Walk Mile in My Briefcase
Beston, Paul
BOOKS IN REVIEW- "Walk a Mile in My Briefcase" The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit at 50. KEEP LOOKING FOR TOM RATH On the Metro North. I've been riding the train to and from Grand Central Station...
...That certainly wouldn't get him the job...
...That's exactly why I want to tell you about the Crosley Conductor...
...Wearing a suit to work came as naturally to Tom Rath as breathing, just as he had worn a uniform when he was at war...
...In an effort to make more money, Rath leaves his comfortable job at a nonprofit foundation for a public relations position reporting to the CEO of a large broadcasting corporation...
...The Crosley Conductor was painstakingly rendered after the original I've come to know and love...
...Gregory Peck played Torn Rath with suitable gravity in the 1956 film, but if Gray Flannel is ever remade, Torn will be more like Kevin Spacey's character in American Beauty, and the Greentree Avenue milieu more akin to Pleasantville...
...Almost all of Tom's colleagues have war in common...
...Americans change jobs more often, work for a wider variety of small businesses, and start their own companies in greater numbers than ever before...
...Kids get out of college and head straight to "B-school," eager to get credentialed, and then rich...
...The authentic design and audio performance come together to remind me of yesteryear but sound like today...
...Tom Rath has no such visions...
...Try the Crosley Conductor in your home for 30 days and if your not thrilled listening to your old LP's and the latest CD's that you bought this week, just send it back for a full refund of the purchase price...
...Imagine: a character who realizes that life offers no grand escapes, just perseverance, and perhaps honor...
...Rath is no George Babbitt, and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit is a business novel without villains...
...Rath was the hero of Sloan Wilson's famous novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, which marked its 50th anniversary earlier this year (a paperback edition is available from Four Walls Eight Windows publishers...
...In 1955, this manner of emotional restraint was in its waning days...
...His idea was a simple one...
...This musical masterpiece features an analog AM/FM stereo radio, 3-speed record player, compact disc player and a side mounted cassette deck...
...Iremember when the big bands were the kings of swing and Elvis and the Beatles were just starting to revolutionize the music scene...
...The drafting process is rendered with considerable comic effect, and anyone who has worked in corporate communications will recognize the terrain...
...Wilson was an unspectacular but effective writer who was genuinely stunned to find his novel, which he saw as a largely autobiographical coming of age story, become a best-seller, feature film, and generational touchstone...
...one of the novel's crises for Tom, who must keep his growing exasperation in check...
...The gospel of nonconformity has made its peace with free market capitalism...
...The business and military worlds are much more stratified today...
...The age of The Organization Man (a nonfiction counterpart to Wilson's novel) has long since passed...
...But today's high-tech audio equipment just doesn't fit with my home's classic style...
...Like his colleagues, he is a stoic...
...It is not uncommon today for job candidates to be asked in interviews whether they are "entrepreneurial," even though they are applying for a position with a company, not starting their own...
...It does sketch a place and time: The Raths live a Cheeveresque existence on Greentree Avenue in Westport, where "contentment was regarded with contempt," competition between neighbors is barely concealed, and martinis lubricate daily existence...
...The speech also represents Wearing a suit to work came as naturally to Tom Rath as breathing, just as he had worn a uniform when he was at war...
...That player was so beautiful that I look for vintage styles like that for my home today...
...THE TOM BATHS OF TODAY GO TO THE GYM instead of downing martinis, and they work in a corporate culture that has been loosened beyond what anyone in the 1950s would have imagined...
...Fully functional for today's music...
...At the end of the novel, when she asks him to talk to her about the war, he gently refuses...
...At the novel's outset, Rath is a former war hero (he had served as a paratrooper in Europe and the Pacific) who commutes to New York every day from his home in Westport, Connecticut, where he lives with his wife and three children...
...Apple Computer's Think Different ads set the standard: be original, get rewarded...
...This audio equipment has that hard-to-duplicate warmth that became so treasured several decades ago...
...The first time Tom and Hopkins have a conversation not touching on work, war is what they discuss...
...Such balanced depictions were not common among Wilson's contemporaries, and are even less so now, whether in novels or the movies...
...Nor, for that matter, did he despise those who occupied the rungs above, like Ralph Hopkins, the CEO of United Broadcasting...
