Children Of An Idle Brain

By Alan Mack

"For hundreds of years the description of love was left to poets and novelists. For example, here is Jane Austen showing how lovers behaved differently than the rest of us:

"For though a very few hours spent in the hard labour of incessant talking will dispatch more subjects than can really be in common between any two rational creatures,

• Language: English
• Publisher: Amazon Publishing Agency
• Release date: May 26, 2023
• ISBN: 9781088154601

Book preview

Children Of An Idle Brain

By

Alan Mack

Copyright © 2023 by – Alan Mack – All Rights Reserved.

It is not legal to reproduce, duplicate, or transmit any part of this document in either electronic means or printed format. Recording of this publication is strictly prohibited.

To P__ , for whom love is all that matters

Table of Contents

The Realm of Love

Introduction

Love and Literature

Love and Science

Love and Society

The Descriptive Problem and What to Do About It

Time and Solving the Narrative Problem

The Learning Curve (1950-1960)

The ‘Burbs

The Alternatives

The Prosaic

Education

Work

Money

The Lyrical

The Thornapple Tree

The Reckoning

Searching for Darcy

Part I: Two Couples,  Both Alike, 1960-1980

The College, 1960-1964

The House on Terry Street

Persuasion

A Trip to The Moon on Gossamer Wings

Shoal Waters

Helen of Troy

Resettling

A Girl From a Different World

At the College

The Natural

Coincidence

Eleutheros and Ananke, Spring, 1964

The Early Years, 1964-1973

St. Louis

Another Coincidence

The Third World, 1970-1973

The Virginian, 1971

End of the Idyll, 1973

Crack-Up, 1975-80

Winter Night, 1979

A Phone Call, 1980

PART II ODYSSEY,  1980-1999

The Buick Years, 1985-1989

Quiet, This Is a Hospital! People Are Dying, and  We’re Trying to Help Them.

Virtual Dad, 1981-

The Tontine, 1989

Dinner At Rothschild’s

The Mission Trip

Dreaming of Frank Miller

Cri D’Coeur, Spring, 1998

Intimations of Mortality, 1998-1999

Prelude, Spring, 1999

In The Henry Doorway, June 18, 1999

"We Have to Talk," June 19, 1999

ENTR’ACTE

PART III: COMING HOME, 1999-2000

Dream Come True Day, June 29, 1999

Soaring (Summer, 1999)

Family Ties

Sweet Dreams . . .

Trolls (July through September 1999)

Forty-Five Year-Old Linoleum, August 1999

The Incredible Rightness of Being, August 1999

The Princess and The Stranger, September 1999

I Can’t Believe This Is Happening, October 1999

The Latino Entertainment Committee, November, 1999

The House On Terry Street, November, 1999

The Invisible Man

The Iron Arithmetic Of Love, December 1999

No Road to Varykino, January 2000

Barry Lyndon

A Jane Austen Wrap-Up

AFTERWORD

Is There a Cure for Love?

The Realm of Love

We all look for love. You take what you learn growing up—the whole of it, all the contradictory experiences—and you search, not that you may even know you’re doing it.

How many times have you heard a man say something like, She’s the best thing that ever happened to me. Or, She was the best of all of them! Those are men who have made the best of their cumulative experience and of the opportunities that have come their way.

All that experience will help determine if your search is successful. Better experience, better chances. And millions are successful. They find love. But there are only chances, not guarantees. Many get off on the wrong track and never recover. Others never get on a track at all. How many women have asked, Why are all the good men taken? It’s not an uncommon complaint. How many, both men and women, have said, if only to themselves, If it weren’t for the kids . . . . And how many of those have fallen into ruinous affairs that have humiliated a spouse and alienated or damaged their children.

These false starts and dead ends happen to many perfectly nice, deserving people who should find love—who you’d think would find love—but who somehow don’t. They just never do. And so it is that other millions are left loveless.

So if you do find love, if you have found love, consider yourself lucky. All else being equal, you will lead a happy life.

***

Then there’s something very different. It’s rarer. It’s the love that finds you—that walks right up and touches you on the cheek and sends a shudder through your entire being. You may not fully realize it when it happens, but you will never be the same. This is the love the poets sang about, that the novelists wrote about, and that scientists are now attempting to study with their primitive instruments and rudimentary measurements.

