanites, at least if we trust their self-assessment; they are just people who live in a suburb” (148, emphasis in text). However, it is very difficult to say that we are trusting their self-assessment because we mainly have Frank’s version of their existence. It should be clear why I am making so much of this seemingly minor point, but I want to reiterate it once more to note how dependent Frank is upon April for maintaining his pose as

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an anti suburbanite. Frank’s image of himself is a complicated portrait that combines his own vanity and his imagined appearance to others. Most important is how he imagines April sees him. He alludes back more than once to things she has said, from his “terrifically sexy walk,” to the fact that he is the most interesting man she’s ever met. More than anything else, for Frank to believe he is exceptional, to believe more specifically that he is the last real man to be found among the drones, he has to believe in April’s worship of him as a man. When April is looking to convince Frank of her plan to move to Europe, she frames the move only in relation to how it will be beneficial for Frank. “Don’t you see what I’m saying?” she tells him, “It’s got nothing to do with definite, measurable talents—it’s your very essence that’s being stifled here. It’s what you are that’s being denied and denied in this kind of life” (121, emphasis in text). April, sounding here like a page out of “The White Negro,” is appealing to Frank’s own sense of himself in a very careful way; she makes certain not to emphasize specific talents, for Frank has no exceptional ones, but rather his very essential nature, which of course a suburban/corporate life would stifle. To borrow a phrase from Jurca, it is not readily apparent what Frank is that is being stifled— April is effectively blowing smoke—but because Frank has allowed himself to believe that his lack of specific interests make him exceptional her appeal is effective. Even when Frank asks the very question, “and what’s that?” April has the perfect answer: “‘Oh, don’t you know?’ She brought his hand gently up her hip and around to the flat of her abdomen, where she pressed it close again. ‘Don’t you know? You’re the most valuable and wonderful thing in the world. You’re a man’” (121). I am tempted to let this comment rest on its utter inanity, but it says much despite not saying anything. This idea of a “man” is very important to Frank, and it is also very important to the 1950s and the critique of the era’s lack of masculinity. I will not rehearse an argument made elsewhere by people like Kimmel and Penner, but merely point to the

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investment that has been made into the idea of finding a “man” among the masses. April is appealing to Frank’s vanity, but she is also appealing to this idea, that a real man is exceptional.

Her appeal also works to perfection, for Frank’s reaction is the following:

And of all the capitulations in his life, this was the one that seemed most like a victory.

Never before had elation welled more powerfully inside him; never had beauty grown

more purely out of truth; never in taking his wife had he triumphed more completely over

space and time. The past could dissolve at his will and so could the future; so could the

walls of this house and the whole imprisoning wasteland beyond it, towns and trees. He

had taken command of the universe because he was a man, and because the marvelous

creature who opened and moved for him, tender and strong, was a woman. (121)

I want to make note of one specific word in the above passage, namely “capitulation.” In it is an understanding that Frank has in fact been coerced by April into agreeing to what she wants, but her coercion has been done so effectively that it makes him feel victorious to succumb to it. This idea that Frank is a man and can as such succeed at anything, be anything, is sustained by April’s telling him so, and thus despite all evidence to the contrary, which would suggest that Frank is an unexceptional man leading an unexceptional, conventional life, he can continue to believe himself to be this exceptional figure.

It stands to reason then that when April dies Frank’s sense of his own exceptionalism dies with her. As I noted above, the book effectively removes him as a central figure before the novel finishes. He becomes nothing more than another corporate-employed man living in suburbia, because it was his focus on himself, through his perception of how April saw him, that made him believe he was anything else. What Revolutionary Road does with this gradual revelation of

Frank’s unexceptional character is to show us that we have been following the wrong character

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all along (and the novel itself is knowingly complicit in this by giving only Frank’s perspective for the bulk of the text). The novel then becomes a strong critique of a culture that focuses on the problems of white masculinity. Here is a character, it says, whose biggest problem is his own ego, a character to whom a comfortable existence has been handed and who is allowed to maintain this comfortable existence without working at anything—Frank is equally inept in each of his worlds—and we are concerned with his plight?

It is for this reason above that I wanted to let Revolutionary Road have the final word amongst the novels in this study. I do this not to suggest the futility or frivolity of a study that focuses on middle-class white men (I’d like to think this study can stand on its own merits at this point), but because it feels like the text that is most aware of the flaws in the post-realist imagining of 1950s America. That imagining is a society that makes a number of what now seem to be very flawed assumptions: namely, that the war could be effectively compartmentalized without issue, that economic ideologies could be deemed “good” and “evil,” and that women would be content, even fulfilled, by an entirely domestic experience. Revolutionary Road recognizes the flaw in these assumptions by realizing that the troubling inevitability of 1950s existence, the naturalistic part of this book, is not, as we might expect, the lack of fulfillment that resides in the corporate/suburban-domestic model for men who work at meaningless jobs and fail to create meaningful connections with their families (the problem as such is not one of conformity, or consensus, or lack of existential experience) but the fate of April. Naturalism, as

Pizer argues, is concerned with the fate of characters being tied closely to their surroundings and their environment. Characters are seen as unable to resist the pull of these environmental forces, much like April seems unable, in the play scene that opens the novel, to transcend the mediocrity of her fellow performers. For April, however, the inevitability is about much more than suburbia

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being unable to provide a viable site for culture. Rather, the inevitability has to do with the post- realist paradigm being unable to provide any kind of meaningful reality for her, and the result is her ultimate death.

Thus, while the other novels in this study with naturalistic themes (The Naked and the

Dead, From Here to Eternity, Seize the Day) focus almost exclusively on the dilemma of a lack of real choice that the 1950s post-realist society provides, Revolutionary Road makes the argument that on the contrary there is much in this society for men. After all, Frank is able to find gainful employment that he even, in the third part of the novel, manages to find fulfilling, despite having no particular talents or ambition. It is a strange kind of narrative indeed that finds rewarding mediocrity problematic for the one whose mediocrity is rewarded, and Revolutionary

Road wants no part of that narrative. The novel might be naturalistic, but I will argue that Frank

Wheeler is not a naturalistic character, in that his self-deceptions are no greater than the self- deceptions of other decidedly non-naturalistic characters like Willie Keith and Tom Rath.

Revolutionary Road is naturalistic rather than post-realist as a narrative because, much like Seize the Day, it rejects the viability of the post-realist narrative. The tragedy of April Wheeler is the tragedy of a decade that ignored the possibility of such a tragedy even existing, let alone occurring.

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i In all but The Naked and the Dead, and even there General Cummings could be argued as somehow mentally ill, there is a suggestion of mental illness in each of the texts studied here. Mental illness plays a prominent role in Gray

Flannel (it’s the campaign that Tom Rath works on with Hopkins), and in The Caine Mutiny (a key factor in the trial is Queeg’s mental health). There is also a suggestion that Bloom’s suicide in From Here to Eternity stems from his mental unrest, and Dr. Tamkin in Seize the Day is a quack psychiatrist. ii Givens appears here to be voicing some of the typical 1950s concerns over gender roles. Penner explains that

1950s ideas about gender roles can be traced back to “M-F Test” (Masculinity and Femininity) developed by psychologists Terman and Miles in the 1930s that looked to scientifically measure masculinity and femininity through a series of personality tests. Penner noted that the tests determined (according to its authors) that “the

American male is not masculine enough” (43). He also points out that “the goal of strengthening the masculinity of young boys and male adults through strong gender roles—the dominant father and the dutiful submissive mother— would eventually become the foundation of sex role theory, the dominant paradigm for American psychology in the

1940s, 1950s, and 1960s” (43). iii The irony in this description is present early on, as nowhere in Frank’s behaviour is the kind of existentialist abandonment found in Tom Rath’s early behaviour in Man in Gray Flannel. iv Cf. Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd v As noted previously, women in the present tense are completely absent from The Naked and the Dead. Willie

Keith’s girlfriend May unproblematically abandons her Broadway career in favour of being a “faculty wife,” both the leading female characters in From Here to Eternity are essentially abandoned and removed from the scene of battle as they leave Hawaii on a transport ship, and in Seize the Day Wilhelm’s ex-wife refuses to even entertain the notion of working.

