The Working Day
7½ CENTS.
By Richard Bissell.
Little, Brown. 245 pp. $3.50.
The 30’s had their “proletarian” novels, but these were concerned with class-consciousness and revolt, and not with how a worker passed eight, ten, or twelve hours at a machine or desk. The 40’s brought forth novels about life in the office of Time or the Times, of an advertising agency or a private eye or a diabolical magnate. But their interest in the daily life of the office was usually either grudging or exotic, a matter of local color or of providing a prosaic background for the “real thing” which lay always beyond and outside the office. Then there appeared, in passing, novels which treated modern industry as a phase of the purgatory through which the artist-writer must pass to discover his true self, novels in the main of anguish and rejection.
In contrast to this, Mr. Bissell looks amiably upon the third floor office of the Sleep Tite plant in Junction City, Iowa (Sleep Tite, the Pajama for Men of Bedroom Discrimination) , finding it interesting for its own sake. Not that he has any notion of celebrating modern industry or boosting the morale of its wage slaves, or any visible ambition in the direction of sociological reportage. If he is celebrating anything, it is the survival of the Horatio Alger taint in the person of a moderately sophisticated small-fry plant superintendent named Sid Sorokin. Sid is a novelty of normality in recent fiction. He is everywhere, and everywhere indispensable to the modern industrial machine, but no one to my knowledge has before this deigned to make him a fictional hero. This particular Sid Sorokin is twenty-eight, educated in the public schools of Gary, Indiana, the night schools and correspondence courses of Chicago, and a whole gamut of jobs in the garment trade. He has wit and industry. He is easily bored and upset, but, unlike the artist type, he is eminently practical, with a strong and active instinct for self-preservation. Again unlike the artist type, he retains his capacity for prosaic pleasures. So in the middle of a standard gripe about the constant tension of the factory and the pot shots sent his way by labor on one side and top management on the other, Sid feels impelled to confess that “nobody has to be a superintendent of a garment plant unless he wants to. So far I can’t say I had been having a very bad time. Having a pretty good time as a matter of fact.”
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If Sid is having a pretty good time, some of the credit is owing to Babe Williams, a freckled and forthright beauty “who operated a Union Special 51400 and could set more sleeves in an eight-hour day than any operator between Council Bluffs and Columbus.” She is one type of “queen” of which every garment factory contains several. Another is the quiet brunette with olive skin and enormous dark eyes “who put button holes in the flies of men’s pajamas with a genteel air as though she were pouring tea at the Junior League.” Babe is Sid’s principal and intimate source of pleasure at Sleep Tite, but she is also, as ringleader of the union slowdown, his tormenter. Manning the barricades on the opposite side is Sid’s cadaverous, penny-pinching boss, Myron Hasler, a man of stern principles derived from Fulton Lewis, Jr. And with Sid in the middle of the battle sits Mabel, repository of gossip and bulwark of strength, Sleep Tite’s particular variation of the universal female office wheelhorse: “Mabel was about forty-three or forty-eight or fifty-one, hard to tell—one of those big energetic girls with a big bust, a lot of hair, and good-looking legs (but also solid), and she alternated between fancy printed dresses with everything on them that a sewing machine would hold together and tailored suits, which she wore partly because they made her look like a career woman such as Colbert or Roz Russell and partly to annoy her husband.”
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In working out the ramifications of this particular segment of the class struggle, Mr. Bissell has made a modest but significant contribution toward the folklore of American capitalism. He has documented for the first time to my knowledge, in the popular medium of the novel, the precise Lardnerian language of a business house bulletin for salesmen, along with supremely meaningful and hilarious verbatim extracts from the morning mail of a plant superintendent. His chapter epigraphs, culled from the weirdest sources (ranging from S. J. Perelman to a brochure entitled The Progressive Sewing Room), constitute a mocking commentary on our industrial rituals. Most of all, he has conveyed something of the incalculable variety and monotony of the eight-hour day, filled with small talk, irritations, gripes, wisecracks, high spirits, work, goofings-off, machine breakdowns, sex, and the casual fireworks of a union drive for a 7½-cents-an-hour raise.
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