The Filing Cabinet by the River

PEOPLE IN GLASS HOUSES by Shirley Hazzard. 179 pages. Knopf. $4.95.

The people in this glass house throw pebbles, not stones, and such damage as they do is not to flesh but to sensibilities. Since the house is tall, stands on the bank of Manhattan's East River and is a monument to international good works, it may be as well to see it as U.N. headquarters. Shirley Hazzard calls it simply the Organization--though she worked at the U.N. for ten years. The characters represent many nations, but, above all, they represent one way of life. What they do and say provides a fictional counterpart to William Whyte's The Organization Man.

Author Hazzard's Organization men and women are not in the headlines (as any reader of her fine first novel The Evening of the Holiday might easily guess). They are the secretaries, the personnel people, the heads of committees who keep the files bursting and the memoranda flying, and the earnest subordinates who seek to notch their way to a level where they too can dictate memoranda.

The really powerful in this world are the people who can block a promotion, or a secretary who by dropping a sly word gets her boss to come down hard on someone she dislikes. When a personnel functionary (whose child does not learn to talk but to "verbalize") searches for a damning phrase, he hotly charges a subordinate with "unilateral action." Even workers in the "field" when making a report must learn the lingo that will impress their chiefs back in the glass house: "As you know, the object of the Civic Coordination Programme is to tap the dynamics of social change in terms of local aspirations for progress."

Move & Breathe. No one, not even the most discontented (and never the author), questions the aims of the Organization. The real difficulty is to move and breathe as an individual in the organizational maze. Not all are gifted with the ability of Miss Bass, who can be indifferent to associates but finds "it easy and even gratifying to direct fraternal feelings towards large numbers of people living at great distances." Mild staff cynicism naturally accompanies a search for a man to fill a job; he "must walk the middle path--a man of middle years and middle brow was wanted, a man not burdened with significant characteristics."

People in Glass Houses clearly asks if big-time idealism is not apt to be as dehumanizing as large-scale anything. The point is neatly made when the Director General departs from his prepared address on Staff Day to pay his respects to the need" for holding on to "one's secret identity." The half-asleep come awake. Throats are cleared. The interpreters hesitate. Is this organizational heresy at the highest level? "I don't quite know," says one of the listeners later. "I think I felt heartened to hear something said merely because it was felt. Still, I did find all that stuff about one's integrity a bit Nordic." Moral: people in this glass house shouldn't throw their inner selves around.

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