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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,