Woman Satirist

Someone has remarked that the most dangerous man in America today is the man who goes to cocktail parties to listen. In the early forties Helen Howe was listening, and her novel about Cambridge people and their talk, "We Happy Few," has made the community uneasy ever since. Miss Howe is a small, bright-featured woman whose father is Mark A. DeWolfe Howe, and whose home-town is Boston. She has written enough novels to qualify as the "Jane Austen" of New England.

"We have a lot of writers in the family," Miss Howe said. "My brothers Mark and Quincy have published books, of course, and my mother wrote a novel anonymously. Those were days when ladies wouldn't have had their names connected with a novel. I feel a lot of sentiment at coming back here. When you're young it's natrual to want to break away from the place where you grow up. And you want to satirize the thing you known about."

After a year at Radcliffe, ("I've always wanted to come back for sophomore year.") Miss Howe went to Paris where she studied theatre under George Vitray. She married Reginald Allen, presently executive director of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, shortly after "We Happy Few" was published. They have lived in Hollywood, Maine, and New York--locales in which each of her novels, and the "Round of Parties" excerpted from them, take place.

"I haven't the faintest idea what it is like here in Cambridge now. When was it that "co-education" started? It's been practically twenty years since I wrote "We Happy Few" and the whole picture of the world has changed. The 'egghead' is so on the defensive now that I wouldn't want to write another book like it. 'Far be it from me...' you know."

The novel was simply a satire on intellectual pride, on people who pride themselves on being 'broad-minded' or 'liberal.' When it came out, I had sheaves of letters on my desk saying, 'How could you know it was like this at the University of Wisconsin or at, oh, Stanford?' I don't suppose that side of Cambridge has changed much: the 'sin of pride.' "

"Of course, I'm not really satirizing a place. My novels deal with a frame of mind and a certain social strata. A female satirist has a difficult row to hoe, because if you are too nasty, people think you are a five-letter word. Actually, I'm terribly torn as to where I fit in. There is an affirmative side to all my novels; I guess it's my Puritan tradition which makes my novels point a moral. Some people think I should do straight satire and are disappointed that the novels have this other aspect."

My monologues have had an influence on my dialogue situations. These were wonderful discipline. At the Blue Angel you have to compete with conversation and drunks and there could simply be no let up; there just had to be a laugh a line. One of the most wonderful things was touring for 'Community Concerts' and doing my monologues. I went stumping all over the country with them and we even performed at the White House and in London. 'A Round of Parties' is something of a departure for me. Essentially, it combines the elements of both the monologues and the novels."

One of the problems a satirist has is that she is always accused of writing about people she knows. My last novel, Fires of Autumn, is about a tiny Maine community very much like the one in which we stay during the summer. It's a lot gentler than my earlier novels and now I find all these ladies who are resentful because they can't find themselves in it. One of them will come up to me and say, 'I know somebody who knows who every single character in your book is supposed to be.' "

"I'm tremendously interested in my husband's work with the Lincoln Center, although I don't have anything officially to do with it. At moments I'm wistful about the fact that I'm not a member of any literary circle, but then I think that in leading a perfectly normal life I probably get a perspective that I probably wouldn't get otherwise." Whereupon, we took leave of the most dangerous woman in America today.