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CODA

“Whatever it is you’re doing… it’s okay”: Passing, The Enormous Present, And The

Pursuit Of Happiness In Mad Men

The television series Mad Men (Weiner) begins with an opening theme that is inspired, as

Eleonora Ravizza explains in her article on the series, by Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. A jazz theme plays and we see a blacked out figure of a man in a business suit against a mostly white background. As the credits roll out we see the figure falling from a skyscraper, his tie dangling, tumbling by various advertisements along the way. As the credits finish the figure is, somehow, seated on a couch in a relaxed position, his right arm outstretched across the length of the couch, a cigarette between his fingers. The opening is quite apt for the series, but perhaps not quite in the way it has been intended. For the show in many ways is one that is both highly invested in the idea of the 1950s as an aesthetic but also in the idea that the era was a sort of last vestige of the past, a gateway to modernity with sometimes disturbing but ultimately quaint ties to a bygone erai. My inclusion of Mad Men here may seem somewhat incongruous, what with its being a television series rather than a novel and its being produced in our current era, rather than the

1950s, but the show’s relationship with the decade, and indeed with much of what I have discussed here, make it, I feel, a fitting place to end the discussion. Mad Men both does and does not take 1950s America seriously, and in the same sense manages to capture what is both fascinating and, indeed, maddening about the period. What follows is an examination of the show’s first season, which is set in 1960 but which can be read, as I will argue, as a coda for the

1950s, and the complicated task it sets for itself in trying to realistically represent America in

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1960 while wilfully employing the kind of condescending nostalgia that the period is usually treated with.

Before moving on I want to comment briefly on what is an inevitability of common scholarship. In Ravizza’s article she discusses the concept of “self-reflexive nostalgia” and how it relates to Mad Men, and the concept bears some similarity to the (albeit less strictly defined) one of condescending nostalgia that I have been employing here. The two concepts are not identical, although they are both grounded in the idea of referentiality, but there is enough similarity that I think it is fair to say that there is a certain common feeling that 1950s America seems to evoke for those studying it to arrive at a similar idea independentlyii. I will quote

Ravizza’s explanation of what she means by self-reflexive nostalgia here along with my take on the show’s use of nostalgia. Ravizza’s definition is as follows:

Self-reflexive nostalgia can be seen at work in various popular texts released in the late

1990s and 2000s that reproduce the Fifties with a certain awareness of their nostalgic

project. These texts know that the past cannot be retrieved, they nonetheless succeed in

visually reproducing it and engaging history by way of explicitly commenting on the

function of such a nostalgia. Through a more critical portrayal of the Fifties by dealing

with issues that were unrepresented at the time, the act of reproducing the past allows

these texts to reflect on the processes behind the creation of the nostalgic construct itself.

Specifically, the notion of the Fifties as a glorified decade offers a particularly fertile

ground for examinations of nostalgia, especially in those texts that attempt to negotiate a

nostalgic view of the past with a more critical take on it. (3)

Ravizza’s definition is a quite accurate assessment of Mad Men’s relationship to the 1950s, because the show does attempt a critical take on the 1950s, most specifically the treatment of

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women in the workplace and the deep-seated unhappiness often found in the 1950s model housewife. The show has the benefit of “The Feminine Mystique” having already been written and the knowledge that never again, at least in modern America, could men so brazenly and uninhibitedly demean the women with whom they shared an office space. We can expand on

Ravizza’s assessment and note that the plight of women in the workplace, which is a prominent theme in Mad Men, was seen as a minor (if it was considered at all) concern amidst the worry over corporate conformity and potential loss of masculine vigour in the studies of Riesman,

White and Mills. Thus, we can look back on the era and be conscious of these concerns in a way that those who actually lived during it could not possibly have been.

Yet, and again as Ravizza is correct in noting, there is also a very real sense in Mad Men of a nostalgic longing for a bygone era. So much care is taken with the sets, with the wardrobe and with the overall style of the show. Everything and everyone looks good on Mad Men; the colours are brighter, the people more stylish, and the settings more glamorous. One signature of the show is a wide shot that features the characters, often the Draper family, as if framed in a painting. The domestic scenes evoke a Norman Rockwell painting, who, as Dwight Macdonald explains rather extensively in “Masscult/Midcult,” was the documenter par excellence of

America’s nostalgic yearnings. Macdonald recounts a line from the comedian Mort Sahl about

Rockwell, “there’s this magazine cover … and it shows this kid getting his first haircut you know and a dog is licking his hand and his mother is crying and it’s Saturday night in the old home town and people are dancing outside in the streets and the Liberty Bell is ringing, and, uh, did I miss anything?” (31) which describes the level of nostalgia taken to the absurd. Mad Men is far too clever a show to take things to the level of the absurd, but the Rockwell-like shots do seem quite conscious. In the first episode, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” we see the show’s

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protagonist, Don Draper, in every aspect of his professional, non-domestic life. We see Draper at work, Draper visiting his Greenwich Village mistress at her bohemian apartment, and Draper in an expensive restaurant wooing another potential mistress, this one a wealthy daughter of a

Jewish department store magnate. Both Draper and the world he inhabits seem far removed from the kind of suburban domesticity with which the 1950s are identified. And yet, in the final scene of the episode we move to the domestic. We see Don driving home in his large automobile and pulling up to his large suburban home and its prominent red front door. We get our first sighting of Betty Draper, who herself is a Rockwell painting of the suburban housewife—she is blonde, beautiful, and carries with her an air of almost child-like innocence. These final scenes, at the

Draper home, as incongruent from the Manhattan world of Don’s work as they are, manage to set the tone for the show, and in some ways the most poignant scene of the entire first episode is the final, Rockwell Saturday Evening Post cover. Don goes up the stairs to the room that his two children share. The children’s beds are close enough together that Don can crouch in between them and we see him tussle the hair of each child. The camera pulls back and our Rockwell cover is filled in, as we find Betty waiting in the doorway, watching Don. It’s an intimate family portrait of an idealized family, and its staged authenticity lends it the feel of Baudrillard’s ideas of simulacra and the hyperreal.iii . And yet, while we should resent this idealized scene, especially given all that we have learned about Draper throughout the rest of the episode, it is hard not to be taken in by it.

