E. E. Cummings

by Susan Cheever

  It was in New Hampshire that Cummings seemed to bond intensely with the copious creatures of the field and the singing birds of the air. More and more, the sixty-seven-year-old Cummings had lost interest in his own species and become fascinated with the New Hampshire flora and fauna. The fearless raccoons and the porcupine mother who seemed to be teaching her child to eat apples, a red fox in the bank above the lake, woodchucks, mischievous chipmunks with their striped backs, all got his attention in a new, vivid way. Cummings still had the Remington .38 pistol Sibley Watson had gotten him when he was on fire with murderous hatred for Frank MacDermot and wild with a despair that made him think of killing himself. Once he had been half-crazy, a feral man with nowhere to turn. Now the thoroughly domesticated Cummings used that haunted gun to protect the farm’s chipmunks from a neighborhood cat.

  The New England summer birds became his pride and joy. He too was a singer; he too was given a short season in which to spread his melodic song.

  christ but they’re few

  all(beyond win

  or lose)good true

  beautiful things

  god how he sings

  the robin(who

  ’ll be silent in

  a moon or two)

  Poring over his bird books, he studied a recording of bird songs to help him identify the to-wit-to-wee of the thrushes, the high and low notes of the nuthatches, the oriole’s complicated symphony, the scornful creak of the roguish blue jay, the high shrill of the occasional tanager, the steady trill of the purple finch, and the low buzz of the hummingbirds that came up to the porch in the morning to drink from the tiny tubes of sugar water Cummings put out for them. Sometimes the birds seemed to be singing to him.

  “o purple finch

  please tell me why

  this summer world(and you and i

  who love so much to live)

  must die”

  “if i

  should tell you anything”

  (that eagerly sweet carolling

  self answers me)

  “i could not sing”

  Joy Farm, with its built-in exercise—building, chopping wood, clearing brush—was where Cummings always felt at his best.

  By September, New Hampshire mornings are cold, but during the day the warming sun still hits the green of the meadows. As summer ends there is a kind of sunset effect—like sunsets, many things are more intense just before they end completely. The growing season is so short and the winter to come will be very long. It’s a time to prepare, to harvest the last potatoes and split wood.

  On the morning of September 2, after he fed the hummingbirds, Cummings was delighted by an out-of-place, late-blossoming, bright blue delphinium in Marion’s flowerbed. In the afternoon, he went out to the barn like many other New Hampshire men in that season, to split some wood for the winter. It was a hot day, filled with the smells of new-mown hay and the cool darkness of the barn. The motion of wood splitting—the wedge, the axe, the downward strokes—was another rhythm clouded in the musty smells of the wood and the barn hay. As he was finishing for the day, Marion came to the kitchen door in the fading light and called out that it was time for dinner.

  He told her he would be there as soon as he sharpened the axe. He stacked the wood he had split, whetted the axe blade against the grindstone so that it would be sharp for the next day, and put it up against the wall just as he had been taught to do by his father when he was a boy. He went inside the house and walked upstairs to wash for dinner. Marion heard him crash to the floor in the hallway. He was unconscious, felled by a cerebral hemorrhage. Marion called an ambulance, but he never regained consciousness and died in the hospital the next morning.

  Three days later, Cummings was buried in the family plot in Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston. In spite of his fame, it was a small, private funeral. Nancy was in Europe but sent her two teenage children, Simon and Elizabeth. Marion was too devastated to let many people know. His tombstone is a slab of New Hampshire granite engraved with his name and dates.

  Marion lived for less than seven years after Cummings, dying of throat cancer in 1969 when she was just sixty-three. She still took photographs in those years, but her real profession was Cummings’s legacy. She oversaw the publication of his final, posthumous book, 73 Poems, and sold his hundreds of boxes of papers, drafts, and letters to the Houghton Library at Harvard. His paintings went to a summer camp in Rhode Island that Nancy’s children had attended.

  CODA

  Cummings’s Reputation in the

  Twenty-first Century

  Cummings’s reputation waxed and waned during his lifetime, from that of a Harvard prodigy to that of a man who couldn’t get published without a loan from his mother. Soon after his death, the 1960s and ’70s embraced him all over again as a poet of freedom and playfulness as he had been embraced in the 1930s. He was the Henry David Thoreau of poets, rediscovered by the 1960s students who revered individualism and worshipped the idea of freedom.

