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I am Richard Moore's "friend" (we use the term loosely these days). He has asked me to write my honest opinion of him and promised that he will publish it on his website, regardless of what I say; and so I have to say sadly, Richard Moore is a monster. For one thing, he will have the perverse self-destructiveness to follow through on his promise and actually post my words. That suggests my conclusion right there, doesn't it? But before I get on with this grim business, I also promised to list the books he has published, the colleges and universities in which he has taught, the places where he has staged the strange performances that have left him decently obscure, and all the other ploys, maneuvers, and antics that have gone to make his and other literary careers in this past century, now mercifully ended. Perhaps you should skip them for now, browser, and come back to them in the unlikely event that you are still interested in this person. Any attempt to account for Richard Moore's oddities will have to begin with a careful look at the first years---maybe even the first minutes---of his life. There can be no doubt that his most significant early triumph occurred when he successfully resisted his mother's attempts to abort him. To borrow a term from prize fighting, he hung in there. He has celebrated this event more than once in his poems. Among the 58 Petrarchan sonnets that make up his second published book, Word from the Hills, for example, we have number 32, written in the early '60's: Abortions should be legal, let me warn. My mother with me, taking awful chances, doing her best under the circumstances, sickened with drugs, poor dear, and I was born. No diplomat, mother would often mourn my fits of stuttering, my childish trances, my bizarre deeds at school and teen-age dances, wondering what those pills had maimed or torn; and told me the whole story, late one night, me, drawing her on, laying careful traps, each with its subtle bait; each time she'd bite--- and I---who draw my father's slow collapse through lofty sonnets now---what will I write for you, dear mother? Limericks perhaps. Some years after this, in Pygmies and Pyramids, his book of poems in elegiac meter, the long essay-poem, "Progress," concludes:
Why do I fondle such nasty and naughty opinions? My mother
thinks it's because I was dropped
out of her belly too soon,
causing, along with some pills she had taken, irreparable damage.
I was unwanted just then:
father was planning a trip.
Trips, as he loved to explain, were the symbol and acme of progress.
Nowadays birth pills halt
babies that get in its way.
Progress, never again need your enemies grow into manhood.
Sirrah, my fight with you now
started before I was born.
Thirty years after writing the sonnet, Moore finally got around to composing those rhyme-born limericks---23 of them---which appeared in The Edge City Review, fifteen years after his mother's death. I once had a mother named Gertrude who often was tempted to blurt rude remarks at her sons, her rhetorical guns poorly aimed; I'd be dead if they were trued. (and:) Because she once tried to abort me, after birth she sought ever to court me, and that, friends, is why to the day that I die mother's memories ever transport me. ---the sequence begins. (Do those last two lines quoted mean that memories of his mother will enrapture him for the rest of his days or do they mean that the memories literally carry him to thoughts of his own death? I wish Moore's poems could be a little clearer sometimes!) Two-thirds of the way through, in an address to the mother, the sequence reaches what many consider to be its emotional high point: Abortion's a terrible deed; and I, who must ponder your need for that awful upheaval, ask, What was the evil? That you tried to? Or didn't succeed? When he performs that one in public, Moore begins in a solemn funereal tone and for the last question modulates into a crazy mock anguish that leaves his audience undecided whether to laugh or wince. And that last question is one that Moore has had to consider all his life, having gleefully seized upon it as a subject for poems. The original Latin meaning of the very word "consider" was "to observe the stars," yet there were no stars visible inside his mother when he was first confronted with the question. No stars. No daylight either. A human being's first and greatest need is for personal survival: so runs all the best modern wisdom. Moore, the poor fool, has never believed this. The human soul, he feels, has a need greater than that. The human soul needs to believe in order in the universe. Before he or she can wish to stay alive, he or she must believe that there is a world worth living in. This belief, more than mere survival, was what his mother's pills, douches, God knows what, threatened. What had he done at that tender age, before he was even "viable," to merit the attention, the honor, the ignominy, of being aborted? Surely he must have done something! Surely these actions being taken against him were part of the natural moral order of things: were justified! So all his life, being by nature a good sport, an infant, then a boy, then a man, who could play the game and go along with a good joke, he has worked his way with an ironic smile into that role assigned: the misfit, the abortable one. The troll under the bridge, in the characterization of a recent interviewer. (And why not just a plain ordinary monster, I would add?) When you find trolls under your bridge, the sensible thing to do is exterminate them. Moore seems to have been aware of this role into which he had been cast from the beginning. When he first learned to talk, he stuttered, deeply hesitant, perhaps, whether he should say anything at all. He put off learning to read until the last possible moment, in the middle of what people now call middle school. If he didn't belong in life, why bother? This attitude has a curious corollary. The fashionable mental illness for poets, artists, and geniuses of all kinds in the twentieth century has been manic-depression. The sufferer oscillates between an irrationally high and an unendurably low opinion of him- or herself. The despairs of such people plunge them into terrible agony because their demands and expectations for themselves are so grandiose. For them, not to be noticed is an offense not to be tolerated. But there is an opposite kind of person, Moore assures me, whose expectations are so low that not to be noticed is a form of bliss. For them, to be noticed is to run the risk of being seized and thrown out, is to face the possibility of God's Almighty Douche. They are the insupportable abortables, the bright ones of whom the gods are jealous. In self defense, they tend to take themselves very lightly and to have a humorous attitude toward life's problems. Moore tells me that, unlike the manic-depressives, he formed a close and friendly relationship with despair in