Reading is often as instinctual an activity as eating. Just as we sometimes yearn for squash or squid, we are sometimes in the mood for Henry James and other times want Elmore Leonard. We have Beach Reads, which is not necessarily the same thing as Summer Reading, and what we read on a train might not be what we would read on a plane. We have Guilty Pleasures (oh, Judith Krantz, you dirty girl) and Important Reading (will I ever finish Proust?) and are often shuffling among several books— like tending a garden, our Biography goes here, our Poetry over there. We ask our friends what they are reading and look at best seller lists and find bookstores where the staff members are not just clerks but readers themselves, eager to tell us what we must read.
Appalled by all we have not read, keen on getting into literary shape, we turn to the great writers of the past. What did they read, how did they get so smart? This evidence is not always easy to uncover. Joyce, in his quest to write the most impenetrable novel(s) of all time, neglected to compose essays on Sterne, Melville, or whoever might have given him pleasure or guidance. In her letters, Elizabeth Bishop gives ample account of her more than ample reading, yet the only prose she composed on another poet was about her friend and mentor, Marianne Moore, more of a profile (and what a profile!) than an analysis.
Miss Moore, thankfully, did give us something of a bibliography. The bad news is that her Predilections is not currently in print, but we with so many appetites for books, always in search of new recipes, shall not be discouraged by such a small obstruction. The rewards of hunting down the book are many, beginning with the very title. When we have so many books called Complete Prose, (including the posthumous edition The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore) it is edifying to have Moore’s Predilections, a word characteristic of her work: Latinate, recondite, and absolutely correct. “We must have the courage of our peculiarities,” she writes in a piece called “Feeling and Precision.”
There is no shortage of acclaim, nor should there be, for Miss Moore’s body of poetry. However, I do not think there is a general recognition of her achievement in prose. It may not be as significant (not as radical) as what she did in verse, but it is significantly enchanting. What I loved from the first moment I picked up Predilections was the consistent (persistent?) sense of enthusiasm Miss Moore had for her job, reviewing.