The Library of America remembers E. L. Doctorow and his “indelible” novels

Ragtime by
E. L. Doctorow
(Random House, 1975)

Writer E. L. Doctorow died in New York City on Tuesday, July 21, at the age of 84. He was born in the Bronx in 1931 and published his first novel, the spare, haunting neo-Western Welcome to Hard Times, in 1960. Over the next half-century he would continue to reexamine the American past, and simultaneously reanimate the form of the historical novel, in a string of contemporary classics that include The Book of Daniel (1971), a fictional treatment of the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg espionage case; Ragtime (1975), later adapted for both film and Broadway; Billy Bathgate (1989), a recreation of the Depression-era Bronx of his childhood; and The March (2005), which brought the author’s imagination to bear on the closing months of the Civil War.

Doctorow won the National Book Award, the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, and the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, to name just a few of his many laurels. In 2012 he was inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame. Literary critic and translator Liesl Schillinger offered this stirring tribute to him at the induction ceremony:

I first encountered E. L. Doctorow’s writing as a child in the 1970s and ’80s, pulling his novels from my parents’ shelves. I began with Ragtime, and was captivated by the flowing way Doctorow integrated historic events, the changing roles of women and African Americans, and—I’ll admit—raciness, into his storytelling. I was hungry for clues to what adults cared about; and to what being an American meant. His writing informed my understanding, and has stayed with me. The 20th century is over; but the American century lives on, and will endure in Doctorow’s magnificent body of work. . . . how lucky it is that those of us who wish to revisit the most significant touchpoints of our national history may do so not by hoarding towers of text, but by inhabiting the evocative world Doctorow has conjured in his indelible novels.

Doctorow was named for Edgar Allan Poe, whom he once characterized as “our greatest bad writer.” In a more charitable vein, he contributed an admiring introduction to The Library of America paperback edition of Jack London’s The Call of the Wild, which he praised as a “tour-de-force of symbolic transfiguration.”

In 2014, meanwhile, he read from Herman Melville’s 1850 essay “Hawthorne and His Mosses” at a public event co-presented by The Library of America and The Public Theater for the LOA anthology Shakespeare in America. Listen to Doctorow read what Melville said about Shakespeare, and then enjoy what Doctorow says about Melville, in the video below.



Related post:
Liesl Schillinger on E. L. Doctorow’s chronicles of the American century

A birthday tribute to Toni Morrison

America’s only living Nobel laureate for literature celebrates her 82nd birthday on Monday, February 18, which prompts us to share a special tribute Morrison received at last summer’s New York State Writers Hall of Fame gala.

Toni Morrison
Ryan Brenizer Photography

As regular readers of Reader’s Almanac will recall, last June The Empire State Center for the Book, New York’s affiliate of the Library of Congress Center for the Book, held its annual gala at the Princeton Club in midtown Manhattan. The highlight of the evening was the induction of the 14-member class of 2012, which included living writers E. L. Doctorow, Pete Hamill, Joyce Carol Oates, and Toni Morrison, as well as John Cheever, Hart Crane, Edna Ferber, Washington Irving, Henry James, Mary McCarthy, Marianne Moore, Barbara W. Tuchman, Kurt Vonnegut, and Richard Wright.

Judge Anne E. Thompson
Ryan Brenizer Photography

The following tribute was prepared for the evening by former New York mayor David Dinkins, who was unable to attend in person. His remarks were read at the gala by Judge Anne E. Thompson of the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey, whose friendship with Ms. Morrison and with David and Joyce Dinkins dates to their college days at Howard University.

Over the four score and four years of my life, I have been blessed to know some of the most wonderful women who ever walked the face of this earth. There was my mother, then my sister Joyce, another Joyce—my bride of more than a half-century . . . who is here this evening, and (eventually) our little girl Donna and her daughter Kalila.

And beyond my family circle, I have had the good fortune to have as close friends a number of truly remarkable women, including one who is central to our purpose here this evening. I speak, of course, of Ms. Toni Morrison. And I am thankful for the opportunity to contribute to this occasion in tribute to her despite the thousands of miles that separate us.

