This article is taken from PN Review 285, Volume 52 Number 1, September - October 2025.
My 1950s
My friend Anita Abbott and I, both in our early nineties, were reminiscing about the Old Days. ‘The fifties,’ she suddenly said with total conviction, ‘was the best decade of my life.’ I was startled. ‘What about the treatment of Blacks’, I asked. Or of gays, the fifties being, as I recall it, a horribly homophobic decade, when those even faintly suspect of being gay couldn’t get job clearances. ‘But most people were much happier then’, she insisted. ‘And we had so much fun.’
Perhaps hers was just a reaction to having been young and hence happier in her twenties. But I must confess I feel the same way. For me, the 1950s was somehow a golden age. Why? In The Vienna Paradox (2004), I wrote about my childhood years, first in Vienna and then as a refugee from Hitler in the United States. The paradox of the book’s title refers to the contradiction between Viennese high culture – Bildung – as a form of religion versus the democracy of the United States, which functioned as a kind of alternative to it. At the turn of the twenty-first century, when I wrote The Vienna Paradox, I was probably much more positive about our democracy than I am today, and yet I still look back fondly on the Eisenhower years.
What was coming of age in the fifties really like? No story is more repeatedly misconstrued, whether in the movies, in novels, or in most historical accounts of the period. Films like Far from Heaven (2002) present the women of the 1950s as so many neurotic, pill popping ladies in high heels, shirtwaist dresses, and lots of red lipstick. These housewives, as they were known, are kept busy taking care of their children, but they never seem to play with them or to do anything with them. The husbands are even worse: arriving home from work exhausted and in need of the Big Drink, they plunk their children in front of the TV, happy to ignore them the rest of the evening. Everyone has children but who can stand being around them? Not in the world of John Updike or John Cheever.
Eventually in the narrative, a series of affairs and probably divorce as in Mad Men, which is the epitome of the fifties’ suburban idyll gone sour. And yet the actual life of the 1950s was rather different! AT LEAST MY LIFE. Consider, for starters, the way social institutions worked in those days.
Marriage
I graduated from Barnard College in June 1953 and got married on July 31 of that year: I was twenty-one. Such early marriage was the norm in the postwar era. Why?
Surely it was not that people fell in love more readily in those days. But it was not yet the custom to rent one’s own apartment and live on one’s own; I for one would have been frightened to pursue the single life. Roommates were of course an option but made privacy impossible. Still, living ‘at home’ with one’s parents? Surely not! Therefore, ‘nice girls’ (mostly still virgins) much preferred the prospects of early marriage, which meant having a man to support you. It seemed like the best solution. And with the G.I. Bill making college possible for millions of young men (although, strictly speaking, only white young men), marriage seemed to be the logical next step.
In the spring of ’53, in any case, most conversations at the Robin Dell café on Broadway just south of Barnard College were about china and silver patterns, bridesmaids, and such. One would never know we were attending an institution of higher learning! Somehow everyone was ‘pairing off’, including myself.
I had transferred to Barnard precisely in the hope of meeting someone, although I would not have admitted this to anyone. At Oberlin, I knew all the eligible men and felt that there was no one for me. And I had taken all the most desirable courses like ‘The Four Theatres’ with the glamorous Professor Centeno, who related all theatrical modes to the varying conceptions of character of the three great Classical playwrights: Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. That summer, I had a boyfriend named Rudy Boschwitz, who was also a refugee and was a law student at NYU. I was quite keen on Rudy until he told me he planned to move to Minnesota after graduation and open a lumber mill with his brother. Minnesota??? Lumber mill??? I knew that would never be the life for me. (Later, incidentally, Rudy became a Republican Senator from Minnesota.)
So that was the end of Rudy. I applied to Barnard and was accepted but I had no idea what Barnard would be like. At Oberlin, I had taken challenging courses like a year of Romantic poets, and a year of Elizabethan/Jacobean drama, but I had not taken the ‘basics’ – Chaucer, Milton, eighteenth century – so I had to take all three in my first semester. Even worse, I had to take math in my senior year as well as gym, which included miniature golf at the Riverside Church. I had been accepted for grad school in English at Columbia, but the new boring classes made me think that graduate school was not for me – at least not yet! Math, incidentally, was a hardship, because I never did understand why dividing a number by zero didn’t simply yield zero?!
During the Christmas holidays, I was invited to a party by one Suzi Rosenthal whom I barely knew. I recall that later that evening I had a date with my brother’s Reed College friend Eli Bergman. But I was sorry to leave the party because I had met this very attractive and sweet Southern gentleman-physician named Joseph Perloff. He wore a gray-blue wool suit I loved and a blue tie. Throughout Tosca (I am not a great opera fan), I thought about Joseph. (I did not like the name Joe.) That’s how it began and by April, when I visited New Orleans, his hometown, we were engaged.
What a boring bourgeois story, yes? Could anything be more routine, triter? And yet consider the interesting wrinkles soon to manifest themselves in the grey blue suit. My arrival at New Orleans airport for example. I had never been to the South. In 1953 there were still signs everywhere, like ‘For Colored Only’ or its antitheses on streetcars ‘Colored in rear of car only’. There were swimming pool signs like ‘White Only’ and so on. As a New Yorker, I had never seen such a thing and I found it very oppressive. I felt I could never live in such a place.
And then there was the family. All white, this time, all Jewish, but... Joe’s father was a short little man with a huge bulging stomach and friendly but very homely face. He never stopped talking but I couldn’t figure out what about – diamonds he had bargained for, his real estate businesses, and J.K. his very own ‘boychik’. Rose, Joe’s mother, was much taller than he was and more normal. But then there were all the aunts and uncles. Joe had three uncles, two of whom would never marry – Morris, Dave and Max. And there were similarly three aunts, Rae, Mimi and Sarah. Sarah was mentally impaired and sat in her bed all day sorting socks and doing other useful activities; Mimi was her caretaker. Rae had finally married and her husband Morris Warnick of course moved in with her and became part of the family. Only Max who had recently married Thelma, had moved out. But then Thelma was not Jewish so she didn’t really count.
