E. E. Cummings

by Susan Cheever

  They were eager to get to the house at Silver Lake. Problems that darkened the world in Cambridge—Edward Cummings’s rejection by his own church, the loss of Nancy—often seemed to dissipate as they headed north. It was a clear day as they left Irving Street and drove the 122 miles north. The air still smelled of autumn apples and crushed leaves. Soon the seasonal foliage, which had been reds and golds in Cambridge, turned darker. When they crossed into New Hampshire, they saw that winter had come to the north country—many of the trees were already bare. As they approached the Ossipee range on the eastern side of New Hampshire near the Maine border, it began to snow lightly, slow flakes twirling down from what had been a blue sky. Then it began to snow in earnest. It was very early in the year for snow even this far north, and the Cummingses weren’t well prepared.

  Although the Franklin was a huge improvement over the Cummingses’ first car, which had run on a chain engine, driving in 1926 was still something of an adventure, especially in northern New Hampshire. The roads were dirt as often as they were paved, and the family had had many encounters with livestock and horse-pulled country traffic on their trips in a car from Cambridge to Silver Lake. Cars in the 1920s were still prone to unpredictable breakdowns and roads to unanticipated problems.

  Rebecca was driving the Franklin, and as they climbed higher into the mountains, the snow increased. Snow began to build at the sides of the road as they passed Lake Wentworth and the small town of Wolfeboro. As the snow got heavier and visibility diminished, Edward Cummings insisted that Rebecca pull the car over to the side of the narrow road and stop so that he could clear the small, high windshield. The wipers were short and primitive, doing little more than pushing the snow back and forth. He cleared off the glass with his hands, but in a few minutes the view was again obscured as Rebecca drove on, partially blinded, to the metronomic rhythm of the wipers.

  Ahead, there were railroad tracks embedded in the road, cutting across the pavement at a sharp angle and now hidden by the snow. Rebecca entered a straight part of the road where, in better weather, they always had their first glimpse of Mount Chocorua’s dramatic rocky summit. The tracks are still there, with no signal and no change in the road’s surface at a place where trees line the shoulder. It’s easy to see how Rebecca, concentrating on driving forward, failed to see what was bearing down on her from her right side. The huge Boston & Maine steam locomotive emerged from the trees as it took its last run of the day north to Intervale, New Hampshire, from Rochester on the spur line. The locomotive’s engineer saw the Franklin heading for the tracks through the snow, and desperately tried to brake the engine and the coal car with their ten sets of deadly iron wheels arrayed behind the cowcatcher. It was too late. The steam-belching engine loomed above the Franklin and then cut it in half. Edward Cummings was killed instantly. Rebecca Cummings was miraculously thrown clear.

  By this time the train had screeched to a stop. “When two brakemen jumped from the halted train, they saw a woman standing—dazed but erect—beside a mangled machine,” Cummings wrote. “These men took my sixty six year old mother by the arms and tried to lead her toward a nearby farmhouse; but she threw them off, strode straight to my father’s body, and directed a group of scared spectators to cover him. When this had been done (and only then) she let them lead her away.” Rebecca Cummings was taken to the hospital in Wolfeboro, the small town that the couple had driven by earlier. The unseasonable snow had knocked out the electricity all over New Hampshire, even at the hospital, and Rebecca’s head wounds were stitched up by a country surgeon working by candlelight.

  Cummings was having a festive dinner at his friend Morrie Werner’s apartment with his new lady love—the sexy, forthright Anne Barton—when his sister, Elizabeth, arrived at the door with the awful news. Brother and sister took the train north the next day to Rebecca’s bedside. “My sister and I entered a small darkened room in a country hospital,” Cummings recalled. “She was still alive … why the head doctor could not imagine. She wanted only one thing: to join the person she loved most. He was very near her, but she could not quite reach him. We spoke, and she recognized our voices. Gradually her own voice began to understand what its death would mean to these living children of hers; and very gradually a miracle happened. She decided to live.” Somehow the vision of her children seemed to give her a new strength, and over the next month she was moved to Boston’s Peter Bent Brigham Hospital and continued to recover.

