Deadlier Than the Male

Betty Friedan killed Phyllis McGinley.  Back when the Second Wave was just coming ashore and the Women's Movement barely was, Friedan published The Feminine Mystique.   It was 1963.  In that landmark book, Friedan brilliantly critiqued what she saw as the deadly complacency of the suburban housewife.  Most prominent among the "housewife writers" Friedan made the special target of her righteous scorn?  Phyllis McGinley.  It is entirely possible that if younger readers encounter McGinley at all now, it is only in Friedan's book, and that is a damned shame.

Already a bestselling writer and regular contributor to magazines from the Ladies Home Journal to the New Yorker, by 1961 McGinley had already won the Pulitzer Prize for for poetry for her book, Times Three: Selected Verse from Three Decades, published with an introduction from no less a light than W. H. Auden.  In 1965 she was featured on the cover of Time Magazine, the last female poet to have appeared there probably having been Gertrude Stein in 1933.  In 1964, McGinley had published her bemused answer to her critics, A Sixpence in Her Shoe, a book of essays on her "domestic profession."  It was likewise a bestseller.  She had by then become what Ginia Bellafante in The New York Times called a "reluctant polemicist."  And that, so far as subsequent critical opinion has been concerned, was largely the end of her.  McGinley died in 1978.

Time rolls on and over the controversies of yesteryear.  Perhaps now we're far enough out from the sort of either/or feminism that made McGinley anathema to women like Friedan.  (And hopefully we have likewise gone beyond the critical insistence that the only women worth championing are just the suicides; the Plaths, and Sextons, and poor ol' Virginia Woolf, the invalids like Alice James, and the shuttered eccentrics like Dickinson.  From the Brits at least, there would seem to be a growing critical interest in popular women writers with major biographies of Mrs. Gaskell and Aphra Behn, for instance, and more recently, even Georgette Heyer!  Now for the American academy to do more of the same.)

Because Phyllis McGinley is delightful.  No other word for it (as Auden himself found when he wrote his introduction.) There are the now almost antique charms of her suburban pleasures, in poems like her "Lady Selecting her Christmas Cards," or "Man with Pruning Shears," or "The 5:32," or "June in the Suburbs," with it's "rose-red golfers" and "pilgrims, touring gardens," all of which bespeak the qualities of un sourire désinvolte -- or the lazy smile --- of the contented housewife.  But she is also, for contrast, as sharp-toothed as any better-remembered satirist, as in:

The Demagogue

That trumpet tongue which taught a nation
Loud lessons in vituperation
Teaches it yet another, viz.:
How sweet the noise of silence is.

Or:

The Old Philanthropist

His millions make museums bright;
Harvard anticipates his will;
While his young typist weeps at night
Over a druggist's bill.

The qualities of her best barbs, and much of her best verse, is exactly that of Herrick and like wits, in the canon as much for their seemingly easy way with rhyme as for the gentle cynicism of their sentiments.  No easy thing, that species of ease.

Ultimately though it is as a poet at ease in her time and happy in her circumstances that she is now both dismissed and neglected by the very critics who might otherwise long-since have made note of her as a sister to Dorothy Parker, if no one else -- herself only lightly taken up as unavoidable by students of American poetry in the 20th Century.  The reputations of both women suffer as a result, I think, of being gifted, in their different ways, with an arched eyebrow where a scowl has become the expected thing.  (Neither, it might be said as well, were much exercised by modernity or innovation in form.  If anything, Parker now seems to me the more doggedly old-fashioned in this way than McGinley; it's Dorothy Parker after all who can't resist a sonnet or avoid L'Envoi by way of farewell.  But not every artist has to reinvent the means to make good ends, does she?  And again, that may have been a symptom of a fevered self-importance finally passing out of literary criticism now that theory has contracted to the common-room parlour-game it always rather was.)

It's now more than one hundred years since McGinley's birth, and thirty-five since she died.  A woman raised in difficult economic circumstances, who lived through the Great Depression largely by her own wits and a poet who not only earned more by her poetry than her husband did from his Madison Ave. job -- it was Phyllis' money that put her daughters through college -- but who also saw all her books bestsellers, deserves, I think, more respect than she's been shown.  It's time to remember that popularity need no longer be a bar to appreciation by new audiences well past the day of judging our mothers for staying at home.

It's also time to remember that poetry can be light without being either trivial or trite.

Phyllis loved a party, hers are remembered fondly by any number of the literary lights she once entertained in her lovely suburban Connecticut home.  She poured, I'll bet, a generous scotch.  Time to return the favor to her sparkling shade and lift a glass to one of our best again.