View from the Sixth Floor

...His people inhabit emotional cubicles...

...When Fritz Tyler replaces Fine at the controls, his first act is to trade the drama column to his dowager-mistress in exchange for illusory financing...

...Tyler lacks character...

...The only trace of this was the cheaper cut of meat, the blown-out television tube, the slightly moth-eaten upholstery that his salary left the writer...

...You could turn off a conversation with Matty simply by passing up your turn...

...The Outsider is an atmosphere more than a publication...

...Ironically, Fine's Outsider turns out to be nothing more than an imprecise, somewhat worn carbon-copy of Twining's...

...Sheed uses the nasty game of editorial chairs that follows as an occasion for mutual- and self-discovery...

...But where White used fictional heroes and villains to argue a real-life proposition about mass maga-zinery (that the businessmen have displaced the editors on the major publications, and that the bigger they are, the harder they fall), Sheed has used the conventions of little magazinery to reveal the murky sensibilities of the prototypical yet highly plausible non-heroic people who populate The Outsider's masthead...

...By this measure Sheed is a minuteman...

...When, as a result of nocturnal excesses while on a fund-raising junket, Twining suffers a heart attack, the various members of the masthead each see it as their private opportunity to impose their personal imprint on the magazine...

...Fine, then, lacks talent and imagination...

...And George Wren, who ultimately prevails, spends the majority of the novel on the sidelines noting but not really protesting, the gradual disintegration of the journal for which he had abandoned his comfortable life in the mass media...

...If you had too much of it you surrendered something else-your watchfulness, your woodland instincts...

...Ultimately, his major innovation is in the area of interior decoration...

...Others, like Salinger, deal in life-phases-childhood, adolescence, the college years...

...It takes the old maestro, Twining, to put the pieces, editorial and otherwise, back together again...

...Sheed assumes what White argued-that a magazine is essentially an extension of its top men...

...Norman Mailer seems to specialize in the agonies of hour-by-hour...

...Office Politics provides evidence for the proposition that by nature the fortnightly is the hollow man of contemporary journalism-not timely enough to be on top of the news like the weeklies, not leisurely enough to reflect perspective or scholarship like the monthlies and quarterlies, yet like all "periodicals," having to come out on schedule regardless of whether there is anything to say...

...He permits the office to be converted into "an Olga Marplate paradise in cream and turquoise...

...Thus Fine theorizes "Courage...

...Reviewed by VICTOR S. NAVASKY Editor, "Monocle" Office Politics is Commonweal-editor Wilfrid Sheed's View from the Sixth Floor of life on The Outsider, a journal of opinion which bears the same relation to The New Leader, The Nation, The New Republic, The Reporter, Commentary, and Commonweal that Theodore White's fortieth floor look at big publishing, big advertising and big banking bore to Colliers and Woman's Home Companion...

...And Wren lacks confidence...

...Thus, George Wren "thought of his old salary and his present one, of how much he had sacrificed for his ideals and how little his ideals actually entered into the situation now...

...Sheed's method does not make for speed-reading because he is unable or unwilling, a la Hemingway, to let his story tell itself...

...It is at once an environment, a quixotic power-symbol and a litmus test by which Sheed's characters come to judge themselves and each other...

...Twining underrated the value of these small concessions...

...All the props are there: The fortnightly deadlines and dummies, the dusty filing cabinets, the blue penciled copy, the nagging deficit, the pieces which float in over (or is it under...

...Some novelists, like Tolstoy, capture centuries...

...It is the yellow copy paper on which Sheed types his story...

...It was the one thing she wanted," he muses, "so why not let her have it...

...Olga's loyalty was purchased forever by a few pots of paint...

...But Sheed is not interested in generalizing about fortnightly or any other kind of journalism...

...His characters are constantly intruding their own half-perceived analytical self-summaries of circumstance...

...Even when they are rationalizing, his people transmit an uncanny demi-wisdom...

...Sheed is obviously a highly talented novelist with much of significance to say and a low-key, deceptive way of saying it...

...the transom, the wealthy dowager who wants to invade the drama column, the dwindling circulation of 21,000 subscribers and the "reputation that shrank a little every time a subscriber died...

...Brian Fine, who specializes in "pimple-sized worries," assumes initial command...

...And his plots, while they do not lack for events, move along less by action than by perceptions...

...Brian Fine, number two man who is convinced if he were only number one, oh he would do such things...

...He is not a story teller so much as a seer...

...Top man at The Outsider is the urbane but not glib (The Outsider trades in balanced opposites) Enlightened Liberal Englishman, Gilbert Twining, whose breadth if not his depth, is underestimated by a staff which is annoyed by his mannerisms and unmoved by his magazine, whose quality they have come to take for granted...

...When they stick their heads out, even if only for a few seconds, we learn something...

...and George Wren, who much to the discomfort of his wife has resigned a $13,-000 per year job with CBS for an assistant editor's post with The Outsider at seven-five...

...He has captured a milieu, created at least one outstandingly realized character (Twining), and, through his network of perceptions, made a meaningful and ironic statement not about quality journalism, the meaning of liberalism, editorial integrity or any of the other preoccupations of his characters-but about the relationship of etiquette to gaining power...

...Philo Sonnabend, the ineffectual advertising manager "whose breath smelled of failure...

...We meet, among others: Olga Marplate, the office manager and spinster with a heart of cookie crumbs and a cupboard full of gold...

...Fritz Tyler, dandyish and cynical ex-radical who believes that selling out is the price of success...