by Yiyun Li
I often contemplated Moore’s words for days without fully grasping their meaning or why they felt so important. “Wilfulness in itself, is an attractive quality but wilfulness fails to take into account the question of attrition and attrition is inevitable,” she wrote in a letter, which I sent to a friend. What did she mean? I asked.
Why do you read her in any case? the friend asked.
One reads and rereads writers with whom one feels kinship—Turgenev, for instance—or else those who, like D. H. Lawrence and Stefan Zweig and Romain Rolland, enter one’s life at a particular moment and become part of personal history. Reading Moore, however, required a willfulness that matched hers. Not understanding, I could intrude only by continuing to read—a rebellion.
When I was ten, I set my heart on memorizing the great poets with the surname Li. There was the romantic craze for Li Po; the melancholy crooning of Li Yu, an emperor turned prisoner; Li Qingzhao, one of the few poetesses recorded in Chinese history who was not also a courtesan; Li Ye, a Taoist nun known for her amorous connections with several poets. And then there were two Tang dynasty poets I did not understand at all: Li Shangyin and Li He, both known for their allusiveness. What attracted me to their work, I now realize, was their unreadableness. Li Shangyin was meticulous with form, his meter and rhyme impeccable, his words painstakingly arranged, with splendid images and dense metaphors strung into indecipherable jewels; Li He was less constrained by form, but his poetry was equally obscure. It was a child’s avenging joy to be able to quote—often only to myself—from the two poets whom even most adults around did not understand.
More experienced and less undaunted a reader, I wondered while reading Moore whether one has the right to claim a connection without understanding. Moore’s letters are as perplexing as her poetry. Reading her is like trudging through a frozen snowfield in the dark. Even though her words seem to have been written out of the wish to communicate, together they take on a frustrating opaqueness. How can a person, writing in a genuine attempt to convey things that are important, make herself so unknowable? Moore’s biographer—I did not read her book until after I finished the letters—mentions a similar frustration.
A writer’s letters often exhibit a transparency, a naturalness even the most autobiographical work could not match. In a letter to Flaubert, who so rarely left his homestead, Turgenev wrote:
Old age, my dear friend, is a great dull cloud that envelops the future, the present and even the past, which it makes more melancholy, covering our memories with fine cracks, like old porcelain. (I’m afraid I’m expressing myself badly, but never mind.) We must defend ourselves against this cloud! I think you don’t do so enough. In fact I think a journey to Russia, the two of us together, would do you good.
Following the exhortation, Turgenev wrote about a four-day trip he had recently taken in Russia. The countryside in that letter was not much different from what was described in Rudin or Fathers and Sons, the observer’s feelings having been felt by his characters. (“One comes out of it as if having been immersed in some sort of restorative bath. And then one gets on with everyday living again.”) Still, to view it through Turgenev’s eyes instead of his characters’ eyes, to read him re-creating the scenery for the mind’s eye of Flaubert, brings a strange satisfaction, not merely from eavesdropping. There is one more frame of seeing, the discrepancy between words written for anonymous others and words written for personal connections.
In his letters, Turgenev, forgoing his detached gaze at his characters, was prone to exaggeration and drama. Katherine Mansfield’s cool, at times cruel, command in her short stories is a sharp contrast to the unrestrained wildness in her letters. Hemingway, exact in each word and its weight in his fiction, could be garrulous in his correspondence. (Once, entertained and annoyed by his repetitiveness on a small monetary matter, I wrote in the margin: be Hemingway already!) The contrast between writers’ published work and private words makes one feel for them, but Moore’s poetry and letters, equally opaque, close a door to anyone’s curiosity. Perhaps my reading her is far from rebellion or intrusion. It is only to insist on being defeated. No one defeats better than Moore.
In a letter to her friend William Carlos Williams, which I reread often, Moore wrote:
The fact is, I must admit, that we usually exemplify—in some measure—the faults against which we inveigh. I am prone to excess, in art as in life, so that I resist anything which implies that the line of least resistance is normal….
Make allowance, William, and muster charity. But no charity is needed so far as friendship is concerned, for friendship is my phobia. It is after all, loyalty which makes one resistful?
The letter says exactly what I am incapable of putting into words. To hear Moore say that she’s prone to excess is not unlike reading young Turgenev’s lament over being an old man before his time. Such absoluteness could be mistaken for affectation, but there are people who can survive only by going to the extreme.
A writer can deny she is autobiographical. But what is revealed and what is concealed expose equally. In that sense Moore, a master at withholding, is a highly autobiographical poet. I wonder how she would react to such an assessment. Were I told such a thing, I would recoil; I would put every word I have written up for examination to prove I have let nothing from my life slip through the cracks. Once—of all places in Beijing—a woman asked at an event if I was an autobiographical writer. No, I said, absolutely not. But your father is a nuclear physicist, she said, and in your collection at least two fathers worked in the nuclear industry. A coincidence, I tried to explain, does not mean a real connection, though my effort to disconnect writing from life, I now understand, is not different from Moore’s excess. One writes about what haunts one. Thus looked at, no one is exempt from being autobiographical.