If it does happen to you, not only are you lucky, you’re very lucky. You may not realize it right away or for some time, but you are swept away. You will never forget it. For want of a better term, let’s call it true love.

This is a true story of love and of true love.

Introduction

For the reasons given below, the story needs to be told just as it happened, but anonymously. A memoir, but without real names. Those who participated, including the writer, are ordinary people with no taste for a public airing or notoriety; or, frankly, the need to be embarrassed by some of the intimacies, the things that occurred, or that were said.

Therefore, this won’t be the unvarnished truth. Of necessity, it will be the varnished truth—transparently observable in all its essentials, including time, but seen through a tinted gloss to obscure identities and some places. The reader will simply have to suspend his skepticism in this regard and believe that a man who sees the importance of telling a true story wouldn’t capriciously alter anything important.

The author is, or was, a member of that large slice of the American population described roughly as upper-middle class and the lower tier of that. One of millions who goes to an office every day, his own or someone else’s, in a city large or small, on a train or in his car, plays golf or tennis on weekends at a club with friends, vacations at a lake with his wife and kids, buys a house in a good suburban school district his wife researched, has a retirement account as well as a mortgage, and raises his kids to go to college, as he and his wife did—college is where they met. He likes to think that what he does helps the economy tick along. He’s a sports fan. In other words, he was that suburban Everyman who liked to think there was something special about himself, even if there wasn’t.

But why a true story and not the traditional way love stories have been told, through literature, early on by poets, and more recently by novelists?

Love and Literature

Literature, as the primary means of describing and analyzing love, had the advantage of employing beauty in the search for truth.

What is love?

. . . it is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wand'ring bark,

What is its effect on those who fall into it? It can make women swoon . . .

O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?

. . . And for that name which is no part of thee

Take all myself.

and fill men with bravado . . .

Alack, there lies more peril in thine eye

Than twenty of their swords: look thou but sweet,

And I am proof against their enmity.

With the advent of the novel, closely imagined life, distilled from reality, became the warp through which the woof of many a love tale was woven—from the gentrified quadrille of Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy to the ill-fated aristocratic passions of Anna Karenina and Alexei Vronsky to the status constrained longing of Jay Gatsby for Daisy Buchanan in an age of seeming liberation.

For several hundred years, gifted practitioners like Austen, Tolstoy, and Fitzgerald were the main conveyors of how love infused their worlds and the people who lived in them. With keener-than-average insight, they wove their stories out of what they knew of their worlds, elaborating or trimming to have their stories make sense and create dramatic tension. Tolstoy even took the true story of a woman driven by love to throw herself under a train as the starting point for his cautionary tale of the dangers of love—making of a tragically distracted individual the foundation of a monumental work of art. What had been an unfortunate event in the news became, through the novelist’s descriptive and imaginative powers, filled with meaning well beyond the actual event that would enlighten generations of readers and expand our understanding of that elusive thing, the human condition.

And so fiction at its best became our chief vehicle for exploring the dynamics of love—the primary explainer of why people in love did the sometimes bizarre things they did, said the strange things they sometimes said, even how they felt so differently than the other people around them who were not smitten by love.

Of late, however, this fictional model of inquiry into the nature of love and its effects seems to be running low on gas. Not that long ago, for example, there was a book published with this title: The End of the Novel of Love. Here is one reviewer’s comment:

If this woman leaves her husband for her lover, in six months, she’ll be right back where she started. There isn’t a reason in the world to believe that she will know herself any better with the second man than she does with the first. In an age of easy divorce and shame-free adultery, romantic love has become just another insufficient quick fix in chronically vacant lives. You can’t hang a powerful novel on its transformative capacity anymore. Laura Miller, review of The End of the Novel of Love, by Vivian Gornick, Salon, 10/27/97

No transformative capacity? What a come down from Anna Karenina. In this contemporary reading, the fictional romantic love that had had the power to transform the lives of the leading characters in two centuries of novels has been reduced to a quick fix that evanesces and then dissipates, presumably leaving the principals with a hangover rather than a new life or a new fate.

