by Kay Ryan
Marianne Moore’s reputation is burdened with a primness and overrefinement that are the hazard of living all one’s life with one’s mother and performing further surgery on split hairs, but she absolutely loved to kick. What she said of William Carlos Williams’s poetry is true of hers as well: “He is willing to be reckless; if you can’t be that, what’s the point of the whole thing?” She was also willing to cast a cold eye. In “Old Tiger,” one of the best of the poems that have never before been collected, she celebrates the tiger as a remote, disdainful observer, with a “fixed, abstracted lizardlike expression of / the eye which is characteristic of all accurate observers.” She relishes the tiger’s adamance and ferocity: “you to whom a no / is never a no, loving to succeed where all others have failed, so / constituted that opposition is pastime and struggle is meat.” Perhaps she is not as goaded as a tiger but she is goaded enough: “you see more than I see but even I / see too much.”
There is something so odd about her technique. She commonly looks at something quite remote and static, such as a piece of silver or an illustration—it is an illustration that lies behind “Old Tiger,” for example—and it explodes in a variety of alarming directions. She is praised endlessly, and rightly, for the unparalleled fineness of her observation. Here, to offer a nearly random example, is the chimpanzee the old tiger is looking at: “An exemplary hind leg hanging like a plummet at the end of a / string—the tufts of fur depressed like grass on which something heavy has been lying.” Yet in another way observation is just the detonator for an explosion of private associations, glittering in their rhetorical arcs, and upon their descent into the reader’s brainpan randomly meaningful and meaningless. At the end of this poem, when she announces triumphantly to the tiger, “you / know that it is not necessary to live in order to be alive,” I feel like applauding, but I am not sure why. I have spent some time trying to put the pieces of this poem together. I feel sure that it is a triumph, but it’s like trying to pack a suitcase in dreams. If I get one piece, I lose another.
Marianne Moore despises the pious assumption that simplicity equals truth and excoriates the simplifiers. Here she condemns the poor devil George Moore, who on some occasion apparently took too much out of a story: “Your soul’s supplanter, / the spirit of good narrative, flatters you, convinced that in reporting briefly / One choice incident, you have known beauty other than of [pig]stys.” And here she casts the “Pedantic Literalist” (a pair of words that combine everything she loathes) down into the fake-palm-tree ring of hell: “What stood / erect in you has withered. A / little ‘palm-tree of turned wood’ / informs your once spontaneous core.” I always have a double feeling, reading lines like these. Oh, more than double. I love to see her spank the lightweights, the pedants, the intellectual posers; I love the pure eccentricity of her language; and I think, who will ever read this? A poet friend of mine recently said, “They should have taken away her library card.” God, it’s true; she goes on and on. I can barely hold onto a single whole poem. And at the same time I think she is the Statue of Liberty.
In “The Ardent Platonist” she writes, “to understand / One is not to find one formidable.” She’s right; if one is formidable, one is not understood. But how can we not find Marianne Moore formidable since she’s so hard to understand? I think we just have to read her until we can contain the complexity that we cannot resolve. That is a bigger kind of understanding. At that point, the poet is no longer “formidable.” A word or two becomes sufficient to invoke the complex spirit. We feel, now, an affection, a human affection, and a receptiveness which we could not feel when we were fighting with particulars. But maybe I’m just preaching to myself here, since I am irksomely literal when I read poetry (having a small palm tree where my core should be).
