"To Be Liked by You Would Be a Calamity"

Marianne Moore needs to be read on her own terms. A co-founder of American modernist poetry—with Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and others—she has nevertheless been hard to place in any of the reigning narratives by which the story of that "movement" and its meaning is told. Moore was born in 1887, and her early life was spent in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where she lived until 1916. She worked at an Indian School in Carlisle until it folded, then moved to New York City with her mother. By the end of her life, she had become a celebrity in New York; older readers of this magazine may recall seeing photos of her in her trademark tri-corn hat and cape; throwing out the baseball on opening day for the Yankees; hobnobbing with Mohammed Ali; interviewed by magazines such as Lady's Home Journal, Time, and Sports Illustrated. She died in 1972. Many critics believe that the heyday of her poetry was over by the time she turned fifty; after about 1940, so the story goes, even as she moved into the mainstream and began to publish her poems in The New Yorker and other well-known vehicles, she was washed up as a poet. Not all readers of her work agree.

Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore

Linda Leavell (Author)

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

480 pages

$20.92

Moore's life, like her poetry, resists tidy categories. (Maybe most lives do, if seen up close.) Although she moved easily among New York's avant-garde, her brother (with whom she was very close) was a prominent and very conservative Presbyterian pastor in the U.S. Navy. Her grandfather had been an important pastor who lived in Gettysburg during the famous Civil War battle. Moore herself never strayed from the church or from Republican politics. Poets are notoriously unreliable—this one hymned Mussolini, that one proudly accepted a prize from Stalin—but a pathbreaking American woman poet who was a lifelong Republican? And a Christian? Inconceivable!

In short, Linda Leavell has her work cut out for her in Holding on Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore, in which she seeks to make her subject appealing to urbane 21st-century readers. So, for example, Leavell presents Moore's mother, Mary, as a rebel in her own right, a racy woman whose lesbianism defied the social contract of Carlisle in the early 1900s. "Although sexual acts between members of the same sex had been acknowledged for centuries," Leavell writes, "few people in central Pennsylvania would have heard of homosexuality, much less of lesbianism, as psychological proclivities. The terms would not come into common usage until the 1920s." Moore's mother was thus ahead of her time. And yet, conscientiously, Leavell also reports an incident in which Moore's mother put Marianne's much-loved cat into a bag and dumped it off the pier near their Manhattan studio, drowning it. Her motive isn't clear, but the overall portrait that emerges is of an exceedingly strong-willed woman. She fought hard to keep her son and daughter close to her. When the son married, the mother stopped talking to him for three years, and never completely accepted his wife. Marianne never left her mother's side.

Moore never married; she never so much as dated. There's no evidence in her life of sexual intimacy—with men OR women. William Carlos Williams was "exasperated" that Moore took no interest in "literary guys," Leavell writes, and Ezra Pound offered to mount her "Presbyterian stairturn," to no effect. What was wrong with her, anyway? Not only did she show "no man-instincts whatsoever," as her mother put it, but also she had no "confidant." Were other potential suitors kept at bay by the formidable mother? Leavell speculates that Moore's apparent lack of libido (how else is a modern person to understand it?) may have been linked to her low weight. Moore weighed less than 100 pounds for much of her teens and into her thirties. At a Greenwich Village public scale she once weighed in, fully dressed, at 75 pounds. (Was the scale reliable?) Leavell comments: "Too little body fat causes … the loss of libido."

There's an interesting contrast between Leavell's book and the previous Moore biography, by Charles Molesworth (Marianne Moore: A Literary Life, 1990). Leavell is a much more fluent writer; her book has a narrative drive that Molesworth's lacks. And yet Moles-worth's is the better book, more persuasive, less agenda-driven. His account of Moore's family life gives more prominence to the naval pastor brother and the close ties between the two. And Molesworth says that, even though Moore never married, she remained open to the possibility of marriage, noting that she told the engraver to leave space for a possible husband next to her name on her tombstone after her mother's death (she is buried at Gettysburg next to her mother). Moore was then already sixty.

Was she a nun without a habit? Leavell writes, "Neither at home nor apparently with her friends did she indicate that she did or did not share [her mother] Mary's religious faith." While Moore's brother and her mother were devoutly Christian, Leavell writes, "Old Testament allusions far outnumber New Testament ones in her work." The import of this isn't clear: for Christians, of course, the Old Testament is Scripture as much as the New. In any case, Leavell's eye for Christian allusions isn't acute. In "The Steeple-Jack" Moore centers an entire town's activity upon a church. The poem "Rosemary" gives us the herb "Springing from stones beside the sea / the height of Christ when he was thirty-three."

