E. E. Cummings

by Susan Cheever

  Cummings was poor and Elaine was rich, but that didn’t matter! They weren’t married, but that didn’t matter! Their daughter was still legally the daughter of another man, but that didn’t matter! They (or at least Cummings) occasionally slept with other people, but that didn’t matter! They had left all those rules and oppressive customs behind and broken through into a new way of living. In the ancient struggle between the rights of art and the rights of living artists and their families, Cummings and Elaine seemed to have reached a happy compromise. “I am essentially an artist, secondarily a man,” Cummings wrote. “but SHE is primarily a woman.”

  By March of 1924, Elaine was restless and wanted to marry him. When it came to his work, Cummings was furiously defensive; in his life he seemed strangely passive. In his journals he is aggressively furious at himself for being so passive. Elaine wanted to get married, so they got married. The Reverend Edward Cummings married his son, E. E. Cummings, to Elaine Orr Thayer at noontime in the living room at 104 Irving Street in Cambridge. Marriage didn’t change much, and both promised that they would immediately release the other if that was wanted. Cummings half-moved into Elaine’s apartment on Washington Square and kept his old apartment as a studio. By April the three were so much a family that Cummings even legally adopted his own child. Was this altogether too much bourgeois claptrap?

  Although his private journals have dozens of pages of exploration of his relationship to Elaine and Nancy, what it all adds up to is a lot of confused feeling. In his own way, Cummings seemed quite happy to be married and even happier to be a father to the increasingly companionable Mopsy. He loved telling her stories and playing with her. His parents now recognized Nancy as their grandchild and adored having her as a visitor in Cambridge and New Hampshire. It all seemed like paradise.

  The utopian strain in American belief is one of the strongest in our history. Greenwich Village in the 1920s was, in its own way, just another utopian community within the confines of an urban neighborhood. Cummings and Elaine were not alone in believing that the human soul—if left unencumbered—could grow and create beyond all previous accomplishments. Like Amos Bronson Alcott at the beginning of his utopian experiment Fruitlands, or like George Ripley at Brook Farm or John Humphrey Noyes at Oneida, Cummings and his fellow writers and the community they drew around them seemed to believe that, free from the ancient social institutions that had bound them and their parents, human beings would thrive. The restrictions had caused the problem, they believed, not the other way around.

  Soon after Elaine and Cummings were married, Elaine’s sister Constance, who had seen her through her pregnancy and childbirth, caught a bad cold that became a fatal pneumonia. Elaine was devastated. The woman who had mothered her was gone. An old-fashioned husband would have been on hand to help with the legal and emotional complications of such an intimate loss. There was the funeral in Troy, Elaine’s hometown, to manage; the estate to be settled; the grieving to be done. Cummings, however, was the new kind of husband, and he hardly paid attention. Cummings may have had an idée fixe of right and wrong, but when it came to managing the adult world with all its aggravations and necessities, he was useless. Because a third sister was abroad, and perhaps because she wanted to be away from her new husband, Elaine, taking Nancy along with the nurse, left for Paris. It was May, and Cummings had a lot to do as the author of The Enormous Room and Tulips & Chimneys and as a contributor to The Dial. Because of Elaine’s absence, he moved his easel and paints into the nursery in Elaine’s Washington Square apartment.

  Something had pushed Elaine to a breaking point. The form her unhappiness took was a love affair with a handsome Irish banker, Frank MacDermot, almost the minute she stepped onto the boat to France. Cummings was happily oblivious.

  First, Elaine wrote Cummings a letter that he experienced as a lightning strike. She told him that she was in love with another man and she wanted a divorce. Then she appeared in New York, showing up in his studio just as he was painting a portrait of Nancy. Cummings could hardly believe his ears: Elaine was adamant. It’s easy to guess why she was overwhelmingly attracted to a man like MacDermot, the son of a self-made man, who had been attorney general for a British-ruled Ireland. MacDermot didn’t have time for poetry and jokes and the vicissitudes of the creative life. For him, life was serious, and he was seriously in love with Elaine. For Cummings, nothing was serious—or at least that was the myth he had lived by.