The trick that these Rockwell cover shots perform is the same one that Don performs as an advertising executive: we are made to believe in a lie being sold to us, even if we are aware that we are being pitched. The paradox of Mad Men, however, is not the sly way it intertwines the themes of advertising with the themes of the show, but rather its attachment to a period that it

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is eager to confine to the past. For the show, while looking like the 1950s, is very deliberately set in 1960; it is a time when, to take a phrase that Jameson used to describe the postmodernist conceit, there is “the conviction that we are ourselves are something new, that a new age is beginning, that everything is possible and nothing can ever be the same again” (Postmodernism,

Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism 311) and the first season is especially invested in gloriously recapturing an era that it is desperately striving to banish. The show is in that sense trying to achieve a balance between historical realism and the kind of kitschy, faux-nostalgia that is typical of what Jameson calls “the nostalgia film.” The genre features films that are “about the past and about specific generational moments in the past” (“Postmodernism and Consumer

Society” 18). Mad Men, much like how Jameson describes American Graffiti, “set[s] out to recapture all the atmosphere and stylistic peculiarities of the 1950s United States, the United

States of the Eisenhower era” (18). As Ravizza explains:

Mad Men—mostly set in an advertising agency on Madison Avenue in New York—

engages all the aspects [seen to be intrinsic to the 1950s]. First, by having an advertising

agency as its center, the show is very aware of the Fifties’ preoccupation with visual

representations, the selling of these visual representations, and of how advertising

depends on the manipulation of the masses. Secondly, Mad Men, in line with the texts it

is inspired by and pays homage to, focuses on a white, middle-class milieu of characters

which favors the same kind of melodramatic narrative choices that similar Fifties’ texts

preferred. (3-4)

In other words, the show presents a 1950s “reality” that is but a small snapshot of the real era, but with all of the nostalgic cues we associate with the era. It is fitting then that the protagonist,

Draper, appears to be Mailer’s “The White Negro” masquerading as the man in the gray flannel

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suit, and that Draper’s own anxieties contain the same kind of paradoxical discontentment with contentment that is typical of the concerns of the white middle-class male focused 1950s. My focus here will be on the character of Draper, because his portrayal most closely follows the discussion of my study, but there are other themes that one could easily follow with Mad Men.

The show is, in a way, very much like its protagonist: it often has trouble being faithful to the period that it finds so endearing, but there can be no doubt of its affection towards it.

In focusing on the character of Don Draper I want to place emphasis on four elements that partially mirror other elements within this study: 1) Draper as an ad executive who creates the impression of the perfect existence that 1950s America wants to embody, and who constantly questions the credulity of those who would believe this impression; 2) Draper as Mailer’s

“American existentialist” who “follows the will of his body” wherever it might lead him—just as

Mailer suggests in his essay, Draper’s pursuit of sensation seems to be borne out of a disillusionment with the world around him; 3) Draper as the earnest family man who senses that happiness, while illusionary in the corporate world, just might be found within the closed confines of the domestic sphere; and, 4) Draper as a former soldier (in his case, of the Korean war) who cannot help but see the postwar world as surreal because of his own experience with war, and whose interactions with the younger generation who did not participate in a war will always be marked by this gap in shared experience. These elements will not necessarily be examined here in linear fashion, but I want to point out the important presence of all four and how reflective they are of the other texts in this study. This last element differs somewhat from the novels discussed in this study, as the war is the constant that joins all the other male figures, and the gap in the generations is not discussed. It is fitting, however, for Mad Men because the series’ focus is on breaking away from the 1950s, and one element that characterizes this break

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in a historical sense is the moving away from active war to Cold War. In another sense, if the

1950s existed in the post-realist sense that I have been describing—that is that postwar reality always contained within it a desire to view the past and present as mutually exclusive phenomena—the 1960s, symbolically, represents the breaking down of this shared understanding. It stands to reason that a generation not directly affected by the war would have a different relationship to it. The show’s final trick, which perhaps best encapsulates this idea of post-realism, has to do with Don’s very existence as Don Draper: specifically, Don Draper is not actually Don Draper at all, but rather a man named Dick Whitman who assumed the identity of

Don Draper when the real man bearing that name (Whitman’s commanding officer in the Korean war) was killed in a bomb blast and the then-Whitman switched his own dog-tags with those of his commanding officer. Thus Don Draper, who in many ways embodies all the qualities that we would associate with the 1950s American male, is seen not only to be living a lie in the more traditional, Revolutionary Road sense of the idea, but is quite literally living a lie. And perhaps the greatest trick of the show’s first season is that the revelation of Draper’s true identity, which would conceivably ruin the man and rob him of his ideal existence (more on this towards the end of the chapter) turns out to be of little consequence; in the post-realism reality of the 1950s, the show is saying, the identity we create for ourselves is the only one that matters, provided, and this is an important distinction, that this identity follows certain archetypal precepts of white masculinity.

I want to look now at the artificial happiness that advertising and Draper specifically work on creating, which seems to be Mad Men’s central conceit and the one most immediately suggestive of the 1950s as an era. In the first episode, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” the series is most heavily invested in this idea of condescending nostalgia that I have discussed before. Aside

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from the conspicuous smoking and drinking that are immediately set out as markers of difference from our current world, this early episode takes pains to establish the difference in relationships between the holders of power, white men, and those without any (everyone else, really, but the show is most concerned with the relationship between men and women). Oddly, the first episode opens with an interaction to which the first season otherwise pays little attention. Don is in a coffee shop scribbling something on a napkin. The waiter, an older black man, comes by and

Don asks him about the cigarettes he smokes. The waiter looks hesitant to discuss things with

Don, but starts talking. The two are then almost immediately interrupted by the manager, a middle-aged white man, who comes to scold the waiter for bothering customers, but Don calls off the manager. The interaction is a strange one, because it speaks to Don’s in some ways progressive understanding of the world—he is both the archetypal Fifties man and that archetype’s complete opposite—in that he cares not at all that the waiter is a black man or playing a subservient role. But, just as we are marvelling at Don’s progressive behaviour, we realize that the waiter’s race is immaterial to Don because Don has no interest in the man as an individual. His question for the waiter is in regards to the cigarettes the man smokes, and he asks this question because the account on which he is currently working is a tobacco account. The premise for the first episode is that cigarette companies are no longer permitted to advertise any health benefits that come from cigarettes; they have to, essentially, admit that cigarettes are unhealthy. So Don is tasked with finding another way to sell cigarettes, and he is thus asking anyone who does smoke what makes him or her do so. The conundrum faced by both Draper’s firm, Sterling-Cooper, and Lucky Strike, the cigarette company and the firm’s biggest client, is that they are no longer able to simply lie to the customer—they cannot say that cigarettes are healthy and in a sense they have to admit that they are trying to sell the public something that

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may actively kill it. The major question, then, is how do you persuade someone to consume something that is inherently damaging to him? The episode presents two possible and very different solutions, which are themselves quite telling, both in the way that the series portrays itself and the way that it looks to paint the period. I will give a brief summary of the sales pitch part of the episode in order to better demonstrate how the series is establishing itself.

The first solution, with which Draper is not involved, is proposed by the firm’s market research arm. The marketing research is headed up by a severe German psychologist in her forties or fifties (one who thus could possibly have been employed by the Nazis) who follows

Freudian methods and who suggests that people may be smoking because of a latent “death vish”

(as pronounced by the character), or that people smoke because of the little thrill they get from performing a dangerous activity. While Don rejects this idea—he makes a show of throwing the research in a wastebasket and tells the doctor, “I find your ideas perverse”—it is picked up by

Pete Campbell; he literally picks the research out of the trash and presents the idea to Lucky

Strike when Don appears to be failing. Pete’s pitch, which sounds insane when he voices it, is based on the idea that advertising can reflect the world as it is, rather than the world as we wish it to be. “You’re going to die anyway,” he tells the Lucky Strike men desperately, “Die with us.”

