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

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 2003 by Linda Leavell

Over the next decade James's personal importance for Moore continued to grow. In a 1919 letter to Ezra Pound, she named James as one of her five "direct influences" (Selected Letters 123). Throughout her career no writer would appear more consistently among those to whom she professed indebtedness.

By 1920 Moore had read all three of James's autobiographies and most likely read them soon after they appeared in 1913, 1914, and 1917. (35) As soon as the two-volume editions of Henry's letters and William's letters came out, both in 1920, she read them and encouraged her mother to do so. While it cannot always be assumed that the two women shared the same enthusiasms, they often did. In October 1920, Mary Warner Moore wrote that she had been "just glutting on The Letters of Henry James." (36) When she read William's letters the following summer, she admired "The honesty and simple mindedness of the Jameses for generations back" and was ashamed that she had "thought them uppity, merely because they were scholarly. I had not time to read and find out. Now I know only me for the snob--I thought Henry James; indeed the family." (37) All indications are that Marianne shared these sympathies and likely influenced her mother toward them.

References to Henry James or quotations from him occur in four of the twelve poems Moore published in the Dial from 1920 to 1925: "Picking and Choosing," "New York," "An Octopus," and "Sea Unicorns and Land Unicorns." In "Picking and Choosing" she says that feeling (rather than ideas) makes James profound. (38) In "New York" his phrase "accessibility to experience" concludes the poem, providing a moral alternative to the examples of plunder described above it (Complete Poems 54). (39) In "Sea Unicorns and Land Unicorns" a catalog is borrowed from James's English Hours to illustrate points of unanimity between "personalities by nature much opposed" (77). James figures most prominently in the long poem "An Octopus," where he is linked with Mount Rainier:

       damned for its remoteness--
       like Henry James "damned by the public for decorum";
       not decorum, but restraint;
       it was the love of doing hard things
       that rebuffed and wore them out--a public out of sympathy
            with neatness. (75-76)

One of the things that had impressed Moore and her mother about James's letters is his difficult relationship with his public. "Poor Henry James!" wrote Mary Warner Moore, "So grieved that the world did not want his books!" (40) In these poems are certain ideas about James to which Moore would return in subsequent years, particularly the idea that James is "so susceptible to emotion as to be obliged to seem unemotional" (Complete Prose 401) and her identification of James with his native land--for instance, his advice in a letter "that young people should 'stick fast and sink up to their necks in everything their own countries and climates can give'" (Complete Prose 144).

From 1918 until 1929, Moore and her mother lived at 14 St. Luke's Place in Greenwich Village. Her winning the Dial award for 1924 and assuming its editorship in July 1925 boosted her to prominence not just in New York but within the international modernist community. When the Dial was discontinued four years later, Moore was without a job. Believing that a move would benefit his mother, who was recovering from a severe illness, Warner moved his mother and sister to Brooklyn in August 1929. The successive illnesses of all three members of her family in the early years of the Depression prompted a reevaluation of her professional and personal responsibilities. In the next two decades, though she developed new friendships, maintained old ones, and continued to make occasional appearances at literary gatherings in Manhattan, her family--and her mother's health in particular--became her first priority.