A Miscellany (Revised)

by e. e. cummings

  7. THE FIRST ROBIN . . . if the punishment fitted the crime . . .

  CHAPTER VII

  The day was a dark one. Ivan Ivanovitch had just,however,completed his tahsedy shokolah;and and the heavens were lowering with snow,when the bootblack entered,bearing in his wrong hand Hood’s poems and in his right a looseleaf edition of the internationally almost unknown encyclopedia irisher. “Is there a man named Stumpf here?” he asked nervously. Igor Smolinsky did not let the grass grow under his friend’s feet:“Yes,” he answered,and an hush reigned. “Indeed,” mummur Baklanovich was muttering as she attempted to raise her rhododendron, “It is hard times. My father lived under the 3rd Regime. We ate neckties. All of our family did not know the meaning of—” but at this instant a drosky lumbered pettishly past the postoffice,out of which conveyance leapt(rather than stumbled)Damorovsky himself,wittily attired as Santa Claus,and waving somebody’s gold napkinring upon which the initials P.H. had been engraved,with a pulfg#(#adz)a little under the minutehand whose point indicated three of twelve. “Jiajajhgna(goodday poppur),” they all shouted in unison,as the dogs set up their usual yelping and Dimitri Fukk seized up Olga Jerkhov’s lithe body in one arm while turning out the gasjet with the other hand. And honestly,you wouldn’t believe there could be so much anyway darkness on land or on sea or on both,even Patrick was frightened and as for Lysol. The wheels fell off,moreover,and a snowdrift closed,with all its inhuman appurtenances,over their heads;but not before but never mind what. As far as that goes,we are all human—even Gobolink,with her mustaches,etc. . . . don’t be unnice.(Pushkin). The Tzar “Artemus-Hoyle-O’Reilly-Timkins-Y.-Flahrety-Ball-Bearings-Thanatopsis-Sleeve-Valve-Theodore-Commupence-Jones” knelt lugubriously to oneside as Alderman Jonathan Wise supported His Reverence’s corresponding eyelid although Harold was the only one strictly speaking who had learned Dutch at the quite unmitigated age of desuetudinous puberty. Franklin’s lightningrods—of what use? particularly when there is not enough thunder. That’s after all’s said and done the question,thought Alyosha dizzily. The volga made Amy feel warm all over as only Karl knew. A goat braid. Far off,the Ural Mts. loomed,for all the world like nothing whatever,sunlight soap excepted,and a realization that complete futility was at the end of every rainbow smote each and every flower in the crannied wall,rendering Bill’s ukalute harmless. Yes. It was then troo. It was t for 2 and versa for vice. He had guessed. No moocheek could put it over on him. Nix. Yuhbetsha. A pterodactyl,nothing morenorless. And blond,too. How kumb? “Pleaz parse the thoymossbottil, Lutetia.” That was all he said he didn’t go into details he was too proud he might have though he had every excuse he thought he was right u.c. and I suppose let us here bid fond ajew to Harrison and welcome Fisher is the best policy. A fortnight later,while The Serene And Lofty Totem Sir Fred Wishbone extracted an uneaten caterpillar from the indigestible sprig of virulent lettuce served,that very evening,by the waiter at the command of his superior at the Plaza which is one of Bagdad’s sinuously extraexclusive hostelries if I do say so,a dernier cri announed to an imperishably waiting audience of hyperdesiduous celebrities that Fritz Wigwam’s saxophone was anxious to accompany Hans Dumplin’s oboe by way of paying a final homage to the exeunt omnes of unfortunately defunct but improbably eternal Baudelaire;quite as if the worm had not turned as Demosthenes forgot to say to Herodotus,not to omit my own experiences in the cycloneswept plateaux of Chiliconcarne(Texas) hich bear out to the very letter everything under gravitation plus or times Planck’s constant and to Hell with Madame La Princesse Crystabelle Nina Consuelo d’Aujourd’hui née indistinctly but nevertheless Smith,who invented radium as a means of preventing her husband from dissuading her from the path of incoitusterruptus incorporated,all rights reserved for foreign countries including wussia,and thereby bridged the chasm between Omnia Gallia and devisa est,to the immense profit of Peru,the glorification of Moses,the inhibition of Ulysses F. Grant,and the in your ear utter discombobulation of the semiannual dinner of the Independent Order Of 3 cheers for Penn Coronacorona Amsterdam,Illinois(period)with which words(comma)being a man(comma)as we say where I do not come from(comma)of limited vocabulary(semicolon)I bid you everyone 1(won)happy 17th of March as I lift my E. Pluribus Unum to the health of he who raised Rebecca from the well eye never mind yew don’t tread on me too grandpapa prika is the best flavouring for a men. Amen.