His idea is met with incredulity and the response, “We’re selling America. The Indians gave it to us for shit’s sake,” is a telling one for a number of reasons. I want to take a moment to posit what these two statements can tell us before I come back to Don’s solution.

Pete’s borrowed idea, which is a distinctly and transparently non-American one, makes the assumption that the public is willing to view the experience of cigarette smoking for what it is in a scientific and existential sense—i.e. an activity that is factually harmful to one’s prolonged existence. This assumption is based on the premise that, since the American public has

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already been confronted with the notion that cigarettes are harmful, this same public is accepting of this notion and thus will continue to smoke despite that acceptance. To do so, the logic would follow, is to admit some sort of desire for death, or at least danger. As I noted above, existentially this would make sense; it would suggest a desire to live in the enormous present and a certain disregard for one’s future happiness in favour of the experiential. It could be argued (I am not going to argue it presently) that this kind of behaviour is seen in the 1960s countercultural movement, and that perhaps Pete’s idea is simply ahead of its time, but what I will argue is that Pete’s idea has no place in the post-realist world that the statement about cigarettes “selling America” embodies. What is telling in that statement is that it suggests an amnesiac view of both what America is and what America’s historical relationship with

American Indians has been. It suggests that reality as a historical truth is insignificant, even unreal, and instead that reality is our present understanding of it and nothing more. In that sense cigarettes perfectly represent the post-realism 1950s because they represent a wilful ignorance of both historical and scientific reality, or what Jameson describes as “the failure of the new, the imprisonment in the past” (“Postmodernism and Consumer Society” 18). The intention is not so much to misrepresent reality as to remark upon only that which is pleasant about reality.

Understanding that you smoke because you may have some kind of death wish may be a step in a better understanding of the self, but it does very little to suggest that your present reality is a happy one. If we look at Dwight Macdonald’s comment regarding “mass ‘entertainment,’” he explains that:

[T]he technology of producing [such entertainment] imposes a simplistic, repetitious

pattern so that it is easier to say the public wants this than to say the truth which is that

the public gets this and so wants it. The March Hare explained to Alice that “I like what I

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get” is not the same thing as “I get what I like,” but March Hares have never been

welcome on Madison Avenue.” (10-11)

Don’s job is not to ensure that the public gets what it likes so much as that it likes what it gets.

Choosing to open the series with a cigarette campaign was a very astute move by the show’s creators, because it is a sizeable blemish in the high gloss veneer of 1950s American society. It is an intrusion of unpleasant reality, much like the threat of nuclear war, the spread of communism, and the disquiet of the suburban housewife (another Mad Men focal point). As the

Lucky Strike man notes, cigarettes are America, in a way, as they represent both the farming heartland (tobacco production), the large corporate interest, and freedom of choice (the freedom to choose to smoke), so to have them unsafe makes for some uncomfortable identification issues.

Up until the time of the episode the solution for the cigarette companies had been to deny the existence of the problem, to claim instead that cigarettes may not be unhealthy and may in fact provide some health benefitsiv—we can see echoes of the current climate change debate here and note that that debate is probably at roughly the same stage—but a surgeon general’s reportv in

November, 1959 has made such a strategy untenable. The only two possible options, in terms of advertising, seem to be Pete’s solution, to acknowledge the issue and embrace it, and the one

Don ends up presenting, which is not to deny the problem but to act as if the problem was not present. It would seem logical that such an approach would fail, but Don hits on a period truth when he finishes his pitch. After pitching the idea, which is in many ways anticlimactic because it is a simple phrase—“Lucky Strike: It’s toastedvi,”—he explains why his idea is revolutionary in its simplicity. He seizes on the phrase “it’s toasted” because it sounds pleasant but it also sounds benign. When Garner notes that “everybody else’s tobacco is toasted,” Don replies,

“everybody else’s tobacco is poisonous; Lucky Strike’s tobacco is toasted.” Everything is

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premised on the associations that people have with the word “toasted” and these associations are of something that is pleasant but completely non-threatening. Don’s explanation is based on his understanding of advertising. He says, “Advertising is based on happiness…1 [it’s] a billboard on the side of the road that screams that whatever you’re doing… it’s okay. You are okay.”

Don’s phrase does not, however, merely explain advertising; it also explains post-realism as a literary style and as a paradigm. In both The Man and the Gray Flannel Suit and The Caine

Mutiny we could find a moment that is very much like Don’s “you are okay” billboard. We can find it in Herbert Gold’s sardonic assessment of these works when he writes mockingly, “the hero learns just how right it is to be right” (585). The principle is not really a rejection of critical thinking so much as a wilful detachment from it. Essentially, Tom Rath finds happiness when he can believe Don’s billboard: “whatever you’re doing… it’s okay,” when he realizes that it is possible for him to simply not work as hard as his boss without facing any negative consequences. In capturing this idea, which is the essence of advertising, Mad Men is also able to capture the strangely unreal feeling that persisted in the 1950s for those who lived in it and wrote about it contemporaneously (for example, “Masscult and Midcult” was originally supposed to be published in The Saturday Evening Post, a magazine that Macdonald spends much of his effort deriding as masscult tripe (68)). It also manages to capture the feeling in a way that the more typically condescending nostalgia-driven Fifties pieces do not, because it portrays the period not as surreal and its people not as blissfully naive, but instead captures this carefully constructed naivety that is grounded in the idea that the present period is happiness, and as such all aspects of it must correspondingly be conducive to the production of happiness. There are many other

1 Don Draper, especially when pitching, speaks in dramatic pauses. I have tried to represent those pauses here by the use of ellipses. 240

moments in the first season where Don reaches this same kind of creative epiphany, but these moments are all based around this same premise. The choice of cigarettes is telling in another way, however, because Don’s strategy can only work for so long with a product whose effects are so pronounced. Thus, if we look at the overall project of Mad Men’s first season as burying the 1950s as both a decade and a way of viewing American society, the successful cigarette pitch is merely a treatment that lessens the severity of the disease’s effects but does nothing to forestall the inevitable. The twist, which is also a signature of the series’ first season, is that no one recognizes this inevitability better than Don Draper, who most of the time seems quite immune to his own pitches.

I argued above that Draper can be looked at as the embodiment of Mailer’s “white negro” figure in his pursuit of pleasure from the present, but Draper can only be viewed this way in his actions, as he seems to get no real enjoyment, or happiness, from any of his pursuits. He succeeds in advertising because he understands what people believe happiness to be, but he is himself agnostic towards happiness. In “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” after the success of the

Lucky Strike campaign, Don reveals his philosophy to his newest sexual target, department store heiress Rachel Menken, over a dinner discussion. Menken’s character is typical of the women that Don pursues because she resists the domestic ideal and asserts a feminist, or proto-feminist perspectivevii. Don asks Rachel why she is in business and not looking to get married—he says,

“You’re a beautiful, educated women. Don’t you think that getting married and having a family would make you happier than all the headaches that go along with fighting people like me?”— but it’s clear both from her response and the way he phrases the question that this is more flirtation than an appeal to “traditional” values. The conversation’s real subject is happiness, the concept that Don has just successfully sold to Lucky Strike, but here it is revealed that Don

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views happiness and other emotions, such as love, that coincide with it, as fantasies. Rachel tells

Don that she has never been in love and Don replies, “what you call love was invented by guys like me… to sell nylons.” Everything is a lie, an illusion to Don. It’s all about the perception of happiness, rather than happiness itself. “I’m living like there’s no tomorrow… because there isn’t one.” Take that, Norman Mailer.

