Mad Men: the most literary show on TV

An excruciating 17 months after the end of series four, Mad Men will return to our screens this month, to plunge us once again into the irresistibly glamorous world of advertising in Sixties New York. It’s time to brace ourselves for the usual avalanche of paeans to the programme’s immaculate sense of period. The boozing! The smoking! The clothes! Joan’s bottom! Yet, while all these things are worthy of note, there’s one aspect of the show that seems to have been overlooked: Mad Men is one of the most literary television shows of recent times.

For a start, its style is markedly less cinematic than the other big American series of the current golden age. The settings are mostly interiors and the dialogue is deliberately theatrical — as creator Matthew Weiner has said, elevated rather than natural and without any of the overlapping speech used to denote realism in shows like the West Wing. More importantly, within those celebrated Sixties trappings, this is a series that’s always concerned with, and sometimes explicitly refers to, several recurring and often timeless themes in American literature.

Take the town where the main character Don Draper lived in the first three series. Of all New York suburbs in which a mysterious but unfailingly charismatic advertising executive could have tucked away his family, the one chosen by Weiner was Ossining: from 1961 until his death in 1982, the home of John Cheever. Dubbed “the Chekhov of the suburbs” or, more extravagantly, “the Ovid of Ossining”, Cheever was, even before Updike, the first American writer to establish the now-familiar literary picture of suburban frustration, status anxiety and marriages cracking under the strain of their own unrealistic expectations. In a 2009 article on Cheever, The New York Times listed the main themes of his work as “secrecy, doubleness, sorrow, the comforts of sex, the perils of alcohol, the suddenness and fleetingness of joy” — which, as a 17-word summary of Don Draper’s life, is pretty hard to beat.

As for a 10-worder, how about this from The New Yorker a few months earlier: “He is both a rank escapist and a conservative pragmatist”? That’s the critic James Wood describing “midcentury American suburban man” as depicted in Revolutionary Road by Cheever’s fellow suburbanite (and alcoholic) Richard Yates — a book that Weiner is known to have handed out to the Mad Men cast to help them understand the social background.

Admittedly, though, there’s nothing timeless yet. Cheever and Yates were both in their pomp at the time when the programme is set. So, let’s broaden it out a bit. According to no less an authority than Saul Bellow, “an important part of the American literary method is to EXPOSE the SEEMING: ‘So-and-so seems to be one thing but I shall show you what he is.’” This, you may remember, is a trick that Mad Men pulled off brilliantly in the first episode, when Don seemed to be a single philanderer about town — until the very last scene showed him returning home to his wife and children.

But of course, Don’s seeming soon proved to go far beyond that. As almost everybody knows by now — although it took his wife Betty three series — Don isn’t Don at all. He’s a prostitute’s child called Dick Whitman, who stole the identity of a dead fellow soldier in Korea. (More obsessive spotters of literary references might have noticed that the real Don was buried in a town called Bunbury, the name used to signify a double life in The Importance of Being Earnest.) In The Human Stain, where the main character, Coleman Silk, is a black man “passing” as white, Philip Roth claims this kind of reinvention as another great American tradition — “the democratic invitation to throw your origins overboard if to do so contributes to the pursuit of happiness”. Not only that, but the most famous literary example of this, from 1926, is another obvious influence on Mad Men.

Like Dick Whitman, F Scott Fitzgerald’s Jimmy Gatz is from a poor Midwestern background, becomes a decorated war hero, and finally makes it in New York under a different name — in his case, Jay Gatsby. (The name Don Draper, incidentally, suggests that The Great Gatsby might not be the only Fitzgerald novel Weiner had in mind: in Tender is the Night, the boozy unfaithful husband is called Dick Diver.) For both men, too, there’s clearly a cost. Neither is quite sure who he is any more — hence all those moments in which Don stares off into the middle distance in a puzzled quest for his true identity. Neither is quite able to answer the questions posed about Coleman Silk in The Human Stain: “Did he ever relax his vigilance, or was it like being a permanent fugitive? Did he ever get over the fact that he couldn’t get over the fact that he was pulling it off?” Neither can dispel the feeling of being essentially alone — and, as Stephen Spender once suggested, “intense loneliness gives all American literature something in common”.

