Farther Away: Essays (29 page)

And here is the trouble with a capsule summary of a Munro story. The trouble is I want to tell you what happens next. Which is that Grant goes to see the boyfriend's wife to ask if she might take the boyfriend back to visit Fiona at the facility. And that it's here that you realize that what you thought the story was about—all the pregnant stuff about Alzheimer's and infidelity and late-blooming love—was actually just the setup: that the story's great scene is between Grant and the boyfriend's wife. And that the wife, in this scene, refuses to let her husband see Fiona. That her reasons are ostensibly practical but subterraneanly moralistic and spiteful.

And here my attempt at capsule summary breaks down altogether, because I can't begin to suggest the greatness of the scene if you don't have a particular, vivid sense of the two characters and how they speak and think. The wife, Marian, is narrower-minded than Grant. She has a perfect, spotless suburban house that she won't be able to afford if her husband returns to the facility. This house, not romance, is what matters to her. She hasn't had the same advantages, either economic or emotional, that Grant has had, and her obvious lack of privilege occasions a passage of classic Munrovian introspection as Grant drives back to his own house.

[Their conversation had] reminded him of conversations he'd had with people in his own family. His uncles, his relatives, probably even his mother, had thought the way Marian thought. They had believed that when other people did not think that way it was because they were kidding themselves—they had got too airy-fairy, or stupid, on account of their easy and protected lives or their education. They had lost touch with reality. Educated people, literary people, some rich people like Grant's socialist in-laws had lost touch with reality. Due to an unmerited good fortune or an innate silliness. . . .

What a jerk, she would be thinking now.

Being up against a person like that made him feel hopeless, exasperated, finally almost desolate. Why? Because he couldn't be sure of holding on to himself against that person? Because he was afraid that in the end they'd be right?

I end this quotation unwillingly. I want to keep quoting, and not just little bits but whole passages, because it turns out that what my capsule summary requires, at a minimum, in order to do justice to the story—the “things within things,” the interplay of class and morality, of desire and fidelity, of character and fate—is exactly what Munro herself has already written on the page. The only adequate summary of the text is the text itself.

Which leaves me with the simple instruction that I began with: Read Munro! Read Munro!

Except that I must tell you—cannot not tell you, now that I've started—that when Grant arrives home after his unsuccessful appeal to Marian, there's a message from Marian on his answering machine, inviting him to a dance at the Legion hall.

Also: that Grant has already been checking out Marian's breasts and her skin and likening her, in his imagination, to a less than satisfying litchi: “The flesh with its oddly artificial allure, its chemical taste and perfume, shallow over the extensive seed, the stone.”

Also: that, some hours later, while Grant is still reassessing Marian's attractions, his telephone rings again and his machine picks up: “Grant. This is Marian. I was down in the basement putting the wash in the dryer and I heard the phone and when I got upstairs whoever it was had hung up. So I just thought I ought to say I was here. If it was you and if you are even home.”

And this still isn't the ending. The story is forty-nine pages long—the size of a whole life, in Munro's hands—and another turn is coming. But look how many “things within things” the author already has uncovered: Grant the loving husband, Grant the cheater, Grant the husband so loyal that he's willing, in effect, to pimp for his wife, Grant the despiser of proper housewives, Grant the self-doubter who grants that proper housewives may be right to despise him. It's Marian's second phone call, however, that provides the true measure of Munro's writerly character. To imagine this call, you can't be too enraged with Marian's moral strictures. Nor can you be too ashamed of Grant's laxity. You have to forgive everybody and damn no one. Otherwise you'll overlook the low probabilities, the odd chances, that crack a life wide open: the possibility, for example, that Marian in her loneliness might be attracted to a silly liberal man.

And this is just one story. There are stories in
Runaway
that are even better than this one—bolder, bloodier, deeper, broader—and that I'll be happy to synopsize as soon as Munro's next book is published.

Or, but, wait, one tiny glimpse into
Runaway
: What if the person offended by Grant's liberality—by his godlessness, his self-indulgence, his vanity, his silliness—weren't some unhappy stranger but Grant's own child? A child whose judgment feels like the judgment of a whole culture, a whole country, that has lately taken to embracing absolutes?

What if the great gift you've given your child is personal freedom, and what if the child, when she turns twenty-one, uses this gift to turn around and say to you: your freedom makes me sick, and so do you?

8. Hatred is entertaining.

The great insight of media-age extremists. How else to explain the election of so many repellent zealots, the disintegration of political civility, the ascendancy of Fox News? First the fundamentalist bin Laden gives George Bush an enormous gift of hatred, then Bush compounds that hatred through his own fanaticism, and now one half of the country believes that Bush is crusading against the Evil One while the other half (and most of the world) believes that Bush
is
the Evil One. There's hardly anybody who doesn't hate somebody now, and nobody at all whom somebody doesn't hate. Whenever I think about politics, my pulse rate jumps as if I'm reading the last chapter of an airport thriller, as if I'm watching Game Seven of a Sox-Yankees series. It's like entertainment-as-nightmare-as-everyday-life.