This revelation in the first episode is effective because it at once flaunts our expectations of the 1950s—a large part of condescending nostalgia is believing that the people of an earlier period were blissfully ignorant; the scenes I refer to above with Betty and the children are examples of this belief—and completely satisfies them. There is a desire to believe that no one in the 1950s was as happy as they appear to be and Don’s revelation satisfies this desire. And while no character takes their dissatisfaction with seeming perfection as far as Don, who is at times nihilistic in his speech and actions (he frequently yells at clients, and in the season’s third episode, “Marriage of Figaro,” he simply departs from his own daughter’s birthday party, going out to pick up the cake mid-party and not returning until late into the evening), many characters experience loss of innocence moments that correspond with the burying of the 1950s. As noted,

Betty Draper experiences her own feminine mystique moment, but we see other characters have similar revelations. Salvator Romano, the conspicuously closeted character, is made to confront the reality of his desires in “The Hobo Code”—he shrinks from them; not everyone is ready to bury the 1950s, it seems. Pete Campbell looks to domestic contentment and corporate advancement to satisfy his ambitions but finds that neither operates in the way he thought he understood. Finally, Peggy Olson moves quickly from utter naivety in her early days as Don’s secretary to become a symbolic rejection of the 1950s domestic contentment model. Briefly, she has an affair with Pete Campbell that leads to an unwanted pregnancy, but the twist is that Peggy

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is ignorant of the pregnancy almost until she gives birth (“The Wheel”). The symbolism here is that Peggy, in transcending the typical female role of secretary and becoming a copywriter, has also somehow transcended her own biological identity. The pregnancy seems as shocking to her as it would be to one of her male coworkers if he found himself pregnant. More could be said on this subject, but for my purposes here I merely wish to note it as a sort of culmination of the rupture from the 1950s that the first season is undertaking. But I want to move back to Don and his “seize the day” mentality, examining it in relation to Mailer’s essay and the domestic ideal from which Don seems unable to escape.

The difference between Don and the characters listed above is that he does not have to be, to borrow a phrase from James Baldwin, “disabused of the notion” that 1950s America is happiness trademarked. His statement to Rachel that he is living like there’s no tomorrow because there isn’t one could be interpreted as a cheesy pickup line if not for the other elements of Don’s past that the show carefully reveals over the course of the first season. Behind that statement could very well be these words from Mailer:

[I]f the fate of twentieth-century man is to live with death from adolescence to premature

senescence, why then the only life-giving answer is to accept the terms of death, to live

with death as immediate danger, to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to

set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self. In short,

whether the life is criminal or not, the decision to encourage the psychopath in oneself, to

explore that domain of experience where security is boredom and therefore sickness, and

one exists in the present, in that enormous present which is without past or future,

memory or planned intention, the life where a man must go until he is beat, where he

must gamble with his energies through all those small or large crises of courage and

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unforeseen situations which beset his day, where he must be with it or doomed not to

swing. (339)

There is a lot to examine in this statement, both in terms of where Mailer is coming from and how much of it applies to Don. For Mailer, World War II represented the inexorable rise of the “super state” which controlled every aspect of society in a way that had not been previously possible.viii Man “lives with death” because he could be obliterated by a nuclear bomb without warning or confined to a concentration camp without reason, such was the power of the state, or at least such was that power in Mailer’s conception of it. These fears, again for Mailer, manifested themselves in the commonly perceived conformist culture of 1950s America. A man conformed because he believed that to dissent was “to give a note upon his life which could be called in any year of overt crisis” (338). So the only way to combat this spectre of death was to embrace it, to ignore the past and disbelieve in the future. What I am calling “post-realism” can actually be viewed in this way—the past is viewed as linear and logical and the future is seen only to be an extension of and improvement upon the present, so in a sense neither exists in the domain of the real—but the post-realist world view necessitates an inherent belief in the rightness of systems and the American ideology. Mailer is suggesting that both of these are to be outright rejected. Don Draper’s own existentialism appears to coincide with what Mailer is saying, but his rejection of the dominant mindset of the 1950s, despite his protestations to the contrary, is never a firm one. He lives at once like he has nothing and everything to lose.

We can see different manifestations of Don’s existentialism (in Mailer’s understanding) in Mad Men’s first season. In “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” the intimate conversation that Don has with Rachel about happiness can be read like Mailer’s explanation of “swing.” In one of the most racially problematic episodesix in the essay, Mailer describes overhearing “a Negro friend have

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an intellectual discussion at a party for an hour and half with a white girl who was a few years out of college” (350). Mailer’s characterizing of his “friend” sounds straight out of a colonial handbook as he explains that “the Negro literally could not read or write, but he had an extraordinary ear and a fine sense of mimicry” (350), but the thrust of his argument has less to do with racial stereotyping than the equally troubling notion of trying to manipulate women for sexual purposes, and Don displays some of the same characteristics. Mailer’s anecdote continues: “So as the girl spoke, he would detect the particular formal uncertainties in her argument, and in a pleasant (if slightly Southern) English accent, he would respond to one or another facet of her doubts. When she would finish what she felt was a particularly well- articulated idea he would smile privately and say, ‘Other direction … do you really believe in that?’” (350, ellipsis in text). Mailer finishes this anecdote by explaining that “[o]f course the

Negro was not learning anything about the merits and demerits of the argument, but he was learning a great deal about a type of girl he had never met before, and that was what he wanted”

(350). It is here that we can find very similar aspects in Don’s seduction of Rachel. She interests him, but not, as she thinks, because of her ideas about independence or happiness. Rather, she interests him because she is what he wants at this particular moment, and he is particularly adept at convincing people that he is what they want. Thus his “what you call love was invented by guys like me… to sell nylons” is a version of the line (right down to the ellipsis in the phrasing)

Mailer quotes above (“do you really believe in that?”). Don has clearly mastered swing, but we see as the first season continues that this Mailer-like existentialism is but one facet of Don’s character.

Mailer’s essay is uncomfortable in a contemporary setting because of its title and the premise that the title suggests. In calling his essay “The White Negro” and then heralding this

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hypothetical figure as some kind of saviour of American society, Mailer is suggesting that what

America really needs is a white man who acts like a black man. America needs a black saviour, but that saviour cannot actually be black. As Andrew Hoberek argues, “Mailer’s impact on the current critical scene is too often underestimated: the legacy of ‘The White Negro’ can still be discerned in the tendency of cultural studies to celebrate ‘transgressive’ politics of style, thereby romanticizing those excluded from power rather than seeking to open power up” (Twilight 67).

When you factor in the racial stereotypes and the, as James Baldwin puts it, “myth of the sexuality of Negroes which Norman, like so many others, refuses to give up” (220) it is easy to see why contemporary reactions to this essay typically range from mild bemusement to contempt. Thus far in speaking of the essay here I have eschewed the racial aspects for Mailer’s more prophetic societal observations, but the racial aspects cannot be ignored and they, in fact, actually have some application towards Don’s own existentialist leanings. For at the core of Mad

Men is actually a core trope of African American literature and experience with white society: the passing narrativex.

