E. E. Cummings

by Susan Cheever

  in Just-

  spring when the world is mud-

  luscious the little

  lame balloonman

  whistles far and wee

  and eddieandbill come

  running from marbles and

  piracies and it’s

  spring

  when the world is puddle-wonderful

  the queer

  old balloonman whistles

  far and wee

  and bettyandisbel come dancing

  from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

  it’s

  spring

  and

  the

  goat-footed

  balloonMan whistles

  far

  and

  wee

  “I am of the aristocracy of this earth,” Cummings wrote during his freshman year at Harvard, when he still lived at home on Irving Street and slept in his boyhood room. “All the advantages that any boy should have are in my hands. I am a king over my opportunities.”

  Yet beneath this happy childhood melody were some chords of sadness and rage. Even the neighborhood had its dark side, as Estlin learned when he watched two smooth cows being driven to the slaughterhouse on one of Cambridge’s larger streets near his home. The sight of the lovely creatures being whipped forward to their grisly death made the young Cummings stop: “I stand hushed, almost unbreathing, feeling the helplessness of a pity which is for some whole world,” he wrote.

  Cummings’s father, Edward, a man so much larger than life that he looms over his son’s entire story, had not had such an easy childhood. He was born in Colebrook, New Hampshire, in 1861 above his dour Calvinist father’s general store, Cummings and Co. After a rough-and-tumble country childhood, during which he became a creditable carpenter, Edward Cummings managed to graduate from high school and get himself to Harvard College, where he stayed on, intending first to get a law degree and then to get one in divinity. After two years he changed again, studying sociology as a graduate student and becoming Harvard’s first instructor in sociology. “No father on this earth ever loved or ever will love his son more profoundly,” Cummings told the Harvard audience in his first nonlecture.

  Yet the older Cummings, an old-fashioned paterfamilias in a male-dominated world, could sometimes seem more frightening than loving, especially for a boy who grew up less interested in sports than in books and less interested in being a woodsman or a crack shot than in poetry and reading. Later, the older Cummings was appointed minister at the Cambridge Congregational Church, and the moment he appeared at home after work looking like an ordained messenger directly from God was a solemn one. He was a solid man morally and physically. His son, Estlin, was small, agile, and playful—all feminine attributes in the gender-challenged early twentieth century. Estlin, flexible and slight, loved to laugh and mimic and make fun of things and stand conventional wisdom on its head. In fact, he loved to flip upside down and stand on his own head. He loved to cheer people up with his antics. When the whole neighborhood came down with whooping cough and the children were going stir-crazy, it was Estlin who founded the “Whooper Club” to make a game out of a problem. His father was a sterner sort, a man who wore his Puritan morality on the black sleeve of his ministerial robes.

  Cambridge and Joy Farm were the two poles of Cummings’s youth. One he eventually came to despise; the other he adored increasingly throughout his entire life. Joy Farm, named after its owner Ephraim Joy, who sold it to Edward Cummings at the turn of the century, also earned its name in the joy of the Cummings children, Estlin’s younger sister, Elizabeth Qualey, told Charles Norman.

  The Cummingses had bought Joy Farm in 1899 after a few experimental summers at the shore, where Edward loved to sail his catboat, the Actress. Rebecca Cummings, however, didn’t like the beach, so the family repaired to the mountains. Cummings’s mother was the aristocrat of the family; her forebears on her mother’s side had been distinguished Unitarian writers, judges, and adventurers. A family scandal—her father had gone to jail for a forged check, and her mother had their marriage annulled and took her three children home to live with her parents—just made the excellence of her bloodline more intriguing. Rebecca Clarke was an old maid of twenty-nine when William James introduced her to Edward Cummings in 1888. She had earned her happiness as a wife and mother, and she was appreciative and loving to the fullest measure.

  On this farm, with its view of Silver Lake and its more distant view of the picturesque Mount Chocorua—a dramatic peak in the Ossipee range with a marked tree line and a craggy summit—the Cummings children were free to tumble in the hay and go on long expeditions in the woods. The entire Cummings family, with aunts, uncles, and cousins, left Cambridge in the spring to go north.

  The state of New Hampshire is a landscape of lakes and rocks, granite outcroppings and thin growing soil, the land scraped clean by the ancient glaciers inching east to west, which went on to dump topsoil and rich loam in Vermont on the other side of the Connecticut River. Settled in the early nineteenth century by sturdy pioneers who desperately tried to grow things in the inhospitable soil and during the minute growing season, it became grazing land for sheep and cows. By the aftermath of the Civil War many New Hampshire towns and farms had been deserted, left behind by families who gave their sons to fight, or who had gone to Boston to work in the growing factories, or who just gave up.

  The New Hampshire landscape is haunted by the ambitions of its first settlers. Walking deep in the woods, hikers like the Cummingses could come upon a long stone wall, perfectly stacked without mortar, built to keep the animals in a pasture that had long since grown up into oaks and maple trees; or upon the remains of a house foundation with the hearth made from granite boulders that some long-ago farmer pushed into place with draft horses in the hope of making a permanent home for his family. This lean landscape, with its dazzling moments of beauty—lakes all the bluer and trees all the greener for their endurance, and skies that blaze out with stars against a velvety night—suited the elder Cummingses perfectly. There this impressive father relaxed and became more of a carpenter than a preacher, rebuilding the original Joy Farm house with extensions and a second story, windows looking out to the view of Silver Lake and Chocorua, and a flat roof for watching the stars and the sunset.

