Evening star., 1946-07-07
OF SeIf-DeIuded
Snobs and Their
Fake Ideals
WE HAPPY FEW

6y HeteU HOIUe. tOHtO3t O
SchuSter;; S2.75.)
The theme of this novel is satire
of the American idealist. We have.
of course, a confusing number OF
strata of ideal professors in our
country; our national belief that
some ideal, any ideal, is always
better than none, leads all kinds of
entrepreneurs to avoW ideallstlc
ends, from soap box agitators to
great leaders of the land. Indeed, it
would probably be hard to find any
one working at anything outside a
manual trade who would not assure
you that he did it for the cause.
And there are numbers of gentry
who work it from the other end and
specialize in creating causes to the
end that they may have jobs and
sala Lewis took care
of them in Gideon Planish." Helen
Howe in this novel accomplishes a
remarkable thing. Though she deals
specifically with one particular
species of current idealist. she con-
trives to give her book such
spreading significance that, in sum,
it becomes an examination of the
whole national attitude toward
idealism. And her verdict is COM
pletely damning.
Her chosen species is the academic
idealist Of the rarefied subspecies
which f1ourishes in Eastern colleges.
Her scene, indeed, is Harvard and
and her clue is in her title-"We
Happy Few" Her characters are
group of faculty members and wives
who have no doubt at all that they
hold the viewpoint of ultimate en-
lightenment they are broad
minded, they loathe prejudice, they
are devoted to the arts, they look
admiringly to Europe as the seat of
the worlds culture, they are inter-
nationalists. they read the Nation.
Actually they are a bunch of
provincial little village snobs who
substitute a colonial Anglophilism
for any effort to know their own
country or countrymen They are
presented with a terrible realism
any one who has lived around an
American college or in any place
that has a closed corporation of
chosen spirits will recognize them.
At the same time, as I said, Miss
Howe throws her work into a higher
perspective and makes this type of
the self-deluded typical of our
whole galaxy of types. What she
says in effect is that Americans
have become afraid of straight
thinking. They have to run the
flag of an ideal up over whatever
they do-be it the most selfish and
hateful action. True idealiSm there
fore does not exactly flourish among
us.
She tells her story through the
case Of one of the faculty wives. She
is the product of consciously liberal
parents, she grows up as faculty
daughter in small New England
church school. sure that the most
amusing thing in life is to epater
the bourgeois. She marries a scion
of an old New England family who
follows his family tradition in
teaching at Harvard. In Cambridge
she forms the Little Group, the pre-
occupations of which are implicit in
its name.
Then comes the war and Harvard
is thrown into a comic dither about
what ideal is the proper one to!
eSpouse. Miss Howe is sometimes
close to magnificent in her disgust
at the embattled scholars and their
certainty that what pronuncia-
mentos are made in their scholarly
halls matter anywhere in the world.
Committees, banquets, broadcasts,
receptions of brilliant" refugees
all these come in for her heavy
gantly amid the academic Glamour.
contriving to get the spotlight on
her gracious figure whenever she
does anything connected with an
ideal.
She comes to grief at last. She
comes to grief in what is for her the
most painful manner-she is forced
to see how utterly unimportant and
provincial her happy few are. She
is forced to absorb little real edu-
cation, that is to say. after spend
ing 40 years in academic environ
ments. And there Miss Howe states
her moral. All of us, she says, all
of our American ideal worshipers
have been thinking of self rather
than the realities of the causes we
profess. To have an ideal has been
merely to be in fashion with us. and
we like to be in fashion. She writes
with merciless pen.