Word: halseyisms
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...FOLKS AT HOME (275 pp.)-Margaret Halsey-Simon & Schuster...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...