Joyce and I have shared a friendship with Toni for many years and, as is true of everyone, we have been fans of her artistry since the beginning of her career . . . and have taken great pride in her accomplishments. You may know that our friendship began while undergraduates at Howard University—I was Class of 1950, and Joyce and Toni were in the Class of 1953.

Our friendship with Toni has evolved as much from how she has chosen to share her talents as it has from the pure talent itself. Her activism in the struggles for educational opportunity for young persons of color has earned her the respect and appreciation of parents everywhere . . . as she has encouraged their children’s dreams and stimulated their creativity by her example and her teachings.

After Howard, Toni went on to earn her master’s degree in English at Cornell University and she has taught her craft at her alma mater Howard and some other good schools—Yale and Princeton. Toni once said in a speech on values in higher education that: “What I think and do is already inscribed on my teaching, my work. And so should it be. We teach values by having them.”

Toni has incorporated the values learned from her parents during her early years in Lorain, Ohio into the richly-expressive depictions of the characters of her novels . . . from The Bluest Eye in 1969 through a succession of works that have included such best-sellers as Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby . . . and her Pulitzer Prize–winning classic, Beloved.

A member of the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters for over a quarter century, Toni has been awarded countless literary distinctions, including the Commander of the French Order of Arts & Letters and, the ultimate—the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. Taking these honors in stride and never losing sight of her personal values, she has remained the warm and unpretentious person she was before becoming an icon whose every word is captured in print, whether in cover articles in Time magazine or the senior theses of students of literature the world over.

“I’m just trying,” she said in an interview with Salon magazine, “to look at something without blinking, to see what it was like or it could have been like, and how that had something to do with the way we live now.” And her body of work is the best testament that she has never blinked. The Nobel Prize Committee described her “epic power, her unerring ear for dialogue, and her poetically-charged” contributions to the field of literature . . . but Toni had other thoughts at the time.

You may recall her initial reaction to learning of her selection for this, the highest recognition for writers in the world. In case you may not, let me share it with you in her own words: “I called someone at the Nobel Committee,” she remembered, “and I said, ‘Look, if you're going to keep giving prizes to women (and I hope you do), you're going to have to give us more warning. Men can rent tuxedos. I have to get shoes and I have to get a dress.’” Vintage Toni Morrison.

In receiving this award tonight, Toni Morrison joins the company of a group of recipients who qualify as our pantheon of artistic excellence—E. L. Doctorow, Pete Hamill and Joyce Carol Oates as well as those inducted posthumously. I commend the good folks at New York Library Association, the Empire State Center for the Book, and the Writers Hall of Fame for their continued efforts to support and encourage the artistry Toni Morrison exemplifies, and hope that your presence here this evening is but prelude to an ongoing commitment to their mission.

Novelist, editor, teacher, scholar, dramatist, poet, children’s author, Pulitzer Prize winner, Nobel Laureate, author of the best work of American fiction in the last quarter century . . . Toni Morrison has given us many hours of literary pleasure and thought, and has provided young writers with a blueprint for the kind of work they must strive to do.

She is dedicated to helping them to build from that blueprint and to design their own, and the tribute tonight is a promise to Toni that the people of the State of New York will continue to support work that expands and engages her artistic and intellectual legacy.

Toni, you are a jewel in the crown of American Letters. We congratulate you on your extraordinary achievements, and promise to do what we can to bring as many of your heirs as possible under the light of that jewel for generations to come.

Ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, please join me in saluting our Beloved, Ms. Toni Morrison.

Previous posts from the Hall of Fame ceremony:
Ross Posnock on Henry James
Liesl Schillinger on E. L. Doctorow
Eleanor Bergstein on Joyce Carol Oates
Elizabeth Bradley on Washington Irving
Alice Quinn on Marianne Moore
Jessica Tuchman Mathews on Barbara W. Tuchman
Langdon Hammer on Hart Crane
Eve Stwertka on Mary McCarthy

Eve Stwertka remembers Mary McCarthy’s “thrillingly civilized life”

Eve Stwertka remembers Mary McCarthy at the
New York Writers Hall of Fame induction ceremony
Ryan Brenizer Photography

Reader’s Almanac continues its presentation of remarks offered at the New York State Writers Hall of Fame induction ceremony with Eve Stwertka’s remembrance of Mary McCarthy. Stwertka, Professor Emerita at SUNY Farmingdale, shares the duties of co-trustee for the Mary McCarthy Literary Trust with Margo Viscusi. Together they edited the collection of essays, Twenty-four Ways of Looking at Mary McCarthy.

