E. E. Cummings

by Susan Cheever

  Briggs was conventional when it came to poetry and radical when it came to teaching. He required a huge amount of writing from his master’s students outside class—writing that was heatedly discussed in the classroom. He led his students through poem after poem in almost every poetic form invented: haiku, four-line stanzas with various rhyme schemes, sestinas, and Italian and English sonnets. They wrote in iambs, dactyls, and trochees, in tetrameter and trimeter and pentameter. They wrote with alliteration and assonance and without it. They used similes and metaphors until they dreamed in similes and metaphors.

  This rigorous education in form was exactly what seemed to free Cummings to invent a new kind of form. His experiments with language became more extreme. Almost all his poems relied on the beauty of nature: a sunset, flowers, the moon. Now he put words on the page to telegraph meaning through the literal form of the poem as Pound had done. He tried to write the way people spoke, using casual language and direct address. He began switching parts of speech. Somewhere in his final year at Harvard and the year or two after that, Cummings found a kind of poetic sweet spot—he was able to string words and forms together in an electrifying and entirely original way.

  “It was something absolutely new when it appeared,” Malcolm Cowley wrote to Cummings later on, “as your poems in the first issue of the Dial were absolutely new. There had been a big change since 1915 … you found something new and your own—the real question is what started you looking for it?” Certainly Cummings’s year with Dean Briggs, in which a newly confident poet and scholar drilled and redrilled the poetics of the English language, had something to do with the freedom he found within the ancient forms.

  Like many poets, Cummings wrote his most startling and most famous work when he was a young man in his twenties. “All in green went my love riding,” “Buffalo Bill’s,” “In Just-spring,” “the Cambridge ladies”—all are poems from after he gave his class speech at Sanders Theatre in 1915 and before he enlisted to fight in World War I in 1917. The energy in Cummings’s poems comes from the strict forms that seem to be barely containing their passionate subjects and images. Perhaps the tension between form and formlessness, between poetics and content, is sharper in these poems because his immersion in form was more recent. Much of Cummings’s poetry plays with form in the way that only a formalist can play—this was the whole idea behind modernism as he embraced it. In the early poems, this revolutionary inversion—the way form can create freedom—seems livelier than it became in some of the more accomplished later work.

  There was plenty of sentimental backsliding. Scofield Thayer asked him to compose a wedding poem for his June 21, 1916, marriage to the beautiful nineteen-year-old heiress Elaine Orr. Cummings, who was half-smitten with Orr himself after one meeting, composed the endless, bloviating, alliterative, faintly Keatsian “Epithalamion”:

  Thou aged unreluctant earth who dost

  with quivering continual thighs invite

  the thrilling rain …

  Thayer paid Cummings a thousand dollars for writing the poem, which Cummings used to move to New York City, free from Cambridge at last.

  Cummings already sensed that he was destined to live in Greenwich Village, that seething mass of poets, writers, and rule breakers. He rented his first apartment, at 21 East Fifteenth Street, near Fifth Avenue, with a friend, Arthur “Tex” Wilson, another writer. “In New York I also breathed: and as if for the first time.” From this apartment, Cummings suited up and went to his first job, which had been found for him by one of his Harvard professors, William Allan Neilson. Cummings had thought the job would be writing or editing for a weekly magazine, Collier’s, but instead he found himself working for the Collier publishing house, where for the handsome sum of fifty dollars a week he answered letters and packed books for shipping. Cummings was so bored by his job that he read both the poetic and the prose Eddas—dense Icelandic sagas—while he worked there.

  Although the job was tedious, Greenwich Village was everything he had hoped it would be. Cummings soon found new friends, like the sculptor Gaston Lachaise; he spent hours over inexpensive meals at places like Khoury’s, where he ate the eggplant paste called baba ghanoush, which he and Dory Miller had discovered in Boston, and Romany Marie’s, where everyone from Eugene O’Neill to Buckminster Fuller gathered for thick, cheap beef stew. He discovered the National Winter Garden, the New York City version of the Old Howard and Healey’s Palace, and soon he felt perfectly at home—more at home than he had felt at home for years.

