E. E. Cummings

by Susan Cheever

  The New York City to which Cummings returned was a city hit hard by the Depression. What was worse than the poverty—Cummings was accustomed to scrounging for food money—was the change in attitude brought by poverty. The economic disaster that the country was living through had a powerful effect on the mood of critics and publishers and readers—men and women on whom Cummings in spite of himself was dependent for his audience and his livelihood.

  For the first time in his career Cummings, the prodigy from “Hahvahd,” the young winner of the prestigious Dial Award, the friend of Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams, had trouble getting a book published. For a man who had been eagerly sought after and published while he was still in college, this was infuriating and humiliating. Sales of his books in print—Eimi, Is 5, W (ViVa), and the mixed-media CIOPW—were unthinkably low; fewer than ten copies in 1935, for instance. His ballet, Tom, had been held up by Lincoln Kirstein because of problems with the music, problems that were beyond Cummings’s control.

  Cummings’s new book of poems was apparently unpublishable. His agent at Brandt & Brandt couldn’t find a willing editor, although the manuscript was sent out to more than a dozen houses. His friend S. A. Jacobs, of the tiny Golden Eagle Press, couldn’t raise the few hundred dollars to pay the printing bills to publish it himself. As Richard Kennedy points out, this situation illustrates Cummings’s struggle for recognition as a serious writer. It also illustrates the fate of many American writers whose careers and incomes rise and fall dramatically depending on the public mood and the whims of cranky critics. “In the previous dozen years, he had published five volumes of poetry, a play, a collection of his art work, and two remarkable prose narratives,” writes Kennedy, “but now fourteen publishers had refused to undertake the publication of one of his most important collections of poems.”

  As Cummings’s personal life seemed to magically fall into place with his union with Marion, his professional life seemed to have fallen out of the benevolent stream of progress that had been his career path since Harvard. This began a slow deterioration of Cummings’s already frayed connection to those in authority—anyone in authority—and the American critical establishment.

  Looking back from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, more than fifty years after his death, Cummings seems like a man with an enviably successful career; but like many American writers he had years of anxiety and hardship, of being sniped at and attacked, of struggling to make a living, to buy food and pay the rent. This kind of rejection is part of being a writer. Men and women who are somehow constituted to get energy from rejection—no matter how painful that might be—are the ones who survive as writers. Cummings was already angry, and this anger at the corrupt establishment—in Cambridge and on the Western Front and wherever he encountered it—had been a furnace in which he forged the wild, rule-breaking originality of his work.

  One bright spot in April of 1935 stood out both as a pleasant surprise and, although Cummings didn’t know it then, ultimately as the start of a new and more fruitful and stable career. Cummings had met a young woman named Helen Stewart at a party in New York in 1934; it was one of those nights when he was relaxed, funny, and brilliant. He sat on the floor and told stories, and Stewart, who lived at the Prasada, a ritzy building on Central Park West and who was a student at Bennington College in Vermont, was enchanted. As it happened, Stewart was the literary representative of the Bennington Student Educational Policies Committee, and she and her classmate Dorothy Case, another Cummings fan, decided to invite Cummings to speak there.

  Bennington, a progressive women’s college founded in 1932, was built around a U-shaped red barn in a classic New England campus style. Its white-columned, three-story brick Commons building, topped by a bell tower, looked west over a vast lawn enclosed by picturesque green-shuttered clapboard dormitories and ending in a sheer drop that students called “the end of the world,” as in “let’s go read in the Adirondack chairs down at the end of the world.” Vermont seems to conspire with Bennington’s architecture. On an early May day, lilacs hang heavily against the white frame dorms, the birds swoop and sing in the eaves, and the world smells of spring.

  A jewel in the crown of the American progressive-education movement, Bennington had attracted a new kind of girl, a girl who was often wealthy, often opinionated, and dedicated to the development of the individual mind and spirit in a way that many colleges—think of Harvard under Lowell—actively discouraged. “We have been able to avoid the rather deadly virginal and old-maid atmosphere of some of the women’s colleges,” Bennington president Robert Devore Leigh wrote proudly to a colleague. Had they ever! Bennington students were famous for their beauty and their pursuit of some kind of airy-fairy self, what Joseph Campbell, at another women’s college—Sarah Lawrence—would later call “bliss.”

