E. E. Cummings

by Susan Cheever

  It was on the family’s summer migration to New Hampshire that the car really came into its own. Before the purchase of the Orient Buckboard the trip was made by an equally temperamental and slow-moving train. Passenger trains at the beginning of the twentieth century were an uncomfortable series of cars with balky windows that failed to keep out the oily smoke from an engine that burned coal and gave off soot and cinders. The train was pulled by an impressive round-fronted steam locomotive with smoke pouring out of its smokestack and steam coming from the top of the gleaming engine, which often had a mind of its own. To stop a train, an engineer had to tell the fireman to stop shoveling, and apply the brakes judiciously, hoping that they would work against the remaining forward power of the engine. “It was both scary and exciting to see one of those locomotives come into a station,” wrote Cummings’s sister, Elizabeth. “The engineer would be leaning out of the cab, looking proud to be able to control such a great monstrous engine.”

  Now with the Orient Buckboard, and later with the Model T Fords they bought as soon as the new ones came off the line, the Cummings family could drive all the way up into New Hampshire, going north on the partially paved road that the state had named Route 3, and then veering off to the east, going through the picturesque small towns—Wolfeboro, Ossipee—until they reached the dirt road to their own houses at Joy Farm.

  As the century progressed and the Model T became a more common sight on the roads around Boston, Edward Cummings decided that a Franklin car would better suit his station in life. The Franklin, manufactured by a die-cast maker named H. H. Franklin, was referred to as “the Car Beautiful.” A luxury automobile, it was the first car to have a case-hardened crankshaft in regular production, to use Duralumin connecting rods in regular production, and to have a steel front body pillar construction. The Franklin boasted an air-cooled engine that was supposed to make it possible to drive for long distances without stopping.

  In the Cummings family there were many annual adventures traveling to and from their house at the crossroads in Cambridge and Joy Farm and later the house that Cummings’s father had built right on the shore of Silver Lake, New Hampshire, and most of these adventures included automotive disasters of one kind or another, in which overnight stays by the side of the road were narrowly averted by the resourcefulness and intelligence of Edward Cummings. His insistence on having the latest, most newfangled machines was an amusing part of his character that delighted his friends and family.

  His mother, Cummings told the attentive audience in Sanders Theater, was “the most amazing person I have ever met.” By 1952 she had been dead five years, outliving her husband by two decades. “Never have I encountered anyone more joyous, anyone healthier in body and mind, anyone so quite incapable of remembering a wrong, or anyone so completely and humanly and unaffectedly generous. I have the honor to be a true heroine’s son,” Cummings told the audience, his voice slowing with feeling.

  In the final fifteen minutes of his lecture, Cummings—who refused to take questions or sign books after a lecture—read all of Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality,” a seven-page poem, which suggested that he too had been born somewhere in heaven and had the benefit of having angels as his true parents. Even in 1952, after the war but before helicopter parents, when the invention of childhood was still young, Cummings suggested to a receptive audience of young people that the young were closer to heaven than their elders—than the parents and professors who thought they knew better because of their age and experience and who therefore tried to tell them what to do. Cummings used Wordsworth to point out that the opposite was true:

  Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

  The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,

  Hath had elsewhere its setting,

  And cometh from afar:

  Not in entire forgetfulness,

  And not in utter nakedness,

  But trailing clouds of glory do we come

  From God, who is our home:

  Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

  Shades of the prison-house begin to close

  Upon the growing Boy,

  But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,

  He sees it in his joy …

  As the first lecture ended and students streamed chattering out into the Cambridge night, Cummings and Marion headed down the street toward the house where he had grown up, on Irving Street, for a small reception given by William James and his wife, Alice. Gratified by the success of his lecture, Cummings was able to put aside some of his deep-seated anger against Harvard and all that it stood for. Marion, however, did not like Cambridge at all. As Cummings’s biographer Richard Kennedy has pointed out in his book Dreams in the Mirror (1980), the conservative, anticommunist Cummings may also have felt politically uncomfortable in this bastion of fifties liberalism. “Have yet to encounter anybody in any manner connected with Harvard who isn’t primevally pink,” he complained to Hildegarde Watson.

