In a review of Linda Leavell’s biography of Marianne Moore, Bruce Bawer describes the poet’s exceedingly bizarre home life. After a brief stay at college, Moore returned to live with her “terribly sick and suffocatingly possessive mother—a woman who, quite calculatingly, set out to imprison [her children] in a hermetically sealed little world of their own with its own peculiar customs, moral codes, and rules of behavior, all of them determined exclusively by her”:
Consider this: [Moore’s mother] Mary established a pattern whereby Marianne, in family conversations and correspondence, was invariably referred to as a boy and identified only with male pronouns. Furthermore, Mary encouraged the siblings to regard each other as “lovers,” and to think of her as their “lover,” too. (In a letter to [Marianne’s brother] Warner, for instance, she told him: “you are Mr. Fang’s lover”—Mr. Fang being one of their names for Marianne—and in another letter she described Warner as being her “lover, father, and son all in one.”)
But maybe domestic despotism is what allowed Moore to thrive creatively:
[T]he closest thing Marianne had to an escape from life with Mary was her poems. A key fact about them, underscored by Leavell, is this:
On the one hand, she “could never have become the poet she was without the four years away from her mother at Bryn Mawr,” where she first became part of a creative community and found the freedom and confidence to forge a poetic voice of her own—in reaction, one might say, to the family language Mary had invented—and where, taking biology courses, she was drawn to the rigorous language of science. On the other hand, it was being back home under Mary’s thumb that made her feel compelled to write—compelled to escape from the world Mary had fashioned (itself an escape from the real world) into a literary landscape of her own devising.
Many of Moore’s poems, Leavell reminds us, feature “camouflaged and armored animals” that are “misunderstood, self-reliant, and invariably solitary”—a manifest reflection, of course, of Marianne’s own circumstances. But the poems, as any reader of Moore well knows, are the very opposite of cries of the heart. Mary, after all, read every word—so raw confession, or anything close to it, was not an option. Hence Marianne was forced to devise what amounted to a new type of poem, stunning at the time, not only for being syllabic in form (something which was previously all but unheard of in serious English poetry) but, perhaps even more so, for its extraordinary, even clinical, degree of precision and dispassion. … [J]ust as so much of the power of first-rate Iron Curtain poets like Joseph Brodsky and Czeslaw Milosz can be accounted for by the terrible pressure of the circumstances under which their poems were composed, so the strength of Moore’s own work owes much to the fact that she, like them, created it while living under an iron-fisted tyranny. Only in Moore’s case, the tyranny was that not of a totalitarian state but of a little old lady.
Previous Dish on Moore here.
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