  Cummings was devastated, and the loss of Elaine was to lead to the most serious breakdown of his life. He turned for help to his family and friends. His father came to New York to urge him to hire a good lawyer, to sue MacDermot, and if necessary, to attack the man physically. Cummings visited Cambridge and Maine, and he found some comfort in the Adirondacks with his dear friends the Watsons. From Watson he also obtained a .38 caliber pistol, and this gun was the prop for scene after scene that would have led to an arrest and institutionalization in a less free society. Cummings threatened MacDermot; that’s what a real man would do. Then he showed up at Elaine’s with the gun and threatened to kill himself. He also considered murdering Elaine and then killing himself, but the thought of Nancy stopped him. In the end he capitulated to Elaine and agreed to a divorce. Watson found his broken, deserted friend a place to live in a third-floor room at Patchin Place, a quiet mews of tenements off Tenth Street near the elevated train tracks that ran above Sixth Avenue. Women would come and go in Cummings’s life; he worked in the third-floor studio at 4 Patchin Place for almost forty years.

  Built as housing for the Basque workers of the long-gone Brevoort House hotel, Patchin Place is on land given to Aaron Patchin by his father-in-law, Samuel Milligan, who built Milligan Place next door. Built in the 1840s before the Civil War when Tenth Street and even Sixth Avenue were sleepy thoroughfares, the three-story brick row houses, adorned with fire escapes, look like a stage set, complete with one of the oldest lampposts in the city, whose gas has been changed to electricity. In 1917 the houses were modernized, with indoor plumbing and steam heat, and in 1920 the last member of the Patchin family sold the cul-de-sac to a realty company, which split the houses up into small one-room apartments—usually two rooms to each floor, divided by narrow hallways and staircases. Across the street stood the campanile of the Jefferson Market Courthouse.

  The poet’s relationship to the enchantment of Patchin Place was one of the strongest and most benevolent in his life. Cummings hated noise—a radio two floors away could drive him nuts. He despised size for the sake of size, as in the vast drawing rooms of Cambridge and Boston, which seemed to be built for intimidation. The small, cozy, cramped landscape of Patchin Place, with its eerie quiet and old-time details, could not have been farther away from the majestic, self-conscious architecture of Harvard College. If Patchin Place had not existed, Cummings would have had to invent it. “For a couple of decades the topfloorback room at 4 Patchin Place, which Sibley originally gave me, meant Safety & Peace & the truth of Dreaming & the bliss of Work,” Cummings wrote in a letter to Hildegarde Watson in 1949.

  By November, at Elaine’s request, Cummings was again in Paris, but this time it was to get their divorce. He saw more and more of the delightful Nancy, although later she would remember only a scrap of their time together. They rode the merry-go-round at the Champs-Élysées. He once again tried to argue Elaine out of the divorce. He had brought the pistol to Paris and again contemplated shooting MacDermot or himself or both.

  He was so disturbed that he came close to shooting a friend who was visiting Elaine one afternoon—he had been listening to voices behind the door of her apartment and convinced himself that one of them was MacDermot’s. Cummings’s journals of this time are agonizing to read. He excoriates himself, and draws diagrams showing where he went wrong with Elaine and where he went wrong as a man. He anguishes over the loss of his daughter. “I love her more than anything alive,” he wrote, “she does not love me … I will help her—although it’s the last thing I desire to do, I will
give her up. BUT!! If the motivation really is: I REALLY DON’T WANT Elaine and Mopsy ENOUGH TO FIGHT for them both: … I am giving them up because I am a coward then______I had better DIE.” The divorce decree was issued on December 4, and a devastated Cummings headed back to New York on the Leviathan.

