Not one to confine her admiration for living organisms to those on the lower rungs of the evolutionary ladder, Miss Moore goes along with Xenophon in loving horses. Her most daring encounter with them—and possibly with any of the creatures of which she writes—occurred in 1952. She had become so interested in the race horse Tom Fool after reading about him in Arthur Daley’s sports column in the Times that she wrote a poem in his honor (“Tom Fool is ‘a handy horse,’ with a chiselled foot…”), which appeared in The New Yorker. When her milliner, a lady with something of a weakness for the track, heard about the poem, she offered to take Miss Moore to the races at Jamaica, and Miss Moore accepted. She had never been to a race track before and (except for a staged visit with a magazine photographer) she has not been to one since. The experience was, therefore, unique, and, compared to most of her experiences, it was an extremely turbulent one. The two women visited the paddock, where Tom Fool was being saddled, and Miss Moore decided on the spot to risk fifty cents on him. “I’ve never seen a horse so limber,” she says. On learning that two dollars is the minimum bet, she took the plunge at the two-dollar window, fearlessly going all out on a win-or-nothing basis. Tom Fool came in second. “That cured me of betting,” Miss Moore says emphatically. As for her surroundings at the track, she had some reservations. “It certainly is a tough place, although I tried to look at the best side of it,” she said later. “I’ve never seen so much liquor in my life. And the people in the stands don’t seem happy even when they win.” The afternoon was cold and the last race was late, and on the way back Miss Moore complained of chills, so her companion took her to her own house, where she broiled her a steak and gave her some brandy to warm her up. Miss Moore accepted the latter only as a prudent medicament, but it added one more fillip to an adventure that struck her as having its decidedly rakish aspects. “I learned my lesson never to become a race-track habitué,” she has since told friends, and they have little fear that she will. When Jock Whitney, the horse’s owner, read her poem about Tom Fool, he asked to buy the original manuscript. Miss Moore was willing to give it to him but not to sell it to him. “I thought it wouldn’t be exactly fitting to be paid twice for the same poem,” she says.
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Although Miss Moore has a number of very good friends who share her interests, and several hundred acquaintances who are more or less celebrated for their accomplishments in the arts, her closest attachment is to a person of a wholly different outlook. This is her brother, Captain John Warner Moore, who is a retired chaplain of the United States Navy and currently the chaplain of the Gunnery School, a prep school for boys in Washington, Connecticut. While Miss Moore’s affection for her brother is naturally attributable in large measure to their blood relationship, it appears to be intensified by the circumstance that he is a man both of staunch religious faith and of staunch military habits—two qualities that his sister, of course, greatly admires. The Captain is a tall, spare, white-haired gentleman, some seventeen months older than Miss Moore, who combines an erect bearing with a fatherly manner in such a way as to give an impression of dignity, dependability, and kindliness. Like his sister, he speaks with a slight Midwestern drawl, and he also resembles her in certain facial and other physical features, and in his patrician air of old-fashioned self-respect. In his time, Captain Moore, who is married and the father of four children, was a small-boat sailing champion in the Navy, winning several titles in the Pacific and officiating as one of the coaches of the Navy team that competed against Germany at Kiel in 1937. While his mental processes are, as might be expected, quite unlike his sister’s—his thoughts tend to run on a logical track rather than by free and headlong association—and it is evident that he would be much more at home on the deck of a cruiser than in a Manhattan poetry salon, he is extremely proud of the eminence she has attained in the literary world. And Miss Moore, in turn, believes that in at least one way he is her literary superior. “My brother is much better at an essay than I am,” she observed recently. “But he doesn’t get time to write much. He’s too busy with his work at the school.”