  In the past twenty years, however, Cummings’s reputation has waned. “He was cool in the 1960s and cool when you were young,” says the poet David Daniel, echoing what Harvey Shapiro said about Cummings. “Somehow he has the feeling of being a kid’s poet, so we never have to think about him.” Of course Cummings, for all his youthful playfulness, is a consummate adult when it comes to poetry. His high jinks with poetic forms are based on a knowledge of those forms—in English, Latin, and Greek. Cummings is rarely taught in schools anymore. His understanding of the history of poesy, of scansion, meters, rhyme schemes, forms, and techniques like internal enjambment, in which a word in the middle of a line rhymes with a word at the end of the next line, is what allowed him the experiments that sometimes seemed so spontaneous and young. In fact they were studied, written, and rewritten, and based in what had gone before.

  Cummings’s sales are a barometer of the national mood. In confident times his poems are beloved. Their questioning, their humor, and their rule-breaking formalism seem to jibe with a democracy ready to ask hard questions and make fun of itself. In precarious times, readers seem to want an older, more assured poet, someone who speaks with authority rather than scoffs at it.

  These days he is too popular for the academy and often too sassy to be taught in high school. Many people remember him for his use of the lower case, but few understand that this lowercasing was a fraction of the experiment with form and syntax that was at the heart of Cummings’s modernism. Educated about poetics and the various forms of language, he chose to twist the forms he knew well to yield more powerful poems. As a result, he is one of the great and most important American poets.

  Furthermore, although modernism is out of style, we live in a time when its mandate—to make it new, as Pound said, and to notice the world—is more important than ever. Cummings and his colleagues felt that they were being inundated with unprocessed information. They hoped that their poetry would make sense of the world.

  AFTERWORD

  Patchin Place

  When I turn in to Patchin Place these days it’s like going back in time. Cummings is still very much alive. Narrow sidewalks line an alley, trees shade houses with white lintels, and the iron tracery of fire escapes hangs above neat wrought-iron fences and gates. The house where Cummings lived has been opened up into a big, light living room and kitchen with hardwood floors and white sofas. The place where Dylan Thomas and Cummings sat and talked about language in front of a smoky fire while drinking gin out of cheap glasses is now the living room of a family with two children and a dachshund, but the tenement feeling is still there in the way the old wooden stairs twist, and in the feeling of many small rooms.

  You walk up the warped risers to Cummings’s old studio, which is now a boy’s bedroom and has become a shrine to basketball. Where Cummings paced and agonized over how to be a formalist with the maximum amount of informality, where his long-lost daughter told him that she loved him, a young boy does his homework. Pigeons coo. Doors open and close as patients vi
sit the psychiatrist next door. The late-afternoon light still streams in from the west through the old panes. Through the window it is still Cummings’s view—the backs of older buildings, the open garden with slate everywhere, the low roofs of the Village where it looks as if families of Italians are still making wine in barrels. Further west toward the Hudson River the sun is beginning to set.

  Acknowledgments

  Biography is a collaboration with the past, with the biographers and historians who have gone before, and this book is no exception. Estlin’s first biographer, Howard Norman, who wrote The Magic-Maker in the late 1950s with his subject perched roguishly on his shoulder, did a lovely job. I am in debt to him for much of his analysis of Cummings’s work—coached by Cummings—and for revealing Cummings’s edits of his own story. Cummings’s next biographer, Richard Kennedy, in the 1970s did extensive interviews with everyone he could find at a time when many of the characters in Cummings’s story were still alive. He was a masterful archivist, researcher, and interviewer whose book, Dreams in the Mirror, will be the baseline for any subsequent Cummings biography—and is certainly the foundation of my own. Cummings’s most recent biographer, Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno, wrote an eloquent and thorough book, E. E. Cummings: A Biography, published in 2004 and based on the Cummings papers at the Houghton Library at Harvard, and the papers and letters that Marion Morehouse sold to the Houghton Library after Cummings’s death. Sawyer-Lauçanno, a poet himself, did a beautiful job of integrating Cummings’s life story with the story of his work. Sawyer-Lauçanno was also helpful to me in person, sharing research and insights into Cummings’s life. In telling E. E. Cummings’s story I stand on all their shoulders. I have been enlightened by their research and insights, their descriptions, and their storytelling.

