POTW: Marianne Moore

[Reception at Gage and Tollner], 1967, V1973.5.1589; Brooklyn photograph and illustration collection, ARC 202; Brooklyn Historical Society.

On November 28, 1967, a book release party for Brooklyn writer Clay Lancaster was thrown at Gage and Tollner, the hallowed and hoary “oyster and chop house” at 372 Fulton Street.  Brooklyn poetess Marianne Moore wrote the introduction for Lancaster’s publication, Prospect Park Handbook, and is shown in the above photo wearing her trademark tri-cornered hat and presenting the lauded tome to the author.

In the introduction, Moore exalts “Mr. Lancaster’s exact, careful but unstilted writing,” and compares him to Thomas Jefferson because the writer “assists us to be intelligent and to love beauty.”

Moore was a former employee at the Hudson Park branch of the New York Public Library in Greenwich Village, and had once worked as a secretary for library science panjandrum Melvil Dewey.  She lived many years in Brooklyn at 260 Cumberland Street, apartment #9.

A devoted baseball fan, Moore had written a poem about the Brooklyn Dodgers that made the front page of the New York Herald-Tribune on opening day of the 1955 World Series.

“... Another series. Round-tripper Duke at bat,

"Four hundred feet from home-plate"; more like that.

A neat bunt, please; a cloud-breaker, a drive

like Jim Gilliam's great big one. Hope's alive…”

The man in the bowtie smiling at the camera is August Heckscher, the NYC Parks Commissioner.  A former White House Cultural Adviser in the Kennedy administration, Hecksher was an editor at the Herald-Tribune when “Hometown Piece For Messrs. Alston and Reese,” Moore’s Dodgers poem, ran on page one.

Marianne Moore, an iconoclast, lady-about-town, and mystifying independent thinker, also wrote liner notes for I Am the Greatest, a spoken word album recorded by world heavyweight boxer Muhammad Ali, who, like Clay Lancaster, was originally from Kentucky.

Interested in seeing more historic Brooklyn photos from the BHS image collection? Visit our online image gallery, which includes a selection of our images, and visit our new website here.  To search our entire collection of images, archives, maps, and special collections, visit Othmer Library at the Brooklyn Historical Society, Wed-Sat, 1:00-5:00 p.m.

SOURCES

Lancaster, Clay (1967) Prospect Park Handbook. Intro. by Marianne Moore. NY: W.H. Rawls.

Moore, Marianne (1967) The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore.  NY: Macmillan / Viking Press.

Roffman, K. “Women Writers and Their Libraries in the 1920s;” in Institutions of Reading: The Social Life of Libraries in the United States.  Augst, T. & Carpenter, K. (ed.) University of Massachusetts Press, 2007.