In her beautiful poem “In the Days of Prismatic Color,” her treatment of complexity is for once sufficiently linear so that the ball she hits is actually the same ball that sails out of the park. She powers through the whole question before complexity gets a chance to ruin the game by throwing in extra balls. She begins her poem by considering “obliqueness.” Originally, in Adam’s time, “obliqueness was a variation / of the perpendicular, plain to see and / to account for.” That is so funny and cartoonlike, an early geometry diagram: oblique doesn’t mean hard to understand; it simply means not perpendicular—a reading that goes nicely with her love of the briskly scientific. However, this brief paradise doesn’t even survive Eve’s arrival; it was only “when Adam was alone.” So for a very long time we have been in the grip of postlapsarian obliqueness, which she equates with “complexity.” Of complexity, there are two types: first, the complexity “committed to darkness” which “instead of granting itself to be the pestilence that it is, moves all a / bout as if to bewilder us with the dismal / fallacy that insistence / is the measure of achievement and that all truth must be dark.” This is the complexity that passes itself off as “sophistication.” And it is “at the antipodes of the init / ial great truths.” The second type of complexity contains the great truths, and its lineaments are a spectacular mess; “‘Part of it was crawling, part of it / was about to crawl, the rest / was torpid in its lair.’” Truth is messy—but it is enduring: “Truth is no Apollo / Belvedere, no formal thing. The wave may go over it if it likes. / Know that it will be there when it says, / ‘I shall be there when the wave goes by.’” What better or more beautiful argument could be made for the endurance of Marianne Moore’s poetry, which despises all the ways that complexity can be used to obscure and celebrates all that give us another angle from which to see and survive? If Marianne Moore were a tomato farmer today, she’d be planting the fantastic bulging and lobed heritage varieties that shape themselves to their difficult soils. She is the champion of multiplicity because it is the only principle that guarantees survival. She has said, “It is a privilege to see so much confusion.”
The tension of intellectual argument is the source of energy in her poems. She presses repelling magnets toward each other inside the contained space of the poem, and argument slips and slides. Her surrogates try to flip each other over in this strange land of repulsion. She is fearless in the pursuit of her argument, leaping from shape to shape at its requirement, as single-minded as a superhero chasing a villain across New York rooftops. And that’s the interesting thing: behind the chronic shape-shifting, the drifting continents of coherence, one simply never doubts that there is a steady, utterly principled vision; every time I read her I am shocked anew at how forceful and dominating her voice is. She loves the prose of Dr. Johnson, and her strange arguments achieve that same towering probity. She can vacillate as often as she wants (she was forever revising her poems, over the course of decades); she can deny that she has a steady center, or “tap root”; she can plead whispiness (“I am so naive, so docile” with such an “ardor to be helped”)—but her particles are so very fond of each other that they simply jump together in our mind, wherever they are in her poems. I am tempted to believe that there is a Marianne Moore over-poem that we are reading.
Yes, certainly we are reading a Marianne Moore over-poem, as we are for every poet we love enough to know well, or know well enough to love. Today, reading a posthumous Philip Larkin poem in the New Yorker, I felt this over-thing so sharply. There was Larkin’s voice again, so welcome. His lovely poem wasn’t alone, stranded on the page, to be read in isolation. In me it had someone who knew its family. Or maybe I was its family, if we admit the possibility that we are really not individuals who read poems and make them our own, but rather that poems make us their own, that we are a poem-delivery system, or poem clearinghouse, allowing the poems of the immortals to reunite with their families—a new Larkin is embraced (morosely) by the Larkins, a Moore (courteously) by the Moores. It felt this personal, and impersonal.
The Poems of Marianne Moore fills a real need. It does not claim to be “complete”—there are only a handful of her translations of The Fables of La Fontaine for example. But it could hardly be
complete what with Marianne Moore’s lifetime of scissorings and pastings which sometimes resulted in as many as a half dozen different published versions. What we do get is all of her clanking but revealing juvenilia and a number of other never-collected poems, totaling more than a hundred new ones. The organization is chronological, which makes good sense in every way except the way in which it scrambles Marianne Moore’s own famously unhelpful notes to her poems. These still follow the organization of her earlier collections and are thus hard to match up. But this is small potatoes next to Grace Schulman’s heroic accomplishment, not just in uncovering so many lost poems, but in restoring favorite poems to their favorite unshrunk size while retaining Moore’s snipped variants in the generous and scholarly Editor’s Notes. What a task it must have been to get this refracting crystal palace of work assembled without benefit of instructions, and how beautifully and unpedantically Grace Schulman has accomplished it. Her introduction is short, insightful, and warmly personal, profiting from her friendship with Marianne Moore beginning when Schulman was fourteen and continuing until Moore’s death in 1972.
A virtue of poetry is that a little goes a long way, and Marianne Moore’s poetry is especially virtuous. We could probably find her in a grain of Moore sand, once we’re a bit trained, but that isn’t the thing. We will probably add few new favorites to our favorites list, and that isn’t the thing. The thing is, all her poems are at last in one place, as they should be.