Including Joe’s sister Shirley, who was my age and became a good friend, there were thus ten adults living at Number 5 Richmond Place in uptown New Orleans, plus the servants who were there every day: Augustine the cook, her husband Sergeant – a general factotum – and Lillian who did the laundry and upstairs cleaning. Needless to say, I had never met such a family before. Everyone ate when he or she felt like it; they would grab a plate and fill it with turkey, stuffing etc. Everyone was always kissing and hugging me which was not my style and they were always, in the heyday of TV, watching the Jack Benny show or Sid Caesar.
Could I really marry into such a family? My mother decided to go down on a visit so as to learn what the Perloff-Cohens were really like. She quite simply invited herself, which must’ve seemed quite odd to the New Orleans family, but of course they said yes and were extremely hospitable. She came home with a good report – that although Joe’s family were wholly alien, they were good-hearted, decent people, who would treat me well. Meanwhile Joe was pronounced nearly perfect, what with his excellent manners and Southern charm. Indeed, grandmother Schuller declared that he looked like a handsome Italian, which was for her the ultimate compliment.
I myself worried secretly that Joe was not intellectual enough, that he had not read enough great books. This was to change very rapidly when we went on our honeymoon at St. Mary’s Glacier Lake Lodge in Colorado, and he read and adored War and Peace. I also admired him for having been in the navy – I loved the pictures in uniform – and for knowing how to ride so well. He was wonderfully athletic, whereas I trudged up the glacier behind the hotel in my saddle shoes, smoking a cigarette and complaining of the cold. Joseph and I were so different, but Joe loved the idea of an educated European wife and so it all balanced out, without any of the artificial notion of common interests that dominates the dating scene today. Somehow, our marriages worked because we wanted them to work.
Work
A standard myth about the 1950s is that women did not work, that we were all homemakers. The actual situation was much more complicated. As college graduates, of course we planned to work, at least until we had children, which was usually three to four years or so. In my own case, we also needed the money, since Joe was doing another year of residency at Mt Sinai Hospital, and was paid almost nothing.
For what sort of job did an English major qualify? Publishing (the favourite), advertising, non-profit foundations, secretarial, receptionist, ‘research’. Obviously, these jobs did not amount to much, my weak point being the artwork required in advertising, where I had neither the skills nor the imagination to proceed. My first job, in any case, was at the Bettmann Archive on 57th St – a wonderful location for lunch dates, what with all the art galleries and boutiques around. Old Dr Otto Bettmann, a German refugee, had assembled a picture archive of vast dimensions. He was alone in the office. Someone might call and want a nineteenth-century image of The Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe. I would search the archive and find the best sample. I believe the pay was $40 per week.
It didn’t take me more than a week to discover that this job was deadly dull. Moreover, Dr B. watched over me like a policeman: five minutes late after lunch meant a very dirty look. Wissenschaft?
Not really. So within six weeks, I quit.
My next job was as a ‘title writer’ for MGM. I followed up on an ad in the New York Times for a ‘title writer trainee’. MGM wanted someone who was PBK (Phi Beta Kappa) and knew two foreign languages. Not that we ever used these languages. Title writing is basically condensation: since we don’t read as quickly as we hear the words on film, cutting is essential. But the real task is the writing of ‘alts’, short for alternate lines. In The Long, Long Trailer, Lucille Ball tells Desi Arnaz, ‘You turn left right here’. Of course the car swerves to the right. Get it? Or again, in Kiss Me Kate, Petruchio sings, ‘If the wife has a bag of gold, / Do I care if the bag be old?’ How to write a sentence in which the American slang ‘old bag’ comes across in, say, Italian or Arabic? A good alt anyone? The translators merely followed our texts: they did not see the films.
I spent many hours and smoked countless cigarettes playing the alt-pun game. It was especially hard in the case of Pete Smiths. No one knows Pete Smiths anymore: those horrible little shorts where the first guy drops all the eggs on the floor and the second one tries to pick them up. One time, I watched six Pete Smiths in a row and started to cry. My boss Bernie Doret couldn’t imagine what was wrong. Why in the hell was I crying? ‘Don’t you understand?’, I tried to explain, ‘how stupid and meaningless this all is? It has no point. No one wants to see these films’, and so on. Bernie disagreed. It was his view that the movies just gave people what they wanted. People loved these Pete Smiths. I decided then and there, I must do something ‘meaningful’ with my life, for example, go to graduate school. Even if the professors and classmates were going to be dull, at least the material would be inherently interesting.
I have never changed my mind about this simple idea. The literature itself, whether Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici or Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis – the essays, poems, plays – was always interesting. No more Long Long Trailers or images of Rosmarie in her raccoon hat! Joe had won a Fulbright scholarship to the National Heart Hospital in London and so before long we set off for what was my first trip to Europe – a truly wonderful year of travel and museum going. In London, moreover, I made the acquaintance of my mother’s sister Hilde, an art historian married to fellow art historian Otto Kurz, who wrote the definitive book on fakes. The Kurzes, including bratty daughter Erica, then fourteen, immediately detected that Joe and I did not realize that the Leonardo Madonna of the Rocks in the National Gallery was a fake: the real one was in the Louvre whereas this one, as Erica proudly informed us, was only by Bernadino Luini.
In 1954, London was still in ruins: I remember especially the stones around Saint Paul’s – a poignant sight. But in those days, you could drive down to Trafalgar Square or Kensington High Street and park anywhere. Few people owned cars, and the streets were still fairly empty. Supermarkets were not yet common; one shopped in a dozen little stores: the greengrocer, the stationer, the butcher, the baker. For me it was a real novelty and since I could not obtain green papers, I spent many hours and days reading. All of Proust, for instance, so that one time I was so absorbed I swallowed a plum pit. I read Mauriac and Malraux, Goethe’s Italienische Reise and Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain. And of course art books like Bernard Berenson’s Italian Renaissance Painters, in preparation for the big continental trip planned for the winter.
On that trip, we visited Vienna for a few days. What a disappointment! The Vienna of the fifties was still Third Man country: gloomy, dark, shabby and slightly sinister. Only old people in the streets and cafés. The beautiful buildings on the Ringstrasse mostly in ruins. People eyeing one another suspiciously. The concierges were consistently unfriendly. We couldn’t wait to leave on the night train to Venice. And yet the recreation of the beautiful baroque Vienna of the eighteenth century was just around the corner. Change comes so quickly in our time.
