At London Review of Books: Marianne Moore & Her Mother

A piece by the editor of the London Review of Books about Marianne Moore considers the poet's relationship to her mother, Mary. Editor Mary-Kay Wilmers writes that "Mary expected poems to have a meaning and as far as she could see there was very little meaning in Marianne’s work." Despite this, their years in New York coincided with gradual praise and publication, as "[t]he heroes of modernist poetry each praised her verse for what he himself set most store by":

For William Carlos Williams, she had achieved modernism’s ‘unbridled leap’; for Eliot she was an enduring member of the ‘tradition’; for Stevens a romantic and for Pound someone who had resisted the romantic impulse from the start. Both Pound and Eliot championed her. She was even being paid for her work.

But for all that a wand had been waved there were no pumpkins turned into carriages waiting at the door of the apartment they rented when they got to New York. They lived as if they didn’t quite know how to do it, not as bohemians but as characters in a fairy tale who might prefer to have a white marble fireplace than a bed to themselves. The apartment was on a pretty street in Greenwich Village, and that was important, but it was also below ground, had only one room and that barely big enough for a bed, a sofa and some chairs; there was no kitchen, no fridge, no phone: ‘Mary prepared meals on a hotplate in the bathroom throughout the 11 years they lived there,’ Leavell reports. They ate the meals sitting on the edge of the bath or in the bath itself. Although Mary constantly worried that Marianne was too thin, too frail, too delicate (‘my mother comes in 16 times a day bringing me apples and things to eat’), her attitude to food was all her own: on one occasion she ‘planned to serve onions and prunes for lunch. Then she decided to invite a guest and scraped together a menu of cooked apples, canned corn, salad dressing and cocoa.’

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 superstructure 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’.

Find all of "What a Mother" at LRB (no sub required). Photograph of MM and her mother by Cecil Beaton.