Mary McCarthy was a crucial presence in my life. We met when she became my tutor, at Bard College, in 1945, and she continued to be my mentor, benefactor, and good angel. I owed her my first job, at Partisan Review, and she hosted my wedding. Eventually, she asked me (together with another friend) to be her Literary Trustee.

Reading Mary’s reminiscences one come across quite a bit of turbulence: There’s the early death of her parents, the miseries suffered from a wicked uncle, an illegal abortion, five husbands, marital rows, illnesses, miscarriages, and that notorious law suit at the end.

But, at the same time, to know Mary, over the years, was to be smitten by the life of friendship, beauty and pleasure she constantly created. To visit her was a treat. And that was as true in the walkup tenement in New York, with its bathtub in the kitchen, as it was later, in her elegant Paris flat and on the seacoast of Maine where she spent many summers. Her hospitality was extraordinary, her parties exhilarating, the food and drink, delicious. And guests were always drawn into some sort of fun, like swimming in secluded ponds or picking overblown roses to make rose-petal jelly. When she served lobsters, the mayonnaise had to be homemade. And the ice cream had to be cranked by hand.

Above all, there was great conviviality with other writers and many clever people of her time, so that the most pleasurable aspect of her gatherings was usually the conversation.

And, Mary was diligent. Up early, she took a cup of coffee into her study and shut the door for the morning. She kept her desk tidy, stuck to the limitations of her manual typewriter, took pains with her research, and answered all letters, often in her exquisite Catholic-school handwriting.

What I observed, then, was a thrillingly civilized life that Mary willed into being—a well-wrought life, with a strong emphasis on good workmanship.

And this reminds me of something she said in a Paris Review interview, about the concept of “Finding Oneself.” “I suppose,” she said, “everyone continues to be interested in the quest for the self. But, what I think, is that you really must make the self. It is absolutely useless to look for it—you won’t find it. But it’s possible . . . to make it. . . . You can finally, in some sense, make and choose the self you want.”

At its June 5 ceremony in midtown Manhattan, The Empire State Center for the Book formally inducted 14 writers into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame, which it established in 2010 to recognize New York-based poets, novelists, journalists, and historians who have made an indelible mark on our culture. The class of 2012 included E. L. Doctorow, Pete Hamill, Toni Morrison, and Joyce Carol Oates, all of whom attended. Also honored were John Cheever, Hart Crane, Edna Ferber, Washington Irving, Henry James, Mary McCarthy, Marianne Moore, Barbara W. Tuchman, Kurt Vonnegut, and Richard Wright.

Previous posts from the Hall of Fame ceremony:
Ross Posnock on Henry James
Liesl Schillinger on E. L. Doctorow
Eleanor Bergstein on Joyce Carol Oates
Elizabeth Bradley on Washington Irving
Alice Quinn on Marianne Moore
Jessica Tuchman Mathews on Barbara W. Tuchman
Langdon Hammer on Hart Crane

Ross Posnock on Henry James’s fascination with the “terrible town” of New York

Ross Posnock speaks at the New York
Writers Hall of Fame induction ceremony
Ryan Brenizer Photography

Reader’s Almanac continues its presentation of remarks offered at the New York State Writers Hall of Fame induction ceremony with Ross Posnock’s tribute to Henry James. Posnock is Professor of English at Columbia University. He is the author of The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the Challenge of Modernity and the editor of Henry James: Novels 1903–1911, the sixth and final volume in the Library of America edition of Henry James’s novels.

“I like to think of my relation to New York as . . . almost inexpressibly intimate,” Henry James confessed in The American Scene, his memoir of his 1904 repatriation after a near twenty-year absence, a book that devotes fully a third of its remarkable near 500 pages to the city of his birth. “You care for the terrible town,” James remarked to himself; despite its “shameless” “swaggering and shouting,” its rude indifference to history, he loved New York, and to be on its streets was always, he said, an “adventure, an adventure I admit, as with some strident, battered, questionable beauty, truly some bad bold charmer.” The bad bold charmer never stopped arousing his imagination; he was fatally responsive to her seductive wiles.

