Prose (25 page)

This institution …

I wonder what Adam and Eve

think of it by this time …

Unhelpful Hymen!

a kind of overgrown cupid

reduced to insignificance

by the mechanical advertising

parading as involuntary comment,

by that experiment of Adam's

with ways out but no way in—

the ritual of marriage …

Do they know that Marianne Moore was a feminist in her day? Or that she paraded with the suffragettes, led by Inez Milholland on her white horse, down Fifth Avenue? Once, Marianne told me, she “climbed a lamppost” in a demonstration for votes for women. What she did up there, what speech she delivered, if any, I don't know, but climb she did in long skirt and petticoats and a large hat. Perhaps it was pride or vanity that kept her from complaints, and that put her sense of injustice through the prisms dissected by “those various scalpels” into poetry. She was not too proud for occasional complaints; she was humorously angry, but nevertheless angry, when her publisher twice postponed her book in order to bring out two young male poets, both now almost unheard of. Now that everything can be said, and done, have we anyone who can compare with Marianne Moore, who was at her best when she made up her own rules and when they were strictest—the reverse of “freedom”?

Soon after I met Marianne in 1934—although I concealed it for what seemed to me quite a long time—somehow or other it came out that I was trying to write poetry. For five or six years I occasionally sent her my poems. She would rarely say or write very much about them except that she liked such and such a phrase or, oddly, the alliteration, which I thought I tended to overdo. When I asked her what the poems she had written at Bryn Mawr were like, she said, “
Just
like Swinburne, Elizabeth.” Sometimes she suggested that I change a word or line, and sometimes I accepted her suggestions, but never did she even hint that such and such a line might have been influenced by or even unconsciously stolen from a poem of her own, as later on I could sometimes see that they were. Her notes to me were often signed “Your Dorothy Dix.”

It was because of Marianne that in 1935 my poems first appeared in a book, an anthology called
Trial Balances.
Each of the poets in this anthology had an older mentor, who wrote a short preface or introduction to the poems, and Marianne, hearing of this project, had offered to be mine. I was much too shy to dream of asking her. I had two or three feeble pastiches of late seventeenth-century poetry called “Valentines,” in one of which I had rhymed “even the English sparrows in the dust” with “lust.” She did not like those English sparrows very much and said so (“Miss Bishop's sparrows are not revolting, merely disaffecting”), but her sponsorship brought about this first appearance in a book.

One long poem, the most ambitious I had up to then attempted, apparently stirred both her and her mother to an immediate flurry of criticism. She telephoned the day after I had mailed it to her, and said that she and her mother had sat up late rewriting it for me. (This is the poem in which the expression “water closet” was censored.) Their version of it arrived in the next mail. I had had an English teacher at Vassar whom I liked very much, named Miss Rose Peebles, and for some reason this name fascinated Marianne. The revised poem had been typed out on very thin paper and folded into a small square, sealed with a gold star sticker and signed on the outside “Lovingly, Rose Peebles.” My version had rhymed throughout, in rather strict stanzas, but Marianne and her mother's version broke up the stanzas irregularly. Some lines rhymed and some didn't; a few other colloquialisms besides “water closet” had been removed and a Bible reference or two corrected. I obstinately held on to my stanzas and rhymes, but I did make use of a few of the proffered new words. I am sorry to say I can't now remember which they were, and won't know unless this fascinating communication should turn up again.

