Green Goods & Grey Men

POWERS OF ATTORNEY by Louis Auchincloss. 280 pages. Houghfon Mifflin. $4.50.

The suspicion that lawyers are not as other men will be deepened rather than dispelled by Author-Lawyer Louis Auchincloss' twelve stories about Tower, Tilney & Webb, a great New York law firm. Auchincloss has become a habitual bestseller with his tales and novels (The Injustice Collectors') about the hereditary rich and the lawyers who themselves become rich by helping the rich stay that way. His current stories are about a specialized tribe within the specialized race--the grey men who deal in "green goods" (securities), and the sharpies who can reduce the tax bite to a friendly nip.

All the characters at Tower, Tilney & Webb, from Senior Partner Clitus Tilney down to the most recent ex-editor of the Yale Law Journal, regard it as the summit of human felicity to be senior partner of Tower, Tilney & Webb. All the behavior of all the characters, even to their manner of dress and the way their hair grows (thick for the comers, sparse, long, oily or fluffy for the outsiders and no-hopers), centers on this notion. Their private life is spent among other lawyers and their wives. They move by the tropisms of power and fear in a world of reaching hands and rapped knuckles.

In terms of this barren pettifoggery, Auchincloss works out a dozen neat but wholly unreal fictional theorems. They are good stories in the sense that the recognizable counters are moved to the appropriate squares. Lawyer A from Yale, with the dark tie and thick short hair, goes one up (associate to partner), B from Columbia, with the silvery tie and slick hair, goes down and out. And so the game goes on down Wall Street, with imaginary ladders and real snakes.

The bleak and repellent egotism of the Auchincloss characters can only be based on the primitive assumptions about human nature that are made in a court of law, where it is weirdly believed that intricate psychological matters may be accounted for in answers to questions asked by a total stranger. It may be sound law, but it is fictional malpractice. However, Louis Auchincloss may be profitably read for a glimpse of law's expensive mystery. It is seldom that the layman gets a chance to improve his knowledge of legal matters for as little as $4.50.

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