Business sense and sensibility, 1950s style

It’s hard stifling a hippo yawn whenever the fiction of the 1950s is discussed. Inevitably, the same novels are laid upon the altar. “Invisible Man.” “The Adventures of Augie March.” “The Catcher in the Rye.” “From Here to Eternity.” But some of the defining novels of the 1950s loiter on the pop outskirts of literary permanence, addictive middlebrow potboilers that may never be inducted into the Modern Library and yet continue to beckon. I’m thinking of such classic paperback-rack sensations as Grace Metalious’ “Peyton Place,” Meyer Levin’s “Compulsion” and the novel with the most ghostly grip of them all, Sloan Wilson’s “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.”

A blockbuster upon publication in 1955 (“Over 2 million copies sold” boasts the 1966 paperback edition), the novel captured and bottled a floating anxiety, a sour malaise, that belied the peppy froth of Patti Page records and TV jingles. Like “The Organization Man” and “The Lonely Crowd,” its title became an instant catch phrase, an ID badge for a queasy decade. Over time, the tag peeled off and floated around loose, mixed up in some readers’ minds with the title of Mary McCarthy’s post-coital story “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt.” The reissue of “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” by Four Walls Eight Windows pastes the label back on the original contents. This is one 1950s revival that doesn’t tickle with nostalgia. The writing is vigorous, unvarnished, tartly observant; its overhanging disquietude isn’t dated -- if anything, it’s deepened. To ensure relevance, this edition features a new and somewhat nasal introduction by bestselling novelist Jonathan Franzen, author of “The Corrections.”

Like Rod Serling’s “The Twilight Zone,” another strange marriage of humanistic ideals and atomic dread, “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” has a plain, humdrum surface that stretches like a flimsy plank over the abyss. One slip could result in starless freefall. Its hero even has his own existential mantra, warding off fear before each major step into the unknown by repeating to himself, “It doesn’t really matter. Here goes nothing ....”

Tom Rath, the novel’s protagonist, resides with his wife and kids in a suburban home in Westport, Conn., that no one would ever mistake for the tidy nest in “Father Knows Best.” It’s a hunched eyesore beset with weeds, mildew and “a thousand petty shabbinesses,” a monument to futility. A crack in the plaster in the shape of a question mark haunts the living room as if the house itself were crying, “What went wrong? Why am I falling apart?”

Puttering sideways in a job at a charitable foundation, Rath is unable to maintain the homestead, much less renovate, an inadequacy flaunted in his face at every neighborhood cocktail party. “Budgets were frankly discussed, and the public celebration of increases in salary was common. The biggest parties of all were moving-out parties, given by those who were finally able to buy a bigger house” -- i.e., leave the old dump behind. Those who don’t aspire to attain a larger pile of lumber elsewhere are eyed as losers: “On Greentree Avenue, contentment was an object of contempt.”

Rath chances into a nebulous job in the PR department of a broadcasting company that promises a bigger paycheck and possible advancement. Hired to help package and promote a hazily conceived public awareness campaign for mental health -- the pet project of the company’s president, Ralph Hopkins -- he learns fast that proximity to the boss doesn’t spare him from being browbeaten by his immediate higher-ups. A paratrooper during World War II (the flashback battle scenes have the erratic pulse, sudden reversals and ground-hugging confusion of Stephen Crane’s “The Red Badge of Courage”), Rath soon grasps that corporate bureaucracy has become a postwar extension of military hierarchy and regimentation and that his war record doesn’t compensate for lack of business experience. His virgin status and vague role reduce him to a raw recruit in a civilian army in which executives are the officer corps, the gray flannel suit is “the uniform of the day” and the CEO is more than a general, he’s a supreme thinker perched at the aerie of the corporate pyramid.

The stupendous vistas that greet Rath from the windows of Hopkins’ penthouse office create the illusion of the floor as a floating stage, “a platform suspended in mid-air.” Popping out from behind his vast desk, Hopkins strikes the reader at first as a walking anticlimax and Babbitty cliche, a windup toy of can-do energy and vacuous chitchat. It’s a charade that over the course of the novel poignantly unravels. Like Rath (who, having survived the war, can’t fathom why he’s still scared -- “I thought peace was supposed to be peaceful”), Hopkins is racked by unspecified wants and hungers, a hollow sense of something missing, something climactic.

A novel with a liberal soul and a roiled disposition, “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” is also a saddening social document, a glimpse into how far America’s civic bonds and business ethics have fallen from honor and integrity over almost a half-century. It’s a piercing reminder of what the Fortune 500 world was like before free-market fundamentalists got a rigid dose of Ayn Rand and took to the airwaves and think tanks to sneer at social responsibility as a sentimental weakness, a sissy concern.

Here, the pursuit of wealth is still a test of character. “Now there are two kinds of rich -- foolish rich and responsible rich,” Hopkins lectures his spoiled party-girl daughter, about to elope with a wilted playboy. He explains that a million dollars isn’t an abstract sum but the life earnings of six average workers: “I’m saying that when you hold a million dollars in your hand, you are in a very real sense holding the entire working lives of six men, and you better be damn careful what you do with it!” A lesson the foolish, irresponsible CEOs of Enron, Tyco, WorldCom, Global Crossing and countless others either forgot or never learned, clapping on a feedbag filled with loans and stock options to finance baronial mansions and art collections, leaving the workers whose well-being they squandered to pick through the scraps of their 401(k)s.

Those who inherit wealth also have a duty not to hog it, the novel says. Summoned to the bedside of his widowed grandmother, a selfish old crow who could give Hopkins’ debutante daughter lessons on how to fritter away a fortune, Rath releases a poison cloud inside his head: “She’s dying, he thought. She’s lived ninety-three years, and it’s all been a free ride. She’s never cooked a meal, or made a bed, or washed a diaper, or done a damn thing for herself or anybody else. She’s spent at least three million dollars, and her only comment has been that money is boring. She’s had a free ride for ninety-three years, and I’m damned if I’ll cry about the end of it.”

Money is the monkey on everybody’s back in “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.” Few novels go as deep under the skin to take a nerve reading of the escalating costs of the American Dream, the price of personal sacrifice required to thrive in a system that rewards the fanatically single-minded -- the whippet-thin workaholics who brag about needing only four hours of sleep a night. When Rath finally opts out of the rat race, not wanting to end up like Hopkins, whose business empire houses the dud shell of his desolate personal life, it isn’t an unimpeachable decision. The novel doesn’t take easy sides, recognizing that irreconcilable outlooks may both be right.

Tom Rath is right to choose family and community over high-salaried servitude, but Hopkins has opposing truth on his side when he wheels on Rath and uncharacteristically blusters, “Somebody has to do the big jobs! This world was built by men like me! To really do a job, you have to live it, body and soul! You people who just give half your mind to your work are riding on our backs!” (“I know it,” Rath replies.) Although the novel ends on a church-bell note of affirmation, its darker chords linger, subverting the official optimism of the Eisenhower era, much as did those films noirs in which happy endings were tacked on as fig leaves.

In an age of casual Fridays, the gray flannel suit is no longer the commuter’s prison uniform, and three-martini lunches are nearly extinct. Yet our enthrallment with money, real estate, expensive toys and social prestige is more slavish than it was in those station wagon days. If the post-bubble economy continues to slide, the question mark on Tom Rath’s crumbling wall may make a comeback -- this time as an omen.