New at IWP Books: The Love Letters of Phyllis McGinley, 1954.

in praise of diversity

Since this ingenious earth began
 To shape itself from fire and rubble;
Since God invented man, and man
 At once fell to, inventing trouble,
One virtue, one subversive grace
Has chiefly vexed the human race.

One whimsical beatitude,
 Concocted for his gain and glory,
Has man most stoutly misconstrued
 Of all the primal category —
Counting no blessing, but a flaw,
That Difference is the mortal law.

Adam, perhaps, while toiling late,
 With life a book still strange to read in,
Saw his new world, how variegate,
 And mourned, “It was not so in Eden,”
Confusing thus from the beginning
Unlikeness with original sinning.

And still the sons of Adam’s clay
 Labor in person or by proxy
At altering to a common way
 The planet’s holy heterodoxy.
Till now, so dogged is the breed,
Almost it seems that they succeed.

One shrill, monotonous, level note
 The human orchestra’s reduced to.
Man casts his ballot, turns his coat,
 Gets born, gets buried as he used to,
Makes war, makes love — but with a kind
Of masked and universal mind.

His good has no nuances. He
 Doubts or believes with total passion.
Heretics choose for heresy
 Whatever’s the prevailing fashion.
Those wearing Tolerance for a label
Call other views intolerable.

“For or Against” ’s the only rule.
 Damned are the unconvinced, the floaters.
Now all must go to public school,
 March with the League of Women Voters,
Or else for safety get allied
With a unanimous Other Side.

There’s white, there’s black; no tint between.
 Truth is a plane that was a prism.
All’s Blanshard that’s not Bishop Sheen.
 All’s treason that’s not patriotism.
Faith, charity, hope — now all must fit
One pattern or its opposite.

Or so it seems. Yet who would dare
 Deny that nature planned it other,
When every freckled thrush can wear
 A dapple various from his brother,
When each pale snowflake in the storm
Is false to some imagined norm?

Recalling then what surely was
 The earliest bounty of Creation:
That not a blade among the grass
 But flaunts its difference with elation,
Let us devoutly take no blame
If similar does not mean the same.

And grateful for the wit to see
 Prospects through doors we cannot enter,
Ah! let us praise Diversity
 Which holds the world upon its center.
Praise con amor or furioso
The large, the little, and the soso.

Rejoice that under cloud and star
 The planet’s more than Maine or Texas.
Bless the delightful fact there are
 Twelve months, nine muses, and two sexes;
And infinite in earth’s dominions
Arts, climates, wonders, and opinions.

Praise ice and ember, sand and rock,
 Tiger and dove and ends and sources;
Space travelers, and who only walk
 Like mailmen round familiar courses;
Praise vintage grapes and tavern Grappas,
And bankers and Phi Beta Kappas;

Each in its moment justified,
 Praise knowledge, theory, second guesses;
That which must wither or abide;
 Prim men, and men like wildernesses;
And men of peace and men of mayhem
And pipers and the ones who pay ’em.

Praise the disheveled, praise the sleek;
 Austerity and hearts-and-flowers;
People who turn the other cheek
 And extroverts who take cold showers;
Saints we can name a holy day for
And infidels the saints can pray for.

Praise youth for pulling things apart,
 Toppling the idols, breaking leases;
Then from the upset apple-cart
 Praise oldsters picking up the pieces.
Praise wisdom, hard to be a friend to,
And folly one can condescend to.

Praise what conforms and what is odd,
 Remembering, if the weather worsens
Along the way, that even God
 Is said to be three separate Persons.
Then upright or upon the knee,
Praise Him that by His courtesy,
For all our prejudice and pains,
Diverse His Creature still remains.

New at IWP Books: Phyllis McGinley, 1946, Stones from a Glass House.

tiger, tiger

Verses composed upon hearing that the Association for Childhood Education, as well as other groups, was calling Little Black Sambo an “undesirable book,” because “it disseminates racial and religious prejudices.”

Little Black Sambo, mind your cues;
 Behave like a wary fella.
Hold on tight to those purple shoes,
 That beautiful green umbrella.
Better be careful, better not bungle,
Strolling soft through this civilized jungle.
Branches bow
 And the grass is hollowed.
Don’t look now
 But I think you’re followed.
Something’s after you, angrier far
Than even your fabulous tigers are —
A striped thing with a public cry
And a hot, fanatical tiger eye,
That lives in bluster and dwells in storm.
And one of its names is called Reform.

