The Telltale Hearth

(See Cover)

In the house on Grindstone Hill, outside Weston, Conn., deep in suburbia, the phone rings. It could scarcely have chosen a less convenient moment. The call catches Charles Hayden in the tub, where he has just supplanted his wife; they are getting ready, on this late spring afternoon, for a drive to New York City. His wife, still not quite dry, hastily flinging a wrap around her, pads barefoot to the phone.

"Hello," says Phyllis McGinley Hayden. A pause. "Yes, this is she." Another pause. "Well, I just got out of the bathtub and I haven't any clothes on . . . Oh!" With this exclamation, in which delight and dismay mingle, she cups her hand over the speaker and shouts into the hall:

"Guess who's calling, dear!"

"Who?"

"The White House!"

"No!"

She returns to the phone. "You know I never do. I have this iron rule. But I guess I could break it for the President. What time of day is it going to be, Mr. Goldman?* Like how early? June 14?"

Her husband, now out of the tub, reminds her: "Remember your honorary degree at St. John's on the 13th."

"Oh, dear," says Phyllis McGinley to Goldman. "I'm getting an honorary degree at St. John's University on Long Island on the 13th. I don't know whether I could get to Washington on time. On the other hand--"

"We have only one President," prompts her eavesdropping spouse.

"--we have only one President," his wife obediently repeats into the receiver. "I'll tell you. I'm not very strong. I've had this very severe fracture, and I'm convalescent . . . I'll have to fly down very late . . ." In the end, a bit reluctantly, she accepts the invitation to the White House Festival of the Arts.

"Oh dear, I don't want to go," she tells her husband after ringing off. "I never do that kind of thing!"

"But this is President Johnson! Your President, dear. You voted for him." Seizing the opportunity for husbandly mischief, he adds: "It isn't as if it were my favorite President, Warren Gamaliel Harding."

"Oh, I don't like to live like this!" wails Phyllis McGinley Hayden. "I like to live quietly and peacefully!"

Diversity. Not many suburban housewives get invited to the White House. Nor, for that matter, do many poets. This week, when Phyllis McGinley, a pleasant matron of 60 who could pass for 45 and does not try to, a woman who just misses being pretty and does not care, presents herself at the White House, she will find herself on a program that includes only one other poet --Mark Van Doren. Asked to recite one of her own poems, she chose In Praise of Diversity, originally written for a Columbia commencement, which ends:

Praise what conforms and what is odd,

Remembering, if the weather worsens Along the way, that even God

Is said to be three separate Persons. Then upright or upon the knee, Praise Him that by His Courtesy, For all our prejudice and pains, Diverse His Creature still remains.

And just for the occasion, she added another six lines:

Applaud both dream and commonsense.

Born equal; then with all our power, Let us, for once, praise Presidents

Providing Dream its festival hour. And while the pot of culture's

bubblesome,

Praise poets, even when they're troublesome.

Depth of Emotion. Such agile verse, composed over three decades, has established Phyllis McGinley as one of the most widely read and acclaimed poets in the U.S., with a harvest of honors that include the Pulitzer Prize, Notre Dame's Laetare Medal and more honorary degrees than she can remember (it's nine, she thinks). Although her metier is light verse, Poet W. H. Auden sets her high on the Parnassian hill. "Where do you place work like Pope's Rape of the Lock?" he asks. "You could equally call it light verse or marvelous poetry. There is a certain way of writing which one calls light, but underneath it can carry a great depth of emotion." The McGinley verse, says Poet-Anthologist Louis Untermeyer, "has something to say about what life is like--which is all we ask of poetry."

Her audience apparently agrees. The Love Letters of Phyllis McGinley, first published in 1954, has sold 80,000 copies in hard cover and paperback. Times Three, the 1961 anthology embracing her life's work, has sold 60,000 in hard cover alone. From its pages gleams a talent that soars felicitously the full length of the human scheme, from man's perversity--

We might as well give up the fiction That we can argue any view.

For what in me is pure Conviction Is simple Prejudice to you.

to man's sorrows--

Sticks and stones are hard on bones.

