THE GREAT MIDDLE CLASS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 435, 24 October 1947, Page 10

THE GREAT MIDDLE CLASS

Written for "The Listener’ |

by

BEATRICE

ASHTON

who returned recently to New Zealand after three and a-half years in the U.S.A.

MERICANS survive conversationally by the use of superlatives. Not only do they have the biggest and best of everything, but without reference to anything in his past or present experience, an American will tell you that yéu have "the best baby," that he has had "the best dinner," or that he has just seen "the best movie." Eventually I realised that allthis is a national whim indulged in much as the English practise tinder-statement, and with equal relish, But at first, seeking common ground with these people, I matched boast with boast.| I told my doctor that New Zealand’s/ infant mortality rate is the lowest in the world. "Poof!" he said looking at me as if I were attempting blackmail, and thrust Piunket’s Advice to the Expectant Mother deep into his desk drawer. Then when my child was eight days old a reporter came into’ my room hot after a story with a romantic angle. I tried to divert him by talking about our geysers, glaciers; and trout until he told me I sounded like a blurb for the Chamber of Commerce and would I please stop. For my lack of co-operation I got a paragraph of bare facts with 11 errors among them and did nothing to put New Zealand on the map. ; if It’s Service You WantIf we make a poor job of publicising our virtues we still protest very little when visitors do it for us. What they say is often true enough, but this last week we have been told in our papers that New Zealand women dress no better and no worse than American women, that our hotels are as good as American hotels, and that New Zealanders are better fed, albeit on plainer fare. This is all very fine except that my re-encounter with New Zealand meals, hotels, and dress was so dismal. On the other hand, the first vivid impression of those first days in the States has never faded. There was no elbow-room on the streets of Los Angeles, where the men in uniform pushed and shoved along among the civilians. American women were wearing vivid greens and gay scarlet that year and these among the bright plaid jackets of the workers made the streets like a dance-hall. It was a relief to seek the peace and quiet of the restaurants, where the waitresses moved with precision and without apparent haste, pausing to set a meal down without a clatter and taking the time to be pleasant about it. If the food they served could be better I should believe again in fairy tales. There never was an hour of the night when it was impossible to get food, and whenever we ordered a meal, in an exclusive restaurant or at the drug store opposite, it was always good and well-served. Still somewhat dazed after the rigours of a troop transport, I thought it absurd that while dozens of. people slept in the lounge of the hotel, the maids and porters kept up a standard of service that I had never experienced in New Zeal in peacetime. Tipping was universal and foreign to me: all this ease and comfort entailed long hours and hard work and awkward shifts for the

employees of the hotels and restaurants -but if it is service you want you can get it in America. _ . When the time came to board that huge monster of a train that rushed and shrieked through the night, I was clutching a packet of sandwiches bought before the tolerant eyes of my relatives. They were as sceptical of my tales of the New Zealand dive every 50 miles for a refreshment-room as I was that train service could still be good in war-time. Later, as I tried to concentrate on my meal in the diner while the orange groves of Southern California slipped past, I understood their amusement. "Extraordinary Comfort" Travelling through the West we went very much according to our purse. When the baby was seven weeks old, I carried her basket into a pale blue roomette on a brand new train and spent most of the time in my solitary splendour working the chromium gadgets: we drove wildly from Utah to Colorado on a furlough with enough money for the gas and nothing to cever repairs that grew more imminent with every mile: we travelled about Oregon by bus in an extraordiriary amount of comfort for a very minumum fare; and we went by coach (which is better than our second-class on the Limited) on a dusty 700-mile stretch in midsummer. However we travelled there was every device for reducing discomfort to a minimum. Gas stations provide wash-room facilities that are absolutely reliable as far as cleanliness goes; restaurants, road-houses, and drivein stands space themselves with a judicious eye for business along the highways and on the outskirts of the towns.

Americans telescope words together with absolute abandon. There is "brunch" for that Sunday morning meal between the usual hours for breakfast and ldnch, and there is "Motel" for the ‘cabins that serve as a garage for your car and a hotel for you. These seemed to be designed especially for New Zealand highways and for our out of the way beauty spots.. Less pretentious and more informal than hotels, they absorb the traffic of businesg@men and tourists and are particularly suitable for people with children. If there is no coffee shop on the premises there is invariably a restaurant close at hand. Hollywood Isn’t Wholly Reliable Hollywood iluminates these aspects of American life well enough and most New Zealanders know about America what Hollywood chooses to tell them. Some New Zealanders know a great deal about some Americans, because there were several divisions of them here during the war. "A few New Zealanders know Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street as well as they know Lambton Quay. But novels, marines, and movies did not prepare me well enough for the America I found. Read Saroyan, Dos Passos and Steinbeck and there is still a vast amount unsaid: take subscriptions to Life, Time, and the Reader’s Digest for the other side of the picture and the impression is still false: sit through all that Hollywood can show and still the face of America is distorted. Living and working among Americans as long as I did, I was beginning to grasp the threads of the American fabric; but it would take a life-time to weave them together with understanding and without bias.

