The Bishop's Daughter

by Honor Moore

  page 102: “Everybody just takes a little less” Dorothy Day, Loaves and Fishes, p. 73.

  7: My Jersey City

  page 110: The King of Kings The Cecil B. DeMille version, 1927.

  8: Four-in-Hand

  In compiling the red book, the scrapbook keeper snipped away the newspaper sources of most of the clippings I used to construct this narrative, and those citations are now virtually irretrievable, but the names of some of the newspapers escaped his or her scissor: the Chicago Daily Tribune, the Chicago Times-Herald, the Sunday Inter-Ocean, and the New York Herald.

  page 123: Years after making a bronze portrait . . . Katharine Weems diary and Paul Moore letter quoted in Louise Todd Ambler, Katharine Lane Weems: Sculpture and Drawings (Boston: Boston Athenaeum, 1987), pp. 42–44.

  page 131: “You have been in politics long enough to know” Quoted in Matthew Josephson, The Robber Barons (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934; copyright renewed 1962), p. 353.

  10: Light and Dark

  page 159: “. . . You couldn’t go next door” Jervis Anderson, “Out There on the Issues,” profile of Paul Moore Jr. in The New Yorker, Apr. 28, 1986, pp. 73–74.

  page 160: “The Tea Shop” Ezra Pound, Selected Poems (New York: New Directions, 1957), p. 37.

  12: In Public

  page 193: “where the suffragan Episcopal bishop . . .” Jenny Moore, “Bishop Paul Moore’s Wife Looks Back at Six Years in Washington ‘with Confusion and Love,’” Washington Post, Potomac Magazine, Sept. 20, 1970.

  page 193: “In a blunt address . . .” “Courts Fail Children, Bishop Asserts,” Washington Post, June 23, 1964, p. C2.

  page 194: “My ogling at powerful figures . . .” Jenny Moore, “Bishop Paul Moore’s Wife Looks Back,” p. 43.

  page 199: “a leader of the new breed” Benjamin Bradlee, “Bishop Moore: A Leader of the New Breed,” Newsweek, Mar. 29, 1965, p. 77.

  13: Eager

  page 215: “I had a talk with Tim Mayer . . .” Julius Novick, “The New Talent May Be Here,” New York Times, Aug. 27, 1967, sec. 2, p. 4.

  15: Killing Me Softly

  page 242: “In the Cathedral’s soaring Gothic nave . . .” Kenneth L. Woodward, “An Activist Bishop Faces Life,” Newsweek, Dec. 25, 1972, p. 55.

  16: Art and Life

  page 248: “as violent and unforeseen as an engine . . .” Simone de Beauvoir, A Very Easy Death, trans. Patrick O’Brian (New York: Putnam, 1966), p. 106.

  page 249: “A woman in the shape of a monster . . .” Adrienne Rich, “Planetarium,” The Will to Change: Poems 1968–1970 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), p. 13.

  page 253: “intense, yet detached . . .” Laurence Senelick, “In Boston,” After Dark: The National Magazine of Entertainment, vol. 7, no. 5 (Sept. 1974).

  page 254: “in mind of passages . . .” Brendan Gill, “Mighty and Dreadful Death,” The New Yorker, Nov. 18, 1974, p. 113.

  17: Women and the Kingdom

  page 265: “When you’re fighting oppression . . .” Charles Willie, Ms., Dec. 1974, p. 48.

  page 275: “I have broken no canon law . . .” Quoted in Paul Moore, Take a Bishop Like Me, p. 128.

  18: Discovery

  page 293: “a just and peaceful solution” Press release, Nobel Peace Prize, 1996.

  A NOTE ON SOURCES

  This is a work of memoir, with elements of biography and autobiography. I have been aided in remembering by my parents’ letters, my own correspondence and diaries, my parents’ writings and my own, and conversations with friends, with friends and colleagues of my parents, and with members of our family. For historical and social context, I have consulted works of history and the journalistic record of the time. In spite of my best efforts, I am sure errors remain, and for them, I alone take responsibility.

  One’s memory, on the other hand, is a document with its own character, and like its companions, dream and imagination, comes with its own beautiful distortions. I have been careful to correct for gross inaccuracy, but I have happily employed memory’s riches in the composition of this narrative. Also, in order to protect the privacy of some of the people who appear as characters in this book, I have changed some names and places and omitted or altered personal details. As I say in the dedication, each of my siblings has another story; this one is my own.