Mailer’s contention with his essay is that certain African American men live this life of

“experience” because they are aware that mainstream American society has rejected them before they were even born. They can live, then, with a freedom to seek out experience without the fear of losing security, as they have no security. Mailer’s implied belief in asking for a white Negro is that we need to see this same kind of behaviour from someone who has something to lose. What

Mailer of course ignores is that white men have had, and continue to have, more freedom to do whatever they want than any other member of American society. In 1950s America this would be particularly true, and the white men who would have the most freedom, who in a sense would be allowed to live most experientially, are the kind that I have been writing about for the entirety of

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this study. Mad Men makes this point clear by taking pains to show its white male, archetypal characters engaging in, among other things, adultery, binge drinking, illegal substance use, and overt sexual harassment of women in their employ, and it also makes clear that we are to see this as the height of excess, a sort of Fall of Rome moment. They are, in a sense, living like there’s no tomorrow because every day for them is the same. This can be seen most tellingly in the season’s eighth episode, “The Hobo Code.”

This episode reveals more of Don’s mysterious past as Dick Whitman, which is done in flashbacks that Don has while at Midge’s during a beatnik party. I am less concerned with the references to Don’s past (more on that in a bit) than with Don’s seemingly existentialist view towards his evening. The episode starts with Don receiving an enormous bonus cheque from

Cooper (it is for $2500 and we have learned in an earlier episode that Pete Campbell makes

$3000 in a year). Cooper, who discusses Ayn Randxi and being “unsentimental about the people who depend on our hard work,” insinuates that Don is like him, and we are perhaps meant to see

Don’s subsequent behaviour as his attempt to disprove Cooper. Regardless, Don takes the cheque straight to Midge’s and announces that he’s taking her to Paris—proving once again that it is much easier to live in the enormous present with an enormous bank account. Midge, however, has different ideas. She has what she calls a “big evening” planned, which turns out to be smoking marijuana and listening to Miles Davis. Don, always open to new experience, is happy to participate.

What follows, in a series of scenes broken up by other plot lines involving Pete, Peggy and Salvator, is a somewhat heavy-handed commentary on the Beats and sexism. The two men at the party besides Don are beatniks. One is goateed and wears a fez and the other, Roy, is bearded with floppy hair and appears to be in competition with Don for Midge’s affections. Two women

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besides Midge are present: one is young and blonde and the other is African American, but their roles are conspicuously domestic—at one point the man in the fez tells the blonde, “make yourself useful and get me a glass of water”—the conflict here is between the three white men and their views on contemporary American society. All three are engaging in subversive behaviour in that they are consuming illegal substances, but Don is accused of being an imposter.

Don realizes that Midge is actually in love with Roy and it makes him combative. Roy says “love is bourgeois,” but we already know Don’s supposed take on love. As the dispute becomes heated, the man in the fez starts speaking in mixed metaphors about “ants going into the hive” and tells Don, “I wipe my ass with The Wall Street Journal.” Don responds, “make something of yourself.” The scene appears to set itself up as Don representing the establishment and the other two as representing the anti-establishment Beatnik movement. Don is essentially telling the beats to “get a haircut and get a real job” while the beats respond by saying, “You’re one of them. You make the lie.” Don responds with a very Randian phrase. He tells Roy, who has made the above comment about making the lie, “there is no conspiracy, there is no big lie; the universe is indifferent.xii” But what makes this scene, and what allows for the reading that privilege makes subversive behaviour much easier, is when Don leaves the party. The police has been called to respond to an incident in Midge’s building and at the same time Don decides that he is leaving.

When Don gets up to go, the beatnik in the fez tells him “you can’t go out there.” Don replies, putting on his hat, “no… you can’t.” He then walks out the door in his suit, and the policemen greet him with “good evening, sir” as he exits the building.

This scene is a particularly intriguing one because it sees Don embracing both the

Beatnik movement and its idea of alternative lifestyle—both in terms of drug use and in terms of his relationship with Midge, which seems to be undefined in any conventional sense—and

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looking to combat it. He both is and is not the man in the gray flannel suit—he’s actually identified as “the man in the gray flannel suit” when he arrives at the party—but his ability to engage in both worlds speaks to the “white” aspect in Mailer’s argument for “The White Negro.”

Don is able to lead what is essentially a life of vice, one where he pretends to believe in nothing and where he thus behaves how he chooses, because of, rather than in spite of, the fact that he appears to outwardly be conforming to the norm. Mad Men as a series, and the first season in particular, is concerned with the concept of happiness and whether such a thing can really exist, but in exploring the pursuit of happiness by a man who claims that it cannot exist the show gives a fair commentary on how much easier it is for a successful white man to act subversively than it is for any other kind of figure. Nevertheless, as I have noted above, Don’s seeming existentialism is not so much rooted in a joyless pursuit of hedonism as it in his feeling that he is constantly playing a role that is not his, that he is, in his mind, passing.

Steven Belluscio presents a useful definition of passing. He explains that there are commonly two understandings of passing. The first, which is sociological, notes that “passing means to conceal a unitary, essential and ineffaceable racial identity and substitute it with a purportedly artificial one, as in the oft-discussed case of a light-skinned black person passing for white ‘for social, economic, or political reasons’” (9). The second understanding is a more postmodern one “that is linked to performativity” (9). Belluscio argues that this second understanding

refers not to an assumption of fraudulent identity but more broadly to the ‘condition of

subjectivity in postmodernity,’ in which our Lyotardian distrust of totalizing

metanarratives, when applied to identity, has caused us to focus not so much on identity

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as a unitary, essentialized entity, but rather as a process-oriented performance drawing

upon a seemingly infinite number of cultural texts, ‘ethnic’ or otherwise. (9)

This second understanding is more in line with the post-realist conception of 1950s America, in that one can perform the identity that one wishes to have. Belluscio further clarifies the difference between the two understanding by explaining, “thus, if the ‘first cultural’ notion of passing relies upon a ‘binary logic of identity, the logics that says if A is white, A cannot be not white,’ then the latter cultural notion shatters this binarism and offers in its stead multiplicity and performative possibility” (9). For Belluscio’s argument the two notions are useful, though

Belluscio cautions that “we as critics cannot forget that many passing narratives written in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are governed by the logic of the first cultural position” (9-10). For my purposes I want to focus on both “cultural positions.” Don Draper’s whiteness means that his passing cannot involve racial identity in any real sense—he is performing an identity and I will later argue that his performance is successful in terms of

Belluscio’s second understanding—but his motivations and fears seem rooted in the first understanding. His belief is that his passing is a binary one, that he is either Don Draper or he is

Dick Whitman, and that once discovered as Dick Whitman he can no longer be Don Draper, in the same sense that anyone passing as white can never become white again once their non- whiteness is revealed.

Don is not passing in the first understanding of the term. He is not a black man trying to pass as white, and many of the attendant dangers that come with a passing narrative are not present in Mad Men. Nevertheless, this idea that Don is passing, that he is attempting to pass for someone he is not, is central to Mad Men’s first season, and Don’s fear of being found out is as real as the fear of a character in a passing narrative. This fear is manifested in small incidents in

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some of the earlier episodes. Don is recognized on a train by an old acquaintance (“Marriage of

Figaro”); Don is sought out by his estranged half-brother, whom Don pushes out of his life with a large sum of cash and a threat (“5G”, “Indian Summer”). There are also a number of flashbacks to Don’s humble beginnings. We are made to have the sense that Don always feels out of place with his life—both his success in advertising and within his suburban domestic environment— because deep down he knows that it is a life he has stolen. One could theorize, then, that his philosophy of living like there is no tomorrow comes from a suspicion that he could be found out at any time. However, what Don’s own passing narrative proves is that, just as the kind of existential behaviour that Mailer is advocating is actually much easier to engage in for those inside the margins than it is for those who are on them, a white male passing as a different white male is not going to have the same implications in America as a black person passing as a white person. However much Don wants to view his passing as the first cultural understanding, it is always going to fall more into the second. This is made clear when Don’s “real” identity becomes known to Pete Campbell in the episode “Nixon vs. Kennedy.”

