`A Flash of Splendour'

Montana-born Edward McKnight Kauffer was a childhood friend of T.S. Eliot who later befriended Marianne Moore and Eudora Welty. He was an artist and designer who, in the decades after World War I, created strikingly modern advertising posters. Go here to see photos of Kauffer, including one with Eliot, and more of his work. Like Eliot, Kauffer lived for much of his life in England. He was afflicted with a sense of injustice, feeling unrecognized, unappreciated and misunderstood in his own country. He died in 1954, age 64, of alcoholism. About two years earlier, Moore, who understood being misunderstood, had written in a letter to Kauffer:

“If one lies in wait; if one is ready for the problem, that is sufficient.”

How often does a friend’s encouragement arrive with a semi-colon? Moore taught herself to lie in wait like one of her animals – jelly-fish, jerboa, wood-weasel, pangolin. Of the last she wrote: “Not afraid of anything is he,/and then goes cowering forth, tread paced to meet an obstacle/at every step.” In the same poem, it’s worth noting, she says “humor saves a few steps, it saves years.” In her letter to Kauffer, Moore writes:

“To speak is to blunder but I venture, for I know the bewilderment one experiences in being misapprehended. We must face it, as you said. When we do well – that is to say, you – in designs of yours which are standard – the Ethyl horse-power, the Gilbey’s port, the Devon downs, the girl in the helmet with the star and effect of velvet darkness, the tall hat on the Victorian table, the door with the keyhole made dramatic, -- there is a flash of splendour apart from the pretext; and when a thing snares the imagination, it is because of a secret excitement which contributes something private – an incontrovertible to admire afresh at each sight, like the bloom and tones of a grape or the glitter of Orion as one emerges into the dark from the ordinariness of lamplight.”

I wish we could know Kauffer’s reaction to receiving this letter. Did it relieve, even for a moment, his despair? One is touched by its solicitude, Jamesian eloquence and unexpected self-revelations: Many of her poems give “a flash of splendour apart from the pretext.” Moore seems to have been born gifted with a sense of clarity and self-acceptance. Such at-homeness is rare, and in her case it was sometimes mistaken for aloofness or mere eccentricity. It gave her the strength to accept with grace the libel of mandarin obscurity. Like one of her great enthusiasms, Henry James, Moore looked with horror upon simple-minded directness. It was vulgar, naïve and misleading, and made for bad poetry. In "Armor’s Undermining Modesty” she writes (please pardon Blogger’s botching of indentations):

“If tributes cannot
be implicit

“give me diatribes and the fragrance of iodine,
the cork oak acorn grown in Spain;
the pale-ale-eyed impersonal look
which the sales-placard gives the bock beer buck.
What is more precise than precision? Illusion.”