E. E. Cummings

by Susan Cheever

  Marion, who had been the toast of New York and Paris, didn’t do well, either. For one thing, suddenly she was over thirty in a town where, for a woman, being over thirty was like being dead. Hollywood was all about acting and not at all about fashion. Marion’s ability to combine the two was apparently not attractive to prospective employers. No one cared if she could become the woman who would wear the clothes. No one cared about clothes at all. Fashion magazines were regarded as an East Coast affectation. Desperately, Marion sought out the great western photographer Edward Weston, hoping that like his colleagues Steichen and Hoyningen-Huene he would want to pay to photograph her. Weston was not interested. He asked Marion if Cummings would be willing to sit for a few portraits. No money, of course.

  Rejected all over again in a place they had hoped would give them a new lease on life—or at least a new lease on their faltering finances—the Cummingses became increasingly homesick. By September, they were ready to admit defeat and go east again, but they couldn’t afford to leave. Desperate, they hitched a ride as far as the Mexico/Texas border with Isamu Noguchi, whom they had met through MacMahon. Out of money again, they wired Rebecca, who obliged by sending the train fare back to New York. As soon as possible they headed for the healing hills of New Hampshire.

  Autumn in New Hampshire is one of the most extraordinary experiences the natural world has to offer. Because the state is built on rock, with dozens of lakes carved out by ancient glaciers, the radiant, astonishing colors of the maples and oaks when they begin to flame out for the winter seem more vivid than anywhere else. Bright red and orange, impossible vermilion and deep sienna create a lacy screen against the bluest imaginable sky. The forest creatures, the deer and squirrel and chipmunks, are actively preparing for one of the longest and bitterest winters in the country, and there is a sharpness to the air, a sharpness laced with the smell of apples, that signifies the change of season. The sound of wood being chopped and split echoes everywhere, and woodpiles grow until they take over porches and driveways. Night falls fast, the late afternoon casting long shadows on the meadows and on the lakes; and as the sun sets behind the mountains, it creates a shining path across each body of water. Cummings took long walks and tried to find a direction for his life and his work. At night he read and reread and annotated Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers.

  Cummings continued to publish sporadically. His career seemed to be over. A slim book of poems came out in England. Lincoln Kirstein came out with a small edition of the scenario for the ballet Tom. But in October, while Cummings and Marion had been crunching through the New Hampshire leaves and building fires for warmth in the evenings and ogling the carpet of stars over Silver Lake, Cummings’s oldest and closest Village friend, Gaston Lachaise, died of leukemia at the age of fifty-three. Cummings and Marion headed south for the sad funeral.

  The handsome, adventurous Lachaise had been at the center of a group of writers and artists who surrounded Cummings in the Village. Cummings had always had a gift for friendship—he was charming, funny, and generous. Beginning at Harvard, his connections had catapulted his work into the public eye, gotten him to the Western Front and back again, and launched his career as a poet. Cummings was an infinitely social animal, a man who could come alive at a good party no matter what discouragements and financial problems were taking place in his life outside the party. During the years he had known Lachaise, he had also been close friends with Hart Crane and their mutual editor, Malcolm Cowley. His friend Marianne Moore had sponsored his work at The Dial, which was paid for by his friend Scofield Thayer. Now, even at his close friend’s funeral, Cummings experienced the humiliation of the has-been. He was not asked to give a eulogy; few people seemed to recognize him. In one account of the funeral, Cummings was described as being “so slightly acknowledged as to be practically of no use.” Cummings was forty-one now, and his best years seemed to be behind him.

  Even in these hard years, Cummings kept writing. He would retire upstairs to his studio at Patchin Place or Joy Farm and, in his choppy, slanted handwriting, with a pen on paper transform his thoughts, feelings, and observations into perfectly formal lines that broke all the rules. Nothing stopped him from producing poems, even if no one seemed to want to read them. Marion was a mainstay, as was his mother. Cummings had a combination of confidence and perversity that forced him forward toward an audience that no one could locate.

  The first good news in a long time came in 1937, when Cummings was forty-two, and his agent Bernice Baumgarten of Brandt & Brandt had lunch with Charles Pearce, a young editor at Harcourt, Brace, and the conversation turned to Cummings’s work. Both agent and editor were disturbed that most of Cummings’s work was out of print and unobtainable. Although Harcourt, Brace had turned down No Thanks and been duly thanked in the dedication, and although many editors there were not Cummings fans, Pearce’s energy and enthusiasm prevailed. He would edit, and Harcourt, Brace would publish, a new volume of Cummings’s titled Collected Poems, which would serve to make his poetry once again available. “If most people were to be born twice they’d probably call it dying,” Cummings wrote in the book’s introduction. Indeed, he was being reborn, whether he knew it or not.

  Collected Poems, published in February of 1938, was the beginning of Cummings’s career as a major American poet, a metamorphosis from his previous incarnation as a precocious bad boy. Cummings and Pearce chose poems from the hundreds he had written in the past decades, starting with poems from Tulips & Chimneys and adding twenty-two that were brand new. “My poems are essentially pictures,” Cummings told Pearce as they worked together.

