{"id":85310,"date":"2021-10-20T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-10-20T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/chasing-the-man-moth\/"},"modified":"2024-03-22T09:10:46","modified_gmt":"2024-03-22T13:10:46","slug":"chasing-the-man-moth","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/chasing-the-man-moth\/","title":{"rendered":"Chasing the Man-Moth"},"content":{"rendered":"

Poe<\/span>ms haunt long after they are haunted. The most disturbing poem in Elizabeth Bishop\u2019s first book, North & South<\/span> (1946), is \u201cThe Man-Moth\u201d\u2014this meek creature, so withdrawn he lives in storm drain and subway tunnel, embodied a peculiar modern loneliness years before David Reisman published The Lonely Crowd<\/span>. Was the Man-Moth hybrid or monster? No one appears to notice him except the poet; indeed, the city where he lurks seems unpopulated. His existence, as in a fairy tale, is never questioned; but his wretchedness and thwarted longing answer something in the poet without declaring it\u2014the poem was anti-confessional long before confessional poetry was born. It opens,<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Here, above,<\/p>\n

cracks in the buildings are filled with battered moonlight.<\/p>\n

The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat.<\/p>\n

It lies at his feet like a circle for a doll to stand on,<\/p>\n

and he makes an inverted pin, the point magnetized to the moon.<\/p>\n

He does not see the moon; he observes only her vast properties,<\/p>\n

feeling the queer light on his hands, neither warm nor cold,<\/p>\n

of a temperature impossible to record in thermometers.
\n\u00a0<\/p>\n

But when the Man-Moth<\/p>\n

pays his rare, although occasional, visits to the surface,<\/p>\n

the moon looks rather diff<\/span>erent to him.<\/p>\n

Readers curious about this nocturnal specter were directed to a footnote: \u201cNewspaper misprint for \u2018mammoth\u2019 \u201d\u2014even his birth was an accident. Hunting the Man-Moth requires misdirection (shy beast, hard to trap), so the reader has been warned.<\/p>\n

North & South<\/span> was prefaced by a diff<\/span>erent note, \u201cMost of these poems were written, or partly written, before 1942\u201d\u2014unlike poems in most books published not long after V-E<\/span> and V-J<\/span> days, they hadn\u2019t been written in time of war. Bishop\u2019s delicacy marked her honesty, or her wish not to be misinterpreted. Some of the poems dated back to her years at Vassar, from which she graduated in 1934. Decades later, explaining the origin of \u201cThe Man-Moth,\u201d she recalled, \u201cAn oracle spoke from the page of the New York Times<\/span>.\u201d Her biographer Thomas Travisano noted that \u201cdespite diligent research, the actual misprint has yet to be found.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bishop had moved to New York after graduation, staying until a trip to Europe the following year. A search of the Times<\/span> for those pre-war years reveals a possibility. On April 30, 1939, a large illustration of the amusement area at the New York World\u2019s Fair, which opened that day, showed Admiral Byrd\u2019s Penguin Island, the Arctic Girls\u2019 Temple of Ice, a \u201cGreenwich Villagy\u201d artists\u2019 colony, Auto Dodgem, and much else, including the Amphitheatre where Billy Rose\u2019s Aquacade performed. A popular attraction at the Great Lakes Exposition two years before, the Aquacade proved a wild success. The accompanying description promised<\/p>\n

Showgirls that can swim, swimmers that are easy on the eyes. Mermaid ballet, beauty parade, fancy diving, songsters, orchestras. Eleanor Holm, Gertrude Ederle and others. Color, light, fountains\u2014a man.moth show. 40 cents to $1.<\/p>\n

The \u201cman.moth,\u201d then. The Man-Moth.<\/p>\n

Holm, the winner of a gold medal in the backstroke at the 1932 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, had notoriously been booted off<\/span> the 1936 team for becoming drunk at a shipboard cocktail-party on the way to the Berlin games. The ship was named, all too appropriately for drinkers, SS<\/span> Manhattan<\/span>. Ederle was the first woman to swim the English Channel. Johnny Weissmuller (Olympic gold medalist, Tarzan) also appeared, though he went unmentioned. Rose, the most famous entertainment impresario of the day, seduced Holm, whom he married after her divorce, and his.<\/p>\n

