E. E. Cummings

by Susan Cheever

  You step away from the traffic and trendiness of lattes and expensive baby clothes on Sixth Avenue and into a place where time stands still. When I wander there under the streetlights on warm evenings, it could be the night fifty years ago that my father and I drove Cummings home. When we got to Patchin Place that night, Cummings warmly invited us to come in for more conversation. We could talk awhile, have a coffee, and listen to some of his new poems; but it was late, and we had a long drive home. Now, in this book, I would like to take him up on that invitation.

  New York City

  June 2012

  1

  Odysseus Returns to Cambridge

  There was no aged dog to welcome him, and no murderous suitors for him to deceive, but E. E. Cummings was a nervous wreck. Professor John H. Finley Jr., introducing Cummings at Memorial Hall, kept saying that Cummings’s return to Harvard after more than thirty years was like Odysseus’ return to Ithaca, but the fifty-eight-year-old Cummings, held together by a neck-to-hip corset that he called “the Iron Maiden,” and attended by his beautiful, homesick common-law wife, did not feel at all victorious or Homeric.

  Many of the women in his audience, however, were as ecstatic as Penelope was when she finally recognized her long-absent husband. “There was a hush when he walked out onto the stage,” says Joanne Potee, who was a Radcliffe student studying Greek with Professor Finley and who had been dragged to the lecture by her mother. “He was enchanting, captivating, and magnetic. He was very virile and sexual on the stage. I think he made some of the men uncomfortable.”

  Decades had passed since Cummings had jubilantly stood on the same vast stage and, with the cheekiness of youth, given a controversial class lecture as a magna cum laude for his own Harvard class. Back then, in 1915, he had been a true son of Harvard College. He had grown up in a large frame house a few blocks away from Memorial Hall at the crossroads of Irving Street and Farrar Street, and he stayed on at Harvard for an extra year after graduation to get a master’s degree in classics.

  Now, on a late October night in 1952, with the crescent moon high over Harvard Yard, he was returning in glory as the distinguished Charles Eliot Norton Lecturer, to give a prestigious series of six lectures (for a total fee of $15,000) in Harvard’s Sanders Theatre within the ornate Memorial Hall, a furbelowed Victorian Gothic giant that had been built after the Civil War to honor the Union dead.

  His self-imposed exile from Cambridge—a town he had come to hate for its intellectualism, Puritan uptightness, racism, and self-righteous xenophobia—had seemed necessary for him as a man and as a poet. Soon after his 1915 class lecture and after serving in World War I, Cummings had permanently fled to sexy, law-breaking Greenwich Village, where he could hang out with other modernist poets like Marianne Moore, talk with writers like Hart Crane, be admired by Dylan Thomas and Edna St. Vincent Millay, have an affair with another man’s wife, go to burlesque performances at the National Winter Garden, and ask William Carlos Williams for medical advice. He had no regrets about leaving his hometown of Cambridge, which liked to compare itself to Athens; one of his earliest poems, a sonnet, brilliantly, angrily takes its measure and finds it wanting:

  the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls

  are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds

  (also, with the church’s protestant blessings

  daughters, unscented shapeless spirited)

  they believe in Christ and Longfellow, both dead,

  are invariably interested in so many things—

  at the present writing one still finds

  delighted fingers knitting for the is it Poles?

  perhaps. While permanent faces coyly bandy

  scandal of Mrs. N and Professor D

  .… the Cambridge ladies do not care, above

  Cambridge if sometimes in its box of

  sky lavender and cornerless, the

  moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy

  Still, he had come back, and standing at the polished maple lectern beneath a frieze of carved laurels, he was in the presence of some major ghosts, including the specter of his own notorious youth. Before Cummings was even born, his redoubtable father, the Reverend Edward Cummings, a Harvard professor and a member of the Harvard class of ’83, had played Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in a college production on the boards of the Sanders Theatre.