Sometimes the seduction was closer to trauma: He tells us of his visit to Ellis Island where he found the immigrant in the act of “knocking at our official door” to be a “drama poignant and unforgettable” but also shocking because only now does James (addressing himself in the third person) “sense the degree that it was his American fate to share the sanctity of his American consciousness, the intimacy of his American patriotism, with the inconceivable alien.” Wandering among the immigrants in Central Park, unnerved by their ease yet impressed by the fastidious appearances of many of the children and their parents, commending especially their “gleaming” teeth and “varnished” shoes: he finds “thrilling” “the sweet ingratiation of the Park” and declares it “New York at its best.” His response is more uneasy after descending into the “whirlpool” of the “dense Yiddish quarter” of Rutgers Street on the Lower East Side, where he feels fascinated—“for once agreeably baffled”—by “swarming” “aliens”: “the scene here bristled , at every step, with the signs and sounds, immitigable, unmistakable, of a Jewry that had burst all bounds . . . the scene hummed with the human presence beyond any I had ever faced . . . producing part of the impression, moreover, no doubt, as a direct consequence of the intensity of the Jewish aspect.”

Liesl Schillinger on E. L. Doctorow’s chronicles of the American century

Liesl Schillinger with E. L. Doctorow
at the New York Writers Hall of Fame gala
Ryan Brenizer Photography

Reader’s Almanac continues its presentation of remarks offered at the New York State Writers Hall of Fame induction ceremony with Liesl Schillinger’s tribute to E. L. Doctorow. Schillinger is a journalist, literary critic, and translator based in New York. Her translation of the novel Every Day, Every Hour, by Nataša Dragnić, was published in May by Viking.

Before I begin speaking about the man I’m here to induct tonight into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame—the matchless E. L. Doctorow—I would like to piggyback on the marvelous anecdotes that Sidney Offit just now gave us about his best friend, the late writer Kurt Vonnegut.

Kurt Vonnegut came from Indiana, and so do I. My high school in West Lafayette offered a course on Vonnegut—so proud were they of his Hoosier roots—and I took that course when I was 12. Fifteen years later, by which time I was living in New York and working at The New Yorker, I met Vonnegut at a book party in the Hamptons for Erica Jong’s Fear of Fifty. He was standing by the pool, away from the rest of the guests, smoking. I went up to him, reverently and a little fearfully, hoping he would let me stand next to him and smoke a companionable cigarette. He did. I told him I was afraid to tell him that I, too, was a Hoosier; because I knew from his book Cat’s Cradle how he hated it when people exaggerated the coincidence of mass affiliations—like being “Hoosiers,” or Cubs fans. (He had nicknamed such fake groups in Cat’s Cradle: “granfalloons.”) Looking not at me, but up into the sky, he mournfully said, “We are all lost animals, looking for a herd.” Looking around this room: seeing the great E. L. Doctorow, Joyce Carol Oates, Toni Morrison and Pete Hamill, along with scores of people who have come here to celebrate these remarkable authors, and who uphold the continuing importance of the written word, I’m now thinking: this is my herd.

Eleanor Bergstein on Joyce Carol Oates’s ability to tap the “chaotic and wild places inside us all”

Eleanor Bergstein introduces Joyce Carol Oates
at the New York Writers Hall of Fame gala
Ryan Brenizer Photography

Reader’s Almanac continues its presentation of remarks offered at the New York State Writers Hall of Fame induction ceremony with Eleanor Bergstein’s tribute to her friend Joyce Carol Oates. Bergstein is a novelist, screenwriter, and director best known for the movie Dirty Dancing, which she wrote and co-produced.

I honor the work of Joyce Carol Oates for its wildness, its risk, its integrity of emotional detail—for all the things we long for in our own work, and in our lives. Occasionally people flail around in the authenticity of feeling they find in her—assuming it must be drawn from biographical details of living people. Rather instead, her work holds out to us the elegant possibility of owning the chaotic and wild places inside us all, places that accumulate and out of which we try to make a self. She creates characters who are often invisible to themselves at the same time they are harrowingly present to us, people with yearning hearts and chaotic souls desperate to order their lives in the face of the disarray of the outside world.