The \u201cman.moth\u201d was created by a broken piece of type\u2014the right shoulder of the \u201cm\u201d may have sheared off<\/span> or been worn away. Could Bishop have seen this page? She was at Key West then, not arriving in New York until two months later. Someone might have sent her the article, knowing her taste for the bizarre or off<\/span>beat, like her friend Marianne Moore, who took her own mother to the fair that October \u201cin a mist that became a Victoria Falls of solid rain this afternoon\u201d:<\/p>\n

[Mother] made me think of Scotch coaching-horses that automatically trot forward like water-rats neither fast nor slow\u2014avoiding no puddles and half-closing their eyes as they travel. . . . Finally it seemed so chilly and unreasonable I said, \u201cWe\u2019ll go to the subway. The masks (from the Congo) and the diamond-cutting aren\u2019t anything you can\u2019t imagine or see in some Geographic magazine.\u201d . . . The food, and the pyramids of stuff<\/span>ed pheasants, peacocks and woodcocks, interested us\u2014and the Camembert cheeses looking like aged English muffi<\/span>ns or Assyrian clay tablets.<\/p>\n

The influence on Bishop of Moore\u2019s poems on creatures like the octopus and the jerboa is plain; but \u201cThe Man-Moth\u201d in its peculiar way is Bishop\u2019s declaration of diff<\/span>erence. Extravaganzas like the World\u2019s Fair were not entirely foreign to the younger poet, who in 1935, when she sailed to Europe, had visited L\u2019exposition universelle et internationale<\/span> in Brussels. She remarked at the time that, \u201caside from the wonderful collection of early Northern painting, it seemed to be mostly the dregs of the World\u2019s Fair, including Dillinger in effi<\/span>gy.\u201d That must have been the Chicago World\u2019s Fair of 1933\u201334, where John Dillinger had taken his girlfriend.<\/p>\n

When the 1939 fair opened, Bishop was renting a \u201c$40\/month \u2018garret\u2019 in Greenwich Village,\u201d though most of that year she lived back in Key West. She arrived in the city about July\u00a04, staying for three months. In the middle of July, she\u2019d written her friend Charlotte Russell in Florida, \u201cPlease come and see us and we\u2019ll have some mild form of fun\u2014the World\u2019s Fair, maybe? I haven\u2019t seen it yet.\u201d The fair was on the docket. Bishop returned to Key West on October 26, she thought, putting a question mark in her travel diary. That November, she recorded,<\/p>\n

Last night\u2014I had a long, dreamy[?] conversation with the little gnome, our ex-gardener. It was just getting dark. Up among the stars the little palm trees described [?gleaming\/glowing] curves, like skates\u2014a man went by, whistling, on a bicycle with a hunk of ice tied to the handlebars, glittering like a big blue diamond. We spoke of Life, Love, and the World\u2019s Fair.<\/p>\n

Years afterward she wrote Robert Lowell from Yaddo, \u201cDid you ever get over to Glens Falls when you were here to see the Hyde Collection of paintings? . . . You may even remember the famous Rembrandt Christ that was in the World\u2019s Fair.\u201d She\u2019s referring to Christ with Arms Folded<\/span>, now in the Hyde Collection but lent by Mrs. Hyde to the fair in 1939, when Bishop would have seen it in the exhibition \u201cMasterpieces of Art,\u201d an astonishing show covering twenty-five galleries with over four hundred drawings, prints, and paintings, including nineteen Rembrandts.<\/p>\n

