Elizabeth Bishop - Prose

The next-to-last outing I went on with Marianne was in the summer of 1968. This was long after her mother’s death, when she had moved from Brooklyn and was living at 35 West Ninth Street in Manhattan. I was staying nearby in the Village, and one day she telephoned and asked me if I would come over and walk with her to the election polls; she wanted to vote. It was the first time, I think, she had ever actually asked me for assistance. It was a very hot day. She was ready and waiting, with her hat on. It was the usual shape, of navy-blue straw, and she wore a blue-and-white-checked seersucker suit and blue sneakers. She had become a bit unsteady and was supposed to use a cane, which was leaning against the door frame. She hated it, and I don’t think I ever saw her use it. The voting booths were quite near, in the basement of a public school off Sixth Avenue; there were a good many people there, sitting around, mostly women, talking. Marianne made quite a stir; they seemed to know who she was and came up to talk to her and to ask me about her while she voted. They were Greenwich Village mothers, with intellectual or bluestocking types among them. I thought to myself that Marianne’s was probably the only Republican vote cast there that day.

It was the originality and freshness of Marianne’s diction, in the most casual conversation, as well as her polysyllabic virtuosity, that impressed many people. She once said of a well-known poet, “That man is freckled like a trout with impropriety.” A friend has told me of attending a party for writers and artists at which she introduced a painter to Marianne by saying, “Miss Moore has the most interesting vocabulary of anyone I know.” Marianne showed signs of pleasure at this, and within a minute offhandedly but accurately used in a sentence a word I no longer remember that means an addiction, in animals, to licking the luminous numbers off the dials of clocks and watches. At the same party this friend introduced the then comparatively young art critic Clement Greenberg; to her surprise and no doubt to Mr. Greenberg’s, Marianne seemed to be familiar with his writing and said, on shaking hands, “Oh, the fearless Mr. Greenberg.”

There was something about her good friend T. S. Eliot that seemed to amuse Marianne. On Eliot’s first visit to Brooklyn after his marriage to Valerie, his young wife asked them to pose together for her for a snapshot. Valerie said, “Tom, put your arm around Marianne.” I asked if he had. Marianne gave that short deprecatory laugh and said, “Yes, he did, but very gingerly. ” Toward the last, Marianne entrusted her Eliot letters for safekeeping with Robert Giroux, who told me that with each letter of the poet’s she had preserved the envelope in which it had come. One envelope bore Marianne’s Brooklyn address in Eliot’s handwriting, but no return address or other identification. Within, there was a sheet of yellow pad paper on which was drawn a large heart pierced by an arrow, with the words “from an anonymous and grateful admirer.”

Last Years

The dictionary defines a memoir as “a record of events based on the writer’s personal experience or knowledge.” Almost everything I have recorded was observed or heard firsthand, mostly before 1951–1952, the year — as Randall Jarrell put it — when “she won the Triple Crown” (National Book Award, Bollingen and Pulitzer Prizes) and became really famous. She was now Marianne Moore, the beloved “character” of Brooklyn and Manhattan; the baseball fan; the friend of many showier celebrities; the faithful admirer of Presidents Hoover and Eisenhower and Mayor Lindsay; the recipient of sixteen honorary degrees (she once modeled her favorite academic hoods for me); the reader of poetry all over the country, in settings very unlike the Brooklyn auditorium where in the thirties I heard her read with William Carlos Williams. She enjoyed every bit of the attention she received, although it too could be a “burden.” After those long years of modest living and incredibly hard work, she had — until the helplessness at the very last — thank heavens, an unusually fortunate old age.

She once remarked, after a visit to her brother and his family, that the state of being married and having children had one enormous advantage: “One never has to worry about whether one is doing the right thing or not. There isn’t time. One is always having to go to market or drive the children somewhere. There isn’t time to wonder, ‘Is this right or isn’t it?’”

Of course she did wonder, and constantly. But, as in the notes to her poems, Marianne never gave away the whole show. The volubility, the wit, the self-deprecating laugh, never really clarified those quick decisions of hers — or decisive intuitions, rather — as to good and bad, right and wrong; and her meticulous system of ethics could be baffling. One of the very few occasions on which we came close to having a falling out was when, in the forties, I told her I had been seeing a psychoanalyst. She disapproved quite violently and said that psychoanalysts taught that “Evil is not evil. But we know it is. ” I hadn’t noticed that my analyst, a doctor of almost saintly character, did this, but I didn’t attempt to refute it, and we didn’t speak of it again. We never talked about Presbyterianism, or religion in general, nor did I ever dare more than tease her a little when she occasionally said she believed there was something in astrology.

Ninety years or so ago, Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote a letter to Robert Bridges about the ideal of the “gentleman,” or the “artist” versus the “gentleman.” Today his ideas may sound impossibly Victorian, but I find this letter still applicable and very moving: “As a fact poets and men of art are, I am sorry to say, by no means necessarily or commonly gentlemen. For gentlemen do not pander to lust or other basenesses nor … give themselves airs and affectations, nor do other things to be found in modern works … If an artist or thinker feels that were he to become in those ways ever so great, he would still be essentially lower than a gentleman that was no artist and no thinker. And yet to be a gentleman is but on the brim of morals and rather a thing of manners than morals properly. Then how much more must art and philosophy and manners and breeding and everything else in the world be below the least degree of true virtue. This is that chastity of mind which seems to lie at the very heart and be the parent of all good, the seeing at once what is best, and holding to that, and not allowing anything else whatever to be even heard pleading to the contrary … I agree then, and vehemently, that a gentleman … is in the position to despise the poet, were he Dante or Shakespeare, and the painter, were he Angelo or Apelles, for anything that showed him not to be a gentleman. He is in a position to do it, but if he is a gentleman perhaps this is what he will not do.” The word “gentleman” makes us uncomfortable now, and its feminine counterparts, whether “lady” or “gentlewoman,” embarrass us even more. But I am sure that Marianne would have “vehemently agreed” with Hopkins’s strictures: to be a poet was not the be-all, end-all of existence.

I find it impossible to draw conclusions or even to summarize. When I try to, I become foolishly bemused: I have a sort of subliminal glimpse of the capital letter M multiplying. I am turning the pages of an illuminated manuscript and seeing that initial letter again and again: Marianne’s monogram; mother; manners; morals; and I catch myself murmuring, “Manners and morals; manners as morals? Or it is morals as manners?” Since like Alice, “in a dreamy sort of way,” I can’t answer either question, it doesn’t much matter which way I put it; it seems to be making sense.