E. E. Cummings

by Susan Cheever

  Once he started experimenting, Cummings never stopped. In one poem he tried reverse lettering: “I will wade out / srewolf gninrub ni depeets era shgiht ym llit [Till my thighs are steeped in burning flowers].” What began with Pound deepened and doubled. At the same time, Cummings fell in love with the idea that became his trademark—the lowercase i. Perhaps he first saw it in the notes written by Sam Ward, the Yankee caretaker at Joy Farm. At any rate, the idea of an unassuming but very special lowercase i appealed to him for many reasons. As Kennedy notes, Cummings was smaller than his father, who was definitely an Important, Imposing capital letter. By using the lowercase i he was able to rebel, break the rules, adopt the Yankee humility of someone his family depended on, and present himself as playful rather than pompous. During the first ten years of his career, Cummings experimented with both upper- and lowercase in his own name and with all kinds of forms and punctuation. Not until the production of his play Him at the Provincetown Playhouse did he use the form of his name that has come to characterize everything he stood for—e. e. cummings.

  At the same time, for all his playfulness and rule breaking, Cummings wanted his word taken seriously. In a letter to the poet and literary critic John Malcolm Brinnin, he explained that the lowercasing of his name was part of his work, not something he wanted every time his name was used. He didn’t, he explained to Brinnin, want to be in any way “tricksy.” When the question of his lowercase name came up, Cummings always answered that it was a poetic device, not some kind of gimmick he had embraced. In the 1950s, when Hugh Van Dusen wrote him to ask about the upper- and lowercasing of his name, Cummings replied charmingly on a postcard:

  perhaps(who knows?)the journalistic “image”

  behind that lower case signature myth was

  of some publicitymad smartalec who used “a

  small I” to call attention to himself

  Then signed his name with upper case capitals.

  The most dramatic blowup during his more corporeal rebellion—his struggle with his father—happened after the discovery of Edward Cummings’s car. When he finally returned home to Cambridge, Estlin found his father in full ministerial fig, greeting him at the door in pajamas with a sermon. Estlin taunted his father, suggesting that he could kick his only son out of the house. Edward burst into tears.

  Cummings the well-behaved boy, the shy, slight mama’s boy, the do-gooder and good-grade getter, became an angry young man. This anger, this shimmering energy of rage, characterized much of his greatness as he left his golden youth behind and struck out to places where there were fewer rules and more rebellion. Cummings’s satirical poems, many of which are his greatest, seem to be thrown off by a great fire of fury at all authority and all established rules and customs. Yes, what happened with his father that night was partly teenaged rebellion, the pushing away of a distinguished parent so that Cummings could find his own identity. Still, he was an angry man and an angry poet; where did all that anger come from? Perhaps some of it came from having a slight, feminine body and a receptive character in a world of burly, overbearing men. Perhaps some of it floated up from the depths of Silver Lake, where a young man wrestled his beloved dog underwater on a summer afternoon a long time before.

  3

  Harvard

  The Harvard University that Estlin Cummings entered in September 1911 was a place in the grip of enormous, conservative, regressive change. Harvard was the oldest and most prestigious college in the United States, and students traveled from all over the country and all over the world to use the observatory and science labs and to take courses with famous professors like George Kittredge on Shakespeare and LeBaron Briggs on poetry. Cummings was not like most of his classmates, who came by train or by one of the newfangled cars.

  To get to college on his first day of classes, Cummings took a short stroll the few blocks down Irving Street past Memorial Hall to Harvard Yard. After school he would return to his childhood home on Irving Street for the formal family dinner with his father, the Reverend Edward Cummings, at the head of the table. He slept at home under the eagle eyes of his family, had breakfast as always in the dining room, and then left for school. Even as he sat in his freshman classes, his mother’s apron strings were firmly tied to him.

  Until 1909, the old Harvard had been run with the aristocratic liberal rigor of Charles William Eliot, who had been its president for forty years. Eliot was a populist democrat in an elitist world who believed that any man could be educated by reading a five-foot shelf of classics—books that became the Harvard Classics. Eliot was so liberal that he had overseen the creation of Radcliffe College from what previously had been the Harvard Annex for women. Radcliffe women had their own classrooms, of course; women weren’t permitted in Harvard classes until 1943. Eliot had brought Harvard from being a provincial school to being a beacon of educational excellence for the entire country.

