The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

by Sloan Wilson

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

Universally acclaimed when first published in 1955, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit captured the mood of a generation. It was a national bestseller that was made into an award-winning film, it was translated into twenty-six languages, and its title has become a permanent part of our cultural vocabulary. Today, it is more relevant than ever.



Here is the story of Tom and Betsy Rath, a young couple with everything going for them: three healthy children, a nice home, a steady income. They have every reason to be happy, but for some reason they are not. Like so many young men of the day, Tom finds himself caught up in the corporate rat race-what he encounters there propels him on a voyage of self-discovery that will turn his world inside out. At once a searing indictment of corporate culture, a story of a young man confronting his past and future with honesty, and a testament to the enduring power of family, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit is a deeply rewarding novel about the importance of taking responsibility for one's own life.

Release date: March 17, 2009

Publisher: Hachette Books

Print pages: 288

Sample

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 P.R. 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 killing 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 any more.” 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 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

BY 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.

WHEN TOM 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.”

Now he hurried toward her. “Hi!” he said. “It’s good to get home. How did things go with you today?”

“Not so well,” she replied ruefully. “Brace yourself.”

“Why, what happened?” he said, and kissed her lightly.

“Barbara’s got the chicken pox, and the washing machine broke down.”

“Chicken pox!” Tom said. “Do they get very sick with that?”

“No, but according to Dr. Spöck, it’s messy. The other two will probably get it. Poor Barbara feels awful. And I think we’re going to have to buy a new washing machine.”

They climbed into their old Ford. On the way home they stopped at a drugstore, and Tom bought Barbara a toy lamb. Barbara was six and wanted nothing but toy lambs. When they got to Greentree Avenue, the little house looked more monotonous than ever, and Tom saw that the front lawn needed cutting. Janey, followed by his son, Pete, ran to meet him as he opened the front door. “Barbara’s got the chicken pox, and we’re all going to get it!” she said delightedly. “Mother says so!”

Lucy Hitchcock, who lived next door and who had been staying with the children while Betsy drove to the station, was sitting in the living room watching a puppet show on television. She got up to go, and while Tom was thanking her, Janey saw the parcel he was holding in his hand. “What’s that?” she demanded.

“A present for Barbara because she’s sick.”

“Did you bring anything for me?”

“No. You’re not sick yet.”

“That’s not fair!” Janey said, and began to howl. Without making any inquiries, Pete began to howl too.

“Barbara’s sick!” Tom said.

“You always bring her presents and you never bring me any,” Janey retorted.

“That’s not true,” Tom said.

“No television!” Betsy said. “If you children don’t stop this nonsense immediately, no television for a week.”

“Not fair!” Janey said.

“This is your last chance!” Betsy said. “Be quiet.”

“. . . fair,” Janey murmured.

“All right, that does it,” Betsy said. “No television for a week!”

Redoubled howls came from Janey and Pete, until Betsy relented on condition that they both be quiet for the rest of the evening. Mournfully the children followed Tom upstairs. He found Barbara in bed, with her small face already a mass of sores. “Did you bring me a present?” she asked eagerly.

He gave her the parcel. “A lamb!” she said delightedly when she unwrapped it. “Another lamb!”

“I didn’t want another lamb anyway,” Janey said. “Lambs are silly.”

“They’re not silly!”

“Quiet! Not another word!” Betsy said, coming into the room with a glass of water and medicine for Barbara.

Tom went downstairs and mixed a Martini for Betsy and himself. When Betsy came down, they sat in the kitchen, sipping their drinks gratefully while the children played in the living room and watched television. The linoleum on the kitchen floor was beginning to wrinkle. Originally it had been what the builder described as a “bright, basket-weave pattern,” but now it was scuffed, and by the sink it was worn through to the wood underneath. “We ought to get some new linoleum,” Betsy said. “We could lay it ourselves.”

“I heard about a new job today,” Tom said. “Public relations. United Broadcasting Corporation.”

“How much does it pay?”

“Probably a good deal more than I’m getting now.”

There was an instant of silence before she said, “Are you going to try for it?”

“I might.”

Betsy finished her drink and poured herself another. “I’ve never thought of you as a public-relations man,” she said soberly. “Would you like it?”

“I’d like the money.”

Betsy sighed. “It would be wonderful to get out of this house,” she said.

THE NEXT MORNING, Tom put on his best suit, a freshly cleaned and pressed gray flannel. On his way to work he stopped in Grand Central Station to buy a clean white handkerchief and to have his shoes shined. During his luncheon hour he set out to visit the United Broadcasting Corporation. As he walked across Rockefeller Plaza, he thought wryly of the days when he and Betsy had assured each other that money didn’t matter. They had told each other that when they were married, before the war, and during the war they had repeated it in long letters. “The important thing is to find a kind of work you really like, and something that is useful,” Betsy had written him. “The money doesn’t matter.”

