The Threatened Unity of the Family Is Re-established

THIS ISN 'T a story. A grown man, unmarried, living alone,
has a job. Times are good, and he has been able to get
exactly the job he wants. He's a very ordinary fellow. No
outlandish tastes, no drive to conquer the world. He
doesn't like the subway, so he buys a secondhand Ford.
He doesn't like business suits or shoes with laces, so he
wears sport jackets and loafers, and these until they have
holes in them. He rolls his own cigarettes because he gets a
kick out of it. He likes three-dollar rye better than bonded
Scotch. He reads the ads in the newspapers and magazines,
and if something appeals to him, the chances are he buys it.
All the people he mixes with socially are his friends. Anyone
he doesn't like he avoids or tells him frankly what's
wrong with him. He is saving enough money to knock off
and stay in Europe for a few months, come the year after
next. He plans to see the Continent on a bicycle and come
home only when his money gives out, at which time he'll
go back to his job if they'll have him. And if they won't,
he'll find another as good, or better.
What's wrong with this picture? Nothing, except that
this fellow is not part of the great American man-machine.
He is immune to the bigger-and-better-every- day-in-every-
way disease which infects almost every normal, adult, married
male and female in the land. This mutineer, this
aberrant doesn't especially care if his car is an antique. It
goes. He doesn't care if his fellow workers wear pants and
jackets to match. That's their business. He stays warm in
the winter and cool in the summer.
It's a peculiar thing, but those co-workers of his admire
him for his debonair disregard of convention. But let him
marry and have a child or two, and attitudes will change.
Should he show a lack of interest in business advancement
then, or tell the boss off when he feels like it, or seem
satisfied with an old car and rumpled clothes, he will be
looked upon as a neurotic. And he would be a neurotic.
That's the strange change a family makes.
Why? Because every normal married American man is
expected to do his utmost to provide his children with a
better social and economic status than was provided to him.
He is expected to do his utmost to gain for his wife those
conspicuous adornments which will enable her at least to
equal and at best to outshine all those women of the class
with which she identifies herself. It's perfectly permissible
that he should not value these things for himself. But not to
want them for his wife and children? That would make
him a bum, literally.
All this is simply to emphasize the importance of both
the idea and the reality of the family to American industrial
activity, and especially to the industrial activity that
slick-magazine advertising concerns itself with. Pick up
any popular magazine and consider how many of the ads
apply to single men and women who do not plan to marry
and raise children. I, personally, have made a space count
with an issue chosen at random. Seventy-six percent of the
ad lineage would not apply.
The grand and obvious lesson to be learned is that the
family as an institution is more sacred to slick editors and
to the manufacturers who pay their salaries than either
church or country. Consequently, the family is a prime
subject for fictional handling-so long as its integrity is
never slighted or its unity destroyed.
All this in preface to a very important story-type.
A husband, pushing into middle-age, wakes one morning
to find he can't tolerate his wife or his children. Something
has come over him. He doesn't know what. He knows only
that he must get away for a while. He phones his office that
he won't be in and goes off to a nearby, but strange town.
With an ability to draw which he developed at college he
gets a job as a draftsman that same morning. He takes the
young secretary in the office out to lunch, gets himself a
furnished room for which he pays a full week's rent in advance,
meets a boy on the street who is crying and fixes his
sled. These things-the new job, the new home, the young
secretary, the little boy-he has all enjoyed. But then as the
day goes on he suspects that what he enjoyed in them is
precisely what he enjoyed in his old job, his old home, his
wife and his children. He takes a train home, arriving just at
the time he would have arrived from work. Everything has
t
aken on the old warm values once more.
That's an easy one, one in which the disaffection is in.
tangible. More often the problem is quite concrete.
A young woman, happily married, gets a letter from the
world-famous composer and pianist who taught her to play
the piano when she was in college. He is coming to her town
to give a concert. Could he stay with her and her husband?
She is delighted. She remembers the deep romantic impression
he made on her when she was in her teens. Would it be
the same again? Might she not fall back in love with him,
and he with her? When he does come, they are conveniently
left alone by the husband. The composer confesses that he
loves her still. But she doesn't seem to know her heart. She
knows she loves her husband-in a certain solid, unromantic
way. Could she be in love with two men? She waits, she
watches them both. Then seeing her children and the home
she has built up around them and her husband, she realizes
it was only an infatuation, even if a particularly glamorous
one, she felt for the composer.
Stories such as this and the preceding one are quite
often subdued pastels without much climax or dramatic
movement. But take this other-woman piece. Its author was
walking on thin ice.
The husband, successful, responsible, father of two children,
is married to a young woman who emotionally is still a child .
She is not ill willed, merely incompetent. As a result, the husband
must do both his job and his wife's.
Into this chaotic household comes a baby-sitter, a single ,
young ex-teacher. She seems to be everything to the childre n
nd the father that the wife isn't. She and the father fall
deeply in love with each other. But, after much heartbreak,
she decides she must leave him. Out of a sense of duty to his
children, he accepts her decision.
This is what in Hollywood they call a down-beat story
(in contrast to an up-beat, or happy-ending opus). The
author really extended himself to show that the married
man and the baby-sitter were meant for each other. Then
he pulled them apart-to no character's satisfaction, and
almost not to the reader's. The story did achieve a certain
poignant effect; but the moral, the point, the message, was
that the family unit must be maintained at all costs.
category:plot lines
Category:romance