But we weren’t there to see it because in the summer of 1955 we moved to Washington where Joe had a cardiology fellowship at Georgetown, and I attended graduate school at Catholic University. And thereby hangs a complicated tale.
It always astonishes me how powerful custom is. Does no one strike out on their own? In the fifties, the term ‘single mother’ was barely known: I don’t believe I knew a single one, except for my dear fellow refugee friend Corinna Metcalf, who had lived in Paris on her own and was bringing up Alexander quite without the help of his father, the painter Jimmy Metcalf. Today, when every would-be Congressman brags about his single mother and what she did for him, this may seem an odd state of affairs, but there it is. In my day, husbands were de rigueur – points on a map, so to speak, that determined where the couple in question lived, what jobs they held, and so on. The role of husbands was to make enough money to buy a house, but in the meantime, they oversaw the search for apartments – primarily in new buildings, with largish living rooms, smallish dining areas, kitchens and bathroom with latest equipment, and two bedrooms.
Ours, in Washington, D.C., which we rented after we returned from our year in England, was in a new building called the Phylmar Plaza, in a corner of the Glover Park neighbourhood surrounded by parkland and parking lot – no garages yet then. The rent was $150 per month (roughly $1,700 today). It was less than a ten-minute drive to Georgetown Hospital where Joe was doing a residency in cardiology. The Phylmar Plaza is still there, looking exactly as it did in 1956.
Was the Phylmar Plaza in any way distinctive? Not at all, but it had an elevator, the woods of Glover Park behind it, and you could usually park in front. Convenience was very important in those days.
Living in Washington
But why Washington to begin with? I said earlier that I couldn’t imagine living in New Orleans. By the same token, Joe did not want to live in New York. Too expensive for a physician who wants to open a practice (which Joe thought at the time he would do). The people were too rude! No one gave their seats in the subway to old ladies! You couldn’t park your car: we often double-parked our little green Oldsmobile all night and, in the morning, it was likely to have new dents and scratches.
At the same time, our city had to be cosmopolitan and have cultural attractions! Joe’s best friend, Billy Kohlmann, who, on the plane to Paris in the early fifties was stricken with polio and spent months in an iron lung, was in Washington, working for the State Department, or so he said – it was really the CIA. Billy had a circle of very interesting friends from the Agency. In those days, grad students who had M.A. degrees but were reluctant to go on to a PhD often worked for the government or for the foreign service for a few years. Agencies like the AID, the USIS, and of course the State Department itself were popular, operating on a largely nine-to-five basis so that there was plenty of time for cocktail parties and dinners at local restaurants. Everyone had parties on weekends or went to them, and there would be much gossip about Sargent Shriver’s latest speech or the chaotic activities at Robert Kennedy’s Hickory Hill.
The Washington of those years was a small town. There was not yet a subway but anyone that one was likely to know lived in the north west in easy driving distance of one another. When our children were small, we would put them in the car in what were then standard little car seats (not the monsters of today) and have art/poetry visits – little salons where discussion of books and artworks was central. One key hostess was Meryle Secrest, who is still publishing biographies, the latest being of Princess Margaret Rose and foetal alcohol syndrome.
Meryle was an Englishwoman from Bath. As was customary then, she did not attend university but became a journalist. In Washington, she got her start by writing social columns – very boring to do she said – and then her first biography of Romaine Brooks, the great lesbian French salonnière and friend of Gertrude Stein. Then came Bernard Berenson, Frank Lloyd Wright – the list goes on and on.
Many interesting and talented women in our little kiddie group but my personal favourite and closest friend was an artist named Carrie Westervelt. Carrie was astonishing. She was beautiful, very funny, and aside from painting in the tradition of Kenneth Noland and Ellsworth Kelly, her teachers at American University, she could recite, over lunch at Martin’s in Georgetown, all of Donne’s ‘Canonization’ or Wordworth’s ‘Resolution and Independence’.
University
Whatever Washington is or isn’t, it is not a university town. In 1955, the University of Maryland suffered a major football scandal and didn’t offer a PhD in English. No PhDs in the Humanities were offered at George Washington, American University, Georgetown, or Howard either. When I consulted my favourite Oberlin professor, F.X. Roellinger, where I might go, he suggested Catholic University, a place that had never crossed my mind since it was the Pontifical University and most of its faculty and students were clergy. For someone Jewish who had gone to two protestant liberal arts colleges – Oberlin and Barnard – Catholic University was quite a culture shock. The first course I signed up for was English Renaissance literature, taught by the department Chair Kirby Neill. We called him Kirby Nihil because his mind seemed so deliciously empty. Studying the Renaissance sonnet, the classification system was by number: is this sonnet by Sidney a 12+2 or 10+4 or 8+6? Where, in other words, is the turn or volta? In Shakespeare, what with the closing couplet, it is usually 12+2, but not necessarily, for the meaning structure can override the sound structure.
Meanwhile, we were busy reading Hiram Haydn’s Counterrenaissance and C.S. Lewis’s The Literature of the Sixteenth Century in England. From these two books, especially the Lewis, I learned that the Renaissance had definitely been a Bad Thing, inimical to Christian humanism. But wait a minute: hadn’t our Oberlin professors taught us that everything good began with the Renaissance, as the very notion of rebirth made clear? So how could the word have these negative implications?
In class I sat next to Father Jordan who was always complimenting me on my sweaters. How to react to that mode of behaviour?? And in Craig LaDrière’s theory class, we were learning that the highest faculty – the faculty that only the angels have – was called the vis cogitativa. Hmmm – I had never heard of that one at Oberlin. Soon I was having discussions about the meaning of grace in Measure for Measure and coming to terms with mimesis vs diegesis in Aristotle. It was all very challenging and new. And not without its problems.
