Books: The Telltale Hearth

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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.