Americans in Subtopia
Newman, William J.
Walking the suburbs in the afternoon In summer when the idle doors stand open And the air flows through the rooms Fanning the curtain hems, You wander through a cool elysium Of...
...Crestwood Heights, that compendium of revolutionary thoughts, must be quoted again: Within Crestwood Heights itself, few, if any, alternative cultural patterns present themselves...
...What is is the living plan of Crestwood Heights...
...Even ignoring the fact that they have "captured" the Democratic party in the suburb ten years too late, who cares...
...But one need not blame some outside force as a scapegoat...
...In the desert of the suburb, community life has lost whatever vestiges of meaning it ever had for Americans...
...A display case: and if it is ruined by outside developers, why then he will move a little further out to a newer suburb...
...There is no planning for freedom nor the space which makes freedom possible...
...II And what do the Masters find...
...That is the inner content of these houses...
...He has created instead a symbol of his flight...
...in the suburb toleration, permissiveness, and individual * Spectorsky estimates that his particular victims spend $32,000 a year with a yearly gross income of $25,000...
...here at last can be achieved-absolutely, irrevocably-the things for which all the bitter striving and in-fighting exists in the city...
...As God's first temples were said to have been trees so today His first temples might be said to be man's home among the trees-on its own plot of land, independent, individual, and in harmony with the restoring rhythms of nature...
...If any woman doesn't believe this statement, she is quite correct, but more of that later...
...Or more profoundly: No man need be common No life need be ordinary...
...The crux of the problem of the wife in the suburb seems to lie in the fact that the woman is trained with men, to compete with men...
...When a glimmering of his reality comes to him in the city he runs to the suburb to avoid it...
...because the real values of the bourgeois life as they are in the city' haunt the suburbs and are reproduced there...
...It is in the suburb that the utopia, the basic escape, is to be created...
...The child is to be brought up as an "autonomous, spontaneous individual": thus the open glass school...
...Unless he is extremely fortunate in being sent abroad to school or university...
...Since creating a home is the reason for the suburb, it is legitimate to ask how successfully this is done...
...In the suburb social mobility can penetrate his whole life, and not just his working life...
...Above all else it is a place for women and children...
...As House Beautiful put it in a recent celebration of American suburbia: "Everybody can Own a House...
...One should not conclude from this that the Crestwood student is driving hard to success...
...Better an ersatz root than no root...
...And what of the man in the suburb...
...Besides he means to move anyway in a couple of years...
...Marquand saw this clearly when he described Clyde, Massachusetts as an historical survival-a town with a living plan that was natural and had a place for everything and everyone-and contrasted this with the formlessness of the suburban life of Charlie Grey...
...With all the money which the exurbs exhibit, it would seem that a few roots could be put down...
...The suburb is indeed a masterly symbol of his perpetual oscillation between his values-in-conflict...
...But does anyone really live in a suburb...
...Don Walling in Executive Suite transforms himself into God to escape...
...achievement-achieved carries within itself its own death and the death of freedom...
...The illusion that the home in the suburb is the final resting place this side of the grave is a powerful one, but it is an illusion...
...in the other suburbs the figure was 27%, 48%, and 18...
...There are others who have even graver doubts...
...It is at the heart of the twin failure, of the very existence of the suburban-city nexus...
...state, possibly...
...The school in Crestwood Heights, the authors say, is concerned with outer reality, not with what might go on inside the student...
...The child must be free in accordance with democratic ideology...
...in practice it hall become the happy eunuch of the school system...
...But he could think of nothing good to say...
...In short she has to maintain a home, destroy the family, and flee the house...
...More and more our architects, our builders, our designers, our manufacturers, all those who are closest to the new needs and new desires of our millions are aware of this as a fact to be coped with, not a theory to be argued...
...But this frenzy of achievement is not what he meant at all...
...More: the family in Crestwood Heights is not concerned with the ' passing on of a traditionabout society or itself-but is rather dedicated to its own disintegration...
...It is easier that way...
...these agents intruding and thrusting them selves upon the family have an interest in the family which is purely impersonal, catering for things rather than people...
