The Org Man Blues

THE DURABLE FIRE (366 pp.)--Howard Swiggett--Houghton Mifflin ($4).

FROM THE DARK TOWER (245 pp.)--Ernst Pawel--Mocm/V/on ($3.75).

The postwar romance between novelists and the business world--a highly tentative affair at best--may be going pfffft. The hero of From the Dark Tower deserts his executive suite in Manhattan and his split-level home in the suburbs to fish for his soul in the shade of a Rocky Mountain peak. The hero of The Durable Fire undergoes the equivalent of a deathbed conversion before he can regain his faith in the corporate way of life. Both men sing the organizational blues, to wit, Big Business is too much like Big Brother.

Conditioned Reflex. The late Howard Swiggett (he died last March at 64) was the better author, and The Durable Fire is the livelier, more levelheaded book. Stephen Lowry, a new vice president of Continental Industries Corp., hopes to stockpile enough cash in ten years to get back to his unfinished book Principal Errors of Judgment of Rulers and Peoples Since the Reformation. Steve's principal error, as Author Swiggett sees it, seems to lie in thinking that a few miles of Long Island Railroad track can separate the company's time from his own. While Steve never becomes as abject as Pavlov's dogs, the company rules him by conditioned reflex. It is the absentee landlord of his home, the unseen host at his dinner parties, the spectral judge of his every decision.

To this quasi-metaphysical monster Steve offers up a colleague and friend who, he accidentally discovers, has embezzled $50,000 in company funds. At this point Steve begins to wonder whether he is a company man or a company mouse.

A company shake-up and the "durable fire" of his staunch and lovely wife's faith in him help Steve to reforge his faith in business and himself. Author Swiggett understands the paternalistic embrace in which the large, modern corporation holds its employees--but he vastly exaggerates it. His notion that the corporation makes or unmakes the man is on a par with all the determinist devil theories of history which hold that every evil of human life flows from the capitalistic "system," or from the machine, or from sunspots.

Total Security. The mock-hero of Author Ernst Pawel's From the Dark Tower unintentionally reminds the reader that Jonahs as well as Ahabs go looking for their private whales. Abe Rogoff is a middle-aged Jonah just asking to be swallowed. For ten years he has been a snickering outsider ("to take business seriously is a kind of disease") camouflaged as a docile insider in the pseudo-Gothic spires of Manhattan's Tower Mutual Life Insurance Co. Abe's disease might be diagnosed as undulant barricade fever, the nostalgic complaint of an ex-free-lover, ex-radical newspaper editor and ex-Wobbly. The newest totalitarianism, Abe decides, is Total Security. As the whale of social conformity begins to swallow him, Abe utters little burps of independent thought.

His first blast is at his neighbors in suburban Samaria Beach, a spick-and-span interracial paradise of rising demographic and disposable-income curves. As a potential school-board candidate, he defends an erstwhile Communist schoolteacher. By this time Abe's wife and son are talking to him in monosyllables, but when he finally tells off his boss and quits to go West, everyone brightens perceptibly for unintelligible reasons. "No jobs for the likes of me," chortles Abe as he camps under the Western sky. The compleat idler is a recurrent American dream, at least as old as Huck Finn lazing. But Author Pawel's ostensible text, "Executives of the world, resign. You have nothing to lose but your Dictaphones," does not seem like a practical slogan with which to rally a teeming army of neo-nonconformists.

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