MARIANNE MOORE: PRIMARY SOURCES

MARIANNE MOORE (LETTER DATES 14 FEBRUARY 1909 AND 31 AUGUST 1921)

SOURCE: Moore, Marianne. The Selected Letters of Marianne Moore, edited by Bonnie Costello, pp. 63-6, 175-79. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.

In the following letters, written in 1909 and 1921, Moore discusses her thoughts on the suffragist movement and the institution of marriage.

To Mary Warner Moore and John Warner Moore

FEB[RUARY] 14, 1909

Dear Family,

I hate to think of your taking so hard, my anxieties. To think I could ever come so near the ragged brink though and miss it, makes me squirm. I find I did not have to get Merit in Philosophy. I merely had to get half 15 hours, but of course with persistent drawing of Passeds, it's very pleasant to have 10 hours. Mary Allen has 2 too few and Hilda S.-S. failed Philosophy (pretty badly), so there has been a general slaughter. Hilda will get her degree of course, for she can take the exam. at Easter.

Elsie failed English Comp.—(technically. Her critical papers are passed)—so she feels very sore but she got H.C. in one Mathematics and in Latin Comp.—and is so "proud of her High Credits," I feel they should salve her pain. She says not infrequently, "I'm pretty proud of my High Credits. Wouldn't you be?" I said I think I would and that I think I'll go in for one in Philosophy in June, ([J. M.] Barrie like).

I have a verse of not very high character which is coming out in The Lantern. I gave it to Tip. But Ruth George wrested it away to my ineffable joy.

Ennui I call it—
He often expressed
A curious wish
To be interchangeably
Man and fish
To nibble the bait
Off the hook said he
And then slip away
Like a ghost in the sea.

I am not proud of it, but I like the rhythm and I intend to try, till I do write something. (I intend to try too for H.C. in Philosophy and in Daddy.)¹

These sporadic poems I don't work over, (though my stories I do), so I smile, (as if I had found a penny) when people tell me how they like them and talk about writing poetry and so on as if it were gymnastics or piano practice.

Miss Shaw spoke last night on the Modern Democratic ideal. I couldn't say how she delighted me. No decent, half-kind, creature could possibly think of fighting suffrage if he or it had heard her arguments. They hold water so that they stand repeating, too. Elsie didn't go, so I gave her an extract today, (we went walking)—and she is "on the fence." (Flourish of trumpets.) I said when Elsie said for the 12th time she didn't see what difference voting would make in "making people better," I said, if you want to oppose women's voting I said, you merely say you are willing to tramp over people's bodies to get all these luxuries you take so calmly. I said, "if women are going to support children and perhaps unproductive adults they ought to have as much pay as men and ought to work eight hours if men work eight hours, and not work ten." I delivered a cruel flow on the score of men. I said the men are all that keep you respectable. Just because they don't choose to grind women down more than women are ground down, is not the fault of the women. I said, (Educated!) women say, men give us every thing we want why try to get the ballot. I said, "the men give you what you want because they are a high grade of animal. The clothes of every woman in N.Y. a few years ago, belonged to her husband, no widow could legally be buried in the state—a widow inherited ⅔ of her husband's property—(during her life). The cemetery lot came in the property, so the woman had ⅔ of the cemetery lot during her lifetime and to get any use out of it would have to be buried before she was dead." Elsie laughed quizzically. I said also that the eight hour day was all a question of the ballot. Elsie said she didn't see how it could be. I said, "well, in Colorado, the men had an eight hour day, the women, a ten hour day, the women got an eight hour day because they put a bill in as voters (for state legislature). In N.Y. they did not." The philanthropy argument I think was Miss Shaw's best. But I think Elsie "tried not to pay attention"—and didn't see what I was talking about—the idea that if you prevent all babies from drinking infected milk, you do more good than if you solicit money and supply 200 with Pasteurized milk. Miss Shaw said, people were bringing up the argument that women would neglect charity (Dr. Lyman Abbott)² the idea of the ballot being to obviate the necessity of charity. She quashed the unladylike argument and the time argument. She said the ladies of Colorado get a bill through in one year and the ladies of N.Y. take a trip up the Hudson every year for seven years and don't get a bill passed then. She said the legislative measures were often more ethical than partisan and that feminine women oughtn't to feel too ignorant to care what happened. The point about the industrial school I thought squashing but Elsie did not. That you can't tell girls to stay at home when the girls who are fit to stay at home are a million in three and the girls that need to stay at home or get positions as housemaids have run on the streets all their lives and don't know what clean beds are or what cooking utensils look like. I wasn't as rabid as I sound here, but I was pretty bulldoggy. I said "of course woman suffrage doesn't mean much to you, because you're petted and have money lavished on you and you wouldn't think what a slum looks like and wouldn't think of touching an infected horse-hide or dangerous machinery for anything, but a lot of girls that haven't quite your chances could see why it might help some." Elsie said, "Did you see that bunch of flowers Glady Spry had on?" and I could have beat her with a book. But my words sank in, as someone asked Elsie in my presence later what she thought of woman suffrage and she said, "I can't decide."