  When Cummings got to Harvard two years after Eliot stepped down, the institution was slowly and painfully giving way to what would become the new Harvard under the conservative, anti-Semitic, racist aegis of A. Lawrence Lowell, a Brahmin’s Brahmin who ran Harvard College for the next twenty-four years. Lowell “represented the conservative and exclusionary wing of the Protestant upper class as surely as Eliot represented its liberal democratic wing,” writes Jerome Karabel. He was also a brilliant fund-raiser.

  Under President Lowell, the university would thrive and prosper when it came to money, enrollment, and buildings. Its endowment would go from $23 million to $123 million, its student body would double from four thousand to eight thousand, and many of the buildings that identify the Harvard campus today—the Widener Library, the Memorial Chapel—were built. Even as the early years of Lowell’s tenure were the years when the physical foundation was laid for Harvard to become Harvard, they were also the years when the foundation was laid for E. E. Cummings, Harvard B. A., M.A., to become the modernist poet e. e. cummings.

  Under Lowell, the university would join the national mood of intolerance: for Jews, for homosexuals, and for women. President Lowell was distressed when the percentage of Jews in the 1922 graduating class rose to 22 from a genteel 7 in 1907. Lowell believed that democracy and universities should be homogeneous—“homogeneous” meaning that they should be peopled by white Protestant men. Lowell knew that his old-fashioned convictions would not be enough to change university policy or sway the disturbingly liberal Board of Overseers. Instead he argued, first, that having a class that was 22 percent Jewish hurt Harvard’s applicant pool, because the right kind of parents didn’t want to send their children to a college with so many Jews.

  President Lowell also argued that admitting so many Jews might add to anti-Semitism; his stated theory was that the more Jewish students there were at Harvard, the greater the prejudice against them might be. No Jews, no anti-Semitism! “The anti-Semitic feeling among the students is increasing, and it grows in proportion to the increase in the number of Jews. If their number should become forty per cent of the student body, the race feeling would become intense,” he wrote. President Lowell decided that Harvard should institute a 15 percent quota system for admitting Jewish students. He was also against letting African-American students live in the freshman dorms, where, beginning in 1915, all freshmen were required to live. This confused policy was quickly abolished. His policy regarding Jewish students was not so easy to resolve.

  Lowell received a great deal of public criticism for his suggestion of a quota, particularly in the Boston press. Later, his rectitude was tested when he served on a three-member commission appointed by Massachusetts Governor Alvan Fuller to review the conviction of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian anarchists and shoemakers who had been tried for murder and, through a series of legal injustices, sentenced to death. Lowell’s commission found that Sacco and Vanzetti had been justly tried and sentenced. His role in sending Sacco and Vanzetti to their execution on August 23, 1927, is one of the ways he lives in history.

&nbs
p; In response to Lowell’s quota suggestion, Harvard’s overseers appointed a thirteen-member committee, which included three Jews, to study the university’s “Jewish problem.” The committee rejected a Jewish quota but agreed that “geographic diversity” in the student body was desirable. At the same time the theoretically defeated President Lowell changed the application requirements to include a photograph and, if possible, an interview. As students began being admitted from the western and midwestern states, the student body became once again predominantly Anglo-Saxon. By the time Lowell retired in 1933, Jewish students constituted less than 10 percent of the Harvard student body.

  Of course, during these decades of discussion about application policies for Jewish students and African-American students there was no discussion of a group that was even more definitely barred from the precincts of the country’s most prestigious university—women. During the years when Cummings was at Harvard, in fact, women did not even have the vote. Ever since Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott convened the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, they had been campaigning. In 1914, by which time women had become one fifth of the American work force, a suffragette named Alice Paul pushed the movement into more militant tactics, which were brutally repelled with the consent of President Woodrow Wilson. Women were stripped and jailed, locked in solitary, and starved—all for the sin of demonstrating on behalf of women having the vote.

