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PARTISAN REVIEW
she says, "armour seems extra," but it isn't ; and when she writes about
"another armoured animal," about another "thing made graceful by ad–
versities, conversities," she does so with the sigh of someone who has
come home. She asks whether a woman's looks are weapons or scalpels ;
comments, looking out on a quiet town: "It could scarcely be dangerous
to be living/ in a town like this" ; says about a man's nonchalance: "his
by-/ play was more terrible in its effectiveness/ than the fiercest frontal
attack./ The staff, the bag, the feigned inconsequence/ of manner, best
bespeak that weapon, self-protectiveness."
That weapon, self-protective–
ness!
The poet knows that morals are not "the memory of success
that no longer succeeds," but a part of survival.
She writes: "As impassioned Handel/ . . . never was known to
have fallen in love,! the unconfiding frigate-bird hides/ in the height
and in the majestic/ display of his art."
If
Handel (or the frigate-bird)
had been less impassioned he wouldn't have hidden, and if his feelings
had been less deep they'd have been expressed with less restraint, we
are meant to feel; it was because he was so impassioned that he "never
was known to have fallen in love," the poem almost says. And how much
sisterly approval there is in that
unconfiding!
When a frigate-bird buys
pictures, you can bet that the pictures "must not wish to disarm any–
thing." (By being disarming we sometimes disarm others, but always dis–
arm ourselves, lay ourselves open to rejection. But if we do not make
ourselves disarming or appealing, everything can be a clear, creditable,
take-it-or-Ieave-it affair, rejection is no longer rejection. Who would
be such a fool as
to
make advances to his reader, advances which
might end in rejection or, worse still, in acceptance?) Miss Moore spoke
as she pleased, and did not care whether or not it pleased; mostly this
made her firm and good and different, but sometimes it had its draw–
backs.
She says of some armoured animals that they are "models of
exactness." The association was natural: she thought of the animals as
models and of the exactness as armour-and for such a writer, there was
no armour like exactness, concision, irony. She wished to trust, as abso–
lutely as she could,
in
flat laconic matter-of-factness,
in
the
minimal
statement, understatement: these earlier poems of hers approach as a
limit, a kind of ideal minimal statement, a truth thought of as under–
lying, prior to, all exaggeration and error; the poet has tried to strip
or boil everything down to this point of hard, objective, absolute pre–
cision. But the most extreme precision leads inevitably to quotation;
and quotation is armour and ambiguity and irony all at once-turtles
are great quoters. Miss Moore leaves the stones she picks up carefully
