Poet Phyllis McGinley…
…lived just a "short walk from the station" in 1950. Her poems, many of which appeared in The New Yorker, are as good a social history of the American suburbs as your are likely to find on a bedside table. Together they are not a sociological tome but rather a generous, if skeptical, nod in the direction of a society that is now as dead as a coffin nail. I was reminded of her poetry by my memory of Jack Armstrong, the All American Boy
Here, in part, is what she says of that bygone world in the introduction to her 1951, Viking Press collection, "A Short Walk from the Station"
"…it is a commuter’s town, the living center of a web that unrolls each morning as the men swing aboard the locals, and contracts again in the evening when they return. By day, with even the children pent in schools, it is a village of women. They trundle mobile baskets at the A&P, they sit under driers at the hairdressers, they sweep their porches and set out bulbs and stitch up slip-covers. "
"The town has become a symbol of all that is middle class in the worst sense…to condemn suburbia has long been a literary cliché…I’ve lived in the country and I have lived in the city but for the best eleven years of my life I have lived in suburbia and I like it… "
Still, she could write this about the Executive’s Wife:
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 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 a writer; but she married young.
She diets. And with Contract she delays
The encroaching desolation of her days.