  Lowell was not alone in his general intolerance or his anti-Semitism in particular. The freshman E. E. Cummings’s favorite professor, Theodore Miller—his first Greek instructor and later a close friend—took a job at Princeton in Cummings’s third year at Harvard. Miller visited Joy Farm in the summer and introduced Cummings to a world of poetry—Shelley, Keats, Sappho—that the young New Englander had not read. It was through Miller that Cummings discovered Greek literature as well as the Greek restaurants of Boston; it was under Miller’s tutelage that he first started working on the art of translation and discovered the fragments of Sappho that appear in different patterns on the page. Miller directed Cummings to a letter from Keats that became a credo for the young poet: “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination.”

  Yet even Dory Miller was immersed in and influenced by the repulsive anti-Semitic environment of this country at the turn of the century. After he went south to teach at Princeton, Miller wrote Cummings that he was glad to have moved, because at Harvard he had to teach poetry with students like Cummings “sitting next to some little rough-neck Irish Catholic or Polish Jew.” Miller, who had been his mentor in his early years at Harvard, came to represent parts of the university that Cummings despised. There was accepted anti-Semitism in education and accepted anti-Semitism in literature. The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton’s best-selling 1905 novel, features a slimy Jewish character named Simon Rosedale who is described as having the unattractive characteristics of his race. In The Age of Innocence, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1921, Wharton deploys the same character in the form of Julius Beaufort. Although Cummings was disturbed by anti-Semitism at Harvard and in Cambridge, and this was one of the reasons he left, later in his own career the charge of anti-Semitism would be leveled at him and his work.

  Another group that drew Lowell’s furious drive for homogeneity was homosexuals. A purge of homosexuals on the Harvard campus was carried out when Lowell convened a secret tribunal that interviewed thirty students and expelled the ones accused. At a time when homosexuality was illegal in many states, it was so condemned that few people were courageous enough to admit to it. In those days, men like Cummings’s Uncle George, for instance, were “unmarried” or “perennial bachelors,” as if even homosexuality had to be defined in relation to heterosexual marriage.

  Cummings himself certainly had bisexual yearnings—yearnings that were so unthinkable as to be entirely suppressed. Although he dutifully wrote poems to women, the great devotions of his early life were to men—to his Harvard friends S. Foster Damon and Scofield Thayer and especially to the tall, handsome James Sibley Watson Jr., a senior from a wealthy Rochester, New York, family who with his wife, Hildegarde, would become Cummings’s lifelong patron and friend. Watson was not a poet, and he reminded Cummings sometimes of Edward Cummings. As Hildegarde reported in her memoir, The Edge of the Woods, when she met him Watson was already thrillingly scandalous in his hometown: “He is interested in rather depraved, even degenerate literature—reads Baudelaire, you know, that sort of thing,” she was told before they met. With his small mustache and dark eyes, his fiancée noted, he looked like someone from another era. During the course of dozens of wildly drunken evenings, these men seem to have become physically as well as emotionally close to each other. “Homosexual feelings toward Watson,” Cummings wrote in his journals. “time we drove fr. Boston–NY all night …”

  Harvard was at a crossroads during Cummings’s five years there, and so was Cummings. When he entered the college, he was younger than most of the freshmen—sixteen—and a slight 5′8″ and looked even slighter standing next to his bulky father, who was more than six feet tall. A blond with refined, narrow features, he was painfully self-conscious about his body and his persistent acne. In public he often hid behind a newspaper. Because he commuted from home, he joined none of the clubs or fraternities that characterize most Harvard students’ time in the Yard.

  At the same time his writing lost its conscientious, conventional pleasingness and began to lurch and jump with a manic, angry energy. By the end of his freshman year he had found his intellectual soul mates and was publishing poetry in both The Harvard Monthly, which would be his home as a poet, and The Harvard Advocate.

