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Leavell discusses Marianne Moore's poetry, her connection with Henry James and his family and her personal convictions regarding the politics of celibacy. Despite her always support of civil liberties, from the suffrage movement of the 1910s to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, Moore is reticent about gender politics.

Not long before she died, Marianne Moore received a letter, a form letter, requesting her signature on the following statement: "I have had an abortion. I publicly join millions of other American women in demanding a repeal of all laws that restrict our reproductive freedom."1 The request was sent to her by Gloria Steinern and Barbaralee Diamonstein, who intended to publish the statement along with the names of its signers in the inaugural issue of Ms. magazine in January 1972. Moore died the first week of February. She was 84 when the letter arrived and quite ill. She almost certainly never saw it.

This letter is a harbinger of what would be asked of women writers over the next 30 years. Although confessional poetry had been around for a decade by 1971, the letter draws on the still-fledgling politics of confession, of "coming out": it asks women to confess to an illegal act, and most likely a private embarrassment, in order to effect political change. Marianne Moore had always supported civil liberties, from the suffrage movement of the 1910s to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, and she received this letter because she supported Planned Parenthood. But for her, "suffering and not saying so" was a mark of heroism, not political apathy (Complete Poems 8). It has annoyed some readers that Moore never admitted to a sexual orientation or even to the trials of growing up female in a patriarchal culture. But we can hardly expect her generation to understand identity politics as we do. When Robert Lowell praised Moore in 1967 as the best woman poet writing in English, Langsten Hughes, who was also on the platform, countered by calling her "the most famous Negro woman poet in America" (Rampersad 419-20).The joke delighted Moore but not, perhaps, young African Americans in the audience.

Almost simultaneously with the arrival of the Ms. letter, Adrienne Rich delivered to the MLA her famous lecture "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision," in which she calls on women to proclaim their sexual identity and disparages Marianne Moore's distance from hers (168). As identity politics took hold in the 1970s and 1980s, feminist poets and critics unearthed the past in search of literary grandmothers whom they could adopt as paradigms or save from obscurity, preferably both. Moore failed them on both counts. One prominent critic told me in 1985, "Marianne Moore does not need me."2 Maxine Kumin described Moore as "an eccentric spinster / whom I can't emulate, however much / I admire her words" ("Marianne Moore" 43-44).3 Women who had come of age in the 1950s and 1960s hardly knew what to make of a celebrity poet in an androgynous tricorne hat who appeared at baseball games, at fashion shows, and in commercials for Braniff airlines. In an era of political activism, how could they admire a poet who joined the campaign to save a landmark tree in Brooklyn but voted for Nixon and supported the Vietnam War? A decade after Moore's death, students who had no memory of the cape and tricorne were entering graduate school. By 1987, the centennial of Moore's birth, the academy had begun to "re-vision" the elderly celebrity as her younger, more defiant self, a woman whose cryptic poems and brilliant conversation "held every man in awe" (Kreymborg 239).

Despite Moore's apparent reticence about gender politics, critics looking for resistance to patriarchal authority in her poems do not turn away empty-handed. Much, and much of the best, criticism in the past decade has been thus motivated; we now know a poet less quaint, less demur, and more politically engaged than previous generations might have imagined.4 But still, however much we admire her words, she remains for many an "eccentric spinster." We have come to know Moore as a gendered poet but not yet as a sexual one. The blindness lies partly in our age. We accept any sexual preference-except celibacy. Although Marianne Moore may be the least autobiographical of poets even within her own famously impersonal generation, she was by no means indifferent to questions of identity, even sexual identity. If contemporary writers have needed their predecessors sexually identified, to what extent did Moore herself have such needs?

Moore never met Henry James, the "literary bachelor" she adopted as her own model of identity (Moore, Complete Prose 317). Nor did she meet his brother, another of her heroes. But one of the strongest yearnings she ever committed to paper is a college crush on Peggy James, William's daughter and Henry's niece. Moore's successive relationships with these three Jameses demonstrate the evolution of her artistic-and more elusive personal-identity at two critical periods: 1907-08, the year of her infatuation with Peggy and her emerging writer's identity; and the winter of 1933-34, when she researched and wrote what is arguably her best essay, "Henry James as a Characteristic American." The family connection is not incidental.5

Before I get to these relationships, it will be useful to distinguish Moore's family situation from that of other women poets. Unlike Rich, Kumin, Plath, H.D., and even Dickinson and Bradstreet, Moore did not grow up seeking the approval of an intellectually accomplished but emotionally remote father. Nor did she, like Rich and Kumin, believe her mother sacrificed her own talents to marriage and children. Moore's parents separated before she was born, and she never knew her father. Her intensely devoted family threesome included an elder brother, Warner, and a literate, over-present mother. From the time Warner left home for Yale until Marianne graduated from Bryn Mawr five years later, the three sent round-robin letters to one another two or three times a week. It was not unusual for one letter, especially if written by Marianne or her mother, to run 20 pages or more. Even more remarkable than their length and frequency are the letters' fictive personae, private vocabulary, and playful wit, used to convey the family's unsentimental yet unabashed affection for one another. The epistolary activity would abate only slightly in subsequent decades after Warner married and pursued his career as a Navy chaplain.