...Public relations and advertising campaigns, once earnest and devoid of irony in the hands of men like Tom Rath, are now controversial as only rock music or porn used to be...
...I remember hearing Bing Crosby and Glenn Miller on my parents record player—the one that looked like furniture but sounded great...
...Paul Beston is a writer in New York...
...CRR196-01 Burnsville, Minnesota 55337 Promotional Code CRR196-01 Please mention this when you call...
...BOOKS IN REVIEW Walk a Mile in My Briefcase The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit at 50...
...Design a fully functioning radio, meticulously craft each unit with obsessive detail and precise accuracy, and of course add a measure of consideration for the wallet...
...I've been riding the train to and from Grand Central Station since August, when I left Manhattan to settle in the Hudson Valley...
...If Tom Rath were on the train, he might be a minority of one...
...If you have classic LP's or digital CD's the Crosley Conductor is ready for your music collection...
...66 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2005/JANUARY 2006 BOOKS IN REVIEW "The most significant fact about me is that I detest the United Broadcasting Corporation, with all its soap operas, commercials, and yammering studio audiences, and the only reason I'm willing to spend my life in such a ridiculous enterprise is that I want to buy a more expensive house and a better brand of gin...
...That probably wouldn't get him the job, Tom thought...
...Gray Flannel's enshrinement in the culture never left much room for less dissident readers to embrace it...
...He has just been told about the mental health project for Hopkins, and then: There was a brief silence, during which Tom heard a fire engine, deprived of its siren because of the need to reserve the sirens for air raid warnings, go chortling down the street below, uttering shrill but unsirenlike mechanical screams...
...One of the novel's lingering episodes is Tom's drafting of a major speech for Hopkins proposing a national committee on mental health, for which Tom REGORY JENNIFER FREDRIC PECK•JONES 'MARCH MARISA PAVAN LEE I COBB ANN HARDING KLENAN WYNN ijApRtL 100,;SCN DECEMBER 2005/JANUARY 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 67 BOOKS IN REVIEW goes through innumerable drafts and contradictory directives from multiple editors...
...But a generation raised on dreams of personal authenticity and emotional release would be baffled by the demands imposed by Tom Rath's post-military, gray flannel world...
...There are still some on the train who wear traditional business attire, but they are a small minority...
...Maybe a remake is out of the question...
...Tom's wife knows nothing about his war experiences...
...Where they're short is on staying and building...
...The novel's portrayal of corporate work and middle class striving was devoured like red meat by American social critics, but these readers tended to overlook the novel's defense of family life and its stark depiction of Rath's war experiences...
...Today's dominant mode of corporate dress is something called "business casual," and many companies take it a step further on Fridays, when almost anything goes...
...Here is Tom attempting to complete the sentence "The most significant fact about me is," part of an essay he is asked to write during his job interview with the United Broadcasting Corporation: "The most significant fact about me is that for four and a half years my profession was jumping out of airplanes with a gun, and now I want to go into public relations...
...The most significant fact about me is that as a young man in college, I played the mandolin incessantly...
...My love for music has grown from the Beatles and Elvis to Norah Jones and Bruce Springsteen...
...Only a generation largely unfamiliar with war could have created such a dream...
...The most significant fact about me is that I've become a cheap cynic...
...After 14 years of shuttling around the borough on subways, I ride overland into the city, the Hudson River over my shoulder most of the way...
...The Crosley Conductor Three payments of $59.95 + S&H 800-859-2092 NEXTTEN...
...The novel's title stands in the language as a synonym for soul-less conformity, and even now serves as a convenient mallet with which to bludgeon a decade into coherence...
...I, champion mandolin player, am applying to you for a position in the public-relations department...
...To order by mail, please call for details...
...GIVEN ITS SUBJECT, it was inevitable that Wilson's novel would become something of a political hobbyhorse...
...They didn't even need to be shared...
...Where did I ever get the idea that life is supposed to be anything but work...
...The gray flannel world nurtured, and depended upon, stoicism...
...Perhaps there are also vestiges of Victorian restraint in their indirect way of letting Tom know his work is not adequate...
...Tom wonders near the end...
...Then, like Ecclesiastes, he thinks, "A man's work should be his pleasure—I shouldn't expect anything more...
...He comes to understand that the obtuse code of communication employed by Hopkins and his subordinates involves a delicate balance of power...
