New Novels Reflect New Understanding

BUSINESSMEN IN FICTION

THAT'S no ulcer . . . That's rot-0the rot that works in the belly of all you big shots." Thus, the hero of the latest novel about U.S. business, Company Man by John G. Burnett (Harper; $3.50), castigates his spineless section chief for caving in to the pressure of office politics. On the surface, Author Burnett's tale, revolving about a big U.S. airline, is merely one more in the long list of novels, from Frank Norris' The Octopus to Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt and John Dos Passos' The Big Money, that show businessmen at their materialistic worst. Yet for all the angry talk of flint-hearted, fatheaded bosses, there is a big difference in Company Man that is symptomatic of the spate of new novels rediscovering the American business scene. A businessman himself (onetime ad manager for Braniff Airlines), Author Burnett has tried to analyze and report how a big U.S. business works in modern-day society.

There are still some critics who argue that today's authors are no more sympathetic to business than their counterparts of the '30s and earlier. Says White House Economic Adviser Gabriel Hauge: "It's high time to portray the constructive things businessmen do. The motivation is more than money, it's the excitement of creation."

But the weight of evidence is that U.S. authors have indeed changed their approach to the businessman, and that their novels reflect the changing times. Author-Critic John Chamberlain, who eight years ago wrote in FORTUNE that novelists "are not only antibusiness; they are also anti-fecundity and anti-life," now feels that "the businessman has been made much more human."

Adds Harvard Assistant Professor Kenneth S. Lynn, writing in the Harvard Business Review: "The lament that businessmen are treated with universal hostility has become less valid with the passage of time."

Though the current crop of novels and plays may not be right on target, Lynn argues that authors approach their task with an inquiring and often sympathetic mind. Even the barbed humor in such plays as The Solid Gold Cadillac is aimed at the funny bone rather than the jugular. As General Bullmoose, a tycoon's tycoon, says wistfully in the new musical comedy Li'l Abner: "Ever since I was a child, I had a dream. And all that simple child wanted was to get his hands on all the money in the world before the Greatest Broker of them all called him to that big Stock Market in the Sky.''

One reason for the shifting attitude in fiction is that the new generation of business authors has often had firsthand business experience. Louis Auchincloss' The Great World and Timothy Colt, Richard Bissell's 7 1/2 Cents, W. H. Prosser's Nine to Five, Lawrence Schoonover's The Quick Brown Fox, are all business novels by authors who at one time or another have been in business themselves. Thus in Executive Suite, Author Cameron Hawley, a longtime executive of Armstrong Cork Co., can expertly detail for his readers the struggle to find a new president in a big corporation. Later, in Cash McCall, he attempts to explain the philosophy that drives men to seek wealth and power. Argues Hero McCall: "We maintain that the very foundation of our way of life is what we call free enterprise--the profit system--but when one of our citizens shows enough free enterprise to pile up a little of that profit we do our best to make him feel ashamed of himself,"

For authors without such a business background--and even for some with --the problem is still a lack of real understanding of what goes on behind company doors. All too often their characters are stereotyped portraits grafted onto a business setting, characters closer to Freud than the factory. Even John P. Marquand argues Harvard Professor Lynn, in Marquand's novel about a businessman, Sincerely, Willis Wayde, has much of the action take place offstage in suburban drawing rooms, thus making it more a novel of manners than of business. Says Lynn: "Like so many writers, Marquand knows society well and the business world not at all." At the same time, concedes Lynn, "he has capitalized on his perception that business and society are no longer the mutually exclusive provinces they used to be."

More and more authors are aware that the businessman is not a duck-billed oddity from another world, but a human being inhabiting the same society as everyone else. The great problem is getting him on paper--and in modern dress, recognizing that business has changed from the freebooting days of the tycoon. What fiction now needs, suggests Chase Manhattan Bank Economist Robert A. Kavesh in a survey of current business fiction, is a "greater focus on the corporation itself and more particularly on the executives who govern collectively. No longer the villain of the piece, the businessman may appear in a variety of roles more adequately reflecting the range and variety of personalities that exist in the business world."

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