The man in the gray flannel (novel)

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The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (English title: The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit ) is a novel by American writer Sloan Wilson , of York in 1955 at the New Publisher Simon & Schuster published. In the following year, a film of the same name was released in cinemas. Also in 1956 the first German translation by Arno Schmidt appeared under the title The man in a gray suit by Wolfgang Krüger Verlag. In 2013 DuMont published a new translation by Eike Schönfeld .

content

Tom and Betsy Rath, a married couple in their early thirties, lived in 1953 with three children in Westport , Connecticut , from where Tom commutes to New York every day . Dissatisfaction grows in their marriage, a condition they hope to remedy with a bigger house. When Tom's grandmother dies, a woman who has lived on a grand scale all her life, she has carried the family legacy through to the point that the Raths inherit only one property in South Bay, to which their long-time house servant Edward also claims. To make more money, Tom applies to United Broadcasting Corporation, a New York television company, and is tasked with setting up a national mental health committee with which Ralph Hopkins, the company's board member, wants to make a name for himself. Against his inner convictions, Tom adapts as well as possible to the work-hungry manager and becomes one of those ambitious employees in gray flannel whom he has so far always despised.

In the elevator operator of the company building he recognizes a former comrade from the Second World War , Caesar Gardella, who witnessed how Tom, as a paratrooper, killed his best friend Hank Mahoney with the careless use of a hand grenade. Gardella was also an accessory to an affair Tom had with the 18-year-old Italian Maria, who in retrospect considered his happiest time. For a few weeks, in constant anticipation of his evacuation to the Pacific War, he lived exclusively in the present without thinking about the wife who had stayed behind or the impending death. After his return, he kept the affair and the traumatic war experiences from Betsy a secret and never got as close to his optimistic and carefree wife as she did when she was in love before the war. On the other hand, he never heard from Maria again until Caesar now offers him to establish contact with the young woman he has left pregnant.

Tom realizes that only through complete sincerity can he overcome his cynicism and live a successful life. He openly criticizes a speech by Hopkins and thereby wins his respect. However, he refuses a job as the manager's personal assistant in order to be able to spend more time with his family. Judge Bernstein denies Edward's lawsuit when it is revealed that the servant cheated on Tom's grandmother for years. The construction of a new school in the community enables the Raths to sell lots of the inherited property at a profit. Finally, Tom Betsy confesses his fling with Maria, and after a brief crisis she agrees to support the illegitimate son with alimony . The new openness between the spouses also allows their love to reignite.

interpretation

Jonathan Franzen thinks the first half of the novel is much better, a "joyride in an Oldsmobile " with a pure "fifties dose". Tom Rath and his wife, a WASP couple in traditional roles, get caught in the treadmill of the consumer age, in which increasing needs require a steadily growing income. Tom despises the "men in gray flannel" and yet escapes into their conformity himself . His positive as well as traumatic, but in any case intense war memories stand in contrast to the laborious and joyless life in peace. He hides his innate honesty more and more behind a mask of cynicism. Ironically, he wants to cure his own mental health problems by working for a mental health committee. According to Franzen, the tone of voice in the first half of the novel fluctuates “violently between fatigue, anger and showing off, between cynicism, despondency and principled determination”.

Franzen sums up the second, more dubious half of the novel as: “Guilty man lets himself be passively helped by a great woman”. Because Tom shows courage and honesty, every detail in the life of the Raths turns out to be good without failure being imaginable. The social questions - about war, the world of work or the desire to consume - are completely ignored and the harmony of society is traced back to the harmony of the individual household. In this sense, the novel fully captures the spirit of the 1950s: “the uncomfortable conformism, the flight from conflict, the political quietism , the cult of the nuclear family, the acceptance of class privileges.” More than the characters want to admit, they become personification the "flannel gray" way of life. If there is still a sting of irony and resistance in them at the beginning, in the end they happily accumulate wealth.

For Anja Hirsch, the attraction of the novel lies in a comparison with the standards of the present and “the question of whether everything is really so different today.” The figures from the 1950s in particular are attracting interest in the present, be they the ones in comparison more complex, novels by Richard Yates , the film adaptation of the turmoil or the television series Mad Men : "They tell of transitional phases, the flow of which is slowed down by the old, the unedited." Daniel Haas sees the novel as the still topical question: " How do you find your way in a world that presents consumption and administration as the ultima ratio of being civilized when existential shocks prove the opposite? ”For Martin Becker , it is the intonation and the cliché-free language of the novel that make Franzen's“ kitsch suspicion “Invalidate. The end stands less for a kitschy happy ending than for the development of its protagonist not to completely sacrifice his life to work.

reception

The man in the gray flannel became a bestseller immediately after its release. 1956 came the film The Man in the Gray Flannel with Gregory Peck in the leading role in the cinemas. The novel's title became synonymous with American middle-class commuters and a catchphrase for conformism in American society in the 1950s. Mainly because of the title, the novel remained present in the American public after it was no longer available in bookshops. In 2002 it was reissued with an introduction by Jonathan Franzen.

Martin Becker sees the novel as a "classic of American post-war literature". According to Heini Vogler, he deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as classics of American modernism such as Richard Yates or Raymond Carver . For Andreas Schäfer it is precisely the "unspectacular surprise" of the happy ending that distinguishes Wilson from Carver, Yates or John Cheever . Bernadette Conrad discovers an anti-war book behind the alleged family novel. According to Nico Bleutge , the novel offers “nothing less than entertainment - in a good as well as in a bad sense”.

expenditure

  • Sloan Wilson: The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. Simon & Schuster, New York 1955.
  • Sloan Wilson: The man in the gray suit. From the American by Arno Schmidt . Krüger, Hamburg, 1956.
  • Sloan Wilson: The man in the gray flannel. From the American by Arno Schmidt . Krüger, Frankfurt am Main, 1976. ISBN 3-8105-2304-6 .
  • Sloan Wilson: The man in the gray flannel. From the American English by Eike Schönfeld . DuMont, Cologne, 2013. ISBN 978-3-8321-9678-3 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Jonathan Franzen : Afterword . In: Sloan Wilson: The man in the gray flannel. DuMont, Cologne, 2013. ISBN 978-3-8321-9678-3 .
  2. ↑ a b Anja Hirsch: The employee who killed seventeen people . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of July 26, 2013.
  3. ↑ Daniel Haas: Tailor-made . In: Deutschlandfunk Kultur from March 5, 2013.
  4. ^ A b Martin Becker : Classics of American post-war literature . In: Deutschlandfunk from May 17, 2013.
  5. ↑ Heini Vogler: "The man in the gray flannel" by Sloan Wilson . In: Radio SRF 2 Kultur from May 12, 2013.
  6. ↑ Andreas Schäfer : The lucky ones: Sloan Wilson's US classic "The man in the gray flannel" . In: Der Tagesspiegel from July 14, 2013.
  7. ↑ Review notes on The Man in the Gray Flannel at perlentaucher.de
  8. ↑ Nico Bleutge : Longing for a better life . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung of June 18, 2013.