  In his introduction to the elegant volume, Cummings wrote directly to his readers, exhorting them to share in his transcendent view of human experience. “The poems to come are for you and me and are not for mostpeople,” he wrote, “—it’s no use trying to pretend that mostpeople and ourselves are alike. Mostpeople have less in common with ourselves than the squarerootofminusone. You and I are human beings; mostpeople are snobs.” Once again he was the mischievous, blindly optimistic man and loving observer who had written the early poems and The Enormous Room. “With you I leave a remembrance of miracles: they are by somebody who can love and who shall continually be reborn.”

  In selecting poetry for the collection, Cummings axed some of the angrier poems—neither “Jehovah buried” nor “the boys I mean” is there—and included his most playful. No Thanks is partially represented by one of his most lighthearted poems about men and women, written in nursery-rhyme iambic dimeter:

  may i feel said he

  (i’ll squeal said she

  just once said he)

  it’s fun said she

  (may i touch said he

  how much said she

  a lot said he)

  why not said she

  (let’s go said he

  not too far said she

  what’s too far said he

  where you are said she)

  may i stay said he

  (which way said she

  like this said he

  if you kiss said she

  may i move said he

  is it love said she)

  if you’re willing said he

  (but you’re killing said she

  but it’s life said he

  but your wife said she

  now said he)

  ow said she

  (tiptop said he

  don’t stop said she

  oh no said he)

  go slow said she

  (cccome?said he

  ummm said she)

  you’re divine!said he

  (you are Mine said she)

  With the four-hundred-dollar advance from Harcourt, Brace, Cummings and Marion headed back to Paris via London, where they were to visit the zoologist Solly Zuckerman. The summer of 1937 was a strange time to be in Europe. The Spanish Civil War was on, and Mussolini had joined forces with Adolf Hitler. At a dinner given by Zuckerman, Cummings and Marion met the famous
philosopher and womanizer A. J. “Freddie” Ayer. “Some men play golf, Freddie played women,” said one of Ayer’s three wives, Dee Wells.

  Ayer’s most famous book, Language, Truth, and Logic, had just been published, a fierce argument on the subject of argument about the existence of God. Ayer, who was on his way to Oxford via a wartime stint in the British Secret Service, got Marion in his sights. She was a famous beauty whose beauty of late had not been much appreciated. After a secret two-day courtship he finally succeeded in sleeping with her. For him, it seems, she was no more than a conquest. For her, he was a mistake. The day afterward, Marion confessed all to Cummings. He was distraught, although the two did not expect monogamy from each other. This time, she succeeded in reassuring him that he was the only man she loved, and their life together went on as usual.

  In Paris Marion and Cummings had tea with an aging Elaine—no longer a delicate, dewy beauty—and her now one and only husband, Frank MacDermot. Although Cummings asked about his daughter, and was told she was at school in Vienna, he had seemingly given up hope of ever having a parental relationship with her. She was seventeen, a young girl who had been ferried from one school to another in Ireland, Switzerland, and Austria and who was already reading and writing poetry.

  Unbeknownst to Cummings, Nancy had read his poems and been moved and excited by them. Of course she had no idea that he was her father. Elaine had kept her secrets, an easier job because Nancy was usually at boarding school. Nancy asked about her father, but she never got answers. Occasionally Elaine would refer to her time in New York, or her time with Nancy’s official father, Scofield Thayer. Once, Elaine let slip that she had been married to Cummings—was she trying to impress her adolescent daughter? When Nancy excitedly asked for more information, Elaine refused to elaborate. Nancy glossed the comment over as one of her mother’s fantasies about her romantic youth in a faraway place. Talking with Elaine about Nancy was painful for Cummings. It was clear that even if he longed to see her, even if he did get to see her, she would have no idea who he was. Time and Elaine had done their work well. Dependent on Marion, concerned about his ability to write, constantly worrying about money, Cummings once again gave up the idea of ever seeing his daughter.

  When the Cummingses returned to New York, it was to find that Collected Poems had done its work. Cummings was hailed as an important poet—the first real encouragement for his writing in a long, long time. “This is the poetry of a man of complete artistic integrity,” wrote one reviewer.

  Other reviewers, from Paul Rosenfeld to S. I. Hayakawa, praised the book, and John Peale Bishop in a long essay in the Southern Review treated him as an important poet and considered all his work in the context of twentieth-century literature. Marianne Moore had nothing but praise; he got a fan letter from Carl Sandburg; Robert Penn Warren included “Buffalo Bill” in his seminal Understanding Poetry, which was used as a textbook in many colleges; and Collected Poems was nominated for the year’s Pulitzer Prize. “When Cummings writes, ‘Birds sing sweeter than books tell how,’ he is singing his theme song,” Harry Levin wrote in a later evaluation of Cummings’s work. “Poetry might be described in his terms, as the vain attempt of books to emulate birds.” Cummings’s natural lyric affirmation, Levin wrote, had turned brilliantly under the stress of modern circumstances into satirical negation. “The daughters of Greenwich Village are caught, as it were, on the rebound from the dowagers of Brattle Street.”