The unspoken assumption here is that those who allow themselves to fall in love these days are suckers, a dramatic reversal of how they had been viewed by the novelists. Whatever their fates, the lovers were the ones the novelists had taken seriously. Tolstoy’s story was not about Alexei Karenin, who was left by his wife to cope with raising his son as a single father—as was Ted Kramer when his wife departed to find herself in the very contemporary novel (1977) and movie, Kramer vs. Kramer.

After two hundred years, what has changed? Two things, I think, hinted at in the quote above, science and society.

Love and Science

It took a long time, new equipment, and careful record-keeping for Western man to convince himself that the plain facts of his observation were simply not true. It sure looks like it, but the sun does not come up every morning in the east, and the stars come out at night. Counterintuitively, it is the earth that turns, giving us that false impression, and the bright but small sun in our sky is, in fact, a ball of glowing gas larger than we can imagine, just far, far away. Science gave us a view contrary to that of our senses.

If you can see love as a quick fix and not a transformation, there is a reason for it, first emerging in the mind of Edward O. Wilson, the Ant King. Wilson’s notion was that man and his works can’t be all that different from the other animals. Here’s how he put it:

My point is that it is entirely possible for all known components of the mind, including will, to have a neurophysiological basis subject to genetic evolution by natural selection. There is no a priori reason why any portion of the foundation of human social behavior must be excluded from the domain of sociobiological [i.e., scientific] analysis. [Emphasis added.]

This evolutionary way of looking at the world doesn’t leave much room for the independent existence of all those things man once liked to think he cooked up on his own—ethics, morals, aesthetics, metaphysics, justice, religion, truth, faith, liberty, equality, and, yes, love. All of man’s works and thoughts are, like nature itself, subject to scientific dissection and taxonomy.

Why would Fitzwilliam Darcy give up his perfectly reasonable objections to the gaucheries of some members of the Bennet family and bail it out of the inevitable scandal they created? Why would Anna Karenina abandon her maternal scruples and run off to Italy with an aristocratic playboy? Why would a hardened bootlegger like James Gatz, used to operating outside the law, moon like a schoolboy at a light across the water?

It wasn’t long before the human brain began to be picked apart scientifically in search of love’s true nature. In a series of books culminating with Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love (2005), the anthropologist Helen Fisher set out to reveal the chemical secrets of the brains of people in love. The great Wilson himself blurbed her book, putting two hundred years of novelistic speculation in what he thought was its proper place:

If you want flashes and particular experiences of romantic love, read novels. If you want to understand this central quality of human nature to its roots, read Why We Love.

Science is exacting. It insists on careful observation and recordkeeping. Scientists who fudge, as novelists do to enhance what they see as the central truth of their observations, are looked down on. Here is how Helen Fisher, in a book intended for popular audiences, describes that potentiality of human nature, romantic love, after taking MRI scans of the brains of people madly in love, to see where, exactly, their brains light up chemically:

But we are coming to some understanding of the drive to love. And what an elegant design. This passion emanates from the motor of the mind, the caudate nucleus; and it is fueled by at least one of nature’s most powerful stimulants, dopamine. When one’s passion is returned, the brain tacks on positive emotions, such as elation and hope. When one’s love is spurned or thwarted instead, the brain links this motivation with negative feelings such as despair and rage. And all the while, the regions of the prefrontal cortex monitor the pursuit, planning tactics, calculating gains and losses, and registering one’s progress toward the goal: emotional, physical, even spiritual union with the beloved. Helen Fisher, Why We Love, p. 76

That allusive treatment—brain functions transformed into a kind of military general staff—may be helpful in translating scientific observation into layman’s language. But I don’t think, even metaphorically, the model she describes fully accounts for the emergence of love from the accumulation of individual experience with an added dollop of dopamine. What is it that triggers the dopamine drop?

That is, brain chemistry isn’t the whole story of love by any means, any more than a description of the functioning of the internal combustion engine describes the pleasures of a drive in the country. Nothing of the experience of it—the smell of manure, the line of motorcycles in front of a roadhouse, the sight of a farm wife mowing her lawn, and all the fleeting images, associations, and memories these conjure up—is attributable to this:

In a spark ignition engine, the fuel is mixed with air and then inducted into the cylinder during the intake process. After the piston compresses the fuel-air mixture, the spark ignites it, causing combustion. The expansion of the combustion gases pushes the piston during the power stroke.

