'A Mania for Straight Writing'

“I have a mania for straight writing—however circuitous I may be in what I myself say of plants, animals, or places . . .” 

The qualifying phrase is honest and essential. Marianne Moore’s work in verse and prose is often a densely sewn quilt of quotes. Simplicity in the sense of effortless accessibility is never her objective, but neither is Gertrude-Steinian opacity. The title of her Ewing Lecture at the University of California, delivered on this date, October 3, in 1956, defines her manner: “Idiosyncrasy and Technique.” Either without the other is arid and dull.

 

Moore rallies some of her favorites – Shaw, Eliot, de la Mare, the King James Bible – in the cause of idiosyncrasy tempered by technique. She quotes one of Twain’s best lines, from his assault on James Fenimore Cooper: “. . . one of his acute Indian experts, Chingachgook (pronounced Chicago, I think).” A sampler of Moore aperçus:

 

“What has been said pertains to technique (teknikos from the Greek, akin to tekto: to produce or bring forth—as art, especially the useful arts). And, indeed if technique is of no interest to a writer, I doubt that the writer is an artist.”

 

“What do I mean by straight writing, I have been asked. I mean, in part, writing that is not mannered, overconscious, or at war with common sense.”

 

“We are suffering from too much sarcasm, I feel. Any touch of unfeigned gusto in our smart press is accompanied by an arch word implying, ‘Now to me, of course, this is a bit asinine.’”

 

“Odd as it may seem that a few words of overwhelming urgency should be a mosaic of quotations, why paraphrase what for maximum impact should be quoted verbatim?”

 

“Convinced that denigration is baneful, one readily sanctions the attack prompted by affection.”

 

“Creative secrets, are they secrets? Impassioned interest in life, that burns its bridges behind it and will not contemplate defeat, is one, I would say. Discouragement is a form of temptation; but paranoia is not optimism.”

 

For this reader/writer, it makes perfect sense to admire and learn from writers as different as Sir Thomas Browne and Daniel Defoe, early Malamud and late Henry James, Samuel Johnson and Marianne Moore.

 

[“Idiosyncrasy and Technique” was published as a pamphlet by the University of California Press in 1958 and is included in The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore (ed. Patricia C. Willis, Viking, 1986).]