I signed up for Goethe taught by a mournful priest. The only other student in this seminar was a young man from Gallaudet, Washington’s well-known college for the hearing impaired. This student leaned over my shoulder and copied my notes: what else could he do? But I stopped writing anything because the priest wasn’t saying anything. Occasionally I would write down, ‘Sorry, he isn’t saying anything worth taking down’. This meant that when I dropped the course a week or two later, my new friend had to drop it too.
And then there was French Romanticism taught by a recent convert from Judaism to Catholicism, Helmut Hatzfeld, who was quite well known at the time for his studies in stylistics. Hatzfeld’s main goal was to distinguish between the truly religious poets (e.g. Châteaubriand) and those capable of no more than religiosity like Dostoyevsky. I was in the doghouse from the beginning because I chose Alfred de Musset as my special author and was evidently not critical enough of the great love affair with George Sand. In other words, Hatzfeld did not like my tone: he found it frivolous; I seemed to take the ‘tragedy’ too lightly. ‘Do you find this amusing, Mrs. Per-loff?’, he asked me after my presentation. The fact is that I probably did! It was so absurdly romantic! But I was not surprised when I got a B+ in French Romanticism.
Graduate School was so different in those days. There were no graduate fellowships: rather one paid tuition which I recall amounted to about $600 in 1955–6. Being accepted at Catholic University was not a problem; if you could pay the tuition, you got in. And I planned to do my MA degree in two semesters and be done by June 1956. It was especially important to carry out this plan, because by January I found out I was pregnant – again, according to plan. Nancy was born on 1 September 1956.
Mine, I later found out, was quite a normal way of doing things in the fifties. Since fees were low one could take one’s time writing one’s MA thesis: mine was on privileged moments in Proust and Virginia Woolf – a topic that no longer especially interests me since it was purely thematic. Those PM’s or ‘moments of being’ were not hard to find, especially not in Mrs. Dalloway or of course in Proust’s ‘Combray’. Most afternoons, I sat in the library making my way through my very long novels with relative ease. Much more interesting to me was LaDrière’s course on sound and meaning, and poetry began to occupy me more than did fiction. Wasn’t poetry, after all, the heart of literature? And wasn’t it quite exciting that Ezra Pound was in residence at Saint Elizabeth’s, where LaDrière and Giovannini were regular visitors and personal friends of the poet?
My friend Elizabeth Hartley, a shy and beautiful girl, arranged to go visit Pound one day. She returned horribly disillusioned. Evidently Pound, who was wearing Bermuda shorts, did nothing but recite favourable reviews of his poetry from the Italian newspapers. His sometime mistress Sheri Martinelli was there, stroking the great man’s ego. And the company included those charming fascists John Kasper and Eustace Mullins.1 Elizabeth never went back, indeed never wanted to hear Pound’s name again. As for me, Pound was still a remote quantity: my first true love among modernist poets being W.B. Yeats, who was no doubt an odd choice for a Jewish girl from Vienna. Not Greek but Irish mythology and Gaelic folklore, not secular humanism but faith in the occult, in mysticism, and Irish versus English politics. Yeats was to serve as an Irish Senator in his later days; his book A Vision (1926) was an elaborate cosmology that measured the phases of life by the twenty-eight phases the moon passed through in its journey from dark through full (phase fifteen) and back again. Maud Gonne, with whom Yeats was in love for most of his life, may have been a great beauty; she was also, in later life, a proto-Nazi, whose ‘revolutionary’ politics were hugely questionable. ‘Where had her sweetness gone?’ Yeats asked in ‘Quarrel in Old Age’ and could only respond with the words, ‘I had forgiven enough / who had forgiven old age’.
When it came to his beloved women, Yeats was in fact not very forgiving. Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz, the two Lissadell beauties, had destroyed their charm by letting their voices ‘grow shrill’ with conspiracy plots and political lust. As for his male friends like Patrick Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh, the big question remains what good their revolutionary activity did? ‘Oh when may it suffice?’ And there is no easy answer.
‘Easter 1916’ is surely one of the great political poems in the English language. But my love of Yeats also depended on sound. The trimeter of ‘Easter 1916’, or the mimesis of sounds as in
where the sound reacts precisely to what is happening: in this case the burst of speech after silence with the caesura as marker and then the sign of approval. Five major stresses, but in a wholly irregular sound structure. Or again take the famous ‘Sailing to Byzantium’:
I remember the frisson of reading that opening line – which was to become the title of Cormac McCarthy’s popular novel and film – for the first time in 1956, marvelling at the seemingly casual and conversational use of the demonstrative pronoun ‘that’, with its dismissal of Ireland, evidently the country of the old, in contrast to the young, introduced at the end of the run over line. The stanza is ottava rima (abababcc, eight lines of iambic pentameter) which in Yeats’s case is wilfully irregular, ‘young’ and ‘song’ constituting only an approximate rhyme as does ‘dies’ in the ‘trees’, ‘seas’, ‘dies’ sequence. Mortality – those dying generations – is stressed throughout: that which lives and flourishes – ‘the young in one another’s arms’, ‘the salmon-falls, the mackerel crowded seas’ is also doomed to death. ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ is to leave living behind for the sake of art, immortality, permanence, ‘monuments of unageing intellect’.
Why was I so captivated by the sounds of poetry that I decided to change my major field of study? Perhaps a new conviction that poetry has its own language and wastes no words, as when Eliot composes the couplet:
I was, in any case, enjoying myself in graduate school and I had also made quite a few friends, a number of whom were Black, since Howard University did not at that time give a PhD and sent its students to Catholic University. One of them was Eleanor Traylor, who was to become a star of the Howard faculty.
Flamboyant and funny, Eleanor always referred to her dissertation as a paper. It was on John Donne: there was as yet no real emphasis on African-American studies.
I remember Eleanor giving our modern novel professor James Hafley a hard time over Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, when we came to the words in the Appendix. ‘Dilsey. They endured’. ‘Dr. Hafley,’ she insisted, ‘They endured? Is that all?’
This work remains unfinished, as Marjorie Perloff died on 24 March 2024.
It has been lightly edited by Kit Kumiko Toda, John Solt and Charles Bernstein.
