THE POST MODERNIST

MARIANNE MOORE'S LETTERS ADD TO OUR APPRECIATION OF A GREAT POET'S OVERFLOWING LIFE

Author: By Donald Hall

Date: SUNDAY, October 26, 1997

Page: N1

Section: Books

And it is a small part of her correspondence. Her editors tell us, ``She would occasionally write as many as fifty letters a day.'' They estimate that ``approximately thirty thousand'' letters exist in archives and in private collections. The center of Moore's correspondence is her family, at least until 1947, covering the most intense and productive years of her life. In 1947, Moore's mother died and her brother largely stopped saving her letters. The editors do not conjecture on his change of habit, but it is worth noting that much of Moore's correspondence with her brother had reported on their mother with love, enthusiasm, and considerable amusement. The bond between these three was extraordinary. Moore never met her father, who was institutionalized before her birth, and her mother created with her children a kind of three-headed single body of intimacy, affection, and literary style. Mary Warner Moore was, like her daughter, a precisionist of language and a dynamo of ethics, judgment, and control. Amazingly, her son, John Warner Moore, detached himself sufficiently for marriage and fatherhood. Both mother and daughter -- rarely separated -- corresponded with brother, who was at first often on duty in the Navy. In these letters, the family has the sometimes annoying habit of referring to each other by nicknames like Mole and Badger. For a time, Marianne Moore signed herself Fangs.

Writing to her brother, Moore quotes her mother, attending to her language and its discriminations. When Moore said to her mother that a visitor had remained, because of her mother's urging, later than the visitor wished, her mother answered: ``Yes, but he knew that I delayed him out of contrition for not wanting him.'' We understand in these letters the intimate collaboration of mother and daughter. It was as if the mother cloned and extended herself through the device of her daughter, a most willing and affectionate reproduction who became nonetheless a strong and independent woman -- leading modernist poet, editor of The Dial, conduit between expatriate and homebody poets.

Of course, these letters are a goldfield for the literary historian, or for the lover of modern American poetics. Her correspondents range from the young Yvor Winters to the young Allen Ginsberg. She and Ezra Pound exchanged letters for 50 years, and a book could be written about the largely happy vagaries of their relationship. She was having nothing of Mussolini from the beginning. A conservative Republican, in her letters she often appears more socially sensitive than her modernist peers, for instance in her early and consistent reproof of anti-Semitism. As late as 1957, she addressed Pound, incarcerated in St. Elizabeth's, ``Ezra, you are intolerable, to defy me, about the Jews who are not mine alone but everybody's benefactor; and foolish.'' A year later she congratulated him on his release.

Twenty of her letters to Pound are printed here, out of the hundred and more that were available. As the editors tell us, her correspondence with Eliot, 1921-1964, yields 12 letters out of a hundred. Here are 11 letters to the poet H.D., and 26 to H.D.'s companion Bryher -- out of 500. Here we have 25 letters to Elizabeth Bishop, and many others to William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, W. H. Auden -- onward to Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, James Merrill, and Mona Van Duyn. Her editorship of The Dial, from 1925 to 1929, is an early centerpiece among these literary letters.

Above all, this book is a pleasure for the lover of Marianne Moore's work. She was all of a piece, and these letters almost give us a further collection of her poems, complete with considerable quotation and misquotation. There are paragraphs -- to no one's surprise -- describing animals, circuses, and performances that could be excerpted into syllabic stanzas and stand comparison with the second-best of her work of verse. ``The scorpions were reddish yellow like very old amber, jointed, with a lobster claw for catching food, and a sting on the tail like a small pin-point.''

In an undertaking of this magnitude, it is inevitable that many references remain obscure and unfootnoted. I hope one may look forward to further individual volumes containing the available correspondence between Moore and one correspondent, perhaps more thoroughly annotated. But a ``Selected Letters'' has its uses: It contains not only what she says to Pound but what she says about Pound to Harriet Munroe, to her brother, to Eliot, and to Bryher.

In the space remaining I will provide a small anthology of Moore's largely literary sentences to display what is available here. To Yvor Winters: ``For the litterateur, prose is a step beyond poetry I feel, and then there is another poetry that is a step beyond that.'' To Ezra Pound, she concludes a letter: ``The Italian stamps -- Roman wolf and Caesare -- make a hit with me that the Fascisti do not.'' Again to Pound: ``I could never take back anything I've said in praise of Williams Carlos Williams; but his prose is not quite his verse; or is it that he is not infallible as a thinker?'' To T. S. Eliot: ``An array of appreciators is so unessential if one is valued by five or even two, that I cannot see why Ezra Pound exhausts himself trying to engender intelligence in the whole world.'' To William Carlos Williams: ``If the value is valuable enough to one, one achieves it. So bless the collective wheelbarrow; with Wallace Stevens beside it like a Chinese beside a huge pair of oxen. . . .'' Late in life, when eccentricity survived creativity, she writes amusingly about being escorted to a prize fight by George Plimpton. Afterward, Plimpton took her to the required nightspot: ``We then met Toots Shor -- a tall, solid, quiet fellow -- very formal. Nobody tweaks him.''