Miss Moore and her brother are drawn still nearer to each other by a strong personal tie they share—a deep devotion to the memory of their mother, who died ten years ago. It would be difficult to imagine a closer family relationship than the one that existed between Mrs. Moore and her two children. A devout Presbyterian who also had a high opinion of the Quakers, she combined her religious feeling with definite literary leanings by saying a different grace—newly minted by her and often in poetic form—before every meal; as her son has recalled, “She had faith in the providence and goodness of God, and matters of honor were more important to her than food.” She was a vigorous fighter for causes she believed in, and these, when she was in her prime, ranged from woman suffrage to crusading against cruelty to animals; in the first instance, she marched in parades, and in the second she stopped in the street to remonstrate with drivers who were mistreating their horses. People who were acquainted with Mrs. Moore differ widely in their recollections of the sort of woman she was; some remember her as a frighteningly intellectual person and a tremendous talker, while others remember her as demure, tenderly attentive, and gentle, though possessed of a strong will and easily outraged by any offense against her notion of correct behavior. In general, however, both sides agree that she was small, quite pretty, distinctly Irish in appearance, and rather witty. (“Knowing the mother, it was easy to see where Marianne’s sense of humor came from,” a friend of the family remarked recently.) And almost everyone qualified to judge believes that as a mentor and critic she could with justice claim part of the credit for her daughter’s success. Probably the person best qualified to judge is Miss Moore herself, and she readily admits that she often made changes in her poetry to please her mother, and sometimes incorporated figures of speech her mother suggested. For years, mother and daughter were almost inseparable, enjoying a spiritual and mental intimacy so profound that some of their friends came to think of the two women as a single personality. A good many of the mementos in the Brooklyn apartment are closely connected with Mrs. Moore in the mind of her daughter, who further keeps her memory alive by observing little household procedures of which she approved, such as using a Pyrex pot, rather than a kettle, to boil water for tea, “because Mother said you couldn’t air a kettle properly, and she wouldn’t have one around.”
Neither Miss Moore nor her brother ever knew their father, who was a construction engineer and a member of an old New England family that settled in Ohio immediately after the Revolution, but some of his forebears—among them Clement Moore, the author of “A Visit from St. Nicholas”—showed literary proclivities or exhibited other traits of character that a genealogical theorist might consider significant in explaining Miss Moore’s development. Her paternal grandfather, for example, was a well-to-do river pilot and shipowner in Portsmouth, Ohio, who, in addition to taking a great interest in birds and cats, was bookishly inclined and owned an enormous collection of morocco-bound volumes; he finally gave it to the Carnegie Library of Portsmouth, retaining only a set of the Encyclopædia Britannica, which he methodically read through in his declining years, starting with the letter “A.” His brother, also a pilot (Captain Bixby, celebrated in Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, learned the ways of the river from him), had such a tender regard for insects that he wouldn’t allow flypaper in his house and had a long record of fishing drowning flies out of the river.
It is not recorded that Miss Moore’s father, John Milton Moore, had any similar side interests. Shortly after the Civil War, his father and uncle pooled their resources and opened a foundry in Portsmouth to manufacture boilers and other fittings for steamboats, and it was there that he learned his trade. In 1885, he married Mary Warner, the daughter of the Reverend John Riddle Warner, who was a Scotch-Irish Presbyterian minister then preaching in Kirkwood, Missouri. John Moore, being something of a visionary, was obsessed with the idea of building a smokeless furna
ce, and not long after his marriage he took his wife to Newton, Massachusetts, where, against the advice of his father and uncle, he put up a factory of his own for that purpose. The venture failed, and the resultant financial worries so preyed on his mind that he suffered a breakdown, from which he never recovered. The Reverend Mr. Warner, a widower, fetched his daughter back to Kirkwood, together with an infant son she had borne while in Massachusetts, and she moved in with him as his housekeeper—an arrangement that was soon briefly suspended by the arrival of her second child, Marianne, on November 15, 1887. The marriage was, in effect, terminated; her shattered husband returned to Portsmouth, where his parents took him under their care, while she continued to keep house for her father until he died, in 1894.
After staying briefly with relatives in Pittsburgh to get her bearings and plan her future, Mrs. Moore was persuaded by a friend to move to Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where she rented a house and settled down to raise her children, living on a small inheritance from her father. She became known to the community as a cultured and intelligent woman, and when, in 1900, an English teacher was needed at Carlisle’s Metzger Institute, a school for girls that has since become a part of Dickinson College, she was offered—and accepted—the job. Even so, the little family was often in financial difficulties, but Mrs. Moore was a woman of indomitable vigor and optimism, and she managed so well that she was once able to take her children on a vacation trip to Florida and contrived to send them to college after they had graduated from the local high school. The son chose Yale and his sister Bryn Mawr, where—curiously, since for years she had been carefully instructed in literature by her mother—she was unable to meet the requirements for taking the advanced courses in English she had been looking forward to. “I was interested in the English and foreign-language courses, but I was too young, too immature for them, so most of my time was spent in the biology laboratory,” Miss Moore recalled the other day. She did quite a bit of extracurricular writing, however, including some verse for Tipyn O’Bob, the college monthly literary magazine. Of these poems Miss Moore observes today, “A few of them were of some interest metrically, but in general they were tentative and ephemeral.”