  Cummings devoted the second lecture to his own childhood, much of which had taken place a few hundred yards from where he stood on the Sanders stage. “My own home faced the Cambridge world as a finely and solidly constructed mansion, preceded by a large oval lawn and ringed with an imposing white pine hedge. Just in front of the house itself stood two huge appletrees; and faithfully every spring these giants lifted their worlds of fragrance toward the room where I breathed and dreamed,” Cummings told his equally eager audience at the second nonlecture a month later. The woods he played in as a child had been donated to the town by the great Harvard professor Charles Eliot Norton, who had owned them; now he was giving lectures endowed by the same professor of poetry.

  The first three lectures, as Cummings planned them, would be about himself and the world in which he grew up—which also happened to be the world of his audience. The second three lectures, delivered in February, March, and April, would be about poetry and the state of the world outside of Cambridge and the Harvard Yard. Each lecture concluded with Cummings reading for fifteen minutes to half an hour from his favorite works—which ranged from his own poems and plays to Wordsworth and Keats and Robert Burns to the Gospel of John from the New Testament to the final scenes of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, in which Cleopatra kills herself by putting a poisonous asp on her skin. “Dost thou not see my baby at my breast / That sucks the nurse asleep?” Cummings read to the enchanted audience at the Sanders.

  Although after the first nonlecture, it was clear that Cummings was a huge success, he continued to write, rewrite, agonize and fret over the speeches, often staying up late the night before to try and bring them into alignment with the perfection he held in his mind. His back was killing him, and he took two or three Nembutal in order to get to sleep—a sleep that was rarely satisfying. Marion’s unhappiness in Cambridge, where she felt isolated in the wilderness and consigned to being an old man’s nurse, made Cummings’s anxiety worse. Even after all his years of exile, Cambridge was still his place—his homeland—and Marion continued to feel left out. The Jameses snubbed her, she said, and other old friends and neighbors of Cummings paid no attention to her.

  The third lecture, delivered on November 25, was so popular that it turned into a mob scene, with students trying to force their way into the door. Cummings was a star. Cummings and Marion had only been in Cambridge a little more than a month, but they could hardly wait to get back to Patchin Place. The second lecture series, after Christmas, was easier although the couple spent two months in the dreary house on Wyman Road. In the final lecture, before reading Keats’s moving “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and the stirring lines from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound that he had chosen as his finale, Cummings delivered an excelsior that many in his audience would never forget. “I am someone who proudly and humbly affirms that love is the mystery-of-mysteries, and that nothing measurable matters ‘a very good God damn’: that ‘an artist, a man, a failure’ is no mere whenfully accreting mechanism, but a givingly eter
nal complexity … whose only happiness is to transcend himself, whose every agony is to grow.”

  These days you can walk from the Harvard Yard to Sanders Theatre in Memorial Hall in a few minutes. A new Harvard building is going up at the corner of Kirkland Street, but if you go left on Irving Street you enter into the leafiness of a Cambridge that, except for the paved streets and parking regulations, has not changed much in the past century. The Cummings house at the crossroads is walled off from the street by a flat wooden fence with a small plaque noting that Cummings was born and grew up there and that he was the poet who wrote that “the Cambridge ladies … live in furnished souls.” It is far more elegantly maintained than it was in Cummings’s day, but as you stand on the narrow street among the grand houses you can almost hear a past commotion coming from over the wall. Children are shouting and playing, an adult voice calls them inside, and a dog barks at the gate.

