E. E. Cummings

by Susan Cheever

  Marion was a very different woman from Elaine or Anne. She was a self-invention. Her story of being born in South Bend, Indiana, to Roman Catholic parents who moved to Hartford, Connecticut, where she was educated at a school called St. Ann’s, turns out not to be true. Wherever she came from, she arrived in New York hoping to make it as an actress. Marion was an inspired chameleon. As Edward Steichen pointed out, when she put on a gown or a riding habit, she became the woman who would wear those clothes.

  With Cummings, too, she was a chameleon. Far more successful on her own than either of his other wives, she was at the same time less stubbornly set in her identity. She was also less desperate. Elaine had been an aristocratic princess who had been rejected by her prince and was hungry for affection; Anne had been the mistress of a man who wouldn’t marry her. Marion was fine without Cummings, and she decided sometime in that night at Felix’s that she would also be fine with him. Marion brought him back to earth, and he found that earth had its benefits.

  With Marion, Cummings became less pretentious and more appreciative of simpler pleasures—food, friends, and sex. Marion didn’t have children, and this gave Cummings plenty of space in the relationship to be the mischievous boy he sometimes seemed to be. Of course, with his quicksilver mind, he also saw the problems with this, which eventually unfolded as the two of them grew old together. Cummings already had a child; he did not want another, not even with Marion. “When you refused to let her have a child (unless she ‘do her share’ in supporting it),” he wrote enigmatically, “you sealed your own doom: making yourself her child, her baby—and herself your all-protecting mother.” In this mood, Cummings even saw Marion’s learning to cook his favorite dishes as a manipulative ploy to control him.

  Yet, by the time he met Marion, Cummings had also changed. His marriage to Anne had been precipitated by a realization he had had on Fritz Wittels’s couch—that it was time for him to stop being a boy and start being a man. With his complicated relationship to authority and the energy he got from being a rebel, this shift from boyhood to manhood was not as simple as it had seemed. His marriage to Anne Barton seemed a high price to pay for manhood. Marion didn’t make demands the way Anne had, and she didn’t cheat on him, either—at first.

  Another difference between Marion and Anne and Elaine was that Cummings specifically chose to be with Marion. She was available and he courted her and won her. Elaine, on the other hand, had found him desperately in love with her and led him into their sexually unsatisfying affair. Anne, too, had needed someone and chosen him. His courtship of Marion, with flowers and love notes and drawings of elephants, was tender and two-sided. Their connection was less about neediness and more about affection; their love was free to grow and blossom.

  And Marion provoked some of Cummings’s most beautiful and intelligent love poems, including one sonnet that is almost a paraphrase of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116, “Let me not to the marriage of true minds / admit impediments.”

  love’s function is to fabricate unknownness

  (known being wishless;but love,all of wishing)

  though life’s lived wrongsideout,sameness chokes oneness

  truth is confused with fact,fish boast of fishing

  and men are caught by worms(love may not care

  if time totters,light droops,all measures bend

  nor marvel if a thought should weigh a star

  —dreads dying least;and less,that death should end)

  how lucky lovers are(whose selves abide

  under whatever shall discovered be)

  whose ignorant each breathing dares to hide

  more than most fabulous wisdom fears to see

  (who laugh and cry)who dream, create and kill

  while the whole moves;and every part stands still:

  Cummings’s mother, Rebecca, having successively loved and cared for Elaine and Nancy and Anne and Diana, was now more than willing to love Marion. The difference was that Marion, not bedeviled by her own needs and unmet desires, loved Rebecca back with a warmth and genuine feeling that never turned to jealousy or anything like it. Marion played well with others. Marion didn’t complain that Cummings had too little money, as Anne had complained, or that he didn’t love her enough, as Elaine had. She seemed to have no complaints. So although in one way Cummings had changed through his treatment with Wittels and through the process of aging—he was approaching forty—and perhaps through the process of heartbreak, he had also finally met the right woman, a woman who could give him the space to work and the warmth he needed; a woman he was proud to be with.

