Breakage on Brattle Street

WE HAPPY FEW (345 pp.)--Helen Howe--Simon & Schuster ($2.75).

The title refers, in irony, to a select circle of the prewar Harvard faculty, to which the heroine is hostess; the novel exhibits the breakdown of 1) the principle of selection, 2) the circle, and 3) the hostess. Miss Howe (sister of radio commentator Quincy Howe, daughter of Mark De Wolfe Howe) works a modest claim in territory on which J. P. Marquand had an option. Her ear is attentive, though incapable of his flights of parody; her knowledge of Boston, Cambridge and Harvard politics is sharp and sometimes subtle; her style is firm, though it would have been firmer to reject a few cliches: metaphors involving roots and tides appear regularly at big moments. All the big moments that could be expected are supplied.

Dorothea Natwick in 1923 plays tennis and flirts with a young libertine, falls in love with a stalwart Progressive from Idaho, and decides to marry the scholarly son of a proud Boston family. The Natwicks, far advanced in airy snobbery, give their clever daughter away at a barn party. Seventeen years later Dorothea's beauty is at its height; she presides over half the gracious living in Cambridge and, at its heart, entertains The Little Group of faculty intellectuals.

Novelist Howe's satire is not the final criticism of higher learning in the U.S., but it has its sting. Harvardmen will recognize the traits and the chatter. The Master of "Bromfield House," who enters on a card each new pun he divines in Finnegans Wake; the English department poet whose looks at least were once Keatsian; the Fogg Art Museum curator and his inseparable friends, young men of debonair malice; the publicity-seeking psychologist from the Midwest and his wife, resolutely unrepressed; and Dorothea's husband, John Calcott, a gentleman. Calcott, always well under control, stuns Dorothea in 1940 by coming to life and joining the British Navy.

Like other rough mysteries, war is something the wits of The Little Group would prefer to skim or skip. When it comes, some of them foam with the "war hysteria" they used to deride. Their self-assured little world, fissured anyway with snobberies, jealousies and plots, goes to pieces. As Harvard overflows with V-12s in training, Dorothea's libertine of 1923 shows up rich and flashy in a Navy uniform. As the ensuing chapters unreel, the reader may think that Miss Howe's heroine is being loaded with the wartime experiences of a dozen women rather than one, but plenty of women felt that way about themselves.

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