  Within a year Cummings had lost a daughter and a father. When Scofield Thayer was institutionalized later in 1926, it was just more of the same. Cummings threw himself into his work and into his ill-fated love affair with Barton, a woman who, even at the beginning of their relationship, didn’t know how to be faithful to one man.

  Cummings and Anne Barton had been introduced by Werner, a new friend of his who had been at Columbia with Brown. A biographer who had worked for the New York Herald Tribune, Werner had written books on P. T. Barnum and Brigham Young. He was married to the classy writer Hazel Hawthorne.

  A pretty girl from a poor family who had been molested by her father, Anne Barton had already been married to the glamorous, unstable New York artist Ralph Barton and had a daughter with him who was a year younger than Nancy. Cummings’s typically sardonic eulogy of her, written years later, is a concise portrait:

  annie died the other day

  never was there such a lay—

  whom,among her dollies,dad

  first(“don’t tell your mother”)had;

  making annie slightly mad

  but very wonderful in bed

  —saints and satyrs,go your way

  youths and maidens:let us pray.

  In character and circumstances, Anne was the opposite of Elaine; she was wild and funny and always in need of money and so sexual that she could electrify all the men in any room she entered. Not at all like the precious, protected, princessy, wealthy woman who had turned on him so bitterly, Anne represented a kind of freedom Cummings admired and craved.

  The problem with Anne Barton was that she also claimed that freedom for herself, in practice as well as in principle, and as she and Cummings became a couple she continued to see other men—especially a wealthy suitor who bought her pretty things and promised to settle money on her daughter, Diana. For all his talk of liberty, this bothered Cummings a lot.

  About the same time he met Anne, Cummings got a letter from his friend Sibley Watson conferring on him the annual award for poetry given by the magazine that Watson now published—the Dial Award, which came with a check for two thousand dollars and an irresistible pedigree; Tom Eliot had gotten it in 1922 and Marianne Moore in 1924.

  All in all, it had seemed like a great idea to Cummings to take Anne and Diana to Paris, with a side trip to Venice, using the Dial Award money to get her away from her other boyfriends, provide her with something that no amount of money could buy, and cement her loyalties to him. Of course, this grand and expensive experiment didn’t work; but Cummings came home with more work done on his play about betrayal. He immediately went up to Silver Lake to work while Anne stayed behind and returned to her flirtations. From this New Hampshire intensity developed the revolutionary play Him, which he continued writing in the fall when he got back to New York. Just as he finished the play, he heard about the accident in West Ossipee.

  It was Marianne Moore who started Cummings on drama when she asked him to do a theater issue for The Dial. Although not an intimate friend of Cummings, Moore was one of his solid patrons and admirers. As editor of The Dial she had a hand in getting him the Dial Award as well as many assignments and publications. Moore, who would later win the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for her poems, was already a formidable figure in Cummings’s community. With her capes and her tricorne hats she looked as eccentric as she was; she was also a good friend of Pound’s and a subject for Lachaise. Hildegarde Watson remembers being spellbound when she finally met Moore at a concert. “As she quickly rose to meet me I notice
d her eyes, shafts of meaning darting from under the broad brim of her black sailor hat, and the shining bands, just visible, of her red hair.”

  Writing about the theater, Cummings came to believe that there was no contemporary theater, no new theater as there was new poetry, written by him and Pound and Stein and Lowell, and new art, painted by Picasso and Braque and Léger. The revolution of modernism had somehow skipped the theater. The real contemporary theater was outside the theater: it was the burlesque at the National Winter Garden, vaudeville, and the circus.

  Cummings hoped that Him would be the first modernist drama. Using an open stage in which the actor’s fourth wall was the invisible space between the actors and the audience, he wrote a strange play about men and women—Him and Me—filled with surreal imagery and wild dramaturgical swings. In one scene, in which Him tries to seduce Me—a scene that follows a scene in which Me gets an abortion—Cummings seems to be influenced by Freud, or perhaps by some kind of wisdom heard or learned from his experiences with Elaine and Anne. “Think that I am not a bit the sort of person you think,” Me warns Him. “Think that you fell in love with someone you invented—someone who wasn’t me at all. Now you are trying to feel things; but that doesn’t work, because the nicest things happen by themselves.”