  During the two years after Cummings and Elaine were finally divorced, all kinds of things seemed to come between him and his daughter. Although Elaine married MacDermot and they moved back to New York—first to the suburbs and then to the city—Elaine was sick, Nancy was sick, lawyers got involved, Cummings was distracted by his work and by a new love affair and by a fresh family tragedy. Although he was able to visit with Nancy two or three times, always chaperoned—and once, as he heartbreakingly remembered years later, got to hear the seven-year-old sing—the visits were short and uncomfortable. Cummings and MacDermot hated each other, and in 1926 the MacDermots moved with “their” daughter permanently back to Ireland. Their plan was to obscure Nancy’s history with both her adoptive father and her real father. Nancy was not told until many years later that E. E. Cummings was her father, and then it was a piece of information that would tilt her world on its axis. She didn’t see him again for twenty-two years.

  7

  Anne Barton and Joseph Stalin

  William James was an unofficial godfather to the young Estlin Cummings. He was Edward Cummings’s close friend, and the Cummings house on Irving Street in Cambridge was built to be close to the James house on the other side of Irving Street. Joy Farm in New Hampshire had also been purchased close to the James family summer house on Silver Lake. After all, James had indirectly been responsible for Cummings’s existence when he introduced his own research assistant, Rebecca Clarke, to his friend Edward. William James’s son Billy would become a close friend of Estlin Cummings’s.

  William James helped Cummings believe that writing was a noble profession, and his work was as instructive to the young man as his life was. This was especially true with his greatest and most important book, The Varieties of Religious Experience, originally written as a series of lectures to be given at Edinburgh University in Scotland in 1901 and 1902. In The Varieties of Religious Experience James wrote about the different kinds of characters men might inhabit—especially men like Cummings who found themselves somehow on the outside of their own childhood world.

  In Lecture 8, James writes about a question that fascinated him and has fascinated many creative people since: how can two or more seemingly opposite characters inhabit the same body and personality? In his lecture, James put the question through the renegade French novelist Alphonse Daudet and his confession of amoral doubleness.

  “Homo duplex, homo duplex!” writes Daudet.

  The first time that I perceived that I was two was at the death of my brother Henri, when my father cried out so dramatically, “He is dead, he is dead!” While my first self wept, my second self thought, “How truly given was that cry, how fine it would be at the theatre.” I was then fourteen years old.

  “This horrible duality has often given me matter for reflection. Oh, this terrible second me, always seated whilst the other is on foot, acting, living, suffering, bestirring itself. This second me that I have never been able to intoxicate, to make shed tears, or put to sleep and how it sees into things, and how it mocks!”

  As an adult, Cummings faced his own divided self and was sometimes sabotaged by it. The most obvious way he did this was in the use of the word “I.” In his poems and some of his prose he had created a personality for the lowercase i. There are many sources for the lowercase i, from the notes left by the unpretentious handyman at Joy Farm to the Greek poets.

  On one particular summer morning at Joy Farm, while writing in his journal, Cummings looked back on his early life and contemplated the problematic dual nature of the uppercase I—in other words, E. E. Cummings. “It’s significant for me to distinguish clearly two Is,& decide which I’ll be.” In writing that reveals his self-hatred, his playfulness, and his robust sense of self, he described Cummings Duplex.

  One I was his “before breakfast self,” Cummings wrote. “he’s short, hateful,& and dogmatic—especially re women. Women are either bitches or morons. They have no soul. They are always taking from you—never giving to you.” This side of Cummings’s character was bitter, snobbish, and lonely, Cummings wrote in a playful moment of self-satire. “What a pity he had to be born into this lousy world at all!”

  The other I, his after-breakfast self, was “warm, cheerful, adventurous, with a quick sense of humor—the world is a perpetual amazement to him … If he makes a blunder he’s the first to laugh over it. If someone meets his affection with love, he’s loyal to the death.”

  Furthermore, Cummings explained as the sun began to dry the dew on the pasture and the birds swooped in and out of the maples outside his window, he understood Montaigne’s statement that “fortune does us neither good nor evil,” for “he’s aware of millions upon millions of individuals inside him—& according to who he becomes, so will fate prove hostile or benevolent. It’s up to him. Wholeheartedly he accepts this responsibility; and recognizes it as the supreme one.”