  I have consulted and sometimes quoted from my father’s three published books, The Church Reclaims the City (New York: Seabury Press, 1963), Take a Bishop Like Me (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), and Presences (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997). I am grateful to Columbia University for permission to consult and quote from my father’s oral history (“The Reminiscences of Rt. Rev. Paul Moore, Jr.,” 1979–1989, in the Oral History Collection of Columbia University). My father’s papers, deposited in the Archives of the Episcopal Church (Papers of the Rt. Rev. Paul Moore. AR 2003.101, Archives of the Episcopal Church) have also been invaluable.

  It was my mother, Jenny Moore, who first told the story of our family in Jersey City, and I have consulted and quoted from her memoir, The People on Second Street (New York: William Morrow, 1968). The family scrapbooks she kept for the duration of her life with my father provided me with an almost cinematic chronicle, as did the family photographs my father assiduously took all his life. My parents’ letters are owned in common by our family, and I am grateful to my sisters and brothers, in particular Marian, Rosemary, Susanna, and Paul Moore, for providing me with copies. I am also grateful to Pamela Morton, Andrew Verver, and David Challinor for sharing their correspondences with my parents.

  For material about my great-grandparents, including letters, clippings, and the red scrapbook referred to in the text, I am grateful to my father’s older brother, William H. Moore. For Moore family history, I also consulted William Henry Moore and His Ancestry by L. Effingham DeForest and Anne Lawrence DeForest (New York: DeForest Publishing Company, 1934) and “Ada Small Moore: Collector and Patron” by David Ake Sensabaugh and Susan B. Matheson (Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin 2002 (December 2003), copyright Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Conn., pp. 30–49).

  “My Father’s Ship,” a selection from my journals, which has been folded into chapter 19, was published in The American Scholar, vol. 72, no. 4 (Autumn 2003). My debt to Anne Fadiman for her intuitive first reading of what became the germ of this book is great, and my gratitude to her and the staff of the magazine is heartfelt.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  For the time, space, and resources required to write this book, I have many to thank.

  First I am grateful to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for a fellowship which not only supported me for a year during the writing of this book, but also enabled me to enlarge its vision and scope. In that regard, I am also grateful for conversations with Edward Hirsch, president of the foundation, and an e-mail correspondence with Jack Miles, of its selection committee.

  For time out of time, I am grateful for fellowships from the Corporation of Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Study and Conference Center at Bellagio. For residencies, I am also grateful to the UCross Foundation, Medway Plantation (Bokara Legendre), and Elixir Farm (Lavinia McKinney). For hospitality, I thank my friends Roxana and Hamilton Robinson, Wendy Gimbel and Doug Liebhafsky, Christoph and Marie-Charlotte Meran, Claudia Weill and Walter Teller, and Fanny Howe. For time and a work space in the Frederick Allen Room at the New York Public Library, I am grateful to the library and to Wayne Furman, and for hospitality in London, I thank the guest house at St. Matthew’s, Westminster, Rona and Bob Kiley, and Diane Gelon and Gillian Hanna.

  For their forbearance, generosity, and support during the composition of this book, I thank my colleagues in the writing programs at the New School and at the Columbia School of the Arts, especially Robert Polito, Richard Locke, Lis Harris, and Patricia O’Toole
. I also thank Susan and Roger Hertog and the Columbia School of the Arts for awarding me a Hertog research assistant in 2004, and I am grateful to the remarkable Sarah Smarsh for her work in that capacity and for our many conversations. Roslyn Schloss read the manuscript and made valuable suggestions, and Tayt Harlin not only fact-checked but offered useful advice. For their thoroughness and hard work I am most grateful. Thank you as well to the New School and its president, Bob Kerrey, for extending my benefits during time off for writing. For technical help at the last minute, I thank Tanya Selvaratnam.

