There are so many weird ways to live a good life! In the excerpts below from Marianne Moore’s affectionately autographical poem, the “paper nautilus” is a female octopus who makes a thin shell to protect herself and her eggs. After Moore’s father was committed to an asylum, her mother, Mary, created a fairy tale world for Marianne and her brother Warren. She brought both of them up as boys: Marianne was “he” in the family’s talk and letters as long as Mary lived.
Mary, Marianne, and Warren all played roles, often as characters from Kenneth Grahame’s “The Wind in the Willows.” Mary was called “Mole,” so delicate that she had to be cared for all her life by her two “uncles,” Marianne (nicknamed “Rat”!) and Warner. Have you got all that? The critic Helen Vendler described this as the “dreadful pathology” of the Moore family. Sigmund Freud, inventing psychoanalysis at the same time in Vienna, would’ve loved to have met them; yet both children prospered and lived extraordinarily successful and “happy” lives, as far as we can know. For those of you immune to poetry, try “Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore” by Linda Leavell.
Moore (1887-1972) was born on November 15 (clink a glass next Friday to her memory; she never complained of loneliness, but enjoyed fame when it arrived in her old age). After graduating from Bryn Mawr in 1908, she lived with her mother, often in one-room apartments in Brooklyn and Greenwich Village, until Mary died in 1947, when Moore was almost 60.
Marianne Moore lived her own life, and wrote her own kind of poetry, with her original and decidedly eccentric mother being the strongest influence, as well as her earliest fan, critic, editor, and co-writer. Modernism had to adjust to absorb Moore’s tightly made poems, as intricate as a bridge or a teacup. Although the Modernist poets (Pound, Eliot, HD [Hilda Doolittle], Williams, Stevens, et al.) loved her, she didn’t write like them. She liked to rhyme and count her syllables. For example, “The Paper Nautilus” has five 7-line stanzas, each one sticking to the first stanza’s odd syllable count of 7, 7, 5, 5, 8, 8, 6.
Moore, an attractive woman with red hair and a penchant for wearing large black hats, was well known in Greenwich Village’s literary life. She was helpful to the younger poets like Allen Ginsberg, who adored her. This was enough “fame” to satisfy her, but suddenly, in 1951, she hit the trifecta, winning the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, and the Bollingen Prize. She appeared on the cover of Esquire. A baseball fan, she threw out the first ball at a Yankee game. In 1955 Ford hired her to name their new car, though they didn’t use her suggestions (my favorite was “Utopian Turtletop,” but Ford went ahead with their own, “Edsel,” a major flop).
I wasn’t good at teaching her poems. Not exactly “difficult,” they’re hard to follow, wildly divergent, opinionated: Like life, immensely detailed and confusing. She never married, or even had an affair (as far as anyone knows), but her long poem, “Marriage,” says more about that institution than many books, without coming to any conclusion. She often looked at nature, describing it microscopically; in the end, she was amazed. Her poem, “Nevertheless,” concludes: “What sap / went through that little thread / to make the cherry red!”
She wasn’t perfect. Constantly revising, she cut down her most famous poem, “Poetry,” which wonderfully advised poets to create “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,” to the last three of the lines you see below (which are still charming):
For authorities whose hopes
are shaped by mercenaries?
Writers entrapped by
teatime fame and by
commuters’ comforts? Not for these
the paper nautilus
constructs her thin glass shell . . .
I, too, dislike it.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in
it, after all, a place for the genuine.
This article appears in Nov 7-14, 2019.