early childhood and that it has always been, not really an agony at all, but in some sense a comfort. He suspects that such attitudes and a quality of experience like his are far more widespread than is commonly realized. Such attitudes pass unnoticed because the people who have them tend to be "low achievers" seldom heard by their noisier fellows. Success and joy in his own achievements make Moore hyperactive, anxious, sleepless, he claims; when he is in despair, he says he sleeps like a baby. I think these observations will go far to explain why his finest, most considerable poem is a 6000-7000-line epic in trimeter couplets about a mouse.... But I am being interrupted. A scientific rationalist has come storming from among his test tubes and computers and demands: how can Moore's whole character-type and weltanschauung be based on events of which he could not possibly have been conscious and in any case certainly doesn't remember? I myself posed this question to Moore, realizing that it has an easy answer in psychoanalytic theory, for which he professes great scorn. He replied that he has been responding, not to unconscious events, but to their echoes in his early life which have always been a vivid presence to him. He actually lives in the past. Isn't that pitiful? His father, as the lines in elegiac meter quoted above tell us, was the one who wanted him aborted, and his father, who became a prominent presence for many years in Moore's outer and inner life, did not take kindly to the unnecessary second son who had so saucily thwarted his plans. He already had a son and a daughter, already comfortably out of the noisy mess of infancy. What did he need this squalling supernumerary creature for? Their first eye-contact was soon lost in their two memories, but it never ceased echoing in their lives. Throughout his life, ever more consciously in his instinctive search for order in his moral universe, Moore sought to become a creature worthy of his father's wrath. Powered by such odd motives, a relationship grew up between the son and the father more complex, Moore maintains, than any that poor Sigmund Freud ever imagined. No simplicity, no ordinary affection or hostility could survive the sympathy that Moore felt for his father's wish---to use the bureaucratic term---to terminate him with extreme prejudice. And this complexity explains why an early and very perceptive reader of the first book of Moore's "mouse epic" exclaimed that the father, whom the mouse-hero describes in such bitter terms, is the only character that gets or deserves the reader's sympathy. The mouse's brother and sister are nonentities, his mother a sentimental nitwit, and he himself a self-important, world-oblivious romantic unaware of the comedy of his own situation. Only his father understands the realities of the sewer in which this mouse family is doomed to live: "Well mother," he'd say, "in this phase he's in now, he's bringing home daisies and dreams of fresh water. Fresh water. Does he know what life is? It's slaughter, it's swim, fight, kill or be killed. It's keeping your stomach filled." But the rebellious mouse-narrator himself, who actually has discovered a source of fresh water, can only think of his world in entirely egotistical terms as a kind of insufferable womb, from which he longs to escape: I was a sensitive soul. My life in that dark hole offended my delicate taste. With a Civilization's waste I remained unsatisfied; and "Could there be an outside?" I wondered, and watched those massed and sluggish waters creep past and gazed in the dismal distance and dreamed of another existence. Complicating matters further and intensifying our sympathies with the father, is the fact that he has been maimed. While he was out foraging for food for his family---in the line of duty, so to speak--- a rat leaped out of a pail and devoured half of his tail. Though his narrating child immediately turns this event against him--- It was this catastrophic mission that had ruined his disposition--- our warm feelings for him remain and complicate our reaction to his son's lyric dismissal: O, dear father, though doubtless I should praise you since it was my sweet lot by you to be begot, I'm sure it won't amaze you, but O, dear father, somehow I'd rather not. Those who in a spasm of hot enthusiasm thoughtlessly beget us: how soon do they regret us? The unseen drop they gave, the driblet they presented, a millionfold augmented, returns, as from the grave. O father, what made you turn so pale? Was it my long new tail? That's a vaunt at the end, isn't it? Moore tells me that he remembers feeling frightened when he wrote that. Ever since then, he says, when something he has written frightens him, he takes that as a sign that the product is going to prove satisfactory. I must say, this strikes me as a strange view of poets and poetry: the aim, it seems, is to make people uncomfortable. O, I know: Aristotle has that bit about poetry arousing pity and fear. But you can carry ideas like that to extremes. This is third millennium America that we have just entered. Pain killers are what they are selling nowadays. Have I made my point? Have I made it clear that Moore will never be happy until this filthy world, in which he thinks he finds himself, aborts him into oblivion at last? What is the use of such a person? What is the point of such jokes, that leave one uncertain about whether one should laugh or groan? Many readers have complained that this epic, bildungs-roman, farce, cosmic joke---whatever it is---betrays its innocent, uncomplicated beginnings and, forgetting its humble beast-epic origins, turning into a psychological novel in verse, goes on to real horrors with the mouse-hero's growing maturity and disillusionment: educational horrors, marital horrors, literary-philosophical-spiritual horrors and paradoxes, until in the final pages the whole is swallowed up in fantasy, mockery, and dream. But they are wrong: the complexity, the madness, the sickness were there from the beginning, bound and wound up in potentia, like the bowling ball on the bureau ready to roll off and crush the ant on the carpet. In the later books of the epic, the complexities do not appear; they merely exfoliate. Though not published until much later, The Mouse Whole, An Epic, was the first book that Moore actually completed in its present form. Then what did he do? In the 34 years spent, finding a publisher for it, he has devoted his life to explaining it, to expounding the world-view that it embodies in book after book and one explanation after another until finally all of history, his life, his universe have been drawn into the vortex of this sinking Pequod. Explainer after explainer has appeared in various guises: inventions all. And now, as far as this pointless tale has gone, he has invented yet another explainer.... I have served my purpose. I have proved my thesis. Let me expire content, remaining nameless! Return to Richard Moore's home page |