Moral Appeaser

THE WHOLE HEART--Helen Howe--Simon & Schuster ($2.50).

The Whole Heart by Helen Howe may sound like a mild fit of coughing but is, in fact, a remarkable first novel. Dedicated to the proposition that half a conscience is worse than none at all, it is an excruciating story of "the typical Anglo-Saxon" and of four women who loved him--a story told entirely in terms of their letters and diaries. It is by turns howlingly funny, shrewd, sinister, ferocious, painful with the pain of a fluctuating personality.

It is also a disappointment. For Miss Howe, a ranking monologuist, brings into fiction both the virtues and the faults of her art. She has a fine ear for the devilish ironies and self-betrayals of normal speech (or writing), and her whole book is nervous and vivid with them. But she has also the monologuist's weakness for overemphasis, for sacrificing psychological integrity in favor of a laugh or a sniff. Even so, The Whole Heart is an impressive, realistic piece of work.

Domestic Munichman. Jim Hurd was a poor relation of the Boston Leveretts. He had pride of poverty, a New England conscience, considerable talent, a gauche attractiveness to women, a fundamental moral feebleness. He was always deeply attached to his mother.

As he emerged from World War I, Jim seemed capable of great things. William Lyon Phelps led the reviewers' chorus in praising his first novel, Young Glory. Hurd was perplexed between the rich advances offered him by Publisher H. H. Ramsay and more modest prospects which would make serious writing possible. Ramsay's brash, glittering daughter Barbara attracted him. When she turned him down, he ran to his second cousin Mary for comfort, mistook his infantilism for love, deceived Mary to boot. He married Barbara. Mary moved into spinsterhood, scientific work and philanthropy, became in the end an impressive woman.

Barbara's turn lasted nearly 20 years while Jim, as a Hollywood writer, galloped downhill from glory to glory. Barbara, at length, began to enjoy herself with the one really spurious character in the book, an opportunistic stallion of a Russian painter, whose sudden death landed her in a shrewdly described sanatorium. There she learned enough about herself and her husband to win the reader's sympathy.

Jim Hurd, unable to forgive his wife her lover, took a mistress named Constance Field, whose letters are perhaps the best thing in the novel. They began with the noisome clatter, wit, self-love and tinny ribaldry of an avid young female intellectual. They moved toward maturity and then into a hell soon matched by the hell Authoress Howe constructs for her hero.

Jim Kurd's hell was his confusion of conscience and cowardice. He was too cowardly to try again with his wife or even to admit sympathy for her; too cowardly to ask her to divorce him; too cowardly to admit to himself that Constance had anything to do with his desire for divorce; too cowardly to break the news, when Barbara did divorce him, to their daughter; too cowardly, finally, to marry Constance when that became possible. In his misery he found a return to the womb--a girl named Briggsy.

No Place Like Home. Briggsy was a horrifying bowser of a Bryn Mawr graduate--a Philadelphia Main Liner, piddler in photography, a breeder of Scottish terriers. Briggsy was abetted by her Ma and Pa, who lined Jimbo-Jumbo's "den" with photographs of clipper ships; by her bouncing redheaded sisters, Franzie, Pollsie and Nellsie.

Jimbo-Jumbo, by now, was so important a news commentator--a man qualified to let everyone know that Germany would never attack Russia and that there was nothing to fear from Japan--that Ma and Pa could overlook his divorce. Briggsy took over everything that might disturb the great mind: his checkbook, his correspondence, the task of feeding his stomach ulcers their diet of hot milk every two hours.

Late in the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, Briggsy was writing a letter from the Leverett home #n Beacon Street. Jim had just received Back Bay's accolade in Symphony Hall, where he had spoken about "the pattern of freedom, the quality of integrity, and the brand of honor which have been yours--and mine." He was out for a bitter, retrospective walk along the Esplanade, where he and Mary, 20 years ago, had seen his future so clearly, when Briggsy concluded:

"I must stop and get busy about making out a Christmas list which I haven't even thought of yet. Isn't this always the most hectic time of the entire year?"

The Author is the sister of CBS News Commentator Quincy Howe. Boston-born, she left Radcliffe after a year for dramatic study in Paris. She has delivered her monologues (typical subjects: a girls' college talk on personal hygiene; a leader of amateur madrigal singers) in London, the White House, many theaters and universities.

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