Oh, one of its names’s Self-Righteousness.
 It feeds on the flesh of rumor
And quite makes up in its zeal, I guess,
 What it lacks in a sense of humor.
Loose in the world, it prowls and pants,
Terming intolerance Tolerance,
Or out of its lair
 Comes daily tumbling
To fill the air
 With enormous rumbling.
So listen, listen, Little Black Sambo.
Take it hastily on the lam, bo.
Whiten your dark, endearing face.
Hide in the bush, deny your race.
For that which formerly hunted witches
Bays on the trail of your sky-blue britches.

Hit for shelter, but as you do so,
Shout a warning to Robinson Crusoe.
Bid him tidy
 The footprints, straight,
Or Good Man Frid’y
 Will share your fate.
Close the covers on Mr. Kipling,
Calling to Mowgli, the sunburnt stripling.
Snatch the palm
 (May the Lord redeem us!)
From Uncle Tom
 And from Uncle Remus,
Epaminondas, and, just to be sure,
Maybe Othello, the noble Moor.
The peril stalks.
 It will soon have treed’ em.
For though it walks
 In the clothes of freedom
And wears a bright, respectable name,
It’s a full-grown tiger just the same.

New at IWP Books: Phyllis McGinley, 1941, Husbands Are Difficult.

death at evening

Scatter, O skeptical minions.
 Scoffers, stay far from our roof.
For Oliver Ames has opinions
 And he’s planning to put them to proof.
He is certain — and then
 He has read it in books —
That the best cooks are men
 And the best men are cooks,
So we’re going to sup
 For once, if we will,
On viands served up
 With an amateur’s skill.
Make way for the conqueror!
Hail to the chief!
That cooking is difficult passes belief.
And feminine fuss is a hollow pretense.
It’s simply a matter of common sense.

As eager as Old Mother Hubbard,
 Convinced that pure reason prevails,
Now Oliver’s storming the cupboard.
 He’s swinging the pots by their tails.
He’s raiding the spice box
 For pepper and clove,
He’s at grips with the icebox,
 At war with the stove.
There’re pans like a tower
 Stacked up on the shelves;
The salt and the flour
 Have hidden themselves.
There’s a knife in the garbage,
There’s glass in the sink.
And Oliver’s having his troubles, I think.
But (presently) food will be issuing hence.
It’s strictly a matter of common sense.

Soon plenty is what we’ll be rich in.
 We’ll feast like Lucullus today.
But was that a groan from the kitchen?
 And what is this odor, I pray?
And is that my dear
 Whom I dimly descry
With a smudge on his ear
 And a glaze in his eye?
And is that potato
 Supine on the floor,
With a trace of tomato —
 Or can it be gore?
And what was that clatter
 That startled the night?
Was it plate? Was it platter?
 And where did it light?
And who is it speaking
In dots and in dashes?
And was that our dinner? Well, peace to its ashes!
Come, Oliver, out of the pantry, I beg.
We’ll bind up your wounds and we’ll scramble an egg;
We’ll sweep out the kitchen while counting to ten
And no one will mention it ever again.
For cooking, my love — and I mean no offense —
Is largely a matter of common sense.

From A Short Walk from the Station by Phyllis McGinley

reactionary essay on applied science

I cannot love the Brothers Wright.
 Marconi wins my mixed devotion.
Had no one yet discovered Flight
 Or set the air waves in commotion,
Life would, I think, have been as well.
That also goes for A. G. Bell.

What I’m really thankful for, when I’m cleaning up after lunch,
Is the invention of waxed paper.

That Edison improved my lot,
 I sometimes doubt; nor care a jitney
Whether the kettle steamed, or Watt,
 Or if the gin invented Whitney.
Better the world, I often feel,
Had nobody contrived the wheel.

On the other hand, I’m awfully indebted
To whoever it was dreamed up the elastic band.

Yes, pausing grateful, now and then,
 Upon my prim, domestic courses,
I offer praise to lesser men —
 Fultons unsung, anonymous Morses —
Whose deft and innocent devices
Pleasure my house with sweets and spices.

I give you, for instance, the fellows
Who first had the idea for Scotch Tape.

I hail the man who thought of soap,
 The chap responsible for zippers,
Sun lotion, the stamped envelope,
 And screens, and wading pools for nippers,
Venetian blinds of various classes,
And bobby pins and tinted glasses.

DeForest never thought up anything
So useful as a bobby pin.