It gets your car there, but none of that leads to your wondering, as you pass that roadhouse, why overweight, balding middle-aged men grow their remaining gray hair into scraggly pony-tails and ride motorcycles on weekends. But if your brain is supercharged by love and fueled with exotic dopamine, you may see those Harley-riding guys as fellow knights on a quest and that stocky farm wife riding her lawnmower as Lady Godiva. The images are provided by experience—what you’ve previously seen, felt, and what you’ve read. Their reconfiguration as knights and ladies is what you might call a chemico-experiential transformation, not unlike a chemically induced high.

However, it seems that whatever scientific love progress is being made is glacial when we think of the spectacular sprint human knowledge, in general, has been on of late. To a layman, there doesn’t seem to be much progress between Helen Fisher in 2005 and these findings on love and brain chemistry over a decade later:

Romantic love is an intangible state of mind. But we are coming to understand it more clearly through techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging. fMRI, as it’s known, measures brain activity by examining changes in blood flow and oxygenation. (Debra Soh, Sex, Love and Knowing the Difference, 2019)

Come again? Unless there is something more to it, fourteen years out from Helen Fisher’s book, this looks more like treading water than progress.

Even recent work by scholarly thinkers on the evolutionary relationship between the brain and the mind is still at a primitive level. Take a book out in 2019 in the spin-off field of neurophilosophy by its main practitioner, Patricia Churchland (Conscience: The Origins of Moral Intuition). The progress shown is not that far beyond the musings of the Ant King himself. Here is how one reviewer describes it:

The limitations in Churchland’s account are mostly limitations in the state of the field. As she repeatedly notes, many aspects of how conscience comes to be embodied in the brain, and shaped by natural selection, are simply not yet known. (Nicholas Christakos, Nature, May 28, 2019)

Chemistry obviously has a long way to go to be able to explain it all. There is, somewhere, still a missing link between the scientific study of love and the truth of love. Nevertheless, you can’t think about romantic love anymore without taking brain chemistry into account.

So there it is. Science, based on carefully recorded factual observation, is in the process of crowding out the novelistic exploration of love, intangible as love still seems to be. The professors of literature in their elbow-patched tweed jackets are quietly packing their dusty books in boxes as the chemists in white lab coats with their test tubes and MRI machines move in down the hall. Once science intrudes, it is only a matter of time before it takes over.

Love and Society

The dramatic tension in these novels by Austen, Tolstoy, and Fitzgerald came largely from the societal impediments that stood between the lovers. The conventions under which they lived, each in their own time and circumstance, were what the lovers had to overcome—if they could—to find happiness. Of the three pairs, only Bennet and Darcy were able to do so successfully. The love of the other two pairs was doomed when the social scaffolding of their worlds came crashing down on their heads.

By the mid-Twentieth Century, when our story begins, these accumulated conventions and the constraints they imposed seemed, on the face of things, to be waning—a process that has only accelerated down the inclined plane of personal liberation since then. (For example, we used to have two sexes. Now we have a proliferation of elective genders.)

Take Anna Karenina, and think of the power of that story in its original setting. In the first part of the story, at the same time Vronsky was beginning to be transformed by love; his mother, who, of course, wanted the best for her paragon of a son, was becoming confused and disconcerted by his behavior. She had, initially, thought of a glamorous love affair as an ornament to a rising young man’s career, perhaps an indication of his leadership capabilities and cool under fire. But then he had sacrificed a promising opportunity for professional advancement (no small thing in any class or any century) in order to remain close to his lover. The nature of Vronsky’s relationship with Anna now frightened his mother.

She was vexed, too, that from all she could learn of this connection, it was not that brilliant, graceful, worldly liaison which she would have welcomed but a sort of Wertherish, desperate passion, so she was told, which might well lead him into imprudence. Anna Karenina, pt. 2, ch 18

The aristocracy had latitude, but limited latitude. The social norms to which Countess Vronskaya adhered, overripe as they may have been, would allow for only so much imprudence. Vronsky himself knew this, knew that his mother was right about the social and professional wreckage to come; but he couldn’t help himself, for to him, Anna was becoming life itself. And this was beyond his mother’s comprehension.