  The play seems to be ahead of the playwright when it comes to understanding the complicated dance between men and women in love. Perpetually engaged to Anne Barton, a woman who seemed to love him passionately but to love many men passionately, Cummings once again found himself in a kind of emotional agony. This time, he went to see a friend and student of Sigmund Freud’s, Fritz (Siegfried) Wittels, an Austrian who had recently set up a psychoanalytic practice in New York. Wittels was a graduate of the erotic emphases of Freud and of fin-de-siècle Vienna. He had left one sex scandal behind him when he came to New York to lecture at the New School for Social Research, and he was on the second of three wives.

  Although Cummings did not submit to a full psychoanalytic treatment, he went to Wittels as a patient beginning in 1928, just after Wittels arrived in Greenwich Village, and for the rest of Wittels’s life. Wittels immediately zeroed in on Cummings’s fears about his manhood. Was he still just a boy in a man’s body? Had he acted the part of the careless, powerless boy when it came to dealing with Elaine and the manly Frank MacDermot? Was Anne Barton unable to be faithful to him because of his own failings as a man? Was his slight stature part of the problem?

  Cummings did not want to marry Anne for very good reasons; but Wittels seemed to persuade him that this was his boyish, irresponsible self and that a real man would want to bear the burdens of a wife and child—even a crazy wife and someone else’s child. Wittels made the decision to marry seem like a gateway to adulthood: now, in marrying Anne, Cummings would become a man. Perhaps this was a way of mourning his father; perhaps it was just a bad idea. “We knew from Freud that repressed sex instincts made men neurotic to such an extent that an entire era was poisoned,” Wittels wrote. “What we did not know then was that former puritans running wild would not help either.”

  Cummings was one of these puritans running wild. He didn’t want to marry Anne, but Wittels and Anne together were hard to resist. Cummings and Anne were married on May 1, 1929, at the Unitarian Church of All Souls on Fourth Avenue and Twentieth Street, with Rebecca and Elizabeth Cummings in attendance. Both the bride and the groom were drunk. “They had been stewed for days,” wrote Edmund Wilson, who was there. “Cummings had taken several baths, one after the other; he had felt his arms and legs getting numb … Anne went to sleep and slept for days and couldn’t wake up … awful moment just before the ceremony … when, after everything had been most nonchalant and amiable, they all began snapping at one another.”

  As Cummings’s personal life took another disastrous turn, seemingly disproving his belief that fortune does us neither good nor evil, his professional life continued to get respectful attention. As a man he was spiraling toward agonizing loneliness; as a writer he was never more popular or successful. Throughout his life the personal and the professional seemed strangely divided. When one went well, the other sank, and vice versa. Now, in the 1920s, it was his professional life that seemed on a trajectory to greatness. Partly because Cummings was produced by the Provincetown Playhouse Him had gotten a great deal of review attention. Cummings adored the jacket copy, which hailed the play’s “lucid madness, adventurous gayety and graceful irreverence.” Edmund Wilson gave it a good review in the New Republic.

  Him inspired loyalty and despair. Its twenty-one scenes and seventy-two characters for a cast of 105 were thrown together with Cummings’s playful energy. Some critics said they couldn’t understand it. “Fatiguing, pretentious and empty,” said Alexander Woollcott. Others embraced it. At a time when the hit plays were things like The Trial of Mary Dugan and The Shannons of Broadway, Him was more than unusual and eccentric—it was almost completely fresh and different. Walter Winchell wrote a long, mixed review, but he did say something so memorably negative that it is still often quoted by people who do not remember its subject or its author—he wrote that watching Him was “every now and then like stepping on something extremely nasty in the dark.” Only through the support of James Light and Eleanor Fitzgerald, forward-thinking directors of the Provincetown Playhouse along with Eugene O’Neill, was the play produced at all. Thus Cummings’s career in the theater was launched, controversial and over budget as it was always to be.

