For Whom Bell Charges Tolls

THIS COMPANY OF MEN by William Pearson. 371 pages. St Martin's. $5.95.

"Call me Herodotus," cries Virtue Smith, the narrator of this nobly titled novel, This Company of Men. Something noble certainly should be in the bulky text. All, however, is irony, and "Herodotus" is actually dealing with "the civilization of the Corporation Man . . . the creature struggling in a snowstorm of trivia."

In other words, William Pearson, a Denver lawyer turned novelist, has undertaken to write another insider's story of a great U.S. corporation--in this case, the Consolidated Bell Company in the fictional town of Rowton (pop. 1,000,000). Pearson never actually worked for such a company but observed a counterpart at close quarters when his Denver law firm had dealings from time to time with the local telephone company.

Fatal Flaw. Such a novel, if it is to be any good, must be a study in the nature of power and the behavior of those who seek it. Shakespeare set his great stage on this theme, but otherwise things have sadly changed. Uneasy still lies the head that wears a crown--the $80,000-a-year presidency. Nobody tells old President Edwards, due for mandatory retirement, anything he does not want to hear. He is even provided with the tragic flaw of the Shakespearean hero. He likes to pinch women's gloves from dime-store counters and file them away in his great big desk. It is a pretty harmless foible, but if this were known, what would it do to the "Company Image"? Two extraverted corporate types are rivals for his ballpoint-pen scepter, but although the telephone company can command more men than Henry V could put in the field at Harfleur, this is a conflict of clowns rather than kings. As in Shakespeare's day, the faithful friend--Mercutio, Horatio or Mark Antony--is in short supply, but Polonius, prototype of the company man, seems to have proliferated.

Pearson's problem is that the telephone company's image is well-nigh perfect. Its charges are known to be just, equitable and, in any case, virtually incontestable; its poles are tall as trees and much neater; its only enemies are unenlightened woodpeckers, public service commissions, and the parents of teenagers. How satirize such perfection? Pearson does his best by suggesting that company executives are only human when trapped behind filing cabinets with neurotic secretaries, but this is squalid stuff. (How little adultery there was in Shakespeare!)

Saving the Image. Finally, Pearson resorts to farce; he gets a subscriber's cat up a corporate pole. To lend a note of modish company and public policy to this event, the cat's owner is a woman of color who alleges discrimination in the company's indifference to her poled pet. Before this cat is rescued, corporate structure has changed, old Edwards is as mad as Lear, two linesmen have been killed, a small boy damaged, but the company image is saved.

Pearson's thoroughly enjoyable novel is written with the vulgar high spirits of a man who is under no sort of illusion that he is either rendering a public service or creating a work of art. Virtue Smith is a memorable invention. He has devised a way of life for himself that he calls "daylighting." He does Bell's work in two hours; the other six he sits happily at his desk compiling an encyclopedic diary of the company at work.

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