Perhaps hers was just a reaction to having been young and hence happier in her twenties. But I must confess I feel the same way. For me, the 1950s was somehow a golden age. Why? In The Vienna Paradox (2004), I wrote about my childhood years, first in Vienna and then as a refugee from Hitler in the United States. The paradox of the book’s title refers to the contradiction between Viennese high culture – Bildung – as a form of religion versus the democracy of the United States, which functioned as a kind of alternative to it. At the turn of the twenty-first century, when I wrote The Vienna Paradox, I was probably much more positive about our democracy than I am today, and yet I still look back fondly on the Eisenhower years.
What was coming of age in the fifties really like? No story is more repeatedly misconstrued, whether in the movies, in novels, or in most historical accounts of the period. Films like Far from Heaven (2002) present the women of the 1950s as so many neurotic, pill popping ladies in high heels, shirtwaist dresses, and lots of red lipstick. These housewives, as they were known, are kept busy taking care of their children, but they never seem to play with them or to do anything with them. The husbands are even worse: arriving home from work exhausted and in need of the Big Drink, they plunk their children in front of the TV, happy to ignore them the rest of the evening. Everyone has children but who can stand being around them? Not in the world of John Updike or John Cheever.
Eventually in the narrative, a series of affairs and probably divorce as in Mad Men, which is the epitome of the fifties’ suburban idyll gone sour. And yet the actual life of the 1950s was rather different! AT LEAST MY LIFE. Consider, for starters, the way social institutions worked in those days.
Marriage
I graduated from Barnard College in June 1953 and got married on July 31 of that year: I was twenty-one. Such early marriage was the norm in the postwar era. Why?
Surely it was not that people fell in love more readily in those days. But it was not yet the custom to rent one’s own apartment and live on one’s own; I for one would have been frightened to pursue the single life. Roommates were of course an option but made privacy impossible. Still, living ‘at home’ with one’s parents? Surely not! Therefore, ‘nice girls’ (mostly still virgins) much preferred the prospects of early marriage, which meant having a man to support you. It seemed like the best solution. And with the G.I. Bill making college possible for millions of young men (although, strictly speaking, only white young men), marriage seemed to be the logical next step.
In the spring of ’53, in any case, most conversations at the Robin Dell café on Broadway just south of Barnard College were about china and silver patterns, bridesmaids, and such. One would never know we were attending an institution of higher learning! Somehow everyone was ‘pairing off’, including myself.
I had transferred to Barnard precisely in the hope of meeting someone, although I would not have admitted this to anyone. At Oberlin, I knew all the eligible men and felt that there was no one for me. And I had taken all the most desirable courses like ‘The Four Theatres’ with the glamorous Professor Centeno, who related all theatrical modes to the varying conceptions of character of the three great Classical playwrights: Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. That summer, I had a boyfriend named Rudy Boschwitz, who was also a refugee and was a law student at NYU. I was quite keen on Rudy until he told me he planned to move to Minnesota after graduation and open a lumber mill with his brother. Minnesota??? Lumber mill??? I knew that would never be the life for me. (Later, incidentally, Rudy became a Republican Senator from Minnesota.)
So that was the end of Rudy. I applied to Barnard and was accepted but I had no idea what Barnard would be like. At Oberlin, I had taken challenging courses like a year of Romantic poets, and a year of Elizabethan/Jacobean drama, but I had not taken the ‘basics’ – Chaucer, Milton, eighteenth century – so I had to take all three in my first semester. Even worse, I had to take math in my senior year as well as gym, which included miniature golf at the Riverside Church. I had been accepted for grad school in English at Columbia, but the new boring classes made me think that graduate school was not for me – at least not yet! Math, incidentally, was a hardship, because I never did understand why dividing a number by zero didn’t simply yield zero?!
During the Christmas holidays, I was invited to a party by one Suzi Rosenthal whom I barely knew. I recall that later that evening I had a date with my brother’s Reed College friend Eli Bergman. But I was sorry to leave the party because I had met this very attractive and sweet Southern gentleman-physician named Joseph Perloff. He wore a gray-blue wool suit I loved and a blue tie. Throughout Tosca (I am not a great opera fan), I thought about Joseph. (I did not like the name Joe.) That’s how it began and by April, when I visited New Orleans, his hometown, we were engaged.
What a boring bourgeois story, yes? Could anything be more routine, triter? And yet consider the interesting wrinkles soon to manifest themselves in the grey blue suit. My arrival at New Orleans airport for example. I had never been to the South. In 1953 there were still signs everywhere, like ‘For Colored Only’ or its antitheses on streetcars ‘Colored in rear of car only’. There were swimming pool signs like ‘White Only’ and so on. As a New Yorker, I had never seen such a thing and I found it very oppressive. I felt I could never live in such a place.
And then there was the family. All white, this time, all Jewish, but... Joe’s father was a short little man with a huge bulging stomach and friendly but very homely face. He never stopped talking but I couldn’t figure out what about – diamonds he had bargained for, his real estate businesses, and J.K. his very own ‘boychik’. Rose, Joe’s mother, was much taller than he was and more normal. But then there were all the aunts and uncles. Joe had three uncles, two of whom would never marry – Morris, Dave and Max. And there were similarly three aunts, Rae, Mimi and Sarah. Sarah was mentally impaired and sat in her bed all day sorting socks and doing other useful activities; Mimi was her caretaker. Rae had finally married and her husband Morris Warnick of course moved in with her and became part of the family. Only Max who had recently married Thelma, had moved out. But then Thelma was not Jewish so she didn’t really count.
Including Joe’s sister Shirley, who was my age and became a good friend, there were thus ten adults living at Number 5 Richmond Place in uptown New Orleans, plus the servants who were there every day: Augustine the cook, her husband Sergeant – a general factotum – and Lillian who did the laundry and upstairs cleaning. Needless to say, I had never met such a family before. Everyone ate when he or she felt like it; they would grab a plate and fill it with turkey, stuffing etc. Everyone was always kissing and hugging me which was not my style and they were always, in the heyday of TV, watching the Jack Benny show or Sid Caesar.