Years ago, after first reading Wonderland, I flattered myself that I understood the world better. Many years later, I continue to turn to Joyce’s work, hoping to understand myself better. I came upon her first published stories in literary reviews when I was starting out as a writer—and I remember saying to myself, “Oh so there’s that in the world.”

We celebrate the work of Joyce Carol Oates for what she has done—and what she is about to do. Sometimes the work terrifies, sometimes comforts, sometimes breaks our hearts. Hers is not a reassuring world—it shows us landscapes of the soul and of the street that startle us and frighten us.

We try to tame Joyce by making her an exotic. Doesn’t she write rather more than the usual number of books, we say? Might not we call her Gothic? Isn’t there a lot of violence, rape, murder, so much of everything. I think of Blonde, A Widow’s Story, them, Mudwoman, stories that burn off the page, mothers, sisters, Mike Tyson, a scrap of paper on a windshield, that sly humor if one looks for it, the locations of her childhood to which she returns again and again—exotic Lockport? Relentless. One might say check the newspaper if you think Oates is extreme, but this is beside the point. I believe the reason we are alarmed by the bleak and strange world she portrays is because it is located so clearly in our hearts.

I have seen Joyce dance with grace and be wickedly funny and I never try to guess what she will do next. The world she imagines is both ours and only and completely and forever hers. I am honored to present her and her work.

Joyce Carol Oates edited volume #204 of the Library of America series, Shirley Jackson: Novels & Stories.

At its June 5 ceremony in midtown Manhattan, The Empire State Center for the Book formally inducted 14 writers into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame, which it established in 2010 to recognize New York-based poets, novelists, journalists, and historians who have made an indelible mark on our culture. The class of 2012 included E. L. Doctorow, Pete Hamill, Toni Morrison, and Joyce Carol Oates, all of whom attended. Also honored were John Cheever, Hart Crane, Edna Ferber, Washington Irving, Henry James, Mary McCarthy, Marianne Moore, Barbara W. Tuchman, Kurt Vonnegut, and Richard Wright.

Previous posts from the Hall of Fame ceremony:
Elizabeth Bradley on Washington Irving
Alice Quinn on Marianne Moore
Jessica Tuchman Mathews on Barbara W. Tuchman
Langdon Hammer on Hart Crane

Elizabeth L. Bradley on Washington Irving’s greatest contribution to American letters: the New York story

Elizabeth L. Bradley pays tribute to Washington Irving
at the New York Writers Hall of Fame gala
Ryan Brenizer Photography

Reader’s Almanac continues its presentation of remarks offered at the New York State Writers Hall of Fame induction ceremony with Elizabeth L. Bradley’s tribute to Washington Irving. Bradley is the author of Knickerbocker: The Myth Behind New York and the editor of the Penguin Classics edition of Washington Irving’s A History of New York.

According to Wiki Answers, Washington Irving is the “Father of the American Short Story.” While Irving, a lifelong bachelor, might have been tickled by this paternity suit, I’m not sure he would have appreciated the glib assumption. To be the father suggests that other nineteenth-century American writers, his literary descendants, are the actual masters of the form. I can already guess which names are leaping to your mind: Poe, Hawthorne, Twain, Chopin, James, Crane. And that seems to be always the way with Irving—his is the name in parentheses—the prequel, the run-up. “Yes, of course, Irving, and then the fun begins!”

But, in fact, the fun began with Irving. He gave us the original American dreamers, Rip Van Winkle and Ichabod Crane, and set their delicious fantasies against a transcendental backdrop—the “fairy mountains” of the Catskills—that prodded us, gently but firmly, to see ghosts and dream dreams of our own. His New York tales transformed a new country into an ancient wilderness, layered with meaning and larded with stories. Before Thomas Cole ever made his way up the river, Irving was the Hudson River School.

He also brought the American frontier to life for readers without steam engines, and seduced Americans into a love affair with the Alhambra, which is still evident in Spain’s contemporary veneration for the Bard of Sunnyside. He was a crusader for author’s rights and strong copyright protection centuries before the Author’s Guild. He dubbed our city “Gotham,” and he may (with apologies to Thomas Nash) have invented the American Santa Claus.