  At the Monthly, Cummings met S. Foster Damon, from Newton, Massachusetts, who edited the magazine. Damon took it upon himself to introduce the provincial Cummings to the world of the new art, taking him to the International Exhibition of Modern Art when it arrived in Boston in 1913. Known as the Armory Show because it opened at the New York City 69th Regiment Armory, it already had scandalized art lovers everywhere it went. It included 1,250 works by many emphatically nonrepresentational painters, such as Paul Gauguin and Henri Matisse. Cubism, with its effort to represent different points of view, was at the heart of the show. Cummings was thrilled and changed. At the center of the controversy was Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2. The Duchamp painting tries to show actual movement: instead of taking a moment from life and making it static on the canvas, Duchamp—with many of the goals that were still embryonic in Cummings’s young imagination—decided to represent a whole series of moments in a series of modernistic forms descending from the upper-left to the lower-right corner of the canvas. A poem could do the same thing. “Practically everything I know about painting and poetry came from Damon,” Cummings said later.

  Cummings became a senior in the fall of 1914. Two years after he had first attended a Harvard College class, he was allowed to move out of the house in which he had been born and into a dormitory at Harvard Yard with his friends from the Monthly. His letter of acceptance to The Harvard Monthly had come from Scofield Thayer, a dapper, flamboyant figure on the Harvard campus, who was to become Cummings’s close friend and who would have an incalculable effect on his personal and professional lives. Thayer was the handsome, dashing scion of a wealthy, distinguished Worcester, Massachusetts, family who had made their fortune in wool. His uncle Ernest had written the famous poem “Casey at the Bat.”

  Another friend, John Dos Passos, a social radical with a stormy background—he was the illegitimate son of a Chicago lawyer by his mistress, whom he later married—was to become one of the leading novelists of the 1920s with his U.S.A. trilogy. Dark, with protuberant eyes behind thick glasses, “Dos” also published in the Monthly, and he and Cummings found themselves sitting together in class. Then there was Stewart Mitchell, who was nicknamed “the Great Auk” because of his hatchet face.

  Delighted with his independence as a senior, Cummings de
corated his room with china elephants and Krazy Kat comic strips. He took full advantage of having his time to himself, especially the time after dark. With his gang of friends, he spent most nights in the fleshpots of Boston, where they drank, cuddled with women of questionable reputation, listened to jazz and ragtime, and danced silly dances like the turkey trot, standing on their toes and flapping their arms to the rhythms of music as unlike the music played in the parlor at 104 Irving Street as anyone could possibly imagine.

  Now, liberated for the first time in his life from the Cummings schedule and the Cummings autocrat at the dinner table and the Cummings mother and the Cummings way of life, Estlin Cummings began to be angry, rebellious, rule-breaking, and provocative. Formerly neatly dressed, he wore dirty clothes and forgot to shave. His behavior changed from that of a rule follower and believer in the Unitarian Church and all its puritanical precepts, as embodied in his powerful, hulking father, to being a trickster, a Loki, a character like the poetic coyote, the character who was always working below the surface to challenge authority and blow up the foundations of the comfortable world. His experiences as a boy, after the death of Rex and with his overwhelmingly excellent father, may have laid the groundwork for his anger. At Harvard he grew into it and became confident. He wasn’t just another young man striking out against his powerful father. He was a new man, an archetypal questioner, and with this newness would come a different kind of poetry. He began to love anything he could do that was truly original in poetry, truly first.

  Now on his trips to Boston, he focused on getting into trouble with women. He haunted the Old Howard, a burlesque theater and strip club whose name never would have been mentioned at 104 Irving Street, and he had fallen in love collectively with the young girls who danced across the stage in increasingly daring states of undress. Begun as a church and then, in the nineteenth century, transformed into a serious theater, the Howard Athenaeum, the Old Howard in Boston’s Scollay Square was already famous for its latest incarnation as the favorite of randy Harvard undergraduates. Cummings adored its vaudevillian stew of dancing, music, comedy, feathered fans, and female nudity. The Old Howard hosted the greats—Fanny Brice, Gypsy Rose Lee, Sophie Tucker—interspersed with comedians and acts like the Kouta-Kouta dancers. There were plenty of broad jokes and plenty of broads. “Would you hit a woman with a child?” one of the Old Howard tramps asked another one onstage. “No, I would hit her with a brick!” answered the second tramp. This joke, created by grammatic modification, inspired Cummings, who began switching out parts of speech and purposefully misplacing modifiers in his poems. Later he said that this joke was the basis of his mature style as a poet.