...nowhere does this consciousness of need reveal more clearly the fact that it cannot be had...
...Her job at home is that of a manager concerned with schedules: the husband gets, off to work at 8:10, the girl to junior high at 8:25, the boy to grade school at 8:35...
...The inevitable flight is away, away from the scene of the battle to the little house in the suburb...
...subtopia is created in the image of its creator and the fact of the matter is that this is what the creators want...
...V A sad picture...
...If one thinks of a home as a sort of fortress where the self can be attained-this is the sociologists' estimate, not mine-then the sub * Crestwood Heights...
...Outside of the filthy city, full of greenness and light, it has everything the city lacks...
...No, the reality of the suburb does not lie in providing a place to live and in providing a focus of loyalty...
...Achievement and the attempt to escape the costs of achievement are the fundamental conflicts in which the suburbanite is caught...
...The same wearing of masks and the isame tension between equals...
...Or is this impossible...
...And all things turn to images of peace, The boy curled over his book, the young girl poised On the path as if beguiled By the silence of a wood...
...it involves his status in the city, his personal relations, his family position, and his particular role in the many shifting sub-classes of American culture...
...House Beautiful was wrong...
...The suburban home turns out to he a hotel from which the businessman emerges to do battle in the race for success, and the child emerges to learn to do battle in his race for success...
...The light of reason, tolerance, and liberal good-will has no more earnest advocate than these apostles according to St...
...What if they were ersatz roots...
...It was not Kafka who invented "the hero as the lonely man" but the suburbanite...
...it can involve his family as well as himself...
...not about whether the middle class will inherit the earth, but whether they are now inheriting the earth...
...The suburb is not the terminal of movement but rather a stage in movement...
...Values of success, happiness, and health are accepted as godgiven and passed on in the same way...
...The suburb is both the reflection of upward mobility achieved and the training ground for further mobility to be achieved...
...But this too involves a failure...
...The trouble with dancing with Molly Blakesley was that since that situation had arisen at the bank they each knew too well what the other was thinking...
...Since it is a choice made on the sly through an omnipresent culture, the child "sees no authority fugures against which to rebel, should he feel the desire to do so . .. the child has, therefore, only one recourse...
...Oscillation...
...it is the urge to go from status to status, for one generation to achieve in the eyes of their peers what the other could not, which is the motive force of suburban living...
...Here is the first distinguishing feature of the suburb...
...Throughout this devotion to the career interests of the family she cannot forget her own self, for this is what she was taught, that she too is a person with career interests...
...Seeley, Sim and Loosely...
...The suburb is the testing ground-the display case-for middle-class life...
...Surely she is the kingpin-rather loose at times, perhaps-of the whole arrangement...
...The suburb is the last escape route and if the cost has to be paid there it is just too bad...
...The suburb is only a fraction of his existence...
...But the flight is a failure because the real is the ideal...
...Life in the suburb is to be a symbol of achievement: here is the place where what has been achieved is to he set down, is to he there, in that spot, and it is to be in the form of things, like a House and a Yard, two healthy Children, and a Slim, Sociable Wife (she must he slim) . Unfortunately, this dream of achievement is not the reality of achievement...
...But it is not only the industrial civilization which provides the drive behind the overmastering of individual choice...
...Rather it stands for some kind of success as measured by society...
...of achievement, the "boys" have set themselves is too high and the pressure cannot be reduced.* And why such a high standard of living...
...The phrase "flight to the suburbs" is a misnomer...
...The child, thus, is "forced into the position of having to chose those competitive means which will assure his ultimate entrance into an appropriate adult occupational status...
...Because the communication "boys" have been taken in by their own deceit, have sold themselves their own product: material goods as a symbol of achievement...
...But it is an important fraction, for it is the place where his systems of values, his ultimate aims are to be realized...
...yet only a small majority even there expected to stay...
...children living in the utopia designed for them...
...It is the place where he is to prove finally and conclusively that not only he personally, but his whole scale of values, his whole activity and class, can produce the good life...