Aimed with an angry art, Words can sting like anything. But silence breaks the heart.

to mothers and daughters--

Mothers are hardest to forgive.

Life is the fruit they long to hand you Ripe on a plate. And while you live, Relentlessly they understand you.

to the poignancy of daughters growing up--

Thirteen's no age at all. Thirteen is nothing.

It is not wit, or powder on the face, Or Wednesday matinees, or misses' clothing,

Or intellect, or grace . . .

Thirteen keeps diaries, and tropical fish (A month, at most); scorns jumpropes

in the spring; Could not, would fortune grant it, name

its wish;

Wants nothing, everything; Has secrets from itself, friends it

despises; Admits none to the terrors that it feels;

Owns half a hundred masks but no

disguises; And walks upon its heels.

Thirteen's anomalous--not that, not

this:

Not folded bud, or wave that laps a

shore,

Or moth proverbial from the chrysalis.

Is the one age defeats the metaphor.

Is not a town, like childhood, strongly

walled

But easily surrounded; is no city. Nor, quitted once, can it be quite

recalled--

Not even with pity.

For this sensitive evocation of adolescence, which its author considers her best verse, Phyllis McGinley's daughter Julie was the model. The McGinley muse, albeit a distant traveler, alights most often on the ordinary landscapes of motherhood and domesticity--the only two professions that consistently outrank the poet. Since the 1930s, Housewife Hayden has been singing the substantial pleasures of the hearth, and contentedly reminding herself

How I might, in some tall town instead, From nine to five be furthering

Career,

Dwelling unfettered in my single flat, My life my own, likewise my daily

bread--When I consider this, it's very clear I might have done much worse. I might at that.

Rising Chorus. The strength of Phyllis McGinley's appeal can best be measured by the fact that today, almost by inadvertence, she finds herself the sturdiest exponent of the glory of housewifery, standing almost alone against a rising chorus of voices summoning women away from the hearth. The loudest of the new emancipators is Betty Friedan, another suburban housewife and mother. Mrs. Friedan maintains in her bestselling broadside, The Feminine Mystique, that the college-educated woman who seeks fulfillment in domesticity will never find it, that the clever girl will either go mad in the kitchen or go forth from it, to market her brain in all those places where the men sell theirs.

Phyllis McGinley did not ask to get into the argument. But since she has been praising domesticity all along, in both essay and verse, her publisher prodded her into assembling her thoughts as rebuttal to all those, like Betty Friedan, who deprecate the very role that Housewife McGinley prefers to fill. The result was Sixpence in Her Shoe, in which she restates the proposition for which her own life has been the best evidence: that even today's educated woman can fit happily into the framework of the home. Sixpence sold slowly at first. But after housewives began to get the message, mainly by word of mouth, it climbed to the bestseller lists. There it has remained for the last 26 weeks. Total sales have passed 100,000, and are still rising.

"I feel so sorry for this younger generation," says its author. "They've got this silly guilt. They've been told that they're not contributing to the world if they relax into their normal ocean of domesticity. If you're not a great artist or writer, you shouldn't be made to feel guilty by having to be somebody besides a housewife. These girls are in school, and they're the queens of the world. Then they get married, and they have problems, and they say it's not fair. Self-pity is the most common but the meanest trait there is. Of course, as a friend of mine says, if you don't pity yourself, who will?"

Phyllis McGinley makes a compelling exponent of the housewife's role not just because she presents the case so well in prose and verse. She also happens to be a woman who set an exceptionally high value on the role long before she herself attained it, and, once enclosed by her own four walls, has never stopped marveling at her good luck.

All of Bulwer-Lytton. As the daughter and second child of an unsuccessful and fiddle-footed land speculator, she grew up with no settled home. She was born in Ontario, Ore., but her childhood memories begin with Iliff, Colo. ("It looked like a stage set for High Noon"), where the McGinleys settled awhile to farm an acreage that her father had been unable to sell.