  Then as now, Bennington was as much a state of mind as it was a place in southern Vermont. There is magic to the place; connections and events happen there that seem to be larger than life, and Cummings’s visit was no exception. Cummings, the aristocratic seeker, the rebel, the questioner, was tailor-made for Bennington, which was an aristocratic experiment in overthrowing the rules and the rulers—an experiment financed by those rulers themselves, the Bennington parents, who paid one of the highest tuitions in the country.

  “After discussing the whole question of rules,” wrote Janet Summers in minutes of a meeting of the first class at the college, “we felt that here we had the opportunity to try a more ideal system—one based on the theory that most of us had learned to govern ourselves.” This was a revolutionary sentiment in the 1930s, when education for women was still controversial, but Cummings himself could hardly have said it better. Furthermore, although it was a time when the country had little interest in literature, things were different at Bennington, where the brand-new English Department was being run by the scintillating, beautiful poet Genevieve Taggard, a friend of Bennington’s neighbor and reigning poetic spirit, Robert Frost.

  Bennington paid attention to its students. Evenings were usually devoted to readings attended by the students, the staff, and interested townspeople, often delivered by people brought in by the students. In its early years the college hosted Frost, Buckminster Fuller, and Efrem Zimbalist. Stewart was able to persuade the administration to invite Cummings to come to the college to read on April 24 for travel expenses and a $25 speaking fee. Cummings spent the night at an inn in Old Bennington, across from a white church surrounded by a village green right out of a Currier and Ives print.

  “I too was at Bennington College, the Higher Education, meaning que les demoiselles—of all dimensions and costumes—sit around each other’s rooms quaffing applejack neat,” he wrote to his friend Pound. The girls delighted Cummings with a story about marauding Williams boys, who had caused the administration to hire a nightwatchman—but in true Bennington style, the first intruder to the women’s dorms arrested turned out to be a distinguished professor of physics.

  Bennington considered itself the center of the New England literary world, and its faculty and students dedicated themselves to proving that assertion. “Three or four times a week everyone climbed the Commons stairs to the theater to hear a lecture or to find out what the dancers, actors or musicians had been up to,” writes Thomas Brockway in Bennington College: In the Beginning. Workshops and formal productions acquainted the community with its most talented students. But Bennington also had its eyes on the larger world—one of the curricular innovations it offered, and still offers, was a work-study semester in which every student took some kind of job off campus.

  At 7:30 at night, Cummings read in a high-ceilinged new space at the top of the Commons building with moonlit, sweeping views of the surrounding meadows. The girls crowded into the rows of seats to hear him. The scene seemed to fluster him—it was his first reading of this kind. Stewart was even more nervous, as was her friend Dorothy Case. She stammered as she started her introduction, she told Richard Kennedy in a
n interview for his biography, and as she faltered the room spontaneously exploded in a chorus of voices reciting Cummings’s “Buffalo Bill’s defunct.” In the official Bennington version, the students were reciting the poem before Cummings and Stewart appeared; at the moment Cummings stepped onto the stage, they happened to be roaring out the penultimate phrase—“Jesus he was a handsome man.”

  Cummings finally stood up at the lectern and the girls calmed down just enough to let him talk. This was his first reading, and he took it seriously. His readings were timed and practiced and they were extraordinary events—so extraordinary that a decade after his appearance at Bennington, reading poetry was to become the career that would make Cummings famous. For now, it was wonderful to be adored in a setting where poets mattered.

  “E. E. Cummings, distinguished modern painter and poet, gave a reading of his poetry at one of the regular evening meetings at Bennington College this week,” the Bennington Banner announced a few days later.

  Mr. Cummings’ poetry has been widely read and studied at Bennington and has aroused much interest and appreciation on the part of the students. His audience, therefore, was large and enthusiastic, and he responded to it with friendly goodwill.