No one would fault me, I think, for stopping there. But I revere Irving for still another innovation: his “temporary jeu d’esprit,” the History of New York, which made the twenty-six-year-old satirist famous and gave us a narrator unlike any other: Diedrich Knickerbocker, a grumpy know-it-all with a fondness for street food and deep roots in the neighborhood—in other words, a real New Yorker! During Irving’s lifetime, Knickerbocker was the genealogist of the Hudson River Valley, studying “with the zeal of a bookworm” any “genuine Dutch families snugly shut up in their low-roofed farmhouses.” He was the narrator of every Dutch tale you hold dear from your childhood—they are all from his pen—but he is also the emblem of Irving’s greatest contribution to American letters: the New York story. The combination of delight and mockery that marked the History has become the vernacular of centuries of New York storytellers, who share Irving’s belief in the singularity of the New York experience, and his mission to share that experience with the larger world. From the works of Herman Melville and Walt Whitman to those of Paula Fox and Jonathan Lethem, New York stories owe much to Irving’s first satirical ode to the city. We may choose not to cheer on the Knicks, but as readers, writers, and New Yorkers, we must always salute the Knickerbockers.

Irving’s great New York stories are collected in volume #16 of the Library of America series, Washington Irving: History, Tales, & Sketches, edited by James W. Tuttleton.

At its June 5 ceremony in midtown Manhattan, The Empire State Center for the Book formally inducted 14 writers into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame, which it established in 2010 to recognize New York-based poets, novelists, journalists, and historians who have made an indelible mark on our culture. The class of 2012 included E. L. Doctorow, Pete Hamill, Toni Morrison, and Joyce Carol Oates, all of whom attended. Also honored were John Cheever, Hart Crane, Edna Ferber, Washington Irving, Henry James, Mary McCarthy, Marianne Moore, Barbara W. Tuchman, Kurt Vonnegut, and Richard Wright.

Previous posts from the Hall of Fame ceremony:
Alice Quinn on Marianne Moore
Jessica Tuchman Mathews on Barbara W. Tuchman
Langdon Hammer on Hart Crane

Alice Quinn on Marianne Moore, “the stealth weapon of American poetry”

Alice Quinn pays tribute to Marianne Moore
at the New York Writers Hall of Fame gala
Ryan Brenizer Photography

Reader’s Almanac continues its presentation of remarks offered at the New York State Writers Hall of Fame induction ceremony with Alice Quinn’s tribute to the poet Marianne Moore. Poetry editor of The New Yorker from 1987 to 2007, Quinn is Executive Director of the Poetry Society of America and an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s graduate School of the Arts. She is the editor of Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments by Elizabeth Bishop.

It is an almost fantastic honor to be offering a few remarks upon the induction of Marianne Moore into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame, especially in the presence of so many contemporary writers whose work I love who are present tonight to be inducted, too.

I can close my eyes and see Marianne Moore’s picture in nooks and crannies and on the walls of the Gotham Book Mart, where I felt inducted into the literary life of the city in the early 1970s, guided by the writers who frequented that place and whose books the founder, Frances Steloff, would keep in stock at any cost.

In a new, wonderful book of essays entitled My Poets about her relationships to the poets she loves best, the young poet and critic Maureen McLane calls Marianne Moore “the stealth weapon of American poetry, with a ferocity and a lacerating intelligence few poets have matched.” And further on, “Her pointed social satires remind one of Jane Austen, her baroque syntactical devastations reminiscent of Henry James.”

All of her great contemporaries admired her—W. H. Auden and William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and I am certain Gwendolyn Brooks.

Moore, the great Modernist poet—who gave so much of herself from age 30–34, from 1925–29, as an editor of the manifestly supreme literary journal, The Dial, bringing along such writers as Hart Crane, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce—was a poet of such originality that her peers were always striving to characterize her achievements in the highest terms. Randall Jarrell noted, “She is, sometimes, as tersely conclusive as Grimm” . . . “Or as wise as Goethe” . . . “Or as beguiling, as full of propriety, as Beatrix Potter” . . . “Or as elevated as the Old Testament” . . . “Or as morally and rhetorically magnificent as St. Paul” . . . .

