From Babbitt to Rabbit

In “Hearing Secret Harmonies,” the closing volume of Anthony Powell’s elegiac 12-novel sequence, “A Dance to the Music of Time,” the character Hugh Moreland expresses one of his favorite themes, “the artist as businessman:”

“I never pay my insurance policy,” Moreland says, “without envisaging the documents going through the hands of Aubrey Beardsley and Kafka, before being laid on the desk of Wallace Stevens.”

Powell is as English a novelist as it is possible to be, and his faint incredulity--that an artist of any kind could be a businessman of any sort--is the point of the joke here. But what about one of the greatest arts of all, that of devising plots and inventing characters? How many men of business come out of that process? And does American literature--the literature of a business civilization--succeed in defying the prejudice of much traditional writing against the man of business? Or does it merely replicate it?

America is founded upon an idea, or perhaps a set of ideas (“the pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration, “property” in the Constitution), and the founding story of the country involves a play on words about the relationship between the Protestant ethic and the Mayflower colonists: that they came to do good and ended up doing well. The ethic of Protestantism, according to Max Weber, was the spirit of capitalism. Yet our mass culture deals paradoxically with this salient fact. In the popular media, owned and controlled by men of business, certain tycoons and entrepreneurs are presented to us as folk heroes. The garage in which Messrs. Hewlett and Packard began their operations is the equivalent of the log cabin in which Abe Lincoln began his, because the more this narrative can feature an element of Horatio Alger, or of Samuel Smiles’ self-help precept, the better we like it. Yet go to the cinema and watch a big-studio thriller, paid for by these same men of business: As soon as the leading character (one might almost say the autonomous individual) shades his eyes and looks up at the skyscraper and the camera tracks to the top of the sheer wall of glass and chrome, you know that there is villainy at the top of this corporate edifice complex. Why should capitalists pay to have themselves portrayed as predators and manipulators? Or, to put the same question in another way, why do they do so?

This is a populist culture, in which even news programs claim to be on your side. If Disney or DreamWorks pumped out feature films extolling the sturdy virtues of the Gordon Geckos, they would run the risk of seeming self-interested, even propagandistic. They would also run the risk of calling attention to their possible motives. More better, as Sam Goldwyn might have said, to be on the side of the little guy against City Hall and the big bananas. It’s worked ever since Chaplin did it silently. And Ronald Reagan, the most Hollywood of our politicians--as well as the most General Electric--showed how easily the act can be made to work. Off-screen and on, he was the folksy average guy with no visible corporate sponsorship. Thus accoutered, he could even run against Washington while sitting in a mansion at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Jimmy Stewart ran a straight-up savings and loan in “It’s a Wonderful Life.” In real life, Reagan let some crummy S & Ls do their worst.

Another possible aspect has to do with economies of scale. Once the businessman ceases to be a lone individual striver, he joins the ranks of the fat cats, of those bankers like M. d’Alembert in Flaubert’s “Education Sentimentale” who, if you remember, had grown so corrupt that he would willingly have paid for the pleasure of selling himself. (In somewhat the same way, no American politician ever claims to be a wised-up big-city boy or an experienced and sophisticated suburbanite or to have been raised in any of the conditions in which most real Americans actually live. It’s small-town values all the way, with almost uniformly calamitous consequences in that smallest of small towns, Washington, D.C.)

In any consideration of the economic actor in American literature, then, I propose a strong subliminal connection with the small-town setting and the rags-to-riches mythology. I exempt those small towns that are actually in Sicily and whose denizens eventually generate large commercial fortunes in the United States, though these do form an important quasi-pulp subdivision of the genre. The ideal protagonist is therefore the man--it’s usually a man--who is out on the road with “a smile and a shoeshine,” who aspires by pluck and thrift and enterprise to better himself and others, who meets with triumph and tragedy along the way: in a word, the salesman. The quote comes from Arthur Miller’s imperishable depiction of Willy Loman, but Miller had a long tradition upon which to draw. For the sheer scope and scale of the thing, here is Thomas Wolfe in “The Company”:

“The higher purposes of this industrial empire, which the employees almost never referred to by name, as who should speak of the deity with coarse directness, but always with a just perceptible lowering and huskiness of the voice as ‘the Company’--these higher purposes were also beautifully simple. They were summed up in the famous utterance of the Great Man himself, Mr. Paul S. Appleton III, who invariably repeated it every year as a peroration to his hourlong address before the assembled members of the sales organization at their national convention. Standing before them at the close of each year’s session, he would sweep his arm in a gesture of magnificent command toward an enormous map of the United States of America that covered the whole wall behind him and say:

‘There’s your market! Go out and sell them!’

“What could be simpler and more beautiful than this? What could more eloquently indicate that mighty sweep of the imagination which has been celebrated in the annals of modern business under the name of ‘vision’?”

Wolfe’s hyperbole is evidently satirical, and it has that in common with many of the excerpts chosen by Mike Tronnes in this excellent anthology. There is something vaguely absurd and pretentious about the whole “business” of company philosophy. The fortune-cookie maxims of self-made entrepreneurs--think of the philistinism of Henry Ford--are often wince-making. A general word for this Rotarian style is “Babbittry,” which is testimony in itself to the influence of one particular literary effort by Sinclair Lewis. The tendency of Babbitts is to truckle to those above them and condescend to those below and to believe in middlebrow nostrums. Fear is a constant spur, as Wolfe also shows:

“So much for the rewards of Mr. Appleton’s Heaven. But what would Heaven be if there were no Hell? So Mr. Appleton was forced by the logic of the situation to invent a Hell, too. Once a man’s quota was fixed at any given point, the Company never reduced it. . . . Mr. Paul S. Appleton III was a theologian who, like Calvin, knew how to combine free will and predestination.”

