Stepmother Country

WITH MALICE TOWARD SOME--Margaret Halsey--Simon & Schuster ($2.50).

U. S. readers are used to Englishmen's relentless output of travel books about the U. S. But for an American to write a travel book about England is still a novelty. Wife of a Ph.D. (brother of Publisher Richard Simon) who spent a year in England on an exchange professorship, 28-year-old Margaret Halsey has added enough wisecracks to make her novelty also a likely bestseller. Divested of wisecracks, Author Halsey's English impressions are surprisingly charitable -- kinder than most English impressions of the U. S., kinder than Peggy Bacon's illustrations, and much kinder than the satire with which young English writers them selves hammer away at their gentry.

In the ''stepmother country'' she found that the worst thing was "the boneless quality of English conversation . . . like watching people play first-class tennis with imaginary balls.'' But it saved Author Halsey from feeling inferior. English weather, about which most conversation revolved, made her think "I was going to grow a coating of moss on the north side." but she liked the green countryside. She ridiculed the diminutive look of England (''the locomotives are only about thirty-four inches around the bust"), but came to like the homey atmosphere it gave. Oppressed by ''that death-in-life which the Britons . . . like to call English reserve," she nevertheless liked its complement, "the cream-of-mushroom-soup texture" of English leisureliness. And reserved children, after her friends' progressive-school brats, were a relief.

English snobbery made her fume, but she later decided a rigid caste system had the good result of making modest-income people immune to success stories, and hence to U. S. "bootstrap hysteria." "A good deal in England makes the blood boil," says Author Halsey, "but there is not nearly so much occasion as there is in America for blood to run cold"--meaning lynchings, gangsters, etc. As between good and bad Englishness, Author Halsey calls it about a draw. "Living in England," she concludes, "must be like being married to a stupid but exquisitely beautiful wife. Whenever you have definitely made up your mind to send her to a home for morons, she turns her heart-stopping profile and you are unstrung and victimized again."

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