...Hence the flight away from and then back to the city...
...Yet the recent outpouring of novels on the businessman at work makes it clear that the pursuit of this achievement is so costly that the business world as the arena of achievement is as much fled from as it is sought...
...There seems to be some doubt as a matter of fact, and the Globe is afraid that automation will reverse "the promising trend toward moderation" and "turn the middle class into a proletarian horde more vast, more fierce than ever before...
...Hence, his flight from achievement...
...The effort would seem to be to create a home as distinct from a house so that this growth into wisdom and beauty-the kind seen in the House Beautiful, ul, for instance-can go on apace...
...It was necessary to be careful with her, too...
...He wished that he did not keep putting their lives into terms of dollars and cents and that he did not always seem to be going over expenses whenever he danced with Molly Blakesley...
...Wives too are career oriented because they are taught to be, because that is all there is to do...
...True, other things being equal, they will be more "liberal" than the Eisenhower brand of whateveritis, but being Organization Men themselves their liberalism is tainted at the source...
...IV "Will the Middle Class Inherit the Earth...
...The Age of the Un-Common Man is now opening before us...
...The suburb will provide the arena in which the family and especially the children can emerge as "free" and "responsible," ready to take their place in the world...
...All suburbs like to call themselves Garden suburbs, yet it is a visual fact they are being eaten up by modern slums, that they are incapable of planning for themselves, that they are being cut to ribbons by superhighways...
...worse, far worse, is the fact that the collective achievement has a high cost in insecurity and competition...
...This 30 percent overspending he considers par for the course...
...To try to hide achievement would indeed be crazy, for then it would be a contradiction of terms...
...The authors of Crestwood Heights-they are no wild-eyed radicals writing for DisSENT-go on even further...
...But the ruins return to haunt them...
...Around the career of both revolves the whole system of subtopia...
...And if she doesn't succeed in both roles she will be threatening her husband with her failure...
...the idea is that, given a place with a house, open areas, and schools, the wife and child-for many of the "Masters" the difference between the two is not absolutely clear-cut-can grow into beautiful and intelligent things which it will be a joy and pride to possess...
...it is for him a sort of super-motel and his scale of activities and scope of action lie in the outside world, in the big city...
...ment all the greater...
...if these transactions are in terms of land, trees, glass houses, or what have you, they differ only in degree from the city's transactions...
...Hide in the exurb from the insecurities of the rat race, hide in New York from the frustrations of the trap...
...Nowhere is there more consciousness of the need for community...
...The news is getting around that subtopia is not all that it was hoped to be, that the suburbs are, to be exact, a rotten place to live in, and that they are a rotten place to live in because of the values they represent...
...The only thing that maintains her sanity is that at some stages in her life these needs do not occur simultaneously...
...Those who can transcend it need not think they can bring anything to it...
...Her job is to get the family out, to get out herself, to represent the family before the world, and to place the family in the world...
...He moved to the exurb to escape the rat race...
...Anyone who has lived in a suburb at one time or another can tell something of the life of a suburb-of the daily round of travel to and from the house, of that part of the "community life" they happen to touch, of the quasi-friendly neighbors, of the financial and physical burden of being a householder...
...It is to these women and children that the "Masters"-we will see how masterful they are-come home, for whom they work, and for whom the whole suburb is supposedly created...
...The age of the Common Man belonged to the first half of America's 20th century...
...But the word never seems to suggest achievement for the sake of achievement or for the individual's own satisfaction...
...Crestwood Heights, The Exurbanites, and The Organization Man all hammer at the point that the values found in the suburbs are so distorted and contradictory that the best that can be hoped for is a deadlock...
...if it doesn't produce good fruit here it never will...
...A mere handful surrounded by the Godly Don Wallings, the Willis Waydes on the make and the cowardly Tom Raths-all Organization Men who will beat them down every time...
...The answer, according to Crestwood Heights, is not very well, if at all...
...it pays the bills...
...Father, mother, brothers, sisters, kin, friends, and neighbors are seen as necessarily expendable" in the demand for social mobility, in the need to get on that rising curve...