When Elizabeth Bishop first met her, in the spring of 1934, the year she graduated from Vassar, she wrote to a friend,

“A couple of weeks ago I met Marianne Moore . . . Frani, she is simply amazing. She is poor, sick, and her work is practically unread, I guess, but she seems completely undisturbed by it and goes right on producing perhaps one poem a year and a couple of reviews that are perfect in their way. I have never seen anyone who takes such ‘pains.’ . . . She is really worth a great deal of study.”

And in this way Moore definitely became a model to Bishop, who fourteen years later wrote of this poet she appreciated from such an early age,

“The precocious child is often embarrassed by his own understanding and is capable of going to great lengths to act his part as a child properly; one feels that Miss Moore sometimes has to make things difficult for herself as a sort of noblesse oblige, or self-imposed taxation to keep everything ‘fair’ in the world of poetry.”

Moore—a resident for many years of Brooklyn, which she described as “this city of freckled / integrity” and a passionate Dodgers fan and co-author with (then) Cassius Clay of some pretty charming verse, would have been delighted with this honor. In her poem, “New York,” she identifies what it is she feels is best about the place,

it is not the dime-novel exterior,
Niagara Falls, the calico horses and the war-canoe;
it is not that ‘if the fur is not finer than such as one sees others wear,
one would rather be without it’—
that estimated in raw meat and berries, we could feed the universe;
it is not the atmosphere of ingenuity,
the otter, the beaver, the puma skins
without shooting-irons or dogs;
it is not the plunder,
but ‘accessibility to experience.’

I think we New Yorkers would all agree lo these many years later that this is so. Randall Jarrell, in summing up his appreciation for her beautiful poem, “Armour’s Undermining Modesty,” expressed what I feel about so many of the poems I love most:

“I don’t entirely understand it, but what I understand I love, and what I don’t understand I love better.”

Thank you for the opportunity to praise this unique and absolutely admirable American poet.

A generous selection of Marianne Moore’s poetry can be found in volume #115 of the Library of America series, American Poetry: The Twentieth Century, Volume One.

At its June 5 ceremony in midtown Manhattan, The Empire State Center for the Book formally inducted 14 writers into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame, which it established in 2010 to recognize New York-based poets, novelists, journalists, and historians who have made an indelible mark on our culture. The class of 2012 included E. L. Doctorow, Pete Hamill, Toni Morrison, and Joyce Carol Oates, all of whom attended. Also honored were John Cheever, Hart Crane, Edna Ferber, Washington Irving, Henry James, Mary McCarthy, Marianne Moore, Barbara W. Tuchman, Kurt Vonnegut, and Richard Wright.

Previous posts from the Hall of Fame ceremony:
Jessica Tuchman Mathews on Barbara W. Tuchman
Langdon Hammer on Hart Crane

Jessica Tuchman Mathews on Barbara W. Tuchman and her “independence of spirit”

Jessica Tuchman Mathews with Rocco Staino,
Empire State Center chair
Ryan Brenizer Photography

In the second post from the series of remarks made at the recent New York State Writers Hall of Fame induction ceremony, Jessica Tuchman Mathews offers a tribute to her mother, the historian Barbara W. Tuchman, whose centennial is being celebrated in 2012. A widely recognized expert on issues related to arms control, energy policy, and science and technology, Mathews is president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a global think tank with offices in Washington, Moscow, Beijing, Brussels, and Beirut.

How to pay adequate tribute to a great lady in four minutes? I will forgo the polished prose she would have used and try merely to sketch a word picture.

What you would probably most remember if you had known her was her independence of spirit. Though shy, she never hesitated to say exactly what she thought to whomever. She had a profound unconcern for authority.

You would have recognized immediately, too, however, her discipline of thought and its corollary, clarity of expression. What she said or wrote had been deeply thought through.

She had tremendous energy and drive. On her death, her three very different daughters wrote three quite different tributes for her memorial service. All three, though, remembered her the same way in one respect: that she was never at rest.

