Jamesiana: Assessments of James and His Work by Marianne Moore, Beerbohm, Forster, Madox Ford, and George Stonier

Jamesiana: Assessments of James and His Work by Marianne Moore, Beerbohm, Forster, Madox Ford, and George Stonier By Arthur Sherbo, Michigan State University Marianne Moore and Henry James Marianne Moore's essay Henry James as a Characteristic American is well known and duly recorded in the bibliography of writings on James. Less known but easily available to readers of her poetry and to those who will look at the index to The Complete Prose are her other remarks on or references to James. I serve, hence, as compiler. First, the poetry. A line in "An Octopus," line 172,1 make it, preceded by line 171, "damned for its sacrosanct remoteness—," reads "like Henry James 'damned by the public decorum.'" Miss Moore does not identify the words in single marks of quotation, as she does for other quotations in her Notes on her poems. See, for example, line 26, "In politics, in trade," of "Sea Unicorns and Land Unicorns," annotated "Henry James, English Hours (1905)" (Complete Poems 274). And see also line 25, "Accessibility to experience," of New York, annotated "Henry James" (Complete Poems 269). In his Marianne Moore, George W. Nitchie points out that Miss Moore revised lines 7-8 of "Picking and Choosing" from "that James is all that has been/said of him but is not profound" to "that James is all that has been/said of him if feeling is profound" and finally, in Complete Poems, to "James/is all that has been said of him" (my marks of quotation throughout), evidently changing her mind about James's profundity or lack thereof (50). Nitchie, incidentally, puts James among those Miss Moore The Henry James Review 15 (1994): 199-218. © 1994, The Johns Hopkins University Press 200 The Henry James Review "loves," the others being Pound, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, and Pavlova (3). Miss Moore has been likened to James. I give what I have gleaned from Charles Tomlinson's collection of essays on Moore. Denis Donoghue, echoing the title of Miss Moore's essay on James, notes that her "accessibility to experience" (James's words) makes her "like James in this respect a characteristic American" (166). Henry Gifford states that "Marianne Moore and Emily Dickinson do not stand to each other in a relationship as undeniable as that between Miss Moore and Henry James. I doubt if one who had mastered the urbane obliquity of James [as, by implication, Miss Moore had] would care altogether for the abrupt and unceremonious withdrawals into enigma of Emily Dickinson. It has often been remarked that Marianne Moore's style develops out of highly civilized prose, "i.e. the prose of Henry James (172). Thanks to the Complete Prose one may now isolate Miss Moore's occasional remarks on James. In her review in The Dial of a work on George Moore by John Freeman, she defends James against Moore: "One finds an enigma in Mr. Moore's indifference—professed indifference, perhaps one should say—to Henry James. The word envy as applied to James's attitude to A Modern Lover [sic] seems fantastic; as for his 'unresponsiveness to the imagination of others,' suggested by Mr. Freeman in this connection, one is bewildered when one remembers James in his letters struggling to catch the reflection of his correspondents' thoughts in every query" (78). In another review, also in The Dial, she writes of "a kind of reminiscence, may we add, which is religious, rapt, a thing inner and final—such writing as has been given us by the Venerable Bede, by W. B. Yeats, by Henry James, and by less conspicuous exemplars of what is burnished and priestly," high praise indeed (141). In this last quotation and some others to follow, one is made aware of her love for James's writings, a love not discernible in her essay on James. I shall pile quotation upon quotation, giving only page references to the Complete Prose and an occasional bridging statement. "Perfect diction is not particularly an attribute of America. We have it, however, in the geometrically precise snow-flake forms of Henry James" (165). She adds the names of Poe, Whistler, Wallace Stevens, Pound, and E. E. Cummings. In her...