Pres. Thomas had us at the Deanery after the lecture (the Suffrage Society) and I was struck dumb, the place is so beautiful. It's more educational than an art course. It rambles a little and there is a narrow passage I don't like, but the whole, is an Elysian garden. The reception hall, is a big square place with a tiled floor and gold (burlap!) on the walls and a hammered brass ceiling of which little shows for heavy brown beams go across—and sparsely filled with antique, capacious chairs, inlaid with gilded legs. The bedrooms upstairs are indescribable. The one I left my wraps in had a punctured bed, square, Indian brass (square posts and low head and foot boards) with a pale silk spread (embroidered flat) across it. The bathroom adjoining is a square room, size of my college room, mosaic floor, white tiled walls. All the ceilings through the house are stenciled, the lamps—Favrile glass—and the woodwork the color of the walls. In Pres. T's study the walls are blue and the window frames blue and the chandelier a bunch of (five) pale pepper shaped, conical lobes, greenish yellow. The Dean came in as we were looking at it, (standing in the doorway, Sh. Warner and Mabel Ashley and some Freshman and I) and said, "I think we shall have it done and have the curtains up, by the time of the Senior reception—the first after Easter." This room was adjacent to the "salon" so it was suitable we should be there, (we were encouraged moreover to circulate). I did the talking about the stone in the gymnasium, the stain on the wood, the gargoyles in the cloister and dozens of kindred topics. The Dean was more charming than I've ever known her. The way she has worked too for the gym. excites my admiration. Hours she worked every day in the hottest part of the summer, on the plans, Miss Lawther says. She said finally, "Now, won't you have some lemonade, nuts, cakes (in the dining-room). See how you like our grape-juice lemonade." The grape-juice lemonade, nuts, cakes and candy were fine, a tinge of Deanery luxury. The old pieces of furniture decorated with brass and the electric lamps and the windows and rugs and the piano—and red patterned East Indian cover made me gasp. My suffrage experiences in New York hearing Mr. Zueblin stood me in good stead—(he is very well known and apparently universally liked) as I first shook hands, for I feel the ice thin at any party when I have to bow and grin and go and haven't time to get into a mellow conversation.

In the middle narrow passage I speak of there are low dark bookcases on which were various pieces of rainbow peacock glass. In the middle room (centre) from which opened the salon, and the office and the narrow hall was a table (low) but square with all the periodicals neatly arranged in columns and here and there on other tables, upstairs were odd modern books, Nonsense verses etc. The servants were masters—at their tasks—neat, very tall, very sagacious—the maids obsequious and busy, (upstairs). I smiled with satisfaction at the whole affair.

Today I went to church—took a walk with Elsie (after dinner) went to the Musseys', (with Elsie) and am now going to bed—10:15. Elsie is provoked with me because I didn't introduce her round, at the Musseys'. But I introduced her to Mrs. Mussey and after the spiel made a dart for the man to ask him a question which right Elsie had also as none of us knew him. Dr. de Laguna was there and I nosed out a seat near him on the sofa, (next to him) and of course left him to speak to Mr. Meeker afterward so I don't think Elsie has really a casus belli. Besides she had 3 years in which to make his acquaintance. Mr. Meeker was very delightful, had a drawl and a shy very humorous way of saying things. But I think Dr. Mussey beats them all. He is sound as a bell. He is crude occasionally, he is so much in earnest, but his clean way of looking at things and his energetic openminded broad-minded face is enough to set you housecleaning yourself. He looks like an inspired fieldhand very square and homespun with respect to ties and shoes. He is the finest type of social evangelism I've seen. He told a funny story (informally). He said a boy was telling about his brothers who had learned to play musical instruments of some kind and he said, "Maurice can play alone but Charles can only play when he plays with the band."

With love, Fangs

I have a story, "The Blue Moth" which I think will do for ye Tip this month or next. Shirley said she liked it, most of it, and gave it to Grace Branham to read. It elates me very much for it is like my poem, (what Dr. D. would call a "tentative" story).

Friday afternoon I went painting to Miss Garber's studio by Miss Baldwin's, she invited me, and did 2 bottles a green one and a brown one, very ugly I thought but I had to do what the others were doing. I hope however refined my taste may become, I shall not be perverted into calling cold gingerale-bottle-green "stunning" as Miss G. called it. I appreciated the invitation however and am going again. I expect to do things bigger, too. Small scale studies are very injurious to one's hand.