Despite her filial devotion, Moore did not leave college expecting to spend her adult life with her mother. When she returned home to Carlisle, Pennsylvania, she enrolled immediately in a local commercial college and a year later, after learning typing and stenography, sent out applications. She accepted a clerical position at Melvil Dewey's resort in Lake Placid, New York. There she met a number of young men and was not altogether joking when she wrote home, "I have 7 suitors. What do you think ofthat? They are all dandies" (Selected Letters 82). But when her position was eliminated for financial reasons after three months, she refused an appealing job offer in New York City and returned home to live with her mother. Marianne Moore and Mary Warner Moore lived together for another 37 years, until the latter's death in 1947. During that time neither engaged in a courtship or, for example, took vacations without the other. They regarded themselves as committed life partners.

Moore came of age in a world-albeit a distinctive one-in which the conduits of intellectual authority were often women. Although she may never have had a sexually intimate relationship, she did participate in what Rich has defined broadly as a "lesbian continuum" that can include many forms of "primary intensity between and among women" (217). Until the age of 30 Moore took such intensities for granted. The Moores' small circle of friends in Carlisle consisted almost entirely of well-educated single women who lived with their mothers or with both parents. These women did not disdain marriage, but neither did they envy their married siblings. At Bryn Mawr, then under the progressive leadership of M. Carey Thomas, Moore encountered many classmates and female professors who did not expect to marry. Some of these professors, self-proclaimed bluestockings, did disdain marriage.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has pointed to the limitations of the homosexual/heterosexual binary that "emerged from the turn of the century, and has remained, as the dimension denoted by the now ubiquitous category of 'sexual orientation'" (24). Although gay-affirmative critics are sometimes willing to "queer" anyone who resists the heterosexual norm, Moore resisted not just heterosexuality but the homo-/heterosexual binary itself. Most of Moore's closest adult friends, both male and female, had same-sex partners, and the norm of her youth was homosocial, if not heterophobic. I find no evidence for regarding Moore's celibacy as an example of what Sedgwick calls "homosexual panic" (182-212). More useful is the position taken by Richard Howard. "The history of Modernism," he writes, "is precisely the history of those figures whom we initially read as if they had no erotic charge-like Henry James, like Virginia Woolf, like Santayana-and whom we ultimately, learning to read better, come to find suffused with erotic life." He finds Moore to be "not only no exception to this law . . . but a thrilling example of a writer charged with erotic energy, sometimes with specifically sexual energy" (10).

This accords exactly with Moore's own experience of reading Henry James. She began reading his fiction in college, but reading his autobiographies and letters a decade later brought her to realize that, like herself, James was "probably so susceptible to emotion as to be obliged to seem unemotional" (Complete Prose 401). Already she identified herself as a bachelor. As children Marianne and Warner admired the character of Uncle George, a worldly wise bachelor in Jacob Abbott's Rollo books. And as adolescents they adopted the role of bachelor brothers to each other and guardian uncles to their "orphan" mother. Although most of their fictive personae changed over the years, these roles never did. Thus, Marianne was always "he" within the family. Reading Shaw in 1914, she told her mother that since she was "a bachelor," "Bernard's pestiferous views" on marriage would not injure her or lead her "to do violence to any bagatelle of an 'encumbrance'" as they might if she had one.6 (Never does she imagine herself as the "encumbrance.") It was only after Moore and her mother moved to Greenwich Village in 1918-and into a social milieu recently liberated by Freud-that she had to defend her domestic arrangements against what her associates considered a "Freudian necessity," or what Rich later called "a compulsory way of life" (217).The "blameless bachelor" became her model of resistance.7

For the first few weeks of her freshman year in 1905, Moore suffered a debilitating homesickness from which she did not fully recover, she later claimed, for two years. The problem was not a lack of friends or involvement in campus activities. She earned early and sustained a high regard among both her classmates and professors.Though she took pains to conceal her homesickness from her family, she was no doubt sincere when she wrote after a couple of weeks:"! have really gotten well started here socially. I feared at first I should be absolutely without people depending on me or without depending on others but imagine I have a hold on more people than any other Freshman, from what I have observed." She only hints at the depths of her crisis: "it seemed possible for me to make headway in knowing people or to make no effort and sink absolutely into oblivion. The latter course was fascinating as the edge of a precipice is but I seem to have come out alright."8

The friendship with Peggy Jam es blossomed in the spring of Moore's sophomore year, when she wrote home that Peggy was among her "favorite freshmen," that "she has much more to her that's interesting than anyone here and a great deal of character."9 Henry James had visited the campus twice just before Moore matriculated, and her classmates debated the difficulties of his late style in both academic and social settings. Less controversial but equally famous on campus was William James, who wrote the textbook for the required psychology course. Peggy was a campus celebrity from the time she arrived, but she first captured Moore's attention when she appeared in the freshman play. Moore wrote that she "is tall and has dark hair and eyes and wears queer shades of blue silk and pongees and Boston shoes and hand made watch-chains and pins etc. She is very 'intellectual' and not a bit aware of it apparently."10 Peggy had a self-assured ease that others likewise found attractive. One classmate described her as "very good-looking and fascinating."11 Peggy returned Moore's admiration. She complimented Moore's poems and stories that had appeared in the campus literary magazine and asked Moore's advice about her own writing. The following summer they exchanged a few letters; Moore thought Peggy's letters "the nicest either a celebrity-or an inconsequential ever wrote."12