After graduating from Bryn Mawr, in 1909, Miss Moore took a secretarial course at the Carlisle Commercial College, and this enabled her to get a job as an instructor in typing, shorthand, and bookkeeping at the Carlisle Indian School, where one of her pupils was the famous Indian athlete Jim Thorpe. Not surprisingly, she found the subjects she taught uninspiring. “I was half good,” she has since said. “I could fix typewriters, but rapid calculating and bookkeeping were just too much for me. It was a necessary financial adventure, and I would have much preferred to sit by the fire and read.” In 1914, her brother was ordained, and two years later he was called to the Ogden Memorial Presbyterian Church, in Chatham, New Jersey. His post included a manse, so his mother and sister quit their jobs and went to Chatham to keep house for him. Theirs was indeed a tightly knit little family.
When the United States entered the First World War, the Reverend Mr. Moore gave up his parish in Chatham and joined the Navy, leaving his mother and sister more or less on their own. Three years before, Miss Moore had paid her first visit to New York, spending six days here and living at a Y.W.C.A. on Lexington Avenue, and those six days were enough to convince her that New York was where she ultimately wanted to live. Now, with her brother in the Navy, she was able to persuade her mother to move here, and in 1918 they rented a basement apartment on St. Luke’s Place, in Greenwich Village, where they remained eleven years. The Reverend Mr. Moore stayed on in the Navy after the war, and in 1929 was stationed at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. That year, his mother caught pneumonia as a result (so he thought) of the draughtiness of the basement apartment, and he resolved to find quarters for her and his sister that would be both more salubrious and closer to his post. The quarters he found were in the apartment house in Brooklyn that Miss Moore still occupies—about three blocks from the Navy Yard.
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For a while after settling in New York, Miss Moore worked as a private tutor and as a secretary in a girl’s school. She spent a great deal of her spare time in her neighborhood branch of the Public Library, at Seventh Avenue South and St. Luke’s Place—so much of it, in fact, that the authorities there, impressed by her interest, presently gave her a job. “I was not very good at library work,” she recalls. “But, after all, it was not my field.” Her field, of course, as she was becoming increasingly aware, was poetry. In April, 1915, when she was living in Carlisle, the Egoist, a London periodical specializing in imagist verse, published “To the Soul of Progress,” her first poem to reach more than a campus audience; the person who supplied the improbable link between Carlisle and London was the poet Hilda Doolittle, a classmate of Miss Moore’s at Bryn Mawr, who had married Richard Aldington, one of the editors of the Egoist. Almost coincidentally—a month later, in fact—Harriet Monroe’s Chicago magazine Poetry published five of Miss Moore’s poems. In 1921, under the imprint of the Egoist Press, Miss Doolittle and the then Mrs. Robert McAlmon (“H.D.” and “Bryher”) at their own expense brought out a small volume of poems of hers that had appeared in the Egoist. Three years later, Miss Moore assembled a number of the poems that had been printed here or in England, and they made up what proved to be her first important book. Entitled Observations, it immediately won the 1924 Dial Award, as a distinguished contribution to American literature, and this brought her not only a welcome two thousand dollars but considerable prestige. (The previous winner was T. S. Eliot, and subsequent winners included E. E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams, and Ezra Pound.) Moreover, it led Miss Moore into a long association with the Dial, a magazine that in the twenties held a unique position in the van of the nation’s progressive literary and artistic life. Miss Moore began by writing verse and book reviews for the publication; then she became its acting editor, and, in 1926, its editor-in-chief.