Don't forget Mrs. Landberton (the address).…

To Bryher

AUGUST 31, 1921
Dear Bryher:

I had already posted you Adventure when your letter came, saying to keep it till you decided what had best be done about it; I am so sorry. I shall review Hymen if Hilda approves; I am most anxious to see her stories. I should think there would be no trouble about placing them and shall do with them just as she directs.

I have not read [Oswald] Spengler's Der Untergang des Abendlandes. I shall try to see Die Weissen Gotter; I am especially interested in the Incas though I know nothing about them and I know nothing about Mexico. I have always thought of Cortez as an iron clad monster of the largest variety; picturesque of course on a large scale, too. I am most impatient to read Flaubert's correspondence. I have wanted to read it for some time.

I am highly in favour of a Bat-ears—later, for I should think as you say, that Berlin would interfere. We had one as a neighbor when we were in New Jersey and nothing could exceed his pansy-like attractiveness of feature and his general vigour, mental and other. When he had been in a fight with a large bulldog and was still so weak that he had to lie down as soon as he had got to the other side of the street, he limped over to attack another dog.

Robert's picture is very like him I think and I am delighted to have it.

We are just back from a delightful visit to a friend, in the mountains near Carlisle, our old home. I took pictures of nearly everything—a pine tree, two dogs in many positions—an airedale and a collie, an earthenware tea set, a winding path to the house—of logs sunk in the earth and two, out of five fringed gilled newts that I caught in a spring. I even allowed a stinging fly to settle on me and select a place to bite me rather than risk losing one of these lizards in a good position. I had them in a square dish of water belonging to the dogs—on a white cloth. I took a copperhead at our doorstep and the shed skin of another copperhead and caught a grasshopper of the kind I had been looking for—a large fawncoloured one with barred legs but had no more films; I also had to relinquish an immense iron crowfoot about two feet long, belonging to one of the carpenters. A live snake is worth feeling, or perhaps I should say a freshly killed one; it feels like a piece of old fashioned bead work made of infinitesimally small beads or a fine gold mesh bag with nothing in it and is silky like a poppy petal—dry and warm. The one I took was dead so it had not the remarkable bevel that a live copperhead has; the way the muscles of one of these snakes with a bevel, are connected with the spine is wonderful I think, like the complicated orderly appearance of the ropes by which a ship's sails are tethered to the mast. If the prints are good, I shall send you some. I saw a falling star which looked like a sheet of paper on fire and a bat so close that I could see light through its wings—a kind of amber—and could make out the veins and scallops. The most beautiful feature of this ledge in the mountains is a group of immense pines; the ends of the branches look like black fox tails against the dark blue of the sky at night and the stars, the times when I was out, glittered like cut silver.

I don't hate Lloyd George but I loathe Lord Northcliffe.³

I don't see in what way T. S. Eliot is not "with you." It strikes me that he has created a good deal of carnage and I certainly feel that in comparison, I am not a very large rock to heave at the stupidity of the public.

As for dressing down Mr. Latham, temerarious pterodactyl, maybe he will answer back like the echo in [Lucius] Osgood's Second Reader, "Foo-olish fel-low."

A great many trashy old time novels are being written today, there is no doubt of that and the form annoys one along with the content and I think with you, that in the case of anyone who can write, the idea will completely burst the bottle but I am sure that the play writing expedients of creating suspense and making people feel by the time they have got to the end—that something has happened—strengthen a presentation and we do not want to be in Dostoevsky's plight of attempting to carry milk without putting it in a jar. He belches out life as a smoke stack belches smoke and George Moore is justified in saying, "His farrago is wonderful but I am not won." We haven't his faults but we have our own, tending to exposit astuteness and sensibility without perspective and people are likely to say, "Very charming but not enough horse power." Robinson Crusoe is to my mind, the perfect novel both in detail and in conception. Apropos of Antar, I don't misunderstand what you say about disliking sentimentality but it recalls to me something I have thought for some time—that it is normal for young people to have a sentimental attitude to love and that it is abnormal for them to be aware of the sexual aspect of their relations.⁴ In beating the drum of sex continually, the psychoanalytical wing of modern thought surely misses the mark; it is as if someone were to say to one of us, in accepting an invitation to tea, "I haven't any illusions about your intellect; my stomach is in good working order and I am here to prove it." Your poor Libyan probably shares my Baucis-Philemon⁵ notion of marriage yet I can't but smile at her view of your corruptness. I don't like divorce and marriage is difficult but marriage is our attempt to solve a problem and I can't think of anything better. I think if people have a feeling for being married, they ought to be married and if they have made a mistake, or if one of them is not on a marriage level, there may have to be a separation. An intentional matrimonial grand right and left has no point whatever so far as I can see; in Turkey, monogamy is gaining as it is everywhere else and there is confusion of thought I think in advocating anything different in a plan where there is any kind of civil contract. If we do away with the marriage contract, the case is different but nobody seems to wish to do that since if we do, we get back to cave life. The canker in the whole situation I think, is that people who have no respect for marriage, insist on the respectability of a marriage contract. When one is at one's wits' end for a solution, I do believe that there is nothing to do but let the elements involved work out slowly.