  Cummings had spent most of the summer before his first Charles Eliot Norton Lecture trying to calm his anxieties by writing and rewriting and rehearsing both the lectures—in a typical reversal, he titled them “nonlectures”—and the poems he planned to read. He decided that in the first lecture he would speak on the subject of his distinguished parents: his New Hampshire–born father and his mother, Rebecca, whose family came over on the Mayflower. His parents were Harvard royalty. They had been introduced by their friend and future Cambridge neighbor the philosopher William James. How would Cummings be able to take this haunted stage and make it his own?

  “Please keep many fingers crossed (on my nonworthy bewhole) from 8 to 9 this coming Tuesday,” Cummings had written his good friend Ezra Pound, who couldn’t be there because he was incarcerated in St. Elizabeths, a Washington, DC, hospital. Both men loved to poke fun at their colleague T. S. Eliot, who had previously given the Norton Lectures, calling him “Old Possum.”

  Cummings had celebrated his birthday two weeks earlier in Greenwich Village before moving at the last minute to the borrowed house at 6 Wyman Road in the Cambridge woods, where he and Marion Morehouse lived while he was giving the lectures. He was encased in the corset that had been prescribed for his aching back by Dr. Frank Ober. (One drunken tryst he had while living with Marion in Greenwich Village was complicated by his carelessness in leaving the Iron Maiden behind. Cummings was too embarrassed to call Dot Case, the friend in whose bedroom he had left it; Marion called her and fetched it.)

  “He strolled in with that elegant, erect bearing of his that expressed so well his apparent remoteness especially noticeable when he was on the lecture platform,” wrote his friend Hildegarde Watson, who was in the Sanders Theater audience. “He didn’t look nervous,” remembers Hugh Van Dusen, a Harvard freshman who had been a Cummings fan since a Maine summer neighbor had introduced him to the poems. “He was erect, tall and slender and bald, cool and collected, reading at a small table and seated with a lamp.” Van Dusen was thrilled by Cummings’s manner on the stage, by his crusty New England manners, his haughty accent with its Massachusetts twang, and his animated reading. “I had a very strong impression of personality,” he says. “Even in a good-humored way he was cranky. It made a deep impression to see one of my heroes in the flesh.”

  Sanders Theater was triumphantly crowded that October night, with dozens of students turned away at the door and others climbing the fire escapes or rapping at the windows hoping to be allowed to sit in the aisles. Harvard sophomore Ben La Farge, who sat in the packed audience, was one of the men whom Cummings apparently made very uncomfortable. The speaker was less than Homeric, La Farge thought, and in fact he gave an impression of disappointing frailty. “Cummings was not at all the man I expected from his photograph—at least, from the one picture I had of him, in Oscar Williams’s A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry.” La Farge was in the minority, but his disappointment persisted. Later, at a reception for Cummings, he remembers, “I found it somehow aesthetically annoying that his wife seemed to tower above him. I was especially disappointed that his head, which had looked so manly in the photo, seemed to wobble above his frail body.”

  Indeed, Marion’s height—she was three or four inches taller than Cummings’s 5′8″—had been a big part of his own first impression of her when he and his friends the Lights took her out for dinner at Felix’s in Greenwich Village in June of 1932 after picking her up backstage after a play in which she had a small part. It was a blind date. At the time Cummings was a poetic prodigy with two awful marriages behind him. Marion was an actress who in spite of herself already had hug
e success as a model. Her long-necked, long-legged, wide-eyed beauty was praised by photographers like Cecil Beaton and Edward Steichen. Steichen said that she was the greatest model he ever shot because she could transform herself into the woman wearing the clothes. This girl’s too tall for me, Cummings thought at first, but his doubts quickly vanished as she listened to him raptly and, later, spent the night in his studio at Patchin Place.

  Before Marion, Cummings was a lonely and sometimes suicidal mess with a tendency to pick and marry women who seemed intent on little less than destroying him. His first wife, Elaine Thayer, who was married to Cummings’s friend and patron Scofield Thayer when their affair started, was the mother of Cummings’s only child, Nancy. Elaine divorced Cummings and abducted his child; Cummings didn’t see his daughter for more than twenty years. His second wife tried to steal the family place in New Hampshire as part of their ugly divorce. Ultimately Marion’s loving kindness and her appreciation of Cummings’s talents made them an unusually close couple.

