10—
Postwar Suburban Fiction:
American Dream as Nightmare

The exodus from cities to suburbs after World War II began one of the most significant demographic shifts in American history and was a reaffirmation of the American dream in concrete, commercial terms. The ideal of the freestanding single-family dwelling with lawn, carport, and a bedroom for everyone came, by virtue of ingenious community planning, energetic marketing, and the GI bill, within range for a larger number of families than ever before. Experimental communities such as Kaiserville in the West and Levittown in the East carried in their blueprints not only a new set of practical possibilities but a set of values keyed to a new kind of consumerism. Homes were affordable and available. Things to fill those homes were multiplying at a staggering rate. Sears catalogs, Tupperware parties, and Chevrolets became visible indices of comfort, stability, and success.

American writers recognized and responded to these changes in a burgeoning body of writing that could be defined as a subgenre—a "literature of the suburbs." A whole generation of writers who witnessed the dramatic transition from Depression to war to domestic complacency began almost as soon as the wave of consumer prosperity crested to document with deepening irony the insidious effects of suburban life. Updike, Irving, French, and many others have contributed during the past three decades to raising Americans' collective consciousness about the issues of class, gender, and moral perspective generated by suburbanization. The short stories discussed in the following pages have been selected as representative of the progressive appropriation of "suburbia" as a literary trope among American writers. In these stories, as in many others, suburbs appear as places where living space has become confining, isolating, and fragmenting and where apparent order and even

gentility effectively conceal a darker side of life and reduce romantic ambitions to confused and surreptitious longings.

Georgia McKinley's "The Crime" is a story about the dislocation, disruption, and fear caused by the encroachment of a suburban development on a small rural village in the deep South.^[1] The main characters, two white redneck hunters and their black servant, watch from their hunting lodge in the local hills as a new shopping center and rows of stucco houses invade the landscape like floodwater spreading. Not only their sport is threatened; so are their sense of dominion and the exploitive separate peace they have been able to strike with the blacks in their town by virtue of a laissez-faire local government. Suburbia, these three men realize, means theaters where both blacks and whites are admitted together. It means neighborhoods where they live next door to one another. It means the encroachment of "civilization" on a primitive order that has become institutionalized not only for these whites, who have retained power, but for this black man, whose subjugation is the only way of life he knows. This story makes the equal and opposite dangers of blind conservatism and thoughtless progressivism disturbingly apparent.

Some Saturdays, we are told as the story opens, the two white men do not go hunting but sit on the front porch of their little lodge, drinking bourbon and staring out at "the rows of houses which had crept out from the city to menace their land" (137). On this particular Saturday the hunters have picked up their servant, Leroy, from his daughter's "flimsy little house" at the edge of town to avail themselves of his services for the day. As the white men drive along the highway toward their lodge, they comment on the changed countryside: "Look at that, look at that. . . . They're putting up another damned motel here. . . . We used to shoot quail there, you remember that?" They gaze in growing distress out the car window at "a whole city of bright little houses, row upon row, acre upon acre, off to the edge of sight" where "flat land had lain so long in black plowed fields or empty prairie grasslands," and one of them mutters bitterly, "Now isn't that a damnable shame." Leroy, too, is looking out the window, and his puzzled unconcern contrasts sharply with the white men's outrage. For seven years he has witnessed their ritual anger on rides to and from the hunting lodge as they have passed the ubiquitous land development sites, with their alien

workers "coming in with bulldozers and piles of bright new wood, and leaving behind them unfinished boxes" (142). Having little to lose, Leroy does not share their fear and suspicion over the changing landscape, though he does come to realize that the good hunting in the hills will not last for long.

McKinley portrays the suburbs as a large organism in movement and the human characters sitting immobile, watching it move. Time is compressed; a seven-year process is observed as though through time-lapse photography. The landscape changes but the characters do not, and the landscape seems to be a kind of monster that is moving in to devour them. These suburbs are recognizable as the kind immortalized by Malvina Reynolds's song, of the same era, about "little boxes." McKinley's rhetorical repetitions reiterate the repetitive, predictable design of the rectilinear tracts. Moreover, the "rows and rows" of houses evoke comparison with the furrows of a planted field. The houses appear to be some alien crop, like inorganic weeds, that has invaded the "black plowed fields."