Those baubles are the ones that keep
 Their places, and beget no trouble,
Incite no battles, stab no sleep,
 Reduce no villages to rubble,
Being primarily designed
By men of unambitious mind.

You remember how Orville Wright said his flying machine
Was going to outlaw war?

Let them on Archimedes dote
 Who like to hear the planet rattling.
I cannot cast a hearty vote
 For Galileo or for Gatling,
Preferring, of the Freaks of science,
The pygmies rather than the giants —

(And from experience being wary of
Greek geniuses bearing gifts) —

Deciding, on reflection calm,
 Mankind is better off with trifles:
With Band-Aid rather than the bomb,
 With safety match than safety rifles.
Let the earth fall or the earth spin!
A brave new world might well begin
With no invention
Worth the mention
Save paper towels and aspirin.

Remind me to call the repairman
About my big, new, automatically defrosting refrigerator with the built-in electric eye.

New at IWP Books: Phyllis McGinley, 1951, A Short Walk from the Station. Review by Jacques Barzun.

lament for a wavering viewpoint

I want to be a Tory
 And with the Tories stand,
Elect and bound for glory
 With a proud, congenial band.
Or in the Leftist hallways
 I gladly would abide,
But from my youth I always
 Could see the Other Side.

How comfortable to rest with
 The safe and armored folk
Congenitally blessed with
 Opinions stout as oak!
Assured that every question
 One single answer hath,
They keep a good digestion
 And whistle in their bath.

But all my views are plastic,
 With neither form nor pride.
They stretch like new elastic
 Around the Other Side;
And I grow lean and haggard
 With searching out the taint
Of hero in the blackguard,
 Of villain in the saint.

Ah, snug lie those that slumber
 Beneath Conviction’s roof.
Their floors are sturdy lumber,
 Their windows, weatherproof.
But I sleep cold forever
 And cold sleep all my kind,
Born nakedly to shiver
 In the draft from an open mind.

“It is not always American writing that most deeply impresses Americans. So I do not apologize for the curious book in which I have taken most pleasure during the last decade — Ronald Knox’s sole masterpiece, Enthusiasm. Supposedly it is a history of Christian heresies and on that basis it is superb. But I find it something more important. It is also a history of recurrent patterns of the human mind, as applicable to literature, politics and government as to religion. Montanism and Donatism, Albigensianism and Jansenism — puritanism, evangelism, rationalism and superrationalism, quietism, relaxation — they are all constantly erupting phenomena of man’s temperament. To be acquainted with this scholarly, brilliantly witty, crotchety book is to be better acquainted with the planet and its odd occupants.” Phyllis McGinley, Outstanding Books, 1931–1961

From Wodroow Wilson, “The Spirit of Learning,” 1909 (in IWP Articles):

“What we should seek to impart in our colleges… is not so much learning itself as the spirit of learning. You can impart that to young men; and you can impart it to them in the three or four years at your disposal. It consists in the power to distinguish good reasoning from bad, in the power to digest and interpret evidence, in a habit of catholic observation and a preference for the non-partisan point of view, in an addiction to clear and logical processes of thought and yet an instinctive desire to interpret rather than to stick in the letter of the reasoning, in a taste for knowledge and a deep respect for the integrity of the human mind. It is citizenship of the world of knowledge, but not ownership of it.”

New at IWP Books: Irwin Edman, 1931, The Contemporary and His Soul.

“Not only is a country too complex for the plans or the accomplishments of the most absolute dictator. A dictatorship within one’s own personality is an impossible mirage. Even in primitive communities life is far from a soliloquy and it is infinitely further from being one in the highly corporate life of modern communities. It is rarely within the achievement of any individual to attain by himself integrity or clarity or peace in a society all confusion and incipient or actual warfare. No psychological technique could reconstruct a truly integrated individual without reconstructing first the whole world in which and by which his individuality is formed. No Thoreauian individualism or Emersonian self-reliance will have any point for the man or woman involved in the network of the industrial and international world of today. He may flee to a desert island or to a desert island of the mind. But that flight will itself be a defeat and a surrender, it is an admission that individuality cannot be attained among the realities of contemporary social experience. And it is admittedly difficult to be an individual, much less to reconstruct one’s individuality, where all the conditions of industry, education and politics make for a standard, a pattern or type, moulds too in which it would be surprising were everyone to find his happiness. One quarrel then is between the individual desiring to be an individual and a society where individuality is increasingly at a discount. But there is a quarrel more ancient and not less alive: that between the flesh and the spirit, or, in the jargon of the day, between impulse and intelligence. That inner tumult which tormented St. Paul and plagued St. Augustine has been rendered no less intense by repressions and restrictions of urban and corporate life. The resources of the whole of modern psychiatry have not been able to cure those neuroses whose sources lie not so much in the biography of an individual as in the history of an era. Where half the neurotic troubles of the present are to be traced to the conditions peculiar to the era of cities, of corporate pressure and of speed, it is not to be expected that an individual simply by determining to be sweet and reasonable can accomplish the miracle of becoming so.”

