E. E. Cummings

by Susan Cheever

  For Cummings, Marie Louise was an awakening—a woman who actually enjoyed her body and its sexual aspects. The two spent the night together in bed, a willing courtesan and a still-frightened Yankee, and although there was no sexual intercourse there was everything else. It was a delirious, passionate night for Cummings, and one that was really his first sexual experience. “the finest girls god ever allowed to pasture in the air of this fresh earth,” Cummings wrote to his mother. For the rest of his life Cummings spent as much time as he could in Paris, the city he called “the miracle.” It was the epitome of liberation from the dusty parlors of Cambridge, the furnished souls of the Cambridge ladies, and the rocks and cold water and severe landscape of New Hampshire. Paris was beauty; Paris was freedom.

  This revelry of artistic, architectural, and sexual delight ended with a summons from an irritated Monsieur Harjes at the Norton-Harjes office, who scolded Cummings and Brown for dereliction of duty. They felt entirely innocent. Perhaps this set the stage for the disaster that was to follow. On June 13, they were sent to the village of Ham on the Western Front for duty.

  When Cummings and Brown got to Ham (in the district of Noyon near Saint-Quentin, a few miles from the Somme), the Western Front was already a synonym for horror and death. Noyon itself had been held by Germans and temporarily abandoned by them. Somehow, Cummings and Brown failed to understand this. They were two American princes in this officially named Section Sanitaire XXI, confident at the worst of times but now coming off five weeks of delight and revelry in Paris. Like many young men who fall in love with Paris, they adored all things French and detested all things American. They both spoke better French than their peers, who found them off-putting and effete. They despised their American commanding officers, and they quickly made friends with the French soldiers, laughing and chatting about the American officer who was the chef de section. In their first weeks at Ham their commanding officer was John T. Phillips, a Harvard man from New York. When Phillips was replaced by Harry Anderson, things took a turn for the worse. Anderson, a former garage mechanic from the Bronx, had absolutely no use for the aristocratic cutups. He told his men that it was their job to “show those dirty Frogs what Americans were like.” This, of course, didn’t sit well with the bereted Francophile from Cambridge, Massachusetts.

  Cummings and Brown, with their gallantry, their aristocratic attitude, and their sympathy for the French, actually belonged to another tradition, which may have been despised by Anderson but which thrived on the Western Front. The Great War is now seen as the end of a kind of civilized, fearless spirit. Bravery and cluelessness sometimes take the same form. Cummings and Brown were like the British officers who went “over the top” out of the trenches in soccer formation dribbling a ball, like the heroic class of British young men who brought more courage than sense to the ugly business of trench warfare. Robert Graves had been fighting just to the west of Noyon. Siegfried Sassoon had been called “Mad Jack” for his coolness under fire.

  In a situation that had no precedent in human history, it was hard to know whether the right thing to do was to allow oneself to be slaughtered or to refuse to go along with the orders when one knew that slaughter was imminent. “They were all so brave, to suffer,” D. H. Lawrence wrote of the thousands who were killed at the Somme, “but none of them brave enough, to reject suffering.” As Geoff Dyer points out in his book The Missing of the Somme: “Perhaps the real heroes of 1914–1918, then, are those who refused to obey and to fight, who actively rejected the passivity forced upon them by the war, who reasserted their right not to suffer, not to have things done to them.”

  Cummings came from a long tradition of gallantry. Having been the little guy himself, he always sided with the little guy. In the encampment at Ham the French were the little guys, forced to be grateful for American help. Even in wartime, it was hard for Cummings to feel sympathetic to the victors. The boredom of life behind the lines, where the food was terrible and his principal work was cleaning the old Fords that served as ambulances and waiting for something to happen, wore on Cummings. Both he and Brown wrote furious letters home freely criticizing everything.

  One day in Noyon there was a rumor of a gas attack. The German army had begun using mustard gas as a weapon late in the war as it retreated to the Hindenburg Line. It was those gas attacks about which Wilfred Owen had written one of the most famous poems of World War I, which ends with the bitter statement:

  My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

  To children ardent for some desperate glory,

  The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

  Pro patria mori.

