Prose (26 page)

Twice we went together to the Saturday-morning lectures for children at the Museum of Natural History—once, to see Meshie, the three-year-old chimpanzee, who came onstage pedaling her tricycle and offered us bites of her banana. And once to see a young couple I had known in Mexico show their collection of pets, including Aguilla, the bald-headed American eagle they had trained to hunt like a falcon, who had ridden all the way to Mexico and back perched on a broomstick in their car. There were more lovable pets as well: Marianne held the kinkajou in her arms, an affectionate animal that clutched on to one tightly with his tail. In a homemade movie the couple also showed us, the young man himself was shown in his library taking a book from the shelf. As he did so, he unselfconsciously blew the dust off the top of its pages. Marianne gave one of her laughs. She loved that; it was an example of the “spontaneity” that she admired as much as she admired “gusto.”

The next-to-last outing I went on with Marianne was in the summer of 1968. This was long after her mother's death, when she had moved from Brooklyn and was living at 35 West Ninth Street in Manhattan. I was staying nearby in the Village, and one day she telephoned and asked me if I would come over and walk with her to the election polls; she wanted to vote. It was the first time, I think, she had ever actually asked me for assistance. It was a very hot day. She was ready and waiting, with her hat on. It was the usual shape, of navy-blue straw, and she wore a blue-and-white-checked seersucker suit and blue sneakers. She had become a bit unsteady and was supposed to use a cane, which was leaning against the door frame. She hated it, and I don't think I ever saw her use it. The voting booths were quite near, in the basement of a public school off Sixth Avenue; there were a good many people there, sitting around, mostly women, talking. Marianne made quite a stir; they seemed to know who she was and came up to talk to her and to ask me about her while she voted. They were Greenwich Village mothers, with intellectual or bluestocking types among them. I thought to myself that Marianne's was probably the only Republican vote cast there that day.

It was the originality and freshness of Marianne's diction, in the most casual conversation, as well as her polysyllabic virtuosity, that impressed many people. She once said of a well-known poet, “That man is freckled like a trout with impropriety.” A friend has told me of attending a party for writers and artists at which she introduced a painter to Marianne by saying, “Miss Moore has the most interesting vocabulary of anyone I know.” Marianne showed signs of pleasure at this, and within a minute offhandedly but accurately used in a sentence a word I no longer remember that means an addiction, in animals, to licking the luminous numbers off the dials of clocks and watches. At the same party this friend introduced the then comparatively young art critic Clement Greenberg; to her surprise and no doubt to Mr. Greenberg's, Marianne seemed to be familiar with his writing and said, on shaking hands, “Oh, the
fearless
Mr. Greenberg.”

There was something about her good friend T. S. Eliot that seemed to amuse Marianne. On Eliot's first visit to Brooklyn after his marriage to Valerie, his young wife asked them to pose together for her for a snapshot. Valerie said, “Tom, put your arm around Marianne.” I asked if he had. Marianne gave that short deprecatory laugh and said, “Yes, he did, but very
gingerly.
” Toward the last, Marianne entrusted her Eliot letters for safekeeping with Robert Giroux, who told me that with each letter of the poet's she had preserved the envelope in which it had come. One envelope bore Marianne's Brooklyn address in Eliot's handwriting, but no return address or other identification. Within, there was a sheet of yellow pad paper on which was drawn a large heart pierced by an arrow, with the words “from an anonymous and grateful admirer.”

Last Years

The dictionary defines a memoir as “a record of events based on the writer's personal experience or knowledge.” Almost everything I have recorded was observed or heard firsthand, mostly before 1951–1952, the year—as Randall Jarrell put it—when “she won the Triple Crown” (National Book Award, Bollingen and Pulitzer Prizes) and became really famous. She was now Marianne Moore, the beloved “character” of Brooklyn and Manhattan; the baseball fan; the friend of many showier celebrities; the faithful admirer of Presidents Hoover and Eisenhower and Mayor Lindsay; the recipient of sixteen honorary degrees (she once modeled her favorite academic hoods for me); the reader of poetry all over the country, in settings very unlike the Brooklyn auditorium where in the thirties I heard her read with William Carlos Williams. She enjoyed every bit of the attention she received, although it too could be a “burden.” After those long years of modest living and incredibly hard work, she had—until the helplessness at the very last—thank heavens, an unusually fortunate old age.

