Cummings spent a little more than a month in Russia, visiting Kiev and leaving the country through Constantinople and Turkey. In the end he met wonderful people there: Joan London, the daughter of Jack London, and her husband; Lili Brik; the great director and actor Vsevolod Meyerhold, whose ideas about the theater were parallel to his own. Yet he found Russia more than disappointing. It wasn’t just that the people were terrified of the government—perhaps totalitarianism was worse than capitalism—or that Stalin’s purges were somehow in the air. Although he and Meyerhold seemed to speak freely, for instance, Meyerhold was arrested and tortured by Stalin’s police in 1939, and in 1940 he was executed for the crimes he had confessed to under torture.
Worse, for Cummings, the Communist propaganda machine seemed to have otherwise intelligent people in its thrall. They did not seem to see what he saw. Their hypocrisy was astounding and terrifying. In spite of the fear and the searches and the disappearances that were already going on before their eyes, men and women like Henry Dana continued to spout platitudes about the noble experiment of the Russian Revolution. The combination of the general fear and the specific mindlessness of those who chose to ignore it was anathema to Cummings. The insanity and the power sucking of the men who were leading Russia under Stalin in the late 1920s were later to be perfectly lampooned in George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Cummings saw through the sham of propaganda right away.
At the time of Cummings’s visit, Stalin was just beginning the first of his great purges, sweeps in which anyone who spoke against the government or who just happened to get in the way was sent off to the gulags of Siberia or executed in the Moscow jails. Cummings was in the shadow of one of the great waves of cruelty in history, and he felt it.
Cummings had been carried along by the leftist tendencies of his friends in Greenwich Village and Paris. Now he did a political about-face. Communism under Stalin scared and horrified him. He hated what it did, and he hated its effect on the people forced to go along with it. For the rest of his life he would take the Communist threat seriously because of the terror and disruption he had seen in the eyes of Stalin’s subjects. Communism had been an idea; now it became a devil. Later, when the rest of the world had changed its mind again, Cummings never forgot his trip to Russia, where he had seen for himself the price people can pay when their supposedly benevolent government goes out of control.
Cummings had left for Russia on May 10, 1931. By June 14 he was headed for New York, where his personal life was brewing the kind of disappointment on an intimate level that communism had turned out to be on a political level. Almost as soon as he left Paris, Anne discovered she was pregnant. Not just because he was traveling but because of Communist censorship, Cummings failed to get the letters she sent. She decided on an abortion and returned to New York to have the operation. In her hour of need, her husband was nowhere to be found; and so she turned to other friends, including the wealthy man who had been Cummings’s rival for her affections all along. By the time Cummings got back to New York with Diana, whom he had picked up in Switzerland, his second marriage was beginning to fall apart.
Now his marriage became a nightmare. Anne’s ex-husband, Ralph Barton, Diana’s father, had killed himself on May 19, and the emotional fallout as she grieved for a man she had left was more than Cummings could handle. In retrospect, it seems clear that Anne was an alcoholic. At the same time, on the death of Edward Cummings, Rebecca Cummings had deeded Joy Farm to her son and, in an ill-advised fit of generosity, his wife. Rebecca loved children, and perhaps she had been moved by Diana’s enjoyment of the country. Now, because of this legacy, Anne started threatening to take Joy Farm. She turned to other men. She got drunk and embarrassed Cummings in front of his friends, complaining that his penis was inadequate and bragging about men who were better lovers.
But Anne’s infidelity would be her own undoing and Cummings’s salvation when it came to the ownership of Joy Farm and his legal freedom. By the end of 1931, she had another steady lover, an assertive dental surgeon who, some thought, beat her. Soon she was pregnant with her lover’s child. In June she went to Mexico for a divorce decree. She was still unwilling to part with her share of Joy Farm, and both she and Cummings hired lawyers. Negotiations ensued.