The hell with that, he thought. The real trouble is that up to now we’ve been kidding ourselves. We might as well admit that what we want is a big house and a new car and trips to Florida in the winter, and plenty of life insurance. When you come right down to it, a man with three children has no damn right to say that money doesn’t matter.

There were eighteen elevators in the lobby of the United Broadcasting building. They were all brass colored and looked as though they were made of money. The receptionist in the personnel office was a breathtakingly beautiful girl with money-colored hair–a sort of copper gold. “Yes?” she said.

“I want to apply for a position in the public-relations department.”

“If you will sit down in the reception room, I’ll arrange an interview for you,” she said.

The company had a policy of giving all job applicants an interview. Every year about twenty thousand people, most of them wildly unqualified, applied for jobs there, and it was considered poor public relations to turn them away too abruptly. Beyond the receptionist’s desk was a huge waiting room. A rich wine-red carpet was on the floor, and there were dozens of heavy leather armchairs filled with people nervously smoking cigarettes. On the walls were enormous colored photographs of the company’s leading radio and television stars. They were all youthful, handsome, and unutterably rich-appearing as they smiled down benignly on the job applicants. Tom picked a chair directly beneath a picture of a big-bosomed blonde. He had to wait only about twenty minutes before the receptionist told him that a Mr. Everett would see him. Mr. Everett’s office was a cubicle with walls of opaque glass brick, only about three times as big as a priest’s confessional. Everett himself was a man about Tom’s age and was also dressed in a gray flannel suit. The uniform of the day, Tom thought. Somebody must have put out an order.

“I understand that you are interested in a position in the public-relations department,” Everett said.

“I just want to explore the situation,” Tom replied. “I already have a good position with the Schanenhauser Foundation, but I’m considering a change.”

It took Everett only about a minute to size Tom up as a “possibility.” He gave him a long printed form to fill out and told him he’d hear from the United Broadcasting Corporation in a few days. Tom spent almost an hour filling out all the pages of the form, which, among other things, required a list of the childhood diseases he had had and the names of countries he had visited. When he had finished, he gave it to the girl with the hair of copper gold and rang for one of the golden elevators to take him down.

Five days later Tom got a letter from Everett saying an interview had been arranged for him with Mr. Gordon Walker in Room 3672 the following Monday at 11:00 A.M. In the letter Walker was given no title. Tom didn’t know whether he were going to have another routine interview, or whether he were actually being considered for a position. He wondered whether he should tell Dick Haver, the director of the Schanenhauser Foundation, that he was looking for another job. The danger of not telling him was that the broadcasting company might call him for references any time, and Dick wouldn’t be pleased to find that Tom was applying for another job behind his back. It was important to keep Dick’s good will, because the broadcasting company’s decision might depend on the recommendation Dick gave him. In any one of a thousand ways, Dick could damn him, without Tom’s ever learning about it. All Dick would have to do when the broadcasting company telephoned him would be to say, “Tom Rath? Well, I don’t know. I don’t think I’d want to go on record one way or the other on Mr. Rath. He’s a nice person, you understand, an awfully nice person. I’d be perfectly willing to say that!”

On the other hand, it would be embarrassing to tell Dick he was seeking another job and then be unable to find one. Tom decided to delay seeing Dick until after he had had his next interview.

Walker’s outer office was impressive. As soon as Tom saw it, he knew he was being seriously considered for a job, and maybe a pretty good one. Walker had two secretaries, one chosen for looks, apparently, and one for utility. A pale-yellow carpet lay on the floor, and there was a yellow leather armchair for callers. Walker himself was closeted in an inner office which was separated from the rest of the room by a partition of opaque glass brick.

The utilitarian secretary told Tom to wait. It was extremely quiet. Neither of the two girls was typing, and although each had two telephones on her desk and an interoffice communication box, there was no ringing or buzzing. Both the secretaries sat reading typewritten sheets in black notebooks. After Tom had waited about half an hour, the pretty secretary, with no audible or visible cue, suddenly looked up brightly and said, “Mr. Walker will see you now. Just open the door and go in.”

Tom opened the door and saw a fat pale man sitting in a high-backed upholstered chair behind a kidney-shaped desk with nothing on it but a blotter and pen. He was in his shirt sleeves, and he weighed about two hundred and fifty pounds. His face was as white as a marshmallow. He didn’t stand up when Tom came in, but he smiled. It was a surprisingly warm, spontaneous smile, as though he had unexpectedly recognized an old friend. “Thomas Rath?” he said. “Sit down! Make yourself comfortable! Take off your coat!”

Tom thanked him and, although it wasn’t particularly warm, took oft his coat. There wasn’t anyplace to put it, so, sitting down in the comfortable chair in front of Walker’s desk, he laid the coat awkwardly across his lap.

“I’ve read the application forms you filled out, and it seems to me you might be qualified for a new position we may have opening up here,” Walker said. “There are just a few questions I want to ask you.” He was still smiling. Suddenly he touched a button on the arm of his chair and the back of the chair dropped, allowing him to recline, as though he were in an airplane seat. Tom could see only his f