She once remarked, after a visit to her brother and his family, that the state of being married and having children had one enormous advantage: “One never has to worry about whether one is doing the right thing or not. There isn't time. One is always having to go to market or drive the children somewhere. There isn't time to wonder, ‘Is this
right
or isn't it?'”

Of course she did wonder, and constantly. But, as in the notes to her poems, Marianne never gave away the whole show. The volubility, the wit, the self-deprecating laugh, never really clarified those quick decisions of hers—or decisive intuitions, rather—as to good and bad, right and wrong; and her meticulous system of ethics could be baffling. One of the very few occasions on which we came close to having a falling out was when, in the forties, I told her I had been seeing a psychoanalyst. She disapproved quite violently and said that psychoanalysts taught that “Evil is not
evil.
But we know it
is.
” I hadn't noticed that my analyst, a doctor of almost saintly character, did this, but I didn't attempt to refute it, and we didn't speak of it again. We never talked about Presbyterianism, or religion in general, nor did I ever dare more than tease her a little when she occasionally said she believed there was something
in
astrology.

Ninety years or so ago, Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote a letter to Robert Bridges about the ideal of the “gentleman,” or the “artist” versus the “gentleman.” Today his ideas may sound impossibly Victorian, but I find this letter still applicable and very moving: “As a fact poets and men of art are, I am sorry to say, by no means necessarily or commonly gentlemen. For gentlemen do not pander to lust or other basenesses nor … give themselves airs and affectations, nor do other things to be found in modern works … If an artist or thinker feels that were he to become in those ways ever so great, he would still be essentially lower than a gentleman that was no artist and no thinker. And yet to be a gentleman is but on the brim of morals and rather a thing of manners than morals properly. Then how much more must art and philosophy and manners and breeding and everything else in the world be below the least degree of true virtue. This is that chastity of mind which seems to lie at the very heart and be the parent of all good, the seeing at once what is best, and holding to that, and not allowing anything else whatever to be even heard pleading to the contrary … I agree then, and vehemently, that a gentleman … is in the position to despise the poet, were he Dante or Shakespeare, and the painter, were he Angelo or Apelles, for anything that showed him
not
to be a gentleman. He is in a position to do it, but if he is a gentleman perhaps this is what he will not do.” The word “gentleman” makes us uncomfortable now, and its feminine counterparts, whether “lady” or “gentlewoman,” embarrass us even more. But I am sure that Marianne would have “vehemently agreed” with Hopkins's strictures: to be a poet was not the be-all, end-all of existence.

I find it impossible to draw conclusions or even to summarize. When I try to, I become foolishly bemused: I have a sort of subliminal glimpse of the capital letter
M
multiplying. I am turning the pages of an illuminated manuscript and seeing that initial letter again and again: Marianne's monogram; mother; manners; morals; and I catch myself murmuring, “Manners and morals; manners
as
morals? Or it is morals
as
manners?” Since like Alice, “in a dreamy sort of way,” I can't answer either question, it doesn't much matter which way I put it; it
seems
to be making sense.

c. 1969

To the Botequim & Back

I go out to the botequim to buy some cigarettes and a Merenda, a soft drink similar to Orange Crooshy, and in the twenty minutes or so the expedition takes me I see “the following,” as they say here. (The slight pretentiousness in speech of semi-literacy. Workmen love to say, “I want to say
the following,
” colon, then say it. Or, “Now I shall say
the following,
” after which they do.)