Cummings threatened to have the Mexican divorce nullified. After his first marriage, he had lost his innocence, his friend and patron Scofield Thayer, and his daily connection to his daughter. After his second marriage he balked at losing the place in the world where he felt most at home.
In May of 1932, Cummings got word that his friend Hart Crane had died. He had jumped overboard from a ship on the way home from Mexico, apparently a suicide.
8
Eimi and Marion Morehouse
Eimi, Cummings’s second memoir, begins on Sunday, May 10, 1931, when he boards the train from Paris for Russia through Poland, and it ends 443 pages later on Sunday, June 14, when, again on a train, he crosses from Switzerland back into France. The title, Greek for “I am,” is an assertion of identity provoked by Cummings’s month-long visit.
After his visit to Russia in 1921, a decade earlier, journalist Lincoln Steffens famously exclaimed, “I have been over into the future, and it works.” Many of Cummings’s friends and colleagues agreed. But a July 1931 interview with a reporter from the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune, just after he returned from Russia, shows the first hints of a controversial, surprising reaction to Cummings’s own journey to Russia. His opinion of what was happening there would sharpen and get angrier over time as the situation under Stalin got worse.
The Russians, Cummings explained to Tribune reporter Don Brown, were very scared and very serious. Cummings liked the Russians, but he did not like Russia and, more amazingly, he did not like communism. “Are the Russian people happy? They struck me like this: they just love to suffer and they’re suffering like hell, so they must be happy. You know Dostoevski … People talk about the strain and tension of life in the United States. It is nothing to that in Moscow,” he said. “If you said ‘boo’ to some of these people they might drop dead … they are in a particularly nervous condition.”
“Cummings went to the Soviet Union with his eyes open and without an agenda,” writes Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno. “But his experiences there, in which he witnessed first-hand the privation and sadness of the Stalinist state, certainly helped him develop an agenda.”
By the time he sat down to write Eimi, using his Russian journals as a template, Cummings had become furious about the condition of Russia and what he saw as the failure of the great Communist idea. His natural perversity had added heat to his observations. Later he referred to Russia as the “subhuman communist superstate, where men are shadows & women are nonmen. This unworld is Hell.”
Eimi describes a terrifying, hellish place where frightened people trudge along in their desperate, monotonous ruts, preyed upon by political tourists come to see the Great Experiment and kept in line by the menacing men of the GPU, who know everything about everyone. Perhaps as a relief from this oppression, there is a great deal of drinking in the Eimi story, even for Cummings, who was never stingy or reluctant when it came time to drink or smoke. Because of his questioning attitude and because he immediately started taking long, aimless walks in Moscow, the GPU seems to have concluded that Cummings was a spy. He was followed almost everywhere he went, which probably did not improve his impression of the place.
He also decided to write in a stream-of-consciousness style with experimental words and a completely original syntax like that of the better-known James Joyce’s Ulysses. Eimi has been published as a novel and as a memoir, but whether he was writing nonfiction or fiction, Cummings remained at heart a poet and a visual artist. Like many of his poems, Eimi has a pattern of words that varies completely from page to page to suit the content. As a poet and painter, Cummings was continually trying to merge the two forms of creativity. His account of his first dinner with Joan London and her husband, for instance, is a typical des
criptive sentence from the book. “next: in the very diningroom where vodkaful romp romped while the alarmed flowerbuyer fluttered and ex-sulked vodkaless, a pompously incoherent conversation fetters 9 tensely untogether—e.g. to my right, a ‘Russian actor’ who doesn’t speak anything else.”
Cummings is more famous for style than for substance. Even today, he is better known for abjuring uppercase letters than for his poems or books. Everyone makes the same joke about him. Eimi is a good example of Cummings’s prose, which, with its pell-mell words and images and reinvented grammar, rewards careful study but is not easy to read. “He avoids the cliché first by avoiding the whole accepted modus of English,” his friend William Carlos Williams wrote about Cummings’s prose style. “He does it, not to be ‘popular,’ God knows, nor to sell anything, but to lay bare the actual experience … He does it to reveal, to disclose, to free a man from habit. Habit is our continual enemy as artists and as men.”