  Harvard students are a notoriously tough audience, and this was so even in the buttoned-up 1950s under the calming influence of President James Bryant Conant, who would soon leave to join the Eisenhower administration, and would be succeeded by the conservative Nathan Pusey from Council Bluffs, Iowa. “We were all very polite and repressed,” Van Dusen remembers. “This was the only time in Harvard’s history when there were no panty raids. There was no friskiness even among college freshmen. The administration kept everything undramatic and laid back. Because of this we appreciated Cummings more.”

  The poet and editor Harvey Shapiro remembers that the audience was annoyingly packed with dewy Radcliffe girls—girls like Joanne Potee, who seemed to worship E. E. Cummings for no good reason, or no good reason that Shapiro could discern. These were the same girls who, when Shapiro was living across the mews from Cummings on Patchin Place in the Village, would show up at all hours to recite Cummings poems under his windows and leave scrawny bunches of wildflowers. Serious poets, Shapiro believed, felt otherwise; Cummings was for kids. “The fifties view of him handed down by Randall Jarrell was that he was a perpetual adolescent and you didn’t have to bother with him,” Shapiro says of Cummings. Except for the one Norton Lecture, Shapiro didn’t. In almost ten years of living as Cummings’s neighbor, in hundreds of evenings when Shapiro would come home to Patchin Place from his job at The Village Voice and find Cummings heading out with a sketchbook in his pocket, the two poets never exchanged one word.

  Ever since the letter from the Harvard University provost, Paul Buck, had come in February, Cummings had agonized over whether to give the lectures at all, asking Harvard to limit the time he had to spend in Cambridge and badgering them over what was expected of him. Professor Finley, as the chairman of the faculty committee on the Charles Eliot Norton Professorship, was put in charge of keeping Cummings happy. In his letters, cleverly laced with admiration and flattery, Finley conceded that although the lectureship was a year-long appointment, Cummings could come in October, leave in May, and go home over the Christmas-and-January break.

  Then Finley comfortingly wrote to him that a previous lecturer, Aaron Copland, had spoken for half an hour and then played some of his music, and Cummings hit on the idea of a short speech followed by a reading. For his first lecture he would talk about his parents and read the whole of William Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality,” one of his favorite poems.

  Although by the 1950s Cummings had tentatively begun lecturing at colleges and high schools—which would become a kind of new career for him, and the one that would support him in the final decade of his life—he timed and rehearsed obsessively literally to the second every time he spoke. Tortured by his own expectations and fears about returning to Cambridge, he still often thought of changing his mind and declining to give the lectures as he worked on them the summer before at his beloved New Hampshire house, Joy Farm. Marion wrote a friend that he had never worked as hard over anything as he did over the Norton Lectures.

  Yet, for all these difficulties, Cummings was a sharp judge of his audience. Everything he stood for—a puncturing of pretension, an openness to adventure, a deliciously uncensored attitude when it came to sex, a sly sense of humor fueled by a powerful defiance—is in his opening phrases. He stood at the lectern under the fifty-foot carved ceilings and won the hearts of the audience in a few words. “Let me cordially warn you, at the opening of these so called lectures, that I haven’t the remotest intention of posing as a lecturer,” he told the students.

  As he watched the audience settle down and heard the rustling of clothing and papers as the rows of listeners adjusted themselves and as he smelled the familiar, slightly lemony, well-waxed wood of Sanders Theatre, his doubts seemed to fall away. As rehearsed, he smoothly continued, calling himself “an authentic ignoramus.” Then, having debunked the powers that be, he proceeded to talk about sex.

