The First Lady of Modernism
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
Writers & Writing THE FIRSTLADY OF MODERNISM BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL Had the institution of American poet laureate existed in the 1960s, the popular choice in many quarters would have been...
...Later, they identified with characters from their favoritebook, KennethGrahame's The Windin the Willows: Mrs...
...high-minded, but not prudish...
...Yet its true strength lies in a profound understanding of a life so quiet that, until now, no biography of the first lady of Modernism had been written...
...Moles worth's study glistens with similar telling anecdotes...
...As she put it in "Marriage," "Psychology which explains everything / explains nothing, / and we are still in doubt...
...Eliot and Ezra Pound...
...A modernist, she fell into the category of "difficult" writers inhabited by T.S...
...Moore taught high school English in Carlyle, Pennsylvania, refusing all support from her husband's family...
...The two shared many tastes, including a desire for privacy...
...Throughout the decade this fragile-looking old lady, unmistakable in her tricom hat, graced magazine covers from Newsweek to Esquire...
...And they have influenced other poets, from Bishop to John Ashbery...
...The biography thus showsthatmany of Moore'sanimal poems, though they may appear objective to the uninitiated reader, teem with private allusions...
...She and her children formed such a tight bond that no other relationship could manage to break it, not even Warner's marriage...
...While an undergraduate at Bryn Mawr, she began devising her distinctive "costume," and she soon forged a stanza pattern unlike anyone else's...
...Eliot, the editor of her Selected Poems, formed a lifelong friendship with Moore...
...Besides, Moore's poetry is not confessional in any sense...
...And it's apleasure,' she continued imperturbably, 'to note how unerringly his execution supports his theories.'" In fact, Molesworth adds, she had often drawn metaphors from that favorite volume in letters to her brother, Warner, aNavy chaplain...
...Although Mrs...
...She may have further reminded some of Emily Dickinson, whose combination of unique lyric structure and engaging personal oddities became part of the American poetic mythos...
...and in [these poems], a much instructed persuasiveness is emphasized by uninsistence...
...Molesworth's book does have its weaknesses, however...
...Endless discussions with her mother and brother insured that her ideas came before her readers crystal-sharp...
...Louis compeer, Eliot...
...As Kreymborg's 1925 autobiography, Troubador, tells it, he then asked, "'Do you happen to know the gentleman who threw that strike?' 'I've never seen him before,' she admitted, 'but I take it it must be Mr...
...Nor would she oversimplify to make a point...
...Writers & Writing THE FIRSTLADY OF MODERNISM BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL Had the institution of American poet laureate existed in the 1960s, the popular choice in many quarters would have been Marianne Moore (1887-1972...
...Mole, Warner the wise Badger, and Marianne the poetic Mr...
...Despite her sheltered existence, she was "never an innocent in the world of literary politics...
...Molesworth has made us feel at home with her lively personality, her sharp mind, her passion for excellence...
...Moore was unquestionably atyrant, Molesworth insists that she had her redeeming qualities...
...Long before she made a name for herself, her poems spoke with authority, and not as the scribes...
...when John Moore suffered a mental breakdown shortly before Marianne's birth, his wife left him and moved with her baby son to the Missouri Manse of her father, a Presbyterian clergyman...
...Moore's poems never achieved the household familiarity of Robert Frost's...
...Figuring that her sheltered life with a bluestocking mother would have precluded any experience of ball park lowlife, he took her to watch the famous Giants' pitcher Christy Mathewson in action...
...The intellectual tradition of Presbyterianism, together with the knowledge that Mrs...
...The Grand Old Men of Modernism accepted her as a trail-blazing innovator...
...Sister and brother, when young, expressed a teasing rivalry by calling themselves, respectively, "Crocodile," and "Snapping Turtle...
...After her mother's death she lived alone, first in the Brooklyn house they had shared for many years, then in Greenwich Village, familiar from her Dial days...
...Moore had faith in her, gave Marianne enormous confidence...
...As a poet, Marianne was able to ignore the pressures of literary fashion, the anxiety of being accepted by other poets and critics...
...Nonetheless, she attained celebrity status, thanks in part to the reverence colleagues felt for her work, but largely because her endearing quirky mannerisms provided good copy for journalists...
...She was seen as the epitome of what a poet should be: eccentric, but gracious...
...Her review of Elizabeth Bishop's first book concludes with a paragraph that might be said to describe herself: "With poetry as with homiletics, tentativeness can be more positive than positiveness...
...Along with the majority of her acquaintances, he had come to know the devastating force of her witty judgments...