  Once the main house was insulated and expanded enough for his family, Edward Cummings built a study for himself at the edge of the woods, a many-sided structure with a wide walk around it. Then he built a gazebo for young Estlin under a nearby tree. As the children grew up and yearned to play in the water, he installed a cold freshwater pond where they learned to swim. During the summer months the family gravitated toward the lake, and Edward decided to build another house by the lake-shore. This boathouse, or summerhouse, which he built for his family with his own hands, also had a flat roof for sky watching.

  Cummings was Rebecca’s first child. As Cummings grew up and became a young man, as he moved out of the house at 104 Irving Street and into a Harvard dormitory and then into an apartment in New York City, there were painful frictions between him and his father. But his connection to his mother never wavered. She was always there for him with emotional and financial support. She sent him monthly checks her entire life and always responded to his needs. Even when she disapproved of his actions, she supported him.

  A story told by Cummings’s sister, Elizabeth, in her memoir, When I Was a Little Girl, and by Charles Norman in his authorized biography of Cummings, gives a whiff of the strength and self-reliance that were expected of many New England boys at the beginning of the twentieth century. Cummings may have been slight and unimposing—he played no sports at Harvard or at any of the three previous schools he attended—yet his spirit was as flinty and determined as anyone’s.

  The patriarchal Edward Cummings had grown up in New Hampshire with many pets and with a series of beloved dogs whose exploits became stories he told his children. There was Old Jack, a Newfoundland, who walked their aunt Jane to school,
keeping the edge of her coat in his mouth so that she was in his care at all times. There was the amusing pug, James Blaine, who liked to nest and sleep in the silky hair of another dog’s tail, making a bed out of a Newfoundland named Doctor. Edward Cummings’s love of animals expressed itself in the dozens of pets his children adored and cared for: rabbits, including one particularly naughty lop-eared named Hong Kong; Elizabeth’s Fluffy and other cats; and dogs—Don, a stray terrier they had found, and Mack, the family collie. When Estlin was about fourteen, his father decided that he should have his own dog, a puppy from a litter born in the village of Silver Lake, a brindle-and-white bull terrier with long, silky ears and a placid disposition.

  “Rex was a wonderful dog, he was always cheerful and ready for a romp,” Elizabeth recalled. “He would let my brother and me do anything with him, even swing him in the hammock and carry him upside down.” Rex had a deep, authoritative bark; but when Estlin came into the house in Cambridge or at Silver Lake, Rex would let out a howl of joy, a kind of yodel that led to the family calling him Prince Ahoohaw. Boy and dog were inseparable. Rex slept on Estlin’s bed at night, growling softly if anyone approached the room, and he waited patiently for him to come home from the Cambridge Latin School in the afternoons. After a bout with distemper, which made Estlin’s feelings about him even more intense, Rex became a kind of family hero.

  When neighborhood dogs attacked Fluffy the cat, Rex—seeing that he was outnumbered—picked her up by the scruff of the neck and carried her to safety around the corner of the house before returning to dispatch the other dogs. When Hong Kong got out of his pen and appeared to be lost forever, it was Rex who led the family to a pile of leaves by the fence where the bad rabbit had been hiding. Rex was also an astute guard dog, able to distinguish between sounds that were actually threatening and sounds that were just the creaks of an old house or the sighing of the wind in the maples. Other dogs had their foibles—Don chased cars, Martin disappeared for days at a time—but Rex was the perfect companion and family dog, and his bond with Estlin was as powerful as anything the young boy had known.

  It was in the country at Joy Farm that Rex really thrived. He guarded the children when they camped out, sleeping in tents or the teepee Estlin had built. He went along on hayrides and caterpillar-collecting expeditions. As the children walked, Rex would run ahead and behind, checking out the country smells, the traces of night animals passing, the fascinating scent of other dogs that might have quartered the same territory. On one of the family’s many climbs up Mount Chocorua, Rex tangled with a porcupine and got a faceful of quills. Estlin held and calmed his dog while Edward Cummings pulled the barbed spears out one by one.

  One summer evening after supper when the family had just moved to the new summer house on Silver Lake, Estlin and Elizabeth, along with the faithful Rex, decided to try out one of their father’s latest acquisitions—a supposedly unsinkable folding canoe with two wooden box seats. As the sixteen-year-old boy and his sister crossed the lake in the late-afternoon light, with sunlight beginning to funnel into a shining path across the water, Rex snapped at a hornet that was flying around the children’s heads. His lunge capsized the canoe, leaving both children far out in the lake fully dressed and holding on to the two skimpy boxes that had been used for seats. Estlin told Elizabeth to hold on to the canoe, which had turned turtle, but when she grabbed the side of the boat, there was a gurgling sound of air escaping and it sank to the bottom of the lake. According to Elizabeth, her brother’s confidence and good humor kept her from being afraid.

