Another favorite haunt was Healey’s Palace, memorialized in one of the poems Cummings wrote in LeBaron Briggs’s class in pell-mell tetrameter rhyme with conventional punctuation. It’s a little-known poem, but it’s a lovely picture of that time in his life and it perfectly fits content to form in a way that came to be a Cummings trademark.
In Healey’s Palace I was sitting—
Joe at the ivories, Irene spitting
Rag into the stinking dizzy
Misbegotten hall, while Lizzie,
Like a she-demon in a rift
Of Hell-smoke, toured the booths, half-piffed.
I saw two rah-rahs—caps, soft shirts,
Match-legs, the kind of face that hurts,
The walk that makes death sweat—Ted Gore
And Alec Ross; they had that whore
Mary between them. Don’t know which,
One looked; and May said: “The old bitch
Lulu, as I’m a virgin, boys!”
And I yelled back over the noise:
“Did that three-legged baby croak
That you got off the salesman-bloke?”
The beer glass missed. It broke instead
On old man Davenport’s bald head.
I picked a platter up, one-handed.
Right on her new straw lid it landed.
Cheest, what a crash!
Before you knew,
Ted slipped the management a new
Crisp five, and everyone sat down
But May, that said I’d spoiled her gown,
And me, that blubbered on her shoulder,
And kissed her shiny nose, and told her
I didn’t mean to smash her…Crowst,
But I was beautifully soused!
I think Al called me “good old sport,”
And three smokes lugged out Davenport.
His angry rebellion also had an adolescent side. Everything his parents disapproved of, everything that Cambridge society disapproved of, from drinking to sex to Jews to foreigners, was what the young Cummings set out to embrace. “I led a double life,” he wrote about his last year at Harvard. “getting drunk and feeling up girls but lying about this to my father and taking his money all the time.”
The world was changing almost as fast as he was. During the summer after his junior year, while he was still living at home on Irving Street, on June 28, 1914, Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife were assassinated in Sarajevo, setting off a series of confrontations that led to the German declaration of war on Russia on August 1 and on France on August 3 and finally the British declaration of war against Germany on August 4. In literature there were the old world—the poet Joyce Kilmer’s sentimental poem “Trees”—and the new world: James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), with its scathing indictment of unjust authority.
Authority everywhere was crumbling, and nowhere more than at 104 Irving Street. As Cummings’s world began to open out in 1915, he made new friends and saw the paintings and read the works that would push his own work forward. In this year of freedom, Cummings, Thayer, Dos, and a few other friends formed the Harvard Poetry Society; they held meetings every few weeks, read each other’s poems out loud, and invited an occasional speaker to come to Harvard and talk about poetry. Even Amy Lowell, President Lowell’s renegade sister, came, smoking cigars and getting very cranky onstage when she was asked what she did when she didn’t have anything to write about.
In June of his senior year, Cummings created a manifesto for his new, experimental world in a term paper for his composition professor, LeBaron Briggs, titled “The New Art.” It was a spring on the brink of a world that would change forever, and Cummings both consciously and unconsciously was thrilled. As President Woodrow Wilson desperately tried to avoid entering the war between Germany and Britain and France, writing a series of notes demanding an apology for the sinking of the unarmed British passenger ship Lusitania, Cummings submitted his essay to be an oral presentation at the June commencement exercises in Sanders Theatre. On June 24, 1915, he delivered it, alongside the traditional commencement orations, to the somewhat bemused crowd of graduates, parents, and visitors.
The new art, Cummings explained to his august audience, was happening in painting (he used Cézanne and van Gogh as examples), in music (he pointed to Debussy and Satie), and of course in poetry. As examples of the new art in poetry, he used Amy Lowell, and with a lascivious flourish he read out Lowell’s deeply sensual lines:
Why do the lilies goggle their tongues at me
When I pluck them;
And writhe, and twist,
And strangle themselves against my fingers,
So that I can hardly weave the garland
For your hair?
“Is that our president’s sister’s poetry he is quoting?” hissed one of the Cambridge ladies in the audience. “Well, I think it is an insult to our president!” According to the class notes, President Lowell kept his face immobile, but flushed a deep brick red. There were stirrings of protest in the audience, and the next day one of the Boston newspapers ran the delicious headline HARVARD ORATOR CALLS PRESIDENT’S SISTER ABNORMAL. Other examples of the new art were a second poem by Lowell, a sonnet by Donald Evans, and twenty lines from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, beginning with the spaced-out “A Sound”: “Elephant beaten with candy and little pops and chews all bolts and reckless reckless rats, this is this.”
