'The Important Medium''

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.”