E. E. Cummings

by Susan Cheever

  In poem after poem Cummings, like Wordsworth, his spiritual forebear, idolized both youth and the natural world. The young were wiser and purer, more innocent and more beautiful than the self-appointed elders of the world. Nature with its indecipherable glories was where true enlightenment could be found.

  may my heart always be open to little

  birds who are the secrets of living

  whatever they sing is better than to know

  and if men should not hear them men are old

  may my mind stroll about hungry

  and fearless and thirsty and supple

  and even if it’s sunday may i be wrong

  for whenever men are right they are not young

  and may myself do nothing usefully

  and love yourself so more than truly

  there’s never been quite such a fool who could fail

  pulling all the sky over him with one smile

  In Eden and in our species and implicitly in Wordsworth the “shades of the prison-house” are sexual. Children and animals and birds have a joyful apprehension of the erotic world not tethered to a particular gender. It’s only with puberty that a boy becomes a heterosexual or a homosexual man or a little bit of both. For a boy growing up in a household with an overbearing masculine father, in a town and a time when there was no such thing as homosexuality, any attraction to men must have been deeply confusing and painful.

  An analysis of his own various dependencies—on his father, on Scofield Thayer, on Elaine—written in Cummings’s journals, notes that when Thayer was in analysis with Freud, Freud urged him to make Cummings marry Elaine. In doing so, he was “relinquishing self-expression for morality and returning to my childhood,” he wrote. Clearly defining his own desires was a struggle. Whatever ambivalence Cummings may have had was safely hidden in his alliance with one of the most beautiful women in the world. Cummings and Marion were tied together by love, possessiveness, and perhaps a few unexplored secrets.

  As the Depression eased and the war approached, and with the publication of Collected Poems, Cummings’s reputation was slowly reestablished. Yet the advent of World War II was cataclysmic and dreadful for Cummings and Marion. As a man and as part of a couple, traveling had been one of Cummings’s greatest delights. He was a citizen of the world. Now that world seemed to be coming apart. Cummings and Marion had traveled to England and France in 1937, starting off with the advance for Collected Poems and continuing with two checks cabled by the ever-willing Rebecca and a third check from her with money that her son had instructed her to borrow from their friends. England seemed sad.

  As he aged into his forties Cummings became increasingly frail, and Marion also began to suffer from severe arthritis. His back hurt almost all the time, and this chronic pain eroded his good humor and his delight in the small things in his world—the slant of afternoon light, the pleasures of a dinner at Khoury’s or a stiff drink at the end of the day, the look of absorption on a the face of a young woman who had come to understand him through his work.

  By the early 1940s the pain in his back and legs had sent him for a variety of cures that finally led him to Dr. Frank Ober in Boston. Ober X-rayed him and diagnosed him with osteoarthritis of the spine. Cummings was a man whose body had been subjected to many hardships. He had spent three months in France sick and close to starvation, and he had smoked cigarettes since he could remember. He despised exercise and drank a lot. He took Nembutal to sleep, and when it didn’t work, he took more Nembutal. Still, it’s hard not to think that this back and leg pain had some kind of psychological basis. Cummings’s beloved world seemed to be ending, as his colleague T. S. Eliot wrote, “not with a bang but a whimper.”

  Ober told him to baby himself and change his way of living, and he created an elastic corset for Cummings to wear that would stabilize his back. “It resembles armour; but I feel like somebody living in a drain Pipe … rather than like any ancient Roman, though stoicism comes in mighty handy these days,” he wrote his mother. Dr. Ober also told Cummings to try to cheer up.

  Stoicism is not a recipe for good moods, and Cummings’s seemed to sink as the war progressed. He was against it, but then he was against almost everything. “His feelings were so bitter that the word pacifist does not seem quite suitable,” Richard Kennedy wrote. In letters to Pound he quoted Thoreau and then wondered angrily, “Dew yew figger Mr. Thoreau wuz a onanist or an eunuch?”

  Although the old music would sometimes float up from inside him and fix itself on the page, the poems written during the war and collected in 1944 in 1 × 1 (One Times One), published by Henry Holt, are even angrier and uncharacteristically bitter:

  of all the blessings which to man

  kind progress doth impart

  one stands supreme I mean the an

  imal without a heart.