  Owen would passively return to the Western Front and be killed in the last weeks of the war in 1918. In Good-Bye to All That, his memoir of World War I, Graves describes the aftermath of life under the threat of a gas attack a few miles from where Brown and Cummings were polishing the fenders of Anderson’s ambulance. “Since 1916, the fear of gas had obsessed me: any unusual smell, even a sudden strong scent of flowers in a garden, was enough to send me trembling. And I couldn’t face the sound of heavy shelling now; the noise of a car back-firing would send me flat on my face, or running for cover.”

  Cummings and Brown, intensely literary and determinedly lighthearted and gentlemanly in the face of death, were just a few miles too far south to have fought—and probably died—with men who would have understood them.

  The American soldiers and commanders were worlds away from any of this; they had not been taught that it was a sweet and decorous thing to die for their country, and it wasn’t even their country. They were Americans; they were there to win. Alerted to the oddness of the two recruits, their possibly treasonous oddness, the French censors began giving special attention to the letters of Brown and Cummings. In the spirit of rebelliousness that also caused him to wear his uniform and bathe as little as possible, Cummings not very cleverly used French to telegraph his whereabouts and elude the censors, some of whom were French, in his letters home. “I hope M. le Censor won’t mind my saying that nothing exciting is going on where I am,” he wrote his mother in July. “Every day French aeroplanes are shot at by German anti-aircraft guns, without the slightest effect.” Bored, badly fed and restless, Cummings and Brown got less and less easy to handle. They wrote to the Lafayette Escadrille offering to become pilots. Once, the sirens went off and a few German shells fell nearby, but that was as close as they got to the historic battles being fought all around them.

  Although in July of 1917 the Western Front was still one of the most heartbreaking and dangerous places on earth, in the tiny district of Noyon very little was going on. Occasionally, while driving in what seemed aimless forays, Brown and Cummings found themselves under fire, but they quickly fled, and the enemy was never engaged. Brown and Cummings took a walk one afternoon and found a small chapel in the willows; they noticed the wounds sustained by the rolling pastoral landscape with its islands and alleys of poplar trees, the churned mud and blasted trees. But still nothing happened.

  Their long conversations with the French soldiers at camp revealed a deep demoralization in the troops. Cummings and Brown heard all about the mutiny in the French army after General Robert Nivelle’s campaign had failed earlier in the spring. Twenty thousand French soldiers had deserted. Brown’s letters about the low morale among the French troops and the possibility of a German victory probably further alarmed the censors. Anderson, whom Brown and Cummings both had come to despise, organized a lottery for a trip to Paris for a few of the soldiers. Of course Cummings and Brown felt delighted by the idea. They lost, and it turned out that Anderson had not even entered their names. “This made me angry,” Cummings wrote home to his mother. “I took a mouthful of cigarette smoke and blew it flat in his face.”

  By August, Cummings and Brown had made a lot of people angry. Some combination of Anderson’s rage and the alarm of the French army finally tripped a switch. Their names were given to someone as possible traitors. Treason, especi
ally during the dreadful battles of 1916 and 1917, was punishable by death. By the first of October, as in other parts of the front, Americans joined their new French comrades on the field of battle, Cummings and Brown were in custody, picked up by two policemen and transported to holding cells in Noyon.

  5

  The Enormous Room

  Even now, almost a century later, the wheat fields of northwestern France are distorted and pocked by the scars of World War I battles. The great upheavals of hundreds of trenches, barbed wire, bombs, fires, and explosions that scorched the vegetation to the ground still mark the weirdly beautiful landscape. Trees grow in gnarled and stunted shapes in the districts around Noyon. A few poppies dot farmers’ neat rows and bales of hay. The collision of thousands of tragic deaths with the stubborn fertility of the soil haunts the villages. Here and there a cemetery with rows of white stones or a monument to the dead rises out of the rolling farmland. They are remembered.

  Yet the greatest and most immortal monuments are not the marble memorials but the dozens of books and poems that were left behind—a generation of literary geniuses fought and often died there: Yeats, Owen, Brooke, Sassoon, Graves, Hemingway, Cummings, and many others. More than any other before or since, World War I was our literary war.

