'Buy Something Before You Get Socked in the Eye'

The indispensable Brad Bigelow of The Neglected Books Page has introduced me to a poet I had never known before, Margaret Fishback (1900-85). Like L.E. Sissman she worked in advertising and published in The New Yorker. Unlike Sissman, she wrote light verse almost exclusively and was commercially successful, at least briefly. 

From the university library I borrowed two of Fishback's books – her first, I Feel Better Now (1932), and her fifth, a first edition of Time for a Quick One (1940). The former is already in its sixth printing just two months after publication. On the end paper someone has written in pencil: “J.S. / 23^rd floor / Smith Young Tower.”  Tucked between pages 68 and 69 is a pink Houston streetcar ticket dated November 22, 1932 – almost  ninety-one years ago. Two boxes are punched: “Ten Cent Fare Paid” and “Cottage Grove.” The ticket left a brown, butterfly-shaped stain across the two pages. On the left is “Saleslady’s Spring Song”:

 

“Polka dot, polka dot, printed foulard,

Thirty-five inches is almost a yard.

If it were wider, a remnant would do;

Here’s the same print in a new shade of blue.

Wrap it about your anatomy. So. . . .

Youthful, distinctive! You’ll love it, I know.

Polka dot, polka dot, printed foulard,

Thirty-five inches is almost a yard.

(Make up your mind, will you, madam, and buy

Something before you get socked in the eye.)”

 

Like many of Fishback’s poems, this one is about women. There’s nothing patronizing about it, and the final couplet, with its tough-broad manner, might have been written by Dorothy Parker. Fishback’s verse is untouched by Modernism. She was writing in the Age of Light Verse, when even newspapers routinely published it. The poem on the right is “Time Out”:

 

“Impressive promises I do

Not make myself, nor ask of you,

For eagerness I prize above

All other requisites of love.

So never try to tell me when

You’ll want to be with me again.

Nor pledge your love for Saturday

While it is yet an hour away.

For even if you ever could

Be sure of Saturday, I would

Be loathe to lose that sweet suspense

Which dissipates indifference.

 

“So, darling, if you’d rather be

With someone else than here with me,

I’ll understand and sympathize

And stifle all my plaintive sighs.

And try to make you think I do

Not care too consistently for you.”

 

A more serious poem, about a woman playing the game of love. Yes, Fishback published in The New Yorker but also in Good Housekeeping, Redbook Magazine, Mademoiselle, Harper’s Bazaar and Department Store Buyer. I’m guessing most of her readership was female. Time for a Quick One seems ripe with double-entendres, starting with its title, but they may all be innocent. Here is “Lip Service”:

 

“Women are wacky. Women are vain.

They’d rather be pretty than have a good brain.

They’d rather be minus their skirts and their slips,

Than ever be caught with rouge on their Lips.

The house might be burning right under their feet,

But still they’d not leave till their maps were complete.

Of wives, and career girls as well, this is true . . .

P.S. This admission applies to me too.”