  After the production of Him, and his honeymoon in Europe with Anne—this time without his mother or Diana, who was parked in a Swiss boarding school, the babysitter of choice for upper-class children in the 1920s and ’30s—he and Anne moved to Paris. From there Cummings decided to try to get a visa for a trip to Russia.

  Russia in the 1920s was a kind of antiauthoritarian promised land, especially for men and women who were fed up with American capitalism, commercialism, and venality. For many artists, the idea of a society in which competition was replaced by a benevolent state seemed genius. They heard all about it. Russia was the scene of a successful revolution on the part of the proletariat, and most artists identified with the proletariat. The idea that goods and services should be distributed according to need rather than according to, well, greed, was immensely appealing. The John Reed Clubs, named after Cummings’s former neighbor at Patchin Place, thrived among the New York City artists and writers who abhorred the money-worshipping culture in which they found themselves. Reed himself was a kind of hero—a Harvard hero to boot.

  The Russian Revolution had overthrown the twin doxologies of religion and money—two things about which Cummings had complicated and passionate feelings. As the son of a minister he had rejected religion, and as a son of Harvard and the wealthy Cambridge neighborhood where he grew up he had rejected money. So in 1931, while he was living in Paris with Anne, Cummings decided that he would like to go and see for himself what the great and glorious revolution looked like on the ground. Friends had visited Russia and come home with glowing reports of this new world where creativity was rewarded and the humble were as looked after as the wealthy. Dos Passos had been there. Morrie Werner had as well. Cummings’s Paris friend Louis Aragon couldn’t say enough great things about this new model of government. For Cummings, who had based both his life and his work on the principle of revolution and the toppling of all authority, the Russian Revolution was fascinating and irresistible. One of his Russian friends urged him to go, saying, in a suspiciously Cummings-like way, “Spring is nowhere else.” In April of 1931, Cummings cabled his mother for money. He applied for a visa to travel to Moscow and Kiev. In May, carrying gifts and his typewriter alone and in high spirits, he boarded the train for Moscow.

  Trouble started on this dream excursion as soon as the train crossed the border into Russia from Poland. There it was stopped and repeatedly searched by unsmiling men in uniform. This train ride, in a second-class carriage crowded with suddenly fearful passengers, became a centerpiece for Cummings’s
very funny stories about his visit to Russia. Puffing and panting as if he were a steam engine, Cummings communicated to his listeners the sharp difference between the relatively benevolent Polish landscape and the terrified citizens and terrifying officials on the wrong side of the Russian border. “Inexorably has a magic wand been waved; miraculously did reality disintegrate; where am I? … in a world of Was—everything shoddy; everywhere dirt and cracked fingernails—guarded by 1 … soldier,” so Cummings described the change from Poland into Russia in Eimi, the memoir he wrote about his journey.

  When the train finally pulled in to Moscow, Cummings somehow missed a connection with the man who was supposed to meet him at the station. He ended up at the very expensive Hotel Metropol, being shown around by exactly the kind of person he had spent his life avoiding—the Harvard Brahmin Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana. Dana appointed himself Cummings’s guide to this revolutionary new world—he became in Eimi’s satiric pages Cummings’s personal Virgil. Part Ancient Mariner, part propaganda machine, Dana drove Cummings nuts.

  As the Hotel Metropol drained Cummings’s bank account, his guide exhausted his patience. Dana’s conversion to everything around them, including the abolishment of religious freedom and every other kind of freedom, did not sit well with Cummings. “The whole trouble with you,” Dana tells Cummings, who is trying to take a nap, at one point, “is that, like so many people who were brought up on religion, you can’t bear the idea of anything doing away with it.” Cummings can barely grunt a response, “What?” “Of Science doing away with religion,” Dana explains. Cummings is unresponsive as Dana harangues him and calls him trivial, childish, and cheap. They went to the theater and to the Writers’ Club, and Dana introduced him to other Americans. Dana was a seemingly mindless believer when it came to communism, and it took Cummings a while to notice that their conversations were often followed by the same unsmiling men in uniform, who turned out to be members of Stalin’s feared GPU, the forerunner of the KGB.