...he asked stupidly...
...As Malcolm Gladwell wrote in the New Yorker last year, Wilson's novel derives considerable power from its portrayal of the stoic approach to personal trauma, the assumption that even terrible experiences were eventually part of the past and did not need to haunt one's every waking thought...
...The History of Crosley Radio The year was 1920--Dowel Crosley founded the 1 company that pioneered radio broadcasting and mass-market radio manufacturing...
...Kerouac's characters do plenty of going and finding...
...Tom eventually offers his own views on the speech, but only after he has learned the proper language for doing so...
...li: 68 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2005/JANUARY 2006 Discover one of the most timeless designs ever created and pay homage to a great American pastime with the Crosley Conductor...
...Call now to take advantage of this limited offer...
...There is no interlude of military service, and not a murmur of request for one, even though the country is at war and seems increasingly stretched beyond its means in blood and treasure...
...His efforts to navigate the bewildering corporate politics, hold his family life together as the company's demands on him increase, and meet certain obligations imposed by his wartime past form the core of the book's plot...
...Soon the sons of Tom Rath would come of age, and they weren't going to shut up any more than they were going to dress up...
...Hopkins (played by Fredric March in the original) will be some combination of Gordon Gekko and pedophile...
...14101 Southcross Drive W, Dept...
...Whenever the requirements of a world we can never understand become too much, we can employ our personalities, our "uniqueness," to disarm our oppressors and carry the day...
...Wilson did not share the contempt for the middle class held by so many serious American novelists...
...The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit is marred by its facile happy ending, but it offers a compelling contrast to the resolutions of flight or self-destruction that many of Rath's fictional contemporaries and descendants opt for...
...The novel is always on the list of books "about" the Fifties, but more as a sociological than literary artifact...
...I'll write copy telling people to eat more cornflakes," Tom thinks disgustedly at one point, "and smoke more and more cigarettes and buy more refrigerators and automobiles, until they explode with happiness...
...That would not be apt to get him the job...
...This reproduction features extraordinary finishing touches like brass accents, heavy-duty hardware, and of course the famous Crosley seven step, hand rubbed furniture-style finishing process...
...8005909 For fastest service, call toll-free 24 hours a day -8 -2 2 For information on all our products: www.NextTen.com MlasterCant 11111111^11111 14911...
...Upon successfully building a working set for only $35 Crosley was quick to spot the mass market potential...
...Along with casual dress and manners have come flatter organizations and promises of increased "access...
...Tom Rath is remembered as a dutiful white-collar slave who plods ahead and follows the rules, but readers today will be surprised to discover that he also anticipates the ironic distance with which many Americans would eventually come to regard their professional lives...
...A workaholic whose success has cost him dearly in his personal life, Hopkins is eager to make something of his remaining years besides financial profit...
...Hollywood hates the 1950s like few other things...
...A committee on mental health...
...I've shared berths with over-scented women (usually in the mornings), wireless disturbers of the peace (usually in the evenings), and briefcase-toting men in non-corporate dress (all the time...
...Dismayed with the $130 price tag for the radio receiver he promised to buy for his son's birthday, Crosley decided to make his own...
...As Wilson remarked with some pride several decades later, Tom Rath does not flee from his responsibilities...
...We have to go somewhere, find something," one character remarks in Jack Kerouac's On the Road, which may as well be the South Pole to Gray Flannel's North among 1950s novels...
...One reason these changes have occurred so imperceptibly and yet with the force of a flood is that the work force, unlike in Tom Rath's day, is made up of men and women who have mostly avoided military service...
...If he didn't cry out in protest about that, he isn't going to act up in the corridors of United Broadcasting...
...Like his colleagues, he has seen men die in war, and has acquired a perverse tolerance for the absurdities of a universe that once dictated that he kill strangers by design and comrades by accident...
...A half-century's propaganda has taught us to regard our own age as infinitely complex, laden with choices that our predecessors didn't need to trouble themselves with...
...Early in the novel, Wilson employs a near-perfect metaphor for the kind of emotional repression the war engenders in men like Rath...
...All of this seems impossibly repressed to contemporary readers raised on myths of the corporate drone who tells off all the stuffy hacks in one great burst of emotion...
...One of the most timeless designs ever created...
Vol. 38 • December 2005 • No. 10
