Volume 5, Number 10 · December 23, 1965
This Happy Breed
By Jean Stafford
The Gentle Americans
by Helen Howe
Harper & Row, 250 pp., $6.95
At some point in her long, generally agreeable ramble through a Boston that no longer exists, Helen Howe causes a casual and inessential passerby from New York to speak of the 'drapes' at the windows of Mark Howe's flat on Louisburg Square, and she says, chidingly, 'Gentle Americans never used the word drapes. Curtains hung in the windows.' This assumption that it is the prerogative of well-connected parishioners of Trinity Church and subscribers to the Athenaeum to know that curtains are not drapes and a house is not a home is a dumb blunder, and it is a shame because it very nearly has the effect of one bad apple in a bushelful of pippins. Up to that point, the ultramontane reader has not been conscious of being underprivileged, but afterward self-doubts arise and he wonders if he shouldn't have been squirming all along. But if it is possible to rise above the gratuitous rebuke, he will be charmed and envious of a modus vivendi that now is history.
Review, 1058 words
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