  Evening meetings are an important part of the Bennington system. Through them an attempt is made to tie together subject matter of the different divisions of the curriculum. At each meeting, of the which there are two or three a week, an expert in his field, either a member of the faculty or an outside speaker, lectures to an audience of students and faculty who attend because of their interest in that or a related subject. The lecture is followed by an informal question period which usually results in animated discussion.

  The fakirs of the literary establishment might have been turning on him; publishers might have decided he was not worth the price of printing. But Helen Stewart and Dot Case adored him, and at Bennington he was a star.

  Back in New York City, the Depression was still deadening hopes and interest in literature. There still were no publishers for Cummings’s book. Brandt & Brandt admitted defeat. When Rebecca Cummings put up the three hundred dollars to pay the printing bill, and S. A. Jacobs ran the presses, Cummings angrily titled the book No Thanks and dedicated it to the fourteen publishers who had turned it down: Farrar & Rinehart; Simon & Schuster; Coward-McCann; Limited Editions; Harcourt Brace; Random House; Equinox Press; Smith & Haas; Viking Press; Knopf; Dutton; Harper & Brothers; Scribner’s; and Covici, Friede.

  The publication of No Thanks elicited more criticism. “E. E. Cummings is far more incomprehensible than his poetry,” wrote Louis Untermeyer, then the reigning anthologist of formal poetry. “He cannot make up his mind who or what he wants to be … there is in him a sensitive commentator and an ornery boy, a skillful draftsman and a leg-pulling cheapjack, a subtle musician … and a clown.” The Depression had changed even the mood in the Village. Cummings, who had once, in the twenties, seemed a brilliant voice raised against corrupt authority, an inspired bad boy, began to seem superfluous at a time when railing against the rules was less important than getting enough to eat.

  In the thirties, this country wasn’t as amused by naughtiness that railed against all things parental and tweaked their preconceptions. In the thirties, everyone was as serious as a revolution. Politics was king, and old friends who had become disenchanted with Cummings’s lighthearted work also broke with him over his anticommunist and increasingly conservative politics. A writer without a publisher, Cummings saw his reputation begin to wane. He had failed. Other writers began to toll his death knell. “Once with The Enormous Room, he swam for the moment to the surface,” wrote Ford Madox Ford in The Forum. “Today as far as I know he supports himself by painting portraits.”

  Jehovah buried,Satan dead,

  do fearers worship Much and Quick;

  badness not being felt as bad,

  itself thinks goodness what is meek;

  obey says toc,submit says tic,

  Eternity’s a Five Year Plan:

  if Joy with Pain shall hang in hock

  who dares to call himself a man?

  … … … … … … … … … … … …

  King Christ,this world is all aleak;

  and lifepreservers there are none:

  and waves which only He may walk

  Who dares to call Himself a man.

  So Cummings wrote in this bleak year.

  Sometimes his anger seemed to weigh the poetry down, but at other times its blistering energy raised the words to a new level. One of his best-known and most triumphant poems comes from this well of disappointment and fury in No Thanks:

  the boys i mean are not refined

  they go with girls who buck and bite

  they do not give a fuck for luck

  they hump them thirteen times a night

  one hangs a hat upon her tit

  one carves a cross in her behind

  they do not give a shit for wit

  the boys i mean are not refined

  they come with girls who bite and buck

  who cannot read and cannot write

  who laugh like they would fall apart

  and masturbate with dynamite

  the boys i mean are not refined

  they cannot chat of that and this

  they do not give a fart for art

  they kill like you would take a piss

  they speak whatever’s on their mind

  they do whatever’s in their pants

  the boys i mean are not refined

  they shake the mountains when they dance

  At last he had found the right woman with whom to share his life, Marion Morehouse, but everything else seemed to be falling apart. If his trip to Bennington was an experiment that ended up being a brilliant, inspired day and night, Cummings’s other 1935 adventure was also an experiment—one that ended in an almost farcical and personally bruising disaster for both him and Marion.