...But whether one lives'in this or that suburb matters not at all...
...But the man is in, not of, the suburb...
...The life of the middle-class American is permeated with this concept...
...But it doesn't work...
...country, certainly...
...but the house is not so little, the bills pile up, and worse, far worse, the competition to achieve continues its merry, if slightly more drunken, pace...
...The Master dreams of founding himself someplace, of finding his fulfillment sometime...
...For the achievement value must continue its work and the attempt to escape from it must of necessity fail because the whole system is built on it...
...The manifestations of this conflict can be found in any suburb...
...And it is in the suburb that his attempt to flee his futility hurts him the most...
...The American middle class has collectively inhabited the suburb long enough to create a suburban way of life...
...But the suburb is also to be the place where those ideals which the city inhibits can be put into practice, ideals revolving around freedom and individualism...
...DISSENT editors, please note...
...In suburban politics much play is made with the fact that in some suburbs at least the younger Democrat-the crew-cut egghead who is our new technocrat-has taken over, or is taking over the Democratic machine and is revitalizing it for the great push...
...Nowhere else but in the suburb can middle-class man achieve so perfectly the isolation he seeks from the rest of mankind-the isolation necessary to mobility...
...It looks the way Edwin Muir describes it...
...6.50...
...its activities are so time-regulated by outside agents-clubs, schools, TV, etc., etc.-that it virtually ceases to exist at all...
...The American search for the spiritual is even greater than the increasing numbers of people newly going to church and to synagogue indicate...
...the Crestwood boy has virtually no choice but to enter the business or professional life of Big City and to live subsequently in Crestwood Heights or other suburbs like it...
...But no...
...If achievement in the city is an impossible accomplishment or too painful to contemplate, then achievement-achieved can be caught, fixed, and founded in the suburb...
...one raises one's hat) reveals the importance of the suburb as the place where the career is started, taught, and carried on...
...More than any other spot on earth, the suburb is the place where the bourgeois is to make himself what he wants to be, to come to the realization of himself as embodied in his values...
...The suburb looks so placid, so clean and so green...
...those who are intruded upon when they are in suburbs help create the intrusion...
...Are they not rather resting places where one stays for the night until the possibility of moving elsewhere offers itself...
...The suburb for the particular species of suburbanite which Spectorsky studies-the communication "boys" of New York City-is the place where the "rat race" of the city can be left behind, where a symbol manipulator can act like a "thing manipulator" and where he can find that vague hope for which all Americans yearn so earnestly, "roots...
...But what are these values and goals in the 1950's, the years of Eisenhower Prosperity...
...And nowhere is the failure of the flight more apparent or severe than in the suburb...
...In fact, however, it is the place where the failure to gain achievement-achieved is made manifest...
...In the city competition is open, acknowledged, and brutal...
...The suburb looks like a place to live, the city like a place to work...
...it is not really a place where the family can grow, but rather it is a place where the family can disintegrate in the most efficacious way possible...
...The suburb is tied to the reality of achievement by an indissoluble union despite the fact that the purpose of the suburb is to escape this reality...
...The suburbanite has everything he needs except one thing-a capacity for confronting his sense of futility...
...Family privacy is broken into by every conceivable gadget known to the middle class mind...
...As bright young lawyers, doctors, engineers, professors, etc., they too are caught up in the achievement value and they have nothing to say which anyone cannot say for himself...
...Impregnated with his own belief in achievement he kills the thing achievement is supposed to achieve...
...The word achievement has many meanings: the authors of Crestwood Heights point to one connotation, the authors of such novels as Executive Suite, The Man in the Grey Frannel Suit, and Sincerely, Willis Wayde point to others...
...Can the bourgeois find himself in the suburb, break free from the heavy hand of the city, and in the suburb find his ideal made real...
...Here he can freely take up the game of shifting himself from one place to another, and can work at realizing his belief in the rising upward curve...
...urban home as distinct from the house is a marvel of inefficiency...
...These are dreams, and only dreams...
