I grew up in a place I’ve been told for most of my life should embarrass me. When I went to college and someone asked where I came from, invariably I said “Cleveland” not “Parma Heights,” a suburb on the West Side of that city. By age seventeen I was already sensitive to the snobbery of would-be sophisticates when it came to the suburbs.
Mine was not one of the swankier suburbs already associated in
literature with John Cheever’s stories and Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road. Our neighbors were working class and most
were first- or second-generation Slavs. The only people I ever met who had gone to college were teachers and doctors. Some stereotypes held: the
obsession with lawncare and washing the car every weekend in the summer. People
were proud of what they had. My paternal grandfather and his three sons built
our house after tearing down the cottage that had been their home until after
World War II.
We had it good. The Fifties and Sixties were a prosperous time
for many American families. My father was a union ironworker and on the side
worked as an auxiliary police officer. My mother was a tax clerk for the city. We
had plenty of problems but money wasn’t one of them. Our suburb, in retrospect,
was a safe enclave. I don’t remember anyone worrying about crime.
These thoughts were prompted by a reader, one I hadn’t heard
from before, who launched into an anti-suburb screed. He congratulated me for
coming from “a real city,” not a “boring commuter haven.” Sorry, but Parma
Heights was not a hip urban center. I
remembered an essay written by the poet Phyllis McGinley in 1950, “Suburbia:
Of Thee I Sing.” She celebrates her suburb, which she calls Spruce
Manor:
“It is a commuters’ town, and the epitome of suburbia. By day,
with the children pent in schools, it is a village of women. They trundle
baskets at the A&P, they sit under driers at the hairdressers’, they sweep
their porches and set out bulbs and stitch up slip covers.”
McGinley and her family lived in Larchmont, a suburb of New
York City in Westchester County more affluent than Parma Heights. “Few of us
expect to be wealthy or world-famous or divorced,” she writes. “What we do expect
is to pay off the mortgage and send healthy children to good colleges.” Who
could object to that? Snobs, of course, the insecure haute bourgeoisie.
McGinley (1905-78) is a poet erased from cultural memory. She
called herself a “housewife poet,” without irony. Auden loved her and wrote an
introduction to Times Three (1960),
her collected poems that went through seven printings in six years. In “Suburbia:
Of Thee I Sing,” she writes:
“I think that someday people will look back on our Spruce Manor way of life with nostalgia and respect. In a world of terrible extremes it will stand out as the important medium.”
3 comments:
Two of my favorite poems by her here: https://iwpbooks.me/poetry/
Just finished reading Richard Yates' "Revolutionary Road", which is generally considered an anti-suburban novel. It's brilliant, of course, but from I could see, the characters' problems have nothing to do with suburbia.Their problem is simply that they drink and smoke too much. They are living outside of reality.
And the East Coast suburbia of "Revolutionary Road" bears no resemblance to working class Parma Heights, a place I know. Cleveland suburbs of the 1950s and 60s were a kind of utopia, looked at in retrospect.
I grew up on a suburban street in Southern California in the 60's. Was it a cultural wasteland? For a lot of people, probably. We did watch a lot of Bonanza and Carol Burnett. But there were good books and good music too. The past couple of decades should have taught us that a lot of supposedly elite places can be wastelands too. Flowers and weeds alike can pop up damn near anywhere - it all depends on the degree of cultivation.
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