Arts and Letters

Between the time of her birth in Ontario, Oregon, in 1905 and her death in New York in February of 1978 at the age of seventy-two, Phyllis McGinley wrote over two dozen books, received nine honorary doctorates, a Pulitzer Prize and a hatful of assorted medals, was the subject of a cover story in Time and a performing guest at the White House, but continued stoutly to think of herself as "a moonlighting housewife." She must have stoked many a feminist to fresh fire by her insistence that a woman is "a born nester," and not someone kept under house arrest by a male turnkey. She considered the domestic profession, as wife to Bill Hayden and mother to two daughters, her first vocation, putting herself, to quote from Sixpence in Her Shoe, "among the part-time writers, illustrators, musicians whom premarital impetus has sent jogging along in two jobs because we don't quite know how to stop." Happily for us, she did not know how to stop writing verses like these entitled "Moody Reflection":

When blithe to argument I come,
Though armed with facts, and merry,
May Providence protect me from
The fool as adversary,
Whose mind to him a kingdom is
Where reason lacks dominion,
Who calls conviction prejudice
And prejudice opinion.
Yes, when with dolts I disagree,
Both sic and also semper,
May my good angels succor me
And help me hold my temper.
But strength from what celestial store
Shall keep my head from bending
When I behold whom I abhor—
The snob, the bigot and the bore—
Wielding their witless cudgels for
The cause that I'm defending?

If we think of the satirist as someone who shoots to kill while the humorist brings his prey back alive, then Phyllis McGinley belongs in the latter category, with occasional excursions into the first. Her vein was not the jugular, but something more in keeping with the purpose of light verse as expressed by the editor of the new Oxford Book of English Light Verse, in which she is one of the few Americans represented, namely to "raise a good-natured smile." Bernard De Voto is given a little more than a genial ribbing, but less than a sound drubbing, in the poem in which she took him to task for scolding the writers of the twenties for their pessimism, as he did in The Literary Fallacy.

We count our blessings, we pray and mutter.
We praise the lock and we press the shutter.
Admire how the walls are weatherproof,
And point with pride to our sturdy roof.
This do we now, with rhyme and reason—
It suits the climate, becomes the season.
But Mr. De Voto, your words are stinging.
Why blame the boys for that old Spring Cleaning?
Perhaps the House, on its firm foundation,
Smells all the sweeter for that ventilation.

Few poems survive the topicality normally dooming so much humor to an early grave, but we can still enjoy "Bans Across the Sea," the well-remembered parody of Gilbert and Sullivan, if we recall the czar-like president of the American Federation of Musicians who in the forties announced that that union would not permit American stations to broadcast musical programs from foreign countries:

A harpist (Italian) sat lost and forlorn
Singing "Trillo, Petrillo, Petrillo!"
And, "Maestro," I said to him, "why do you mourn
With a 'Trillo, Petrillo, Petrillo'?"

And so on. No memorial sampler could possibly give a sense of her tremendous output in the few decades of her prime.

Something in the complex weave of her personality made her declare detraction as her besetting sin, when there seemed to be no evidence of guilt on that score at all—none, at any rate, beyond the normal human capacity for gossip. Infidel listeners would have it explained to them that detraction is an officially listed sin in the Catholic Church, certainly no mortal one—indeed in her book Saint-Watching she refers to it as the most genial of sins, albeit one against which anyone bucking for sanctification must be on guard, such as Hugh, Abbot of Grenoble, who so disliked to speak ill of friends that he could not bear to make out official reports on them. Be all that as it may, her chief deprecations were against herself, nor was there in the self-disparagement any of the angling for contradiction that often motivates this art form. She seemed to take the humorist's classic pleasure in it. I remember her bursting into delighted laughter one evening at a remark she thought another guest at the party had made about her. "That's wonderful, what you just said," she exclaimed. The guest was puzzled. "About what?" "About me." "What did I say about you?" "That I was rich in limitations." Now this was nonsense. The chap hadn't said anything of the sort. He'd never have said it to a lady, I know. But protestations availed him nought. It amused her no end to think that he had. What it was he had actually said, and her ear picked up and her mind recycled, put through some kind of transformer, I don't remember.

One other memory stands out particularly because it struck such a delicate balance between oneself as a renegade Calvinist and the still loyally affiliated Roman Catholic, each not really giving house room to the other's viewpoint, the combination, however, illustrating something about human coexistence. The result showed she could be mischievous without being malicious, or even playful without being mischievous, for that matter.

