Books: Help

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How TO HELP YOUR HUSBAND GET AHEAD (251 pp.)—Mrs. Dale Carnegie —Greystone ($3).

Even Dale Carnegie has a tendency to muff matters, when he should be winning friends; he forgets names. Fortunately for him, he has a wife who knows how to help. At parties, she jerks him up by saying: "Dale, you remember Mrs. Robinson. She was just telling me about Lake Louise." In How to Help Your Husband Get Ahead. Dorothy Carnegie fills 251 pages with similar tips. She has almost surely written a bestseller.*

The first thing a husband needs is enthusiasm. "The word . . . stems from the Greek and means . . . 'God-inspired.'" Husbands also need "building-up"("Praise his taste in ties") and constant reassurance (tell him "he's going to knock those buyers dead!"). The conviction that hubby is a roaring success must be maintained "at home, across the breakfast table, in bed." It must not be undermined by cracks. Never greet your husband with the words: "Well, how's the Boy Genius? Did you bring home any commissions? I suppose you know the rent is due next week?" Other ways to egg a man on: watch his "calorie intake." take him to a medical mechanic for a "regular 10,000-mile checkup," share his interests.

Wives who shrink from a round-the-clock application of Dorothy Carnegie's rules are given an example of the sort of man a non-Carnegie attitude produces: "Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the English poet." Coleridge had plenty of enthusiasm but no goal and presumably no checks on his calorie intake, no praise for his taste in ties. Consequently, he left much of his poetry "unfinished . . . dissipated his talents . . . lived in a world of unrealized dreams . . . was always on the verge of doing something and . . . never did it." Oddly enough, it is the image of Coleridge —dissipated, useless and lovable as a Thurber dog—that lingers in the mind long after Dorothy has finished with her tips.