The Poems of Marianne Moore, ed. Grace Schulman (Viking, 2003)
Fidget and Gnash
“The handkerchiefs almost frighten us by their perfection.” Who but Marianne Moore could possibly have written this? Her Selected Letters (Alfred A. Knopf, 1997) offers up a ridiculous sublimity of letter-writing in which nothing, not the least gift of handkerchiefs, escapes meticulous apostrophe. We are not just talking precision of expression here; we are talking the very torments of rapture and the characteristic strain they put on the fabric of Moore’s sentences: “Even a bungler must see that maintained rectangles in drawn-work so tenuous and complicated, required genius and many years’ apprenticeship; and the fineness of the material is to begin with a constant wonder.” Everything all the way around the unassailable fact of Marianne Moore’s genius strikes one as slightly, well, slightly comical. We bounce off a truly original mind like rubber balls. Even Elizabeth Bishop, in “Efforts of Affection,” the beautiful memoir of her mentor, is deflected from the central mystery of such a person. Bishop can only gesture toward “the rarity of true originality and the sort of alienation it might involve” and then turn back to the pleasures of anecdote. It is hard not to limn Moore as an endearing character, a precious curio. But of course this is the paradox of Marianne Moore. In a sense her poems, also, are precious curios—which seems like the wrong thing to say about achievements so great and enduring. Marianne Moore compels us to a special discomfort: she represents a sort of sustained impossibility; we are bounced between awe and amusement.
Moore’s letters reveal how literal her poems are, how of a piece with her life. Everywhere is evidence of her darting, delicate, exacting, pan-interested mind. Detail is poetry to her. Throughout her life she receives exotic bric-a-brac from traveling friends. Her exquisite appreciations stimulate further gifts, and the cycle continues, object to object, pleasure irresistibly inviting pleasure, leapfrogging like her poems. She writes to Elizabeth Bishop, “It may be a mistake to pore over minutiae as I do but it makes such work as the carved capitals on the cards of the Madeleine, an active poem.” Nothing that is New York is alien to her—she loves the zoo, naturally, and the Natural History Museum, and all the other museums, but she also loves the ill-attended lecture by an authority on pears, and the rodeo at Madison Square Garden where “one contestant wore carmine goat’s fur chaps with tufts of black goat’s fur inserted at regular intervals, on the principle of kings’ ermine.”
It takes a deep security to endure a life of such endless lightness, tangled delicacy, nearly mad fealty to serial perfections, almost comic probity. Less secure people have to be denser and more flat-footed. The letters help us see what made her so strong. Above all there was her family, which was nearly one creature. It was a small family, her awesome mother with whom she lived until Mrs. Moore died when Marianne was fifty-nine, and her navy chaplain brother, Warner. Moore’s many family letters reveal the sort of furry burrow-dwellers’ tumbling intimacy that the three enjoyed. They had endless animal names for one another—Badger, Bear, Mole, Fangs, Ratty—and these names shifted loosely among them. Marianne was always referred to as “he,” both in her mother’s letters to Warner and in her own. She sometimes signed herself “your brother.” Moore never seemed to pine for other company; she reports up to “7 suitors” at one time in youth, but they seem to have done little more than make her “fidget and gnash.” She enjoys an obvious satisfaction in the great lifelong “we” of herself and her mother in the small Brooklyn apartment they shared, the two of them maintaining the highest standards of grammar, wit, and moral character; attending poetry readings and animal movies; remaking not only the dresses and coats that Marianne’s rich friends were always passing along but also Moore’s poems, which had to pass “under the maternal clippers”—and all the while having the full roster of modernist poetry over for simple lunches and complex conversation. “I am cautious … about encouraging visitors who … might bore my mother. She is over the heads of most of them,” confesses Moore to old friend Ezra Pound.