  The year 1926 and the years just after it were a time when Cummings’s divided self was under enough pressure to shatter a stronger soul. His custody battle with Elaine was reaching its final, sad chapter. He would be granted a visit with Nancy in March of 1927 after he furiously refused to cancel his adoption of her. Elaine had been sick. There were many excuses for Nancy’s unavailability. His mother had even written to Elaine in her own version of a fury at losing Nancy. Finally he was allowed an hour with his own daughter. She looked small and pale but was as spirited and playful as ever. This was the last time they would see each other until Nancy was a married adult with two children of her own.

  Another loss was in the wings. Early in 1926, Edward Cummings—a man who seemed to embody the power and the mercy of God when he stood in the pulpit—lost his job as a minister. Two Cambridge churches merged and he was asked to step aside. Estlin Cummings was delighted that for once he was able to cheer his father instead of the other way around. “You can only see that you’ve lost the church, but that isn’t so,” Cummings admonished his grieving father. “He looked at me. ‘In losing the church,’ I said, ‘you’ve entered the world. You’re a worldly person: why deny it?’ We stood face to face. ‘Only a small part of you could possibly fit in that church’ I said almost angrily—‘all the rest of you had to remain outside.’ ”

  His father, Cummings told him, was like a child who had slammed his finger in a door; the incident was painful, but now he was free. “I congratulate you,” he told the older man, and the conversation ended in a tender hug. In spite of Edward Cummings’s dejection, the family had a wonderful summer at Joy Farm.

  Later, when Cummings was back at the studio on the third floor of 4 Patchin Place, with the low roofs of the city outside his windows and the rumble of the elevated tracks on Sixth Avenue in the distance, and his parents were at home on Irving Street in Cambridge, Rebecca sent her son a long letter as well as some neckties—for which Cummings naturally had scant use, but a mother can hope—and handkerchiefs. Cummings’s lighthearted thank-you letter to his mother was the last he would send to the house in Cambridge for a long, long time. He recommends to Rebecca the works of Sigmund Freud, which he had read on the train home to New York after the summer. He reports that he is churning out articles for Vanity Fair and that his play Him is almost finished.

  With Cummings, clarity in writing seemed to come when he was happiest, almost as if obscurity were a refuge from unwanted feeling. This particular letter has all the syntactic originality of a Cummings letter but none of the veil. “Myself seems to be quite on the rampage as usual,” he writes. “If keeping busy were synonymous with keeping happy, your humble servant would claim a palm or three.”

  And Cummings the poet was certainly keeping busy in the summer and fall of 1926. Tulips & Chimneys had been out for three
years, and its astonishing poems were still reverberating in the public consciousness as he embarked on more poems, more paintings, and a play. He followed it up with two more collections of poems, &(AND) and XLI Poems, in 1925 and another, Is 5, in 1926. Tulips & Chimneys, published when Cummings was a very young man and inspired by the huge relief of being free from a variety of prisons, including puritanical Cambridge and La Ferté-Macé in France, collects most of the poems for which Cummings is justly famous. “All in green went my love riding,” “In Just—,” “Buffalo Bill’s,” “I was sitting in mcsorley’s,” “the Cambridge ladies”: the book is a treasure trove of astonishing poems written by a young man who was still a gallant adventurer in a world of wonders. Great losses were about to change that world.

  In the old days the drive from Cambridge to Silver Lake could be a long day’s trip, first north to Concord, New Hampshire, and then west over small local roads, leaving Lake Winnipesaukee to the north and turning north again toward the Ossipee range and the sharper peaks of the White Mountains, dominated by the rocky summit of Mount Chocorua at Silver Lake and Mount Washington in the distance. On November 2, 1926, Cummings’s parents were headed back to Joy Farm for a mid-autumn visit. The couple, both in their sixties and with undiminished physical energy, drove their elegant, air-cooled Franklin, which with its huge, shiny fenders, long engine block in front of the passenger seat, and small windshield was Edward Cummings’s latest automotive pride and joy.