This was not as miserable as it might sound. Admits Phyllis: "We were land poor--the kind of poor that had mahogany furniture and solid silver. We had books, and I read a great deal. I am probably the only person left living who has read the entire works of Bulwer-Lytton--when I was ten years old. We had 35 volumes of them." Phyllis thinks of herself as a cradle Catholic, because her father was an Irish Catholic from way back, and her mother, who was of German descent, adopted Catholicism when she married her father.

Phyllis remembers life on the ranch with no pleasure. "We were two or three miles from the next neighbor, and there were no children to play with. There was nobody in the school but my brother and me and an occasional farmer's child. Often we couldn't get a teacher, and Mother would teach us."

Phyllis's father died when she was twelve, and the widow was forced to move again. "We went back to Ogden, Utah, to my mother's home. My aunt was a widow, too, so we lived in a sort of communal home--we never had a home, and to have a real home, after I got married, was just marvelous."

Giddy Going. At the University of Utah, Phyllis McGinley suppressed a natural appetite for scholarship--"I knew I was bright, but I also knew that in that period and in that environment, brainy women were not appreciated. I made myself over into a giddy prom trotter. I wasn't all that pretty-- my teeth stuck out--and so I had to try harder. I didn't learn very much at Ogden, but I had what I always wanted all my life: the society of people, friends, beaux."

Even so, it was on campus that the giddy prom trotter's brainy side began to show. For as far back as she could remember, the muse had been coaxing her thoughts toward verse, most of it not much better than her first quatrain, composed at six:

Sometimes in the evening When the sky is blue and pink, I love to lie in the hammock And think and think and think.

"From then on," says Phyllis McGinley, "it never occurred to me that I wasn't going to be a poet." The conviction spurred her to enter a university competition offering cash prizes for the best poetry, short stories and essays. For two years running, Contestant McGinley, submitting pseudonymous compositions in all three categories, won all the honors--and all the money. She also began sending poetry to New York magazines, and in 1929, after some of them were bought, she invaded this receptive market in person.

As a precaution against the possibility that her verse might not produce an instant livelihood, she took a job teaching English in a junior high school in New Rochelle, 17 miles north of New York City. She sold a few verses to The New Yorker, then got a plaintive note from Fiction Editor Katherine White: "Dear Miss McGinley: We are buying your poem, but why do you sing the same sad songs all lady poets sing?" Phyllis took the hint, began turning out light and amusing verse.

In New Rochelle, her principal showed something less than approval of the new schoolmarm's extracurricular pursuit. One day he summoned her to the office, brandished a copy of The New Yorker with a McGinley poem in it, and confided the hope that this moonlighting would not interfere with her classroom commitments. At the end of the year, the schoolteacher decided not to let classroom commitments hobble her muse. She resigned.

Unexpected Banns. The poet in Phyllis McGinley marked time for cautious years, however, before zeroing in on her life's theme. Measured against the high standards she had set as a little girl, New York in the Depression 1930s was not the ideal place to find either a husband or a home. Nothing saddened her more than the distress auctions at which handsome silver services, those symbols of gracious family living, were knocked down for the value of the metal. She wanted to be married, "but the men I met were either divorced or they drank or they didn't have money. It wasn't so easy to find the right man."

The right man happened along in 1934, after some valuable matchmaking arrangements by his sister. Having met Frances Hayden (now Mrs. Merritt Riggs of Sherman Oaks, Calif.) in a Roman Catholic health resort in Denville, N.J., where both had gone to recuperate from the pressures of life in Manhattan, Phyllis McGinley was duly introduced to Fran's brother Charles, better known as Bill.* An lowan with New England ancestors, Bill Hayden worked for the Bell Telephone Co. by day and at night played jazz piano in his own musical combo, which staggered under the title of Benny Benedict's Bouncing Blue Boys and His Five Celestial Harmony Rhythm Kings. Bill was good. Oscar Levant once told him: "I'd give my right hand to be able to do what you do with your left."

