Foremother Poet: Phyllis McGinley (1905-78)

Phyllis McGinley when young

Dear friends and readers,

About two weeks ago now Wom-po seemed to flower with poetry by Phyllis McGinley: one member and then another and then another put a poem by McGinley on the list and people began to speak of how much they enjoyed her poems. I was one of them and now think it’s high time I devoted one foremother poet blog to Phyllis. First of all, Ginia Bellafante and all those who peg McGinley as more or less complacently in rapture with life as a middle class wife in the suburbs are wrong, in effect asking us to dismiss McGinley.

Read and consider these:

Evening Musicale

Candles. Red tulips, ninety cents the bunch.
          Two lions, Grade B. A newly tuned piano.
No cocktails, but a dubious kind of punch,
          Lukewarm and weak. A harp and a soprano.
The ‘Lullaby’ of Brahms. Somebody’s cousin
          From Forest Hills, addicted to the punch.
Two dozen gentlemen; ladies; three dozen,
          Earringed and powered. Sandwiches at one.

The ashtrays few, the ventilation meager.
          Shushes to great the late-arriving guest
Or quell the punch-bowl group. A young man eager
          To render ‘Daddy Deever’ by request.
And sixty people trying to relax
On little rented chairs with gilded backs.

Occupation: Housewife.

Her health is good. She owns to forty-one,
          Keeps her hair bright by vegetable rinses,
Has two well-nourished children — daughter and son —
          Just now away at school. Her house, with its chintzes
Expensively curtained, animates the caller.
          And she is fond of Early American glass
Stacked in an English breakfront somewhat taller
          Than her best friend’s. Last year she took a class

In modern drama at the County Center.
          Twice, on Good Friday, she’s heard _Parsifal_ sung.
She often says she might have been a painter,
          Or maybe writer; but she married young.
She diets. And with Contract she delays
The encroaching desolation of her days.

This anti-war lyric:

Ballad of Fine Days

All in the summery weather,
          To east and south and north,
The bombers fly together
          And the fighters squire them forth.

While the lilac bursts in flower
          And buttercups brim with gold
Hour by lethal hour
          Now fiercer buds unfold.

For the storms of springtime lessen,
          The meadow lures the bee,
And there blooms tonight in Essen
          What bloomed in Coventry

All in the summer weather,
          Fleeter than swallows fare,
The bombers fly together
          Through the innocent air.

*******************
McGinley’s social verse is social satire. McGinley became “the “bete noir” of feminists in the 1970s, because she was widely marketed and reviewed as against ambition: the title of her book was Sixpence in my Shoe (as bad as barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen), with satires on power, ambition, and making light of access to control of your income. She is presented as someone innocent of any understanding of say The Disinherited Family by
Eleanor Rathbone, a labor politician in the UK who said to allot
money to men as the heads of families assumes it makes it to the
wives and children and showed it didn’t.

McGinley certainly does reflect the world of the 1950s, but it is the one we can read about today in Anne Tyler’s The Amateur Marriage. Another of her books is The Diary of a Mad Housewife which can be aligned with a long tradition of such self-deprecating books — a latest one is Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary. But they may be taken very differently than celebratory — as in the way Alison Light dealt with Mrs Miniver in her Forever England.

More from the sonnet sequence called “Sonnets from Suburbia:”

Lending Library

Between the valentines and birthday greetings
With comical verses, midway of the aisle,
Here is a rendezvous, a place of meetings.
Foregathers here the lady bibliophile.
A dollar down has bought her membership
In this sorority. For three cents daily
Per paper-jacketed volume she can dip
Deep in Frank Yerby or Miss Temple Bailey,

Lug home the current choices of the Guild
(Commended by the press to flourish of trumpets),
Or rent a costume piece adroitly filled
With goings on of Restoration strumpets
And thus, well read, join in without arrears
The literary prattle of her peers.

Trapped women. The world Betty Friedan exposed. Her poems follow the vein of Dorothy Parker. And these show the second aspect of her verse held against her: her formalism, her penchant for rhyme and intricate stanza formations. Just not modern. Just not what men were doing — Annie Finch has shown us that women tend to like and use rhyme.

