The various poetry magazines and their crowds came and went – Others, the one to which Marianne had been closest, ceased publication in 1919, so did the Egoist, but Scofield Thayer, Marianne’s staunchest advocate, took over the Dial and in 1925 asked her to be its acting editor while he went to Vienna to be psychoanalysed by Freud. Two years later when his shaky grip on reality obliged him to resign, Marianne took his place. Asked by Donald Hall what had made the Dial such a good paper in the years when she was editing it, she said ‘lack of fear’: ‘We didn’t care what other people said … Everybody liked what he was doing and when we made grievous mistakes we were sorry but we laughed over them.’ (How bad were those mistakes, I wonder, and did everyone really laugh?) In ‘The Dial: A Retrospect’ Marianne makes out that it was even more fun for everyone when Thayer was in charge: ‘there was for us of the staff, whatever the impression outside, a constant atmosphere of excited triumph; and from editor or publisher, inherent fireworks of parenthetic wit too good to print.’ Her own editorship was steadier and more modest than Thayer’s and sometimes it doesn’t get the credit it deserves – especially, Leavell implies, from men. Yet in his autobiography the hyperbolic Williams describes Marianne as ‘a rafter holding up the super-structure of our uncompleted building, a caryatid … our saint – if we had one – in whom we all felt instinctively our purpose come together to form a stream’.
In 1929 the Dial ceased publication. Of the two owners, one was mad and the other, James Sibley Watson, a rich philanthropist, had new interests. Marianne, who wasn’t pleased, chose to describe the decision as ‘largely chivalry’ on their part: ‘I didn’t have time for work of my own,’ she told George Saintsbury, the English man of letters, who’d been one of her contributors. At Warner’s insistence, she and her mother left Greenwich Village for a more suitable – ‘spacious’ would be the word – apartment in Brooklyn: they could have had a bed each had they wanted to. Marianne hadn’t written any poems since ‘The Monkey Puzzle’ in 1924 and wouldn’t write any now until she gave ‘Poetry’, or a version of it (as always there were many), to Harriet Monroe in 1931. Time passed; bursitis, bronchitis, laryngitis filled the day as first Mary, then Marianne and sometimes the two at the same time would take to the bed. For Mary illness offered a further call on Marianne’s sympathy; for Marianne it provided a moment of calm in which to write. But as her connection with the world began to fade (there would be a late rebound) the poems were more inclined to speak plainly, or even preach; to come closer, in other words, to something Mary might like.
In 1935 Faber published Marianne’s Selected Poems. Eliot himself wrote the introduction; and it was there that he spoke of her work forming ‘part of the small body of durable poetry written in our time’ – the quote reproduced on the cover of every edition of her poems. To begin with Mary ‘deplored’ the selection: she ‘investigated me till my very fleas blushed and I had to do over a great deal of the work,’ Marianne told her brother as she got out the ‘synonym books and small dictionaries’ that she and her mother had used when they were editing her prose – and other people’s – for the Dial. Marianne had told Thayer at the start of her editorship that she wouldn’t have time to see contributors or to write letters. By the end answering letters filled her day: Mary drafted them, Marianne spent hours perfecting them. ‘Readers of the Dial,’ Leavell writes, ‘would have been shocked to learn the extent of Mary’s involvement,’ but readers of her own book would have been surprised had that not been the case. ‘Mon dieu! What a mother,’ Alyse Gregory, who’d worked at the Dial and was more than anyone Marianne’s friend, wrote to Thayer: ‘so large, pale, refined, washed over by the years, but inexorably, permanently, eternally rooted and not to be overlooked, and remorselessly conversational, sentences with no beginning and no end, and no place left to jump in and stop them’. Mary’s presence is no less insistent in Leavell’s book: every time you want to say something about Marianne, you find yourself confronted with her mother.
Mary died in 1947; Marianne, worn down by years of anxiety on Mary’s behalf, went to pieces.