The dimensions of the housing development are left deliberately, threateningly vague. It stretches "off to the edge of sight," a phrase that hints at uncontrolled spreading with nothing to stop its imperialistic progress. That spread is described in terms that suggest violence and wounding. "The little box houses had almost reached them now," she writes, "and already the County had cut a highway straight across their land, slicing open the red clay earth with machines and leaving it healed with a wide grey macadam scar" (143). The anonymous, alien force behind the machines is never named; as vague as the boundaries of the development is the plan or intelligence behind it, which seems arbitrary and hostile and inevitable. Nowhere is there any indication that any of the characters, black or white, contemplates any kind of response to the expansion of the suburbs other than passive hostility or, in Leroy's case, mildly distressed curiosity.

Mr. Underwood, one of the two white men, while gazing out toward the new shopping center ironically reminds Leroy that there are "lots of colored moving into that area" and then reflects bitterly, "They'll meet. Have to come a street with new white houses on one side and new colored houses on the other." And, he continues, "the first thing you know it'll be possible, it'll be legal for some black son of a bitch to move in next door to any

of us." At this point Leroy deliberately begins not to hear the conversation. Instead, he drifts off into comforting fantasies and leaves the white men "jabbering." He finds a place to sit in the yard away from the other two and withdraws into himself:

Slowly, helplessly he dropped his eyes from the hills, down down, until they rested upon a small circle of ground at his feet and found there many comfortable and familiar things: scalloped brown leaves and tiny acorns from the scrub oak trees, shining stalks of dry grass, some wing feathers of a mallard. . . . He knew that if you sat still in the direct sun, even in winter, you could pull its heat straight through your skin until you had a pool of warmth inside you. (146)

This steady diminishment of perspective to the immediate circle around and then within Leroy's body becomes a lyrical moment that encapsulates the action of the entire story: the shrinking of the boundaries of an old way of life, the necessity of withdrawal into oneself in the face of social forces beyond one's power to combat or even to contemplate. Leroy, who has learned survival through passivity over many years of practice, poses a complex foil to the two men who now find themselves in an analogous position of helplessness and are outraged. All three sense the change.

The many analogies between Leroy's position as indulged victim and that of the two white men can hardly be missed: they, too, belong to a class of people whose wants are presumably being provided for by impersonal, nameless powers beyond their control—housing, convenient shopping, cleanliness, order, predictability. The needs that are not being met are harder to name and are therefore suppressed or ignored. And the two men's adaptations to change will inevitably be as ineffectual as Leroy's: they can engage in impotent gestures of defiance or comfort themselves with nostalgic memories and fictions that will provide them that small place in the sun into which they can withdraw and be warmed as the land around them disappears.

W. D. Weatherill's "The Man Who Loved Levittown" traces the obliteration of rural landscape from a different perspective—that of the enthusiastic buyer of one of the new tract homes that

supplanted acres of potato farms on Long Island after the war.^[2] Out of the army and eager to begin a new life with his wife away from his parental home, Tommy DiMaria ventures out across the Brooklyn Bridge to hunt for a job as an airplane mechanic and, stopping in a local cafe, finds himself in the midst of a microeconomic crisis: "Farmers inside look me over like I'm the tax man come to collect. Bitter. Talking about how they were being run off their places by these new housing developments you saw advertised in the paper, which made me mad because here I am a young guy just trying to get started, what were we supposed to do . . . live on East Thirteenth Street the rest of our lives?" (1).

Curious, he drives farther out of town to investigate. "Sure enough, here's this farmhouse all boarded up. Out in front is an ancient Chevy piled to the gunwales with old spring beds, pots and pans. Dust Bowl, Okies, Grapes of Wrath  . . . just like that" (1). A bit further on, he sees the skeletons that have driven the farmers off their land: half-built houses with "baby grass" and posts waiting for street signs standing expectantly on each corner. As he watches, a truck of workers stops in front of one of the structures, and a crew leaps out, installs bathroom plumbing in it, and moves on in fifteen minutes to the next. He comes on "a guy in overalls planting sticks in little brown patches stamped out of the grass" (3), asks what he would have to pay for "one of these babies," and finds that he is talking with Bill Levitt himself, who magnanimously takes the eighty-three dollars Tommy has with him as a down payment on a seven-thousand-dollar home. Thus begins the story of the house of DiMaria in Levittown.

