Uninhibited Ha-Ha

I AM THINKING OF MY DARLING--Vincent McHugh -- Simon & Schuster ($2.50).

This book is a light fantastic case his tory of the hlehhana epidemic which swept Manhattan in an unnamed year, made everybody uninhibited and hence happy. It is also the history of unsmiling Jim Rowan, Acting Commissioner of New York's Department of City Planning, who had to cope with the public and private consequences of the euphoric disaster.

The outbreak began one February. Suddenly everybody started laughing. Grinning millions walked out on their jobs. At Pennsylvania Station a train announcer bawled: "Express leaving for Mayaguana, Mozambique, Ambrizette, Mossamedes, and Sebastian Viscaine Bay." Men left their wives in droves. Narcissism, nymphomania, necking became general.

On Fifth Avenue, men wore what they wanted: house slippers and hunting jack ets, overalls, bathing trunks, mandarin robes. Columnist Lucius Beebe appeared in front of De Pinna's garbed in lilac butler's livery.

Giggling Proletariat. Cinema houses stopped charging admission. At bars, all drinks were on the house. At banks, tellers gave away packs of $100 bills. Free love was freer than ever. The Mayor resigned to play with toy electric trains.

Doctors diagnosed this "mass psychoneurosis" as the result of a Caribbean malady, hlehhana, "the happy or laughing disease." Its symptoms were happiness, "ridiculous self-confidence," irresponsibility.

But the effects of happiness on Manhattan were catastrophic. Cops and firemen gaily abandoned night sticks and fire hoses to be pursued by blonde maenads. As the proletariat began to giggle and desert its jobs, subways, trains, busses, elevateds and elevators stopped running. Lights blinked and went out. Since gravity was found to be almost as essential to the flow of food as to the flow of water, famine threatened.

Humming in a Helmet. At this point, Acting Commissioner of City Planning Jim Rowan returned from lobbying in Washington. Rowan had reason to be grim. His beautiful actress wife, Niobe, had contracted hlehhana and had left him. She also left a note: "I feel perfectly humming and I haven't had anything. Not a drop. So I'm going right out to do all the other things I've always wanted to do, and God knows when I'll be back. The ice cream is in the oven."

The chase after Niobe was almost as tough for Jim as stamping out happiness. Once Jim saw Niobe wearing a tropical helmet and dancing third from the end with the famed Music Hall Rockettes. In the New York Times he found a one-line personal notice from her which said:

MILTON AVEUGLE DICTA NT 'LE PARADIS PERDU' A SES FILLES. Jim finally located Niobe in the 42nd Street Library copying Munkacsy's painting of Milton in his blindness dictating to his daughters. She got away. Next time Niobe turned up was at memorial cervices for Bloodgood H. Cutter, "the Long Island Farmer Poet." As Mrs. Bertha K. Hollings of Butte, Mont., she said a few words in honor of Cutter's memory, ran away when Jim chased her. Soon afterward she emerged as "Miss Sanderson," evangelist for the Society for the Preservation of Happiness.*

By then Rowan had caught hlehhana himself, had made love to four women, including his secretary. A cold wave cooled him off, along with Niobe and everybody else.

No doubt Author McHugh hopes that his readers will contract hlehhana from reading I Am Thinking of My Darling. Old McHugh hands may well laugh themselves sick. Others may surprise Author McHugh by developing a stubborn immunity to the laughing virus the longer they are exposed to this somewhat overlabored fantasy.

* Among its sponsors: Bandleaders' Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Louis Armsrong Muggsy Spanier.

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