Jane Rye

The mad, mum-fixated maiden aunt of modernism

Marianne Moore slept in the same bed as her mother and dined with her on the edge of the bath-tub — this may have helped her poetry, says Linda Leavell in Holding on Upside Down

Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet Marianne Moore Photo: Getty

Marianne Moore’s poems are notoriously ‘difficult’ but her personality and the circumstances of her life are as fascinating today as they were to the avant-garde writers and artists of 1920s New York. Much of the fascination lies in the contrast between what Linda Leavell calls Moore’s ‘maiden-aunt persona’ and her position as a ground-breaking modernist, whose highly idiosyncratic verse and technical experimentation dazzled and baffled her contemporaries.

She was fragile, nervous, shy and had difficulty eating; an invitation to tea might ‘knock her up’ for days, but as editor of The Dial from 1925-1929, with ‘a paradoxical combination of self-assertion and self-effacement’ she was a powerful figure at the centre of modernism, and in her life, as in her poems, she embraced modern American culture, high or low, with ‘gusto’ — a quality she regarded as essential in art.

Her wit, ‘the unpredictability of her views and her diamond hard … observations’ brought her many admirers, Ezra Pound, T.S.Eliot — the first promoters of her poetry — William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens among them. And as another poet Randall Jarrell observed ,‘in spite of a restraint unparalleled in our time, [Miss Moore] is a natural, excessive and magnificent eccentric.’

She never married, ‘apparently never fell in love’, but lived with her mother for 40 years in conditions of appalling intimacy and apparently quite unnecessary frugality (sharing not merely a bedroom but a bed). Mother and daughter are described by one observer as ‘an anachronism … characters out of a Victorian novel misplaced in the modern frenzy of New York’. For five years these punctiliously formal, genteel and high-minded ladies ate their meals sitting on the edge of the bath. (And what meals: onions and prunes; for a guest, ‘cooked apples, canned corn, salad dressing and cocoa’).

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