  Young, poor, and furiously ambitious, Cummings could feel ideas igniting in his mind like a string of firecrackers. On January 10, 1917, reading the New York Sun during one of those boring days at Collier, he came upon a headline announcing the death of Buffalo Bill Cody. “Buffalo Bill is Dead,” noted Cummings on a piece of P. F. Collier & Son stationery already a scrawl of penciled notes incomprehensible to anyone but himself—“Tasmania,” “netsuke of Japan,” “imprimatur,” “hernia,” “like a best-seller.” Buffalo Bill Cody had been a symbol of glamour and sadness for Cummings and all those who followed his career; once one of the most famous men in the world, with long, flowing white hair, a silver stallion, and the adulation of millions, Cody went bankrupt and spent his last years trying to resuscitate his famous show. Later, at home on East Fifteenth Street, Cummings started fooling with the idea of writing a poem about Buffalo Bill that would take a spoken pattern on the page—as Pound had in “The Return”—and use all the alliteration and metric mastery he had learned in Briggs’s class to express his anger and sadness.

  Cummings was an angry young man in a generation of angry young men—many of whom would be destroyed by the war. “We were young, we were poor, and we were ambitious,” wrote Allen Tate, another poet friend of Cummings’s. “We thought that the older generation was pretty bad, and we were later going to replace them.” Perhaps because of his education, or perhaps because of his intensity, or perhaps because of a stroke of great good luck, Cummings was one of those rare geniuses who were able to use their anger to create sublime, incandescent art. The short poem he wrote that January would become one of his most famous, and its few, short lines are some of the most powerful ever written in English. He uses the word “defunct” to create a syllabic meter in the second line—shades of Dean Briggs—and runs words together to create speed and visual imagery. Then he uses spacing and language forms to create the impression of speech. The work shimmers with anger: at loss, at the end of beauty, and most of all at death.

  Buffalo Bill’s

  defunct

  who used to

  ride a watersmooth-silver

  stallion

  and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat

  Jesus

  he was a handsome man

  and what i want to know is

  how do you like your blueeyed boy

  Mister Death

  The regular job at Collier was to be Cummings’s first and last; after three months he quit. Armed with letters of recommendation from Amy Lowell, he decided to take his chances on magazine work. As a twenty-two-year-old and always, Cummings’s attitude toward money was gallant and carefree. He returned his father’s checks, sent to help the two young men set up housekeeping, and chided his sister about an overcoat his parents had sent. “We are alright and not really in need of a single thing (in fact, the trouble is to find a reputable burglar to remove our superfluous stuff),” he wrote home.

  Although the winter of 1916–17 was bitterly cold, and New York was all pavement and streetcars and yelling, unlike peaceful Cambridge, Cummings fell in love with Greenwich Village, the neighborhood he would come back to and live in for the rest of his life. This was a first casual sighting of the city that would become one of his true loves—a place where the photographer who lived upstairs invited young women to pose nude for his camera, hoping they would not discover that he had no lens; a place where races and religions mixed with “colossally floating spiderwebs of traffic; a star
k irresistibly stupendous newness, mercifully harboring among its pitilessly premeditated spontaneities immemorial races and nations.” In nonlecture 3, Cummings told his audience he was led to self-knowledge by a “phenomenon and a miracle.” The miracle would be Paris; the phenomenon was New York.

  Cummings and Wilson reveled in the city. Cambridge was everything old and stodgy; New York was everything new and adventuresome. New York had no quota system, no puritanical ideas about sex, no uptight restrictions on drinking and partying. There was no bullying, racist President Lowell; no smothering, adoring mother or meddling Aunt Jane to tell him what to do or to make him feel guilty about what he wanted to do. When he got home drunk after a night of partying and drinking, staying up late with his new friends to argue the state of the world or the ethics of prosody, there was no terrifying ministerial presence waiting up for him.

