The Hero as Businessman

THE MAGICIANS (246 pp.) -- J.B.

Priestley--Harper ($3).

THE POWER AND THE PRIZE (326 pp.)--Howard Swiggett--Ballantine ($3.50).

The businessman in the fiction of the '20s and '30s not merely seemed a boor and a menace: he was scarcely a real human being. He was a full-time symbol, unable to buy a new necktie without illustrating "conspicuous consumption,'' or to fall in love without serving as a comment on "bourgeois morality." But in recent years, the businessman has been emerging as a human and something of a hero. The trend seems transatlantic. In the past year Britain's Nigel Balchin published Private Interests and in 1952 the U.S.'s Cameron Hawley contributed Executive Suite. Fresh bows to the businessman are now made by Britain's Socialist Novelist J. B. Priestley in The Magicians and the U.S.'s Republican Novelist Howard Swiggett in The Power and the Prize. Priestley's book is suave, but wanders off into drawing-room speculation; Swig-gett's novel is crude, though closer to boardroom politics.

Soma & Dianetics. On the first page of The Magicians, Sir Charles Ravenstreet's directorial colleagues of a quarter-century hand him a humiliating surprise. Instead of making him managing director of New Central Electric Co., they jump an accounting whiz-kid over his head and hand Ravenstreet the consolation prize of production chief. Fed up, fiftyish and rich, Ravenstreet resigns. A childless widower with a bad marriage behind him. he holes up with his books at first, then starts roving the nightclubs, even beds down for a joyless hour with an opulent blonde.

His life, he soon realizes, is not only at loose ends but at a meaningless dead end. An egocentric tycoon named Lord Mervil seems to offer a way out when he asks Ravenstreet to join him in the mass production of a pill rather like the soma of Huxley's Brave New World. No larger than an aspirin, it banishes all anxiety and induces a state of euphoric serenity. Bui before Ravenstreet says yes, his life takes a strange new turn.

He plays host to three pixilated old men who have lost their lodgings. Busy as the dwarfs in Snow White, they ply him with mystic mumbo jumbo and a brand of higher Dianetics called "time alive." by which Ravenstreet can relive key events in his past with the added wisdom of hindsight. Under the influence of time alive, Ravenstreet realizes that he should have married an adoring mistress rather than the boss's daughter, and that Mervil and associates are evil men. anxious to clamp a power-mad elite on drug-happy masses (the theories of the '30s reappear here for a spell). Outfitted with a new set of values, Ravenstreet breaks with Lord Mervil and wins the forgiveness of his erstwhile mistress on her deathbed. Ravenstreet is eager to thank the three "magicians" for everything, but they have vanished into the thin upper air of Author Priestley's somewhat pixilated imagination. A deft master of pace, Priestley keeps his story interesting, long after all its preposterous plot lines have become tangents.

Love & Chemistry. Cleves Barwick, hero of The Power and The Prize, thinks he has his head screwed on the right way. At the age of 40 he is married only to Allied Materials Corp. and is heir apparent to its chairman, an expansive barrel of platitudes named Salt. Barwick's chore is to negotiate with a London firm over a revolutionary chemical process. While in London, he runs into a sad-eyed Viennese refugee named Rachel Linka. Love turns out to be a revolutionary chemical process that Barwick knows little about.

The negotiations bog down. Back in New York. Chairman Salt--who has been keeping a blonde cutie in a midtown flat for 20 years--tells Barwick that he must not marry Rachel: it would "wreck your career." In a knockdown fight, with one melodramatic round following another, Cleves Barwick battles for 1) Rachel, 2) the British process and 3) the chairmanship of Allied Materials Corp.

There are spurts of life in The Power and the Prize, particularly when Author Swiggett draws on his own 35-year background in business. But too often, the life is choked out of it by a love story that consistently mates the silly with the high-falutin in action and dialogue, e.g., "Darling, now I truly love you. You have a recording of Mozart's Clarinet Quintet with Kell."

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