Could I really marry into such a family? My mother decided to go down on a visit so as to learn what the Perloff-Cohens were really like. She quite simply invited herself, which must’ve seemed quite odd to the New Orleans family, but of course they said yes and were extremely hospitable. She came home with a good report – that although Joe’s family were wholly alien, they were good-hearted, decent people, who would treat me well. Meanwhile Joe was pronounced nearly perfect, what with his excellent manners and Southern charm. Indeed, grandmother Schuller declared that he looked like a handsome Italian, which was for her the ultimate compliment.
I myself worried secretly that Joe was not intellectual enough, that he had not read enough great books. This was to change very rapidly when we went on our honeymoon at St. Mary’s Glacier Lake Lodge in Colorado, and he read and adored War and Peace. I also admired him for having been in the navy – I loved the pictures in uniform – and for knowing how to ride so well. He was wonderfully athletic, whereas I trudged up the glacier behind the hotel in my saddle shoes, smoking a cigarette and complaining of the cold. Joseph and I were so different, but Joe loved the idea of an educated European wife and so it all balanced out, without any of the artificial notion of common interests that dominates the dating scene today. Somehow, our marriages worked because we wanted them to work.
Work
A standard myth about the 1950s is that women did not work, that we were all homemakers. The actual situation was much more complicated. As college graduates, of course we planned to work, at least until we had children, which was usually three to four years or so. In my own case, we also needed the money, since Joe was doing another year of residency at Mt Sinai Hospital, and was paid almost nothing.
For what sort of job did an English major qualify? Publishing (the favourite), advertising, non-profit foundations, secretarial, receptionist, ‘research’. Obviously, these jobs did not amount to much, my weak point being the artwork required in advertising, where I had neither the skills nor the imagination to proceed. My first job, in any case, was at the Bettmann Archive on 57th St – a wonderful location for lunch dates, what with all the art galleries and boutiques around. Old Dr Otto Bettmann, a German refugee, had assembled a picture archive of vast dimensions. He was alone in the office. Someone might call and want a nineteenth-century image of The Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe. I would search the archive and find the best sample. I believe the pay was $40 per week.
It didn’t take me more than a week to discover that this job was deadly dull. Moreover, Dr B. watched over me like a policeman: five minutes late after lunch meant a very dirty look. Wissenschaft?
Not really. So within six weeks, I quit.
My next job was as a ‘title writer’ for MGM. I followed up on an ad in the New York Times for a ‘title writer trainee’. MGM wanted someone who was PBK (Phi Beta Kappa) and knew two foreign languages. Not that we ever used these languages. Title writing is basically condensation: since we don’t read as quickly as we hear the words on film, cutting is essential. But the real task is the writing of ‘alts’, short for alternate lines. In The Long, Long Trailer, Lucille Ball tells Desi Arnaz, ‘You turn left right here’. Of course the car swerves to the right. Get it? Or again, in Kiss Me Kate, Petruchio sings, ‘If the wife has a bag of gold, / Do I care if the bag be old?’ How to write a sentence in which the American slang ‘old bag’ comes across in, say, Italian or Arabic? A good alt anyone? The translators merely followed our texts: they did not see the films.
I spent many hours and smoked countless cigarettes playing the alt-pun game. It was especially hard in the case of Pete Smiths. No one knows Pete Smiths anymore: those horrible little shorts where the first guy drops all the eggs on the floor and the second one tries to pick them up. One time, I watched six Pete Smiths in a row and started to cry. My boss Bernie Doret couldn’t imagine what was wrong. Why in the hell was I crying? ‘Don’t you understand?’, I tried to explain, ‘how stupid and meaningless this all is? It has no point. No one wants to see these films’, and so on. Bernie disagreed. It was his view that the movies just gave people what they wanted. People loved these Pete Smiths. I decided then and there, I must do something ‘meaningful’ with my life, for example, go to graduate school. Even if the professors and classmates were going to be dull, at least the material would be inherently interesting.
I have never changed my mind about this simple idea. The literature itself, whether Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici or Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis – the essays, poems, plays – was always interesting. No more Long Long Trailers or images of Rosmarie in her raccoon hat! Joe had won a Fulbright scholarship to the National Heart Hospital in London and so before long we set off for what was my first trip to Europe – a truly wonderful year of travel and museum going. In London, moreover, I made the acquaintance of my mother’s sister Hilde, an art historian married to fellow art historian Otto Kurz, who wrote the definitive book on fakes. The Kurzes, including bratty daughter Erica, then fourteen, immediately detected that Joe and I did not realize that the Leonardo Madonna of the Rocks in the National Gallery was a fake: the real one was in the Louvre whereas this one, as Erica proudly informed us, was only by Bernadino Luini.
In 1954, London was still in ruins: I remember especially the stones around Saint Paul’s – a poignant sight. But in those days, you could drive down to Trafalgar Square or Kensington High Street and park anywhere. Few people owned cars, and the streets were still fairly empty. Supermarkets were not yet common; one shopped in a dozen little stores: the greengrocer, the stationer, the butcher, the baker. For me it was a real novelty and since I could not obtain green papers, I spent many hours and days reading. All of Proust, for instance, so that one time I was so absorbed I swallowed a plum pit. I read Mauriac and Malraux, Goethe’s Italienische Reise and Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain. And of course art books like Bernard Berenson’s Italian Renaissance Painters, in preparation for the big continental trip planned for the winter.
On that trip, we visited Vienna for a few days. What a disappointment! The Vienna of the fifties was still Third Man country: gloomy, dark, shabby and slightly sinister. Only old people in the streets and cafés. The beautiful buildings on the Ringstrasse mostly in ruins. People eyeing one another suspiciously. The concierges were consistently unfriendly. We couldn’t wait to leave on the night train to Venice. And yet the recreation of the beautiful baroque Vienna of the eighteenth century was just around the corner. Change comes so quickly in our time.
But we weren’t there to see it because in the summer of 1955 we moved to Washington where Joe had a cardiology fellowship at Georgetown, and I attended graduate school at Catholic University. And thereby hangs a complicated tale.
