Epitaph to a Generation: What Shall We Wear to This Party?
["What Shall We Wear to This Party?", the] autobiography of the man who wrote "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit," seems to promise some unpromising confessions—self-hatred, divorce, alcoholism, middle-aged romantic yearnings, nostalgia about a faded WASP propriety, hapless vanity, Internal Revenue problems, an uneasy Harvard boy now lurking in the body of a grandfather. And, indeed, it delivers this load of splintered kindling. Yet this book, after eight novels, which led many readers to think Sloan Wilson had no surprises in him, is finally touching, charming, and revelatory in the best way—it tells what the author knows and also more than he knows. It is a near miss at summing up the experience of a generation, marred mostly by a hastily sentimental running down at the end, which is itself a symptom of the life his career has attempted to define….
Whatever Sloan Wilson offers in his paltry last chapters, the book as a whole tells more, a more powerful instrument than the will of its harassed author. (p. 7)
Wilson begins by reminding us of how his war seemed "an authentic struggle between good and evil," and how he had to pass the tests of bravery and seasickness. After all this stalwartness, there was the scramble "to build the house which filled our dreams—or at least those of our wives—to join the country club…." In Bicentennial America this sounds archaic, even to most of those who lived it, and yet this march to the sound of the same drummer was only yesterday. Time magazine writers wore the uniform and knew they were in the business of selling the opinions of Henry Luce. The world had its order, and, for those who knew the limits, there was a yacht in the pot at the end of the rainbow. "Girls, like loving cups, were trophies who always went to the victor of some strenuous event." A nice boy like Sloan went to Exeter and Harvard and hoped to end as a "winner" so that he could earn one of those loving cups.
The real relationship of such men is to other men, and Wilson is effective and moving about war, business, money, success. His eloquent matter-of-factness about armies seagoing among desolate ice floes is exactly right. His tender notice of the birth of his first daughter and of the final dying of his ancient mother, transcend the loving-cup standard, but most of his contacts with women echo the harassed and dreamy powerlessness of a driven class of men. (pp. 7-8)
"The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit" was a book which many of us snooted for its fuzzy neatness. The title seemed to make its point and to leave little left over to the novel itself. And yet it hit a nerve, it entered the collective soul of the middle class; if that's too clanging a statement, say simply that it gave a generation the mirror it craved for itself….
It reflects a bygone period of American resurgence, a sort of internal Marshall Plan, which hid the real problems of American life—and of man's mortal destiny—under a convenient blanket of flannel. This reminiscence evokes the time of Sloan Wilson, Harvard boy turned writer, with some of the rueful best qualities of the decedent class. He was obedient even in sex—"the duty and pride of a man is to give pleasure to a woman in bed"—and this mournful Puritanism tells more about marriage in the 50's than most of the executive-suite books of the time and their honeyed episodes of executive sweets….
The story's very familiarity is part of its value. In a shabby lobby he meets James T. Farrell, who offers him a wise saying about writers and women: "Women will go to you because of your intensity. They will leave you for the same reason."… Troubled by women, proudly obsessed by sex, Wilson gives clear evidence for his confusion; but it doesn't help to understand this homely ill. Rising to it would be better; growing from it would be best. But here too, his symptoms will make the men of his generation feel right at home, the children of F. Scott Fitzgerald out of J. P. Marquand, ever hopeful of perfect love and O.K. status.
The autobiographical form enables Sloan Wilson to unburden himself of a good deal of real wisdom unfortunately contradicted by his style during the self-consciously "wise" passages. In its way, this too is true to the confusions of morality and esthetics, elegance and doing it right, which distracted a class and a time…. The style is heavy—what could be called, with heavy reviewer's ambiguity, underwritten—and the book is too long, but the sincerity of its griefs makes it frequently touching; the life is felt, so that the journeyman style ultimately works better than it should, doing the real work of style—to say what the man means. The muzziness of some of the apologies, the sentimentality of the joyous second marriage (it may be true, but it doesn't convince) are often redeemed by sharpness of epithet and apposite incident. And the person who comes through, in all his vanity and weakness, is finally an appealing one.
As epitaph to a type, the millions in their gray flannel suits, now peculiarly greened and denimed over, thanking gurus or lithium as they used to thank God and Fate and the Table of Organization, this book makes the wounded, inadvertent suggestion that the end of American youthfulness is not yet the end of everything. (p. 8)
Herbert Gold, "Epitaph to a Generation: What Shall We Wear to This Party?" in The New York Times Book Review, May 17, 1976, pp. 7-8.
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