The "college crush" was something of an institution in women's colleges at the turn of the century. In most cases the object of the crush was an older girl (although a class behind, Peggy was eight months older than Moore); it might be accompanied by flowers or anonymous poems, and certainly by teasing of both parties. In Bryn Mawr parlance, a girl with multiple admirers had "birds"; one venue for teasing, according to Moore, was the "Bird News," which "deals with all college crushes and comes out daily on the bulletin board" (Selected Letters 27). Although at first Moore reported herself "lamentably immune to that kind of dis ease," by February of her freshman year, she confessed to having "what sad to say corresponds to a crush."13 This was the first of several, of progressive intensity, before she became enamored of Peggy James. Several historians have shown that socially acceptable "romantic friendships" flourished at the turn of the century, especially among college-educated women. A notable example is that of M. Carey Thomas, the president of Bryn Mawr, and her successive partners, Mamie Gwinn and Mary Garrett.14 Not famous but equally notable here is the romantic attachment between Mary Warner Moore and Mary Jackson Norcross, a 1900 Bryn Mawr graduate and subsequent employee of the college; this attachment endured throughout Marianne's adolescence and college years. Her letters home thus show little reserve in expressing the true nature of her feelings for Peggy; her mother strongly encouraged the relationship but expressed some anxiety lest her daughter's "little heart . . . be wrung."15

The year-long infatuation with Peggy reached a furious intensity in the autumn of 1907, in Moore's junior and Peggy's sophomore year. Especially in October and November, Moore's long letters return again and again to Peggy: "Peggy is the staff of life. She is so funny and so unaffected." And a few days later: "Peggy irritates me beyond words." One lengthy passage about Peggy concludes: "She is no devotee of mine yet but my hand closes upon her beautifully. She is exactly like a wild horse-Too beautiful to leave unbroken, and yet too perverse not to make you want to swear."16 Peggy did reciprocate Moore's friendship. In the summer, she had concluded her letter, "I love you very much as you know. And am your affectionate friend, Peggy James."17 But by October, Moore was no longer satisfied with mere affection. She was disappointed on one occasion by Peggy's putting an arm around her shoulders in a "brotherly" fashion and reported a few days later: "She largely overestimates my literary ability-and I must get her out of it. She sees much more in me intellectually than physically anyhow (which is of course the best thing that could be). I mean she plain, likes me-She doesn't feel any terrific excitement over me."18 Even when she felt resigned to the lack of reciprocal feelings in the present, she maintained hope for a future with Peggy. Although part of the attraction was surely physicalMoore repeatedly mentioned how "handsome" Peggy was-it is unlikely that she thought of it as sexual, much less an indication of sexual orientation. In 1921 she wrote "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" (Selected Letters 177).

In the spring of her sophomore year, when Moore first began taking an interest in Peggy, two events happened that would shape her campus identity: she was elected to serve on the staff of the student literary magazine Tipyn o'Bob and was advised not to pursue an English major because of the unevenness of her academic writing. Nevertheless, she felt an inexplicable compulsion: "I don't know why I am so possessed to write. I know it's not because of what nice things people say and it's not for the doing itself, for I cannot express myself" (Selected Letters 25). Simultaneously with her infatuation with Peggy over the following year, Moore began to try out the role of writer. Her obsession with Peggy seems virtually a distillation of her obsession with writing, and her letters often veer between the two passions. Part of the attraction was who Peggy was and Moore's desire in some sense to be Peggy. Moore regarded Peggy as "a child brought up on the hearth-rug of a king," the product of a "most favorable environment" (Selected Letters 39). Many in their circle of friends aspired to be writers, and Peggy was no exception. But because Peggy had, in Moore's view, the ideal environment for becoming a writer, Moore seems uncharacteristically blind to Peggy's true abilities. At one point, for instance, Moore defended Peggy's writing to the editor of Tipyn o'Bob claiming that she and Peggy had the same faults. The editor laughed and remarked presciently, "You are quite different.... If you keep on the way you are going by the time you are fifty you may be able to do something. I think Peggy doesn't know about the essentials."19

