Books: Guidebook to a World

DANGER! KEEP OUT—Edward J. Nichols—Houghton Mifflin ($2.50).

To a large part of the world which reads books, the immense world which functions behind the high woven wire fences of U.S. industry is almost as cryptic as the canals on Mars. First-Novelist Edward J. Nichols makes that world so lucid, so human, so interesting, that Sinclair Lewis’ accolade seems none too generous: “I don’t know any other novel that gets so deeply into this new and battling way of living that we call Industrialism.”

The plant through whose intricacies Author Nichols guides the reader is an oil refinery in a suburb south of Chicago. The time is quietly crucial—1921-22—when new oil-cracking processes were first proving themselves. Author Nichols handles the change with so little progress ballyhoo, so little bitterness, so persuasively as a picture of individuals who are also industrial archetypes, that the story reaches beyond its own modesty into genuine pathos and touches the boundaries of tragicomedy.

Hugh Poor, superintendent of Pressure Stills, who had a certificate from grammar school, started with the company before 1900. Dr. M. F. Smarts, half his age, who had a chemical Ph.D., came in over his head as superintendent. Both men were profoundly embarrassed about the situation; both knew it was just and inevitable. They respected and rather liked each other; only the nervousness of General Manager Oscar Sayers made their first meeting difficult. The dialogue among these three is as perfectly calibrated as Lardner, and at least as historically illuminating.

George Heller was a first-rate craneman. The workers elected him to serve their interests when the Employee Representation Plan went into effect. As long as the demands were peripheral—more showers, new lockers, better air—the management came through generously. But when Heller’s electors hurried him into asking about wore pay, Sayers said, “I’m afraid you boys don’t see the problem whole.” George became sullen and remote; his work began to go sour. His own fireman called him a company man. When he asked about resigning from the Employee Plan, his superintendent said: “I’m overlooking this little trouble you had, but I expect you to stay on the committee.” And so on—no neater or fairer study of labor relations has been made. Author Nichols moves all over the plant. But the pivotal symbol of the book is Pressure Stillman Gus Hammer, in whom, as his stills and his lifetime’s skill become hopelessly outmoded, courage and dependability gradually degrade into sad, senile little tricks of sabotage, dangerously overambitious misjudgments of what a still bottom will bear. They have to pension Gus off two years before his time, and all he is good for is sitting down by the lake.

Author Nichols’ study of the curious marriages which men make with their jobs is gratifyingly unsentimental. He is not strong on “characters,” in the novelist’s traditional sense; but in his quiet, exact registration of the interdependence of men, of processes, of old and new traditions, he all but convinces one that “characters,” in that traditional sense, hardly exist in industry; that their human kind is changed even in its essence by the world they work in.

Danger! Keep Out is neither a great novel, nor a brilliant one, nor even an exhaustive one; it does not try to be. What it tries, it succeeds in admirably: it gives a mature, sensible, credible and moving picture of a well-known world that is little known in literature, a world that, more than any other, gives this century its characteristic shape.

The Author was born at Chicago Heights, Ill. in 1900 and spent most of his first 26 years in Whiting, Ind., an oil-refinery town. He worked at the refinery, studied at De Pauw, then commuted between his refinery job and the University of Chicago, where he took his B.A. Since 1928 he has taught English composition at Pennsylvania State College.