Books: Prophet of the Inner Onion

THE S-MAN (174 pp.)—Mark Caine—Houghton Mifflin ($3).

Freudian man, Marxian man, organization man, lifeman, gamesman and grey-flannel-suit man—what were they compared to the S-Man? Piglets to a python. In the diabolically clever guise of a self-help manual, The S-Man aims a good Swiftian kick at the cult and cultists of success. A British export, the book lacks the clubby good humor of Parkinson and Potter, substitutes instead the wittily barbed aphorisms of the success man’s ascent (“New friends are best friends”). Cocktail party Platos will find a host of new S-Man concepts, including the Inhibition Barrier, the Law of Party Parity, and the Prostitute’s Fallacy (“A sign of stagnancy is to do the same thing again for the same amount of money”).

No signs of stagnancy are noticeable in the two up-and-rising Londoners who collaborated under the pseudonym Mark Caine. Tom Maschler, 27, who thought up the S-Man, is editor in chief of the venerable publishing firm of Jonathan Cape. Frederic Raphael, who wrote most of the book, is a film and TV scriptwriter and author of a successful novel, The Limits of Love, due for April publication in the U.S.

Bankrupt Piggy Bank. What separates the S-Man from the F-Man, or failure, is that he has rocketed through the Inhibition Barrier—a mental obstacle consisting of outmoded ethical principles by which the F-Man limits himself. The F-Man believes “that virtue is its own reward, that a man’s word is his bond, that money isn’t everything. The failure wishes to be credited with good marks for each little deed. He regards his career as a kind of piggy bank. At the end of a lifetime he breaks open the piggy bank and finds that there is less in it than there was when he started.”

The S-Man, on the other hand, puts far less reliance on talent than on tactics: “The man of talent is limited by the fact that his talent is for something. The S-man has no such limitation, since he has no specific talent.” But to get to the top, the S-Man must meet the men at the top. Crashing exclusive parties is one method. In tuxedos, all men are equal. The Law of Party Parity prevails: “Anyone whom you meet at a party will automatically and without question assume your right to be there and your equal status with himself.” In ingratiating himself with influential acquaintances, the S-Man invariably tries to be of service. He lives by the Principle of the Artificial Sacrifice. “The S-Man will give the coat off his back, provided he has another underneath it and he got them both wholesale.”

Once he has a foothold in a business firm, the born S-Man learns to organize. This will enable him “to blame others for his own mistakes.” The S-Man always has inside stories. He always knows “who is sleeping with whom. Inside every large onion, innumerable smaller and inner onions are waiting to be revealed. You are the prophet of the inner onion.” The best road to the top “is often a zigzag—from one competitor to another and back again. Never be ashamed of rejoining your old firm if the salary is right: what a pleasure it is to be among old friends again!”

No Home Cooking. The success is known “by the company that keeps him.” The most significant part of that company is the idea man, the resident genius. Fortunately, the man of genius is both gullible and tractable: “When a success drops back to lend the genius a helping hand—and offers, for the sake of simplicity, to go fifty-fifty for life—it looks an act of unparalleled generosity. It never occurs to the genius that he is entitled to more than 50% of himself. Don’t shout at him or utter threats or tell him who’s boss; you want your genius happy. The genius has the imagination to make himself your slave. His fears are far greater than anything you can instill into him.”

For the S-Man, “love is out” and so is early marriage (“A taste for home cooking has been the death of many a good man”). Since, in the S-Man’s life, “nothing is for its own sake,” sex is merely another tactic: “He charges every business relationship with an intangible electricity which others reserve for their most private and most deeply experienced moments. To the success all sexual relations are business and all business relations are sexual.”

And so, loveless and friendless, the S-Man completes his “lonely odyssey.” Deadpanned and often deadeyed, Maschler and Raphael offer a devastating if somewhat fanciful critique of modern non-ethics. The only overt moral judgment is in the pseudonym itself, with its implication that the S-Man is his brother’s killer.