Marianne in 1940 gave me a copy of the newly published
Last Poems and Two Plays,
by William Butler Yeats, and though I dislike some of the emphasis on lechery in the poems, and so did she, I wrote her that I admired “The Circus Animals' Desertion” and the now famous lines “I must lie down where all the ladders start, / In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.” She replied:

I would be “much disappointed in you” if you
could
feel about Yeats as some of his acolytes seem to feel. An “effect,” an exhaustively great sensibility (with insensibility?) and genius for word-sounds and sentences. But after all, what is this enviable apparatus for? if not to change our mortal psycho-structure. It makes me think of the Malay princes—the
horde
of eunuchs and entertainers and “bearers” of this and that; then suddenly the umbrella over the prince lowered, because a greater prince was passing. As you will suspect from my treachery to W. B. Yeats, I've been to a lecture on Java by Burton Holmes, and one on Malay …

One day she abruptly asked me, “Do you like the
nude,
Elizabeth?” I said yes I did on the whole. Marianne: “Well, so do I, Elizabeth, but
in moderation,
” and she immediately pressed on me a copy of Sir Kenneth Clark's new book,
The Nude,
which had just been sent to her.

Some Expeditions

This was a story told me by Mrs. Moore, of an outing that had taken place the summer before I met them. There had been a dreadful heat wave, and Marianne had been feeling “overburdened” (the word
burden
was an important one in the Brooklyn vocabulary) and “overtaxed.” Her mother decided that Marianne “should take a course in the larger mammals” and said, “Marianne, I am going to take you to Coney Island to see Sheba,” an unusually large and docile elephant then on view at a boardwalk sideshow. Coney Island is a long subway ride even from Brooklyn, but in spite of the heat and the crowds, the two ladies went. Sheba performed her acts majestically, and slowly played catch with her keeper with a shiny white ball. I asked about the elephant's appearance, and Marianne said, “She was very simply dressed. She was lightly powdered a matte rose all over, and wore ankle bracelets, large copper hollow balls, on her front legs. Her headdress consisted of three white ostrich plumes.” Marianne was fond of roller coasters; a fearless rider, she preferred to sit in the front seat. Her mother told me how she waited below while the cars clicked agonizingly to the heights, and plunged horribly down. Marianne's long red braid had come undone and blew backwards, and with it went all her cherished amber-colored “real tortoiseshell” hairpins, which fortunately landed in the laps of two sailors in the car behind her. At the end of the ride, they handed them to her “very politely.”

Two friends of Marianne's, two elderly Boston ladies, shared an exquisitely neat white clapboard house in northern Maine. I once spent a day there, and they teased Marianne about her habit of secreting food. She laughed, blushed, and tossed her head, and did not seem to mind when one of them told of going into Marianne's room for a book only to discover two boiled potatoes lying on the dresser. Some years later the older lady phoned Marianne from Boston and told her she was dying of cancer. She was perfectly stoical about it, and said she was in a hospital and knew she could not last very long. She asked Marianne to come and stay near her until she died, and Marianne went. At the hospital, she told Marianne that while she would be grateful to her if she came to see her every day, she knew that Marianne couldn't possibly spend all her time with her, so she had arranged for her to take driving lessons. Marianne, who must have been nearly seventy at the time, agreed that this was a good idea; she had always wanted to learn to drive, and she did, with a lesson at the driving school every day and a visit to the hospital. A day or so after her friend died, Marianne passed her driving test. She said she had a little trouble with the lights in Copley Square and confessed she thought the “policeman” giving her the test had been a little overlenient. I said I hoped she hadn't driven too fast, and she replied, “A steady forty-five, Elizabeth!” On her return she proudly showed her driving license to her brother, Warner, and he, sounding no doubt very much as her mother used to sound, said, “There must be some mistake. This must be sent back
immediately.
”

Marianne was intensely interested in the techniques of things—how camellias are grown; how the quartz prisms work in crystal clocks; how the pangolin can close up his ear, nose, and eye apertures and walk on the outside edges of his hands “and save the claws / for digging”; how to drive a car; how the best pitchers throw a baseball; how to make a figurehead for her nephew's sailboat. The exact way in which anything was done, or made, or functioned, was poetry to her.