For example,

Song of the Underprivileged Child

Youngsters today need television for their morale as much as they need fresh air and sunshine for their health…It is practically impossible for boys and girls to “hold their own” with friends and schoolmates unless television is available to them. To have television is to be “cock o’ the walk.” Not to have it, well, that is unthinkable.—Angelo Patri in an advertisement of the American Television Dealers and Manufacturers in the Times.

Mother, my mouth is dimpled,
          Mother, my cheeks are pink.
There are stars in my eyes
From exercise
          And the vitamined juice I drink.
My way is a winning way, Mother,
          My manners a hundred proof,
But I’ll never be Queen of the May, Mother—
          No aerial’s on our roof.

We have no Console Model
          For viewing of Imogene,
No Super-Precision
Full-Room Vision
          Dual-Antennae Screen.
So my playmates cry
As they pass me by
          With courtesy less than scanty,
“There goes the girl
Who doesn’t know Berle
          From Caesar or Jimmy Durante!”

What use to bind my hair, Mother,
          Or cherish my childish brain?
I can’t quote banter
By Eddie Cantor,
          I never see Benny plain.
Though I’m lavish with treats
Like sodas and sweets,
          Though my roller skates roll like jet,
Hark to the jeers
Of my youthful peers:
          “She’s got no video set!”

An outcast tot am I, Mother,
          Stranger to fun or flatt’ry,
Pitied by none
Beneath the sun
          Save God and Angelo Patri.
So turn the key in the lock, Mother,
          While you kiss my tears away,
For I’ll never be cock o’ the walk, Mother,
          I’ll never be Queen of the May!

To be fair to the view of her as creating paeans to mythic suburban moments, here is one of her most frequently reprinted poems:

McGinley later in life

The 5:32

She said, If tomorrow my world were torn in two
Blacked out, dissolved, I thnk I would remember
(As if transfixed in unsurrendering amber)
This hour best of all the hours I knew:
When cars came backing into the shabby station,
Children scuffing the seats, and the women driving
With ribbons around their hair, and the trains arriving,
And the men getting off with tired but practiced motion.

Yes, I would remember my life like this, she said:
Autumn, the platform red with Virginia creeper,
And a man coming toward me, smiling, the evening paper
Under his arm, and his hat pushed back on his head,
And wood smoke lying like haze on the quiet town,
And dinner waiting, and the sun not yet gone down

Twelfth Night

Down from the window take the withered holly.
Feed the torn tissue to the literal blaze.
Now, now at last are come the melancholy
Anticlimactic days.

Here in the light of morning, hard, unvarnished,
Let us with haste dismantle the tired tree
Of ornaments, a trifle chipped and tarnished,
Pretend we do not see

How all the rooms seem shabbier and meaner
And the tired house a little less than snug.
Fold up the tinsel. Run the vacuum cleaner
Over the littered rug.

Nothing is left. The postman passes by, now,
Bearing no gifts, no kind or seasonal word.

The icebox yields no wing, no nibbled thigh, now,
From any holiday bird.

Sharp in the streets the north wind plagues its betters
While Christmas snow to gutters is consigned.
Nothing remains except the thank-you letters,
Most tedious to the mind,

And the gilt gadget (duplicated) which is
Marked for exchange at Abercrombie-Fitch’s.

There is much information about her life at wikipedia. She is claimed by Utah as a daughter. Many of her poems are online. There is a Twayne book: Linda Welshimer Wagner, Phyllis McGinley (New York: Twayne, 1971). The best essay I’ve read on her is by Nancy Walker of Stephens College, Source: American Humorists, 1800-1950. Ed. Stanley Trachtenberg. Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 11. Detroit: Gale Research, 1982. An interview: “The Lady in Larchmont,” Newsweek, 56 (26 September 1960): 120-122.

Several women on wompo declared McGinley to have been a personal foremother for them, how they remembered reading McGinley’s verse as children and young women; one woman said she wanted to be a poet after reading McGinley: “they were my first encounter with a woman poet, my first sense that poetry and reflective practice sh/could be a part of the daily lives of American women.” When I first read her, I was drawn to comments she made about how growing up relatively isolated in Oregon and Utah left her to lose herself in any and all reading she could get hold of: “I am probably the only person left living who has read the entire works of Bulwer-Lytton–when I was ten years old.”

Ellen