  My personal thanks begin with my father, who introduced me to his friend Estlin in stories and then in real life. My son Warren who, fortunately for me, is between college and graduate school, was an immeasurable help. He read and reread the manuscript and the poems, editing and re-editing until they were correct. Ingrid Sterner also did a masterful job of editing and fact-checking. Kevin Bourke and Patrick Dillon at Pantheon did astonishing work above and beyond the normal call of duty. Bob Morris and Ira Silverberg somehow came up with the idea that I should write about Cummings, and my extraordinary, adorable, and loving agent, Gail Hochman, supported the idea.

  I am also indebted to the Houghton Library at Harvard, and to many others who have written brilliantly about Cummings: Richard Kostelanetz, Hildegarde Watson, Catherine Reef, and Wyatt Mason among others. Aileen Gural, who lives with her lovely family in Cummings’s former house in Greenwich Village, was astonishingly generous in opening her home and in finding people who remembered him.

  My friends, my spiritual Board of Trustees, and my family all make it possible for me to write. The world I live in—New York in the twenty-first century—is a rich and thrilling place for a writer. My lovely editor Victoria Wilson was a brilliant and supportive part of the book. Thank you all!

  Notes

  1. ODYSSEUS RETURNS TO CAMBRIDGE

  1 “There was a hush”: Author’s interview with Joanne Potee, West Hartfield, Mass., December 2011.

  2 series of six lectures: Norman, The Magic-Maker, p. 370. Norman’s account of Harvard’s wooing Cummings to give the Charles Eliot Norton lectures is the most complete and includes the correspondence between Cummings, Finley, Buck, and other Harvard officials. Since Norman’s biography was approved by Cummings, albeit reluctantly, I have taken its numbers as accurate.

  3 “Please keep many fingers crossed”: Pound/Cummings, p. 331. Letter dated October 24, 1952.

  4 One drunken tryst: Sawyer-Lauçanno, E. E. Cummings, p. 457.

  5 “He strolled in”: Watson, The Edge of the Woods, p. 144.

  6 “He didn’t look nervous”: Author’s interview with Hugh Van Dusen, New York City, February 2012.

  7 “Cummings was not at all the man”: Author’s interviews and correspondence with Ben La Farge, September and October 2010.

  8 “I found it somehow aesthetically”: Ibid.

  9 the greatest model: Edward Steichen, A Life in Photography (New York: Doubleday, 1968), p. 86.

  10 This girl’s too tall: Sawyer-Lauçanno, E. E. Cummings, p. 364; Kennedy, Dreams in the Mirror, p. 338.

  11 “We were all very polite”: Author’s interview with Hugh Van Dusen.

  12 “The fifties view of him”: Author’s interview with Harvey Shapiro, 2010.

  13 Marion wrote a friend: Kennedy, Dreams in the Mirror, p. 441. Marion Morehouse letter to her friend Evelyn Segal, October 1, 1952. Kennedy has the date of the first lecture wrong; it was October 28.

  14 “Let me cordially warn you”: Cummings, i: six nonlectures, p. 3. All the following quotes are from this edition.

  15 “many times worshipped”: Ibid., p. 3.

  16 “Lucky the students”: Houghton Library, Harvard College Library. Janet Flanner IMG 2436.

  17 “As a child he was puny”: Cummings, Journal entry, Houghton Library, Harvard College Library. Restricted material.

  18 “It was both scary and exciting”: Qualey, When I Was a Little Girl, p. 105.

  19 “Have yet to encounter”: Kennedy, Dreams in the Mirror, p. 443.

  2. 104 IRVING STREET

  1 “to have you in”: Kennedy, Dreams in the Mirror, p. 9. Kennedy quotes this tidbit without attribution.

  2 the Cummings house was also filled with pets: Qualey, When I Was a Little Girl, p. 33.

  3 “Eeenie, meemie”: Ibid., p. 29.