The<\/span> possibility that \u201cThe Man-Moth\u201d was inspired by this particular misprint is all too attractive. The strange wraith might have been exhibited alongside the Seminole Village (\u201cAlligator wrestling, primitive dances\u201d), the Miracle Town of midgets, Nature\u2019s Mistakes (\u201cfrom the two-headed cow to the pig without a ham\u201d), Savoy (\u201cDark-skinned jiggerbugs stepping to Harlem swing\u201d), Strange As It Seems (\u201cNatural wonders from all parts of the world; pigmies, giants, duck-billed Ubangis\u201d), and Dal\u00ed\u2019s Bottom of the Sea (\u201cReal diving girls splash into a surrealist pool and come up with the strangest things\u201d). He would have been perfect for the middlebrow freak show, as the organizers no doubt thought it, that apparently so delighted the crowds. The Times<\/span> trumpeted such features of the fair: \u201cRight this way to the most astounding, . . . most stupendously colossal collection of natural wonders, mystifying marvels, . . . fantastic phenomena and free-hearted fun ever assembled.\u201d Many of the \u201camusements\u201d would now be an off<\/span>ense against public taste.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, it\u2019s impossible for the poem to have been prompted by the Times<\/span> typo of 1939, because three years before the fair opened \u201cThe Man-Moth\u201d was published in the March 1936 issue of Life and Letters To-Day<\/span>. The footnote about the misprint for \u201cmammoth\u201d was there from the start. A quarter-century later, in 1962, Bishop recalled,<\/p>\n

This poem was written in 1935 when I first lived in New York City.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve forgotten what it was that was supposed to be \u201cmammoth.\u201d But the misprint seemed meant for me. An oracle spoke from the page of the New York Times<\/span>, kindly explaining New York City to me, at least for a moment.<\/p>\n

One is off<\/span>ered such oracular statements all the time, but often misses them, gets lazy about writing them out in detail, or the meaning refuses to stay put.<\/p>\n

Rather like any oracle, then\u2014duplicitous. Why my earlier sleight of hand in quoting only a fragment? To show that without crucial information\u2014the prior appearance of the poem, Bishop\u2019s memory of the year she saw the misprint\u2014it would be all too easy to argue that the inspiration had come from the Times<\/span> listing for the fair. The magazine and book versions of the poem are identical, except that the latter has inserted a comma, restored a cedilla to \u201cfacade,\u201d and added three articles and a pronoun (\u201ca,\u201d \u201cthe\u201d [twice], and \u201chis\u201d). The addition of the articles and pronoun came in North & South<\/span>, where Bishop no longer capitalized the first word of every line, a choice afterwards consistent.<\/p>\n

Cou<\/span>ld the poem have been finished in New York in 1935, or did Bishop rough it out there and take it abroad during that first trip to Europe? In one of the spiral notebooks dated 1934\u201336 in her archive at Vassar, there\u2019s a draft of \u201cThe Man-Moth,\u201d though without place or date. The previous page contains an unfinished poem with the lines \u201cOnly the word \u2018save\u2019\/ Lights quickly in our brain\/ Without preliminaries\u201d and \u201cIn every cabin there must be\/ A life-preserver\/ For every passenger.\u201d Bishop would certainly have seen life preservers on childhood boat-trips to Nova Scotia to visit her relatives in Great Village. Indeed, in 1919 her ship, the North Star<\/span>, had run aground on an island off<\/span> the coast, so the passengers, who all safely disembarked, might have been ordered to wear life preservers. It\u2019s nonetheless tempting to imagine, as the poem\u2019s attentions seem immediate, Bishop writing the lines on SS<\/span> K\u00f6nigstein<\/span>, the German freighter on which she sailed to Antwerp in July 1935, paying, as she wrote Marianne Moore, $155 for roundtrip passage.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe third rail<\/span> is almost worth some sort of prose poem. Running along silently, as insincere as poison.\u201d<\/p>\n

This fragment and the incomplete draft of \u201cThe Man-Moth\u201d that follows might have been her farewell to New York City. The Man-Moth scales the buildings in the belief that the \u201cmoon is a small hole at the top of the sky\u201d and that \u201cthis time he will manage\/ to push his small head through that round clean opening.\u201d Alas, \u201che fails, of course, and falls back scared but quite unhurt.\u201d Taking ship for Europe, Bishop was probably seeking not escape but experience\u2014she loved to explore new countries. Perhaps \u201cwhat the Man-Moth fears most he must do\u201d does not apply to her; but her often expressed lack of self-confidence mirrors the inner life of the woebegone figure of tunnel and drain. Such a lonely, morose outsider, like Bishop herself, couldn\u2019t find his place\u2014to use Dickens\u2019s phrase, he seemed to \u201cretire into himself.\u201d Perhaps this presses the meaning too hard; but the symbols are there to press, like the wordplay embedded in \u201clife-preserver.\u201d Ambiguity is not innocence.<\/p>\n