  At first Rex swam away from the children, furiously heading for the shore. At some point he realized he had left the children behind, and he started swimming back toward them. “He must have felt himself at the end of his strength and, hearing our familiar voices, turned back to us for help,” Elizabeth wrote. Estlin raised himself as high as he could from the surface and shouted at Rex to go to shore, but the dog apparently did not understand. When he got to them there was no way for him to stop swimming. In a panic and splashing so much he apparently could hardly see, Rex tried to save himself by climbing up on Elizabeth.

  “I felt his weight on my shoulders; then lost hold of my box and went underwater, I came up, sputtering, and got hold of the box again,” Elizabeth remembered. “Again Rex tried to climb on, and again I lost hold and went underwater.” Estlin yelled at Rex and called to him, but as he saw his sister about to go down for a third time he grabbed the frightened, panicking dog and held him underwater until he stopped struggling. Elizabeth was saved from being pushed underwater for the moment, but the children were by no means out of danger. They spent another exhausting hour in the water before Edward Cummings, luckily out for a ride in the motorboat, investigated two heads bobbing in the middle of the lake and rescued them. Estlin asked his father and other rescuers from nearby Camp Shawmut to search for Rex, hoping that he could be saved, but nothing was found that night.

  The next day Estlin walked the edge of the lake until he found Rex’s bloated body and carried it home for a burial. The family put up a marker, and Estlin did what he so often did when his feelings threatened to overwhelm him—he wrote a poem.

  Rex, you and I have loved each other

  As dog and man

  Only can,

  And you have given your silent best,

  With silent cheerfulness to me,

  And now that our great mother

  Holds your poor body to her breast

  I come to give you my best, you see

  Dear dog, to that pure Rex whom we,

  We two, know lies here not at rest.

  Estlin Cummings never had another dog.

  This was the end of his idyllic childhood. Edward Cummings kept the wooden boxes that had kept his children from drowning in the house by the lake for the rest of his life. “I keep them to remind me whenever things seem to me to be too bad,” he said.

  Indeed, father and son enjoyed an increased closeness as the boy approached puberty. The next March they took the train together up to Joy Farm to build a new room onto the farmhouse. On June 14, 1911, at the graduation ceremonies for his Cambridge Latin School class, Estlin Cummings attended the first of many momentous occasions of his life at Sanders Theatre in Memorial Hall.

  There is a mystery at the heart of the story of the youthful Cummings. The young man who walked the few blocks to his first Harvard classes in September 1911 was above all things a loving and respectful son and a credit to his estimable parents and to their friends the professors and philosophers with whom he had grown up—the movers and shakers of Cambridge and its incomparable university. His parents abhorred drinking and all kinds of intemperance, and their only son agreed heartily. They were old-fashioned New Englanders who drew a veil—a thick muslin curtain—over all things sexual. They came from an era when piano legs were covered with fabric and women’s clothes were dried inside special shams lest thinking about any kind of body part be too much temptation for the soul. Until he got to Harvard, Estlin went along without a qualm.

  Something, during the years he was there, shifted tremendously. E. E. Cummings went from being the good boy of 104 Irving Street to being the bad boy of his Harvard class and later the bad boy of the national consciousness. He found that he loved to drink. He discovered the Old Howard and the burlesque delights of Kenmore Square, and one famous night he even left his father’s car—the Ford of a distinguished minister—parked in front of a bordello, where the Boston police were very surprised to find it and towed it away. Cummings found that he loved going out with friends to pick up girls, get drunk on whiskey sours and gin rickeys, and end up hungover and loose in the early morning hours.

  He even officially fell in love—with Amy de Gozzaldi, a woman whom he kissed onstage when they both joined the Cambridge Social Dramatic Club and had parts in The New Lady Bantock. Cummings played the role of the second footman, but the poet who played Lord Bantock—T. S. Eliot, another Harvard student—also had designs on Amy. Neit
her of these literary suitors won her over.

  Soon enough, Cummings was in full rebellion against his father. He hated Cambridge; he scorned the prevailing American attitudes and tastes, and he associated with, as Richard Kennedy calls them, “a lively, spree-drinking, girl-chasing group of young men who were apprentices in the new artistic movements of the twentieth century.”

  At the same time that Cummings began to rebel against his parents and their culture, he began to aggressively experiment with language in a different kind of rebellion—a rebellion that would become his trademark. His friend S. Foster Damon at Harvard had introduced him to the poems of Ezra Pound, especially the powerful plaint “The Return,” in which capital letters are used for emphasis within a line and the form of the poem on the page stutters along like the defeated men and dogs who are its subject. In contributing poems for his first book, Eight Harvard Poets, published by Laurence Gomme, Cummings included poems that played with punctuation, capitalization, and the form of the poem on the blank page. Cummings forged ahead, eager to be the first to do anything and also happy to follow paths that no one else had noticed. Pound’s influence was added to that of his beloved Greek poets, who capitalized only the first letter in a poem, and his favorite comic strip, Krazy Kat, which also used capital letters for emphasis rather than according to the style manual.