  For important conversations, I thank Louie Crew, the Very Reverend and Mrs. James Parks Morton, the Reverend and Mrs. Ledlie Laughlin, Nona Clark, Andrew Verver, Nell Gibson, Colin Coward, Joel Gibson, John George Robinson, Daniel Webster, Frances FitzGerald, Geoffrey Kabaservice, Michael Roberts, Kirsten Grimstad, Diana Gould, Brad Gooch, Benjamin Taylor, David Leeming, Janet Kraft, Isabel Potter, Ruth Lord, Emma Black, Victoria Rue, and Robert Leleux. And last but not least, for particular friendship and support during the writing of this book, I am indebted to Marian Moore, Stanley Siegel, Carolyn Forché, Catherine Ciepiela, André Bishop, Fanny Howe, Victoria Redel, James Lapine, Wendy Gimbel, and the late Arthur Miller—thank you.

  At the Wylie Agency, I thank Sarah Chalfant, Andrew Wylie, and Edward Orloff for their extended attention and encouragement. I am, of course, enormously grateful to W. W. Norton & Company, and I particularly thank my editor, Jill Bialosky, for her shrewd readings and buoyant support, and Don Rifkin and Paul Whitlatch for their marvelous attention to detail.

  PHOTOGRAPHS

  Part I: Father

  CHAPTER 1: Prophet’s Chamber,

  Mother and son at Hollow Hill, c. 1923. Credit: Family Collection

  CHAPTER 2: Guadalcanal

  The hero gives a speech at a war bond rally, Seattle, September 27, 1943. Credit: Family Collection

  CHAPTER 3: Inseparable

  At LaRue, New York City, Spring 1943. Credit: Family Collection

  CHAPTER 4: Holy Matrimony

  Bride and groom, en route from church to the wedding reception, November 26, 1944. Credit: Family Collection

  CHAPTER 5: Firstborn

  In the herb garden at Hollow Hill, c. 1948. The statue in the background is St. Francis. Credit: Family Collection

  CHAPTER 6: Becoming a Priest

  Ordination as a deacon, the first stage in becoming a priest, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, June 12, 1949 (Paul Moore is fourth from left in the first row of ordinands). Credit: Family Collection

  CHAPTER 7: My Jersey City

  With children (Honor at right with dog) at Grace Church Field Day, Mary Benson Park, Jersey City, c. 1953. Credit: Family Collection

  CHAPTER 8: Four-in-Hand

  William H. Moore (“Great-grandfather”) driving his winning team at the Road Coach Marathon, London, 1911. Credit: Family Collection

  CHAPTER 9: The Oldest

  Fishing in the Adirondacks, c. 1952. Credit: Photograph by Paul Moore Jr., Family Collection

  Part II: Daughter

  CHAPTER 10: Light and Dark

  Family portrait in the living room, Indianapolis, 1963. The carpet is Great-grandmother’s. Left to right by rows: Adelia, Paul III, Honor; Jenny, Susanna, Daniel, Paul, Patience (on his lap); Rosemary, George, Marian. Credit: Family Collection

  CHAPTER 11: Thou Shalt Not

  At sixteen in Indianapolis. Credit: Photograph by Paul Moore Jr., Family Collection

  CHAPTER 12: In Public

  Marching for Home Rule with Martin Luther King Jr. (far right) and the Reverend Walter Fauntroy (near right), Washington, 1968. Credit: Family Collection

  CHAPTER 13: Eager

  In my Sergeant Pepper jacket, Adirondacks, c. 1970. Credit: Photograph by Paul Moore Jr., Family Collection

  CHAPTER 14: The Family Cracks Open

  In costume for our parents’ twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, the Links, Adirondacks, 1969. Left to right starting at the back: Honor Moore, Jenny, Paul, Adelia, Paul III, Susanna, Daniel, Marian, Patience, George, Rosemary (front). Photograph by Paul Moore Jr., Family Collection

  CHAPTER 15: Killing Me Softly

  My mother at my sister Adelia’s wedding, October 1972, a year before her death. Credit: Photograph by Honor Moore

  CHAPTER 16: Art and Life

  At my desk in my loft in Tribeca, 1981. Credit: Photograph by Michiko Matsumoto from her 1983 book New York Women. Used with permission.

  Part III: Revelations

  CHAPTER 17: Women and the Kingdom

  The renegade ordination of eleven women to the priesthood, July 29, 1974, at the Episcopal Church of the Advocate, Philadelphia. Credit: Courtesy of the Archives of the Episcopal Church

  CHAPTER 18: Discovery

  My father at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, at the Blessing of the Animals, St. Francis Day celebration, c. 1988. Credit: Collection of Moira Kelly

  CHAPTER 19: Wayfarers

  With my father on Martha’s Vineyard, c. 1980. Credit: Photograph by Victoria Rue. Used with permission.