For the purposes of the present analysis it is enough to know that Don has assumed the identity of his dead Army commander (“Nixon vs. Kennedy”). This is the secret that he guards closely and the secret that, the show appears to be arguing, gives him his unique perspective on advertising, as he himself is nothing more than a manufactured image of what a successful advertising executive is supposed to be. He is, in other words, the perfect post-realism subject, as the only reality is the one being lived in the present, and historical inconveniences are smoothed over. Or at least, that is what we are meant to believe. Thus when Pete Campbell serendipitously comes into possession of materials that prove Don is not who he claims to be, it appears that

Don’s carefully constructed world is about to collapse around him. And, in a very clever

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thematic juxtaposition, the supposed imminent collapse of Don’s world is meant to coincide with the loss of Richard Nixon, whose campaign Sterling-Cooper has been assigned to work on, to

John F. Kennedy. Nixon, who is the sitting Vice President, represents the Fifties and the established way of doing business, while Kennedy, apparently, represents the new reality of the

Sixties. When Kennedy wins, it is officially the end of an era, or so the narrative would have us believe. However, in this case the show rejects its own narrative. As much as Mad Men’s first season appears to be about laying the Fifties, and the values associated with them, to rest, this particular episode, and the revelation of Don’s falsified past, suggests that the Fifties remain with us in many ways. In terms of narrative it is a very clever twist, and in terms of this study it is an important reminder of the enduring resonance of the 1950s masculine archetype being discussed here.

The tension, in both this episode and the first season as a whole, lies in the enormity of

Don’s secret. Not only has he assumed another man’s life, but he is also a deserter, a criminal by military law. The revelation of his true identity should mean the loss of everything in somewhat the same way it would mean for a character in a passing narrative.xiii Don appears to believe so, and his existentialism vanishes along with the safety of his faux-identity. He tries to convince

Rachel, who is now his lover, to run away with him, behaving as a con man who knows that this con has run too long. When Rachel refuses—and here she actually plays true to her perceived role as a feminist, arguing convincingly that her life is in New York running a company and not with Don on some sort of romantic adventure—Don realizes that the only way he can meet

Campbell’s threat is to acknowledge the truth in the accusations. So, instead of hiring Pete as head of accounts, the position over which Pete is blackmailing him, he tells Pete that he is hiring another candidate. In a rather comedic scene the two almost race to Cooper’s office, hurrying to

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take their shoes off (an idiosyncrasy Cooper insists on) and beat each other to the door. Don tells

Cooper that he is hiring Duck Phillips (the other candidate) and Pete bursts out that Don is not really Don, that he is “a deserter at the very least and who knows what else.” I am taking extra space to narrate this scene because of the way it turns the death of the Fifties narrative on its head. Much of the first season is framed as an elegy for the decade. As Ravizza also comments,

“something about the Fifties has facilitated the development of a strong nostalgic feeling in popular culture,” continuing that “through the centrality of the mass media, the Fifties came into existence particularly in a visual fashion, with images of happy families and an overall feeling of well-being broadcast on screen, which contributed considerably to the establishment of a nostalgic discourse of the Fifties” (4). Mad Men evokes this “feeling of well-being” and applies it: everything, from the colours of women’s dresses and lipstick, to the leather booths in the restaurants of luxury hotels, to Don’s enormous suburban home with its red door, is viewed as something of a beautiful relic from a bygone era. The colours are brighter than real colours, the people more beautiful than real people and all of it is in some sense too good to be true (and in other senses too bad to be true). This romanticized view of the era is never quite to be believed, and hence the inescapable condescension in the nostalgic waxing. These people don’t know it can’t last, the show tells us, so we can pity them while we admire them. Don’s secret fits right into this feeling. The idea that he can simply make up a new life for himself in the way he chooses, with himself as an advertisement for himself (with apologies to Norman Mailer), is a romantic one that cannot be sustained in reality; it is ultimately just as silly as his trying to convince Rachel to run away with him by telling her “we can be like Adam and Eve.” Except, and here is where I will return both to “reality” and the idea of post-realism that I’ve been discussing throughout, it is our perception of reality that is questioned.

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What I mean by this statement is that much of the first season of Mad Men, with its application of condescending nostalgia to the characters and the era, is made to look like one of the Norman Rockwell tableaus in which it frames its characters. When we look at such a

Rockwell painting we are at once aware of its unreality as much as we are charmed by the scene it is looking to evoke. Thus much of the work of the show is to belie the images that the show itself is presenting. However, the ultimate message that is coming across seems to be much harder to interpret. On the one hand we have the obvious discontent of the many characters, not to mention the damaging effects of misogyny and repressed homosexuality, to juxtapose and call into question the beautiful representations—imagine a Rockwell painting where the characters have thought bubbles that express the exact opposite sentiment of what the painting itself is portraying—but on the other hand we have the thesis that “truth in advertising” is not an oxymoron, because advertising makes truth. As such, if truth in Mad Men is subjective, if it is always subject to multiple interpretations, then advertising is an attempt to foreclose interpretation. Or, as Baudrillard describes:

All original cultural forms, all determined languages are absorbed in advertising because

it has no depth, it is instantaneous and instantaneously forgotten … more generally, the

form of advertising is one in which all particular contents are annulled at the very

moment when they can be transcribed into each other, whereas what is inherent to

“weighty” enunciations, to articulated forms of meaning (or style) is that they cannot be

translated into each other, any more than the rules of a game can be. (87)

Baudrillard’s explanation of how advertising absorbs other determinations (and he means the form more so than the specific outputs of advertising as a field) can be found illustrated in the

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way in which Don’s crisis of identity is resolved. I will come back now to this scene of grand revelation to explain what I mean by this.

What is most significant about Don’s false identity turns out to be its insignificance. In the “Nixon vs. Kennedy” episode this insignificance is foreshadowed in Bert Cooper’s reaction to Kennedy’s victory. The firm has been working on the Nixon campaign and appears to have much invested in a Republican White House. After all, Kennedy seems to represent a changing of the guard, a move away from business as usual, and his most conspicuous supporter in the show’s first-season is Helen Bishop, the subversive divorcée who goes “walking” and feeds her children frozen fish sticks (“Ladies Room”, “New Amsterdam”). It would be logical then that

Bert Cooper, who is a self-professed disciple of Ayn Rand, would be upset at Kennedy’s victory.

Yet Cooper appears unmoved. When Don comes in to speak to him after the election results are known, Cooper says that there has been widespread fraud in the election, that things were very close. He blames Nixon’s loss on “those damn jingles and Frank Sinatra,” but instead of being angry or resigned he tells Don that a corporate executive, “Neil from P & G,” has said “if

Kennedy is willing to buy an election, he’s willing to play ball with us.” Cooper then says, rather cryptically, “it’s a football game to them.” The idea seems to be that politics mean very little when it comes to business interests. And for Cooper, whose interest is those with business interests, no news is good news. Thus, as far as the firm is concerned, nothing has really changed with Kennedy’s election, so the supposed new era is viewed instead as a continuation of the current one.

