The Man Who Fell to Earth

In a few weeks of living with this woman he had learned a great deal about one aspect of American society that television had not informed him of at all. He had known about the general prosperity that had bloomed continuously, like the flower of some giant and impossibly hardy weed, for the forty years since the end of World War II, and he had known how this wealth had been distributed among and spent by the nearly all-inclusive middle class that, as every year passed, put more time into less productive work and made more money for it. It was that overdressed and immensely comfortable middle class that almost all television shows dealt with, so that one could easily get the notion that all Americans were young, suntanned, clear-eyed and ambitious. In meeting Betty Jo he had learned that there was a large substratum of society that was totally unaffected by this middle-class prototype, that a huge and indifferent mass of persons had virtually no ambitions and no values whatever. He had read enough history to realize that people like Betty Jo would once have been the industrial poor; but they were now the industrial well-to-do, living comfortably in government-built housing — Betty Jo rented a three-room dwelling unit in a huge old brick housing project, now a semi-slum — on checks from a bewildering diversity of agencies; Federal Welfare, State Welfare, Emergency Relief, Country Poor Relief. This American society was so rich that it could support the eight or ten million members of Betty Jo’s class in a kind of shabby, gin-and-used-furniture luxury in the cities, while the bulk of the country tanned its healthy cheeks by its suburban swimming pools and followed the current fashions in clothes and child-rearing and mixed drinks and wives, playing endless games with religion and psychoanalysis and “creative leisure.” With the exception of Farnsworth, who belonged to still another, rarer class, that of the genuinely wealthy, all of the men whom Newton had met were of this middle class. All of them were very much alike and seeming, if you caught them off their guard, when the hand wasn’t extended in friendliness or the face composed in its usual mask of smug and boyish charm, a little haggard, a little lost. It seemed to Newton that Betty Jo, with her gin, her boredom, her cats, and her used furniture, was getting the better part of the social arrangement.

She had had a party once, with some “girl friends” from other units in the building. He had remained in the bedroom out of sight, but he had been able to hear them well enough, singing old hymns like Rock of Ages and Faith of Our Fathers, and getting drunk on gin and sentimentality, and it had seemed to him that they had found a better kind of satisfaction in this emotional debauch than the middle class derived from its Roman barbecue feasts, its drunken midnight swimming, and its quick sex. Yet even Betty Jo was false to those childish old hymns, for after the other women had gone drunkenly back to their own three-room cells, she had laid by him in bed and giggled about the silliness of the Baptist, hymn-singing, revivalist religion that her Kentucky family had brought her up in and how she had “outgrown all that, even though, sometimes, it was kind of cute to sing the songs.” Newton said nothing to this, yet he could not help but wonder. He had seen an “old-time revival hour” several times, on the old Anthean TV tapes, and he had seen a “modern” church hour which “made a creative use of God,” for which the music consisted solely of an electronic organ playing Strauss waltzes and parts of The Poet and Peasant Overture. He was not at all certain that these people had been entirely wise in their development of that strange manifestation of theirs, a thing Anthea was totally without — and yet which the Antheans, in their ancient visits to the planet, were probably to blame for — this peculiar set of premises and promises called religion. He did not understand it very well, however. Antheans believed, to be sure, that there probably were gods in the universe, or creatures that might be called gods, but this was not a thing of any great importance to them, any more than it really was to most humans, Yet the old human belief in sin and redemption was meaningful to him and, he, like all Antheans, was quite familiar with the sense of guilt and the need for its expiation. Yet now the humans seemed to be building loose constructions of half-belief and sentiment to replace their religions, and he did not know what to make of it; he could not really fathom why Betty Jo was so much concerned over the supposed strength she received in weekly doses from her synthetic church, a form of strength that seemed less certain and more troublesome than that she received from her gin.