Cummings was deadly serious about the new art, but his audience was largely outraged or amused. They were used to seeing paintings that represented the objects being painted, hearing music based on time-honored melodies, and reading poetry written in formal lines and stanzas, with the antique language of their beloved Longfellow or Emerson. Cummings had been deeply influenced by the man who had pulled off the trick of being a friend and mentor to both the experimental Cummings and his less-than-beloved colleague and classmate the experimental Tom Eliot. Ezra Pound was already famous for his help in encouraging and publishing James Joyce and Robert Frost. According to Matthew J. Bruccoli’s Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame, a later beneficiary, Ernest Hemingway, would write about Pound’s epic, notorious generosity to other writers: “He defends [his friends] when they are attacked, he gets them into magazines and out of jail. He loans them money … He writes articles about them. He introduces them to wealthy women. He gets publishers to take their books. He sits up all night with them when they claim to be dying … He advances them hospital expenses and dissuades them from suicide.” Pound, who would later require many of these services himself from his own generous friends, was living in Europe; but Foster Damon had showed Cummings his masterful, groundbreaking poem “The Return,” written in 1913. As well as its experiments in language, the poem also uses the metaphor of hunting and hunters, which Cummings would soon use himself. The use of sounds to convey meaning, of form on the page to telegraph an emotion, of capital letters to underline importance—these were things that Cummings had somehow been searching for. “The Return,” he wrote, “gave me [the rudiments] of my writing style.”
See, they return; ah, see the tentative
Movements, and the slow feet,
The trouble in the pace and the uncertain
Wavering!
See, they return, one, and by one,
With fear, as half-awakened;
As if the snow should hesitate
And murmur in the wind,
and half turn back;
These were the “Wingéd-with-Awe,”
inviolable.
Gods of the wingèd shoe!
With them the silver hounds,
sniffing the trace of air!
Haie! Haie!
These were the swift to harry;
These the keen-scented;
These were the souls of blood.
Slow on the leash,
pallid the leash-men!
Before he absorbed Pound, Cummings was writing well-behaved nature poems that leaned on Shakespeare and
Wordsworth. A typical sonnet is one of the conventional poems published in Eight Harvard Poets:
this is the garden: colours come and go,
frail azures fluttering from night’s outer wing
strong silent greens serenely lingering,
absolute lights like baths of golden snow.
Robert Frost later wrote in “The Figure a Poem Makes” that “like a piece of ice on a hot stove, the poem must ride on its own melting.” Before Pound, Cummings didn’t seem to be able to make this miracle happen. After Pound, and especially after reading and rereading “The Return,” Cummings took a leap forward into the kind of poetry that became his signature. One early masterpiece has fourteen stanzas varying from two to three lines in iambic tetrameter:
All in green went my love riding
on a great horse of gold
into the silver dawn.
four lean hounds crouched low and smiling
the merry deer ran before.
Fleeter be they than dappled dreams
the swift sweet deer
the red rare deer.
Four red roebuck at a white water
the cruel bugle song before.
Horn at hip went my love riding
riding the echo down
into the silver dawn.
four lean hounds crouched low and smiling
the level meadows ran before.
Softer be they than slippered sleep
the lean lithe deer
the fleet flown deer.
Four fleet does at a gold valley
the famished arrows sang before.
Bow at belt went my love riding
riding the mountain down
into the silver dawn.
four lean hounds crouched low and smiling
the sheer peaks ran before.
Paler be they than daunting death
the sleek slim deer
the tall tense deer.
Four tall stags at a green mountain
the lucky hunter sang before.
All in green went my love riding
on a great horse of gold
into the silver dawn.
four lean hounds crouched low and smiling
my heart fell dead before.
Pound and his friend the poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) and her husband, the poet Richard Aldington, had all lived in London when Cummings was at Harvard. They had produced three rules that became the basis of a poetics they called imagism. (Later, when Amy Lowell had become so identified with them that it came to be called Amygism, they changed its name to vorticism.) The rules were simple: (1) The thing must be treated directly; (2) no word that does not contribute should be used; and (3) rhythm should be musical rather than metronomic. Pound’s famous haiku was the manifestation of these rules: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough.”
Pound would become a close friend and mentor to Cummings, and the young poet was one of the friends who did not desert him even during his period of repulsive support of fascism or his incarceration after World War II in St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, DC. Before the war, Pound, who came from Idaho, was at the center of the vibrant, changing world of twentieth-century poetry. He was friends with William Butler Yeats; the two spent summers together talking about a new kind of poetry. He married Yeats’s lover’s daughter, Dorothy Shakespear. He was friends with William Carlos Williams and Ford Madox Ford. A flamboyant character who sometimes wore a huge hat and colorful earrings, Pound was shaken by the British experience of World War I, and in 1921 he moved to Paris.
