Farther Away : Essays

THE MAN IN THE GRAY FLANNEL SUIT

One of the classic settings in fiction, a little world as reassuring as imperial St. Petersburg or Victorian London, is suburban Connecticut in the 1950s. If you close your eyes, you can picture autumn leaves drifting down on quiet streets, you can see commuters in fedoras streaming off the platforms of the New Haven Line, you can hear the tinkle of the evening’s first pitcher of martinis; and hear the ugly fights then, after midnight; and smell the desperate or despairing sex.

Both the comforts and the frustrations of this little world can be found in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. The novel, Sloan Wilson’s first, was published in 1955. It sold extremely well and was quickly made into a movie starring Gregory Peck, but in the decades since then it has fallen out of print. Nowadays the book is remembered mainly for its title, which, along with The Lonely Crowd and The Organization Man, became a watchword of fifties conformity.

Maybe you enjoy condemning that conformity, or maybe you harbor a secret nostalgia for it; either way, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit will provide you with a pure fifties fix. The main characters, Tom and Betsy Rath, are an attractive WASP couple who divide their labor traditionally, Betsy staying home with three kids, Tom commuting to a fantastically bland job in Manhattan. The Raths conform, but not happily. Betsy rails against the dullness of their street; she dreams of escaping from her striving neighbors (who are, themselves, discontented); she’s anything but Supermom. When one of her daughters defaces a wall with a bottle of ink, Betsy first slaps her and then goes to bed with her; in the evening Tom finds them “tightly locked in each other’s arms,” their faces covered with ink.

Like Betsy, Tom is sympathetic in proportion to his failings. “The man in a gray flannel suit” is an object of fear and contempt for him; and yet, because his life of breadwinning and suburban domesticity feels so radically disconnected from his life as a paratrooper in the Second World War, he consciously seeks refuge in gray flannel. Applying for a lucrative new PR job at the United Broadcasting Corporation, he learns that the company’s president, Hopkins, plans to form a national committee on mental health. Is Tom interested in mental health?

“I certainly am!” Tom said heartily. “I’ve always been interested in mental health!” This sounded a little foolish, but he could think of nothing to rectify it.

Conformity is the drug with which Tom hopes to self-medicate for his own mental-health issues. Although he’s honest by nature, he tries hard to be a cynic. “My whole interest in life is working for mental health,” he jokes to Betsy one evening. “I care nothing for myself. I’m a dedicated human being.” When Betsy chides him for his cynicism and tells him not to work for Hopkins if he doesn’t like him, Tom replies: “I love him. I adore him. My heart is his.”

At the moral and emotional core of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit are Tom’s four-plus years of military service. Whether he was murdering enemy soldiers or falling in love with an orphaned Italian teenager, Tom Rath as a soldier felt intensely alive in the present. His war memories now form a painful contrast to a “tense and frantic” peacetime life in which, as Betsy laments, “nothing seems to be much fun anymore.” Maybe Tom is unhappily traumatized by combat, or maybe, to the contrary, he’s pining for the sense of excitement and manly engagement that he lost after the war. In either case, he’s liable to Betsy’s accusation: “Since you’ve gotten back,” she says, “you haven’t really wanted much. You’ve worked hard, but at heart you’ve never been really trying.”

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 Wrestle 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 an effusive acknowledgment 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 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.