At this time Moore was writing more stories than poems, and by all accounts her greatest success was "Pym" (Complete Prose 12-16), a story she composed during October and November 1907, the months of her most intense obsession with Peggy James. Peggy appears in the story, according to Moore, as a "portrait in green of a lady with dark slippery hair."20 This portrait, the prized possession of the young male protagonist Alexander, is his stimulus for writing. Moore described the story, at first titled "The Nature of a Literary Man," as "a series of individual impressions in 'my latest style.' . . . It is what James calls the record of 'a generation of nervous moods.'"21 Told as a series of journal entries by Alexander, it illuminates Moore's own turmoil at the time. Alexander struggles between social attachments of various kinds and his own determination to write. He must resist the demands of his guardian uncle Stanford, who wants Alexander to pursue the law; his servant Charles, who interrupts Alexander's writing to remind him it is late and to offer something to eat; his employer Cob, who wants to prescribe how Alexander writes; and even his dog Daniel, a gift from an overly kind friend. One can see elements of Moore's mother in both the servant and the uncle, and of her Bryn Mawr professors in the employer, perhaps even of her brother in the dog (one of his family personae). Like other stories she wrote at this time, "Pym" examines the costs of pursuing individualism: "One must be pertinaciously ingenious as well as genuinely a little blind, to follow long a course which insists upon maintaining its original, experimental character" (15). Resolving at last to apologize and return to his estranged uncle, Alexander reflects fondly on his material surroundings and then chooses two things to take with him, the portrait and a dark blue rug. (The rug is another private tribute; Mary Norcross, an Arts and Crafts enthusiast and mentor to Marianne, had woven a rug for her college room.)

A remark to a classmate a few months later reinforces the identification of Peggy with the portrait:"! hate to make Peggy an objet d'art and it is her fault that I do" (Selected Letters 38). In "Pym" Alexander muses on the differences between the "silly fools that affect a claim upon me" (15) and the "calm, fond aspect" (16) of his material surroundings, which he prefers. Since the portrait of the lady is grouped with the latter, it would seem to represent an ideal, a relationship that inspires Alexander's writing without making demands. But his recognition of the impossibility of such an ideal convinces him to return to his uncle, to "put off the semblance of dignity" and "go in for some actual experience" (15). Even in the deepest throes of Moore's passion for Peggy, it is closely tied in her mind with her emerging identity as an artist.

Moore's interest in Peggy persisted into the spring semester of her junior year-but not without further agonies. Now the agonies focused less on Peggy's behaviors than on Moore's yearning for her own true self. In an especially dark (and for the mature Moore uncharacteristic) moment, she wrote: "I feel as if it is hopeless for me to be as I want, I beat the air like a wild beast at night, and can but hope, at best... that a little truth and sincerity will bum its way through like the moon through the trees."22 A few weeks later, her path becomes clear: "Writing is all I care for, or for what I care most" (Selected Letters 45). She seems to have liberated her desire to write from her desire for Peggy: "Peggy is a fair wave in my wake.... I don't want to 'waste myself on her."23 This time she meant it. By late April of her junior year, she was at last "over" Peggy, though they continued to be friendly with each other.

The friendship did not survive college. In 1917 Peggy married Bruce Porter, an acquaintance of Henry James and prominent member of the San Francisco arts community. He was a stained-glass designer, amateur architect, and occasional versifier (author of "I never saw a purple cow"). Their two children, extended family, and community were the chief concerns of Peggy's adult life (Lewis 623-25).24 For Moore, on the other hand, it was the last time she would admit (so far as is known) to an amorous passion.

Not only had Moore been reading, and apparently emulating, Henry James during the months of her Peggy obsession, but she had also begun to read William James. In November 1907 she was invited to give a talk at a Friends meeting (Bryn Mawr had Quaker origins). She wrote home:

want to stir things up both morally and intellectually . . . I think of calling the paper, the abuse of individualism-and say that we should feel and mean everything we say and appear to stand for. My individualism meaning our normal point of view the thing we are born with our Originality' and by the abuse of it the don't-care do-care superior attitude we get with a little learning.25

Her mother recognized the influence of Emerson, whom Moore had read the previous year, and a friend gave her a copy of William James's recent article "The Powers of Men."26 Moore found enough here of interest to prompt her to read more. The following April, she read the student section of James's Talks to Teachers and Students, which she found "diverting and instructive" and recommended to her brother. Six days later she heard Theodore de Laguna lecture on the psychology of pragmatism and began the next day to read The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. Though she acknowledged a discrepancy between James's ideas of individual will and the Calvinist beliefs to which she and her family subscribed, the work stimulated hard thinking and convinced her "that the thing to do, is to go at the business and see that life is worth living." A week later she finished the book. Perhaps it is not mere coincidence that during this week Moore resolved at last not to "waste" herself on Peggy.27

The following autumn, the first semester of her senior year, Moore took Professor de Laguna's required two-hour psychology course, for which James's Psychology was the text. As late as 1963 she named this volume as one of the 10 books that did most to shape her vocational attitude and her philosophy of life (Complete Prose 671).28 She seems to have found in William James's philosophy part of what she had yearned for in Peggy, a confirmation of her own individualism and the encouragement to pursue her own aspirations. For following Darwin, James argueas that it is the aberrant individual rather than the average one who becomes heroic, who changes the course of history (Will to Believe 618-52). By her senior year, Moore's letters revel in a new self-confidence. While she still enjoyed a wide circle of friends and now had "birds" of her own, she no longer worried about her social position. She seems intent, instead, on acquiring the experiences and knowledge that will be useful to her art. As in her mature work, she has learned to prefer the sincere to the pretentious, the idiosyncratic to the mundane. She told one gossiping classmate that "it's a very inartistic way of looking at life to have scandal suggested to one by unconventions," that "by artistic I mean a view to the relations of things, with a respect for the main issues of life and a sort of contempt for hard and fast definitions."29