Bis<\/span>hop\u2019s later books included Questions of Travel<\/span> (1965) and Geography <\/span>III<\/span> (1976). She had so many addresses over the years, she seemed to inhabit a highly detailed anywhere that was nowhere, \u201calways a sort of a guest,\u201d as she once said in an interview. After she bought a house in Key West in 1938, her life largely shifted between there and New York, ending only when she moved to Brazil in 1951. Though other poems in her notebook before and after the draft of \u201cThe Man-Moth\u201d are certainly New York poems (the first of \u201cThree Poems,\u201d of which there were but two, and \u201cConey Island\u201d), poets when abroad are often moved to write of home. Such speculation falls well short of proof.<\/p>\n

The New York of her poem is imaginary, the best address of all. The final stanzas describe the Man-Moth\u2019s home in \u201cpale subways of cement,\u201d where<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 He flits,<\/p>\n

he flutters, and cannot get aboard the silent trains<\/p>\n

fast enough to suit him. The doors close swiftly.<\/p>\n

The Man-Moth always seats himself facing the wrong way<\/p>\n

and the train starts at once at its full, terrible speed,<\/p>\n

without a shift in gears or a gradation of any sort.<\/p>\n

This must be a fantasy New York, because no subway train ever started at full speed. The idea of the train remaining silent would not have occurred to any New Yorker used to the screech of steel wheels on steel tracks. The \u201cartificial tunnels\u201d through which he\u2019s carried each night seem real enough: \u201cHe does not dare look out the window,\/ for the third rail, the unbroken draught of poison,\/ runs there beside him.\u201d (Bishop\u2014or the Man-Moth\u2014may not have known that you can\u2019t see the third rail from inside the car.) Could she have merged memories of New York with those of her stay in Paris, the location of some poems in North\u00a0& South<\/span>? Probably not. The M\u00e9tro<\/span> lines have a third rail, but the famously quiet rubber-tired cars were not introduced until the 1950s.<\/p>\n

The third rail might be the true genesis of \u201cThe Man-Moth,\u201d however. Sometime after July 25, 1934, Bishop wrote in her travel journal, \u201cThe third rail<\/span> is almost worth some sort of prose poem. Running along silently, as insincere as poison.\u201d She was then not long out of Vassar and a new resident of New York City. Whether she saw the \u201cman-moth\u201d typo earlier or later, at some point she combined the ideas.<\/p>\n

Bishop\u2019s version of the origin of the poem seems vivid, all those years afterward, especially that the Man-Moth was born of a misprint for \u201cmammoth.\u201d Still, perhaps instead she\u2019d seen one of many magazine ads for Larvex, a mothproofing spray:<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t fool around with Old Man Moth. You can\u2019t lick him by superficial methods. It\u2019s your wool<\/span> he is after, and if you treat the wool itself with Larvex, he is harmless and powerless. . . . Ask your druggist to show you Larvex. He will tell you it is a scientific triumph and there is nothing else like it.<\/p>\n

(Woman\u2019s Home Companion<\/span>, May 1934.)<\/p>\n

Nothing else like it<\/span>! That might describe the Man-Moth. Decades later, a poet may not remember precisely where, when, or why a poem was written. Bishop almost certainly would have been amused by the Macy\u2019s ad printed in the Times<\/span> (June 17, 1936) months after the poem was published and a week after she returned to New York from that long initial trip to Europe: \u201cThen it will take a G<\/span>-man moth or a Houdini piece of dust to work its way into the garment bag in this ensemble.\u201d<\/p>\n