  In the middle of enjoying himself, as a poet who was part of a brilliant community of New York poets and as a young man sowing his very wild oats, Cummings was still vaguely aware of the shadow of war and the possibility of being drafted. As Germany declared that it would use all available weapons to stop ships going to and from Great Britain, Cummings spent evenings enjoying the dancing girls at the National Winter Garden. In the first months of 1917, German submarines sank thousands of ships; in April alone, allied and neutral nations lost 122 ships to the German sea offensive. Cummings and his friends in the Village didn’t really care. The war seemed very far away and not very serious. “I don’t know why I talk of this ‘pseudo’ war as I have no interest in it—and am painting and scribbling as ever … I read but one paragraph of Wilson’s speech, being taken with a dangerous fit of laughter,” he wrote to his mother as late as April 1, the day after the United States had entered the war. Even then it all seemed unreal, if not amusing. Wilson’s stirring declaration of war accused Germany of seeking to rule the world through any means. “The challenge is to all mankind,” the president said. “Each nation must decide for itself how it will meet it. The choice we make for ourselves must be made with a moderation of counsel and a temperateness of judgment befitting our character and our motives as a nation.”

  As ever, there were special protocols for Harvard men. In order to avoid being forcibly enlisted, Cummings went to see Eliot Norton, the wealthy son of the late Harvard professor, in his office at 2 Rector Street in New York to sign up along with a group of Harvard friends, including Dos Passos and Robert Hillyer, for the private ambulance corps that Norton’s brother, Richard, had organized to help the French. The young men would be driving old Fords, Packards, Renaults, and Fiats in support of French and American troops near Noyon on the Western Front, where there had already been furious fighting.

  While Harvard boys had been distracted, the French and German armies had suffered a million casualties on the Western Front, including the horrors of the trench warfare during the Battle of the Somme in the summer and fall of 1916. Three of Cummings’s fellow poets of the Western Front—Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Robert Graves—had already been emotionally destroyed by what had happened to them in the trenches, and had been sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital to recover from shell shock. Owen would return to the battlefield and be killed the next year.

  Not only was the war far away, but Cummings at Harvard was halfway to being a pacifist. Still, under the threat of conscription into the infantry, joining an ambulance corps seemed wise. This cautious choice didn’t make him any more enthusiastic about the prospect of war in general or war against the Germans in particular.

  Writing to his parents on April 18 about his plan to sail for France on the ship La Touraine ten days away, Cummings wrote, “Hope the war isn’t over before I get there.” He wasn’t alone in not being able to take the war seriously. As Malcolm Cowley wrote in Exile’s Return, “We were eager to get into action, as a character in one of Dos Passos’s novels expressed it, ‘before the whole thing goes belly up.’ ” The Norton-Harjes American Volunteer Motor Ambulance Corps, loosely associated with the American Field Service (where Malcolm Cowley drove an ambulance) and the American Red Cross, was the enlistment of choice for Harvard men. The Harvard Crimson, announcing that twenty undergraduates had already signed up, explained that “for those who wish to go over …, the requirements are briefly these: A man should pay his way over and back, and have at least $150 in spending money. His uniform will be furnished him in Paris. He should have considerable driving experience, but not necessarily mechanical experience. His physical and nervous condition must be good. Transportation will be paid for some but they must have had considerable experience with driving the larger types of cars.”

  Cummings was seasick on board the Touraine, and so prone to think of the war as a great lark that he wrote his parents that the French ship’s discomfort had made him pro-German. His misery was so great that if a German U-boat were to “waste a torpedo” on the Touraine, he would be delighted, he wrote. After the first few days of the voyage things improved. Someone introduced him to another young man headed for the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps, William Slater Brown, a Massachusetts aristocrat (his family had founded the town of Webster) who had been studying journalism at Columbia. Brown was two years younger than Cummings, but almost immediately the two men became close friends. Cummings’s natural skepticism of any authority, heightened by liberal amounts of alcohol, was probably aggravated by Brown’s equally devil-may-care attitude. Later this would get both of them into more trouble than they ever could have dreamed of. The war had been raging in Europe for three years; but crossing the Atlantic on their way to a battlefield, Brown and Cummings, two indulged young men, seemed determined to behave as if they were back on an Ivy League campus. “The amazing vulgarity of the whole deal—I mean La Croix Rouge, Voluntier Cummings—keeps one from jubilations on one’s successful escape from conscription,” Cummings wrote from the Touraine. Soon vulgarity would be the least of his problems.

