God & Mammon

THE FOLKS AT HOME (275 pp.)--Margaret Halsey--Simon & Schuster ($3).

Margaret Halsey was 28 when her best-selling assault on the British way of life, With Malice Toward Some (TIME, Aug. 28, 1938), swept her into realization of "the American Dream--the sudden, juicy, delicious, enthralling, entrancing, exhilarating acquisition of money." "Between Sunday night and Monday morning" she became a well-to-do celebrity, all set to hurl herself into the "national pastime" of "having things nice." "I had people in to dinner, and I had a maid to cook the dinner ... I got a divorce, which is standard. I went to a psychoanalyst--which is standard, too." In a few more years, said her friends, Margaret would be safe in Hollywood's bosom, having things nicer than ever.

The friends were wrong. Author Halsey was not (as she herself well knew) a professional writer. She was simply a talented amateur who had stumbled on pay dirt. While the lucky lucre trickled from her purse, her typewriter stood shrouded and mute. Melted soon were the impeccable makeup, the eye shadow and mascara of "gracious living." Today Author Halsey is happily remarried and the mother of a four-year-old daughter. She is, by her own description, a middle-class mamma who "wears cotton shirts and blue jeans to everything but weddings, christenings and funerals." She turns a deaf ear to the clang of falling shekels. Being well-to-do has convinced her that The Dream is pure nightmare.

Her new book is a dissertation on this theme. It wears much of the smooth make-up that made Malice a bestseller, with the difference that it reveals underneath a very agitated face. It is 100% American in that it is written with a high ideal in the right hand and a wisecrack in the left--each serving as something of an apology for the other. It is inspired by deep emotions which often result in intellectual pratfalls.

The average American, Author Halsey believes, is a double man. Thanks to his nation's moral traditions, the American is still taught as a child "the Judeo-Christian ethic" of "yieldingness, generosity, sympathy, altruism, tenderness." Then the morally instructed child grows into a businessman to whom "aggression, competitiveness and skepticism" are represented as the only ways of "being on the ball" and "going places." During working hours, the businessman plays to the hilt the role of the "smooth operator." Evenings and weekends, he attempts to revert to the honest, kindly role of principled Christian and loving father.

The result, says Author Halsey, is spiritual and psychological confusion. Aggressiveness "cannot be eluded merely by putting on a hat and walking away." When the businessman leaves his office, he takes with him a sinister self that has no place to go. At worst, he becomes savage and cynical; at best, he swells the ranks of those who "smoke too much, eat too much, drink too much . . . marry too much, take too many sleeping pills and drive too fast."

Author Halsey's arguments are often narrow and sometimes absurd. She writes, in fact, as if the split between God and Mammon had not plagued man from the beginning. Nonetheless, her book is the work of an earnest armchair moralist with an honored American tradition behind her. If, as is very likely, The Folks at Home puts Author Halsey back into the moneymaking nightmare, it will be because she has laid a tremulous but honest finger on a national nerve.

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