When the F.B.I. filled the ship’s library to examine our papers I recognised them from the movies. But no movies I ever saw prepared me for the actual experience of jogging from Los Angeles to San Pedro in a rickety train full of the swing-shift of ship-yard workers, and pressing through the gates among them. These were hard-working, tough-looking people, tall men and brawny women with faces descended from Denmark and Russia, the Gold Coast and Greece; with hundreds of dollars in their monthly pay envelope, existing in hideous housing conditions in trailer camps and Federal Housing Projects; all seething West from the farms and out of the depression on to the assembly lines of the Pacific Coast. The American Businessman No book I ever read suggested the contrast between that lusty environment and the middle-class refinement of Salt Lake City and Portland. Brought up to believe that Americans were loudmouthed and brash, cocksure and vigorous, I was completely nonplused by the fastidious feminity of the women and the quiet assurance of the men. With his white shirt and well-draped suit, an American businessman is asmuch a type as the worker in his jeans or overalls. They are as far apart in appearance and social status as they are convinced that their sons have equal chances to enter the White House. Business does not end in the office, but pursues the head of the family home, dictates ‘his dinner guests, and determines whether they shall be entertained in the house or feted at a restaurant or his club. Business and the pursuit of the dollar absorb the waking energies of middle-class men; and even as they relax with their wives around the bridge table the spectre of losing that deal is haunting them. Socially they stick to their class, grouping themselves together in clubs like the Kiwanis, or expensive country clubs, where they idly play the slot-machines, drink heavily without getting drunk, and take their wives and children to dinner on Sundays. Here they use up their excess income or live beyond what they have in order to impress the right people with their intellectual mediocrity, their ambition, and their convivial personality. More seems to happen over a Scotch-and-soda out on the golf-course, or at the lunch table than behind the office desk. These men move in a groove of accepted opinion, where an intellectual. is a crack-pot, a union member is un-American, and a cultural interest is suspect. : Social Code for Wives Among the wives of these men is a social code elaborate beyond anything we know. Entertaining is an art and the preparation of food for bridge luncheons, showers, Thanksgiving dinners a ritual. -- These are the women who fill up their leisure with social clubs, meeting for nothing more than chatter and gossip at regular intervals. These are the women who are staunchest about the virtues of home life when filing suit for divorce. With their passion for efficiency and their scrupulous cleanliness, (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) their kitchens and bathrooms reflect what they are, and their fluffy, period living-rooms indicate the women they would like to be. While they dress themselves in the exact fashion of the moment, streamline their housekeeping to a minimum, they pick their way around each other’s houses with a cocktail in one hand and a cigarette in the other, avoiding collisions with endtables, coffee-tables, and what-nots, fashioned after the taste of generations whose traditions, opinions, and frustrations they deplore, Not all the middle-class is brittle and cynical. Much of it is sentimental and solid, holding its homes together in spite of the tensions and disruptive influences of a society that knows all about designing its comfort and very little about a design for living. ‘There are thousands of middle-class women who carry their social "Conscience into charities and Church clubs; who give time and energy to creative activities like pottery and painting, music and drama; who spend time and energy on their children; who served long hours on canteens and at clubs for servicemen; who belong to the Red Cross and do the collecting in drives for public funds. These women ‘make homes which survive the corruption of the intense worship of the almighty dollar. Less obvious than the pacers of the social sets, they are the women who know more about international affairs than they do about keeping up with the Jones’s; who make some use of the time they save with their gadgets; who are good neighbours and good citizens. ‘Teen-Age America But sentimental or cynical, corrupt or courageous, the middle class is what predominates. It is the target of the radio, the Press and the magazines, Its men depend for their opinions on Time and Newsweek, the Saturday Evening Post and the Reader’s Digest. read a dozen magazines on home-mak-ing and fashion, child raising and gardenIts women ing. Its ’teen-age girls have a choice of three or four magazines designed to direct their fashions, cultivate their social poise, and develop their dress-sense. ‘Teen-age America, whether middleclass in origin or not, is constantly being pushed in that direction. Instead of going to exclusive private schools, the *teen-agers from the wealthier homes gravitate to the school in the residential district in which they live.. This means, of course, that each city has a snob-school in spite of itself. The prestige attached to East High in Salt Lake and to Grant High in Portland was out of all proportion to their academic standards. American teen-agers are at once more seriousminded and more attractive than Hollywood and unfavourable publicity would suggest. Their manners are easy and informal, the boy’s corduroys and jeans are almost uniform and the girls’ sophistication is kept in reasonable check. These kids work their way through high-school, not to pay their fees, but to have that old jalopy and those half-dozen blouses. From a high ‘school where their social education is as thorough as_ their academic they go on to -colleges and

universities, always able to escape from the assembly line of their parents to the businesses and _ professions. At the university they enter sororities and fraternities on a competitive basis that is more social than academic, marry young, divorce early, and almost: without exception repeat with little variation the pattern of the older generation. If. there was any one thing about America that shocked and surprised me more than another it was -this great majority, this levelling-off, this stifling of the impulse and impetus that has made a conscious nation out of so many diverse immigrants. And among these people, first impressions are everything. What you are wearing, and the car you are riding in, are the measure of your worth. (To be concluded.)