Morals, Manners, and "Marriage": Marianne Moore's Art of Conversation

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1999 by Heather Cass White

"Conversation Galante," the third poem in which a woman speaks, is a duologue in which, if the man is being as "inane" as he gallantly says he is, the woman is, it seems, not even quite aware that he knows he is being fatuous, and that he is making fun of her as well as of himself in doing so:

And I then: "Someone frames upon the keys

That exquisite nocturne, with which we explain

The night and moonshine; music which we seize

To body forth our own vacuity."

She then: "Does this refer to me?"

"Oh no, it is I who am inane."

"You, madam, are the eternal humorist,

The eternal enemy of the absolute,

Giving our vagrant moods the slightest twist!

With your air indifferent and imperious

At a stroke our mad poetics to confute--" (38)

My summary treatment of Eliot's book ignores most of what Moore herself valued in it. However, it is not unfair to observe that in it women's conversation bears much of the brunt of the young Eliot's dissatisfaction with modern society's dishonesties and pretensions. Indeed, the mere fact that women are talking is all Prufrock needs to note in order for Eliot to gesture at a world of deadening, elitist, ignorant social chat.

The first paragraph of Moore's review of this book (for Poetry, in 1918) demonstrates her mixed reactions:

It might be advisable for Mr. Eliot to publish a fangless edition of Prufrock and Other Observations for the gentle reader who likes his literature, like breakfast coffee or grapefruit, sweetened. A mere change in the arrangement of the poems would help a little. It might begin with "La Figlia che Piange," followed perhaps by the "Portrait of a Lady"; for the gentle reader, in his eagerness for the customary bit of sweets, can be trusted to overlook the ungallantry, the youthful cruelty, of the substance of the "Portrait." It may as well be admitted that this hardened reviewer cursed the poet in his mind for this cruelty while reading the poem; and just when he was ready to find extenuating circumstances--the usual excuses about realism--out came this "drunken helot" (one can hardly blame the good English reviewer whom Ezra Pound quotes!) with that ending. It is hard to get over this ending with a few moments of thought; it wrenches a piece of life at the roots. (Complete Prose 34)

Perhaps the most striking feature of this paragraph is the number of characters who inhabit it. There is "the gentle reader" and his half-empathetic adversary "this hardened reviewer." There is "Mr. Eliot" and his alterego the "drunken helot," a "good English reviewer," and "Ezra Pound." This review is unique in Moore's prose for the degree to which Moore "tells all the truth but tells it slant," shifting voice and attitude to accommodate contradictory judgments.

At pains not to suggest that she would have Eliot "sweeten" his poems, Moore creates the "gentle reader" as her repository of squeamish, sentimental feeling about literature. So tone-deaf is this reader that the elements of "ungallantry" and "youthful cruelty" to which the reviewer objects, and to which the gentle reader surely would as well, are "overlook[ed]" by him. In taking on a persona capable of registering cruelty without necessarily wishing it different, Moore chooses that of the "hardened reviewer," a male figure who, presumably, curses Eliot out of noble-mindedness rather than a sense of personal injury. This persona allows Moore the strength of disinterestedness; a male reviewer cannot be accused of partisan feeling in objecting to "ungallantry." The levels of distancing Moore affects in order to criticize Eliot are remarkable. By calling its author the "good English reviewer," the first adjective slyly indicating his affiliation with the ignorant "gentle reader," she is able to employ the description of the poem's narrator as a "drunken helot" to indicate the heedless savagery she feels in the poem's end. Indicating that even this strategy of remove is not quite sufficient, she mentions the name of Ezra Pound, borrowing his literary authority to back her judgment and perhaps to license her repetition of the slightly crude "drunken helot" remark.