Love, Eh?

LOVE IN AMERICA--David L. Cohn--Simon & Schuster ($2).

When God made the Southern woman . . . He wrought with the gold and gleam of the stars, with the changing colors of the rainbow's hues and the pallid silver of the moon. He wrought with the crimson that swooned in the rose's ruby heart, and the snow that gleams on the lily's petals. Then glancing down into His own bosom He took of the love that gleamed there like pearls beneath the sun-kissed waves of the summer sea, and thrilling this love into the form He had fashioned, all heaven veiled its face, for lo, He had wrought the Southern girl. (Applause)

Southern oratory is not very impressive to David L. Cohn. Born in Mississippi, an alumnus of the Universities of Virginia and Yale, Cohn has explored the purlieus of American love "from living room, bedroom, and bathroom" to lovelorn columns and women's magazines. And he has reached the most jaundiced conclusions.

The American male, says Cohn, really dislikes women because 1) he was dominated by them in childhood and early youth, 2) "he vaguely suspects that they regard men as suckers," 3 ) he resents their stepping off their pedestals and competing with him in the vulgar world of offices and cocktail bars. Emotionally adolescent, eager to be mothered by his wife, the husband's place in the family is often that of an elder son. This status is encouraged by the women's press. "When a man weeps at the movies," drools the Ladies' Home Journal, "it means he's A-1 matrimonial material."*

Vain Bosses. American women are the victims of "endless competition" and their own vanity, are incapable of "spiritual submission to or harmony with a man." Usually pretty enough to afflict a visiting foreigner with the "buck ague," they rarely have enough character to be beautiful; they are their husbands' bosses, but are incapable of passion or intimacy.

Unlike Europeans, says Cohn, only four alternatives present themselves to an American couple whose marriage has run into obstacles: 1) "going home to Mamma," 2) "getting a divorce," 3) "getting tight," 4) "draping oneself on a psychoanalytical couch." Shocked by the trials of marriage, men &. women have turned for help to scientists and doctors. Sample findings:

> Dr. William Moulton Marston (Good Housekeeping) has found "that men are annoyed by women who leave hair in washbasins."

> Biologists "have discovered by experiments upon male guinea pigs that the seat of romance is in the hypothalamus"--which consequently should not be jarred.

> Dr. Ernest R. Groves of the University of North Carolina declares: "When to kiss, when to stop kissing, and when not to kiss are three of the most important . . . social problems today."

Old Bird Dogs. Cohn suggests that such findings are inadequate. American women, he believes, are hunting will-o'-the-wisps "with an energy, a resolve and a blatancy" that soon drives a predisposed, infantile husband to lose all interest in his home and accept his wife as he would "an old bird dog." To become adult in marital relations is not enough, says Cohn. Women must turn over a new public leaf. Instead of enthusing "for the missions of Namaqualand," they might pay some attention to "the essentials of local government." Instead of talking complacently about the glories of the U.S. educational system, women might "concern themselves with their community schools" and raise the pay of women teachers. They might also try to help marital problems at their youthful source, by supplying, in place of the "appalling hodge-podge of gossip, inanities, and ragtags of talk," the kind of mental nourishment that would help Junior and Junior Miss really to grow up some day.

The Author. David L. Cohn, 46, one-time national advertising manager of Sears, Roebuck, good friend of Sculptor Jacob Epstein, Dorothy Thompson, Sinclair Lewis and Rebecca West, is now a policy adviser with the British Information Service in Washington. He is a bachelor.

*To Cohn such an "unobstructed tear-duct lad" is more likely to be one of "the pinchers and garter-snappers of America." Says he: "Recently at a dinner in Washington, the conversation was suddenly stilled as a woman loudly said to the statesman who sat at her right, 'Hands on the table, Senator!' "

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