  8. THE DOG IN THE MANGER . . . Aesop knew . . .

  CHAPTER VIII

  Interested since her birth exclusively in strangeness in beauty,the murmuring anteaters,an occasional wollef,or native attired only in a passport milking his drowsy rhinoceros,above,the wistful membrane of heaven lazily punctured by stalagmites,stalactites,etcetera,and other occupants of the campanile,seemed as naught by comparison with a grove of the expansive doow-der trees through which her lavabo passed from time to time,threading its way in and out with so much skill you almost forgot that we were subject to the laws of tame and spice,until gradually in a mass of cerebral foliage they all stopped,and after an equatorial downpour the passengers got out and sunned themselves openly in the sunshine,hanging themselves up here and there all over the mountains by their ears and tails,so that it was very picturesque.

  Carefully adjusting her sandglasses,Edna gazed over the brink.

  Three thousand feet beneath,Bmow,the sacred river,exhaled its thunderous mist through which,now and again,all the hues of the particoloured rainbow played,while just below,on a jutting crag,a small group of worshippers,equally unconscious of her and the terrible beauty of the scene,were lolling under prickly umbrellas hollowed from the cherubic fruit of the elp-paen-ip,and at the same time watching,out of the corners of halfclosed eyes,their herds of busily nibbling aphides.

  When she turned her head night had already fallen. A quorum of pedunculate herons,four or five billion in number perhaps,circled ominously in the narrowing slip of dusk. A single star thirstily beckoned beyond the fragrant terror of the jungle,in which voluminous frogs grunted incessantly. To her surprise her father,seated upon a toadstool,mushroom or whichever it was,in the exact middle of the tent which was already illuminated by interminable fireflies was reading the lord’s prayer. Touched,she kissed his left wrist.

  With the agility of lightning Herman Hogg rose to his feet,firing both barrels of a .44 Winchester into a drove of peccaries seven and a half miles away as he did so. “Lord,how you scared me,child,” the old man,caressing his treasure,murmured as an unhappy shepherd in the act of peeling a cocoanut through which most of the shot had passed in transit fell almost immediately in terrible agony into the fire.

  The blueeyed issue of the greeneyed banker of thirty-nine,sometimes entitled by his respectful associates “Old Her,” and by those nearest him in the flourishing realestate office of H. Hogg Inc 93 John Street and 1 Maiden Lane,affectionately known as “Bubbles,” raised her adoring visage to his. “Daddy,” she poutingly chided, “you’re nervous.”

  He looked at her,slowly,musingly,from the tips of her dainty mules,the latest thing in Brussels lace,to the brim of her translucent sombrero,the ultima Thule of mad Madrid. How like her mother,he thought,wonderingly. Pride swelled within him,bringing to his tireless cheek a natural tear.

  “It’s those damned aegospotami,” he muttered huskily.

  Edna laughed gaily at this little slip;then she frowned,remembering well how,only a few days before,the crowded eonac(canoe)filled with gesticulating natives,which had served as escort to the party’s steamlaunch during the crossing of the Sirotilc in spate just south of Anigav,had been bouleversé by one of those mammoth amphibians and its contents devoured in plain sight of all. It was remarkable how well everyone had stood this trying ordeal. Mrs. Hendricks only had fainted temporarily.

  “How’s mummy,” she said coyly,changing the painful subject.

