Self-Portrait in Gray

By John Skow

WHAT SHALL WE WEAR TO THIS PARTY? by SLOAN WILSON 442 pages. Arbor House. $12.95.

Sloan Wilson reports in these amiable memoirs that in 1955, after the vast sales of his novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, tailors sought him out and begged him to accept, gratis, suits of fine gray flannel. Wilson's book had already confirmed what everybody knew--that the gray flannel suit had become the uniform of some sort of success in a tall building in New York. Wilson felt that to wear one would be to indulge in ridiculous self-advertisement. It says something about the careful, rather unimaginative Wilson, as well as about the doleful plumage of the period, that when he finally did pick a free suit, his liberated choice was brown flannel.

A reader today finds it hard to see what seized the imagination of the country in Wilson's earnest novel of postwar listlessness. The prose is bland. The plot devices are those of what used to be called women's magazine fiction. Will Betsy forgive Tom for fathering an illegitimate child in Italy during World War II? Yes. Will a dishonest caretaker succeed in cheating Tom and Betsy out of an inheritance? No.

The novel does ask a better question, though. Tom, who has fought a hard war, now rides a commuter train and works at a corporate job. Shouldn't there be something more to life, he wonders dimly, than crawling up the salary ladder, moving from suburb to classier suburb? If the process by which a novel becomes a bestseller is not simply a random phenomenon, like the winning of a lottery--a dubious proposition that wise old publishers brood about--then Gray Flannel owed its vogue to the fact that a lot of sad young men were thinking the way Tom was. Presumably they must have liked the novel's reassuring answer, which is, more or less, cherish your wife, vote yes on school bond issues, and existential despair will stay away from your door.

At 55, Wilson is more interesting than that, and his memoirs have a truer texture than his windfall novel. He was born into an Eastern family of faded affluence, whose wealth was more attitude than actuality. There was sufficient reality, however, that young Wilson could learn seamanship aboard the family yacht. When the U.S entered World War II, he won a quick commission in the Coast Guard, and served eventually as commanding officer of a converted trawler assigned to the dangerous Greenland patrol. He learned to be a good skipper under the contemptuous eye of a great skipper, and one of his lessons was that he must make do with ability that stopped short of brilliance.

The hundred or so pages that take Wilson through his Coast Guard years would make a fine short sea novel. The writing, in general, is dogged, honest and unbrilliant, and to chronicle the Greenland patrol, those qualities are sufficient. The sea supplies the power and depth missing in his dry-land work, just as similar sagas of water and war have served other journeymen writers well.

Doggedness and honesty are not a bad combination. The middleaged, civilian part of Wilson's memoirs has its own interest. The writer survived his success, and even had a little fun with it. He watched his marriage to a beautiful and decent woman wind down to nothing, without understanding why it was happening. He then survived divorce and the period that has become the eighth age of modern man, in which the newly single 40-year-old gawks around like a teenager, wondering miserably how to get girls. He married again, with great love and luck, lived on a boat for five years, beat down alcoholism, watched his children grow, and went on honorably writing books that are not, now, much read. His years have been a skidway, but he has man aged to observe the slide well. John Skow

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