Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (2 page)

Tom Rath is indeed in a Consumer Age pickle. With three kids to support, he dare not venture down the road of anomie and irony and entropy, the Beat road that Kerouac blazed and Pynchon followed. But the treadmill of consumerism, the comfortable program of desiring the goods that everybody else desires, seems scarcely less dangerous. Tom can see that if he steps onto the hedonic treadmill he really will become a man in a gray flannel suit, mechanically chasing ever higher salaries in order to afford “a bigger house and a better brand of gin.” And so, in the first half of the novel, as he squirms between two equally unattractive options, his mood and his tone of voice veer wildly from weariness to rage to bravado, from cynicism to timidity to principled resolve; and Betsy, who is poignantly unaware of why her husband is unhappy, squirms and veers alongside him.

The first half of the book is by far the better half. The Raths are attractive precisely because many of their sentiments are not. And the book’s early walk-on characters, as if to mirror the Raths’ volatility, are often comic and arresting; there’s a personnel manager who reclines horizontally behind his desk, a visiting doctor who hates children, a hired housekeeper
who whips the louche little Raths into shape. The first half of the book is
fun.
Immersing yourself in Wilson’s old-fashioned social-novel storytelling is like taking a ride in a vintage Olds; you’re surprised by its comfort and speed and handling; familiar sights seem fresh when you see them through its little windows.

The latter half of the book belongs to Betsy—Tom’s better half. Although their relationship has consisted of three years of puppy love followed by four and a half years of wartime lies and separation, followed by another nine years of making love “without passion” and raising a family “without any real emotion except worry,” Betsy stands by her man. She launches a program of family self-improvement. She gets Tom involved in local politics. She sells the hated house and leads the family out of its dull exile and into more exclusive precincts. She volunteers for a life of full-time high-risk entrepreneurship. Most important, Betsy ceaselessly exhorts Tom to
be honest.
The story line, in consequence, gradually drifts away from “Appealingly Flawed Couple Wrestles With Fifties Conformity” toward “Guilt-Ridden Man Passively Receives Aid From Excellent Woman.” Although people as excellent as Betsy Rath exist in the world, they don’t make excellent characters. In a preface to the novel, Sloan Wilson offers such effusive an acknowledgement of his own better half, his first wife Elise (“Many of the thoughts on which this book is based are hers”), that you may begin to wonder whether the novel is not a kind of love letter from Wilson to Elise, a celebration of his marriage to her, maybe even an attempt to dispel his own doubts about his marriage, to talk himself into love. Certainly something dubious goes down in the distaff half of the book. Certainly, despite the many conflicts chez Rath, Wilson never lets his characters come near the possibility of true unhappiness.

One of the clear implications of
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
is that the harmony of society depends on the harmony of each household. The war has sickened the United States by driving a wedge between men and women; the war has sent millions of men overseas to murder and witness death and have sex with local girls while millions of American wives and fiancées waited cheerfully at home, nursed their faith in storybook endings, and shouldered the burden of being ignorant; and now only honesty and openness can repair the bond between men and women and heal an ailing society. As Tom concludes: “I may not be able to do anything about the world, but I can set my life in order.”

If you believe in love and loyalty and truth and justice, you may finish reading
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
, as I did, with tears in your eyes. But even as your heart is melting, you may feel annoyed with yourself for succumbing. Like Frank Capra in his goopier films, Wilson asks you to believe that if a man will only show true courage and honesty, he’ll be offered a perfect job within walking distance of his home, the local real-estate developer won’t cheat him, the local judge will dispense perfect justice, the inconvenient villain will be sent packing, the captain of industry will reveal his decency and civic spirit, the local electorate will vote to tax itself more heavily for the sake of schoolchildren, the former lover overseas will know her place and not make any trouble, and the martini-drenched marriage will be saved.