Looking back, Miss Moore remembers the Dial as “an elysium for people who were really interested in quality,” and, like many others who have memories of its beautifully printed pages, she cannot restrain a feeling of nostalgia for the era of intellectual exuberance that the magazine represented. The drab conformity of Marxist thought that later paralyzed the minds of so many writers in Europe and the United States had yet to make itself felt, and the great tide of mechanized mass communication and mass entertainment that has since threatened to swamp the minds of thinking individuals was still far off. “Those were the days when, as Robert Herring has said, things were opening out, not closing in,” Miss Moore wrote in 1940, in a memoir describing her connection with the magazine. “There was for us of the staff a constant atmosphere of excited triumph—interiorly, whatever the impression outside; and from editor and publisher a natural firework of little parenthetic wit too good to print—implying that afflatus is not chary of surplus.” The Dial was concerned neither with politics nor with theories of social progress but purely with the arts of writing, painting, and music, and its index of contributors was crowded with names that guaranteed the quality of which Miss Moore wrote in her memoir—Thomas Mann, Ortega y Gasset, Paul Morand, Maxim Gorky, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, W. B. Yeats, Roger Fry, Robert Morss Lovett, Paul Valéry, Ford Madox Ford, Gilbert Seldes, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, and Kenneth Burke among them. The magazine also contained colored reproductions of paintings by an extraordinary number of artists who were then fairly new to this country, including Picasso, Seurat, di Chirico, Brancusi, Lachaise, Kuniyoshi, Sheeler, Marin, Stuart Davis, Max Weber, and Wyndham Lewis.
In the middle of all this intellectual ferment sat Miss Moore, fastidiously reading and editing manuscripts. The offices of the Dial were in a three-story brick building on West Thirteenth Street that had brownstone steps leading up to the front door, carpeted staircases, and rooms with fireplaces and white mantelpieces. “There was the recurrent flower-crier in summer, with his slowly moving wagon of pansie
s, fuchsias, geraniums, petunias, ageratum,” Miss Moore recalled in her memoir. “Or a man with strawberries for sale; or a certain fishman with his pushcart-scales, and staccato refrain so unvaryingly imperative, summer or winter, that Kenneth Burke’s bit of parenthetic humour comes back to me almost as an epic, ‘I think if he stopped to sell a fish my heart would skip a beat.’ ” As an editor in these pleasant surroundings, Miss Moore is reputed to have worked with tact, taste, and vast enthusiasm. Once, when a visitor to her office asked her if she didn’t ever grow weary of reading manuscripts, she replied, “To me, it’s a revel.”
Miss Moore’s revelry, however, left her almost no time to write verse. She had even less time after 1926, when Scofield Thayer, a founding editor of the magazine and one of its two leading backers, fell ill and had to retire. Three years later, the Dial’s other important backer—Dr. James Sibley Watson, a wealthy physician originally from Rochester—decided to return home, where, with the assistance of the Eastman Kodak Company, he could indulge his powerful interest in photography. (He made several medical motion-picture documentaries, and is now head of the Radiology Department of the University of Rochester’s School of Medicine and Dentistry.) With two-thirds of the magazine’s principals departed, Miss Moore had no compunction about becoming the final third and returning to poetry, and in 1929 the Dial folded.
Since then, Miss Moore has done no professional editing, although she devotes a lot of time to such related activities as book reviewing and giving young poets advice about their manuscripts; as a critic, she shows a tendency to be appreciative rather than caustic. She has also done a number of translations, most notably a monumental English version, undertaken at the suggestion of W. H. Auden and published in 1954, of The Fables of La Fontaine, which in sheer bulk far outweighs all her books of poetry. She toiled over the Fables for something like nine years, and the project caused her much anxiety. “I worked practically all the time,” she says. “I’d wake up at six and get right to work, and I’d keep at it all day and all evening, except for an occasional brief stop to eat, or maybe I’d have to go to the market and buy a few odds and ends. Then back to the job again. I did the whole thing over completely four times.” Miss Moore’s revisions of her own revisions would alone have been sufficient to keep her publishers in a state of anxiety equal to her own, but those unhappy gentlemen soon found that their headaches did not end there, for she worried not only about the literary quality of the forthcoming book but about details of its typography, paper, and binding—about almost everything, in fact, except the remuneration she was to receive for her labors. Of that, she was characteristically oblivious; when it comes to money, her attitude always seems to be that her publishers are doing her a great favor in printing her work, and all she asks is that they make a handsome job of it. The opinions of the critics who reviewed Miss Moore’s version of the Fables were mixed—it can hardly be denied that in spots the text reads a great deal more like Moore than like La Fontaine—but the literary workmanship involved received general acclaim, and one reviewer declared that the work was among the most ambitious projects ever attempted by a modern poet.
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