Holding on Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore by Linda Leavell

Finally, Marianne Moore has a biography that does justice to the richness, complexity, and significance of her writing career. Although Charles Molesworth’s Marianne Moore: A Literary Life (1990) contributed importantly to Moore scholarship in its earlier days—before the Selected Letters (1998) was published and before many critics had begun to plumb the depths of her extraordinary archive—Linda Leavell’s Holding on Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore is the first authorized biography of the poet, and it is superb. It is insightful, revelatory, and insofar as I can judge, absolutely accurate (I say this, having probably read more of the family letters than any critic but Leavell herself). One might disagree with an interpretation here and there, but the quality of detail is dazzling. This biography is a must-read for anyone who cares about the development of early modernism, and it will change the state of Moore studies.

Leavell tells the story of a brilliant poet who is (to use Moore’s words from “The Paper Nautilus”) “hindered to succeed” by a domineering albeit loving family, and particularly by her mother, with whom Moore lived for thirty-seven years of her adult life until her mother’s death in 1947. In Leavell’s account, because of financial exigencies, but even more because of her own emotional neediness, Moore’s mother gave the poet no privacy except that which she found in writing poetry. While Moore herself promulgated the myth that her mother was an indispensable help to her in her writing, Leavell persuasively argues that Mary Warner Moore did not understand her daughter’s poetry nor much like it, although she took great pride in her daughter’s success. Poetry became Marianne’s only outlet for individuality and ambition. Leavell also provides convincing evidence that Moore resisted eating as a strategy of resisting her mother’s domination: when Moore was away from home she gained weight; at home, she did not, at one point weighing only seventy-eight pounds. Mary was a bad cook and so frugal that she provided little in the way of nourishing meals; Marianne associated food with her mother’s control of her body. Especially when the two women spent eleven years in a one-room apartment (with no kitchen), there was literally scant opportunity for privacy, except in work.

Leavell proceeds from extensive research in Moore’s vast archive, public records, and private conversation with the surviving family, thereby finding answers (sometimes definitive, always reasonable) to questions that have long puzzled Moore scholars. For example, she is the first to procure information about Moore’s father and the psychological condition that caused Mary to cease all contact with him before the poet’s birth. Leavell also establishes the record of Mary’s emotional insecurity, caused by her mother’s early death, her lonely childhood spent among various relatives, and her short-lived marriage. Leavell writes frankly about Mary’s lesbian relationship with Mary Norcross during Marianne’s growing-up years in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, during the 1890s and 1900s. Marianne and her older brother Warner worried frequently about their mother’s health and happiness, especially after Norcross took another lover in 1909, just as Moore graduated from college. Warner had become relatively independent of his mother’s most controlling demands—although, as Leavell argues, he dealt with them by agreeing with what she said and not telling her about activities or ideas that would disturb her. This is a transformative portrait of Warner, who has been portrayed as pathologically connected to his mother and sister. In effect, Warner pushes Marianne to sacrifice her adult independence to their mother’s needs when he chooses a career and marriage that put him frequently (as Navy chaplain) at a distance. Not surprisingly, as Leavell shows, Marianne’s relationship with her brother involved some resentment and her own mode of emotional distancing as well as deep love and trust. Leavell’s biography demonstrates not only that Marianne developed strategies for intellectual, spiritual, and emotional independence from her family—even while acceding to the demands of cohabitation with her mother—but that, paradoxically, these circumstances also enabled her to write her radically innovative, emotionally and intellectually complex verse.

The first 250 pages of this immensely readable biography take us up to 1930, through Moore’s tenure editing The Dial, which Leavell describes as effectively Moore’s magazine, especially between 1927 and 1929. Even before 1927, however, Moore played a more important part in much of the decision making at the Dial than has been recognized. In her earlier scholarship, Leavell has documented Moore’s influence on her contemporaries and the ways in which she anticipated aspects of modernism later adopted in more famous form by her peers; here she also documents Moore’s influence as an editor.

In 1930, Moore and her mother moved to Brooklyn only because Warner rented an apartment for them there explicitly against Marianne’s will. From 1930 until Mary’s death in 1947, Marianne and Mary were rarely both well at the same time, and Marianne’s sense of isolation from the literary scene in Manhattan exacerbated her health problems. Again, however, Marianne found a way to turn the isolation of this move to her advantage. Thanks to the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Letters, she was able to see friends, to meet important writers who read there (often sitting in the front row and taking notes on how they performed), and to stay current through science lectures and documentary films. Once she began writing again, her health improved. Leavell provides a moving account of Moore’s first publications in the 1930s and of the delicate dance of politeness in her professional relationship and friendship with T. S. Eliot. She refreshingly recounts Moore’s first meeting with Elizabeth Bishop—a story typically told from Bishop’s perspective. Leavell also provides the first adequate account of Moore’s determination to write a novel—based, as Leavell puts it, on Mary’s “fairy tale” of “family togetherness” to which Marianne had been “captive” her whole life (295)—and the best accounts both of Moore’s choice to spend years translating La Fontaine’s fables and of the celebrity of her final two decades. Leavell also traces Moore’s abiding friendships with other writers and celebrities and with crucial but less well-known friends of her late years such as Kathrine Jones.

Equally impressive is Leavell’s deft critical discussion of Moore’s poetry at every stage of her career. Leavell depicts the major breakthrough in Moore’s work between 1914 and 1915, the brilliantly innovative architecture and unaccented rhyme of her early syllabic stanzas, and the “unabashedly exultant” tone, along with other shifts, entering her verse in the 1930s (291). Leavell argues that Moore’s poems of the 1960s are audience-focused, deliberately performative in ways enabled by Moore’s study of other poets’ readings. While Moore seems to have been largely without libido in her personal life and to have had a reputation for prudishness, from early in her career she had a magnetic charisma that was almost “sexual,” a word Kenneth Burke used to describe her (343). Moore had a “unique effect” on people on and off the stage, and in her late years was in much demand as a reader, thanks to her blend of “easy erudition,” “disarming humility,” and “a comedienne’s sense of timing” (342). Holding on Upside Down combines the grace, humor, and compelling story line one expects in good fiction with the detail of formidable scholarship, definitively deconstructing myths about Moore that have prevented too many readers and scholars from expending the effort required to deal seriously with her work. As Leavell states in her introduction, “For too long … the perceived chasteness in [Moore’s] art and life has all but dehumanized her in the public imagination”—in part because her witty ironies and lack of anger or openly sexual rebellion made her seem irrelevant to the generation of new feminists in the 1960s and 1970s, and in part because even her archive gives little access to the poet’s private emotions, hopes, and fears (xi). Leavell gives us a poet we can understand and admire humanly, linking the poems to the emotions and relationships of her life without reducing them to autobiography. Whether you are interested in a good summer read or in taking notes on Leavell’s scholarly excavations, you will like this book. It is a magnificent biography.