The housewife as housewit
Or, Phyllis McGinley on the wrong side of history
It’s hell to be trapped at home, isn’t it? Six weeks in, domesticity is getting a bit wild.
No sane and self-aware person could truly enjoy this time — sorta like how we now think of 1950s American suburban life. To conjure up the meticulous lawns, nuclear families, and smiling white faces is to think of The Stepford Wives, Bettys Friedan and Draper, Revolution Road. And they’re all made out of ticky tacky and they all look just the same. Orderly surfaces covered inner torment, or worse, nothingness.
Phyllis McGinley (1905-78) really, really enjoyed it.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet had a hardscrabble childhood in the American West. She was the daughter of a land speculator who died when she was 12. When she made it to the New York City suburb of Larchmont and married a mind-mannered employee of the telephone company, it felt like victory. She began to submit her writing to The New Yorker, where editor Katherine White set her course with this advice:
We are buying your poem, but why do you sing the same sad songs all lady poets sing? … Yours have always had till now a detachment that was refreshing and that set you apart from the average woebegone lady poet.
And so McGinley wrote poems as detached as the houses they described. Light verse was her style, one that critics disdained but audiences lapped up. If you wanted your poems to rhyme and be clever about it, you wanted McGinley.
As she wrote in Attention: Book-of-the-Month Club,
But every now and then
I want
A plot that thickens —
Something like Christie,
Something like Dickens,
Something like Trollope at his most methodical,
Something like something
From a ladies’ periodical.
Her subjects were drawn from life, including her happy marriage —
We could not swap our virtues, John,
So this was our design:
All your bad habits I took on,
While you adopted mine.
from Recipe for a Happy Marriage
— her children —
For little boys are rancorous
When robbed of any myth,
And spiteful and cantankerous
To all their kin and kith.
But little girls who draw conclusions
Make profit of their lost illusions.
from What Every Woman Knows
— and her voluminous cultural intake.
Englishmen of the upper classes
Are more amusing than the masses.
from The Absolute Law of Evelyn Waugh*
(*see GWQ No. 19)
Just as one editor persuaded McGinley to keep it light, a publisher convinced her that being the anti-Betty Friedan was brilliant marketing. And it was: Sixpence in My Shoe, her response to The Feminine Mystique, was a bestseller. Sample line, per this excellent reappraisal by Ginia Bellafante:
Surely the ability to enjoy Heine’s exquisite melancholy in the original German will not cripple a girl’s talent for making chocolate brownies.
Commercial success put Phyllis McGinley on the wrong side of history. Her poetry wasn’t anthologized; The Paris Review never deigned mention her. She knew she wasn’t writing about The Big Issues of The Day. But as she said of her work,
I try to do it with wit. And by doing this, I hope to illuminate a social pattern and a larger world.
She looked for something important in her manicured surroundings, and aimed to make it amusing. If she were alive today, she’d make hilarious TikToks. There are worse things.
Quick quips; lightning
“I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.” — Rebecca West
“Housework can’t kill you, but why take a chance?” — Phyllis Diller
“History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the buckets.” — Alan Bennett
This marks the 44th issue of Get Wit Quick, a weekly sampling of Heinrich Heine’s quarantine baking. My book Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting was semi-detached. If you give the ♥️ below a gentle boost / this newsletter’s reach will be lightly juiced.