It always astonishes me how powerful custom is. Does no one strike out on their own? In the fifties, the term ‘single mother’ was barely known: I don’t believe I knew a single one, except for my dear fellow refugee friend Corinna Metcalf, who had lived in Paris on her own and was bringing up Alexander quite without the help of his father, the painter Jimmy Metcalf. Today, when every would-be Congressman brags about his single mother and what she did for him, this may seem an odd state of affairs, but there it is. In my day, husbands were de rigueur – points on a map, so to speak, that determined where the couple in question lived, what jobs they held, and so on. The role of husbands was to make enough money to buy a house, but in the meantime, they oversaw the search for apartments – primarily in new buildings, with largish living rooms, smallish dining areas, kitchens and bathroom with latest equipment, and two bedrooms.
Ours, in Washington, D.C., which we rented after we returned from our year in England, was in a new building called the Phylmar Plaza, in a corner of the Glover Park neighbourhood surrounded by parkland and parking lot – no garages yet then. The rent was $150 per month (roughly $1,700 today). It was less than a ten-minute drive to Georgetown Hospital where Joe was doing a residency in cardiology. The Phylmar Plaza is still there, looking exactly as it did in 1956.
Was the Phylmar Plaza in any way distinctive? Not at all, but it had an elevator, the woods of Glover Park behind it, and you could usually park in front. Convenience was very important in those days.
Living in Washington
But why Washington to begin with? I said earlier that I couldn’t imagine living in New Orleans. By the same token, Joe did not want to live in New York. Too expensive for a physician who wants to open a practice (which Joe thought at the time he would do). The people were too rude! No one gave their seats in the subway to old ladies! You couldn’t park your car: we often double-parked our little green Oldsmobile all night and, in the morning, it was likely to have new dents and scratches.
At the same time, our city had to be cosmopolitan and have cultural attractions! Joe’s best friend, Billy Kohlmann, who, on the plane to Paris in the early fifties was stricken with polio and spent months in an iron lung, was in Washington, working for the State Department, or so he said – it was really the CIA. Billy had a circle of very interesting friends from the Agency. In those days, grad students who had M.A. degrees but were reluctant to go on to a PhD often worked for the government or for the foreign service for a few years. Agencies like the AID, the USIS, and of course the State Department itself were popular, operating on a largely nine-to-five basis so that there was plenty of time for cocktail parties and dinners at local restaurants. Everyone had parties on weekends or went to them, and there would be much gossip about Sargent Shriver’s latest speech or the chaotic activities at Robert Kennedy’s Hickory Hill.
The Washington of those years was a small town. There was not yet a subway but anyone that one was likely to know lived in the north west in easy driving distance of one another. When our children were small, we would put them in the car in what were then standard little car seats (not the monsters of today) and have art/poetry visits – little salons where discussion of books and artworks was central. One key hostess was Meryle Secrest, who is still publishing biographies, the latest being of Princess Margaret Rose and foetal alcohol syndrome.
Meryle was an Englishwoman from Bath. As was customary then, she did not attend university but became a journalist. In Washington, she got her start by writing social columns – very boring to do she said – and then her first biography of Romaine Brooks, the great lesbian French salonnière and friend of Gertrude Stein. Then came Bernard Berenson, Frank Lloyd Wright – the list goes on and on.
Many interesting and talented women in our little kiddie group but my personal favourite and closest friend was an artist named Carrie Westervelt. Carrie was astonishing. She was beautiful, very funny, and aside from painting in the tradition of Kenneth Noland and Ellsworth Kelly, her teachers at American University, she could recite, over lunch at Martin’s in Georgetown, all of Donne’s ‘Canonization’ or Wordworth’s ‘Resolution and Independence’.
University
Whatever Washington is or isn’t, it is not a university town. In 1955, the University of Maryland suffered a major football scandal and didn’t offer a PhD in English. No PhDs in the Humanities were offered at George Washington, American University, Georgetown, or Howard either. When I consulted my favourite Oberlin professor, F.X. Roellinger, where I might go, he suggested Catholic University, a place that had never crossed my mind since it was the Pontifical University and most of its faculty and students were clergy. For someone Jewish who had gone to two protestant liberal arts colleges – Oberlin and Barnard – Catholic University was quite a culture shock. The first course I signed up for was English Renaissance literature, taught by the department Chair Kirby Neill. We called him Kirby Nihil because his mind seemed so deliciously empty. Studying the Renaissance sonnet, the classification system was by number: is this sonnet by Sidney a 12+2 or 10+4 or 8+6? Where, in other words, is the turn or volta? In Shakespeare, what with the closing couplet, it is usually 12+2, but not necessarily, for the meaning structure can override the sound structure.
Meanwhile, we were busy reading Hiram Haydn’s Counterrenaissance and C.S. Lewis’s The Literature of the Sixteenth Century in England. From these two books, especially the Lewis, I learned that the Renaissance had definitely been a Bad Thing, inimical to Christian humanism. But wait a minute: hadn’t our Oberlin professors taught us that everything good began with the Renaissance, as the very notion of rebirth made clear? So how could the word have these negative implications?
In class I sat next to Father Jordan who was always complimenting me on my sweaters. How to react to that mode of behaviour?? And in Craig LaDrière’s theory class, we were learning that the highest faculty – the faculty that only the angels have – was called the vis cogitativa. Hmmm – I had never heard of that one at Oberlin. Soon I was having discussions about the meaning of grace in Measure for Measure and coming to terms with mimesis vs diegesis in Aristotle. It was all very challenging and new. And not without its problems.
I signed up for Goethe taught by a mournful priest. The only other student in this seminar was a young man from Gallaudet, Washington’s well-known college for the hearing impaired. This student leaned over my shoulder and copied my notes: what else could he do? But I stopped writing anything because the priest wasn’t saying anything. Occasionally I would write down, ‘Sorry, he isn’t saying anything worth taking down’. This meant that when I dropped the course a week or two later, my new friend had to drop it too.
And then there was French Romanticism taught by a recent convert from Judaism to Catholicism, Helmut Hatzfeld, who was quite well known at the time for his studies in stylistics. Hatzfeld’s main goal was to distinguish between the truly religious poets (e.g. Châteaubriand) and those capable of no more than religiosity like Dostoyevsky. I was in the doghouse from the beginning because I chose Alfred de Musset as my special author and was evidently not critical enough of the great love affair with George Sand. In other words, Hatzfeld did not like my tone: he found it frivolous; I seemed to take the ‘tragedy’ too lightly. ‘Do you find this amusing, Mrs. Per-loff?’, he asked me after my presentation. The fact is that I probably did! It was so absurdly romantic! But I was not surprised when I got a B+ in French Romanticism.