  That autumn, Cummings had applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship. Henry Allen Moe, the principal administrator of the Foundation, was an admirer. Cummings wasted no words on his application, writing that he would produce “a book of poems.” His plan was that when he got the money, $1,500, in the spring, he would take Marion to Paris on a trip they had both longed for.

  Marion had never been abroad; the closest she had come was seeing friends off on the glamorous, sleek ocean liners docked at the piers on the west side of Manhattan. She had always longed to travel. A week after Cummings officially got the award, he and Marion were headed for France. In Paris they were able to sublet near the Porte d’Orléans. Marion learned to cook, and Cummings bought their wine. When Marion dropped by the offices of French Vogue just to say hello, her looks caused a small sensation. Soon she became the talk of the Paris fashion world and the favorite model of the glamorous photographer Baron George Hoyningen-Huene. Marion’s Paris career brought in extra money and an invitation to the baron’s villa in Tunisia.

  Cummings was always delighted by Marion’s success, both when she worked as a model and later when she became a photographer herself. In fact, he was disappointed by her inability to succeed as an actress. This was part of his boyishness, an attractive aspect of his sometimes androgynous nature. Marion’s successes never threatened him. He was not brittle and macho and insistent on some form of masculinity. He was thrilled to have the most beautiful woman in the world on his arm and thrilled to have a playmate who brought her own connections and talents to the table. Marion did not care about literature, but she was an adoring and appreciative student when it came to all things Paris.

  For Cummings, physical size had an almost metaphorical resonance. He had been teased for his smallness and had felt overwhelmed by his father’s great, masculine bulk. He had small, delicate hands and feet. If Elaine’s ephemeral, birdlike beauty had made him feel like a big man, Marion’s masculine lankiness sometimes bothered him. Still, he was falling in love with a woman who literally leaned on him whenever she took his arm, because of her physical height. “The physical act is an expression of a spiritual attitude,” Cummings worried, although Marion’s ambition to be an actress made him think she would not be leaning on him emotionally as Elaine and Anne had.

  He emerged from his marriage to Elaine feeling inadequate sexually as well as in every other way. He was too slight, too short, too indecisive. As a result, he had lost his wife and daughter. Being with Marion, a large-boned gazelle of a woman who sometimes seemed to tower over him—so much so that it disturbed Ben La Farge years later—was a way to challenge that old idea of himself. There was a sweetness to Marion, a willingness to love that he had never experienced before in a sexual partner. Her height seemed to vanish as the two became closer. The two of them together shattered the conventional image of a couple just because of their size, and although he had had his doubts about this, Cummings came to relish it.

  Age also worked in their favor. Cummings was almost forty, a man with a great deal of success behind him and a lot of experience. It was easy for him to have a relaxed authority with the twenty-seven-year-old Marion, the kind of authority that transcends the problems of masculine and feminine. Cummings was already a distinguished and celebrated artist, and Marion, for all her accomplishments, was still a girl.

  The two set up housekeeping in Paris and were happy. They entertained the Pound
s and anyone else they could find. Marion cooked and modeled; Cummings wrote and painted. “Marion’s my new pride and joy: as you’ve probably guessed,” he wrote his mother from Paris almost a year after he and Marion met. “Coming to a new language or world she immediately took it by storm … The Vogue people are doting on her slightest whim, creeping the boulevards on hands and knees to buy her orangejuice (with just the necessary goût of champagne) etc—as for Baron Huene, photographer de luxe, he wants us to visit him in Africa whenever he can stop snapping ‘the most beautiful woman and the most poised in Paris.’ A nice fellow, by the way.”