But Phyllis McGinley reacted warily. To her, Bill Hayden's alter ego as Benny Benedict suggested a man who fancied the footloose and unfettered life. When he tried to impress her with his jazz piano playing she asked him if he knew any Bach. "I thought somehow he wouldn't stay at home. It was all invented on my part. Then, without telling me, he called on the pastor at St. Joseph's and arranged to have the banns read. When I went to church on Sunday and heard them, I almost swooned in the aisle. It was the only really brash, rash, adventurous thing Bill Hayden ever did." She was married in St. Joseph's in 1936. She was 31.

Prenatal Euphoria. She responded to domesticity as if it were poetry--which, for her, it was. She loved and lyricized over everything about it. "Julie was born in 1939, and I have never felt so divine in my life as the time before she was born. I was so full of euphoria, I was practically immune to all human illnesses!" A second daughter, Patsy, came along two years later. Even before these two events, the Haydens had gone house hunting in suburbia--where Phyllis knew just what she wanted. "Don't you have a house with a bathtub on legs?" she demanded of real estate agents. This requirement was met in Larchmont, a bit of suburbia 19 miles north of Manhattan: "I just lost my mind over this adorable town full of old Victorian houses!"

In one of them the Haydens took up residence, and there the poet and the housewife irrevocably merged. "I was very surprised when I first met her," says Jean Kerr, the author and playwright, and one of the Haydens'Larchmont neighbors. "I expected her to be someone with a cigarette in a long holder, terribly soignee, terribly brittle. Even now sometimes, I'll read something she's done and I'll think, 'She couldn't have written that--she's just a housewife.' "

Domesticating the Muse. Phyllis McGinley's amber eyes fell with approval on everything about her, and the muse set the scenes to verse: the view from her suburban window, little boys racing madly by on bicycles, Memorial Day parades, the simple comforts of a warm bath and a soft bed, a husband's casual words of praise after dinner.

Until Phyllis McGinley, no poet had ever successfully domesticated the muse, or, for that matter, had even tried to. Her singular achievement is that she has brought off the match without undue strain on either partner. The Hayden household in Larchmont rang to the rhythms of recited poetry. "We used to sit around the fire while she read it to us," Daughter Julie recalls. "It was mostly ballads--and Yeats and Chesterton too. She chose dramatic stuff because she believes that poetry should appeal to the emotions. Mother and Patsy would always cry at the sad parts. She'd also discuss what she was writing at dinner, and she'd recite it, and she'd cry if it was good."

The girls also submitted, amiably enough, to an exercise of maternity that was rather on the strenuous side. "Mother is a bottomless pit," says Patsy, now Mrs. Richard Blake, wife of a lawyer practicing in Los Angeles. "She will kill you with love. As I was growing up, I didn't want to be understood. My biggest problem was knowing when and how to confide in Mother."

"Never Laughed At." Neither girl appears to have suffered either from the emotion-charged recitations or the maternal embrace. "We were never talked down to as children, and we were never laughed at," says Patsy, who graduated cum laude from Wellesley. "We grew up with dignity." Julie, who sailed through Radcliffe with equivalent scholastic honors, has since written her own declaration of independence.

"Mother finds it hard to understand the educated woman and her ambitions because her own education was so lousy," says Julie, now pursuing a career in journalism on the staff of Family Circle magazine. "She doesn't know what it is like for a young woman when you've gone to Radcliffe. It is hard to settle for two babies and a husband who comes home at six--and none of my friends have."

Exclamation Points. To a less highly motivated householder, the Hayden style of domesticity might seem a bit too emphatic to be real. A fair share of the emphasis comes from Bill Hayden, who is just as domestically inclined as his wife and enthusiastically endorses her own relish for the role: "I don't think of her as a writer, I think of her as my wife and the mother of my children."

He does much of the shopping, tends the garden, cleans the swimming pool, thoughtfully leaves the family Buick out all night because another domestic couple, two robins, have set up nesters' rights in the garage. Like his wife, he frequently speaks in exclamation points. "I've got some lovely lamb chops here!" he shouts, coming in from a shopping trip. "One whole side of a baby lamb!" Two years ago, at 60, he retired from his position as public relations analyst at Bell Telephone, five years before compulsory retirement age. "Well, really," he said in explanation, "there were 70,000 people at the telephone company, and there was only one Phyllis McGinley. I felt I should nurture and do everything I could to help this great performer function."

