Forever Babbitt

MR. SMITH (278 pp.)--Louis Bromfield --Harper ($3).

One morning while shaving, Wolcott Ferris, prosperous insurance broker, froze before his bathroom mirror as if he had seen a shrunken head. He had seen something worse: his shrunken self. "What are you missing?" he asked his blue-grey eyes. "Why the hell do you exist? Why do you go on living?" Why had life been picked clean to the bones short of 40?

All the answers Ferris can dredge up are corroded with hate and futility. He loathes his job, is desperately weary of the daily stint on the office treadmill. He detests his pretentious "neo-Georgian" home in Oakdale, a genteel Midwestern suburb. Most of all he hates "the goddamn blood-drinking octopus" he married. Enid Ferris is one of those primly efficient young matrons who know how to place-kick an indulgent husband over the goal posts of a cash culture to make a social score. But Enid is all take and no give. Frigidly squeamish about the claims of the flesh, she chills Ferris' love-making with protests like: "Don't! Where did you learn such a filthy trick?" After two children, they take to twin beds and an expurgated marital life.

Values F.O.B. Ferris tries to fill the loveless void with cocktails, out-of-town stag sprees, and finally an affair with a rich divorcee, Mary Raeburn. While the whole town is clucking, Ferris discovers that Mary, in her own way, is as much of an emotional bankrupt as Enid. One afternoon he finds her doubled in pain from the need for dope; she is a hopeless addict.

Their affair ends just as World War II begins. For Ferris, it means a late reprieve from the "little-death" trap he is in.

He enlists, only to be marooned on a tiny South Pacific island supply depot. There he types reams in a confessional diary, relating his failure as a human being to that of all the other middle-class Mr. Smiths who, in Thoreau's phrase, "lead lives of quiet desperation." He decides he has never been his own man. His values have come f.o.b. Detroit, New York, Hollywood. Instead of the surges of the heart, he has lived by the slogans of the hucksters. One night a confused sentry mistakes him for a Jap, sends him to meet the man-sized death he secretly yearns for.

Change from Jello. As a slash at American middle-class life, Mr. Smith rarely cuts more than cuticle-deep. But for Author Louis Bromfield, who has tackled only Jello-weight themes for years, it marks an abrupt change of mental pace. Dunked in soggy prose and soupy characters, Mr. Smith still claims a kissing kinship with Babbitt and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.

It also contains many of the standard gibes of European intellectuals--no surprise, since Midwesterner Bromfield himself spent 15 expatriate years in France prior to 1938. The ideas behind Mr. Smith hatched after his return. "I was struck very forcefully," he says, "by things I might not have noticed if I had been living here all that time." Chief among them: "The confusion in the minds of many Americans about the importance of water closets, automobiles, radios, etc. They think they are civilized because they have these. But they actually are a means to an end, not an end itself."

Today, says Author Bromfield, the level of U.S. taste is "based on the sports pages, comics, radio and TV." Flocking together in crowds, many Americans "cannot be alone and think for themselves."

Author Bromfield was not always so alert at spotting the termites in the American grain. Interviewed at a homecoming in 1933, he cried: "What do I like about America? Everything! ... We have a Pollyanna's Paradise ... I went to a movie, walked through the five-&-ten, ate peanuts and felt at home again."

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