...First, his rather superficial readings of the poetry do not justify his subtitle...
...the '20s to her death at age 84, called her one of the most sexual women he had ever met, but she seems never to have had an affair, nor is there evidence that she ever fell in love...
...On occasion, she dined at Toots Shor's with the likes of Norman Mailer and Muhammad Ali...
...True to form, she held forth on literary matters right up to the first pitch...
...Her jabbing wit, abrilliant feature of her verse, similarly seems to have developed from her mother's custom of trying to correct character faults through humorous irony...
...At last we have someone who knows, who is not didactic...
...The book abounds in sentences like "It is in Connecticut that Warner will live after the war, though for the war years he was stationed for a while in Washington, D.C...
...Yet, for all her certainties, she recognized that, in Molesworth's phrase, "adamancy was the enemy of truth...
...Kenneth Burke, who knew her intimately from her days as an editor of TheDial'm...
...In the movement's second generation, poets from W.H...
...she negotiated its shoals with enviable aplomb...
...But as recent biographies of her contemporaries, Wallace Stevens and T.S.Eliot, haveagain confirmed, when informationis lacking guesswork quickly degenerates into gossip...
...William Carlos Williams confessed, "I am in perfect terror of Marianne...
...and radiant, with a lively interest in both intellectual and popular culture...
...During a career that spanned over 40 years, Moore won admiration from the literary community not only for her dazzlingly crafted verse, but for "her agile conversation, her intelligence, and her bracingly high standards," ethical as well as poetic...
...Auden to Elizabeth Bishop assumed their best manners for the strict Presbyterian mother Marianne lived with into her 50s—so that they might win the right to call on the daughter...
...It was enough that "In her immediate family circle [her writing] was seen as something very like the missionary work of a religious figure...
...Her inimitable rhythms and sly observations continue to capture our attention...
...Pound was another close friend, though Moore, a liberal most of her life, deplored his politics and once admonished him to clarify his thinking by reading the theology of John Calvin...
...Like her, he was born in St...
...I could onlygasp, 'Why?' 'I've read his instructive book on the art of pitching—' 'Strike two!' interrupted [the umpire...
...Still, with nothing but her poems to go on, the reader might find Moore intimidating, aloof...
...Moore was the bossy, domestic Mr...
...Known to be a devotee of spectator sports, she was invited several times to toss out the first ball for her beloved home team, the Brooklyn Dodgers...
...Louis and spent the earliest years of childhood with a clerical grandfather...
...Marianne appears to have had no desire to rebel against her mother, who went so far as to dictate which of her poems should be published...
...Once, in the 1920s, after she had moved to New York, editor Alfred Kreymborg decided to stump her...
...She wrote about ideas and observations...
...Several critics have faulted Molesworth for failing to dig deeper into Moore's psychological make-up—especially for failing to tackle the riddle of her sexual orientation...
...According to Charles Molesworth's Marianne Moore: A Literary Life (Atheneun, 472pp., $29.95), the privatewoman differed from the public perception merely in her more subtle and complex character...
...Moore was reputed to speak in polished sentences and could discuss a vast number of subjects with encyclopedic knowledge...
...Mathewson...
...Following his death, Mrs...
...I suspect many people also identified her with a classic stereotype—the spinster schoolmarm whose enthusiasm and principles encourage generations of pupils...
...Molesworth particularly concerns himself with her "coded language that was especially relevant to" the Moores...
...Furthermore, the family's sense of purpose was fostered by a shared religious idealism, and by the mutual support the three provided for one another...
...Molesworth effectively demonstrates how Moore crafted her persona into a mask that helped her become an artist, as well as a vivid personality...
...In addition, he writes the way many people talk—changing tenses in midstream, repeating the same information in three or four places...
...Photographers loved to snap her at zoos or circuses with some of the exotic creatures that inspired such poems as "The Jerboa," "Elephants," "No Swan So Fine," "The Pangolin," and "Snakes, Mongooses, Snake-Charmers and the Like...
...Molesworth convinces us, against the arguments of recent detractors, that Moore deserves her place among America's great poets—alongside Whitman (whom she hated, but who was nevertheless her spiritual father), Dickinson, Stevens, Frost, Williams, and, yes, her St...
...He notes that she may have kept her children in emotional bondage, but she did teach them to think independently...
...These flaws notwithstanding, the biographer has fashioned a penetrating portrait of his subject, neatly balancing her public image and her penchant for personal privacy...
...Their letters contained a variety of pet animal names...
Vol. 73 • November 1990 • No. 15
