NEWS & VIEWS
NEWS & VIEWS PhglHs Me.riley Phyllis McGinley died last month. She wasn't exactly Commonweats cup of tea, nor we hers for that matter. She published a number of her poems here--in 1927 and...
...I was mistaken...
...Catholic...
...We've always made a point of that," said Antonucci...
...I doubt that it did...
...I wasn't kind to her suburbia, suggesting that it was false and fated to sink in a sea of supermarkets, pizza parlors, Texaco stations and superficial values...
...There are no less than 19 Robert Lax items in print, and available from Journeyman Press, a non-profit publisher devoted to producing books and films of poetry in imaginative visual form...
...No one's going to run out and get an abortion like she gets her nails done," she said to me...
...And one reason may have been because she herself came up from Bohemia...
...I don't think the book ever did much...
...Her world was peopled by happy kids skipping rope, by dedicated volunteer firemen, by Decoration Day paraders, by stolid husbands arriving home on the 5:32 out of Grand Central, 'being met by composed wives settled behind the wheels of station wagons...
...The decision to get an abortion is a traumatic one...
...Phyllis McOinley moved back to Manhattan from suburbia for the last years...
...Bobe~t Laz (eoJ...
...She wasn't anxious about being interviewed, but she had just written her book Saint Watching and she thought an article at that time and in that outlet might help sales...
...The items are pamphlet size...
...It's fair to say Phyllis McGinley was genteel in ways Commonweal never was, nor could be and still be Commonweal...
...I expect she came to regret her 1960s logic, but if she did, she never went public about it...
...Whatever my comparison, Phyllis McGinley was a perceptive, exceptionally talented person...
...I suspect she considered her work several pegs above James Whitcomb Riley's...
...With one exception (a $75 portfolio of all of Lax's color poems), the Journeyman Press items by Robert Lax are $2 or less...
...Phyllis McGinley was aware that hers was "light verse," and she even allowed in that U.S...
...Of course, we weren't paying The New Yorker rates, either...
...Emil Antonucci is Journeyman Press...
...I shared a village for almost ten years with Phyllis McGinley...
...She died there, not having disturbed the pluperfect suburban image she had constructed about herself through her verse out in Westchester...
...Finding nothing, I presumed there was nothing of his in print...
...She was also considerably less conservative than her verse---and her milieu--suggested...
...People just didn't look to Phyllis McGinley for large judgments on theological or secular questions...
...I doubt she ever did...
...When I wrote the reflection on Robert Lax a couple of weeks ago, I checked Books in Print for current Lax titles...
...Box 4434, Grafid Central Station, New York 10017...
...A $5000 small-presses grant in 1971 from the National Endowment for the Arts was a help for a while, but mostly R's'a struggle to keep costs minimal and keep the Lax items coming...
...As a young poet she lived in Greenwich Village, and she did her turn tripping around on rooftops with the Village avant-garde...
...Well, you've seen all that change, and so did Phyllis McGinley...
...I never heard from her after its appearance, and I suspect I know why...
...She published a number of her poems here--in 1927 and 1928, in 1932 and 1934, in 1957...
...CommonweaFs heart--wherever its editors may have been residing--was tugged in other directions...
...I have a friend who used to urge Phyllis McGinley's daughters to get their mother to put those memories down on paper before it was too late...
...he has designed and illustrated all of Lax's works, continuing an association that began back at Jubilee a generation ago...
...JOHN DEV.Du 31 March 1978:194...
...We came in contact only once, when I profiled her in 1969 for U.S...
...She was one of the four Catholics, remember, on the special study panel named by Governor Nelson Rockefeller in the mid-1960s, to study and make recommendations on New York State's old abortion law...
...But the longer she was in suburbia the more firmly she seemed to lock those experiences out of consciousness...
...Catholic interview that the 1961 ,PulRzer Prize for poetry "probably" should have gone to Ogden Nash...
...she "just happened" to have Times Three out that year, she said...
...she was the only one of the four to vote for liberalization...
...Such money as they make-which at $1, $1.50 and $2 apiece can't be much---goes back ~to the books...
...Dorothy Day's world was ever closer for Commonweal than Phyllis McGinley's...
...A widow, she ~needed to be nearer to family...
...Her appearances were sporadic, almost as if she was uneasy with us as we were with the suburban world she celebrated so lyrically and, in time, almost exclusively...
...Not that she was a woman without ideas...
...We've sought to be as reasonable as possible...
...Catalogues are available by wr~Ring to Journeyman Press, P.O...
...I hate the idea of abortion," she said in U.S...
...Catholic, "but ours is a pluralistic state, and I don't expect the State of New York to administer the laws of my church...
...And though she was one of those who helped pave the way for change, no one looked for her to...
...It was all very neat and ordered and sensible...
...Further, I was impolitic enough to link her verse with that of James Whitcomb Riley, arguing she was to suburbia what Riley was to turn-of-the-century rural America...
...Phyllis McGinley's delusionwidely shared, be it said in her defense--was that she didn't behove liberalization would lead to abuse...
...it was rather that she seemed the archetygical suburban housewife concerned about smaller matters, however important...
...The New York Times, in its obituary, remarked that she "did not care for Bohemia, but she seldom became shrill about her distaste...
...The creator, in a word, died the creature of what she had surveyed . . . . R.I.P...
...The selfdenigration notwithstanding, she esteemed herself greatly, and no reason why she shouldn't have...
...True...
...I doubt, too, that Phyllis McGinley liked my piece...
Vol. 105 • March 1978 • No. 7