  Paris during the twenties and early thirties was the center of the New York literary world. Although Ernest Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley, had already drunk themselves out of their marriage and Hemingway had married the second of his four wives and decamped for the United States, many of New York’s most important artists and patrons were still there. Lincoln Kirstein was also in Paris that summer, and when Cummings lost his passport and letter of credit after a particularly wild evening, which involved a great deal of drinking and also some dancing on the tops of cars, Kirstein lent him money.

  Kirstein is an odd figure hovering in the background of the twentieth century and its creative community. Born wealthy, he cultivated eccentricity and apparently worshipped the ability to make art. While still an undergraduate at Harvard he had started a new magazine, The Hound and Horn, in which Cummings and almost everyone else published. Later he was a founder with George Balanchine of the New York City Ballet and one of the founders of the Museum of Modern Art. Already fascinated by dance, Kirstein asked Cummings if he wanted to write a ballet. Marion suggested a ballet of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Kirstein wrote the check.

  Elaine, now officially Mrs. Frank MacDermot, also happened to be in Paris that summer of 1933—and as usual she wanted something from Cummings. MacDermot had decided to run for a seat in the Irish parliament. He hoped to represent County Roscommon. Doing this required him to have been married in the Roman Catholic Church. Elaine, twice divorced, could only be married in the church if both of her previous marriages were officially annulled.

  An annulment, unlike a divorce, is a document stating that the marriage in question never happened. The annulment cites circumstances that invalidated the marriage from the beginning. If the marriage is never sexually consummated, for instance, it can be annulled—this is how Henry VIII wangled a legal marriage to his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, formerly his brother’s wife, from the Church of Rome—something he was unable to do for his subsequent marriages. If one or the other party to the marriage was mentally ill at the time, it can be argued that the marriage never happened; if one of them was unfit to decide that they should be married, it could be decreed by the church that they had never really been married even if there were children involved.

  Annulment is a medieval concept that the modern church still embraces. Elaine had already managed her annulment from her marriage to Thayer by testifying that he was mentally unstable and therefore unable to make the decision to marry. Ipso facto they had never “really” been married in the eyes of the church. Annulling her marriage to Cummings was a more difficult problem. Elaine’s argument was that since she and Cummings had verbally agreed to let each other out of the marriage if that was what either of them desired, they had never really had a marriage. It was a thread of an idea, but apparently she was desperate to please and accommodate her new husband. She had even found a Parisian priest who was willing to facilitate the annulment if Cummings would meet with him.

  But Cummings wasn’t interested in obliging Elaine, the woman who, after all, had heartlessly severed his connection to his only child. He refused to answer her messages. What did he want with her now? She coaxed and pressured and wheedled, using their mutual friends. Finally she caught up with him, running after him on the street and calling his name. Always the gentleman, he agreed to meet with her.

  He brought Marion to their lunch at a small restaurant in the Rue de l’Echelle, inwardly crowing that he was with a woman so beautiful and loving that Elaine could eat her heart out. But it was Cummings whose heart had been continuously eaten out by the loss of his daughter. As always, Elaine had the upper hand. She didn’t care that Cummings had moved on to taller and more beautiful things. She wanted what she wanted. Cummings once again seemed helpless in front of her onslaught. At least he got his first news of Nancy, who was now thirteen, in seven years. She was at school in Bexhill in England, Elaine said. But when Cummings said he would like to meet MacDermot as a way of seeing Nancy, Elaine burst into tears.

  So for a minute or two, Cummings had the upper hand. Elaine and Frank needed something from him, and he needed something from them—visitation with his daughter for himself and his mother. But once again, in this negotiation, Cummings backed away from winning. Was it that his newfound happiness with Marion made the painful disconnection from Nancy seem best left in the past? What did Marion think about Nancy? Cummings had made it clear to her that he wasn’t willing to have more children, although at that point she certainly had plenty of time before making such an important decision. She was more beautiful than Elaine and younger than Elaine and a million times more loving than Elaine, but Elaine would always be the mother of Estlin’s child. Cummings had drafted a telegram to Elaine saying there would be no annulment unless there was something definite about Nancy. Elaine appeared to relent, and Cummings wrote to MacDermot, who gave a friendly but noncommittal reply.