It is perhaps not surprising then when Don’s true identity (or, perhaps more correctly, his false identity) is revealed that Cooper is indifferent. He greets Pete’s exhortation with, “Who cares?” Then he says, “a man is whatever room he is in. Right now Donald Draper is in this

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room.” Cooper finishes his statement by saying that “there’s more profit in forgetting this.” The, if not obvious, implied reading here, in a show that is about advertising, is that Don’s advertised identity is more important than his “real” identity. Cooper exhibits a viewpoint akin to what

Baudrillard says above, in that this revelation of Don’s past is both “instantaneous and instantaneously forgotten,” and all “previous contents are annulled.” Cooper’s undoubtedly objectivist philosophy would dictate that a problem is only something that keeps one from meeting one’s (profit driven) goals. He is indifferent to Don’s secret not because of any loyalty to Don or belief in his character but because the man in his office who claims to be Don Draper makes him money. His philosophy is something akin to that of the modern corporation, where the concern is always increasing shareholder value. But in terms of the show’s ethos there is a bit more at play. Don’s supposed existentialism has been revealed to be a masquerade. In the episode he is panicked and irrational and gravely concerned about the loss of his constructed identity. Cooper’s reaction is hardly surprising to those that have been watching the series, but what is surprising is that Don and Pete do not anticipate it. Despite their working for an advertising agency, they still express doubt that advertising is effective. They are, in a sense, no different from their own sceptical clients, and Don seems to believe that he keeps up his false identity and his many vices because of some sort of death wish. In reality, or at least in the show’s reality, he does these things not because of some desire for death, but rather because he is being told, implicitly, that he is okay—whatever it is he’s doing, he’s okay.

Thus it is possible to argue that Mad Men, which seems to be about the end of an era and the impossibly idealistic suburban pastoral lifestyle, is in fact about the enduring domination of white masculinity in America (and this fact is no doubt why one of the conclusions that Ravizza makes in her article is that the show is conservative in its values). Part of our viewing the 1950s

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with condescending nostalgia is our belief that things are different now, that the world is somehow less dominated by white masculinity. Ostensibly and cosmetically this is true, no corporation could behave in such obviously racist and sexist ways as Sterling Cooper exhibits, but the underlying power dynamics that existed in the 1950s are still largely in place today.

Corporations have just done a better job at promoting a different interpretation. As I have pointed out above, Don’s hedonism is enabled not so much because of how he views the world and himself, but because the world he inhabits allows him to hold such a view. This is why, while the first season may employ a passing narrative, it is impossible to call what Don is doing passing in the first cultural understanding. When Don’s true identity is revealed the truth about his identity is that he is still a white man in America. Thus, while it is possible to look at Cooper’s take on the revelation as a meritocratic one, in reality he is taking a very slight risk. Don’s whiteness is the trump card in the relationship and it enables him not only to keep his job, but also to go back to his family at the season’s end, and while he may have lost both of his mistresses by this point, there is never any doubt that he can simply find another. Don’s case is the post-realist era personified, not only in that the past is never anything but a reflection of the present, but also that the present refusal to critically engage with the past results in a similar domination, in terms of the power and access available to white masculinity. For Don—for almost any of the characters discussed in this study—all he need do is put on his gray flannel suit, “the uniform of the day,” and he can go anywhere he likes.

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i As the series continued on to its conclusion it became a show that was distinctly about the 1960s, as each season progresses through various different historical markers (and clothing and hairstyles) of the Sixties, with only Don

Draper remaining as a constant, looking almost the same in the final season as he does in the first. The first season, in retrospect, appears to be a way of both introducing the 1960s and saying goodbye (and paying homage) to the

1950s. ii Ironically, early on in the first season of Mad Men the (at times loathsome) character Pete Campbell comments on his own creativity by explaining that he came up with the concept for direct marketing. “Of course, someone else had already thought of it,” Campbell concedes, “but I came up with the idea independently” (“New Amsterdam”). iii As Baudrillard describes, the hyperreal “is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs for the real, that is to say of an operation of deferring every real process via its operational double, a programmatic, metastable, perfectly descriptive machine that offers all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes” (2). iv In 1946 the tobacco giant RJ Reynolds started a major campaign calling their Camel brand, among other things, the “doctor’s choice” and in the late 40s had advertisements in medical journals with purported “mildness reports” that commented on things like incidents of throat irritation. As late as 1952 the “more doctors smoke Camels” line was still being used. By 1960, when Mad Men is set, doctors were no longer being used, but the American medical association did not publicly recognize cigarettes as harmful until 1978 (Gardner and Brandt). v What the series is most likely acting upon is the statement by Surgeon General Leroy E. Burney, who in 1957 released a statement declaring the links between cigarette and lung cancer looked to be conclusive. “On November

28, 1959 … Burney reiterated and strengthened his previous statement by saying ‘The belief of the Public Health

Service is that the weight of evidence at present implicates smoking as the principal factor in the increased incidence of lung cancer’ and that ‘Cigarette smoking particularly is associated with an increased chance of developing lung cancer’” (Brawley et al, 7). vi The actual brand Lucky Strike had been using the “It’s Toasted” slogan since 1917 (“Stanford Research into the

Impact of Tobacco Advertising”).

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vii As the series continues we can see that Draper pursues these strong female characters not because of his own feminist-leanings but rather because he seeks to conquer them and subjugate them to domestication—in a sense to turn them into his present wife—again, it appears, not out of any sort of ideological notion but rather for the thrill of the experience. viii As noted Mailer critic Joseph Wenke explains, Mailer was preoccupied with totalitarianism and was convinced that World War II provided the conditions for it to be consolidated in America. “For Mailer,” Wenke argues,

“totalitarianism is not limited in its expression to despotic governments and dictatorial leaders such as Hitler,

Mussolini and Stalin. Instead it is a ‘geist, a spirit, which takes many forms.’ It is manifested in any attempt at reducing complexity, minimizing expression, or eliminating differences in personality and culture” (12-13). ix In Love and Theft Eric Lott identifies Mailer’s text as twentieth-century minstrelsy. He argues that “Mailer codifies the renegade ethic of male sexuality, conceived out of and projected onto black men—and always

‘compromised’ by white men’s evident attraction to them—which constituted the more than metaphorical racial romance of the minstrel show Early minstrel performers would not have been able to articulate it, but Mailer’s dream of the black male may stand as a fairly close description of their own fascination” (54). x Passing is a trope that was common the 1990s and early 2000s, as for example in Philip Roth’s Human Stain. It was also of course an important topic in the 1960s (e.g., Black Like Me). xi It is worth noting that Cooper’s evocation of Rand is more symbolic than it is nuanced. Hoberek argues that Rand and her “conception of mental labor, and the politics to which it gives rise, are much more complicated (if in many ways no less conservative) than we usually give them credit for being” (Twilight 33). Cooper is not a man of ideas; he is a man who employs mental labour rather than utilizing his own, so for him Rand likely represents the principles of Objectivism. Hoberek claims that Rand is actually a defender of middle-class values as they relate to private property. He explains, “if Rand’s heroes proudly define themselves as producers and traders, her villains reproduce the picture of white-collar abdication central to The Organization Man” (Twilight 37). xii Hoberek notes that, “for Rand the market is not the source of social inequality but the mechanism for eliminating hierarchical relationships, the basis for what is in effect a functioning anarchy” (Twilight 38).

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xiii Cf. Nella Larsen’s Passing and James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. In Passing, the revelation that Clare Kennedy is passing for a white women results indirectly in her death, and the extreme racism exhibited by her white husband suggests that her life may have been in real danger at any case. In Johnson’s novel, the passing figure is successful in his endeavour, but risks losing everything he has gained when he tells his white wife the truth.

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