Though Moore never met Peggy's father, she found in his writings certain principles that would manifest themselves in her mature poetry. The following paragraph from The Will to Believe, for example, anticipates Moore's own "passion for distinguishing," what she called years later a "passion for the particular" (Complete Poems 231).30

But alongside of this passion for simplification there exists a sister passion, which in some minds-though they perhaps form the minority-is its rival. This is the passion for distinguishing; it is the impulse to be acquainted with the parts rather than to comprehend the whole. Loyalty to clearness and integrity of perception, dislike of blurred outlines, of vague identifications, are its characteristics. It loves to recognize particulars in their full completeness, and the more of these it can carry the happier it is. It prefers any amount of incoherence, abruptness and fragmentariness (so long as the literal details of the separate facts are saved) to an abstract way of conceiving things that, while it simplifies them, dissolves away at the same time their concrete fullness. Clearness and simplicity thus set up rival claims, and are a real dilemma for the thinker. (506)

Literary critics sometimes identify these rival passions as the impulse toward unifying metaphor on the one hand and distinguishing metonymy on the other, and James's paragraph might well serve to describe Moore's preference for the latter.31 The ethical implications of James's pluralist philosophy would also have appealed to Moore. His "democratic respect for the sacredness of individuality . . . the outward tolerance of whatever is not itself intolerant" accords with Moore's own mature convictions (Talks 708).

While Moore got over her crush on Peggy, she never got over her infatuation with the James family. Henry, however, would eventually surpass his brother and niece in Moore's esteem. In October 1907, in the heat of her crush, Morton Fullerton, a brother of one of the English instructors, addressed the English Club about Henry James. (Not until after Moore's death would the handsome Fullerton become known as an object of infatuation for Henry James and as Edith Wharton's lover; he was between the two relationships when he spoke at Bryn Mawr [Kaplan 510-12].) Though ineligible to attend because she was not an English major, Moore managed to get an invitation for both herself and Peggy. She wrote home:

I was wildly excited about it beforehand, as the pedants talk of nothing but Henry and as I have read since my arrival here this fall 30 pages of The Sacred Fount (with edification). In chapel this morning the Dean [M. Carey Thomas] said her say on Henry. She said Henry James was not like those (Browning & Meredith) who couldn't write clear English for his earlier books were "absolutely crystal clear." But that in his later style his ideas were the obstacle, that the complicated nature and the vast amount of what he had to communicate made lucidity impossible.32

Moore thought Fullerton himself "pretentious and 'kryptic'" but enjoyed the attention bestowed on Peggy afterward. Moore's friends and professors engaged in heated discussions on the respective merits of Henry James and George Meredith. Thinking James "a bit limited," Moore sided with those who preferred the latter (Selected Letters 41). She agreed with a guest lecturer, Dr. Ethel D. Puffer of Wellesley College, that "what ailed Henry James was his aestheticism unconsciously carried to excess. His 'later' people were all standing off 'experiencing' and observing."33

She nevertheless read James with interest, finishing both The Portrait of a Lady and "The Turn of the Screw" while at Bryn Mawr. And in the months and years following her graduation, when she returned to Carlisle, James was prominent among the authors Moore studied independently. Her interest was certainly aesthetic, but there may have already been a personal identification with him. That she and James were both criticized by the same "pedants" for their lack of lucidity could not have been lost on her. Within the first year after graduation, her mother wrote to Warner:

as one bad fellow says of another with a head-shake, "He's been drinking heavily," so may I mention that he [Marianne] has been pouring in heavily potations of Henry James. . . .The little wretch stood under the light with his book, one night, motionless; yet with a Sarah Bernhardt look at me, he said: "I tremble from head to foot when I read a book like this."34

Over the next decade James's personal importance for Moore continued to grow. In a 1919 letter to Ezra Pound, she named James as one of her five "direct influences" (Selected Letters 123). Throughout her career no writer would appear more consistently among those to whom she professed indebtedness.

By 1920 Moore had read all three of James's autobiographies and most likely read them soon after they appeared in 1913, 1914, and 1917.35 As soon as the two-volume editions of Henry's letters and William's letters came out, both in 1920, she read them and encouraged her mother to do so. While it cannot always be assumed that the two women shared the same enthusiasms, they often did. In October 1920, Mary Warner Moore wrote that she had been "just glutting on The Letters of Henry James."36 When she read William's letters the following summer, she admired "The honesty and simple mindedness of the Jameses for generations back" and was ashamed that she had "thought them uppity, merely because they were scholarly. I had not time to read and find out. Now I know only me for the snob-I thought Henry James; indeed the family."37 All indications are that Marianne shared these sympathies and likely influenced her mother toward them.

