02/02/98 BEFORE BABBITT

BEFORE BABBITT

IF I WERE BOSS
The Early Business Stories of Sinclair Lewis
Edited by Anthony Di Renzo
Southern Illinois University Press
363pp $39.95 cloth/$19.95 paper

Long before the success of Main Street and Babbitt, Sinclair Lewis augmented his income as a copywriter and journalist by producing a stream of short stories featuring the salesmen and company managers that would fascinate him throughout his career. Although written from 1915 to 1921, the tales brought together in If I Were Boss: The Early Business Stories of Sinclair Lewis are startlingly relevant to Corporate America in the '90s.
Anyone who has ever worked behind a desk will recognize the bullies, quislings, and assorted other characters that people this collection. There's R. Chester Doremus, M.D., a Machiavellian schemer who, in the tale called ''The Whisperer,'' poisons the harmonious climate of Bowen Drug Manufacturing Co. with innuendo, gossip, and outright slander. There's Whittier J. Small, the office manager in ''Commutation: $9.17'' who tries to mask his insecurities by terrorizing clerks and secretaries. And, in the title story, there's Charley McClure, who starts out as an iconoclastic youth shoving his way into upper management, then becomes part of the next generation of entrenched bureaucracy.
It's clear in these early stories, which originally appeared in such magazines as The Saturday Evening Post and Metropolitan, that Lewis is still learning his craft. Many characters lack depth and individuality. Lancelot Todd, the loathsome advertising man who appears in four of these tales, is unchanging in his vileness. Other selections are marred by Lewis' own biases. Like Americans in general, he's deeply ambivalent about Big Business and the culture of free enterprise. In Lewis' world, everyone strives for success, but it comes at the expense of one's soul, while failure usually befalls the good guys.
Still, these stories tackle issues, particularly the dehumanizing effects of commercial life, that Lewis would develop in later works. Take Valory, the bank teller in ''Bronze Bars'' who, at age 33, has spent a decade in a tiny cage at the Palladium Savings Bank. His work has turned him into little more than a piece of office equipment, a sort of human ATM. Into this bleak world comes a new customer, a woman he knows only by account number and has seen only from the waist up from the confines of his window: ''Account 112,761 was the one person who invariably stood out of the drab, preoccupied line creeping past him...the one person who understood that he wasn't a mechanical device, an accessory to the adding machine and the change counter.''
A few stories are forward-looking. Nancy Arroford, an executive in ''A Story with a Happy Ending,'' faces sexism on the job decades before anyone called it that. Professor Tonson, a charlatan cult leader in ''Nature, Inc.'' who advocates the simple life while getting rich off his followers' donations, sounds uncannily like a New Age guru. All in all, this collection offers a fascinating glimpse into office life at the dawn of the business age. To most readers, it will be a surprisingly familiar place.
By MARY KUNTZ