  CHAPTER 20: Andrew Verver

  The cave of the Apocalypse, Patmos. Credit: Photograph by Ellen Warner. Used with permission.

  CHAPTER 21: Complexity

  In Antigua, 2003. Credit: Photograph © Inger McCabe Elliott. Used with permission.

  CHAPTER 22: Footsteps

  The guide boat, on the lake in the Adirondacks. Credit: Photograph by James McKean Whalen. Used with permission.

  THE BISHOP’S

  DAUGHTER

  Honor Moore

  READING GROUP GUIDE

  HONOR MOORE ON WRITING

  THE BISHOP’S DAUGHTER

  For many years, in pieces, I wrote about my father—scrawled pages I stored away, for a book I never thought I’d write: A description of him celebrating Holy Communion or rowing a guide boat across the lake at our family’s summer place in the Adirondacks. Dreams that replayed moments from my childhood. Something funny from our family life. An imagined conversation between my parents during the early days of their marriage. Enraged tirades I never delivered, letters I never sent. Only after his death was I able to understand our life together clearly enough to make my way into telling our story.

  My father was a man of contradictions: A sincere man of God who cursed like the marine he once was and loved a stiff martini and a tough tennis game. A visionary social activist who lived and worked with the poor, but relished the trappings of luxury. A genius at the intimacies of pastoral work who only awkwardly navigated the closeness of family life. A husband and the father of nine children who led a second life—a secret existence with lovers who were men.

  Much of our life together was spent in stilted silence, but in taking care of him during the weeks before his death my feelings about my father were suddenly transformed. One moment my emotions were so inchoate that I could see nothing at all, and the next my perspective miraculously shifted—I could see the whole of our years together and love him as the firstborn daughter I had always wanted to be. That freedom brought a new way of thinking about my father’s life as an Episcopal priest and bishop. I began to liken his spiritual calling to an artist’s vocation. Thinking of him as a kind of artist, I could disentangle the strands of his complexity and identify with his suffering, his shortcomings, his errors. And in comparing his sexual search at the beginning of this century with my own in the heyday of sexual liberation in the 1960s and 1970s, I found new respect for his difficult choices.

  I began to ask questions. Was my father’s choice to become a priest predicated on his altruistic desire to help people or spiritual desire to become closer to God? Or was it the only avenue available for a man like him? Unlike some of his generation and class who chose the ministry
to escape their passions, my father became a priest to dive deeper into life, to venture much farther than he would have had he become the banker or lawyer his father expected him to be. My father’s vocation brought him great satisfaction, carrying him to the highest echelons of religious and political power in America, but his secrets caused suffering for my mother and later my stepmother, and for his children and himself.

  During the four years I spent writing The Bishop’s Daughter, I saw my father’s life anew. I read the letters he wrote to my mother in the early days of their courtship and met many people who credited him with a dramatic influence on their lives. My childhood sense of my father’s greatness returned, now seasoned by my own experience as an adult. At times, I felt as if I were accompanying my father and mother as they lived their lives, all the while revisiting my own experiences as a child and a young woman. To my surprise, writing the book, while hard work, was also an ecstatic experience. I had wandered in my own confusion and pain and had thought about these people and events for years. Now things began to fall into place, and I was telling a story that seemed larger than my own, filling in the blanks, with memory rising through my dreams and thoughts, bringing revelation and tears but also laughter.

  Alfred Kazin, the literary critic, once told me that what he adored about being a writer was that when he finished a book, he found himself “an entirely different person.” After turning in my first manuscript to my publisher, I asked him when he thought a book was finished, and he answered, “When you stop thinking and dreaming about it all the time.” Now that I have stopped thinking and dreaming about The Bishop’s Daughter, now that this story is out in the world, I find myself free of the shame and sorrow that accompanied much of my life. But, surprisingly, I also find that I miss my parents more than I ever have. Released from their story, they float through my days, and I’m forever thinking of things to ask them, imagining that when the phone rings it’s one of them and that we can start all over again, now that I understand.