  In the winter of 1935, Cummings did what many New York writers did in the 1930s, ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s when they had severe economic problems—he went to Hollywood. Although F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner had gone before him, it is hard to believe that anyone thought this was a good idea. It was true that Cummings vaguely believed that he wanted to write a screenplay. He meant, however, to experiment with the form, not to obey it. His ability to write to order, to obey anyone else’s guidelines, was almost nonexistent. He had no experience of writing screenplays and no desire to do anything but continue with poetry and painting. Were they going to make a movie out of Eimi? At this point in his life, even Cummings’s letters to friends are so playful and modernist as to be almost incomprehensible.

  Nevertheless, a lawyer friend, Maurice Speiser, had arranged for Paramount to offer Cummings a scriptwriting job. He turned that down, still in his right mind and not inclined to honor what was referred to as the Golden Age of Hollywood. Cummings had always favored the freedom and improvisational nature of the theater, and movies didn’t interest him much. But when another offer came from his old friend Eric Knight, the eccentric Yorkshireman who had written Lassie Come Home, his resistance was down.

  Knight and his wife were friends of Cummings and Marion, and Knight urged Cummings to try Hollywood, where, he bragged, he was making a silly amount of money. Knight and Cummings had a further bond: Knight, too, had been separated from his children by his former wife, and the two men spent hours talking about this. Hollywood was the ticket! Everyone agreed that Marion could find work acting or modeling in the City of Angels in the Golden State. It wasn’t just the Okies and those down and out from the Depression who were packing up to seek their fortunes in Hollywood; it was also writers and actresses. Marion’s old friend Aline MacMahon was already doing well there.

  The final persuasive push, after a winter that had been the hardest Cummings had yet lived through, came when he ran into a young man, Edward Titus, whose father he had known in Paris. Titus was a huge Cummings fan—an oasis i
n a desert—and urged Cummings and Marion to accompany him and his wife in their commodious Packard on a trip to Los Angeles via Mexico City.

  The two couples started out amicably and stopped to see the sights in Washington, DC, and New Orleans. They were off on a great adventure. In the close quarters of a car, even a Packard, Titus’s hero worship became cloying and tinged with jealousy. Cummings found it hard to put up with the young man’s judgments and criticisms, delivered as if he knew what he was talking about. Marion couldn’t stand Mrs. Titus. Predictably, by the time the two couples reached Mexico City they were no longer speaking. Cummings and Marion, with five dollars to their name—a bill Cummings had found in the pocket of some old pants at the bottom of his suitcase—checked in to the cheapest pension they could find and wired Rebecca asking for money.

  As always, the Bank of Mom was open for business and ready to lend. She wired a hundred dollars and forwarded another five hundred from Cummings’s aunt Jane, with whom she was now living back in Cambridge on Irving Street. After two weeks of fun in Mexico City—when Cummings had money, he spent it—the Cummingses took their first airplane flight, up to Los Angeles, where they were welcomed by the Knights. They quickly rented a cheap apartment on Eleventh Street in Santa Monica, near their friends. The Knights and Aline MacMahon lent cars, and a round of meetings was scheduled.

  If New York had seemed hard, Hollywood was even more unyielding. The place was booming, that was true. The talkies had swept in, and actresses like Greta Garbo and Katharine Hepburn were starring, and actors like Clark Gable. This did not translate into interest in a New York poet with an attitude problem. Knight’s friend the Austrian-American director Josef von Sternberg did not want to meet with Cummings. He did meet Irving Thalberg at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, but Thalberg took a pass. Cummings could not manage to be earnest enough for the movie culture; he insisted, for instance, on calling Thalberg’s studio “Metro Goldfish and Mayer.” Los Angeles did not seem the place for saying whatever was on your mind and doing whatever was in your pants. In his boyish, aristocratic way he was trying to be amusing. The Hollywood moguls did not get the joke. Disney had just released the first short featuring a bumbling star named Donald Duck, and their Three Little Pigs was also a hit, but it was not interested in hiring the forty-year-old cutup from New York. This bitter experience, which piled failure on top of failure, had the awful result of deepening Cummings’s verbal anti-Semitism, and this too may have hurt his chances in Hollywood.