Starting this
semester’s work, we commence with Updike’s 1960 novel, Rabbit, Run. One of his early works and the one that helped him win
acclaim because it began the Rabbit series.
One of the themes this novel deals with is suburbia; or more specifically how
the 1950’s generation dealt with suburban living.
This topic requires some background, as the economy
boomed after World War II, more and more middle class Americans moved away from
cities and into suburban bedroom communities. They built single family homes on
predetermined lots, had a lawn for their children to play within, and a garage
to store the great chrome festooned Chrysler Newport or Ford Mainline that the
family used for transportation. This type of lifestyle can seem idyllic to
some. The peace, security and general comfort that a suburban home can provide
is a pleasing quality to many people. Even your author, who saddled with a fair
amount of college debt and a poor job market, would give a great amount to have
his own home in Westerville or New Albany. Living in my own two story home and
driving a new Chrysler or Jeep would seem just about perfect to me. However, to Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom or Richard
Yate’s Frank Wheeler in Revolutionary
Road, suburban living and all of its trappings is something to be reviled
and disdained.
One of the factors for this that Prof. Myers and I
discussed is what I will call the “Traumatized Veteran Theory.” This premise
considers that as a large majority of the men, both in fiction and real life,
from the 1950’s were veterans of World War II. They won the glorious cause by
beating Hitler and Tojo, sparked a manufacturing and research boom back home,
and were touted as liberators and the most powerful military force in countries
abroad. Because of their wartime
experience being adrenaline packed and stimulating to the senses, the minutiae
of mowing the lawn, listening to the wife and playing with the kids is boring. It
is so boring, that they yearn for more excitement in their lives. But these men
are beholden to the trappings of middle class life that they wish to dispose
of. If we consider the 1950’s as the “conformist decade” where everything and
everyone in White middle class society was the same, men were not faced with
hard choices. Their most pressing choices in life were Ford or GM and scotch or
bourbon. Notwithstanding that with either choice the man will end up with a car
or whiskey, his life was largely routine and bland. Coming from a world of
vicious jungle combat or French whores or North African heat, these men were
not stimulated by the comfortable lives with homemaker wives and sons playing
Little League. Being affected by war makes these men disinterested in civilian
living, but the facts that they won’t step outside of the norm and that they
have a duty to their families to provide means that they will continue to lead
lives of quiet desperation and fulfillment
I am attaching a link to Supertramp's song " Take The Long Way Home" as an accompanying piece to the desperation and sadness these men felt.
I blush to recall that as an undergraduate forty years ago I used to disparage Updike as a mere chronicler of suburban adultery without actually having read a word of him. I’d grown up in the drearily wholesome postwar subdivisions of the north San Fernando Valley (in my childhood a few discontiguous clots of cheap but “respectable” single-family dwellings scattered among the citrus groves and small ranches; today a sprawling smoggy polyglot slum with twenty times the population, the “whites” who can afford to having withdrawn into gated enclaves erected on the acreage of those last ranches) and at twenty had no use for suburban anything. A few years later I purchased a remaindered copy of Museums and Women on a whim and was immediately captivated. I set about backing and filling (you must know that "The Happiest I've Been," from The Same Door, drew an encomium within a few years of its publication from Vladimir Nabokov, who tended to be sparing in his praise of living American writers), and while still regarding Couples as an unworthy subject of JU's genius, recanted unreservedly my earlier sneer. After another decade I came to understand to my cost that suburban adultery is a deeper and, ah, more fraught topic of inquiry than I had understood at twenty.
ReplyDeleteI rather wonder, though, at your “Traumatized Veteran Theory” premise. My own father, 91 later this month, and a USMC veteran of the Guadalcanal and Solomon Islands campaigns, was certainly traumatized enough (and will, to the delight of Professor Myers, cast his vote for the GOP in a seventeenth consecutive general election), but Updike himself, and his less-articulate doppelgänger Harry Angstrom, contrived to thread the needles of the Good War and the not-so Good War: surrounded they may have been by rattled WWII and Korea veterans, but neither Updike nor Rabbit disdained suburban routine in consequence of nerves made numb by the frazzle and trauma of war. There were plenty of other reasons in the fifties to kick over the traces of suburban sameness without summoning up PTSD. Since you are apparently early in your dissertation, I urge you to burrow more deeply for the roots of that restlessness and dissatisfaction Updike limns in these prosperous New England burbs. The answer lies farther down, I think.