Marianne Moore, "Henry James as a Characteristic American"; Elizabeth Bishop, "Efforts of Affection: A Memoir of Marianne Moore"

A NICE SIDE benefit of Rachel Cohen's A Chance Meeting is picking up some excellent suggestions for further reading. Both of these items showed up in her chapter on Moore and Bishop.

I think only Moore could get away with calling the child of wealth and nearly-lifelong expatriate Henry James, Jr., a "characteristic American," but she does. The argument, I think, is that James studied what made Americans American with a singular assiduity and that his longtime residence in Europe and England made a better lab, so to speak, than the USA itself, since American-ness could be better studied in a contrasting environment. 

"Argument" may be too blunt a word, though, since the essay, like many of Moore's poems, is an intricate construction--a monkey puzzle tree?--of quotations from James, mainly from his non-fiction, that is meant more for contemplation than for the drawing of conclusions.

"Henry James as a Characteristic American" was published by Hound & Horn in the issue for April/May 1934, which is right around the time Bishop first met Moore. Bishop, as an undergraduate at Vassar already a great admirer of Moore, likely read it, which is why it comes up in Cohen's chapter. "Efforts of Affection" is Bishop's account of that first meeting and the long friendship that grew from it. 

It's beautiful--graceful, generous, wise, loving. 

Odd and maybe a little sad that it never appeared in Bishop's lifetime. She worked on it over the last ten years of her life, and it seems fully developed to me, but it was not published until 1983, four years after Bishop's death, in Vanity Fair. Did she not think it was quite done? She was famous for holding things back from publication until she absolutely positively thought they were ready. I'm glad someone decided it was worth publishing and that it was included in Bishop's Collected Prose.