Marianne Moore, the James family, and the politics of celibacy

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 2003 by Linda Leavell

Though Moore deeply regretted the demise of the Dial, the sudden withdrawal from editorial deadlines and aspiring literati provided over the next few years the greatest leisure for writing that she would ever know. She could spend weeks and months writing a single poem or review. For her 1931 review of Ezra Pound's A Draft of XXX Cantos, for instance, she determined to learn everything that Pound himself knew before reading the book and writing the review. In October 1933 Lincoln Kirstein invited her to write an essay for a special Henry James issue of Hound & Horn; she proposed the topic of James as a characteristic American. (41) The following December and January Moore and her mother spent four weeks near Carlisle at the mountain home of their old friend Mary Norcross. When Moore was not attending to Norcross's personal needs (she was in a cast following an automobile accident) or the various farm animals, she read the James books she had brought with her, filling 57 legal-size pages with quotations. (42) After returning to Brooklyn, she took several weeks to finish the essay. "Be thankful," she wrote Warner, "you weren't here to usher in the James article!" (Selected Letters 320).

It is hardly surprising that as a modernist Moore would admire the work of Henry James. But it is surprising that the works she chiefly admires are his early stories and novels, his letters, essays, and memoirs. There is no indication that she ever changed her mind about the style of his late fiction, but she came to admire an "almost indescribable naturalness" in his letters and memoirs (Complete Prose 320). Of the dozen or so sources for quotations in "Henry James as a Characteristic American" (Complete Prose 316-22) all either predate The Portrait of a Lady (1881) or postdate The Golden Bowl (1904). She cites The American (1877), Hawthorne (1879), three stories from the early 1870s ("Madonna of the Future," "Madame de Mauves," and "The Passionate Pilgrim"), The American Scene (1907), and the three autobiographies: A Small Boy and Others (1913), Notes of a Son and Brother (1914), and The Middle Years (1917). (43) Her choice of early works is influenced by Ford Madox Hueffer, who calls "The Passionate Pilgrim" James's "first masterpiece" (111) and asserts that in "Madame de Mauves," "A Passionate Pilgrim," and "The Madonna of the Future," which he thinks "were written immediately after Roderick Hudson and immediately before The American ... our master was beginning to find himself" (128). Moore attempts in her essay to reassess not the novelist but "himself," not the artist but the American.

That is indeed the purpose of the special issue of Hound & Horn, which begins with Moore's essay. Lincoln Kirstein enlisted R. P. Blackmur, Edmund Wilson, Stephen Spender, Glenway Wescott, and others to redress James's reputation, which had suffered ever since his infamous return to his native land 30 years before. The American Scene, the critique of American society that resulted from James's 1904 tour, did not improve his American reputation. Nor did his subsequent change of citizenship. In a thorough analysis of the cultural response to James during the 1920s and 1930s, Ross Posnock speculates that "not only was his exile read as contemptuous rejection but his strange social presence was interpreted as contempt for and freedom from conventional masculine roles" (59). Glenway Wescott put the problem baldly: "expatriation and castration" (179). (44)