...For when the Master comes to the suburb he thrusts his values on wife and child, and they too are caught in the frenzy of achievement...
...He stands before society hoping for the best possible verdict...
...A pleasant society this, a new society, in which freedom is institutionalized, where choice is dictated...
...To be loyal to •a suburb is to insult "the American dream...
...If the children and the wife have become "future-oriented, voluntaristic, individualistic, controlaspirant, rationalizing, organizing people," it is because the man has created the suburb as an expression of his way of thinking...
...church, maybe...
...The student in Crestwood hopes for a lot from his career but doesn't expect much...
...the middle-class American is nothing if not a public figure...
...For the suburb is a closed society...
...for who in the suburb will rise up to defend planning...
...And if such a cocoon can enable, say Tom Rath to forget his fears, or his mistress in Italy (fortunately she has grown fat now, so that problem is solved) why, then, it has fulfilled its purpose...
...This is the failure of the suburb...
...What of the woman in this maelstrom of social climbing, social knifing, and social anxiety...
...No suburban woman can afford to be devoted to the family as such...
...And most of all it has property, property which can be owned individually and not collectively as in the city...
...It is her job to balance the various aspects of the suburbs (clubs, schools, church) so that a combination will come about that will maximize the benefits the family can receive...
...The suburb is a vast mart where land and houses are transferred from one hand to another, where families are moved from one neighborhood to another, and where the concept of living someplace has given way to the belief that a smooth curve upward gives more stability than a spot on the face of the globe...
...Yet there is a sort of living plan too in the suburbs...
...Achievement exists only when others think it exists, and there can be no achievement if it is not public and displayed...
...He suspected that her dress must have come from Bergdorf's and must have cost at least a hundred and fifty dollars, which Roger could afford because the Blakesleys did not have children...
...The standard of living, i.e...
...They are only dreams because middle-class man will not look at what he does, will not admit that he must pay, and pay, and pay for his achievement, will not see that there is no escape from the costs of his achievement, not even in his lovely suburb...
...the power of the suburbs is awe-inspiring) . The woman is driven into two markets at once: the marriage market and the money market, and this dichotomy continues after her marriage with the additional burden that now she has as many careers to further as there are members of her family...
...Speaking of woman's education in Crestwood Heights the authors say that "in some respects it seems that sexual differences have been eliminated...
...In the suburb the middle-class man thought he could build his ideal world for which he was working...
...It is his life, his activity, which creates the suburb and which, sets the standards and activities, the goals and functions of suburban existence...
...Who can imagine loyalty to a suburb...
...But it is the middle-class man's last stand, the place where he refuses to admit the reality of what he is...
...Here is Marquand's description of social life in subtopia...
...but what has he done...
...Not exactly...
...The brutality of business is too much, it seems, even for the businessman to stomach...
...What is the suburb indeed...
...But there is no community...
...And even those few liberals who can transcend their culture, what are they...
...but he must, by no means, become free to the point of renouncing either the material success goals or the engineered cooperation integral to the adequate functioning of an industrial civilization...
...No one, since no one lives there...
...That is the meaning of this statistic: Today 60 per cent of our families own their homes...
...But once a wife has met the time schedules set by the outside forces she faces her own personal vacuum which must be filled somehow...
...Franklin...
...Time is the master...
...The child's "childhood" in which he struggles to find his place in the amorphous and shifting society of the suburbs (the authors record that one high school student became so disgusted he went to live in the Channel Islands...
...This paean of praise to "The People's Capitalism" reaches its peak in a spiritual apotheosis...
...The family thus finds its venue here...
...To a city, perhaps...
...The material shell of the escape is gratifying to the eye...
...For how can community be built in a place the purpose of which is to escape the smothering effect of immobility...
...And if today the periodicals directed to the suburban way of life prattle like infant minds about "togetherness," this simply shows an acute vision of what the American suburbanite is not...
...But he breaks his dream with his own hands and then runs away from it-too dishonest to want to know what he has done...
...Still, it isn't quite so easy as the editors of House Beautiful and Sloane Wilson would have us believe...