  If he had trouble taking the war seriously, his problem was compounded by what happened when he and Brown debarked from the Touraine and headed for Paris. Somehow, perhaps because they were deep in a private conversation, or perhaps because they were drunk, or perhaps because of some misunderstanding that had nothing to do with them, the two got off the train from Bordeaux at a different stop from their future colleagues-at-arms—or at least their colleagues at the steering wheel. Conscientiously, they made their way to the Norton-Harjes offices at 7 Rue François Premier, only to find that they had fallen through a delightful bureaucratic rabbit hole. The office was closed, and they were directed to the Hôtel du Palais, a lovely spot on the right bank of the Seine. Although they reported again at the office the next day, their assignments had somehow been lost or sidetracked. While their classmates and peers hunkered down in trenches or risked their lives in the primitive airplanes of the RAF, Cummings and Brown were detained in Paris for five weeks because of a bureaucratic glitch. Detained in Paris in the spring! For Cummings it was enough to begin to take the war with a bit more gratitude, if not any more seriousness.

  April in Paris: if Cambridge was the question, Paris seemed to be the answer. Brown and Cummings walked everywhere and did everything. In Paris, scented by horse-chestnut blooms, the war still seemed far away, signified only by an absence of young men in the streets, the obvious deformities of the men left behind, and the presence of airplanes and dirigibles flying overhead. “Last night I sat in the Champs (with my feet in a running gutter) for half an hour, watching an eclairee aeroplane come from perhaps fifty miles off, through a night bursting with stars,” he wrote home. The two young men had coffee at the Deux Magots on Saint-Germain-des-Prés and haunted the Louvre on the Right Bank. They read Le Matin and Le Figaro at breakfast near the Champs-Élysées. They reveled in the casual beauty of the Tuileries and of the Pont Alexandre III. They found a favorite restaurant, Chartier, and discovered couscous. Cummings, a talented linguist, soon picked up enough French to understand and speak. They read French poetry.
Cummings bought Cézanne and Matisse reproductions and dozens of books from the stalls along the Seine.

  They plunged into Parisian culture with the momentum provided by limited time. They went to the Ballets Russes to see Petrushka and liked it so much they went again. They were moved by the premiere of Erik Satie’s Parade, with its sets by Picasso, and horrified by the audience’s negative reaction. Cummings sketched everything: soldiers, children, a woman carrying a baguette, horses. He grew a mustache and wore a beret.

  The great liberation of Paris was sexual. Still a frightened and confused virgin at twenty-two, Cummings had grown up in a household where sex was never discussed and sex outside of marriage was a sin. In Cambridge, men’s evil animal desires were tamped down with cold showers, a no-touch zone around one’s own genitals, constant warnings of moral boundaries and the dreadful price one paid for breaking them. For all his mischievousness and desire to break the rules, this was one rule that Cummings hadn’t broken. He had taunted his parents by letting them know he loved burlesque. He had left his father’s car outside a bordello, but he had not apparently gone so far as actually having sex.

  Added to the moral strictures imposed on him by Cambridge was the fear of disease. Harvard physiology classes stressed the ease of contracting syphilis and its terrible symptoms. Sex was wrong and it was dangerous. Harvard men could look, but they had better not touch. So although Cummings and Brown were thrilled by the Folies Bergère and the city where prostitution was legal, and although they found two young prostitutes to hang out with—Mimi and Marie Louise—the frightened Puritan in Cummings was very much on the alert. According to Richard Kennedy (the biographer with the fullest account of Cummings’s time in Paris, because he interviewed Brown after Cummings’s death), Marie Louise was genuinely fond of Cummings, who wrote poems for her and cherished her. She called him “Edouard,” and the two girls even invited the young men to dinner at their own apartment.