Whether you buy this or not, the novel does succeed in capturing the spirit of the fifties—the uneasy conformity, the flight from conflict, the political quietism, the cult of the nuclear family, the embrace of class privileges. The Raths are a lot more gray-flannel than they ever seem to realize. What distinguishes them from their “dull” neighbors is finally not their sorrows or their eccentricities but their virtues. The Raths toy with irony and resistance in the book’s early pages, but by the last pages they’re happily getting rich. The smiling Tom Rath of
chapter 41
would be an image of complacency, an object of fear and contempt, for the confused Tom Rath of
chapter 1
. Meanwhile Betsy Rath emphatically rejects the notion that the malaise of the suburbs might have systemic causes. (“People rely too much on explanations these days,” she thinks, “and not enough on courage and action.”) Tom is confused and unhappy not because war creates moral anarchy or because his employer’s business consists of “soap operas, commercials, and yammering studio audiences.” Tom’s problems are purely personal, just as Betsy’s activism is strictly local and domestic. The deeper existential questions that are stirred up by four years of war (or by four weeks in the offices of United Broadcasting, or by four days of motherhood on a dull street in Westport) are abandoned: an unavoidable casualty, perhaps, of the decade itself.

The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
is a book about the fifties. The first half can still be read for fun, the second half for a glimpse of the coming sixties. It was the fifties, after all, that gave the sixties their idealism—and their rage.

                                                   Jonathan Franzen

                                                   July 2002

B
Y THE TIME
they had lived seven years in the little house on Greentree Avenue in Westport, Connecticut, they both detested it. There were many reasons, none of them logical, but all of them compelling. For one thing, the house had a kind of evil genius for displaying proof of their weaknesses and wiping out all traces of their strengths. The ragged lawn and weed-filled garden proclaimed to passers-by and the neighbors that Thomas R. Rath and his family disliked “working around the place” and couldn’t afford to pay someone else to do it. The interior of the house was even more vengeful. In the living room there was a big dent in the plaster near the floor, with a huge crack curving up from it in the shape of a question mark. That wall was damaged in the fall of 1952, when, after struggling for months to pay up the back bills, Tom came home one night to find that Betsy had bought a cut-glass vase for forty dollars. Such an extravagant gesture was utterly unlike her, at least since the war. Betsy was a conscientious household manager, and usually when she did something Tom didn’t like, they talked the matter over with careful reasonableness. But on that particular night, Tom was tired and worried because he himself had just spent seventy dollars on a new suit he felt he needed to dress properly for his business, and at the climax of a heated argument, he picked up the vase and heaved it against the wall. The heavy glass shattered, the plaster cracked, and two of the laths behind it broke. The next morning, Tom and Betsy worked
together on their knees to patch the plaster, and they repainted the whole wall, but when the paint dried, the big dent near the floor with the crack curving up from it almost to the ceiling in the shape of a question mark was still clearly visible. The fact that the crack was in the shape of a question mark did not seem symbolic to Tom and Betsy, nor even amusing–it was just annoying. Its peculiar shape caused people to stare at it abstractedly, and once at a cocktail party one of the guests who had had a little too much to drink said, “Say, that’s funny. Did you ever notice that big question mark on your wall?”

“It’s only a crack,” Tom replied.

“But why should it be in the form of a question mark?”

“It’s just coincidence.”

“That’s funny,” the guest said.

Tom and Betsy assured each other that someday they would have the whole wall replastered, but they never did. The crack remained as a perpetual reminder of Betsy’s moment of extravagance, Tom’s moment of violence, and their inability either to fix walls properly or to pay to have them fixed. It seemed ironic to Tom that the house should preserve a souvenir of such things, while allowing evenings of pleasure and kindness to slip by without a trace.

The crack in the living room was not the only reminder of the worst. An ink stain with hand marks on the wallpaper in Janey’s room commemorated one of the few times Janey ever willfully destroyed property, and the only time Betsy ever lost her temper with her and struck her. Janey was five, and the middle one of the three Rath children. She did everything hard: she screamed when she cried, and when she was happy her small face seemed to hold for an instant all the joy in the world. Upon deciding that she wanted to play with ink, she carefully poured ink over both her hands and made neat imprints on the wallpaper, from the floor to as high as she could reach. Betsy was so angry that she slapped both her hands, and Janey, feeling she had simply been interrupted in the midst of an artistic endeavor, lay on the bed for an hour sobbing and rubbing her hands in her eyes until her whole face was covered with ink. Feeling like a murderess, Betsy tried to comfort her, but even holding and rocking her didn’t seem to help, and Betsy was shocked to find that the child was shuddering. When Tom came home that night he found mother and daughter asleep on the bed together, tightly
locked in each other’s arms. Both their faces were covered with ink. All this the wall remembered and recorded.