It is a beautiful bright morning, big soft clouds moving rather rapidly high up, making large patches of opaque blue on the green hills and rocky peaks. The third of February; summer has come. Everything has grown amazingly in a week or so. Two kinds of morning glory adorn the standing walls of a ruined house—a pale lavender kind and a bright purple, pink-centered kind, hundreds of gaudy flowers stretching open to the sun as wide as they possibly can. All along the way the stone walls are flourishing after the January rains with mosses, maidenhair ferns, and a tiny yellow flower. I look down at a garden inside another ruin, an attempt at beauty and formality about ten feet square: there are a square border and two diagonals, with a rosebush in the middle covered with small red roses. Everything straggly and untidy, unpruned, long shoots on the bushes swaying in the breeze. Two Monarch butterflies are flickering, with hundreds of bees getting at the blossoms. Two hummingbirds sucking at the morning glories—one the little brilliant iridescent kind, the other the big long-bodied hummingbird, gray, with white edges to its tail. A tree (almost) of orange-yellow dahlias; white roses; a common variety, yellow-white, untidy; lavender flowers in profusion, onions mixed up with them all along the border, and a little kale. Where a cascade passes under the street, and comes out below, there is a rank growth of “lily of the valley,” a wild water plant with lush long leaves and big tired white blossoms that drag in the water. Every once in a while I catch their scent, overstrong and oversweet.

Palmyra had asked to leave work early this morning to go to have her throat blessed. Father Antonio was holding a Throat Blessing at the church at 6 a.m. (It's the feast of St. Blasius, the patron saint of throats.) Aurea had had a sore throat; Palmyra didn't, so apparently she was taking precautions. I asked her how the blessing had gone. There had been “many folks”; the priest had blessed them all in general, then at the railing he had come up close to each one, with his arms crossed and candles burning on either side of him, murmuring a blessing.

The botequim is a little shop or “grocery store,” where I buy a liter of milk every morning—that is, if it hasn't already turned sour. The bottles are usually left standing on the sidewalk, in a frame, all morning or all day, until they are sold. This store is owned by João Pica Pau, John Woodpecker. But, on the way, there is something new today. A “poolroom” has just opened, and there are five or six men and boys blocking the narrow sidewalk in front of the two open doors. It is a snooker table, I suppose, but so small it looks like a toy one, brand-new, with bright green felt. Two boys are playing, almost on the sidewalk.

Just before I get to João Pica Pau's, which is next to the barbershop, I meet three boys of twelve or so, brothers by their looks, all about the same size, mulattoes, with dark gray eyes. The two outside boys are helping the middle one, who is very thin, wasted, pale, wearing boots on his bare feet. He is languid and limp; his ragged shirt and blue trousers are very clean. He drags his feet and bends and sways like a broken stalk. His head turns toward me and he seems to have only one eye, a sunken hole for the other one—or is it an eye? I can't bear to look. His brother suddenly puts an arm under his knees and picks him up and takes him into the barber's. The barbershop is barely big enough for the chair, the barber, a fly-specked mirror, and an enormous atomizer. (At other times I've gone by, a child has been playing with the atomizer, spraying a rich synthetic scent out the door at his friends.) I glance in now and there are
two
people in the barber chair, the one-eyed boy sitting on his brother's lap, while the barber cuts his long frizzy hair. Everyone is silent as the brother holds him in a tight embrace. The boy cocks his one eye helplessly at the mirror.

Constant coming and going on the sidewalk, hot in the sun. A large black lady holds an apricot-colored umbrella, sheer and shiny, high over her head to give as much shade as possible to herself, the baby in her arms, and two little ones trailing behind. One of the local “characters” comes toward me, a miserable and shuffling old woman. She is broad and sagging; everything sags—breasts and stomach. She carries a black umbrella as a sunshade. Her shoes don't match; one is an old tennis shoe, almost falling off, the other an old black slipper. Her hair is wild and white; her crazy little eyes glitter at me. Two little girls follow, giggling. I give them a look.

I reach the botequim, but I find it closed. João Pica Pau has set up shop in the small cloth store next door. He has moved shop to the extent of pushing his milk bottles along the sidewalk a few feet, and setting up his glass case, which is filled with a wild variety of cheap cigarettes. I also see his pair of red scales, a huge knife, and a mess of small salamis in a basket, sitting on top of bolts of yard goods. He seems to be handling the sale of cloth as well. Ropes of garlic and a box of half-ripe tomatoes are all he has to offer fresh this morning. I drink a Pepsi-Cola, small size, while he wraps up the others for me. I also buy a pack of razor blades and some cheap candies. He spills the candies out all over the dirty counter for me to make my selection.