  “Poorly,” “Old Her” replied,reloading his gun with care. She watched him. How strong his hands were,hairy and strong,the efficient hands of a chequesigning broker with just a suggestion of the gorilla,y
et there was something ineffably tender about them. It was as if within the gnarled fingers a secret softness lurked,ready at an instant’s notice to steal forth and show itself in its true colors. Strange hands,rude yet sensitive,such as Rodin might have loved to sculp,or Velasquez draw. She felt glad that these hands belonged to her parent,and sighed.

  “Still vomiting,” Mr. Hogg added,the process completed.

  The remark was how like him. Nothing wasted,crisp and to the point,yet how accurate! Edna awoke with a little start from her dreams.

  “Daddy,” she said smiling,“don’t worry for my sake.”

  The worrier kissed her and picked up the Bible,sitting down with the gun on his knees. “Something around here smells bad,” he stated briefly.

  “Maybe it’s the toadstool,” quickwitted Edna replied without hesitation,wondering if it was a mushroom as she regarded its vast stem and huge upper part which housed her progenitor easily.

  “Burning,” her sniffing daddy corrected,drumming with his heels on the extraordinary freak of Nature as his hands lit a cigar.

  Hogg’s slim darling was silent. The acute smellsense of “Bubbles” for which he was justly noted,so much so that his enemies contended that it extended even to money,was of course not unfamiliar to her. She herself smelled nothing whatever,except the expensive Quelque Fleur tonic which our protagonist used on his,alas,speedily thinning hair three times a day. The exquisite name and the odour itself reminded Edna of nothing so much as her childhood,and especially of summers spent in the luxurious Seabreak mansion,rented from the impoverished scion of an ancient but decayed family,Larry Bing of Nahant and Salem,whose oftphotographed sister Gwendolyn had eloped with Prince Doogon only to be divorced,36 seconds later,when the nobleman ascertained that his beautiful and cultured bride was as good as penniless.—Adv.

  From The New American Caravan (New York: The Macaulay Company, 1929); also [No Title] (New York: Covici Friede, 1930).

  BRIEF BIOGRAPHY

  One awkward morning in the year of grace——, an analerotically­minded cop unhappycomelucklessly patrolling his almost defunct beat narrowly missed the first indications that E. E. Cummings was born in a sleeping steamshovel of Lettish-Hybiscus parents on the upper side of St. John’s Avenue somewhere between 1893 and 1895th streets, or precisely where “Small’s Paradise” still stands. Taking a leaf from the schoolbook of his compatriot Homer, Ulianov (as they called it) promptly disappeared for some reason, preferring to spend the better part of each decade in a different toeandheelery where, imperceptibly but irrevocably, the child’s Bonaparte was formed. From this it was only a step to Oxford. After creating an extranational incident by elaborately refusing to stroke the soi-disant crew, our coxswain found himself frequently decorated by the Queen of Noumania and about to become a mucker. Centuries passed (as they will) but still the boy remained true to himself (as they will) producing every so often a whole series of little classics or classicettes such as Play in Regress, a Comedy of Errors and Idle Tears L. Yut, or Grama Stoops to Folly. Meanwhile a new generation was sowing its proverbial hay, prices steadily mounted prices, Rome took Carthage over Hoover’s veto and Old Black Jack no longer sat on the Young Kentucky Home. Came the Great War. Instantly Cummings abandoned writing and threw himself with the elasticity of Paris artists into fourleafcloverraising (among which several specimens between .00001 cm. long and with their eyes tight open were captured by Fabre and synthetically reconstructed out of Snowflake Axlegrease). The climax, however, shortly arrived on December 52th, when an intimate dinner tendered by Vanity Fair to Theodore Rosenfeld became an outstanding raceriot as Mr. Cummings (under pressure) produced a theoretically working model of the first mimeoninnygraph in existence. To his genius humanity also owes the rubber match, the painless perspiration, to ottocant, the interplanetary rocketchair, the nearbeardless corkscrew, the telemicrophono­scope, leban, elliptical banking and in fact practically everything, whichever its nature may be, that makes (or tends to make) that which we so loosely call our modern civilization. But the end was not yet. Demising by proxy with full millinery dishonours, this unique figure of all time willed his immense fortune to an obscure gull who had unwittingly done him a spontaneous and otherwise totally unexpected favour, thereby rendering a new skimmer (fully patented, if not exactly invented, by that great Esquimaux humanist, obstetrician and gunsmith: G. B. Borsalino) plausible. He was buried alive in Harvard (1912–15).