“I would have died long since if I did not excel at defaulting.” Defaulting to what, Moore never said. Even when she did not refrain from talking about herself, it was abstract. If there is no proof of the existence of secrets, one is spared the fate of having two lives:
one, open, seen and known by all who cared to know, full of relative truth and of relative falsehood, exactly like the lives of his friends and acquaintances; and another life running its course in secret. And through some strange, perhaps accidental, conjunction of circumstances, everything that was essential, of interest and of value to him, everything in which he was sincere and did not deceive himself, everything that made the kernel of his life, was hidden from other people. (Chekhov)
Marianne Moore reminds me of what I could have become.
—
OTHER THAN COLLEGE, Moore did not live apart from her mother until her death. When they first moved to New York City, a neighbor gave them a kitten, and they named him Buffalo. “Buffalo is developing and is cuter and cuter,” Moore, deeply attached to the kitten, wrote to her brother. The next day, when she was at her library job, her mother killed Buffalo. “Mole [Moore’s mother] got chloroform and a little box and prepared everything and did it while I was at the library on Monday….And nothing could have been more exact….But it’s a knife in my heart, he was so affecting and scrupulous in his little scratchings and his attention to our requirements of him.” Still, Moore could not but defend her mother. “It would have been cruel to him to let him grow and might have…seemed like murder to him if we had kept him and turned him over to strangers.”
Together the mother and daughter let the Hudson River take the body away, and for a few years after they avoided the pier. The menacing logic by which Moore’s mother functioned is familiar. When my sister started working after college, she gave me a pair of hamsters as a present. I became fond of them, and soon after they disappeared. I gave them away, my mother said; look how obsessed you are with them. You can’t even show the same devotion to your parents.
Moore and her brother treated their mother as a child. I had known, long before I could put that thought into words, that the only child in our family was my mothe
r. More than her rage I feared her tears.
My mother is a child I had to leave behind so as to have my own life. I admire Marianne Moore’s brother. But sometimes action is propelled by hope that is only a wish; action does not absolve one’s sin, action itself is the sin.
I remember those late winter evenings, after I served as the librarian’s assistant, walking to the bus stop. Between the campus and the stop was a long avenue, unlit but for one lamp at each end. The campus was empty. The Old Summer Palace, in those days, was a deserted place even during the daytime. The poplars flanking the avenue were black against the dusky sky, and the crows circled the treetop in their loud cacophony. Beyond the poplars were two narrow ponds. The lotus that had blossomed pink and white in the summer lay withered on the water’s surface; nothing, I have always had the misimpression since then, can look deader than lotus in winter.
I would listen to my footsteps and recite Turgenev’s words in my head, certain about one thing in that bleak moment. My father had told me, when I was five, that a person was in danger only when another person was around. When nobody was near me, I was safe; I could even imagine a different life. What I feared was arriving home. Too often my mother would be screaming at my sister; too often my mother would be crying because she was hurt by my father’s defense of my sister. To be assigned as the one to smooth over her mood, to appease her anger, to bring her back to her childlike cheerful self so we could all breathe again—dreadful as it was, it was not the worst. This, I will tell you, was the worst—I shivered when I read that Moore’s mother scrutinized not only everything Moore wrote, but her physical change day by day—too often my mother would question, with omniscient suspicion, if any man on the bus had touched me inappropriately. How could she not understand that I was made invisible by having been old already, too old for those men lurking in the dark?
—
“WE WRITE TO narrate, not to prove,” Turgenev advised a young writer in a letter. I wish I had learned that earlier, though to prove, even as a failed effort, brings the relief of certainty, and what brings relief can become a habit, an addiction. The things I had wanted to prove were ambitious, even inhuman: to be free from all that haunts one, and to keep a distance so as never to haunt others.
I wonder if Moore wrote and lived to prove, and what she intended to prove, and to whom, and for what reason. Reading her makes me feel resentful: in her I see the self I wanted.
Turgenev was not afraid of showing his melodramatic nature (which must have matched his mother’s—this possibility always disturbs me). Moore, whose melodrama was internalized to the point of annihilation, gave access to only one witness—herself. Unlike Turgenev, whom I now feel ready to leave on my bookshelf with other writers, Moore will haunt me for a long time—is it from understanding too little, or too much?
In never leaving home, Moore found a shortcut in suffering, and she suffered impeccably. “Writing, to me, is entrapped conversation,” she wrote to Ezra Pound when he was in St. Elizabeths Hospital. I resent her for living an unhaunted life. I envy her for her entrapment. I can find no selfishness in her but her selfless art: sane, elegant, uncharitable.
Amongst Characters
I called my mother the other day and she reported that she was reading an old journal of mine. At that very moment. I changed the subject only to be guided back. She wanted to start keeping a journal and, looking for a suitable notebook, found one nearly unused, with only a few entries at the beginning. Written right after you left the army, she said. No, you don’t have to read it to me, I said when she described the first entry. The paranoia I felt then is the same fear that has always been with me. Anyone reading one’s words is able to take something from one. Had I been more disciplined I would have written nothing and lost nothing.