Contrast this rather cosmic impasse of 1870’s Tsarist Russia with an observation about a hypothetical Anna Karenina and her agonies catapulted a hundred years ahead in time and place, that is, into our world:

I once heard one of my university colleagues arguing that if Anna had lived in the state of Wisconsin today [the 1980’s], a liberal judge would have given her a no-fault divorce and custody of her child. Thus, the book would appear to be only a mirror of worn-out and unjust legal systems. [Today] Anna could have had her affair and her child without tension or guilt. (Allan Bloom, Love and Friendship)

Well, probably not without tension or guilt. That’s overstating it—divorce and family break-up in any era is a tough proposition—but considering the waves of personal liberation and clinical research that have ensued in the interim, would a contemporary fictional account of the gal from Sheboygan who threw herself under a train for love carry the same tragic weight as did the original Anna Karenina, or would she be as convincing a character, even with a Leo Tolstoy writing her? We’d be wondering, not so much about her passion, but if she’d gone off her medication or perhaps was self-medicating.

Today, we might be tempted to think, like the reviewer of Vivian Gornick’s book, that only the deluded or clinically impaired would be foolish enough to find themselves helplessly in the grip of overwhelming love. Serious people now seem to know better.

And yet . . . and yet, from time to time, serious people still do find themselves in the grip of a love they can’t seem to fully understand or do anything about. Not all that long ago, the Republican governor of a southern American state ran off to Argentina for a few days without telling anyone, providing a transparently phony excuse and sacrificing both a marriage and a promising political career. Why? For love.

If someone as theoretically hard-shelled as a professional politician can’t resist love, who can? In subsequent interviews, the Governor gushed that he would die knowing I had met my soul mate, who turned out to have been a middle-aged divorcee with two kids.

The Descriptive Problem and What to Do About It

Has the promise of romantic love, like so many other promises of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, proven to be a mirage? Is love on the way out? Will we, as Samuel Clemens described in Life on the Mississippi, find that the more we learn about navigating the channels, the less we will be aware of the beauty of the river? Will true love come to be seen as a chemical imbalance, a pathology to be treated, and not as the beautiful thing only a fortunate few are lucky enough to experience?

Compare these two descriptions of romantic love, and you’ll see the dilemma. The first is the abstract of a scientific paper describing the effects of love written by Helen Fisher and some colleagues. (Her previous description was intended for popular consumption. This is the clinical version.) The second description, the excerpt, is a fictional account of the same thing, the immediate effects of love. You may recognize it:

Scientific Abstract

Early-stage romantic love can induce euphoria, is a cross-cultural phenomenon, and is possibly a developed form of a mammalian drive to pursue preferred mates. It has an important influence on social behaviors that have reproductive and genetic consequences. To determine which reward and motivation systems may be involved, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging and studied 10 women and 7 men who were intensely in love from 1 to 17 mo. Participants alternately viewed a photograph of their beloved and a photograph of a familiar individual, interspersed with a distraction-attention task. Group activation specific to the beloved under the two control conditions occurred in dopamine-rich areas associated with mammalian reward and motivation, namely the right ventral tegmental area and the right postero-dorsal body and medial caudate nucleus. Activation in the left ventral tegmental area was correlated with facial attractiveness scores. Activation in the right anteromedial caudate was correlated with questionnaire scores that quantified intensity of romantic passion. In the left insula-putamen-globus pallidus, activation correlated with trait affect intensity. The results suggest that romantic love uses subcortical reward and motivation systems to focus on a specific individual, that limbic cortical regions process individual emotion factors, and that there is localization heterogeneity for reward functions in the human brain.

Literary Excerpt

[He] knew that she was listening to his words and that she was glad to listen to him. And this was the only thing that interested him. Not in that room only, but in the whole world, there existed for him only himself, with enormously increased importance and dignity in his own eyes, and she. He felt himself on a pinnacle that made him giddy, and far away down below were all those excellent —s, —s, and all the world.

Though it has all the charm of an autopsy, you can’t ignore the Abstract. It is a scientific description of what is happening in the Excerpt. No one in love looks at it that way. No one in love thinks, Oh, that’s my left insula-putamen-globus pallidus acting up.

The man swept away by love simply finds himself on a pinnacle, feeling giddy. But without abandoning our prejudices and the evidence of our own eyes and thus the Ptolemaic view of the universe, we’d have never gotten to the moon.