She dropped things, lost things, and broke things. Her hair whitened. Her skin sagged. Crying made her eyes puffy. She looked exhausted and old beyond her sixty years. In the company of others she ate well but at home ate little because she so hated dining alone.
Warner took matters in hand. Not long before she’d been photographed by Cecil Beaton for Vogue. Far from being flattered she thought she looked terrible. ‘Now, now my boy,’ Warner wrote to her, ‘you and I can do something about “that face”.’ Bit by bit, massage by massage, facial by facial, homage by homage she re covered. In September she moved out of the bedroom she’d shared with her mother.
Fame came in a rush. Leavell dates it to 28 February 1950, when she addressed a ‘large, formally attired’ audience at the Museum of Modern Art, sharing a double bill with Auden. In 1952 her Collected Poems won the National Book Award, the Bollingen Prize and the Pulitzer Prize; Life magazine published a photo essay in their issue of 21 September 1953; in 1957 she was profiled (not very flatteringly) in the New Yorker. In 1968 she threw out the ball at the Yankee stadium to inaugurate the new baseball season (she’d always been a Dodgers fan) and wrote the liner notes for Cassius Clay’s I Am the Greatest. She met Norman Mailer, ‘whom she liked immensely’, and George Plimpton and James Baldwin, ‘a fine youth’; in 1968 Harry Belafonte invited her onto The Tonight Show along with Petula Clark and Dionne Warwick; he had been going to ask Robert Kennedy but didn’t because she hadn’t liked his brother – she was a supporter of Eisenhower and Nixon but also of LBJ, calling herself ‘one of his most fervent admirers’, Vietnam and all. She was an old lady now, New York State’s Senior Citizen of the Year for 1969, both the wrong kind of woman, an insider, and the wrong kind of poet – an elite figure, a poets’ poet. Anne Sexton and Adrienne Rich counted for more, as Leavell points out with some displeasure. Her mother had consistently worried that Marianne was too susceptible to other people’s attention; that she was too fragile to go out into the world, that it was bad for her health to leave the house, to meet new people, to attend a large gathering. But it seems that few other poets, women poets especially, have enjoyed the world so wholeheartedly or received from it such a ringing endorsement.
Book reviewed:
Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore by Linda Leavell
Acknowledgments
I’d like to thank everyone who had a hand in giving these pieces a second life: Sue Barrett, Paul Forty, Andrew Franklin, Deborah Friedell, Jeremy Harding, John Lanchester, Jean McNicol, Andrew O’Hagan and Nicholas Spice. I am also grateful to the editors, including myself, of the publications in which they first appeared.
Credits
The pieces reprinted here were first published as follows:
I Was Dilapidated: Listener, 4 May 1972
Civis Britannicus Fuit: New Review, April 1976
Next to Godliness: New Yorker, October 1979
The Language of Novel Reviewing: The State of the Language, eds. Leonard Michaels and Christopher Ricks, 1980
Narcissism and Its Discontents: London Review of Books, 21 February 1980
Death and the Maiden: London Review of Books, 6 August 1981
Divorce Me: London Review of Books, 17 December 1981
Patty and Cin: London Review of Books, 6 May 1982
Hagiography: London Review of Books, 3 March 1983
Vita Longa: London Review of Books, 1 December 1983
Sisters’ Keepers: London Review of Books, 7 June 1984
Fortress Freud: London Review of Books, 18 April 1985
Lady Rothermere’s Fan: London Review of Books, 7 November 1985
Quarrelling: London Review of Books, 29 October 1987
Promises: London Review of Books, 10 November 1988
Nonchalance: London Review of Books, 27 July 1989
Attraction Duty: London Review of Books, 10 October 1991
My Distant Relative: London Review of Books, 4 August 1994
Brussels: London Review of Books, 29 July 1999
What if You Hadn’t Been Home: London Review of Books, 3 November 2011
Peter Campbell: London Review of Books, 17 November 2011
Flirting Is Nice: London Review of Books, 11 October 2012
What a Mother: London Review of Books, 3 December 2015
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Human Relations and Other Difficulties Page 25