A thousand petty shabbinesses bore witness to the negligence of the Raths. The front door had been scratched by a dog which had been run over the year before. The hot-water faucet in the bathroom dripped. Almost all the furniture needed to be refinished, reupholstered, or cleaned. And besides that, the house was too small, ugly, and almost precisely like the houses on all sides of it.

The Raths had bought the house in 1946, shortly after Tom had got out of the army and, at the suggestion of his grandmother, become an assistant to the director of the Schanenhauser Foundation, an organization which an elderly millionaire had established to help finance scientific research and the arts. They had told each other that they probably would be in the house only one or two years before they could afford something better. It took them five years to realize that the expense of raising three children was likely to increase at least as fast as Tom’s salary at a charitable foundation. If Tom and Betsy had been entirely reasonable, this might have caused them to start painting the place like crazy, but it had the reverse effect. Without talking about it much, they both began to think of the house as a trap, and they no more enjoyed refurbishing it than a prisoner would delight in shining up the bars of his cell. Both of them were aware that their feelings about the house were not admirable.

“I don’t know what’s the matter with us,” Betsy said one night. “Your job is plenty good enough. We’ve got three nice kids, and lots of people would be glad to have a house like this. We shouldn’t be so
discontented
all the time.”

“Of course we shouldn’t!” Tom said.

Their words sounded hollow. It was curious to believe that that house with the crack in the form of a question mark on the wall and the ink stains on the wallpaper was probably the end of their personal road. It was impossible to believe. Somehow something would have to happen.

Tom thought about his house on that day early in June 1953, when a friend of his named Bill Hawthorne mentioned the possibility of a job at the United Broadcasting Corporation. Tom was having lunch with a group of acquaintances in The Golden Horseshoe, a small restaurant and bar near Rockefeller Center.

“I hear we’ve got a new spot opening up in our public-relations department,” Bill, who wrote promotion for United Broadcasting, said. “I think any of you would be crazy to take it, mind you, but if you’re interested, there it is. . . .”

Tom unfolded his long legs under the table and shifted his big body on his chair restlessly. “How much would it pay?” he asked casually.

“I don’t know,” Bill said. “Anywhere from eight to twelve thousand, I’d guess, according to how good a hold-up man you are. If you try for it, ask fifteen. I’d like to see somebody stick the bastards good.”

It was fashionable that summer to be cynical about one’s employers, and the promotion men were the most cynical of all.

“You can have it,” Cliff Otis, a young copy writer for a large advertising agency, said. “I wouldn’t want to get into a rat race like that.”

Tom glanced into his glass and said nothing. Maybe I could get ten thousand a year, he thought. If I could do that, Betsy and I might be able to buy a better house.

W
HEN
T
OM STEPPED OFF
the train at Westport that night, he stood among a crowd of men and looked toward the corner of the station where Betsy usually waited for him. She was there, and involuntarily his pace quickened at the sight of her. After almost twelve years of marriage, he was still not quite used to his good fortune at having acquired such a pretty wife. Even with her light-brown hair somewhat tousled, as it was now, she looked wonderful to him. The slightly rumpled cotton house dress she was wearing innocently displayed her slim-waisted but full figure to advantage, and although she looked a little tired, her smile was bright and youthful as she waved to him. Because he felt it so genuinely, there was always a temptation for him to say to her, “How beautiful you are!” when he
saw her after being away for the day, but he didn’t, because long ago he had learned that she was perhaps the one woman in the world who didn’t like such compliments. “Don’t keep telling me I’m pretty,” she had said to him once with real impatience in her voice. “I’ve been told that ever since I was twelve years old. If you want to compliment me, tell me I’m something I’m not. Tell me that I’m a marvelous housekeeper, or that I don’t have a selfish bone in my body.”