Philip Larkin, on his deathbed, asked that his diaries be destroyed. His request was carried out by Monica Jones—his longtime friend, intermittent lover, and later companion. Other private papers she allowed to be made public, a controversial outcome from a debatable will. At our first meeting William Trevor talked about one’s wishes being misinterpreted, giving Larkin as an example. On that day I was aware that my understanding of Trevor’s concern was hypothetical. I was thirty-four and he was seventy-nine; I had published one book, he, more than thirty. That one’s words would be misinterpreted seemed to me as inevitable as death itself. What I did not know yet was that a young person’s fatalism was only bravado.
When that bravado failed, fatalism became fatal. Or, to make a more honest statement: unless shut away in a journal that will be safely and timely burned, one’s words will always be read, by design or by accident. Hiding behind those words is like entrusting one’s self to a straw house—there is the wind, there is the wolf, and above all, there is one’s urge to destroy the house before it is destroyed by an external force.
Between the two hospital stays, I was in London for a few days by myself. The hotel, a narrow house on a quiet street, had a strip of a garden guarded by high walls, and I spent much of the time there reading Katherine Mansfield’s notebooks. When it rained I moved to the sitting room, which was hidden from the hotel entrance. Other guests appeared, but they were either too busy or too idle, and none of them seemed to be able to sit still for long. There were sights to see, and business to conduct. There was also time to kill. A woman picked up and put down a magazine without opening it; a son in his thirties walked into the garden once and again, bringing the same news of rain to his mother; a man studied the marble fireplace before his wife and daughters joined him.
To appear as the most idle person in the hotel—to not have to venture out for business or sightseeing—and to be able to sit still for hours: only in retrospect do I understand this extrication as a dangerous sign. It is an experience similar to when a child stares at something close until he only sees nonexistent patterns—the mind makes up what it wants to see.
Both busyness and idleness make people fidget. The busy scatter themselves around, refusing to be occupied by only one thing at a time; the idle are engaged with a thousand trifles. The worst kind of fidgeting is that of one’s mind. In London, the more agitated I was internally, the calmer I remained physically. I did not have to fight the urge to turn a dark hotel room into a tomb as I had in Ireland months earlier. The stillness I carried was enough to make the world retreat.
That year I traveled frequently. In a hotel in Edinburgh, I sneaked into a medical conference and read the posters about fractured bones and inflamed tendons, imagining what might have been mine, a scientist’s life built on facts and diligence. In an Idaho homestead—Ezra Pound’s birthplace—where I was the only guest on the second floor while the first floor serves as a museum, I held still when visitors entered, fearful and yet curious whether someone would lift the red velvet rope and walk upstairs. It was the week immediately after the first hospital stay, and against everyone’s warning I had insisted on going to Hailey, where Pound started his life and near where Hemingway, seventy-six years later and ten miles away in Ketchum, ended his. At the airport in New York—returning from another trip to London—when the computer system crashed and trapped in line hundreds of immigrants, wary and patient, I entered the country with unquestioned ease, the first time I traveled with an American passport, a small gain in a year of ungraspable loss. Each trip had been meant to renew a belief that I had forgotten. Nothing matters. The belief was fallible, but I knew from experience that absence is more reliable than presence, and a lie sustains life with absoluteness that truth fails to offer.
—
MY FIRST YEAR in college, the university arranged for a reunion with the officers from the army. Our freshman advisor, who was male and thus not allowed to enter the female dorm, waited at the building entrance. When I did not present myself, he sent someone to fetch me, and I hid behind the curtain on the top bunk, refusing to respond to the knocking on the door. There was no reason to reencounter the past, I rationalized; no reason to complicate a time line when it
could be separated into terminable fragments.
Before graduating from college, a dorm mate asked me to sign a T-shirt that had collected many signatures already. I did what I was asked to, though I must have shown reluctance, as my boyfriend—later my husband—reproached me for my aloofness. But I don’t see the point of adding one more signature to the T-shirt, I said; in any case she and I will probably never see each other again.
I believed at that moment I was speaking of a fact. Was I speaking a genuine feeling? Perhaps only to the extent that I wanted it to be true. The truth is, I knew I would not forget the girl with the T-shirt because she, like most people I have met, had qualities that made me curious—in her case, it was the disarming way she mocked her own mediocrity. I knew too I would not forget the officers, who, without the army camp to grant them protection and authority, would only look inconsequential and lost in Beijing. To remember is my instinct.
The possibility of being remembered, however, alarms me—it is not from the wish for erasure, but the fear that people’s memories will erase something essential. Expectations met and unmet, interpretations sensible and skewed, understanding granted or withheld, scrutiny out of kindness and malevolence—all these require one to actively accommodate others’ memories. Why not turn away from such intricacy? The less I offer you something to remember, the better I can remember you.
