The small living room and dining room were crowded with furniture that had obviously come from an older, larger home, and there were many pictures on the walls, a mixture of the old and the new, family possessions and presents from friends (these generally depicted birds or animals). One painting of trees and a stream had suffered an accident to its rather blurry tree passage, and Marianne herself had restored this — I felt, unkindly, not too successfully — with what she said was “Prussian blue.” She was modestly vain of her manual skills. A set of carpenter’s tools hung by the kitchen door, and Marianne had put up some of the bookshelves herself. In one doorway a trapeze on chains was looped up to the lintel. I never saw this in use, but it was Marianne’s, and she said that when she exercised on it and her brother was there, he always said, “The ape is rattling her chains again.” A chest stood in the bay window of the living room with a bronze head of Marianne on it by Lachaise. The chest was also always piled high with new books. When I first knew Marianne she did quite a bit of reviewing and later sold the review copies on West Fourth Street.
I was always seated in the same armchair, and an ashtray was placed on a little table beside me, but I tried to smoke no more than one or two cigarettes a visit, or none at all. I felt that Mrs. Moore disapproved. Once, as I was leaving and waiting for the slow elevator, I noticed a deep burn in the railing of the staircase and commented on it. Mrs. Moore gave a melancholy sigh and said, “Ezra did that. He came to call on Marianne and left his cigar burning out here because he knew I don’t like cigars…” Many years later, in St. Elizabeths Hospital, I repeated this to Ezra Pound. He laughed loudly and said, “I haven’t smoked a cigar since I was eighteen!” Beside the ashtray and even a new package of Lucky Strikes, I was sometimes given a glass of Dubonnet. I had a suspicion that I was possibly the only guest who drank this Dubonnet, because it looked very much like the same bottle, at the level it had been on my last visit, for many months. But usually we had tea and occasionally I was invited for dinner. Mrs. Moore was a very good cook.
Mrs. Moore was in her seventies when I first knew her, very serious — solemn, rather — although capable of irony, and very devout. Her face was pale and somewhat heavy, her eyes large and a pale gray, and her dark hair had almost no white in it. Her manner toward Marianne was that of a kindly, self-controlled parent who felt that she had to take a firm line, that her daughter might be given to flightiness or — an equal sin, in her eyes — mistakes in grammar. She had taught English at a girls’ school and her sentences were Johnsonian in weight and balance. She spoke more slowly than I have ever heard anyone speak in my life. One example of her conversational style has stayed with me for over forty years. Marianne was in the kitchen making tea and I was alone with Mrs. Moore. I said that I had just seen a new poem of Marianne’s, “Nine Nectarines & Other Porcelain,” and admired it very much. Mrs. Moore replied, “Yes. I am so glad that Marianne has decided to give the inhabitants of the zoo … a rest.” Waiting for the conclusion of her longer statements, I grew rather nervous; nevertheless, I found her extreme precision enviable and thought I could detect echoes of Marianne’s own style in it: the use of double or triple negatives, the lighter and wittier ironies — Mrs. Moore had provided a sort of ground bass for them.
She wrote me one or two beautifully composed little notes on the subject of religion, and I know my failure to respond made her sad. At each of my leave-takings she followed me to the hall, where, beside “Ezra’s” imagined cigar burn, she held my hands and said a short prayer. She said grace before dinner, and once, a little maliciously, I think, Marianne asked me to say grace. Mercifully, a childhood grace popped into my mind. After dinner Marianne wrote it down.
Of course Mrs. Moore and her daughter were what some people might call “prudish”; it would be kinder to say “over-fastidious.” This applied to Mrs. Moore more than to Marianne; Marianne, increasingly so with age, was capable of calling a spade a spade, or at least calling it by its archaic name. I remember her worrying about the fate of a mutual friend whose sexual tastes had always seemed quite obvious to me: “What are we going to do about X…? Why, sometimes I think he may even be in the clutches of a sodomite…!” One could almost smell the brimstone. But several novels of the thirties and forties, including Mary McCarthy’s The Company She Keeps, were taken down to the cellar and burned in the furnace. I published a very bad short story a year or two after I first knew the Moores and I was reprimanded by both of them for having used the word “spit.” (Two or three years later I was scolded for having used “water closet” in a poem, but by then I had turned obstinate.) Marianne once gave me her practical rules for the use of indecent language. She said, “Ordinarily, I would never use the word rump. But I can perfectly well say to Mother, ‘Mother, there’s a thread on your rump,’ because she knows that I’m referring to Cowper’s pet hare, ‘Old Tiney,’ who liked to play on the carpet and ‘swing his rump around!’”
I was shown many old photographs and snapshots and, once, a set of postcards of their trip to England and Paris — at that time the only European traveling Marianne had done. The postcards were mostly of Oxford, and there was a handwritten menu, including the wines, of the luncheon George Saintsbury had given for her. I was also privileged to look into the notebooks, illustrated with Marianne’s delicate sketches.
Besides exercising on the trapeze, Marianne was very fond of tennis. I never saw her play, but from the way she talked about it, it seemed as if she enjoyed the rules and conventions of the game as much as the sport. She engaged a young black boy to play with her, sometimes in Prospect Park and sometimes on the roof of the apartment house. He was finally dismissed because of his lack of tennis manners; his worst offense seemed to be that instead of “Serve!” he would say “Okay!”
The bathroom in the apartment was small, long, and narrow, and as if I were still a child, I was advised to go there when Marianne thought it would be a good idea. (Also in subway stations: “I’ll hold your bag and gloves, Elizabeth.”) In their bathroom was an object I liked, an old-fashioned shoeshine box with an iron footrest. On one visit this had just been repainted by Marianne, with black enamel, and so had a cast-iron horse, laid out on a piece of newspaper on its side, running, with a streaming mane. It looked as if it might have originally been attached to a toy fire engine. I asked about this little horse, and Mrs. Moore told me that when Marianne was two and a half years old she had taken her to visit an aunt; the horse had had to go along too. Mrs. Moore had gone into the guest room and discovered that Marianne had taken a length of lace, perhaps a lace collar, from the bureau and dressed the horse up in it. “Marianne!” she had said — one could imagine the awful solemnity of the moment—“You wouldn’t take Auntie Bee’s lace to put on your horse, would you?” But the infant Marianne, the intrepid artist, replied, “Pretty looks, Ma! Pretty looks!”