Shoddy Merchandise

THE GILDED HEARSE (246 pp.)--Charles O. Gorham--Creative Age ($2.75).

Once upon a time Charles O. Gorham was publicity chief of the biggest U.S. book publisher (Doubleday). Now he has set out to do for the publishing business what Frederic Wakeman has done for the "hucksters." The result is The Gilded Hearse, a novel which Doubleday is not publishing.

It tells the story of Richard Styles Eliot, publicity whiz for Publishers Hutchinson, Inc.,* "a perfectly authentic young-man-on-the-way-up, with all the trimmings: insomnia, a nice apartment on the correct street, seven suits, and the urge to leave his wife." His boss believed that "books are merchandise, like soap or toothpaste or fountain pens." Dick Eliot felt cheap and dishonest, but he was also a social climber with his eye on a social-register widow. So he promoted trash and got himself a nice raise.

The Gilded Hearse is the story of one day in the life of Publicity Man Eliot. It happens to be the day in 1938 that the Munich Pact was signed, but the stunt of employing momentous events as a backdrop for Eliot's neurotic strivings for cheap success never comes off. To bring it off requires more than making a character tune in on the depressing broadcasts of that day every few pages and glibly crediting the hero with a "premonition of shapeless disaster."

As an indictment of the book business, The Gilded Hearse is neither good burlesque nor significant exposure. Few readers will be surprised to learn that book salesmen often haven't read the books they sell, that salesgirls in bookstores are often dumb, that book publishers are increasingly less concerned with literature than with bestsellers. Those with the kind of taste that Gorham deplores will be quickest to see that The Gilded Hearse is just superficial enough, spiced with just enough bedroom business, to make it a likely Hutchinson book.

* Not to be confused with Hutchinson & Co., Ltd., a large London publisher.

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