New at IWP Books: Irwin Edman, 1939, Candle in the Dark: A Postcript to Despair.

“What brief candles of hope or of resource can we find in a darkness which we are first prepared to accept as absolute? What, amid the noisy alarms and scarring disillusions, can the mind remaining at once candid and liberal hope for?”

“It may seem strange to the point of perversity to declare in an almost immitigably tragic time that a vivid sense of the present is one of the best antidotes to despair. But the fact is, so great is the impact of events upon us, that we are losing the capacity to realize the present at all. Even in quiet times most people live for the most part at second-hand, by labels and clichés passing for experience. In tense periods such as that through which we are passing, we do not so much live as we are interrupted in living by dire intimations, by signals of death and darkness. We do not experience the present at all as a poet or any free spirit or, in a word, any person completely alive feels it. Each moment is filled with such complex uncertainty that we are losing the capacity to take or to feel the moment as it is in itself — now. Haunted habitually by the thought of how all goods are threatened, we no longer have the freedom of spirit to be wholly or wholeheartedly acquainted with such goods of life as even now there are, such goods of life as persist, whatever ardors and endurances face men. These we experience at their fullest in art and play, in friendship and affection, or in our work (if we happen to be lucky), and in all those activities which release and enhance the sense of being and, with it, the sense of joy.”

(From Irwin Edman’s Under Whatever Sky, 1951.)

A macabre practical joker once appeared at the front door in the middle of a dinner party given by an older friend of mine, then a very lively dean. The man insisted on seeing the head of the house; and when the host appeared at the door, the visitor turned out to represent a local undertaking firm. He had come on a telephoned request to take charge of the body of our host, who was intelligibly not amused.

At a large university recently, an eminent scholar, who had reason to believe his writings were fairly well known, had a similar experience. The Secretary turned over to him a letter addressed to the University from a small town in California. The letter inquired whether the University would enable the correspondent to “contact” the scholar in question. “He was,” so the letter ran, “connected with your university, I believe, about twenty-five years ago. If you would give me his present whereabouts, I should greatly appreciate it. I have no way of knowing what has become of him.” The eminent thinker brooded over this missive.

Everyone broods at some time or another over the obscurity, the anonymity, the zero place of his own personality in his era. Swift is said to have remarked when he looked, years after its writing, at A Tale of a Tub: “My God, I had genius when I wrote that.” Many another writer, looking at an early work of his own, can only reflect on how long forgotten it is. Max Beerbohm once found in a secondhand bookshop a book that long ago he had “affectionately” inscribed to a friend. He bought the book, wrote in it “still affectionately,” and mailed it to the friend who had disposed of it.

How often one meets the ghosts of former celebrities, men and women whose names once meant something to practically every literate person. It is a shock that they are still alive; one feels it would have been much more decent and proper of them to have been buried with their reputations. They have no right to be perambulating in so belated a living air. They constitute reminders, too discouraging, of the transiency of fame.

My friend replied to the inquiry as to what had become of him that he presumed he was still identical with the person being sought. But was he? Are we not all distant echoes of earlier selves, of transformed personalities going by the same name? “Whatever has become of so and so?” we ask. Whatever has become of me, one sometimes asks himself or should ask. But — the consoling thought comes to us — our essential being, our authentic self, has changed no more than (until very old age) our own familiar voice changes. It is only the public mask of one stage of our lives that has vanished. Thus, the modishness of a given art critic may have disappeared, but his delight in art itself may last freshly and happily through his obscure last years. Marcus Aurelius warned us against relying upon the externalities of wealth, of friends, of fame. He followed his own warning and retired into the fortress of his own soliloquy. It is not his fault that by so doing he insured his future fame. While he was still alive, there must have been someone in some remote corner of the Roman Empire who asked, “What has become of Marcus Aurelius?” — or, when he passed by in some place remote from Rome, “Now who on earth is that?”