Phyllis was to be presented the Laetare Medal, given annually by the University of Notre Dame to one who has, so run the terms, "enriched the heritage of mankind." Instead of being required to go to South Bend to pick it up, the university came to her, in the form of the president, Father Hesburgh (then not yet embattled on campus, though this was the seething sixties) and one or two other men of the cloth, I've forgotten how many. A few friends were invited to a luncheon at the Haydens' home in Weston, Connecticut, where the bestowal was to be made. The medal being named after Laetare Sunday, and that being the fourth Sunday in Lent, I guess that's what this spring Sabbath was. Since out of a negative and no doubt perverse ecumenism of my own I instinctively equate priests with the dour Dutch ministers whom as a rebellious lad I could never bring myself to call "Dominie," it palsies my tongue to say "Father" as well, and Phyllis sensed my discomfiture—to anything but her own. My problem was seen as intrinsically comic, and rightly so. Finally, probably afraid I might resort to the outright vocative "Hey" to get some priest's attention, she leaned over and, laughing merrily but gently, said, "Peter, does it really hurt that much?"

One is inevitably curious as to exactly how much religious faith means to those professing it, especially if it involves a body of doctrine one cannot oneself swallow. Not that one would ever be churlish enough to ask. How much solace Phyllis derived from her faith in the years following Bill Hayden's death, when in lonely widowhood she suffered her quota of the thousand shocks, and probably her share of that notorious black dog, melancholy, is something to which others might better attest. But of the depth of her religious interest there can be no doubt; it is amply monumentalized in the book called Saint-Watching. She was absolutely fascinated with the infinite variety of those on the Calendar, and must have spent half a lifetime reading and studying them, and in so doing trying to chip away the accumulated plaster from her cherished subjects, the better to see them whole and mortal. She liked to say a good word for those of modest stature, and for the giants presently out of favor. She undertakes stoutly, and convincingly, to rescue Saint Paul himself from the hagiological decline into which he has fallen. To call her a kind of connoisseur of sanctity is to do her no disservice, since she herself uses the more reductive word "dilettante," again with typical modesty. Not aspiring to holiness herself, she turned over libraries in her study of that virtue in others, and her responses include as much humor as awe. It amused her no end to find the only good word said for John Calvin in the Catholic Encyclopedia. She was fond of Antony Grassi, who when a bolt of lightning struck him declared cheerfully that it had cured his indigestion, and she clearly liked quoting Saint Augustine's famous cry to God, to "make me chaste, but not yet." No one named Phyllis McGinley would lack a special affection for the saints of Ireland, but her praise of the ancient and often forgotten glories of that land and people is hardly exaggerated. She reminds us that "for several hundred years—from the fifth century until the tenth—in that green, garrulous, rainwashed, crotchey island the twin lights of learning and Christianity burned sweetly and steadily when they had gone out over Europe." She took personal satisfaction in the Episcopal Church's making room for John Donne and scheduling his Collect for March 21st, because that was her own birthday. "Thundering divine he may have been and, no doubt, a serious penitent. Still, his election amuses me as much as if the Roman Curia suddenly decided to canonize Bach."

I cannot conclude without confessing that I realize, after all, one might have made bolder to draw her out on more personal considerations, because God knows she never hesitated to drop a question on your plate. So that if you drew her as your vis-à-vis at dinner, you had best not be J. Alfred Prufrock, or Spencer Brydon either, the Henry James hero who in "The Jolly Corner" complains that everyone is always asking him what he "thinks" of everything, because before you had got through the soup you would have been pressed for your opinion of the President's State of the Union message, the Italian elections, and the latest Nobel selection. She telephoned once to ask what I thought of Gerald Ford, and it must have been at least forty-eight hours after he had been sworn in as Chief Executive. I said I thought we both needed a little more time to sift out the cares of state, but promised her an evaluation in due course.

The combination of light-versifier and voracious scholar of sanctity must be an arresting one, and the paradox itself might stand as a kind of memorial. She was at pains to insist that the study of sainthood, however sedulous, is not to be confused with its pursuit, and that she herself did not dedicate herself to the emulation of what she admired. Nevertheless, some of the faith, hope, and charity that were the spiritual commodities under lifelong review certainly rubbed off. And we could do worse, by way of leave-taking, than quote her own last paragraph of Saint-Watching:

"So let us, by all means, tell over the names of our favorites among the heroes of earth and heaven, keeping a kind of All Hallows continual memorial for the best and bravest among us. These people give us hope, and may as I said at the beginning, at length give us a little grace."