There follows a brief chronicle of twenty years of occupation, settlement, renovation, and organization of this model American suburb. Carrying three jobs between them to pay the mortgage, spending weekends enhancing their small estate with new porch, shrubbery, and a neighborhood swimming pool, the DiMarias find themselves happily surrounded with similar and like-minded families. Tommy shares tools and Saturdays with his fellow veterans, now fathers, who start the local Little League and attend the local PTA. From a much later vantage point he looks back on those years of building with unabashed

nostalgia and pride: "I'll never forget those years. The fifties. The early sixties. We were all going the same direction. . . . Thanks to Big Bill Levitt we all had a chance. You talk about dreams. Hell, we had ours. We had ours like nobody before or since ever had theirs. SEVEN THOUSAND BUCKS! ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS DOWN! We were cowboys out there. We were the pioneers" (4).

This heroic reconstruction of the early years of Levittown as an American utopia precedes a long descent into a tale of American tragedy. The dream has lasted twenty years—long enough to raise one generation of children and trees, long enough to remodel bedrooms and install covered patios, knock out a few walls, and build a homogeneous, congenial, and fairly complacent little community that shares yards and expertise and a small conspiracy to filch free electricity from the power company by rigging the meters.

Now, as Tommy puts it, the end begins to come. With a few stock characters from the 1960s the writer sketches the outlines of a demographic shift that brings into the town not just a new generation but a new ethos. Into the house next door, which the first "defector" from Tommy's generation of neighbors has vacated to move to Florida, move a couple of young aliens: a sandaled, beaded, braless, and brash woman with a husband comic in his worldly ignorance (who thinks Levittown is an Indian name). Into the next house, sold by a neighbor for six times what he paid, moves a preoccupied, aggressive "sheepherder," as Tommy christens him, who threatens to shoot Tommy's dog if he wanders onto the lawn. Tommy's efforts to create community meet with repeated rebuffs. He shares almost nothing with these people. At first he is philosophical about the situation and regards them only with regretful condescension:

You have to wonder about them to begin with. Here they are starting off where we finished, everything took us so long to get they have right away. They're sad more than anything . . . sadder than the old-timers moving south. Shopping centers, that's it. If it's not in a mall they don't know nothing. And talk about dreams, they don't have any. A new stereo? A new Datsun? Call those dreams? Those aren't dreams, those are pacifiers. Popsicles. . . . What will the

sheepherders be able to say they did when they get to be our age? . . . Evaded the draft. Bought a Cougar. Jogged. (7)

But Tommy is fighting the tide. One by one his old neighbors join the exodus to Florida, and he finds himself outnumbered not only by unfamiliar faces that range from cool to hostile but also by invading forces of real estate brokers pressuring him to sell out to househunters willing to pay inflated prices and tax assessors whose reevaluation of his property consumes much of what he has saved. His children move out, his wife dies, his dog is killed in what appears to be an intentional "accident," and, as a final blow, the power company catches up with his longstanding gimmick and charges him years of back payment for stolen electricity. Tommy's final act of defiance is to prevent the house he has held onto with such fierce pride of ownership from falling into the hands of profiteering philistines: he drags a can of gasoline in from the garage and wanders from room to room, soaking the accumulated possessions of half a lifetime, planning one last event for the neighbors, who can "see what fifty-five thousand dollars, thirty-two years, looks like going up in smoke." Then, he thinks, he will head out, first to his sisters, and then maybe south, though not, he declares emphatically, to Florida.

Tommy's anguish and resentment at the passing of a way of life are presented in this story with a delicately balanced mixture of irony and pity. It is left to the reader to decide which side to take in a struggle to maintain a dream whose failure is inevitable. And the unanswered question lingers with the image of the little rows of "boxes"—is it in the nature of the planned and packaged community to produce the kind of consumerism that leads to the community's diminishment into an atomized, anomalous collection of self-preoccupied people who buy homes for their resale value, fence off their lawns, and carry shields of protectiveness and suspicion? The dream, it seems, was also an illusion—of stability, insular contentment, and a growing collection of material comforts that were supposed to add up to a kind of earned peace for the returned warrior and innocence regained in the mutual protections of the nuclear family. A

reader of the generation after almost has to regard the dream itself with a certain dubiousness, if not irony, and perhaps to wonder if its disintegration may not leave room for a vision more variegated and more malleable, shaped to the complex contours of a culture in which "home" can and does and perhaps should have a thousand faces.

The theme of diminishment and nostalgia for a nobler, freer past is replayed in a different key in John Cheever's "The Country Husband," a story about the burial of primitive vitality under the genteel rituals of suburban life in the Northeast.^[3] Here the protagonist, Francis Weed, finds himself struggling to maintain vital contact with the part of himself that feels and acts authentically, even primitively. In a state of alienation brought on by a brush with death, he begins to penetrate the polished surfaces of suburban life and to intuit what powerful mythic forces are contained explosively not only within himself but behind all the placid housefronts along his quiet street. Suddenly suburbia is a dangerous place waiting to explode from the pressure of its own repressions.