She even learned to tango. Before she acquired a television set of her own, she was in the habit of going down to the basement apartment at 260 Cumberland Street to watch the baseball games with the janitor and his wife, who had a set. During one of the games there was a commercial that advertised a Brooklyn dancing school. Any viewer who telephoned in was guaranteed a private tango lesson at a Brooklyn academy. Marianne announced that she had always liked the tango, and hurried to the fourth floor to put in her call, and got an appointment. The young dancers, male and female, may have been a little surprised, but soon they were competing with each other to dance with her. She was given a whole short course of lessons. I asked about the tango itself, and she allowed that they had felt perhaps it was a little too strenuous and had taught her a “modified” version of it. She had also learned several other steps and dances in more current use, and insisted everyone had enjoyed himself and herself thoroughly.

In the late winter or early spring of 1963, when I was in New York, one evening around eight I emerged from a Lexington Avenue subway station on my way to a poetry reading at the YMHA. Suddenly I realized that Marianne was walking ahead of me over half a block away, alone, hurrying along with a bag of books and papers. She reached the YMHA before I did, but she was not present at the function I was attending; I wondered what she could be up to. Later she informed me that she was attending the YMHA Poetry Workshop, conducted that term by Louise Bogan. She said she was learning a great deal, things she had never known before; Miss Bogan was another of the people she considered “erudite.” Shortly afterwards I met Miss Bogan at a party and asked her about the workshop and her famous student. Poor Miss Bogan! I am sure Marianne never dreamed what suffering she was causing her. It seemed that Marianne took notes constantly, asked many questions, and entered into discussions with enthusiasm. But the other students were timid and often nonplused, and so was Miss Bogan, besides feeling that she was sailing under false colors and never knowing what technical question she might be expected to answer next.

I attended very few literary events at which Marianne was present, but I did go with her to the party for Edith and Osbert Sitwell given at the Gotham Book Mart. I hadn't intended to go to this at all; in fact, I really didn't want to, but Marianne, who was something of an Anglophile, was firm. “We must be
polite
to the Sitwells,” she said.

The party was given by
Life
magazine and was rather awful. The photographers behaved as photographers do: strewing wires under our feet, calling to each other over our heads, and generally pushing us around. It took some time to separate the poets, who were the subjects of the picture, from the non-poets, and this was done in a way that made me think of livestock being herded into cattle cars. Non-poets and some real poets felt insulted; then the photographer announced that Miss Moore's hat was “too big.” She refused to remove it. Auden was one of the few who seemed to be enjoying himself. He got into the picture by climbing on a ladder, where he sat making loud, cheerful comments over our heads. Finally the picture was taken with a sort of semicircular swoop of the camera. Marianne consented to let a friend and me take her to dinner and afterwards back to Brooklyn in a cab. I had on a small velvet cap and Marianne said, “I wish I had worn a
minimal
hat, like yours.” The taxi fare to Brooklyn at that time was something over five dollars, not counting the tip. That evening my friend was paying for dinner and the cab. Between comments on the Sitwell party, Marianne exclaimed at intervals, “Mr. W———, this is
highway robbery!
”

She told me about another, more elegant literary party she had been to in a “penthouse,” to celebrate the publication of a deluxe edition of a book, I think by Wallace Stevens. The chairs were upholstered in “lemon-colored velvet,” there was a Matisse drawing she didn't altogether like, and she had taken a glass of champagne and regretted it all evening; it had made her face burn. I asked for further details. She became scornful: “Well, we signed our names several times, and after
that
thrill was over, I came home.”

Sometimes we went to movies together, to
Kon-Tiki
twice, I recall. I never attempted to lure her to any dramatic or “artistic” films. Since Dr. and Mrs. Sibley Watson were her dearest friends, she must have seen his early experimental films, such as
Lot in Sodom.
I heard the sad story of two young men, however, who when they discovered that she had never seen Eisenstein's
Potemkin
insisted on taking her. There was a short before
Potemkin,
a Walt Disney film; this was when the Disney films still had charm and humor. After the movies they went to tea and Marianne talked at length and in detail about the ingenuity of the Disney film, and nothing more. Finally they asked her what she had thought of
Potemkin.
Her opinion was brief but conclusive: “Life,” she said, “is not like that.”