DOUBLE LIVES
Robertson, Priscilla
Double Lives The Organization Man, by William H. Whyte, Jr. Simon and Schuster. 429 pp. $5. The Crack in the Picture Window, by John Keats. Houghton Mifflin. 196 pp. $3. A Surfeit of Honey, by...
...Whyte believes most people are going to have to work in big organizations, but that they should yield as little as possible to their encroaching demands—a difficult prescription because such resistance can only be a qualified, not a categorical duty...
...The heads of big organizations, he says, are still the brilliant and contrary individualists of an earlier generation who could probably not pass today's screening...
...Russell Lynes, in A Surfeit of Honey, takes some of these free souls apart by calling them Upper Bohemians and relentlessly exposing their status symbols...
...Incidentally, he thinks it woulcf invigorate the organizations themselves, which need more inner light...
...He can conceal them from the prying personnel departments that want normalcy in the service of the great organizations which dominate our society...
...in The Organization Man William H. Whyte does something about it, beginning with his already famous appendix telling how to cheat on personality tests...
...Most big decisions are made by groups, and unanimity becomes an end in itself...
...Even Whyte might think this was making resistance too romantic...
...We watch a fictional couple, John and Mary Drone, become entangled in debt, false promises, empty social life, and unrealistic dreams...
...The "resistance" in this case is personified in a couple named Adam and Eve Wild, who occasionally shut the door on their neighbors, collect junk in the back yard instead of keeping up with the lawnmower, who kiss with embarrassing warmth, and from whose windows wafts the smell of freshly baked bread (instead of cake mixes) and even of oil paints...
...As for the U. B.'s, the problem posed for them is where can they retreat now...
...140 pp...
...Resistance to The Organization is what Whyte would like to see, pjgj...
...Freud said that when public knowledge grew to such a point that everyone knew his defenses would be shown up for what they were, people would have to face plain reality, and he predicted a healthier life when this should come about...
...Lynes, lives by status symbols, and the country is organized into separate social pyramids depending on whether one is after Cadillacs, academic degrees, or government appointments...
...The problem of Whyte's book is one we all need to worry about...
...Here again Whyte shows the double face which life presents to these people, who are often as grateful for having sociability and responsibility brought out as they are angry at not being able to get away from other people, to cultivate private interests, or to cherish opinions beyond the rather wide tolerance of the group...
...In order to select men to whom unanimity will come easy, modern organizations rely on personality tests—multiple choice questionnaires where testers insist there are no "wrong answers," yet where a wrong "profile" can crush one's career...
...Armed with these charming instructions, anyone can conceal not only his Oedipus complex but his interest in truth and his sensitivity to beauty...
...Surely Keats must have picked the worst types of real estate practice and empty-headed tenants, yet his documentation is sufficient to show that his examples, though selected, are not falsified...
...After all, The Organization is not itself evil, it is merely presumptuous and stifling...
...Once categorized, somehow a status symbol loses its appeal...
...It is from such agony, nevertheless, that Whyte believes a new moral climate may come forth...
...A Surfeit of Honey, by Russell Lynes...
...In the somewhat lower grade suburb depicted in John Keats' The Crack in the Picture Window, no one is grateful for anything...
...Keats' book is savagely indignant...
...Its face of genuine beneficence shows in country clubs and pensions, in the promise of well-roundedness and of group decisions...
...Whyte's is important...
...Of course people exist in this country who would scorn to live in mass housing or to work for big organizations...
...Lynes' is witty and Upper Bohemian...
...Everyone, to Mr...
...Harper...
...cooperativeness is one form of virtue, and the choice between it and righteous self-assertion may be agonizing...
...The last section of Whyte's book deals with home life in a mass-produced suburb where many young organization men live and develop their own schools, churches, and political groups...
...These organizations, primarily business, but also governmental, military, and academic, have almost unconsciously adopted the thesis, says Whyte, that the most important quality a man can have is the ability to get along with the team...
...One imagines that friends of Upper Bohemians are reading this book with wicked pleasure...
...Reviewed by Priscilla Robertson EVERYONE talks about non-conformity...
...marily because he believes in indivifl| uals...
Vol. 21 • April 1957 • No. 4