Francis, who has just been evacuated from a plane that came near crash landing, returns home from his brush with death to find dinner nearly ready, his wife preoccupied, his children quarreling, and no one capable of hearing or understanding the enormity of what he has just been through. His wife, Julia, is an immaculate housekeeper, which we gather from an extended description of a living area in which "nothing had not been burnished." "It was not the kind of household where, after prying open a stuck cigarette box, you would find an old shirt button and a tarnished nickel. The hearth was swept, the roses on the piano were reflected in the polish of the broad top, and there was an album of Schubert waltzes on the rack" (247–248). All this order contrasts markedly with the absence of tranquillity among the family members. To escape the dinner table bickering, Francis retreats to the back garden for "a cigarette and some air." There he hears the familiar sounds of neighbors' voices; sees the neighborhood menace, a dog named Jupiter who steals meat from people's barbecues, leaping a hedge; and listens to doors slamming and the hum of lawn mowers. Jupiter

is one of the free-roaming creatures in this neighborhood of carefully separated yards and little squares of privacy.

In the course of the story the smooth surfaces of Francis's life of routine and fixed customs begin to crack. He starts to experience an upsurging of the unconscious, to endow ordinary events with mythic significance, and to resist the civilizing restraints that filter out the greater portion of what takes place in his mind and heart. He suddenly looks at the baby-sitter and is touched to his core by her beauty, which evokes a passion in him he would not have believed himself capable of. He recognizes a new French maid at a neighbor's party as a woman he had seen publicly stripped and shaved in a small town in France during the war as punishment for living with a German soldier, but even as her identity dawns on him he realizes there is no one to whom he can confide it without violating all the proprieties by which his neighbors regulate their carefully controlled existence, where the shocking, the grotesque, the obscene, bear no mention. He finds himself suddenly so irritated by one of the loquacious "leading women" of the community that he insults her to her face and then confronts his wife's wrath when his inexplicable rudeness finds its way back to her through the quick and efficient local grapevine.

As the story progresses, what seems to impel Francis to his uncharacteristic improprieties is a realization he is hard put to articulate: that the forms of life in Shady Hill are insufficient to the magnitude and variegation of the inner life, that most of what is worth feeling and saying cannot be acknowledged there, that life is a series of artificially perpetuated rituals that have long since lost their meaning.

Francis eventually consults a psychiatrist when he himself begins to be alarmed by his own behavior. The prescribed therapy is woodwork, and when we last see Francis he is hard at work in his cellar building a coffee table. As evening wears on, he hears all the familiar neighborhood sounds. Then night falls, and in a final line we are given a glimpse of Francis's dreamlike state: "Then it is dark; it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains" (274). Like the protagonists in the other stories, Francis ends in acquiescence to the demands and constrictions of the way of life imposed on him by an ethic

that seems to have evolved with the Dutch colonial houses and department store furniture. The notion of the "suburban way of life" is clearly under attack in this story, though Cheever seems to concede that these are "good people" who are legitimately engaged in the pursuit of happiness as they understand it; they are in their blindness and shallowness perhaps no more blind and shallow than the fickle human race is wont to be. The question of to what extent the random communities formed as suburbs contribute to those things that destroy the soul is definitely raised but left to the reader to judge.

The themes of loss, disruption, and institutionalized hypocrisies are offset in each of these stories by recognition of the complexities of the changes described. None of these stories is sentimental—indeed, the sentimentalities of the protagonists in each are exposed as just as much a sham as the false values motivating those who threaten their pieties. All the stories are both ironic and ambivalent in presenting the spread of suburbs, rectilinear streets, shopping malls, and chrome and glass kitchens as an outgrowth of a complex of needs and values that are not all bad. In the tradition of the jeremiads that characterize our literary tradition, these stories are warnings but not condemnations. As a culture still firmly grounded in our Puritan foundations, we are uncomfortable with our own hard-won comforts. Moreover, our romantic legacy makes us wary of possessions and practices that separate us from nature; we tend in many ways to harbor the same distrust of "civilization" that drove Thoreau out to Walden Pond and caused Huck Finn to "light out for the territory." What each of these writers does, like many others of their generation, is to reassert the continuity of the pervasive social and metaphysical concerns that have most distinctively characterized our native tradition, bound as it has been to a history of settlement and conquest whose morally ambiguous victories have left each generation uneasily contemplating the cost of its own achievements.