If that seems to cast Bill Hayden in a secondary or supporting role, his friends and his wife know better. Says Jean Kerr: "He caters to Phyllis all the time, but he makes the decisions. He is the manager. If she gets into an argument with Bill, she just makes the natural assumption that he's right." Except in the realm of national politics perhaps, where the Hayden compatibility has not been deranged by the fact that Phyllis McGinley is a lifelong Democrat and Bill a lifelong Republican.

Engineering a Dinner. Moreover, Phyllis McGinley brings to her own domestic performance an energy, confidence and zeal that eliminates all need for a man in an apron. The housewife dominates the poet--and the house. "I always do my writing in the little strings of time I have. I wrote when I had time, and that's all there is to it. I can remember cooking dinner, and I'd be stirring the stew, and I'd be working on some rhyme. You can't cook a great dinner that way, but you can scrub a floor or make a bed. I did what I could when I could, but I put my children and family first."

It is not by chance that the diningroom table seats ten; to Phyllis, ten is exactly the right number for a sitdown party, which she plots with an engineer's care: "The house has to be pretty and full of flowers, and for a short time everything must seem to be under a glass bell. I always have place cards and figure out who should sit next to whom. I go into such a state of shock that by the time dinner is ready I've forgotten." Even when there are no guests to plan for, she plans anyway, laying down explicit instructions for the household cook: "The one boast I have is that Bill has never in his whole married life, even when I was sick, had to have a delicatessen dinner."

Assorted accidents--or accident proneness, anyway--have beset her life. Her right arm has been in a sling since April, when she broke her shoulder in a fall from a hotel bed (she was reaching for the Venetian blind and misjudged the distance). The mishap added injury to injury: years ago she dislocated her spine in a tumble on her own kitchen floor--freshly waxed, of course. It still gives her trouble. It also gave her something in common with a U.S. Senator named John F. Kennedy, whom she met on a visit to Washington in 1955. Both were delighted to find a fellow sufferer. "We got off in a corner," she remembers, "and felt each other's corsets."

"My Lifeline." This same forthright, down-to-earth assurance colors her opinions and her activities in all spheres. Her views tend to be firm, and firmly pronounced:

> "I've always said that writers make the best wives. They're romantic, understanding, and have to stay home."

> "Bill and I have a maxim that if you see a marvelous buy, something you're going to adore for the rest of your life, even if you can't afford it, buy it."

> "It would never occur to us to go to bed without reading for an hour. When I'm reading a book, I can't put it down until I finish it. When Bill has a good book, he can't bear to finish it, so he reads several books at once."

> "The phone is my lifeline! It has literally saved me hours of every day! I don't think I could have been so prolific as I have been without the telephone. I got so I'd even call up to buy my clothes. I don't have time to go shopping. The whole 26 years I lived in Larchmont I went to the same butcher, and I got the best meat--but I don't think I went in once a year. I ordered by telephone."

> "I am efficient in many areas. I never stand when I can sit, I never sit when I can lie down."

> "I'm sure there are many gifted women who could write, but don't have the discipline. You have to make yourself do things that are cruelly difficult. The only difference between a man and a woman is that a woman puts her family first, but the actual discipline is a cruel thing."

A Sickness? It was scarcely surprising that The Feminine Mystique, which attacked the whole structure of Phyllis McGinley's convictions, provoked the contented housewife of Grindstone Hill into a spirited response. Betty Friedan's book classified the housewife state as nothing short of "dangerous." "It is not an exaggeration to call the stagnating state of millions of American housewives a sickness," she wrote. "The problem--which is simply the fact that American women are kept from growing to their full human capacities--is taking a far greater toll on the physical and mental health of our country than any known disease."

There is nothing really new about the Friedan argument except its language. Her book, in fact, is merely one more pronunciamento of the 20th century feminist movement. It owes a consider able debt to that formidable French non-housekeeper, Simone de Beauvoir, who in The Second Sex insisted that any woman who submits to housework betrays "a kind of madness bordering on perversion."