Can a better kind of fiction save the world? There's always some tiny hope (strange things do happen), but the answer is almost certainly no, it can't. There is some reasonable chance, however, that it could save your soul. If you're unhappy about the hatred that's been unleashed in your heart, you might try imagining what it's like to be the person who hates you; you might consider the possibility that you are, in fact, the Evil One yourself; and, if this is difficult to imagine, then you might try spending a few evenings with the most dubious of Canadians. Who, at the end of her classic story “The Beggar Maid,” in which the heroine, Rose, catches sight of her ex-husband in an airport concourse, and the ex-husband makes a childish, hideous face at her, and Rose wonders

How could anybody hate Rose so much, at the very moment when she was ready to come forward with her good will, her smiling confession of exhaustion, her air of diffident faith in civilized overtures?

is speaking to you and to me right here, right now.

Once there was a mansion in which there lived five brothers. The four oldest brothers, who had played and fought and survived the diseases of childhood together, lived comfortably in the beautifully furnished older wing of the mansion.

The fifth brother, Joseph, was much younger. By the time he came of age, there were no comfortable rooms left for him, and so he was given the raw rooms in the mansion's newer wing. Joseph was a strange, solitary, somewhat frightening child, and although his brothers loved him, they were relieved to have him out of their hair.

Joseph wished to be a gentleman like his brothers, but life was difficult in the raw wing of the mansion. The new wing was a place of Protestant industry, and Joseph went to work.

In time, the old wing grew crowded—too many children, too many mistresses. There came bitter internecine feuds, disastrous debts, terrible drunken brawls. For a while, it appeared that the mansion might fall into ruin and be lost altogether.

But Joseph had been working hard, and his businesses were thriving. The strange little brother turned out to be the person who could rescue the family. Among themselves, the older brothers made fun of Joseph's puritanism and the gaudy style in which he'd decorated the new wing. They were irritated that the little kid was acting like the big brother now. But there was no denying that they'd made a mess of their lives, and they were grateful for Joseph's sacrifices on their behalf.

Joseph, for his part, disapproved of his brothers' lax morals—the mistresses, the too-liberal spending. But he was loyal to his family, and he tried to show his brothers the respect that older relations deserve.

His businesses were doing so well, moreover, that he himself began to relax. He and his new girlfriend, a great beauty from Arkansas, threw lavish parties to which the brothers were usually thoughtful enough to bring a few bottles of wine. Some of them grumbled that the parties were in bad taste, and some of them worried that Joseph was still secretly a prude, but they accepted him as the head of their family, and they adored his new girlfriend.

After eight years of partying, the time came for Joseph to settle down. He assumed that he would marry his good, sensible friend Albertine; but Albertine, alas, was not remotely sexy. One night, in pursuit of a last bit of fun, Joseph flirted with Georgina, a dirty girl from an ambitious family down the street; they ended up fooling around in the backseat of her SUV.

The next morning, Georgina's parents came to the mansion with five lawyers and said that Joseph had to marry her.

“But I don't even like her!” he protested. “She's spoiled and stupid and mean.”

Georgina's parents, who had long had designs on the mansion, insisted that marrying her was the only honorable thing to do. And Joseph, who wished to be a gentleman like his brothers, and who felt remorseful about his eight-year party, married her.

How unhappy the mansion was then! Although Georgina was a dirty girl herself, she voiced horror at the loose morals of her brothers-in-law, and she went out of her way to be rude to them. She invited her parents and her parents' lawyers to move in with her. Chiding Joseph for his own liberal spending, she took his money away from him and gave it to her parents.

It looked as if the marriage would be short and unhappy. But then, one night, a bully from a poor neighborhood threw a rock through the window of Joseph's study, scaring Joseph badly. When he went to his brothers, he found that he'd forfeited their sympathy by marrying Georgina. They said they were sorry about the rock, but a broken window was nothing compared with what they'd suffered, over the years, in the old wing of the mansion.

Although Georgina was too stupid and spoiled to think for herself, her parents were shrewd opportunists. They hoped to use Joseph's momentary fright to gain control of the entire mansion. They went to Joseph and said: “This is the logic of war. You're the head of the family, Georgina is your wife now, and only her parents can defend this house. You must learn to hate your useless brothers and trust us.”

The brothers were enraged when they heard this. They went to Joseph and said: “This is the logic of peace. Your wife is a bitch and a whore. As long as she's in this house, you're no brother of ours.”

And the rich little brother clutched his head and wept.

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.