Leavell never mentions these details and many others in the same vein. But the evidence of Moore's deep engagement with Christianity is apparent throughout her work. Her beautiful, densely textured poem "Marriage," one of her most celebrated, cites Presbyterian Puritan Richard Baxter's The Saints' Everlasting Rest (published in 1650) as crucial to an understanding of marriage. Her war poem, "Keeping Their World Large," has clear references to Jesus and his disciples, who were willing to sacrifice themselves for us (there is an echo of Julia Ward Howe's "Battle Hymn of the Republic"). In the poem, she describes the rows of white crosses at Arlington Cemetery. Moore's poem "Melancthon" refers to the Lutheran reformer. And so on.

To be fair to Leavell, she has plenty of company among Moore scholars. An omnibus volume of critical readings of Moore's poetry mentions only one article to date (1990) that had bothered to illuminate the religious aspect of Moore's work (eighty years after her first poems were published). It's a brief and amateurish piece published by a Presbyterian pastor who was not trained as a literary critic. After some twenty books of literary criticism and hundreds of articles, there is only one newish article devoted to Moore's friendship with the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (ignored in Leavell's biography). Let's suppose this survey missed some fugitive items. Even so, the gap is astonishing.

The point is not to make Moore into a Christian apologist—something she patently was not. Rather, it is to understand Moore on her own terms, in her faith, in her everyday life, across the board. This Leavell persistently refuses to do. With inadvertently comical tenacity, she gives her subject a makeover. Leavell explains to us that "the socialist ideals of Marianne's college years" were "partly realized" in the Moores' multiracial Brooklyn neighborhood, where they treated each person with "equal solicitude." Noting that the Moores routinely brought "their own shopping bags" when getting groceries and such, Leavell hopes to signal an ardent interest in conservation.

Well, yes, Moore briefly embraced socialism when she was in college at Bryn Mawr. Back in her own milieu—as Molesworth makes clear in his biography—she became a life-long Republican. Early on she favored Taft. She adored Herbert Hoover. She wore a Nixon pin on her lapel in the 1960s. It is possible to read in the Letters of Marianne Moore that she hated Roosevelt and in one letter compared him to Adolf Hitler. Oh, dear. In her seventies, Moore was an ardent supporter of the war in Vietnam. Many fellow poets loathed Moore's support of the military. Randall Jarrell, who admired Moore's poetry, cited her World War II poem "In Distrust of Merits" as proof that she was a backwards provincial in her politics; like many 21st-century readers, he had no sympathy for the Christian tradition of Just War.

And this takes us back to the stunning neglect of the orthodox religious dimension of Moore's poetry, consistent with a decades-long attempt to shoehorn Moore into the secular modernist canon. The reality was more complicated, and more interesting. Looking at photographs of Moore in the biographies, one is struck by the lacy collars and the neatly pulled-back bun of hair, and how the hair is often covered with a hat. And yet, there are avant-garde nuances. She wears something like a pantsuit in one photograph. It is smart and yet old-fashioned, even for the period. Moore is always "pulled together." She wears ankle-length dresses with stockings pulled up so that not a trace of leg is visible, and only the face can be seen. There is tremendous alertness in the eyes, and a kind of knowing smile that would seem foreign on the faces of Mennonite women from the period. Moore was one of a kind.

There are 800,000 neatly arranged written documents in the Moore papers at the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia (she was trained as a librarian and kept her correspondence and clippings in alphabetic files). One can never guess quite what she will be writing. One whole section of a notebook from the 1960s is devoted to descriptions of baseball players' athletic grace, as she recounts bare-handed catches by Mickey Mantle and home runs parked by Roger Maris, while next to this are notes on the intricacies of the debate between Lamarck and Darwin.

Who was Marianne Moore? Her eyes reveal a curious but kindhearted woman who retained a child's alertness in her old age. Moore went to parties, knew many writers and artists of her time, excelled as an editor of important periodicals. It would be wonderful if one day a new biography were to appear that could integrate those aspects of her life with her relationship to her religion, including her local Presbyterian church. (Some remnants of Moore's Brooklyn congregation exist. While visiting the Lafayette Presbyterian church in June of 2006, I met an elderly African American woman who remembered Marianne with great fondness.)

Moore was no recluse. She was involved in the social realm and had strong political and religious interests in addition to literary and artistic ones. Nothing escaped her. She saw humanity and the animals as part of God's creation, and yet her poetry opens into a vast social world. Her poetry is unusual in that she researched topics, often spending more than a year on a single poem. Each one has to be read like a Sudoku puzzle that takes a year to solve. Her kind of art—high modernist for sure!—doesn't attract everyone; some readers will be instantly repelled. That's fine. There's no obligation to read Marianne Moore. But critics and biographers who interpret her life and work are obliged to respect the resistant particulars of their subject.

Kirby Olson teaches philosophy, literature, and creative writing at SUNY-Delhi.