  2

  104 Irving Street

  Edward Estlin Cummings was named after his father, Edward, and J. Estlin Carpenter, a British friend of Edward Cummings who also became the boy’s godfather. To avoid confusion with his father, everyone always called the boy Estlin. He was the first child of his family and the only son. He was born on the evening of October 14, 1894, after a six-hour labor and a forceps delivery in the family’s white clapboard mansion, with its three stories and thirteen fireplaces, at 104 Irving Street. He weighed eight and three quarters pounds and his astrological sign, Libra, the scales, predicted that he would be charming, romantic, and a bit gullible. Edward Cummings, who at thirty-three had just been appointed an assistant professor at Harvard, later told his son that the house on Irving Street was built “to have you in.” Although the house may have been built in expectation of a first son, baby Estlin was the smallest of its many inhabitants, human and animal, who only increased in number as he grew up.

  For starters, the bustling house was home to the baby’s grandmother—his father’s mother, who was called Nana. A New Hampshire grande dame, in long skirts and high-button shoes, Nana Cummings kept a sharp eye on everyone and sometimes said that she never relaxed until the entire family was safely in bed—often very late at night. Estlin’s father’s sister, the unmarried Aunt Jane, lived on the third floor. His mother’s mother, Nana Clarke, and his aunt Emma Clarke lived in large bedrooms with their own fireplaces off the hall on the second floor. All of these female relatives were charged with being sure that young Estlin learned proper etiquette.

  It was a big house, but it often seemed to be bursting with family. The triangular yard attracted neighbors’ children, and it was big enough for a touch football game. Cummings and his younger sister, Elizabeth, usually joined by a crowd of cousins and friends, were allowed a lot of freedom to play games like marbles and hopscotch, to get cold and dirty and to wander around the neighborhood. But they were also expected to be respectful, punctual, and bathed and ready for bed at eight o’clock at night. Rounding out the household were a cook, Julia, and a handyman named Sandy. Unlike many early-twentieth-century homes, the Cummings house was also filled with pets—cats, rabbits in a pen in the backyard, and the beloved family dog.

  The children’s favorite family member who lived in the house was their mother’s charming, rule-breaking, beloved unmarried brother, Uncle George Lemist Clarke. “He was by profession a lawyer, by inclination a bon vivant, and by nature a joyous human being,” Cummings recalled in his second nonlecture. George was a playful man who also wrote poems. Cummings’s mother adored poetry, and she hoped her son would become a poet. As a result, Estlin started writing poetry before he went to school, and he was also a talented sketch artist. A drawing he made at the age of six features two buoyant elephants—an animal that would be Estlin Cummings’s totem and favorite creature for the rest of his life. His pachydermophilia was also fed by family trips to the circuses that came through Cambridge.

  When it came to writing, Rebecca Cummings encouraged George to encourage her son, and so Uncle George was Estlin’s first poet and a man who provided a perfect model of the mischievous, aristocratic Boston gentleman. He was a man who knew the rules but found them a bit too boring to follow. It was a household filled with books, reading, and poetry. Even the children’s games were punctuated by counting rhymes passed down through generations. When the children disagreed about who should be It in their games of tag, or who should turn the rope and who should jump, they ceded authority to the traditional choosing rhymes, like this one in which sound trumps sense: “Eenie, meemie, moanie, my / Huskaloanie, bonie, stry / Hultie, gultie, boo. / Out goes you.”

  Uncle George took on part of Estlin’s education, and gave him a precious gift when he was in those impressionable years before puberty—a book titled The Rhymester, subtitled The Rules of Rhyme: A Guide to English Versification, with a Dictionary of Rhymes, an Examination of Classical Measures, and Comments upon Burlesque, Comic Verse, and Song-Writing. This wonderful book is much more than a primer in poetry writing. Quoting Cicero’s injunction that poets are born poets, its author, Tom Hood, includes a comprehensive discussion of everything about poetry from word sound to metrics, from subjects to syntax. Most important, it taught Cummings his first lesson in the basics of formalism and diverted him from the “what” of poetry and from thinking that poetry was only good if it had a political importance like Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” The Rhymester focused on the “how” of poetry. Because of Uncle George and his gift, young Estlin’s focus in poetry went from substance to structure, a shift that would characterize all his work.

