Ringing Marianne Moore's Apartment

By Philip F. O'Mara

By Philip F. O’Mara

As a student from 1952 to 1956 at Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School, located on Greene and Clermont Avenues in Brooklyn, I was already committed to the study of modern poetry as part of my life’s work, and I was impressed to learn from one of the Christian Brothers who taught there that Marianne Moore lived nearby. I wished that I might see her some time, perhaps at the library or when I was headed to the subway after school, but that never happened. In my senior year at St. John’s University, however, several members of the English Club were complaining of the uninspiring character of club meetings, and Lorraine DeFranco and I observed that it would be an excellent thing if we could persuade Miss Moore to give a reading; Lorraine had learned her exact address, and I knew how to get there on the subway. Deputed, accordingly, to go to Miss Moore’s apartment (we mistakenly assumed that she would have an unlisted telephone number) and invite her, we met after our last classes on the sprawling new campus in Queens, headed down the hill to the subway, and entered upon our quest.

We had the impulsiveness, the innocence, and I suppose the irresponsibility of youth: we simply went into the lobby of the building and rang the bell under the name “Moore”; nothing happened. We felt foolish; it was a fine afternoon in winter, we saw no one resembling Miss Moore coming along the street, and we hated to retrace our journey after these few minutes of standing in the small, empty lobby.

Just a few doors down on Cumberland Street, Queen of All Saints parish maintained a small chapel, Nuestra Senora del Pilar, for Spanish-speaking people, almost all Puerto Ricans in this neighborhood; I had passed it occasionally when I was in high school but had never entered it before. Lorraine and I went in to the chapel, knelt, and prayed for a few minutes. What else did we have to do? Then, nothing ventured, nothing gained, having asked the Lord’s blessing on our adventure, we returned and again rang Miss Moore’s bell. This time she answered, and buzzed us into the building. We climbed the stairs to her apartment, marveling at this answer to prayer, and respectfully introduced ourselves as college students, hoping to bring her to campus.

Miss Moore invited us in; we walked down a narrow corridor with full bookcases and many pictures on the wall, into her bright, small living room, with still more books and with the many animal mementos for which she was well-known. We accepted cups of tea, restated our mission, and explained where Saint John’s was located when, a little to our dismay, the university, prominent for its basketball team and in other circles for its recently established Center for Chinese Studies, but without a strong baseball team, proved unknown to her. She agreed to give a reading, we discussed possible dates, she inquired about the most convenient subway route to the campus, and we assured her that we would drive her to and from the reading. All of this took place before we had finished our tea, although we had spent some time in casual pleasantries and in expressing enthusiasm about her poetic achievement, in compliments that she brushed off, not too brusquely. Lorraine and I were overawed and very pleased, but we still had to deal with what we feared was an insuperable problem, as Miss Moore sensed.

She said, as our conversation limped a little, that she had the impression that we were unable to offer her an honorarium. This was indeed our problem, and we admitted it, feeling hopeless. She said, however, calmly and with no tone of condescension, “I’m so glad, and I will be happy to come to your college.” She explained that there had been times in past years when she had to seek out all of the paying invitations she could accept. She had, therefore, decided that she would preferably visit those campuses that could not afford it; if the English Club had been able to offer her payment, she would have turned us down. We were so elated that I have no memory of anything that happened the rest of that day.

Thus it happened that, a few weeks after that momentous and prayerful afternoon, I traveled back into Brooklyn with Richard Falk, another member of the English Club, a possessor, as I was not, of an automobile, and drove Marianne Moore to our campus, where she gave a reading that included one of her finest late poems, “Tell me, Tell me,” then still unpublished. The crowd was large, her answers to questions, some of which had me squirming, were direct and not at all larded with irony, and after it was over and we drove her back to Cumberland Street, she invited us up for sherry—Professor McBrien, Lorraine, Richard, and me. She declared her admiration for her view of Queen of All Saints Church, built in the early twentieth century under the leadership of a pastor, Msgr. George Mundelein, who went on to become the Archbishop of Chicago and a cardinal. Miss Moore commented that she liked the sight of the church, seeming to stand boldly, even protectively, above the houses and flats of the surrounding streets, and that she could remember when it had a high steeple, which had been removed for safety reasons years before. She remarked that because her name is Irish, people had often assumed that she herself was a Catholic, but of course her allegiance to Presbyterianism was firm; she is, I think, the most important Presbyterian poet since Milton, a collocation odd enough, without being in the least strained, to fit into one of her own poems. She also made some knowledgeable remarks about the pleasures of dry sack sherry (to which I had been an utter stranger until that moment) on cold afternoons.

She acknowledged that she placed a good many animals in her poems, complimented us on the new buildings going up on our campus, and stated her decided preference for recent American over recent British poetry, thus, without mentioning the name of Dylan Thomas, managing to imply that aspiring poets like Richard and me might look closer to home for role models in a generation younger than hers. Did she refer at all to Jarrell or Nemerov, to Wilbur or Lowell or Plath, or to any of the other then-young poets whom we had been reading? How I wish that I could remember. She was, of course, a close friend of Elizabeth Bishop, and she expressed approval of her work, of “The Fish” and “In the Waiting Room,” if I recall correctly, noting that in these poems there is nothing fussy, no portentous airs, but authentic, secure implication of discovery. The passing years have taken the rest of our conversation with them.  

This essay will also appear in NVR 1.1: Summer 2024

Philip F. O'Mara, born in Brooklyn, New York and raised there and in Queens, received the B.A. from Saint John's University in 1960 and the Ph.D. from Notre Dame in 1970. He has taught at historically Black colleges in Mississippi and at Bridgewater College in Virginia. He has published on John Berryman and Richard Wilbur, and in Medieval studies, including especially on the literature of Cistercian monasticism, and on Franciscan origins.  He lives in Lexington, Virginia.