Arts and Letters

Remembering Howard Moss, I speak out of nearly fifty years of delight and devotion. He was eighteen when he walked into my life—a boy whose soulful brown eyes seemed entirely at odds with the nervosity of his movements and his quick shifts of attention from this object to that, one topic to another. The objects were books—salmon-colored first editions of Finnegans Wake and of W. H. Auden's Look, Stranger from Faber & Faber; Dylan Thomas's 18 Poems from the Parton Press, a new Virginia Woolf from the Hogarth. These stood on the shelves of the bookshop which, upon my father's death in my freshman year at the University of Michigan, I had opened in the hope that I might support my mother and see myself through school. The topics? God knows… but they were in any case the explorations of two deeply shy people who sensed an instant affinity, but didn't know where to begin. He came from Far Rockaway, he told me. I said I knew the name only as a reference point in Hart Crane's poem The Bridge. This pleased him and perhaps made him realize that I was not a clerk in the shop, but its proprietor, and gave him courage to say that he'd heard that I kept copies of The Daily Worker under the counter. Could he buy one? As I was fetching it, he had time to study an inscribed photograph on the wall.

"You actually know Auden?" he asked.
"A little," I said.

"That was taken right here a few months ago." I showed him a sticky little ashtray I could not bring myself to empty. "Here's what's left of his cigars." Afraid that he was about to tuck the paper under his arm and walk out, that our foot-shuffling interview had somehow become stalled, I rose to the occasion with the boldest proposal I'd ever made to anyone. Would he like to come with me to Lansing to see a modern dance recital?

"What's Lansing?" he asked.
"A town," I told him, "ninety miles north of here."

And so it was that two reasonably vigorous young men who should have been cheering the basketball team through a game against its arch-rival, Purdue, or drinking it up at one of the beer joints downtown, hurtled through the Michigan night in a tin can Ford coupé to watch Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman go leaping like deer over pyramids of painted boxes—and were united in enchantment on the spot.

Odd as it may seem that would-be writers—two adolescents already steeped in literature—should find their deepest aesthetic satisfaction in the emergent disciplines and theatrical aspirations of modern dance, for us it was the truth.

Bennington College was then crucible and center of modern dance and, in separate summers, we both gained fellowships allowing us to live on its campus, to attend classes and rehearsals and, in every way, to observe. At the time, Martha Graham was on the threshold of a phase of her career in which one masterpiece followed another—and we were there to talk with her and study intimately the ways in which ideas became movements, concepts took form as emotions, mythology came alive as drama. Under her influence (if that's not too meager a word for the beauty of a presence that left us love-struck) we made a quantum leap into an understanding of the nature of art that had nothing to do with application, knowledge, or the devices of what is explicable.

Without being quite aware of it, we both, I think, wanted somehow to appropriate some of the magic we witnessed—and so proceeded to write dance dramas in which words were meant to be as unignorable as the action they advanced. The limited success of these experiments was sobering; yet, invigorated by failure, we persisted. My efforts would one day be rewarded by an extended footnote in the documents of modern dance; Howard's were the basis of a lifelong engagement that would lead to the book-length appreciation of George Balanchine on which he was at work when he died.

Over the next few years—like people in different sections of a revolving door—we entered upon graduate study at Harvard, found apartments and our first publishers in New York, and spent summers on the granite shore of Cape Ann in the company of some of the young painters who'd eventually add Abstract Expressionism to the lexicon of art history. When I became an instructor in English at Vassar, the pattern held: two years after I'd joined the faculty, so did he—a development, I sometimes think, based on a plot by the suffragettes who ran the place, to keep me on the campus weekends and not in the clutches of that young Mr. Moss who, rumor had it, was leading me down a garden path that ran from the Cafe Brevoort to the Village Vanguard, from the San Remo to Tony's Trouville, and who seemed to possess a baffling indifference to distinctions between the art of Billie Holliday and Fats Waller and that of Franz Kafka and Eudora Welty.

When, in 1952, Howard became poetry editor of The New Yorker, there was a widespread conviction about the reality of something called "the New Yorker poem"—a kind of slick light verse reflecting the urbanity and satiric disposition of the magazine itself. Under Howard's aegis, this belief persisted, even though poems that might have given it credence were seldom in evidence. Over the next three decades and more, poetry in The New Yorker, year after year, was of a breadth, depth, and variety unapproached by any other periodical in the English-speaking world, including even those journals dedicated exclusively to poetry. At The New Yorker, a three-hundred-line poem was given as close a reading as a cryptic quatrain and, upon acceptance, was paid for at a fee without precedent.