The net result of my experiences at Bryn Mawr was to make me feel that intellectual wealth can't be superimposed, that it is to be appropriated; my experience there gave me security in my determination to have what I want. I can't very well illustrate, it would take too long, the more since you and Hilda and I are at the antipodes from each other in our notions of education. In an article on the advantage to a musician of university training, a journalist quotes a friend of mine who is a musician as saying that her college experience gave her "a sense of repose and conscious strength" and "developed good taste and the power to think problems through," "breadth of style and a more strongly defined colour sense." At Bryn Mawr the students are allowed to develop with as little interference as is compatible with any kind of academic order and the more I see of other women's colleges, the more I feel that Bryn Mawr was peculiarly adapted to my special requirements.

Master Mouse and the narcissus and the manuscript have arrived. The narcissus, looking as if it had come right from the garden, is hanging on me on an old, old chain which I have never worn for lack of a suitable pendant and I am entranced with Master Musculus Mouse "from the tooth of an elephant." The polish ivory takes is almost incredible. Last year, I lost a white mouse up my sleeve; he bit me and came out at the far side of my collar and involved in mischief by me as he was, I cannot but contrast with him Sir Musculus Mouse, ten thousand times charming. As for that giraffe, he would have made me unspeakably poor. Do you remember the eight cornered tent that Nero insisted on having made, "a wonderful object both for its beauty and costliness" and how Seneca said, "You have now shown yourself to be poor for if you should lose this, you will not be able to procure such another" and how it happened that it actually was lost, in a shipwreck? I paid no duty.

I am delighted with the prints of you and Robert; I do wish that I could get scientific results.

As I told you, Mother drove me to Miss [Alice] Boughton's in June. The proofs were not good but Miss Boughton said she will try again as soon as it is cooler; your friends will be refreshed I am sure, when I am passed around.

I have not read the new version of Adventure as it has just come, but what I should like to do is to take it back to Macmillan. I am convinced that their reason for declining it was not commercial but because they misunderstood the Antar part in the way that I misunderstood it myself; my choice of publishers is as follows: Macmillan, Doran, Knopf, Huebsch. As for commission, no compensation would induce me to take the manuscript anywhere if I did not wish to take it and if I took ten manuscripts a month about for you, I should not feel that you were under any obligation to me; do you recall the ten dollars that you sent for postage; I don't remember the postage on anything I have mailed but I know that I could mail things all winter and not exhaust in postage, those ten dollars.

I am sorry that you decided not to answer Mr. Thayer's letter; it was not businesslike to ignore it. When friendship is balanced with pride, the result is never even and those least responsible bear the deficit. You feel that Mr. Thayer is not a gentleman but a ruffian does not allow his victim any leeway and Mr. Thayer tried to consult you so, although you can take him to task for his attitude to your marriage and for wishing to discuss it, it is not possible I think, to lay on him the whole responsibility of the article.

Don't think I have given up hope of coming over; you say everyone is quitting England for Berlin and I only wish I could fill their places as air fills a newly made vacuum.

I have no poems just now as I am under promise to Broom to submit something as quickly as I can get it ready. I have no idea what Broom will be but as I told you, I am friendly to Alfred Kreymborg and if you and Hilda are willing to go outside the established magazines, I think you might not regret submitting some things. I have been held up because I wanted to revise some poems taken by The Dial last spring—three, which resisted the most pertinacious attack.

In regard to Amy Lowell, don't think that I have any less friendly feeling for her than you have but that doesn't say that I admire her work.

I have for some time been watching for an opportunity to write to Robert.

When your dress is made, won't you send me a scrap and do send me a picture of your stand-up page curls; they sound very pleasing.

Mother sends her love to you, every one and would love to see Perdita in her rose and wonders if she was plane-sick.

Your affectionate albino-dactyl

Notes

1. MM and her friends referred to physiology professor Joseph Warren as Daddy.
2. Congregational clergyman (1835-1922), who edited Outlook; author of The Life and Literature of the Ancient Hebrews.
3. David Lloyd George (1863-1945), British statesman of Welsh extraction who was considered eloquent but unscrupulous and opportunistic. Lord Northcliffe (1865-1922), Irish-born British journalist whose newspaper campaigns during World War I were determining factors in England's conduct of the war and whose support of Lloyd George in 1916 was instrumental in bringing about the downfall of the Asquith government.
4. MM refers here to some of Bryher's remarks in Adventure.
5. Baucis and Philemon, an aged couple who received a visit from Zeus and Hermes, and whose house was then transformed by the gods in return for their hospitality.