The book was published first as a novel—editors at Covici, Friede, which had published Cummings’s two previous books, thought it worked best as a novel. Cummings created many different characters—versions of himself—as narrators, using a kind of pidgin Russian to name them: Kemminkz, Peesahtel (a scan of the Russian word for writer), Hoodozhnik (artist), and the “heroless” hero. Also, of course, he writes as the ubiquitous Cummings i. “i is small, usually inconspicuous, but nimble and resilient and completely committed to its liberty,” writes Madison Smartt Bell. “It runs around inside the wainscots of Soviet Russia like the mouse in a Tom and Jerry cartoon.”
Loosely based on Dante’s visit to the underworld—Cummings calls Russia the “unworld”—the story features the silly, waspy Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana as the Virgil of the Metropol Hotel. A friendlier guide for Cummings was Joan London, who in Eimi becomes the author’s Beatrice.
In New York City in the 1920s, in Cummings’s community, there was a lot of dreaming about the beauties of Lenin’s new government and the glorious revolution on the other side of the world. American capitalism seemed to be failing, especially after the stock-market crash of 1929. The great American ideal of freedom seemed to exist only for the rich, while working-class people and the poor were stranded in a backwater of democracy where scarcity and deprivation were the rule. With the wealthy, oblivious Herbert Hoover as president—a president who seemed to purposefully fail to understand what was happening—our country seemed to be sailing over the edge of the civilized world.
In Communist Russia, on the other hand, authority had been overthrown, and the dream of a workers’ government had been realized. Writers like Malcolm Cowley, Sherwood Anderson, Alfred Kazin, and even Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald eagerly embraced the idea that Russia had succeeded where America had failed.
Perhaps Cummings was just too late. By 1931, things had begun to turn sour in Russia. Lenin had died in 1924, and the resulting power struggle ended with Joseph Stalin, already paranoid when he ascended in 1928. Trotsky had been exiled a year later. The dream of the Soviet Union was nine years old, and Cummings visited it at the beginning of its bloody, criminal end. No one was better suited to pick up on the fact that the government by the people had turned into a government against the people. Hoover was a bad president, but he was a bad president in the context of a democratic system that worked.
The year 1931 was a fascinating moment in world history, a moment when democracy and socialism passed each other, going in two different directions—one toward success and the other toward failure. When Eimi was first published, Cummings’s account of Russia was shocking and deeply disturbing to his own friends and community in Greenwich Village, where many people still needed to believe that the Russian ideal was working. He lost friends, and people crossed the street to avoid him. Malcolm Cowley and Edmund Wilson were horrified at what seemed to them, accurately, to be a sudden veering into right-wing conservatism on the part of their erstwhile left-wing drinking buddy. George Jean Nathan called Eimi the worst book of the month. The poet Karl Shapiro wrote that it was “a four hundred page garland of bad fruit thrown at the Soviet Union, [which] missed the mark entirely.” Other reviewers complained about the way the book was written. “If only Cummings would condescend to let his readers read him,” wrote Lewis Gannett in the Herald Tribune.
Cummings’s disgust for communism wasn’t restricted to the pages of Eimi. In one poem he decried both the Russians’ fear and their lack of hygiene:
kumrads die because they’re told)
kumrads die before they’re old
(kumrads aren’t afraid to die
kumrads don’t
and kumrads won’t
believe in life)and death knows whie
(all good kumrads you can tell
by their altruistic smell
moscow pipes good kumrads dance)
kumrads enjoy
s.freud knows whoy
the hope that you may mess your pance
every kumrad is a bit
of quite unmitigated hate
(travelling in a futile groove
god knows why)
and so do i
(because they are afraid to love
Having little money had never bothered Cummings—in fact, it seemed to delight him. Cummings was thrilled at being able to act the part of a Yankee aristocrat who lived on crumbs and ate humble fare off ancestral china. He had grown up in a world where money didn’t matter, and he embraced the shabby eccentricity of intellectual Cambridge where professors were too wrapped up in the world of ideas to care if their clothes were shabby or their roofs leaked.