References to Henry James or quotations from him occur in four of the twelve poems Moore published in the Dial from 1920 to 1925: "Picking and Choosing," "NewYork," "An Octopus," and "Sea Unicorns and Land Unicorns." In "Picking and Choosing" she says that feeling (rather than ideas) makes James profound.38 In "New York" his phrase "accessibility to experience" concludes the poem, providing a moral alternative to the examples of plunder described above it (Complete Poems 54).39 In "Sea Unicorns and Land Unicorns" a catalog is borrowed from James's English Hours to illustrate points of unanimity between "personalities by nature much opposed" (77). James figures most prominently in the long poem "An Octopus," where he is linked with Mount Rainier:

damned for its remoteness-

like Henry James "damned by the public for decorum";

not decorum, but restraint;

it was the love of doing hard things

that rebuffed and wore them out-a public out of sympathy with neatness. (75-76)

One of the things that had impressed Moore and her mother about James's letters is his difficult relationship with his public. "Poor Henry James!" wrote Mary Warner Moore, "So grieved that the world did not want his books!"40 In these poems are certain ideas about James to which Moore would return in subsequent years, particularly the idea that James is "so susceptible to emotion as to be obliged to seem unemotional" (Complete Prose 401) and her identification of James with his native land-for instance, his advice in a letter "that young people should 'stick fast and sink up to their necks in everything their own countries and climates can give'" (Complete Prose 144).

From 1918 until 1929, Moore and her mother lived at 14 St. Luke's Place in Greenwich Village. Her winning the Dial award for 1924 and assuming its editorship in July 1925 boosted her to prominence not just in New York but within the international modernist community. When the Dial was discontinued four years later, Moore was without a job. Believing that a move would benefit his mother, who was recovering from a severe illness, Warner moved his mother and sister to Brooklyn in August 1929. The successive illnesses of all three members of her family in the early years of the Depression prompted a reevaluation of her professional and personal responsibilities. In the next two decades, though she developed new friendships, maintained old ones, and continued to make occasional appearances at literary gatherings in Manhattan, her family-and her mother's health in particular-became her first priority.

Though Moore deeply regretted the demise of the Dial, the sudden withdrawal from editorial deadlines and aspiring literati provided over the next few years the greatest leisure for writing that she would ever know. She could spend weeks and months writing a single poem or review. For her 1931 review of Ezra Pound's A Draft of XXX Cantos, for instance, she determined to learn everything that Pound himself knew before reading the book and writing the review. In October 1933 Lincoln Kirstein invited her to write an essay for a special Henry James issue of Hound & Horn; she proposed the topic of James as a characteristic American.41 The following December and January Moore and her mother spent four weeks near Carlisle at the mountain home of their old friend Mary Norcross. When Moore was not attending to Norcross's personal needs (she was in a cast following an automobile accident) or the various farm animals, she read the James books she had brought with her, filling 57 legal-size pages with quotations.42 After returning to Brooklyn, she took several weeks to finish the essay. "Be thankful," she wrote Warner, "you weren't here to usher in the James article!" (Selected Letters 320).

It is hardly surprising that as a modernist Moore would admire the work of Henry James. But it is surprising that the works she chiefly admires are his early stories and novels, his letters, essays, and memoirs.There is no indication that she ever changed her mind about the style of his late fiction, but she came to admire an "almost indescribable naturalness" in his letters and memoirs (Complete Prose 320). Of the dozen or so sources for quotations in "Henry James as a Characteristic American" (Complete Prose 316-22) all either predate The Portrait of a Lady (1881) or postdate The Golden Bowl (1904). She cites The American (1877), Hawthorne (1879), three stories from the early 1870s ("Madonna of the Future," "Madame de Mauves," and "The Passionate Pilgrim"), The American Scene (1907), and the three autobiographies: A Small Boy and Others (1913), Notes of a Son and Brother (1914), and The MiddleYears (1917).43 Her choice of early works is influenced by Ford Madox Hueffer, who calls "The Passionate Pilgrim"James's "first masterpiece" (111) and asserts that in "Madame de Mauves," "A Passionate Pilgrim," and "The Madonna of the Future," which he thinks "were written immediately after Roderick Hudson and immediately before The American . . . our master was beginning to find himself" (128). Moore attempts in her essay to reassess not the novelist but "himself," not the artist but the American.

That is indeed the purpose of the special issue of Hound & Horn, which begins with Moore's essay. Lincoln Kirstein enlisted R. P. Blackmur, Edmund Wilson, Stephen Spender, Glenway Wescott, and others to redress James's reputation, which had suffered ever since his infamous return to his native land 30 years before. The American Scene, the critique of American society that resulted from James's 1904 tour, did not improve his American reputation. Nor did his subsequent change of citizenship. In a thorough analysis of the cultural response to James during the 1920s and 1930s, Ross Posnock speculates that "not only was his exile read as contemptuous rejection but his strange social presence was interpreted as contempt for and freedom from conventional masculine roles" (59). Glenway Wescott put the problem baldly: "expatriation and castration" (179).44

