What Price Groggle?

THE INTELLIGENT MAN'S GUIDE TO WOMEN (167 pp.)-Jane Whit bread & Vivian Cadden-Schuman ($3).

"The American man has high standards for everything but marriage. As long as his wife doesn't run off with another man, commit suicide, develop acute dementia praecox, or stab him with the carving knife, he considers his marriage reasonably successful. . . [The American woman] is frustrated, unfulfilled, humiliated, and bored by the routine existence that passes for family life in her native land. If Groggle doesn't change, she can only hope to get worse."

Who is Groggle? Groggle is the average U.S. male as drawn and quartered by a pair of onetime Vassar girls, Jane Whitbread and Vivian Cadden. Having cribbed their title, The Intelligent Man's Guide to Women, from a late, great male named Bernard Shaw,-Whitbread & Cadden also show glints of the Shavian gift for entertaining polemics.

Hot Desks & Melon Balls. Groggle spouts 20th Century attitudes, but seethes with Neanderthal prejudices. In the business world, he can stand dilettante competition from women who are "on the marriage-market." "But let a poor benighted female . . . get serious about working, and she is relegated to a class with Catherine de Medici, Lady Macbeth, Use Koch, and . . . accused of Lesbianism, a shortage of the female sex hormone, an arrested Oedipus complex, and of not being a natural mother."

Groggle is convinced that "if the American woman is headed straight for a mental hospital, it's pretty safe to conclude she took her first step in college." He wants to see more "education-for-mother-hood." This usually consists of "a series of housekeeping hints and a constant reiteration of the joyous fact that women can have babies-a proposition that most females in our culture catch on to before they are out of the sandbox."

Secretly, Groggle resents modern woman as a parasite who leads a push-button life of leisure while he slaves over a hot desk. "Actually, every laborsaving device of the past century has added to women's work ... A man invents a vacuum cleaner and ... a co-conspirator popularizes Venetian blinds, so there will be something else for the vacuum cleaner to do in a jiffy. A man turns out a simple little mechanism to make melon balls, and it's no longer comme il faut to toss a plain hunk of melon into a fruit salad ... In the period when beer came in kegs, the man of the house hauled it himself. Now that it comes in handy little cans, even a woman can lug a dozen from the delicatessen. The man who speeds by a woman, stopped by a flat tire, can't be accused of lack of chivalry. He knows that the way they make jacks these days, even a woman can change a tire."

Diapers & Antibiotics. As for the children, "there is a current impression that the diaper service takes complete charge of children until they are toilet trained, and the television set takes over from there on in." Since she obviously has nothing to do, Groggle feels that his wife should pack the combined sex appeal "of Lana Turner, Merle Oberon, his mother in a tinted tintype at eighteen, the latest magazine cover girl, and Miss Rheingold of 1951."

Groggle's own sex appeal is pretty low-wattage stuff. He "wolfs his sex" the way he bolts his food. ."It hardly matters to him whether [his wife] can work up any enthusiasm about it." When he isn't being a churl, Groggle is a clam. His conversational par for an evening is about five word-"No," "Hmmm?", "Oh," and "What's cooking?" "Some experts count 'What's cooking' as three words."

Culturally, Groggle is a fugitive from Tobacco Road. Mrs. Groggle finds it "hard to believe that he once had enthusiasms for Gilbert and Sullivan, Hemingway, Charlie Chaplin." The only enthusiasm of the mature Groggle is for a "twenty-thousand-dollar job before he's senile."

Groggle imagines that he protects the wife and kiddies. Actually, he doesn't even protect himself. It is done by "the Yale lock, the storm window, the policeman, the fireman, the telephone, the oil burner, the children's court, and antibiotics." He fancies he is passing on the wisdom of the race to his children. But in cold facts, he sees his children only 60 minutes a day and a few more on weekends. He does still bring home the bacon, or most of it, though it takes the dehydrated shape of a paycheck.

All that Mrs. Groggle asks of Mr. Groggle-according to Whitbread & Cadden-is that he do a long double-take on himself in a 20th Century mirror.

-And from his Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism.

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