Poverty was unbearable for Anne. She certainly did not have in mind riding out the Great Depression with a penniless artist who wasn’t even interested in having a job. All around her, people seemed to have lost everything they had. Edmund Wilson was living in a furnished room. Cummings’s friend Jim Light was so poor he slept on a doctor’s operating table. Her own wealthy lover—the man who had caused Cummings so much jealous pain—had also lost his money. Where could she turn for security? By October she was having an affair with a dentist who, Cummings heard, regularly hit her. Soon she was pregnant, by the dentist. His second marriage was over.
Then, in the spring of 1932, an extraordinary thing happened. Anne had left him, and of course he was interested in meeting women. Cummings loved women. On June 23, 1932, Jim and Patti Light—he had directed Him at the Provincetown Playhouse—took him backstage after the performance of a play in which another friend of theirs, Marion Morehouse, had a small part. Marion was a woman with a murky past who had come to New York in the 1920s to make it as an actress, but who instead had already had phenomenal success as a model. Like Cummings, she adored the theater and longed to be part of it; also like Cummings, she didn’t think much of the clothing industry that had become her career. The four went to dinner at Felix’s restaurant. “As soon as you saw her,” Cummings wrote much later in his journals, “something in yourself told you, ‘she’s too tall for me.’ ”
Indeed, the gorgeous young actress was twelve years younger than the thirty-seven-year-old Cummings and almost six feet tall. Long-legged, with huge eyes and a pretty face, she was sexually generous—a trait that would delight and torture Cummings in the years to come—and charmed by Cummings’s animation, humor, and lack of pretension. Edmund Wilson found her stagy and “not spontaneous,” but Cummings had enough spontaneity for the two of them.
Marion was not interested in reading or in the arts, except for the theater—and she was not interested in the intellectual part of the theater, either. She had probably not graduated from high school. She was not an intellectual, she was averse to becoming one, and she didn’t like Cummings when he launched into his brilliant monologues—monologues that featured two Harvard degrees and one of the best minds of his generation. “During one of your early meals with her in a little wop speakeasy which she knew of, you were soaring along in your natural way—& she looked at you imploringly; as if to say ‘p
lease! Don’t be intellectual with me: I’m just a woman!’ ” he wrote later. “whereupon you came down to earth … &have been there ever since.”
Yet Marion was beautiful—officially, famously beautiful—and she was also obliging and charmed. In fact, his first night with Marion was the beginning of thirty years of love and friendship between them—the kind of love and friendship that had previously been impossible for him. Cummings was always a man who made lemonade out of lemons—writing about his problems with women, he described the way in which “the curse becomes a blessing, the disappearance an emergence, the agonizing departure an ecstatic arrival.” Still, his history with women was as much a failure as it could possibly be, with its two failed marriages and its lost daughter, Nancy.
Cummings was an angry man, an anger that became more of an irritation with the entire world when he drank and as he aged. The anger was a problem with the women he had picked. Yet the story of his life is the story of a man who reaped the benefits of anger. He was able to turn defiance into creative force and to express for all of us his delight in the world and his fury at the world and the men and women in it.
Cummings’s story, as his biographers tell it and as he told it, is hard to understand in our modern context. He had two of the most disastrous marriages imaginable—marriages that featured adultery, lies, deceit, the loss of a child, and constant heartbreak. The psychological wisdom of the twenty-first century is that we carry our problems within ourselves. Somehow, either Cummings just met the right person when he met Marion, or he had changed. He had been seeing a psychoanalyst, Fritz Wittels; he was older. Perhaps he was also wiser.
E. E. Cummings Page 13