She was an unapologetic elitist who worshipped quality. Quality derived, she believed, from two sources, “intensive effort and honesty of purpose.” In other words, not just skill, but intent. You set out to do something well or to do it half well or well enough. She had no patience for the latter two.

But she was much more than a bulldozer of energy, discipline and drive. What distinguished her most was an absolute passion for her craft. “It is this quality of being in love with your subject that is indispensable” she wrote, and she lived that.

New York State Writers Hall of Fame: Langdon Hammer on Hart Crane

Toni Morrison greets fellow Hall of Fame inductees
Pete Hamill and E. L. Doctorow
Ryan Brenizer Photography

On June 5, The Empire State Center for the Book, New York’s affiliate of the Library of Congress Center for the Book, held its annual gala at the Princeton Club in midtown Manhattan. The Center is committed to fostering reading and greater appreciation of the literary arts, and among its initiatives is the New York State Writers Hall of Fame, established in 2010 to recognize New York–based poets, novelists, journalists, and historians who have made an indelible mark on our culture. The centerpiece of this year’s gala was the induction of the fourteen-member class of 2012, which included E. L. Doctorow, Pete Hamill, Toni Morrison, and Joyce Carol Oates, all of whom attended. Also honored were John Cheever, Hart Crane, Edna Ferber, Washington Irving, Henry James, Mary McCarthy, Marianne Moore, Barbara W. Tuchman, Kurt Vonnegut, and Richard Wright.

Hall of Fame inductees Joyce Carol Oates and Toni Morrison
Ryan Brenizer Photography

Over the coming weeks, The Reader’s Almanac will present remarks offered at the induction ceremony, in which literary scholars, critics, and descendants of the writers honored the inductees. We begin with Langdon Hammer’s tribute to the poet Hart Crane. Hammer is professor of English at Yale University, where he teaches modern and contemporary poetry. He has written and edited several books on Crane, including volume #168 in the Library of America series, Hart Crane: Complete Poetry & Selected Letters.

Langdon Hammer offers a tribute to Hart Crane
Ryan Brenizer Photography

Like many New York writers, Hart Crane was born somewhere else—in Garretsville, Ohio, in his case. He came here to live, quite alone, in 1916. He was 17, just a little older than the century, and he felt obscurely but intensely (Crane’s feelings were usually obscure and intense) that his fate and that of the century were deeply connected with each other and with the capital of modern life, New York City.

On New Year’s Eve of that first year in the city, the new arrival wrote home from East 15th Street: “My Dear Father, I have just been out for a long ride up Fifth Ave. on an omnibus. It is very cold and clear, and the marble facades of the marvelous mansions shone like crystal in the sun. . . . The room I have now is a bit too small, so after my week is up, I shall seek out another place near here, for I like the neighborhood. The houses are so different here, that it seems most interesting, for a while at least, to live in one.”

Crane was peripatetic and lived in many houses in the city. The address that mattered most was 110 Columbia Heights, Brooklyn. It was there he began the love affair of his life with a Danish sailor named Emil Opffer, and where, “living in the shadow of the bridge,” as he put it, he conceived of his epic poem about the visionary promise of America, The Bridge. “That window,” he said about his window facing Brooklyn Bridge, “is where I would be most remembered of all: the ships, the harbor, and the skyline of Manhattan, midnight, morning or evening,—rain, snow or sun, it is everything from the mountains to the walls of Jerusalem and Nineveh, and all related and in actual contact with the changelessness of the many waters that surround it.”

The Bridge begins with an ecstatic address to Brooklyn Bridge in which its Gothic arches suggest a new religion and a new image of divinity. The bridge rises up above not simply New York but the whole of the continent, even the Midwest Crane left behind to make his life here. This stanza comes from the proem:

O Sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies’ dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the curveship lend a myth to God.

That’s gorgeous poetry, as stirring as any language an American has authored. But it isn’t easy poetry, and The Bridge was a puzzle and a problem when it arrived in most reviewers’ mailboxes. Crane died, a suicide, in 1932. He knew what he had achieved in his poetry. But he must have feared no one would ever recognize it, including the most important audience he wrote for, literary New York. I can just imagine, therefore, how gratified he would be by this recognition tonight. Hart Crane wrote the great poem of New York, and it is right to name him one of New York’s greats.