“Humility
is an indispensable ally, enabling concentration to heighten gusto. There are
always objectors, but we must not be sensitive about not being liked or not
being printed. David Low, the cartoonist, when carped at, said, 'Ah, well—’ But
he has never compromised; he goes right on doing what idiosyncrasy tells him to
do. The thing is to see the vision and not deny it; to care and admit that we
do.”
In
memory, I can always recall the third of Moore’s cardinal virtues while unhumbly
forgetting the first two. Moore originally delivered the piece as a lecture to
the Grolier Club, a New York bibliophile society, on Dec. 21, 1948. The title
was recycled for a profile of Moore by Winthrop Sargeant published in the Feb.
16, 1957, issue of The New Yorker. The
essay has been collected in Predilections
(1955), A Marianne Moore Reader
(1961) and The Complete Prose of Marianne
Moore (1986).
Like
her poems, Moore’s essay is a patchwork quilt of quotations and wry
Americanisms. She employs the time-honored guise of quaintly eccentric old lady
to safely say wise and important things. She describes humility, concentration
and gusto as our “foremost aids to persuasion” and moves with subterranean
logic from Caesar’s Commentaries, to
Caxton, to Defoe, to Cummings, to James Laughlin in little more than two
paragraphs. The effect is not one of showing off or dazzling with pseudo-learning
but something like intellectual x-ray vision, seeing connections others have
missed. She's a masterful quoter. Moore juxtaposes previously unrelated anodes, and sparks fly – a Poundian
strategy without the craziness. She’s articulating an artistic credo without announcing
it:
“Concentration—indispensable
to persuasion—may feel to itself crystal clear, yet be through its very
compression the opposite, and William Empson’s attitude to ambiguity does not
extenuate defeat. Graham Greene once said, in reviewing a play of Gorki’s,
`Confusion is really the plot. A meat-merchant and a miller are introduced,
whom one never
succeeds in identifying even in the end.’ I myself, however, would rather be
told too little than too much. The question then arises, How obscure may one be?
And I suppose one should not be consciously obscure at all.”
Reading
of her preference for too little over too much, I think of my single attempt at
trying to read a page of Stephen King’s prose. The experience recalled the final scene in Citizen Kane in which Welles shows us the vast heaps
of gratuitous junk Kane has accumulated – no discrimination, no instinct for
readerly comprehension, no taste. In contrast, Moore, like a magpie of genius, makes
it all work – Auden, George Herbert, a letter from the Federal Reserve Board of
New York, Edward Lear, T.S. Eliot, Maurice Bowra, William Cowper (“The Snail”),
Christopher Smart, the Psalmist, the Apostle James, Spenser, Wallace Stevens,
Beaumarchais, Walter de la Mare, Pound, Padraic Colum, and so on. It’s a
celebration of bounty, not an endorsement of clutter. In her second-to-last
paragraph, Moore writes:
“All
of which is to say that gusto thrives on freedom, and freedom in art, as in
life, is the result of a discipline imposed by ourselves. Moreover, any writer
overwhelmingly honest about pleasing himself is almost sure to please others.”
1 comment:
Garcia Lorca: Verde que te quiero verde. Verde viento. Verdes ramas. El barco sobre la mar y el caballo en la montaña.
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