Graduate School was so different in those days. There were no graduate fellowships: rather one paid tuition which I recall amounted to about $600 in 1955–6. Being accepted at Catholic University was not a problem; if you could pay the tuition, you got in. And I planned to do my MA degree in two semesters and be done by June 1956. It was especially important to carry out this plan, because by January I found out I was pregnant – again, according to plan. Nancy was born on 1 September 1956.
Mine, I later found out, was quite a normal way of doing things in the fifties. Since fees were low one could take one’s time writing one’s MA thesis: mine was on privileged moments in Proust and Virginia Woolf – a topic that no longer especially interests me since it was purely thematic. Those PM’s or ‘moments of being’ were not hard to find, especially not in Mrs. Dalloway or of course in Proust’s ‘Combray’. Most afternoons, I sat in the library making my way through my very long novels with relative ease. Much more interesting to me was LaDrière’s course on sound and meaning, and poetry began to occupy me more than did fiction. Wasn’t poetry, after all, the heart of literature? And wasn’t it quite exciting that Ezra Pound was in residence at Saint Elizabeth’s, where LaDrière and Giovannini were regular visitors and personal friends of the poet?
My friend Elizabeth Hartley, a shy and beautiful girl, arranged to go visit Pound one day. She returned horribly disillusioned. Evidently Pound, who was wearing Bermuda shorts, did nothing but recite favourable reviews of his poetry from the Italian newspapers. His sometime mistress Sheri Martinelli was there, stroking the great man’s ego. And the company included those charming fascists John Kasper and Eustace Mullins.1 Elizabeth never went back, indeed never wanted to hear Pound’s name again. As for me, Pound was still a remote quantity: my first true love among modernist poets being W.B. Yeats, who was no doubt an odd choice for a Jewish girl from Vienna. Not Greek but Irish mythology and Gaelic folklore, not secular humanism but faith in the occult, in mysticism, and Irish versus English politics. Yeats was to serve as an Irish Senator in his later days; his book A Vision (1926) was an elaborate cosmology that measured the phases of life by the twenty-eight phases the moon passed through in its journey from dark through full (phase fifteen) and back again. Maud Gonne, with whom Yeats was in love for most of his life, may have been a great beauty; she was also, in later life, a proto-Nazi, whose ‘revolutionary’ politics were hugely questionable. ‘Where had her sweetness gone?’ Yeats asked in ‘Quarrel in Old Age’ and could only respond with the words, ‘I had forgiven enough / who had forgiven old age’.
When it came to his beloved women, Yeats was in fact not very forgiving. Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz, the two Lissadell beauties, had destroyed their charm by letting their voices ‘grow shrill’ with conspiracy plots and political lust. As for his male friends like Patrick Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh, the big question remains what good their revolutionary activity did? ‘Oh when may it suffice?’ And there is no easy answer.
‘Easter 1916’ is surely one of the great political poems in the English language. But my love of Yeats also depended on sound. The trimeter of ‘Easter 1916’, or the mimesis of sounds as in
/ / / || / /
Speech after long silence: it is right.
where the sound reacts precisely to what is happening: in this case the burst of speech after silence with the caesura as marker and then the sign of approval. Five major stresses, but in a wholly irregular sound structure. Or again take the famous ‘Sailing to Byzantium’:
/ / / / || /
That is no country for old men. The young
/ / / | / /
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees,
/ / / || / /
– Those dying generations – at their song,
/ / / / /
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
/ /\ / / /\ /
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
/ / / / /
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
/ / / / /
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
/ / / / /
Monuments of unageing intellect.
I remember the frisson of reading that opening line – which was to become the title of Cormac McCarthy’s popular novel and film – for the first time in 1956, marvelling at the seemingly casual and conversational use of the demonstrative pronoun ‘that’, with its dismissal of Ireland, evidently the country of the old, in contrast to the young, introduced at the end of the run over line. The stanza is ottava rima (abababcc, eight lines of iambic pentameter) which in Yeats’s case is wilfully irregular, ‘young’ and ‘song’ constituting only an approximate rhyme as does ‘dies’ in the ‘trees’, ‘seas’, ‘dies’ sequence. Mortality – those dying generations – is stressed throughout: that which lives and flourishes – ‘the young in one another’s arms’, ‘the salmon-falls, the mackerel crowded seas’ is also doomed to death. ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ is to leave living behind for the sake of art, immortality, permanence, ‘monuments of unageing intellect’.
Why was I so captivated by the sounds of poetry that I decided to change my major field of study? Perhaps a new conviction that poetry has its own language and wastes no words, as when Eliot composes the couplet:
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotelsA couplet remarkably memorable like the last line of ‘Prufrock’, ‘Till human voices wake us, and we drown’. A kind of magical mathematics so that poetry can be ‘News that stays news’, in Ezra Pound’s words.
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells –
I was, in any case, enjoying myself in graduate school and I had also made quite a few friends, a number of whom were Black, since Howard University did not at that time give a PhD and sent its students to Catholic University. One of them was Eleanor Traylor, who was to become a star of the Howard faculty.
Flamboyant and funny, Eleanor always referred to her dissertation as a paper. It was on John Donne: there was as yet no real emphasis on African-American studies.
I remember Eleanor giving our modern novel professor James Hafley a hard time over Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, when we came to the words in the Appendix. ‘Dilsey. They endured’. ‘Dr. Hafley,’ she insisted, ‘They endured? Is that all?’
This work remains unfinished, as Marjorie Perloff died on 24 March 2024.
It has been lightly edited by Kit Kumiko Toda, John Solt and Charles Bernstein.
- John Kasper (1929–1998), politician, segregationist and Ku Klux Klan member. Eustace Mullins (1923–2010), antisemitic conspiracy theorist, Holocaust denier and white supremacist. Both men considered themselves disciples of Pound.
This article is taken from PN Review 285, Volume 52 Number 1, September - October 2025.