The hyphen in Man-Moth may be an artifact of the word\u2019s position, divided at the edge of a newspaper column (\u201cman-\/moth mass meeting,\u201d Brooklyn Daily Eagle<\/span>, April 6, 1932,\u201c54 Captains Sign Up for Patriot Drive\u201d), though \u201cmanmoth\u201d or \u201cman moth\u201d ought to have served well enough (\u201ca man moth rally in Madison Square Garden,\u201d Canandaigua [NY<\/span>] Daily Messenger<\/span>, October 1, 1936, \u201cBallot Battle Spurred Today By Activities\u201d). There may have been no typo at all, as the two ads for mothproofing show; but, if typo it was, \u201cmammoth\u201d could have been transformed in a number of ways. The error might have been (a) a simple slip in typing, though on a Linotype keyboard \u201cm\u201d and \u201cn\u201d are a good distance apart, not adjacent as on the keyboard of a typewriter. Perhaps it was (b) a misreading by the Linotype operator\u2014or, worse, (c) a mistake in the copy he was given. Last, the lowercase \u201cm\u201d might have been caused by (d) a broken piece of type. The deformity could also have been due to a flaw in the brass matrix from which the piece of lead type was cast.<\/p>\n

The<\/span> typos \u201cmanmoth,\u201d \u201cman-moth,\u201d or \u201cman moth\u201d are not hard to discover in the digital archives of The<\/span> New York Times<\/span> or on sites like ProQuest and Newspapers.com. Though the Times<\/span> Article Archive does not search display or classified ads, TimesMachine and ProQuest Historical Newspapers do. The latter is more sensitive, producing two sightings of the word in the Times<\/span> for 1935 and 1936. Both, unfortunately, come too late. The first appeared after Bishop had departed for Europe: \u201ctwo ma:nmoth new red signs\u201d (\u201cGiving Shape to \u2018Jumbo,\u2019 \u201d November 3, 1935). Part of the left upstroke of the \u201cm\u201d is missing, enough that a reader might have seen a Man-Moth there. The second lies in the classified ads of June\u00a010, 1936, probably the day she returned from her long stay abroad:<\/p>\n

solicitors<\/span>, 3, experienced journal and special edition men for Manmoth World Labor Athletic Carnival; commission. Apply 152 West 42d, Room 1222.<\/p>\n

There was indeed an anti-Nazi World Labor Athletic Carnival that August on Randall\u2019s Island in the East River, this in protest against the Olympics held that year under the watchful eye of Adolf Hitler.<\/p>\n

If neither can be the typo for \u201cmammoth\u201d that revealed New York to the young Bishop, perhaps one or the other comes close to what she saw. There\u2019s another possibility. A month before she graduated, \u201cold man moth\u201d appears in an ad for \u201csafety clothes closets\u201d in Vassar\u2019s local paper, the Poughkeepsie Eagle-News<\/span> (May\u00a04, 1934): \u201cno entrance can be made by old man moth.\u201d It\u2019s not the Times<\/span>, of course, and not a typo for \u201cmammoth.\u201d That\u2019s as near as I can come to what could have sparked the poem.<\/p>\n

If the typo does exist in the Times<\/span>, someone will have to search a hard copy of each issue from Bishop\u2019s arrival in New York in 1934 until her departure for Europe a year later. That might not be enough. The Times<\/span>, like many papers, printed a number of editions each day; and stories might be added, subtracted, or altered from one edition to another. The digital archives, as with microfilm before them, have saved only the Late City Edition. Therefore articles referred to in secondary sources sometimes simply cannot be found.<\/p>\n

Bishop might have thought, had she seen the cluster of appearances of \u201cman-moth\u201d in the years immediately after the poem was written, that the \u201cMan-Moth\u201d was everywhere. The quest for the true \u201cman-moth\u201d continues, but inspiration may arrive on many wings. Had Bishop never spied the typo in the Times<\/span>, she might have written the poem after reading Love\u2019s Labour\u2019s Lost<\/span>:<\/p>\n

Armado: I confess both: they are both the varnish of a complete man.<\/p>\n

Moth: Then I am sure you know how much the gross sum of deuce-ace amounts to.<\/p>\n

A \u201ccomplete man.\/ Moth.\u201d Just so.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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