How great a toll Howard's editorial involvement took on his own career must remain unassessed, simply because he himself was never sure of just how far his concentration on the work of others may have reduced attention to his own. That matter aside, he continued to be prolific, producing twelve volumes, and in 1972 became recipient of the National Book Award for his Selected Poems, followed in his later years by a sufficient number of other prestigious awards to make him feel that his reputation as the poetry editor of The New Yorker had not obscured his eminence as a poet in his own right.

If there were a category of poetry called Folksongs from the East Fifties, Howard might well be its eponymous voice. Long before Woody Allen had invented, or revealed, the now familiar character of the paranoiac, hypochondriacal, Jewish intellectual whose turf is Manhattan, Howard was giving exquisite, sometimes hilarious, expression to that personality and adding his own Rhapsody in Blue to the rhythms by which it is both nourished and distracted. To read him as a native New Yorker is to be at once translated to a legendary island that is, at one moment, as desolate as the sad cafés and empty movie houses of Edward Hopper and, in the next moment, as rife with twilight and aquiver with imminence as the photographs of Berenice Abbott.

His wit, the cascade of it, was endless—not of the sort recalled by gags, one-liners, or zingers, but the kind whose source lies in an anarchic sense of humor capable of charging any situation with absurdity. To people who knew him, Howard was funny before he opened his mouth, simply because we knew what he was thinking before he was impelled to announce it. Yet I cannot forbear reporting a moment when—as we were poring over the Sunday Times or staring through the rainy windows of his house in East Hampton—he turned to me with a straight face limned with gloom. "In the piggy bank of years," he said, "you made the greatest deposit."

For those individuals who can keep a precarious step ahead of paranoia and hypochondria, these morbidities are wellsprings of comedy. By an ironic twist, all of Howard's intimations of doom at hand were confirmed when, at the age of twenty-eight, he was victimized by the onslaught of a condition from which he would never be released. This was a recurrent tendency to fall without warning into a dead faint from which he would awaken, sometimes in an emergency ward, sometimes where he had fallen, to find his spectacles smashed, his forehead bloodied, his muscles painfully regaining their resiliency. Scores of examinations, physical and psychogenic, failed to provide a satisfactory diagnosis or indicate a cure. And while the pathology of epilepsy suggested to most people that he was one of those subject to bouts of petit mal, this was never confirmed, partly because his symptoms showed only vague resemblance to the classic patterns of that affliction. Whatever, it provided Howard with all that he ever needed to enlarge his suspicions about the progress of modern medicine. A day came when—after observational procedures that had gone on for years—he was still once more tested by a newly enlisted specialist. When the clinical side of the examination was over, Howard joined the physician in his office for a discussion of what might have been concluded. In the course of talk, the doctor excused himself to check something in his filing cabinet. When his fumbling through the top drawer of the cabinet led to nothing, he opened the second drawer… and produced a huge black rabbit that hopped to a corner of the office and sat on its haunches, staring—at Howard, of course, but not for long, since the object of the rabbit's scrutiny was soon down the stairs and in the first stages of a flight from professional voodoo that would last as long as he lived.

Yet, even in nonstop flight, an ever-widening concern with genius in literature was, day and night, what Howard lived for, and by which he tested the limits of what his own excellence allowed him to grasp.

He leaves us with a poetry as sensitive and generous in its approach and compass as he was himself… a body of criticism (How Proust would have lighted up at his recognitions! How Chekhov would have purred!) profound, exact, and written with an economy natural only to those who know precisely what needs to be said and—with a potent throwaway remark, or the click of an aphorism—when to shut up. His illustrious term at The New Yorker is not likely to be repeated. But whoever assumes his role will have the advantage of a model and a record of unmatched distinction serving to bring the best of American and British poetry to the widest audience it has ever enjoyed. To those who knew and loved him, he leaves the memory of an endearing vulnerability forever daunted by the world's black rabbits… and a perpetually hovering expectation of sweetness and wit never again to be met.