  From Whither, Whither, or After Sex, What? A Symposium to End Symposiums (New York: The Macaulay Company, 1930); also the catalogue of a twomanshow at the Painters & Sculptors Gallery, N.Y.C., December 1932.

  A FAIRY TALE

  Foreword by Gilbert Seldes: That poets, painters and novelists are beginning to feel their arts unworthy (and economics much more important), you can see any day by looking at pictures, reading books, or listening to literary cocktail talk. So I take special pleasure in offering a rebuttal by E. E. Cummings, who is poet and painter and prose writer, who has been to Russia (and is writing a book about it1), and isn’t scared. He isn’t even scared enough to change his extraordinary and brilliant style.

  Did anyone wish to enjoy himself or her- or itself?

  Probably not. Probably themselves are what people least wish to enjoy. People have different opinions, probably, or neckties; and people are probably alike in that they reserve enjoyment for whatever isn’t themselves.

  Once upon a time (before a great big mean nasty horrid ugly ogre ate up all the cereal) there was a thing called “life,” which people enjoyed. And the reason why people enjoyed “life” may be mysterious; but this is clear—“life” was whatever people’s selves weren’t. If once upon a time people’s selves were waking up with a capitalist alarmclock, “life” was going by—by with a cannibal princess; if once upon a time people’s selves were bathing in the bathtub, “life” was continuing in the continuum; if once upon a time people’s selves were taking it on their communist chin, “life” was triumphantly waving the irrevocably righteous oriflame of unenslaved future generations of transcendentally omnipotent humanity. (The queen and the continuum and the humanity were probably all done with movies and talkies—although life may conceivably have involved opening a speakeasy or getting shot for non-collective farming or even reading a book on matter: it doesn’t matter: people enjoyed “life” once upon a time.)

  And the only trouble, probably, with “life” was that meanwhile “life” wasn’t. “Life” wasn’t not only people’s selves—and therefore enjoyable to people; “life” wasn’t even its own self. Probably “life” was “economics” and “life” must have been “science”; and “sex” is a nice word, too; at all events, this thing called “life” wasn’t a and wasn’t r and wasn’t t.

  Art, curiously, is the only thing which is.

  It makes no difference whether people who enjoy “life” (when there’s “life” to enjoy; which there isn’t just now) disagree with the above statement, whether they consider myself idiotic, or whether they unjustly just (sort of kind of) don’t care—the very simple (the perfectly improbable, the extremely painful) truth being, that all said ladies and gents and scientists and tovariches are nonexisting. Nonexisting people, probably, are the only people who reserve enjoyment for whatever isn’t themselves. And whether nonexisting people nonexist according to Marx or according to Morgan or according to Santa Claus (or some other bigtime racketeer) doesn’t matter a damn.

  Art—defined by an unknown playwright of the 20th century as “a question of being alive” (not “a matter of being born”)—is the one question which only matters.

  And whether “civilization” tries to control art, or neglect art, doesn’t matter. And if probably fish will be taught to sing the international and volcanoes will probably learn esperanto and O’Gene Euneil will open a probably cherrybowling parlour for mute inglorious Agamemnons in every little pink schoolhouse—who cares? Certainly not the artist! “We,” very gaily if very sorrowingly remarked the greatest liv
ing sculptor, who inhabits New York and is called Lachaise, “you and I, we have all-ways know dis ting de-pression!” He might very well have added that the more nonexisters stick their heads in gasovens and slash their wrists with safetyrazorblades and quaff iodine and hop out of windows and hang and bang and drown and communize and socialize and telescope and microscope and spectroscope their “life”-enjoying selves, the better.