  Cummings dutifully did his part. Still a Yankee at heart, he couldn’t quite believe that there were people—the MacDermots, for instance—who could make promises and then break them. He seemed stunned, like prey before a strike, that Elaine could be so charming and so agreeable and then seem to forget what she had promised altogether as soon as she got what she wanted. Cummings visited the priest with Elaine and agreed that the marriage had always been provisional. Then Elaine, Marion, Cummings, and MacDermot all went out to dinner.

  But no arrangements were made for Cummings to see his daughter. Rebecca Cummings, writing that she was delighted to hear that her son was happy to be in Paris with Marion, then wistfully added: “I only wish I might have a photograph of Nancy & know whether she has ever received my birthday gifts.” The upshot of all this was pathetic. Once again Cummings’s way of engaging with the world was cooperative and ineffectual—the opposite of his father’s. Instead of seeing Nancy and getting to know her again, Cummings settled reluctantly for a few snapshots finally sent to his mother, and a few schoolgirl thank-you notes for gifts without any acknowledgment of the importance of the giver. Was this what he really wanted? Had the idea of Nancy become part of a painful past, while the present was all the adored Marion? At any rate, it’s what he got.

  By the end of the summer Marion and Cummings had accepted Hoyningen-Huene’s offer and were ensconced in a Moorish palace by the sea. “There in Africa were flamingoes and fairies and burros with long warm strong thonglike ears and even an occasional scorpion,” Cummings wrote to Hildegarde Watson. “Born under Libra, Estlin did not see the scorpion; which disappeared into a double you sea. Marion saw it, but she was not afraid and so their existence passed like a day in the night. Effrica …”

  After this amazing year together, the couple left Tunisia for Italy—Estlin wanted Marion to see the Sistine Chapel—and finally in December sailed for New York on the Bremen. Their time abroad cemented the two as a couple, and they would be together for the rest of their lives—they always considered each other, wept and raged at each other’s misfortunes, and supported each other through the many difficulties ahead. Later in their life together, as Cummings and then Marion became seriously ill, they took turns taking care of each other. As far as women were concerned, Cummings had found his soul mate. Cummings-and-Marion became a one-word way of describing them. Within a year of their return from Europe, Marion had found a small apartment to rent on the ground floor of 4
Patchin Place, downstairs from Cummings’s studio.

  9

  No Thanks

  By December of 1934, when Cummings and Marion returned to Greenwich Village from their year in France, Tunisia, and Italy, the United States had slid into the awful depths of the Great Depression. In November of 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt had beaten Herbert Hoover by a landslide. FDR was inaugurated in Washington, DC, in March of 1933, and in his inauguration speech, paraphrasing Thoreau, he told the American people that the only thing they had to fear was fear itself.

  Like Cummings, Roosevelt was an aristocrat and a Harvard man, but he had been at Harvard under the liberal Charles Eliot rather than the conservative A. Lawrence Lowell, and perhaps this was what enabled him to work brilliantly within the political system. By this time Cummings had turned against all political systems. Unfortunately for him and his fellow writers, although Roosevelt had already introduced the federally funded job corps and public works projects that would begin to alleviate the Depression, the publishing industry was still in the doldrums.

  It was true that President Roosevelt had changed the way government supports its people in the heady “Hundred Days,” the early months of his administration, during which Congress and the Senate seemed to pass any law he wrote—creating the Civil Works Administration, the Gold Reserve Act, the Crop Loan Act, the Farm Relief Act, the Cotton Control Act, the Securities Exchange Act, the Communications Act, the National Housing Act—in the creation of what was essentially a new government called the New Deal, which Cummings called the “nude eel.” All this did not bring significant help to the Greenwich Village community of writers and poets where Cummings had once been a star.