That’s a neat evocation of the Protestant ethic, which, by an irony of sorts, translates in the real world to a version of Darwinism. It’s difficult to think of any salesman in American fiction who is not haunted by the terror of the scrapheap and the concomitant negation of his own illusions about being a self-willed success.

An exception might perhaps be made for the Southern boy who hawks Bibles door to door in Flannery O’Connor’s coruscating story “Good Country People.” In this beautifully crafted tale there appears the line: “Mrs. Hopewell had no bad qualities of her own, but she was able to use other people’s in such a constructive way that she never felt the lack.” (I like to picture the youthful Bill Clinton looking up from this passage, in his well-spent boyhood in Hope, Ark., with a far-off light of recognition dawning brightly in his eyes.) O’Connor’s story is one of the best cautions ever penned against the human tendency to allow oneself to feel sympathy for a tired foot-in-the-door salesperson. Never forget for an instant that Sinclair Lewis’ Elmer Gantry began life as “a traveling salesman for the Pequot Company,” dealing in agricultural tools and supplies: “He was not unsuccessful. He was a good talker, a magnificent hand-shaker, his word could often be depended on, and he remembered most of the price-lists and all of the new smutty stories.”

But not all the commercial travelers in our literature are illustrations of the caveat emptor principle or are mere disposable figures in organizations larger than themselves. In John Cheever’s “The Autobiography of a Drummer,” for instance, the narrator is a vendor of high-class footwear in the age of steam railway travel and falls victim both to changes in fashion and to the age of mass production. Having been a figure of wealth and status in his own right and having derived much of what we would now call “job satisfaction” from his work, he finds that standardization is as much a part of capitalism as choice:

“After that all my trips went in the red. Methods of doing business had changed, faster than I could change. Chain stores and stores owned by manufacturers took the place of stores owned by individuals. Cheap shoes took the place of expensive shoes. . . . We have been forgotten like old telephone books and almanacs and gas lights and those big yellow houses with cornices and cupolas that they used to build.”

The capitalist economy, as Joseph Schumpeter so tellingly phrased it, operates on a process of “creative destruction.” But then again, if this were not so, and if it were not for Fordism and mass production and standardization, then we would not have that quintessential American figure: the automobile salesman. John O’Hara helped get him underway with a jaunty start in “How Can I Tell You?”:

“A T-Bird and two Galaxies was very good for one day, especially as the T-Bird did not involve a trade-in. The woman who bought it, Mrs. Preston, had come in and asked for Mark McGranville and shown him a magazine ad. ‘Do you have one of these in stock, in red?’ she asked.”

How do we know that this breezy day isn’t going to end well? We just do:

“He lit a cigarette and took the first drag, but he let it go out. He was thirty years old, a good father, a good husband, and so well thought-of that Mrs. Preston would make sure that he got credit for a sale. His sister had a good job, and his mother was taken care of. On the sales blackboard at the garage his name was always first or second, in two years had not been down to third. Nevertheless he went to the hall closet and got out his 20-gauge and broke it and inserted a shell.”

One reason for the popularity of John Updike, I sometimes think, is that he takes the interior life of a salesman and makes it, if I may so exploit a common expression, fairly rich. This is definitely to buck a trend and a tendency. But then Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom bucks more tendencies than that. He defies the idea that what’s good for General Motors is good for America, and, for that matter, he scorns the wisdom that the business of America is business:

“The f------ world is running out of gas. But they won’t catch him, not yet, because there isn’t a piece of junk on the road gets better mileage than his Toyotas, with lower service costs. Read Consumer Reports, April issue. That’s all he has to tell the people when they come in. And come in they do, the people out there are getting frantic, they know the great American ride is ending. . . . He tells them, when they buy a Toyota, they’re turning their dollars into yen.”

Making your killing--a suggestive phrase--from the decline of the national economy is just as legitimate, in business terms, as making it from the American Dream. But there is, in novelistic terms, a willingness to confront the former that is not found in the Junior Chambers of Commerce that preach--and that is the word--the latter.

Perhaps too many of the original masters of American writing, like Melville and Hawthorne, were given sinecures in the old customs house: business in a way but steady government work nonetheless. Conceivably we still owe too much to those, such as Emerson and Thoreau and Whitman, who had a distaste for the vulgarity of industry and preferred the opposing utopia of the bucolic idyll, yet another version of America as the small community. Or maybe too many of the later masters were the sons of sweated immigrants, who experienced the mighty industrial empire only from the proletarian point of view.

Be that as it may, the most common perspective is from the lower middle rungs or--as in a brilliant Philip Lopate dialogue in this collection--from the scrabbling world of the foreign-born marchand de tapis. Mike Tronnes did not see fit to include any of the work of Ayn Rand (necessarily difficult to excerpt) in this anthology, but hers is the only boardroom’s-eye view that I can call to mind that merits the status of a classic. And that is only another way of demarcating the business of American literature from the literature of American business.