We want to experience love, not just know about it. But does the scientific study of love make it impossible to describe its effects without telling it truly, especially when the sources of the dramatic tension necessary to tell a fictional love story compellingly seem to have withered considerably on their journey from St. Petersburg to Sheboygan?

Science must have its due, the objective truth. In an age of science, nothing else will make sense.

Time and Solving the Narrative Problem

Which also leaves us with a bit of a narrative problem. The timeframe of this story is most of a lifetime, from the 1960s into the 2000s. The actual allotted time—that is, that devoted to the love story per se—could obviously have been only a tiny fraction of that span, and all mixed in with the other, not lovelorn, time.

Here’s how Scott Fitzgerald dealt with the problem over a much shorter span of time, in a few deft sentences that both liberate the important narrative from all the other irrelevant time and create a space for the necessary prioritizing reflection:

Reading over what I [Nick Carraway] have written so far I see I have given the impression that the events of three nights several weeks apart were all that absorbed me. On the contrary they were merely casual events in a crowded summer and, until much later, they absorbed me infinitely less than my personal affairs.

He then goes on to summarize the events and thoughts that had held first place in his consciousness that crowded summer until the Gatsby/Buchanan story emerged out of the tangle of everyday life: his daily work routine in the bond business, an affair with a girl who lived in Jersey City; his financial studies at the Yale Club; his growing affection for New York City.

It is much the same with this love story. It was always there, latent, so to speak, amid the millions of events and thoughts and huge spans of time that make up our everyday lives from childhood to retirement. Like Nick Carraway, I was of two minds, but over an exceedingly long period of time, time measured in decades rather than days. Notice how Carraway refers to much later. He wasn’t of two minds in equal consideration simultaneously. One mind had to have been hidden somehow until it emerged and took precedence over all that other stuff—the bond business, the Jersey City girl, the Yale Club, the attractions of New York City. It’s easier to think of it metaphorically as a heart and mind problem, or heart versus mind, even though it’s all taking place in the brain, whereas the heart is merely a blood-pumping muscle somewhere down below.

Inside Nick Carraway’s brain, the mind was temporarily masking what was going on in the heart, which was a tragic love story waiting to emerge. Making this a little more explicit, you could say that within the brain, when it comes to love, we are of two minds—a mind mind and a heart mind—two modes of thinking and feeling that can exist simultaneously and even contradictorily, without causing insanity.

***

Taking all this together—the receding of love in literature, the emergence of scientific love study, and the melting away of constraining social convention in the face of individual liberation, what might be more revealing or helpful, or believable to a contemporary audience, another attempt to replicate the work of the master novelists; or a true love story told as it actually happened—in effect a case study?

The Learning Curve (1950-1960)

The ‘Burbs

I am a son of the suburbs—their wide lawns and tall trees, their safe streets and cars in the driveway—and I can say, without irony or embarrassment, that the American suburbs were the best place on earth for a kid to grow up in when I did, the 1950s. I can say that having helped keep those lawns trim and those cars shiny and having had some familiarity with the alternatives.

That claim, I realize, faces some pretty stiff headwinds. There is substantial literature of many types claiming quite the contrary. In fact, the suburbs of my youth, perhaps because of their very nurturing benignity, were a target of substantial ridicule. Here’s a typical comment from Lewis Mumford, a big-think guy from that era, who saw the suburbs not only as a place but as an ethos, and a defective one:

In the suburb one might live and die without marring the image of an innocent world . . . . Thus the suburb served as an asylum for the preservation of illusion. Here domesticity could prosper, oblivious of the pervasive regimentation beyond. This was not merely a child-centered environment; it was based on a childish view of the world . . . .

The suburbs were often portrayed not only as childish but as banal, mediocre places, places that people settled for when they couldn’t do better. In the 1950s, Herman Wouk’s Marjorie Morgenstern of New York City harbored ambitions of becoming Marjorie Morningstar, a Broadway star. When that didn’t work out, she gave up her notions of the artistic life and settled for becoming Marjorie Morgenstern Schwartz of suburban Mamaroneck, just another ordinary person living an average life in a humdrum place.