Cummings and Pound finally met after the war on a Paris street, introduced by none other than Cummings’s friend and Harvard Monthly colleague Scofield Thayer. As Thayer and Cummings walked down the Boulevard Saint-Germain one July night, Pound appeared before them and bowed. “Mr. Ezra Pound is a man of my own height,” Cummings wrote his parents, “reddish goatee and ear whiskers, heavier built, moves nicely, temperament very similar to J. Sibley Watson (as remarked by Thayer)—same timidity and subtlety, not nearly so inhibited. Altogether, for me, a gymnastic personality.” Pound and Cummings spent the evening together, two comrades on the barricades of a new way of writing poetry.
Pound, who was in some ways the brightest star of his generation, the most talented and the most generous, seemed to come completely unraveled during World War II. His civic grandiosity began with furious letters criticizing the design of the New York Public Library and ended with him being thrown into prison for being a traitor to his country. History has pushed this man to the sidelines, unable to tolerate his treachery. Perhaps his attacks on his own country might have been forgiven. The form those attacks took—voluntary radio speeches denouncing the Jews and on behalf of Mussolini—was unforgivable.
In the study of art and literary history, one of the great problems is how to separate the art from the artist, how to separate the masterworks of a Wagner or a Richard Strauss, a Pound or even a Cummings, from the terrible things they said and wrote in their roles as puny, deluded human beings—men. On the one side of the spectrum of possible reactions we have the silliness of political correctness—students who are denied the joys of Dickens or even Salinger because of those writers’ behavior as men and their identity as men. When literature is divided into categories based on the politics or even the worldly identity of the writer, everyone loses. On the other side of the spectrum, we have Pound.
In some ways Cummings’s experience at Harvard was typical of a young man’s first experience away from home. Of course, for Cummings Harvard was not far away from home, and perhaps this made his experience even more vivid. In an early poem about the college, Cummings imagined seeing through the shadow-walls and ghost-toned tower of the “ancient-moulded” Yard to a heart of fire where sweating men worked at a smithy on the massive-linked chain “which is to bind God’s right hand to the world.” In other ways his group of young friends were clearly extraordinary. From the ranks of the Harvard Monthly writers who met on the third floor of the Harvard Union, one of them, Stewart Mitchell—the Great Auk—decided to produce a book that would be entitled Eight Harvard Poets. The anointed were Mitchell himself, Cummings, Dos Passos, S. Foster Damon, Robert Hillyer, William A. Norris, Dudley Poore, and Cuthbert Wright. Many things conspired to make this book hard to finish, difficult to produce, and late in reaching the press, but it was finally published with a great deal of financial help from Dos’s father, a Chicago lawyer, in July of 1917. The publisher was Laurence Gomme, who ran out of money more than once, closed his publishing house and opened a new one for the purpose of publishing the book. Gomme printed two thousand copies and sent one hundred out to each of the contributors. The collection established Cummings as a poetic prodigy.
Between 1914 and 1917, Cummings and his friends lived in a kind of paradise. That world would accommodate even Cummings’s silliest rebellions and respond to him with love and acceptance. World War I, with its unbearable death toll and new visions of the horror humans inflict on each other, would change all that. It would change what seemed possible for a whole generation of writers; and specifically, in the most gruesome and physically painful way, it would change that for one wide-eyed volunteer, E. E. Cummings.
4
The Western Front
Cummings entered Harvard as a slight, frightened, well-behaved boy, and he left it a confident, angry, rebellious young man who knew the rules so well he could break them in fresh and imaginative ways. In his fifth year there, after his controversial Class Day speech, “The New Art,” he moved back in to the family house, where he abandoned his childhood bedroom and holed up in the attic to paint and write poems.
Harvard gave Cummings a sense of self, but one of his final classes there in English versification with LeBaron Briggs may have been the one that made him a great poet. Briggs, the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, was an extraordinary teacher of the old school. Although he was a father figure to his students, he was stern when
it came to principles. He came from a tradition of privilege and service, as Cummings did. A quotation from him, passed on by his student George St. John, who became the headmaster of the Choate School when John F. Kennedy was a student there, has been documented as being the basis for JFK’s famous “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” According to Chris Matthews’s biography, Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero, the famous inversion was first used by the Harvard dean when he said, “Ask not what your alma mater can do for you, but what you can do for your alma mater.”
E. E. Cummings Page 6