Moore addresses all of these issues. A dense tapestry of quotations, her essay is nevertheless remarkably personal and has a subtle progression. To prove her "Henry James theory," as she called it to a friend,45 she begins with the individualism that first drew her to Emerson and William James-the advice given to Christopher Newman-"Don't try to be anyone else." She draws on the early fiction to show that true individualism is a kind of art in itself: "You seem to me so all of a piece that I am afraid that if I advise you, I shall spoil you." And she enlists Hawthorne as James's own characteristic American: "as if Hawthorne had become [an artist] simply by being American enough" (316). The essay proceeds by enumerating virtues that she attributes to both America and James (but in fact are most characteristically her own): a "respectful humility toward emotion," "idealism" (317), "a good conscience" (320), "freedom," a "rapture of observation," and above all an "affection for family and country" (321). Although she describes James's patriotism as "doting," she acknowledges that in The American Scene and elsewhere it might seem otherwise. "In alluding to Our barbarous hearts,'" she writes, "he had, of course, no thought of being taken at his word," and she likewise excuses as anachronistic his "retaining the Northerner's feeling about the Confederate" (318). She turns then to the memoirs to show "treasured American types" (319) and builds to a climactic long final paragraph about the James family. If The American Scene expresses disillusionment with America, she argues implicitly, the memoirs reassert James's patriotism, paying full tribute to American democracy in the image of the James family itself: "Family was the setting for his country" (321).

"It is over-difficult," writes Moore, "for Henry James, in portrayals of us, not to be portraying himself" (316). Given the poet's own famous reserve, I accept this as an invitation to read the essay as Moore's own indirect self-portrait, an assertion of her own politics of identity. During her years in the Village, when open discussions about sexuality became fashionable, Moore learned to counter the argument that marriage is a "Freudian necessity" with her own catalog of "blameless bachelors ":Traherne, Beethoven, Sir Isaac Newton, Washington Irving, Charles Lamb, Henry James.46 It is an idea and a list to which she returns in the next decade. In a 1932 essay she asserts the primacy of familial over erotic love-"Love is more important than being in love, as memories of childhood testify"-and presents to the reader "instances of impersonalism," persons who chose not to be in love: "Sir Isaac Newton, Washington Irving, Henry James, and Lord Balfour" (Complete Prose 284). (It is no accident, surely, that she omits women from the list, since an "eccentric spinster" is presumed to have no choice.) In "Henry James as a Characteristic American," she enlists yet another name when she compares James to John Greenleaf Whittier as a "literary bachelor whom the most ardent sadist has not been able to soil" (317). In "The Frigate Pelican," written just weeks after the James essay, she names "impassioned Handel" as one never "known to have fallen in love," who "unconfiding . . . hides / in the height and in the majestic / display of his art" (Complete Poems 25-26). Note the impassioned Handel. She refuses to equate celibacy with sexlessness. Henry James provides her best demonstration that bachelorhood need not preclude passion: "Things for Henry James glow, flush, glimmer, vibrate, shine, hum, bristle, reverberate." Someone never known to be in love can nevertheless know "Joy, bliss, ecstasies, intoxication, a sense of trembling in every limb, a shattering first glimpse" (Complete Prose 317).

Moore surely found the persona of James's memoirs, the "little gaping American" (James, Autobiography 172), enormously appealing, and identified with his "rapture of observation." But what she identifies with even more profoundly is his "affection for family and country." Like James, Moore is descended from Irish Protestants, and like him, she had an "ideal Elder brother" (James, Autobiography vii).The quotations from his letters that she copied into her notebook show Henry to be a devoted son and a remarkably generous brother. She records in full his famous response to William's criticisms of The Golden Bowl and his magnanimous conclusion, "And yet I can always read you with rapture."47 The final paragraph of "Henry James as a Characteristic American" quotes affectionate passages from A Small Boy and Others about James's father and mother and several sentences that describe the family of his childhood as an unqualified Utopia: "We were surely all gentle and generous together, floating in such a clean light social order, sweetly proof against ennui" and "The social scheme, as we knew it, was, in its careless charity, worthy of the golden age . . . the fruits dropped right upon the board to which we flocked together, the least of us and the greatest" (321). It hardly matters whether the image of the James family presented by the autobiographies (and Moore's essay) is accurate or not. It would have appealed to Moore and her mother in the same way that The Wind in the Willows did, a book they so loved that they adopted its woodland personae as their own. But the James family was a specifically American ideal: not only did it provide an environment in which art could thrive, but this family adhered to, even invented, a religion of American individualism.

Moore returns at the end of her final paragraph to a theme she addressed a decade earlier in her long poem "Marriage" (Complete Poems 62-70). Her mother explained one of theinspirations for that poem:"One day when skating in Central Park, and coming to a statue of . . . Daniel Webster, [Marianne] noted the words inscribed, . . . 'Liberty and Union, now and forever,'and thought his notion was as appropriate to the family as to the state."48 "Liberty and union" is the paradox of American democracy, and of family love, that Moore returns to again and again. It is significant that in "Marriage" she deletes the third phrase of Webster's famous quotation-"Liberty and union, now and forever, one and inseparable"-because it would upset the balance in favor of "union." Although she devotes most of the poem to the almost inevitable failure of heterosexual marriage, she does allow finally for the "rare" possibility of a relationship of such "simplicity" and "disinterestedness" that "the world hates" it, a relationship the "essence" of which is "Liberty and union / now and forever" (69-70).