...How are their wives and • From the Collected Poems of Edwin Muir, reprinted through the courtesy of thepublishers, Grove Press...
...But soon the brazen evening clocks will bring The tramp of feet and brisk Fanfare of motor horns And the masters come...
...So he oscillates: a comic figure if the consequences were not so sad...
...So...
...What is a suburb to a suburbanite...
...And the career of the child is the object of life in subtopia itself, which is there to provide the climate, means, and incentive for, riding the rising curve...
...In terror of himself yet fascinated with his own power, he flees from himself and his power to what he hopes the power will make possible-freedom...
...The businessmen meet face to face in the suburb just as they do in business and the dropping of the mask for a minute, a slip of the tongue can mean disaster...
...No place...
...we all know them-tries to run from the ruins behind him, the place to which they run to escape from what they have done and have allowed to be done to them, the place where they play at being free...
...Yet where else is there to go...
...People are aspiring upward in varied and individual ways...
...The inhabitantsone can hardly call them citizens-care, of course, a great deal about the conveniences of a suburb...
...The planners prattle gaily about community spirit...
...Yes, the property of a suburb can do wonderful things for the mind, soul, and body...
...Back and forth, from city to suburb, from office to family...
...It is in the conflict between the suburbanite's goals of achievement and his goals of freedom that the failure of the suburb as an escape from the costs of bourgeois existence becomes manifest...
...Tom Rath flees back to the womb...
...These are the small change of suburban complaints, but behind them there presumably lies a greater reality which distinguishes the suburb from the city and the suburbanite as a species from those of his fellow sufferers who live in different places...
...It is the child's dream of a grown-up world...
...the woman cannot do even that for she is caught in the trap made by her Master...
...Here is the homestead where an individual can-after having sacrificed himself in the cityrealize, if not himself, then, his creed for himself...
...And if religion is so rash as to question these truths, it is made to conform...
...if any community life exists at all, it is frantically on the synthetic level of suburban club and church...
...but suburb!-the question puts itself out of court...
...It is only a model, as they say today, or we would all have gone mad by now...
...so back to the other failure in the city while during the day in response to his demands and values the wife and child flee the failure of the home to make his achieve...
...It is this immobility from which the middle-class American flees when he goes to the suburb...
...The man at least has that consolation...
...To be crude: no achievement, no money...
...choice are to rule...
...suburban party talk is incessant -and incessantly dull-about tax rates, garbage disposal, schools, streets, etc., etc...
...To maintain a sense of loyalty to a suburb is one sure way of marking oneself as queer, and anyone who is so misguided by his childhood as to think that because he grew up in a suburban spot he has a tie to ; it will be soon disabused by the demands of his own, desires to get on that rising upward curve...
...The need of the members of the family to seek outside the family thus reveals the essential dynamic of the suburb...
...This writer who has lived in the suburbs far longer than he would like to remember and who has acquired a powerful dislike for them, has, all through this recital of woe, felt the urge to say something good about the suburb...
...The suburb provides the perfect setting for escape...
...The career of the parent is the mainstay of life in expensive subtopia...
...For not only is the purpose of the family to throw the children out of the family and into society but the wife herself is taught to flee the family as -a deadly and constricting thing...
...It is the place to which the Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, the Man on the Train, Organization Man-call them what you will...
...But can these values be realized in the suburb...
...So it is in Crestwood Heights, and so it is in every suburb...
...anybody can own several houses.* • In a study of residential mobility it was discovered in foul-Philadelphia suburbs that in one 56°%o intended to stay in their suburb...
...the suburbs are as much fled from as they are fled to...
...Here he will find himself...
...No: safety comes first...
...She was a very good wife to Roger...
...Or: Any direction you take-if you are good-leads you to success and self fulfillment...
...Walking the suburbs in the afternoon In summer when the idle doors stand open And the air flows through the rooms Fanning the curtain hems, You wander through a cool elysium Of women, schoolgirls, children, garden talks, With a schoolboy here and there Conning his history book...