In addition to the security her family provided her, Moore simply seemed to be born emotionally unhandicapped and at ease with her own nature. When the poet Bryher wants to give Moore money in the 1920s to release her from her part-time library job, Moore responds: “The work I am doing and the annoyances to which I am subjected, are to some extent the goose that lays the golden egg and are I am sure, responsible just now, for any gain that I make toward writing. I have no swiftness … [but] I have I think, an intuition as to how I am to succeed if I do succeed.” She can do without fame as well, although in the end she didn’t have to: “I have no sympathy with people who find unpopularity embittering.” And best of all she can respect her own virtues. She says in the famous “water-closet” letter to Elizabeth Bishop that she herself would not use the word in a poem because “I can’t care about all things equally, I have a major effect to produce, and the heroisms of abstinence are as great as the heroisms of courage, and so are the rewards.” Such strenuous amalgams of rigor and rhetoric abound in the letters, exalting restraint and insisting upon the highest and hardest road: “Patient or impatient repudiating of life, just repudiates itself… . What can be exciting to others is one’s struggle with what is too hard,” she exhorts the young (and apparently life-repudiating) Allen Ginsberg in 1952.
It is her inner clarity, one suspects, that allows Moore to put up with the lifelong charge that she writes obscurely, and indeed to stare down her own distaste for the great price directness must pay if she is to achieve the “implication” she requires. As far back as her Bryn Mawr days (Class of ’09) she is accused of being “incoherent” and is discouraged from majoring in English. She says to Warner (addressed as “Winks” in this playful 1941 letter—she’d be in her fifties by then): “I rekkonize my trouble as being too oblique & obscure, as a result of hating Crudeness (& … condescension and insulting didacticism)… . And I shall endeavor to be CLEARER.” But of course one can only be as clear, as she writes to her niece, as one’s “natural reticence allows.”
Her letters, which can seem the most mandarin, fussy constructions, can also at any moment go straight to the heart of the hardest subject. Her eerie assessment of Wallace Stevens in a letter to William Carlos Williams, for example, shows the privacies one oblique poet can sound in another: “Wallace Stevens is beyond fathoming, he is so strange; it is as if he had a morbid secret he would rather perish than disclose and just as he tells it out in his sleep, he changes into an uncontradictable judiciary with a gown and a gave
l and you are embarrassed to have heard anything.” Moore adores Stevens, mind you, confessing in a 1935 letter to Bryher that she has long secretly attempted “to bring my product into some sort of compatibility with Wallace Stevens.” It is when she writes of Stevens more than in any other of her judgments that one feels she is appraising herself. “His great accuracy and refracted images and averted manner indicate to me a certain interior reconcentration of being. One who has borne heat and burden as well as he has, and as long as he has, is very deeplaid.”
Moore sensed her own depths early, when still at Bryn Mawr. The letters of the young are one of the special thrills that volumes of letters offer, giving us the sense of being there when the self and the self’s powers are still novelties worth remarking upon, before the poet has grown accustomed to her nature. She writes to a friend, “I have ‘encysted’ myself as far as the general world goes. I fairly sparkle inside now and then, to think how real is the world of fancy.” Later, of course, she would never mention such a thing. In Moore’s college letters one sees her just beginning to realize that her literary subject matter isn’t going to be the “red-hot stuff.” Instead she inclines to elusive subjects such as the jellyfish, which she addresses in a manner already timelessly Mooreish: “An amber-colored amethyst / Inhabits it.”
Everything makes Marianne Moore’s letters worth reading. Thanks to her many reviews for the little magazines of the twenties and especially to her editorship of the Dial between 1925 and 1929, she knew slews of modernist writers and knew them early. Later, when she was an established poet and later still a Life magazine-size personality, she came to know second, third, and fourth waves of poets, enjoying correspondence of varying degrees of intimacy with Auden, famously with Elizabeth Bishop, also with James Merrill, and even with Allen Ginsberg. One admires the Byzantine courtesies Moore could elaborate to deflect the unwanted attentions of admirers or the fulminations of difficult friends such as Ezra Pound, a poet whom she staunchly admired but from whom she took no guff. She also counted as friends William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot, and the sometime couple H.D. and Bryher whom she and her mother took straight to their hearts. Mother and daughter enjoyed the literary people they knew in the old-fashioned way, eager for regular news of their families, however remote the domestic combinations might be from the Moores’ own Presbyterian conservatism.