But Mad Men’s links to the Twenties don’t end there, especially in the treatment of the female characters. The Twenties are often seen as the last blast of American hedonism before Depression and war put fun on hold until the Mad Men era. Yet, they were also a revolutionary decade for women, particularly in New York, as they daringly smoked, drank and slept around. At the same time, the pattern familiar from Mad Men was also put in place: married men had their wives in the suburbs and their mistresses in the city.

It’s a period that’s tellingly chronicled by the likes of Dorothy Parker and Edna St Vincent Millay, both of whom wrote mainly from the perspective of the mistress: sometimes defiantly, sometimes with a kind of breezy ruefulness and sometimes with a much darker awareness of the emotional cost. All three attitudes are shared by Peggy in Mad Men, who began as a secretary in episode one and has been working her way up ever since, all the while trying to shake off her Catholic Brooklyn background and become a proper Manhattan girl. They’d also make sense to office manager Joan who, as we’ve gradually realised after some more exposure of the seeming, isn’t the carefree man-pleaser that she first appeared. (For one thing, she clearly regrets following many of Parker’s characters — and Parker herself — into the illegal abortion clinics.)

If you want to go back still further into the American literature of the past, Mad Men can do that as well. After all, one of the central themes in Henry James’s work is the relationship between the thrusting New World of America and the more sophisticated but decaying Old World of Europe — and when the original agency of Sterling Cooper is bought by a British company at the end of series two, that gets a fairly thorough airing too.

True, this is not the show at its most subtle, with the Brits spending much of their time drinking tea and saying “splendid” if they like something and “rather disappointing” if they hate it. Even so, when the sacked accounts manager Burt Peterson tells the snooty new British boss that “you’re the dying empire, we’re the future”, we’re unmistakably in James territory. More successfully to my mind, there’s also the episode in series two where Don meets the Euro jet-set in California and sleeps with a girl introduced to him by a shadowy count, who turns out to be her father. Faced with such corruption, Don — not for the first or last time — suddenly comes over like an old-school American puritan.

Yet if there really is a single theme that unites all American literature, it’s surely America itself. Every now and then, usually to something of a media fanfare, a British writer produces what’s still called a Condition of England novel. There is, by contrast, virtually no big American novel that doesn’t tackle the condition of America. (Or as Martin Amis once put it, “every ambitious American novelist is trying to write a novel called USA”.) In the end, needless to say, this is also Mad Men’s overriding interest.

The big events are all there — from the Cuban missile crisis to the assassination of JFK. So, too, is the unease about the failure of the American dream for people like Betty Draper and Don’s ambitious colleague Pete Campbell, who’ve obeyed all the rules, but don’t seem to be getting the promised rewards — especially the happiness part. Before she finally divorced Don, Betty was reminiscent of the wife in Joseph Heller’s Something Happened, the only rival to Revolutionary Road for the title of Bleakest Ever Novel about American Middle-Class Life. “My wife is unhappy,” Heller’s narrator tells us. “She is one of those married women who are very, very bored and lonely… (I was with a married woman not long ago who told me she felt so lonely at times she turned ice cold and was literally afraid she was freezing to death from inside, and I believe I know what she meant).”

Unlike Yates or Heller, however, Mad Men has the advantage of hindsight. Occasionally, this can be the source of the show's only weakness, with today’s viewers invited to applaud themselves for leaving those benighted racist, sexist, homophobic days so far behind. Where it does work is in our knowledge of what’s about to happen next. Many of the characters may be perfectly suited to their era just at the moment. But the real convulsions of the Sixties that will transform, and undermine, their America — the Vietnam protests, the counter-culture, the race riots — are heading straight for them, and my guess is that Don won’t be on the side of the hippies.

Now that it looks as if Mad Men will run for seven series – Weiner has said this is the length he intends it to be – this knowledge doesn’t just add an elegiac feel to the show’s careful analysis of the country. It also ratchets up the dramatic tension — in the same way as if say, a drama about Pompeii was set in AD78. And in the meantime, there’s some more immediate questions to be answered. Will Don really marry his new fiancée, Megan the secretary — and if so, can he possibly be faithful? Will Joan regret aborting her last trip to the abortion clinic — and will her husband find out the baby isn't his? Will Peggy ever get the recognition that her work deserves? After that long 17 month hiatus, the suspense is almost enough to drive a man mad.

The fifth season of Mad Men begins on Sky Atlantic at 900pm on March 27. Seasons 1–4 are now out on DVD