  “I know that I shall meet my fate / Somewhere among the clouds above; / Those that I fight I do not hate, / Those that I guard I do not love,” William Butler Yeats wrote after the death of his friend Robert Gregory in his plane in 1918. This kind of acceptance and willing shouldering of an obligation that didn’t really make sense—an obligation that was nevertheless sacred—is part of the character of the soldiers of the Western Front and part of the yearning for a better world that makes great literature. “Death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it,” wrote Erich Maria Remarque in his novel about the German soldiers on the other side of the trenches in northern France, All Quiet on the Western Front. “It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war.”

  Fate had different plans for E. E. Cummings and William Slater Brown. Soon their defiance and outrageous behavior would take them out of immediate physical danger, although that was the last thing they wanted. On September 23, an otherwise quiet day when Section Sanitaire XXI was camped near the Somme in a formerly picturesque town named Ollezy with a bombed-out church, Officer Anderson commanded the two men to polish and grease his personal car. As they were finishing this unwelcome job, a crowd of officials—soldiers and policemen, including the local minister of health—arrived in camp. They ordered Brown and Cummings to collect their belongings and then drove them into Noyon, where they were separately interrogated by a panel of petty bureaucrats. Cummings was delighted by the three functionaries assigned to him, whom he nicknamed “the moustache,” “the rosette,” and “Noyon.” At last his war was happening. The French bureaucrats were less than delighted by their prisoners. They warned Cummings that Brown’s letters home had shown that he was no friend of France.

  After many unimportant questions, the panel had a final very important question for Cummings, as he recalled later. “ ‘Est-ce que vous detestez les boches?’ Did he hate the Germans? I had won my own case. The question was purely perfunctory. To walk out of the room a free man I had merely to say yes. My examiners were sure of my answer,” he wrote. “The rosette was leaning forward and smiling encouragingly. The moustache was making little ouis in the air with his pen. And Noyon had given up all hope of making me out a criminal.” Unfortunately, these small-town French officials had no idea whom they were dealing with—an irrational Yankee who prized perversity over safety, a Harvard boy who had been taught that gallantry was all, a poet whose defiance would carry him happily right up to the edge of death. No, Cummings responded; he did not hate the Germans. “J’aime beaucoup les français.”

  Not surprisingly, Cummings found himself separated from Brown and spending the night in a primitive jail cell. Back home in Cambridge, the Cummingses received a telegram from Ambulance Corps chief Richard Norton: EDWARD E CUMMINGS HAS BEEN PUT IN A CONCENTRATION CAMP AS A RESULT OF LETTERS HE HAD WRITTEN STOP AM TAKING UP THE MATTER THROUGH THE EMBASSY TO SEE WHAT CAN BE DONE. The next day in Noyon, two policemen escorted Cummings to a railroad junction where he spent another night in jail. After a second day of traveling he was taken off the train at Briouze in southern Normandy, well south and west of the worst fighting. To Cummings, at least in retrospect, anything was better than the alternating boredom and mindless obedience of Noyon. In his first cell he wrote: “An uncontrollable joy gutted me after three months of humiliation, of being bossed and herded and bullied and insulted. I was myself and my own master.” That night he was ordered into another building—the Dépôt de Triage at La Ferté-Macé, a holding camp for all kinds of undesirables.

  In the dark Cummings stumbled through a huge door and lay down on the straw bed he had been given. He did not know where he was and could see very little in the darkness. “I fell on my paillasse with a weariness which I have never felt before or since,” he wrote. “But I did not close my eyes: for all about me there rose a sea of most extraordinary sound … the hitherto empty and minute room became suddenly enormous: weird cries, oaths, laughter, pulling it sideways and backward, extending it to inconceivable depth and width, telescoping it to frightful nearness. From all directions, by at least thirty voices in eleven languages … at distances varying from seventy feet to a few inches … I was ferociously bombarded.” This room would be Cummings’s home for the next three months.