Old or new, the Friedan challenge was irresistible to Phyllis McGinley. "I rise to defend the quite possible She," she had written many years ago--meaning by that the woman with absolute freedom of choice to find her destiny, not just by the rigid and somewhat outmoded rules of the feminists but in the world of today.

That world, to her, has always included the home. Phyllis McGinley sings its praises as the best and possibly the richest part of the feminine equation, but by no means all of it. Her arguments, unlike those of the opposition, are undeniably modern. She is no disciple of the Teutonic school of Kinder, Kueche, Kirche. And although she believes strongly in her religion, she does not place the domestic role on the pedestal of religious duty.

Phyllis McGinley's message to the housewife is that despite emancipation, despite the vote, despite jet travel and contraceptives and sleeping pills and a steadily rising census of college-educated women, there are still ample rewards and nourishment to be found in woman's noblest and most venerable role as keeper of the home.

"A liberal arts education," she writes in Sixpence, "is a true and precious stone which can glow just as wholesomely on a kitchen table as when it is put on exhibition in a jeweler's window or bartered for bread and butter. To what barbarian plane are we descending when we demand that it serve only the economy?" The educated housewife "will be able to judge a newspaper item more sensibly, understand a politician's speech more sagely, talk over her husband's business problems more helpfully, and entertain her children more amusingly if her brain is tuned and humming with knowledge.

"Of course, women have a right to work if they can do so without stinting the family. I have nothing at all against housewives who use their education and their brains outside the home. I have, from time to time, used mine. By and large, though, the world runs better when men and women keep to their own spheres." But more important, "we who belong to the profession of housewife hold the fate of the world in our hands. It is our influence which will determine the culture of coming generations. We are the people who chiefly listen to the music, buy the books, attend the theater, prowl the art galleries, collect for the charities, brood over the schools, converse with the children. Our minds need to be rich and flexible for those duties."

Betty Friedan & Co. discount such talk because, they say, it comes from a woman who is not just a housewife but a poet, and who herself discounts housewifery by employing fulltime help. This attitude is slightly tinged with envy. Phyllis McGinley has managed, with stunning success, the very sort of life they advocate--and, what's more, like the Phi Beta Kappa effortlessly producing scholarship, she has made it look easy. From this housewife's mind, in between unstinted domestic chores, have come nine volumes of excellent verse, two books of essays and 15 children's books, half of them classics. "For all you could tell from her schedule," says Jean Kerr, "everything she wrote she did in ten minutes."

Good Structure. Certainly no one role, not even suburban domesticity, is big enough to confine Phyllis McGinley's awesome capacity for self-expression. "She has a good ego structure," says Nina Jones, a friend from the Larchmont days (and now Happy Rockefeller's press secretary). "Phyllis is good and she knows it."

Indeed Phyllis does. And in discussing the skill that has possessed and apostrophized her life, she can speak with objective authority and candor, as if the poet were not even there. "Rereading my poetry the other night," she says matter-of-factly, "I was amazed at the high level of my competence. I know every technical trick. But I don't quite reach the plateau of the great poet. Eliot, Auden, Yeats--there are poets whose genius is so great I could weep over them.

"I have one facet of genius, and only one. I have an infinite capacity for taking pains. My passion is for lucidity. I don't mean simplemindedness. If people can't understand it, why write it? Swift read his stuff to the stable boys.

"I do think I have been a useful person. At a time when poetry has become the property of the universities and not the common people, I have a vast number of people who have become my readers. I have kept the door open and perhaps led them into greater poetry."

Returning to the role of all women, she adds: "I realize I have been fulfilled, and I don't want my readers to think that I'm saying you can all be poets. All I'm saying is that if you really like being a wife and mother, if that's your basic drive, don't be upset by characters who say you have to get out and do something. Because I think you hold the future in your hand."

* Eric Goldman, Princeton professor of history, author and TV moderator, and now a special consultant to the President for cultural affairs.

* For no particular reason. The name just got attached to him in his youth, and stuck.

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