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

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 2003 by Linda Leavell

Her mother recognized the influence of Emerson, whom Moore had read the previous year, and a friend gave her a copy of William James's recent article "The Powers of Men." (26) Moore found enough here of interest to prompt her to read more. The following April, she read the student section of James's Talks to Teachers and Students, which she found "diverting and instructive" and recommended to her brother. Six days later she heard Theodore de Laguna lecture on the psychology of pragmatism and began the next day to read The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. Though she acknowledged a discrepancy between James's ideas of individual will and the Calvinist beliefs to which she and her family subscribed, the work stimulated hard thinking and convinced her "that the thing to do, is to go at the business and see that life is worth living." A week later she finished the book. Perhaps it is not mere coincidence that during this week Moore resolved at last not to "waste" herself on Peggy. (27)

The following autumn, the first semester of her senior year, Moore took Professor de Laguna's required two-hour psychology course, for which James's Psychology was the text. As late as 1963 she named this volume as one of the 10 books that did most to shape her vocational attitude and her philosophy of life (Complete Prose 671). (28) She seems to have found in William James's philosophy part of what she had yearned for in Peggy, a confirmation of her own individualism and the encouragement to pursue her own aspirations. For following Darwin, James ar- gues that it is the aberrant individual rather than the average one who becomes heroic, who changes the course of history (Will to Believe 618-52). By her senior year, Moore's letters revel in a new self-confidence. While she still enjoyed a wide circle of friends and now had "birds" of her own, she no longer worried about her social position. She seems intent, instead, on acquiring the experiences and knowledge that will be useful to her art. As in her mature work, she has learned to prefer the sincere to the pretentious, the idiosyncratic to the mundane. She told one gossiping classmate that "it's a very inartistic way of looking at life to have scandal suggested to one by unconventions," that "by artistic I mean a view to the relations of things, with a respect for the main issues of life and a sort of contempt for hard and fast definitions." (29)

Though Moore never met Peggy's father, she found in his writings certain principles that would manifest themselves in her mature poetry. The following paragraph from The Will to Believe, for example, anticipates Moore's own "passion for distinguishing," what she called years later a "passion for the particular" (Complete Poems 231). (30)

         But alongside of this passion for simplification there exists a
         sister passion, which in some minds--though they perhaps form
         the minority--is its rival. This is the passion for
         distinguishing; it is the impulse to be acquainted with the
         parts rather than to comprehend the whole. Loyalty to clearness
         and integrity of perception, dislike of blurred outlines, of
         vague identifications, are its characteristics. It loves to
         recognize particulars in their full completeness, and the more
         of these it can carry the happier it is. It prefers any amount
         of incoherence, abruptness and fragmentariness (so long as the
         literal details of the separate facts are saved) to an abstract
         way of conceiving things that, while it simplifies them,
         dissolves away at the same time their concrete fullness.
         Clearness and simplicity thus set up rival claims, and are a
         real dilemma for the thinker. (506)