  4 The Rhymester: By Tom Hood, originally published in London, republished in Boston in 1882.

  5 “if there are any heavens”: Cummings published this tribute in ViVa in 1931, when his mother was seventy-two years old. His tribute to his father, “my father moved through dooms of love,” wasn’t written until fifteen years after his father’s death and was published in 1940 in 50 Poems.

  6 “Only a butterfly’s glide”: Cummings, i: six nonlectures, p. 32.

  7 “the ignoramus listening”: Ibid., p. 30.

  8 “I stand hushed”: Sawyer-Lauçanno, E. E. Cummings, p. 24.

  9 Harvard’s first instructor in sociology: Kennedy, Dreams in the Mirror, p. 493, note II. 15.

  10 “No father on this earth”: Cummings, i: six nonlectures, p. 9.

  11 Joy Farm: Norman, The Magic-Maker, p. 29.

  12 “He would let my brother”: Qualey, When I Was a Little Girl, p. 75.

  13 “He must have felt”: Ibid., p. 91.

  14 “I felt his weight”: Ibid., p. 92.

  15 “Rex, you and I have loved each other”: This poem, quoted in Sawyer-Lauçanno, E. E. Cummings, p. 41, is in Charles Norman’s papers at the Harry Ransome Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas.

  16 “I keep them to remind me”: Kennedy, Dreams in the Mirror, p. 49.

  17 Cambridge Social Dramatic Club: Ibid., p. 86.

  18 “a lively, spree-drinking”: Ibid., p. 74.

  19 “I will wade out”: Ibid., pp. 108–10.

  3. HARVARD

  1 Lowell “represented the conservative”: Jerome Karabel, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale and Princeton (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), p. 459.

  2 Under President Lowell, the university would: Bethell, Harvard Observed, pp. 43–54, is a source for this discussion of President Lowell’s attitudes.

  3 “The anti-Semitic feeling”: Karabel, The Chosen, p. 28.

  4 “I am certain of nothing”: Norman, The Magic-Maker, p. 44.

  5 “sitting next to some little”: This repulsive statement from Theodore (Dory) Miller is quoted in Kennedy, Dreams in the Mirror, p. 53, but Miller’s identity is hidden. He is referred to only as “Cummings’ first Greek instructor.” His name is in Kennedy’s endnotes.

  6 someone from another era: Watson, The Edge of the Woods, p. 81.

  7 “Homosexual feelings toward Watson”: Sawyer
-Lauçanno, E. E. Cummings, p. 82. On this subject, when Sawyer-Lauçanno asked the poet John Ashbery if he would talk about Cummings, Ashbery asked, “Are you going to out him?”

  8 “Practically everything I know”: Norman, The Magic-Maker, p. 43.

  9 With his gang of friends: Reef, E. E. Cummings, p. 20.

  10 “I led a double life”: Sawyer-Lauçanno, E. E. Cummings, p. 56.

  11 “Is that our president’s”: Foster Damon on Amy Lowell, quoted in Reef, E. E. Cummings, p. 22.

  12 Lowell kept his face immobile: Kennedy, Dreams in the Mirror, p. 84.

  13 “He defends (his friends)”: “Ezra Pound,” Wikipedia.

  14 “gave me [the rudiments] of my writing style”: Sawyer-Lauçanno, E. E. Cummings, p. 72.

  15 “Mr. Ezra Pound”: Pound/Cummings, p. 1.

  4. THE WESTERN FRONT

  1 “It was something absolutely new”: Houghton Library, Harvard Library Collection, quote from Malcolm Cowley from John Urlich research.

  2 “In New York I also breathed”: Cummings, i: six nonlectures, p. 52.

  3 “We were young”: Reef, E. E. Cummings, p. 26.

  4 “We are alright”: Cummings, Selected Letters, p. 14. Letter dated April 17, 1917.

  5 “colossally floating spiderwebs”: Cummings, i: six nonlectures, p. 53.

  6 “I don’t know why”: Cummings, Selected Letters, p. 14. Letter dated April 7, 1917.

  7 “Hope the war isn’t over”: Ibid., p. 16. Letter dated April 18, 1917.

  8 “We were eager”: Norman, The Magic-Maker, p. 29.

  9 “for those who wish”: Harvard Crimson, March 1917.

  10 “waste a torpedo”: Cummings, Selected Letters, p. 18. Letter dated May 4, 1917.