  “For while a genuine lecturer must obey the rules of mental decency, and clothe his personal idiosyncrasies in collectively acceptable generalities, an authentic ignoramus remains quite indecently free to speak as he feels. This prospect cheers me, because I value freedom; and have never expected freedom to be anything less than indecent.” Furthermore, Cummings explained to his thrilled audience, he was a man who loved naked women, a man addicted to striptease and burlesque theater, where he had “many times worshipped at the shrine of progressive corporeal revelation.” He had their attention. He took control of the vast room in a way that was almost palpable. “Lucky the students who had you to distemper their easy comfort of thought,” his friend Janet Flanner wrote him after reading nonlectures, which was published by Harvard University Press. “It’s a wonder I thought … that you weren’t jailed.” Since, as Cummings explained to his audience, he knew nothing at all, he would not lecture on what he knew. He would lecture on who he was, and he would start with his astonishing parents, Rebecca and Edward Cummings.

  How did Cummings get away with it? His academic bona fides—Harvard, Harvard again—helped, but he was also a true intellectual. After debunking his own credentials, praising naked women, and preaching freedom, Cummings attacked the literary critical establishment directly by reading a few revolutionary lines from Rainer Maria Rilke. “Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing to be so little reached as with criticism. Only love can grasp and hold and fairly judge them.”

  In a more satiric mood he might have recited an edgy autobiographical poem he had written years earlier but never put in a collection—“Ballad of an Intellectuall.” Here his distaste for Harvard’s intellectualism, its high-minded conversations and linguistic convolutions, is clear:

  Listen,you morons great and small

  to the tale of an intellectuall

  ………………………………

  You know the rest:a critic of note,

  a serious thinker,a lyrical pote,

  lectured on Art from west to east

  —did sass-seyeity fall for it? Cheast!

  if a dowager balked at our hero’s verse

  he’d knock her cold with a page from Jerse;

  why,he used to say to his friends,he used

  “for getting a debutante give me Prused”

  and many’s the heiress who’s up and swooned

  after one canto from Ezra Pooned …

  By the fall of 1952, Cummings’s speaking style had evolved over the dozen or so lectures he had given into something both powerful and eccentric. His voice, a whispery yet carrying sound, was magnetic as well as pleasing. Using it as an instrument, he read the poems as if they were arias without music. You leaned forward to hear him, and you were often rewarded with a joke or an inspired, wicked impression of someone like T. S. Eliot or a redoubtable English professor.

  At fifty-eight, Cummings had had his share of illnesses—most of which were a series of aches and pains that defied diagnosis—but his body was also lithe and small, more feminine than masculine, more flexible
than imposing. He had a kind of buoyancy and quickness that he used to great effect in acting out scenes and mimicking those he wanted to mock. He was a conversational genius, creating dazzling monologues in which words seemed to cascade over themselves in shining profusion. His close friend Gaston Lachaise, the sculptor, made huge, rounded women in bronze to float above the MoMA garden. Cummings was able to achieve this physical floating quality in the service of wit. When he was a schoolboy, his classmates joked that God would forgive them their short Cummings. “As a child he was puny; shrank from noise,” he wrote, and his physical slightness as he grew was in sharp contrast to his father’s righteous masculine bulk.

  To describe his father to his Sanders Theatre audience, Cummings quoted a letter he had written about the redoubtable Professor Edward Cummings. “He was a New Hampshire man, 6 foot 2, a crack shot & a famous fly-fisherman & a firstrate sailor (his sloop was named The Actress) & a woodsman who could find his way through forests primeval without a compass & a canoeist who’d stillpaddle you up to a deer without ruffling the surface of a pond …”

  The elder Cummings, his son explained to his young audience, was a great humanist who urged his own congregation on one sunny Sunday to get out into the beautiful world instead of listening to his sermon. He was the man who had the first telephone in Cambridge and one of the first automobiles. An Orient Buckboard with a friction drive, made by the Waltham Watch Company, the car was driven by chains not unlike bicycle chains. It had two kerosene lamps, open seating for two, and went as fast as fifteen miles an hour—dangerously fast on roads that were dominated by horse-drawn carriages. The car was started by pulling an ignition strap out of the rear end, a method that worked erratically. The ride was bumpy on primitive tires and dirt roads, and the car would often stall, leaving its driver to walk home. Edward Cummings loved machines and always had the latest technological invention, but it was Rebecca Cummings who named the Buckboard Bluebird and offered rides to everyone she knew.