  Cummings took a determinedly positive and amused view of being imprisoned, which, he claimed, was far better than being the flunky of the moronic Harry Anderson, among other things. “I couldn’t possibly want anything better in the way of keep, tho you have to get used to the snores, and they don’t allow you a knife, so you can’t cut the air at night which is pretty thick, all windows being shut,” he wrote on October 1 from the Dépôt de Triage at La Ferté-Macé. “You can’t imagine, Mother mine, how interesting a time I am having. Not for anything in the world would I change it. It’s like working—you must experience it to comprendre—but how infinitely superior to Colliers! If I thought you would excite yourself I wouldn’t write from this place, but I know you will believe me when I reiterate that I am having the time of my life!”

  For the American troops who poured into France during the same month and started joining the trench war, charging barbed-wire barriers and being picked off by German snipers while Cummings was still in jail, the battleground was presumably a lot less superior than a job at Collier. In fact, being in jail may well have saved Cummings’s life. The story of his arrest makes sassing yourself into deep trouble look like an act of grace. The sector of Noyon where he and Brown had been suffering under Anderson was later the scene of the war’s most dreadful battles as American troops under General John “Black Jack” Pershing turned the tide of the war and desperately and successfully fought off the German army’s final offensive at the Marne.

  Ypres, Passchendaele, Belleau Wood: the killing fields of the Allied final offensive were all within a tank-drive distance of the Noyon sector. At the end of November the famous American Rainbow Division, with men from every state of the Union under the command of Colonel Douglas MacArthur, would be among the two million Americans who landed in France and swept east across the torn-up wheat fields. While Cummings worried about fleas and thin soup and took notes and sketched the interesting characters with whom he shared the enormous room at La Ferté, 49,000 American soldiers were killed and 230,000 wounded. Another 57,000 died from disease.

  In spite of Cummings’s bravado, his parents were outraged and beside themselves with worry. For them, Norton’s telegram set the tone. Edward Cummings, using his Harvard connections and writing as a Unitarian minister, first contacted the American embassy in Paris and the State Department, only to be jerked around. His fears for his son began turning into anger
at those who refused to help. As the days and weeks passed and the Cummingses didn’t hear from officials about the whereabouts of their son, who appeared to have dropped off the map somewhere in a war zone, Edward Cummings’s fury and fear increased. This was a man who wasn’t used to bureaucratic blow-offs. If his son was being treated badly—and certainly incarceration was a high price to pay for some relatively innocent high jinks—the senior Cummings would find a way to save him and then to tell the world about it. The Cummingses now found themselves in their own enormous room.

  The U.S. State Department didn’t seem to be inclined to help—and then they did something to make the situation much, much worse. On October 26, Edward Cummings received a message saying that his son, one H. H. Cummings, had gone down on the S.S. Antilles, torpedoed by a German submarine. Terrified, anguished, and grief-stricken, Edward kept this information from his wife. After what might have been the worst two days of the Reverend Edward Cummings’s life, the State Department let him know that this information was erroneous and that H. H. Cummings was not the E. E. Cummings who was still incarcerated at La Ferté-Macé.

  Finally, beside himself at the beginning of December, Edward Cummings wrote to President Woodrow Wilson himself—a long, pleading, passionate letter. “Pardon me, Mr. President, but if I were President and your son were suffering such prolonged injustice at the hands of France,” he wrote to the White House on December 8, “and your son’s mother had been needlessly kept in Hell as many weeks as my boy’s mother has,—I would do something to make American citizenship as sacred in the eyes of Frenchmen as Roman citizenship was in the eyes of the ancient world.”

  Due partly to his father’s constant work on his behalf, but also due to French scheduling—La Ferté-Macé was a depot designed for three-month stays—Cummings was finally released without fanfare on December 19. Brown was moved from La Ferté-Macé a few days earlier and then released a month later. Cummings took the train to Paris on his way home and wandered around the wintertime, wartime city, finding it much less charming than on his last visit. He could not find Marie Louise; although he left a note at her apartment, he never heard from her. He was debilitated and sick. He was determined to lose his virginity; and after dinner in a restaurant he went home with a waitress named Berthe and, apparently without much joy, accomplished the longed-for consummation.