The Drumbeatniks

Maybe there are a lot of incompetent hangers-on who only want a place to come every day to sit around and wear nice clothes and act like big shots . .. But the ones that people don't think about very much are . . . doing things like helping the government, or guiding some great charity, or just quietly and competently guiding the destiny of a great company . . . that honestly and intelligently and faithfully advertises sound products to people who are glad to know about them. And that, after all, is what makes the economy go around.

The speaker is referring to the advertising business and is himself one of Manhattan's peons of praise--a little adman who wants to become a big adman. He is the main character of A Twist of Lemon (Doubleday; $3.95), a Madison Avenue novel by Adman (Dancer-Fitzgerald-Sample, Inc.) Edward Stephens, who writes in a style that is alternately arch and fallen arch. But Author Stephens' protagonist would instantly be on knife-in-the-back, wife-in-the sack terms with the huckster-heroes of half a dozen other new novels. The salient feature of this season's supply of advertising and public-relations fiction, all written more or less from the inside, is that people, plots and other parts are virtually interchangeable. If ad fiction can become plentiful and anesthetic enough, it may yet rival science fiction: the bug-eyed monsters will be replaced by tyrannical clients, the clean-cut spacemen by bright-eyed space-buyers, and the half-dressed blondes by other half-dressed blondes.

In 1946, when Novelist Frederic Wakeman sent Adman Victor Norman into the high-salary altitudes of The Hucksters, he let his man enjoy the big, bad money for a while, then shot him down in a barrage of hack-ack. But the new heroes do not come to bad ends. They are drumbeatniks who brood during a few drinks about the morality of what they are doing, then get over it. Author Stephens' hero, for instance, guiltily grows an ulcer after he rings in an infected blood sample in the yearly Wassermann test the agency requires his boss to take. He also gets the boss's job, and at the fable's end looks forward to an old age of health and wealth. Other new reading matter for the 6:05 to Westport:

THE ADMEN (Simon & Schuster; $4] is a sadly unsatiric novel by Satirist Shepherd Mead, onetime vice president of Benton & Bowles, who was wackily horrifying about the pitchman's trade in The Big Ball of Wax. This time the author does not try for laughs, instead achieves a notable first: a novel whose characters will have to be deepened before they are translated to the screen.

PAX (Random House; $3.95) bears the pseudonym Middleton Kiefer on the front, on the back helpfully lifts the disguise: the author is a committee, Harry Middleton and Warren Kiefer, onetime P.R. men for the drug firm Chas. Pfizer & Co. Writing at double strength, they achieve one of the most moving scenes of nobility in defeat since The Song of Roland. Pressagent Joe Logan has corrupted a war hero and seduced his fiancee while boosting a dangerous new tranquilizer; he is about to ditch his boss as a Senate committee begins to ask unpleasant questions. But the sight of his employer cruelly beset by Senators is too much. Logan's cry, as he unsheathes his blowgun and prepares to stand off the foe: "The little son of a bitch is going to need help."

A REALLY SINCERE GUY (McKay; $4), by Robert Van Riper, public-relations director of N. W. Ayer & Son's Philadelphia office, poses a puzzler: Can a publicity man who believes in low tariffs find happiness with a client who wants him to tout high tariffs? Van Riper's idealogue finds happiness for a while with a yummy girl reporter from a newsmagazine, finally goes back to his wife and the dream of all P.R. men: a nice little agency of his own, with clients who tariff low, pay high.

THE DETROITERS (Houghton Mifflin; $3.95), by Harold Livingston, formerly of Detroit's D. P. Brother & Co., tells of the intrepid admen whose clients are the shaggy, beady-eyed aurochs of the auto industry. It offers a notable addition to the stream-of-consciousness technique ("If I left now, with no notice, they'd be in a terrible mess' ... Just thinking about it, he could hear Jack Reynolds' ulcer dripping on the floor"), winds up with the same old fadeout: hero and buddy in a rose-covered ad agency of their own.

THE INSIDER (Holt; $3.95), by James Kelly, a vice president of Ellington & Co., stands out amid other ad fiction like a short man in a roomful of midgets. The story of an evilly empty man's decline, fall and ironic resurrection is told thoughtfully, and is worth reading. The author's language is sometimes pretentious, but it is several grades better than that of the other ad fictioneers, who evidently do not have enough word power left over after churning out all those ads.

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