Among the many fine and diverse readings of this poem, nowhere, I think, has it been called a love poem.49Yet, given Moore's domestic situation and her remarks elsewhere about love, the poem might well be celebrating her rare and unconventional "marriage" with her mother. Mary Warner Moore likely read it this way, since during these years she often referred to Marianne and herself as "a young couple."50 Other poems present maternal love as liberating, not possessive. In "The Hero," "the feelings of a mother" are heroically lenient and as disinterested as a cat (Complete Poems 9); in "The Paper Nautilus," the mother devil-fish and her "intensively watched eggs" ultimately free one another (121). It is also possible, and herein lies the paradox, to read "Marriage" as a cry for liberty and autonomy from her mother's love. Certainly many of Moore's literary associates thought she needed such liberation. And her oeuvre includes too many images of imprisonment to suggest that she did not know the feeling herself; for instance, "the sea in a chasm, [that] struggling to be / free and unable to be, / in its surrendering / finds its continuing" (95).

The final paragraph of the James essay states:"Love is the thing more written about than anything else, and in the mistaken sense of greed. Henry James seems to have been haunted by awareness that rapacity destroys what it is successful in acquiring." James exemplifies for Moore a love that will not obliterate the other person: "He feels a need 'to see the other side as well as his own, to feel what his adversary feels'" (321). It is this love that commends him as Moore's "characteristic," but by no means typical, American. In two sentences she later deleted, she points out, as she had in "Marriage," the rarity of such love: "What we scarcely dare ask is, how many Americans are there who can be included with him in his Americanism. Family affection is the fire that burned within him and America was the hearth on which it burned" ("Henry James" 16). The James family is her model for democracy, and James himself her model American. Pulling together in her final sentence a collage of phrases from Notes of a Son and Brother, Moore defines James the American as '"intrinsically and actively ample, . . . reaching westward, southward, anywhere, everywhere,' with a mind 'incapable of the shut door in any direction'" (Complete Prose 321-22). She anticipates here what Ross Posnock has called James's "politics of nonidentity" (16 and passim).^ Rather than asserting himself egoistically upon experience, James surrenders to it, is accessible to it.

No other essay that Moore wrote garnered more praise from her friends and family than did "Henry James as a Characteristic American." Her friend Bryher wrote, "I have-I think-never enjoyed any prose you have written so much as your article on Henry James: I feel having read it, that at last I know something of the man. . . . I am recommending all I know to read the article."52 And even her mother, who would have read it multiple times in draft, told Warner when it appeared:

I read it, fearing it would by this time seem just old stuff-but it is, every sentence, a new heart-touch, and the article gains in what moves the soul, as it reaches the close. There is a climax so gentle in ascent, that when you come to the last, you look back in a kind of surprise, not realizing you have been climbing.. . . Just know you will love Henry James, if you never did before.53

In response to one acquaintance who wrote her about it, Moore wrote, "It does me good to know that you liked my James. I feel, after reading Notes of a Son and Brother, and the little book on Hawthorne, and some of the Letters that a more naturally exalted and yet in a way simple person I should never hope of finding."54 When she was asked about her "outlook on life" in 1935, Moore referred the inquirer to this essay.55 It was one of four essays she selected for inclusion in both Predilections (1955) and A Marianne Moore Reader (1961).

That Moore adopted for her own model of identity a "literary bachelor" should not be construed as a betrayal, or denial, of her own sex. Unlike Stein and Gather (both 14 years older than Moore), she never equated artistic power with masculinity, and she assiduously promoted the work of various women: H.D., Bryher, and Elizabeth Bishop, to name the best known. What Moore envied the bachelor, and Henry James specifically, is freedom: freedom not only from those stereotypes that grant a bachelor uncle more independence than a spinster sister or daughter, but also from those romantic delusions about the lonely artist with which Alexander struggles in "Pym." For Henry James-as imagined by Moore-enjoyed both the emotional bonds of family that traditionally keep women at home and the freedom, traditionally reserved for men, to become a "passionate pilgrim."

"What of chastity?" Moore wrote in 1958. "It confers a particular strength. Until recently, I took it for granted-like avoiding 'any drugs'" (Complete Prose 503). Although Moore teases the reader here with "until recently," "chastity" is not incidental to Moore's aesthetic. What William James calls "the passion for distinguishing" is almost by definition celibate. James himself does not make the leap from a philosophical dislike of "blurred outlines" and "vague identifications" to the vague identifications that erotic love produces, but Moore does. Repeatedly her poetry resists categories, resists stereotypes, resists expectations, resists, in short, unions. To lean against the prevailing wind of erotic desire and of most lyric poetry demands "gusto" (Complete Prose 420-26) on Moore's part, if not "criminal ingenuity" (Complete Poems 62). And yet what she chooses ultimately is not the myth of the solitary artist or lone American pilgrim. Self-sufficiency can be as egotistical as "love in the mistaken sense of greed." Rather, her model of national and personal identity lies in the difficult paradox of "liberty and union," each impossible without the other.