...never the picture windows so large...
...And the radicals would inherit the earth...
...Here above all places is where the middle-class American can realize his aims and where the brute reality of what has to be done to achieve achievement can be forgotten...
...Partly, because the family is disintegrating beneath her feet and she must perforce aid in its disintegration...
...Human contacts are not for pleasure but for a purpose, and the same status struggle which takes place in the business world takes place in the suburb where instead of the secretary there is the wife and instead of junior executive there is the son...
...The suburb is simply the ultimate expression of the bourgeois value system...
...The thing that threatens her sanity is that at some stages in her life they do occur simultaneously...
...It is in the dichotomy between the one goal-the suburb as the place of mobility and achievement-and the second goal-the suburb as the place of free development-that the suburb becomes the arena of a headlong and even tragic clash...
...But where are they going...
...That's why Americans are happy...
...But like the city, the suburb is a place where necessary transactions of prestige and material satisfactions are carried out...
...THE SUBURB, then, is not a place for the growth of a family life as the bourgeois likes to pretend, but a place for a particular form of socialization...
...now, like as not, he looks forward to the morning train to New York as an escape from the trap which he perceives his limited dream has become...
...The two suburbs with high percentages were house-owning suburbs...
...No suburb could be as had as it has been described here...
...He lives there temporarily...
...It is the attempt to flee the cost of bourgeois values as they are found in the reality of the city to the ideal of bourgeois values as they would be found in the suburb...
...Thus the symbolism of the modern school where all is open glass (except for the toilets and the office of the principal) , so that no one can develop by any chance a tendency toward inwardness...
...Willis Wayde is too dumb to know what he has done...
...He is driven into a race for achievement, yet in the process he must flee from what he has done...
...The failure of bourgeois values is nowhere seen so clearly as in his own life and in his own life nowhere so clearly as in his own ideal, the suburbs...
...But if the achievement is a failure so is the flight...
...never has the American suburb been more slick...
...Locked within its own conflicts the suburb will admit nothing alien, nothing new, nothing startling...
...it has a tinny quality betraying a lack of conviction on the part of all concerned...
...the fact that it is Canadian in no way vitiates the description given of suburban living in America...
...Whatever may be collectively produced in the communication industry of New York City, there is nothing achieved by the individual despite his frantic efforts...
...Basic Books...
...III For the Master as well as for his family, the suburb is a necessity...
...The men are all away in the offices, Committee-rooms, laboratories, banks, Or pushing cotton goods In Wick or Ilfracombe...
...Crestwood Heights is a recently developed suburb on the edge of a big city in Canada...
...Achievement is the word which best sums up the combination of personal success, social mobility, and public esteem at the heart of the middle-class value system...
...The massed unanimous absence liberates The light keys of the piano and sets free Chopin and everlasting youth Now, with the masters gone...
...Despite its appearance of fixedness and place, the American suburb is the institutionalization of mobility, much more so than the city which, perhaps because there is so much granite lying around, seems to represent the principle of immobility...
...She had a way of remembering everything one said, accurately and usefully...
...But as he flees he brings his power with him and kills the freedom...
...The suburbs are an attempt to found a gigantic illusion, that flight is possible, that the costs of bourgeois values can be avoided, that bourgeois means wiII not contaminate bourgeois ends, that a bourgeois utopia can be built out of bourgeois cruelty...
...and now it has been described by a group of sociologists in a new book, Crestwood Heights (by Seeley, Sim, and Loosley) .*` It is a perceptive work, and they give a true and painful view of what it means to live in the upper-middle-class suburbs of America today...
...The purpose of the suburb is to break the family in the interests of the rising curve...
...Thus the headline in the Boston Sunday Globe...
...to turn his attacks against himself...
...He is prudent, therefore, and anxious-very anxious-not to destroy the possibility of a career by foolishness (always with the honorable exception of the young man in the Channel Islands) . It is out of this cautiousness that the personal relationships of the suburb grow, those "quasi-intimate relationships with people in impersonal situations...
Vol. 4 • July 1957 • No. 3