It could get worse. Herman Wouk was subtle and nuanced compared to Betty Frieden, who, looking back from 1962 in The Feminine Mystique, took on the accepted wisdom that fulfillment as a woman had only one definition for American women after 1949—the housewife-mother. Victims of the problem that has no name, Friedan’s suburban women were frustrated, unfulfilled, bored; some even psychotic:

But on an April morning in 1959, I heard a mother of four, having coffee with four other mothers in a suburban development fifteen miles from New York, say in a tone of quiet desperation, the problem. And the others knew, without words, that she was not talking about a problem with her husband, or her children, or her home. Suddenly they realized they all shared the same problem, the problem that has no name. They began, hesitantly, to talk about it. Later, after they had picked up their children at nursery school and taken them home to nap, two of the women cried, in sheer relief, just to know they were not alone. …

Poor dears. Pathetic, and doesn’t describe at all the substantial women under whose guidance we grew up in the suburbs of the 1950’s.

A decade earlier, David Riesman had found the emerging other-directed middle-class men of the suburbs to be increasingly conformist go-along-to-get-along types, malleable and unsure of themselves, molded by the new corporate requirements for success. This disdainful academic slant on the suburbs is worth an extended look for the unsubtle bias that bleeds through its seemingly clinical language. Here’s a passage on the deficiencies of suburban child-rearing:

Increasingly in doubt as to how to bring up their children, parents turn to other contemporaries for advice; they also look to the mass media; [or] they turn, in effect, to the children themselves. Yet they cannot help but show their children, by their own anxiety, how little they depend on themselves and how much on others. Whatever they may seem to be teaching the child in terms of content, they are passing on to him their own contagious, highly diffuse anxiety. They reinforce this teaching by giving the child approval—and approving themselves because of the child—when he makes good. . . .

Approval itself, irrespective of content, becomes almost the only unequivocal good in this situation: one makes good when one is approved of. Thus all power, not merely some power, is in the hands of the actual or imaginary approving group, and the child learns from his parents' reactions to him that nothing in his character, no possession he owns, no inheritance of name or talent, no work he has done is valued for itself but only for its effect on others. Making good becomes almost equivalent to making friends or at any rate the right kind of friends. To him that hath approval, shall be given more approval.

The typical other-directed child grows up in a small family, in close urban quarters, or in a suburb. Even more than in the earlier epoch the father leaves home to go to work, and he goes too far to return for lunch. Home, moreover, is no longer an area of solid privacy. As the size and living space of the family diminish and as the pattern of living with older relatives declines, the child must directly face the emotional tensions of his parents. There is a heightening of awareness of the self in relation to others under these conditions, especially since the parents, too, are increasingly self-conscious.

Under the new social and economic conditions, the position of children rises. . . . Even boys from comfortable homes were expected until recently to hit the sunrise trail with paper routes or other economically profitable and character-building chores.

The parents lack not only the self-assurance that successful inner direction brings but also the strategy of withdrawal available to many unsuccessful inner-directed types. The loss of old certainties in the spheres of work and social relations is accompanied by doubt as to how to bring up children. Riesman, The Lonely Crowd, pp. 48-49 (1989 ed.)

That academic gobbledygook is not just wrong but spectacularly wrong.

For an academic book, Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950) became amazingly popular, as The Feminine Mystique would be a dozen years later. But looking back on these academic and ideological exercises, I simply do not recognize in these portraits by Friedan and Riesman my parents and the parents of the childhood pals that I grew up with. The mothers I knew were strong, self-confident, and, from my observation, very happy; not at all the neurotic Nervous Nellies portrayed by Friedan.

The men, many of whom had served in the war, mostly as junior naval officers, were self-confident and accomplished. They knew how to do things, how to make things. They didn’t look to their children about how to raise children. They didn’t exactly raise us. They led by example. They tended to be outgoing, assertive, even loud. They knew right from wrong. They had their own bowling and softball leagues. Some were entrepreneurs, a handful in our neighborhood becoming spectacularly successful and wealthy, trading on their educations and the capabilities they’d acquired living through the Depression and military service. Whatever other-directed means if you’d described them to their faces as Riesman’s anxiety-ridden, uncertain shrinking violets, lacking in the self-assurance that successful inner direction brings, they’d have laughed right back in your face.

It wasn’t just intellectuals and academics who were wildly wrong about the suburbs. In the realm of popular culture, the portrayal of the suburbs in the Fifties and beyond has