  Cummings’s first word, according to the extensive journals of his behavior that his mother kept along with scrapbooks throughout her life, was “hurrah.”

  if there are any heavens my mother will(all by herself) have

  one. It will not be a pansy heaven nor

  a fragile heaven of lilies-of-the-valley but

  it will be a heaven of blackred roses

  my father will be(deep like a rose

  tall like a rose)

  standing near my

  swaying over her

  (silent)

  with eyes which are really petals and see

  nothing with the face of a poet really which

  is a flower and not a face with

  hands

  which whisper

  This is my beloved my

  (suddenly in sunlight

  he will bow,

  & the whole garden will bow)

  As a toddler Cummings wore a white sweater that his mother had embroidered with a crimson H for Harvard. The Cummings house was unusually relaxed. Children came over to play on the swings and in a sandbox and in a tree house built for their delight in spaces that, in neighboring houses, might have been groomed and manicured. They lived in and were part of a mythic neighborhood, and the Cummings house was within calling distance of a half-dozen other Harvard professors, including William James and Josiah Royce; it stood in the woodsy backside of Cambridge far from Brattle Street, behind the Divinity School on the Boston side of Massachusetts Avenue and close to the Somerville town line.

  “Only a butterfly’s glide from my home began a mythical domain of semiwilderness,” Cummings told the audience in nonlecture two, “separating cerebral Cambridge and orchidaceous Somerville … Here, as a very little child, I first encountered that mystery who is Nature; here my enormous smallness entered Her illimitable being …” This love of nature as well as a passion for both the high and the low, the restrained and the showy, the cerebral and the vulgar, is another one of Cummings’s characteristics as a writer and as a man. The Irving Street neighborhood was more populated by intellectuals than other, more Brahmin neighborhoods nearer the college itself. Their dogs had names like Hamlet. The Cummings house was filled with books, music, and adoration.

  One day Professor Josiah Royce, chair of Harvard’s Department of Philosophy, ran into young Estlin on the street and asked if he knew the sonnets of Dante Gabriel Rossett
i. He invited Cummings in, led him to the study, and read him a few: “the ignoramus listening, enthralled; the sage intoning, lovingly and beautifully, his favorite poems.” Cummings was delighted as Royce’s rich voice read Rossetti’s “The sonnet,” an ode in sonnet form.

  A Sonnet is a moment’s monument,—

  Memorial from the Soul’s eternity

  To one dead deathless hour. Look that it be,

  Whether for lustral rite or dire portent,

  Of its own intricate fulness reverent:

  Carve it in ivory or in ebony,

  As Day or Night prevail; and let Time see

  Its flowering crest impearled and orient.

  A Sonnet is a coin: its face reveals

  The soul,—its converse, to what Power ’tis due:—

  Whether for tribute to the august appeals

  Of Life, or dower in Love’s high retinue,

  It serve, or, ’mid the dark wharf’s cavernous breath,

  In Charon’s palm it pay the toll to Death.

  The sonnet became Estlin Cummings’s favorite form.

  Long summers were spent at Joy Farm in Silver Lake, New Hampshire, near the White Mountains, where his education was still overseen by Uncle George and by his parents. By the time Estlin was enrolled at Miss Webster’s School, he could already read and write fluently and he knew the Greek alphabet.

  In many ways it was a golden childhood at a great moment of American history in one of the country’s most interesting and beautiful places—a place where the seasons blazed out red and gold, faded to roof-high drifts of soft snow, and then burst into the bright, hot greens of summer in New England. Loving, attentive parents and servants kept a close eye on this beloved boy. His first poem, faithfully transcribed by his mother after he had announced that he wanted to be a poet, was thought to be precocious for a toddler: “O, the pretty birdie, O / with his little toe, toe, toe!” A few years later, in his first collection of poems, Tulips & Chimneys, he immortalized the mood of his childhood, a childhood of circuses and games and other kids in one of his best loved poems.