  Yet the twenty-two new poems included in Collected Poems sizzle, fizz, and snap with Cummings’s joy in life, his respect for the unconventional, and his delight in all things strange and unusual and humble. The best of the poems, which ends the book, begins with an invocation,

  you shall above all things be glad and young.

  and ends with one of his most powerful, thrilling couplets:

  I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing

  than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance

  Cummings and Marion had been together five years, and their ménage at 4 Patchin Place was taking on a conventional domestic flavor. Although Cummings kept a separate studio, they were really living together as man and wife, although they were not married.

  Now, once again Marion took up with another man, English director Paul Rotha. A young, unmarried filmmaker, Rotha would later win two Academy Award nominations for his documentaries. He was smitten by Marion, and she gave in for a while. Then, as always, she confessed all to Cummings. He didn’t want to marry Marion. He couldn’t bear to have another child with her or with anyone else. He didn’t want to tell her what to do, because he did not want to be told what to do—but he did not want her to cheat on him, either. After many talks with his contrite lover, and a few consultations with Dr. Wittels, Cummings decided to patch it up with Marion, accept her apologies, and move on.

  10

  Ezra Pound and Santa Claus

  Biography is an exercise in context. In writing a life, biographers must create the time in which that life was lived. Sometimes, biography looks back in judgment, condemning a subject’s actions with the advantages of modern knowledge and customs. Sometimes, a biographer will try to re-create circumstances in which a subject’s actions may be understood in a way in which they could not be understood at the time of writing.

  Behavior that was considered normal in the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s when Cummings was alive is now thought to be addictive, self-destructive, racist, or perverted. Behavior that is now considered normal—in sexual orientation, in marital status—was then considered addictive, self-destructive, and perverted. For instance, for most of Cummings’s life almost everyone gleefully chain-smoked. No one thought twice about the damage smoking might be doing to lungs and heart. On top of that, most of the writers he knew and most of his friends drank huge amounts of liquor without thinking twice about it. The middle of the twentieth century was the age of literary drunkenness—a drunkenness so prevalent that even now, when most writers do not drink to excess, many people still link creativity and alcohol. Cummings and his friends and colleagues were almost always drunk or hungover or in that uncomfortable place in between.

  Beginning in the 1940s the discovery of prescription drugs and many doctors’ willingness to prescribe them added another layer of physical change to an already toxic cocktail. Cummings took Miltown, Librium, and Nembutal, and this was never considered a medical problem. He was not alone. The concept of side effects doesn’t seem to have entered the public mind until the end of the twentieth century.

  Furthermore, in those days very few people did any kind of routine exercise. When the highly respected University of Chicago president Robert Hutchins was asked about exercise, he said that when he had the urge to exercise he lay down and waited until it passed. Everyone thought this was very funny. The now proven benefits of exercise—for the body, for the brain, for mental health—were unknown. People imagined that exercise would kill them rather than make them stronger. Although they ate less processed food than we do, few people except kooks thought twice about the effect of certain foods on the body. There were few gyms, few health-food stores, and although there were some food faddists, they were marginalized and often mocked.

  In terms of racial, sexual, and religious tolerance, the men and women of the 1940s and ’50s might as well have been in the Dark Ages. Jim Crow laws dominated the South. Although women had had the vote for twenty years, few of them had their own political opinions; they deferred to their breadwinning husbands. There were no women in the Senate or the House. Few women had jobs except as homemakers and mothers. Casual anti-Semitism was common. Professional anti-Semitism was expected. A letter from the Yale admissions committee about an applicant referred to the dark coloring and low brow of the applicant’s “Hebrew race.”

  In the world in which Cummings lived, homosexuality was almost entirely unacceptable and unheard of. President Lowell had mounted a campaign against homosexuality at Harvard, but he was not alone. Although Harvard boys sometimes horsed
around, and although Cummings had lusted after Jim Watson and William Slater Brown and had all but ogled the other inmates at La Ferté-Macé in The Enormous Room, it seemed not to occur to anyone that he might be legitimately bisexual—perhaps because in his world there was no such thing as legitimate bisexuality. A man was either a man or an illegal freak.

  As late as 1960, the critic and professor Newton Arvin was arrested by federal agents in a dawn raid on his apartment—he had made the mistake of sending photographs of partially naked young men through the U.S. Mail. The federal government decided that these photographs were illegal. Arvin, once a well-respected member of the literary community—“Newton was my Harvard,” Truman Capote famously said—was fired, jailed, and died three years later. His trial was a scandal that terrified anyone who was even thinking of ever acting on being gay. Testimony detailed the men he had slept with, and these men were also fired and hounded out of their communities. Yaddo, the writers’ colony where Arvin had done much of his work, asked him to resign.

  For Cummings, these signs of intolerance were all disasters, occasions for the forces of conventional evil to shut down the freedoms he celebrated. Cummings always identified with children—his favorite poem was Wordsworth’s child-worshipping “Intimations of Immortality.” In the poem, children come innocent and whole from heaven, “trailing clouds of glory,” very much like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden before the Fall. As they age, children are corrupted by our dark, punishing civilization. “Shades of the prison-house begin to close/Upon the growing Boy,” Wordsworth writes.