  When Pound let him know that the National Institute of Arts and Letters had turned him down, in spite of repeated nominations from Archibald MacLeish, Cummings made fun of the august body of literary lights that Pound called the “Insteroot (ov Awts n Lers).” Nothing seemed to please Cummings, and the world spinning toward an apocalypse of hatred was reflected in his own anger. Pound had sent a friend, the artist and writer Wyndham Lewis, to visit him. “I saw him in New York,” Lewis wrote Pound later. “But he was such a jumpy and peppery little creature it was impossible to talk to him much.”

  Cummings’s anger, which had once flamed into brilliant, gorgeous cascades of words, seemed to turn inward. The educated antiformalism that had led to the brilliant, revolutionary poems of his youth—“Buffalo Bill’s,” “All in green,” “the Cambridge ladies”—became more anti- and less poetic. Everything always seemed to go wrong on a personal and on a cosmic scale. Cummings was an equal-opportunity hater. He hated Hitler and he hated the Jews. He hated Roosevelt and he hated Stalin—he especially hated Stalin. He hated the critical establishment and he didn’t like the new restaurants on Tenth Street. He made fun of other poets who had once been his friends, William Carlos “Doc” Williams among them.

  In the spring of 1939, Pound sailed to New York on the Rex partly to visit Cummings, who welcomed him with a telegram. Pound’s visit was something Cummings had anticipated with some gladness, but Pound’s large, cranky presence in the cramped rooms at 4 Patchin Place was more than Cummings or Marion could bear. Everyone wanted to meet the Great Man. At a dinner at Robert’s on Fifty-fifth Street, Max Eastman thought Pound was “attractively curly-headed, almost rolly-polly, and with lots of laughter in the corners of his eyes—nervously restless, however, with the insatiable thirst of the self-infatuated ‘great man’ … I found him sweet and likeable withal.” Pound lectured the group—Cummings, Marion, Eastman, and a reporter, Guy Hickock—on eating habits, exhorted them to eat lightly, and then ordered the most expensive thing on the menu—“a thick and sanguinary steak and exquisite red wine.”

  Cummings was disturbed by Pound’s burgeoning anti-Semitism. “We don’t know if he’s a spy or simply schizo, but we do feel he’s incredibly lonesome,” he wrote to his old friend Jim Watson. “Gargling anti-semitism from morning till morning doesn’t (apparently) help a human throat to sing.” Everyone wanted to see Pound while he was in New York, but the Great Man couldn’t be bothered to answer phone calls from the likes of Williams or Ford Madox Ford. “I find poor Pound on his back on the frontroomcouch looking like a derailed fast freight & gasping it was too hot to telephone, but when I offered to invite Williams over here the patient weakly said no,” Cummings wrote Watson. June in New Hampshire is black fly season, but on the first warm day, Cummings and Marion decamped for Joy Farm, leaving Pound in possession.

  During this time the one person close to him, the one he didn’t mock, was Marion. Cummings’s frailty made him extremely dependent on her, as later her illness would make her dependent on him. The two grew so close that anyone from the outside seemed like an intruder. Marion became more and more protective, as if shielding Cummings from his admirers a
nd the rest of the world would make him less angry or less sick. This put a huge strain on her—she was essentially the nanny to a cranky, aging boy. It also set up a kind of isolation for the two of them that later caused a lot of heartbreak. For the moment, under the stress of aging and illness, Marion and Estlin could only thank God that they had each other—no one else could tolerate them.

  As the war wound up to its dreadful climaxes, Pound also seemed angrier and angrier, crazier and crazier. Back home in Rapallo in 1940, he wrote to Cummings that the U.S. was governed by “foreign jew agents.” The letter is an almost incomprehensible jumble of anger and confusion, mixing praise for Hitler’s farm program, a reference to Cummings’s poem “the boys i mean are not refined,” and paragraphs of anti-Semitic, anti-American ranting. Cummings answered with his sweetest, most lighthearted self. “Spring is coming. Two penguins salute you from our mantelpiece. The lady sends love and the elephant wishes bonne chance …”

  By 1942 Pound was ranting on paper from Rapallo about setting up a provisional government of the U.S.A. Cummings responded with his mother’s favorite slogan, “health and a senseofhumor.” But health and a sense of humor seemed to have deserted Pound along with everything else. Attracted by his anti-Semitism and his hero worship of Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, the Italian government paid him to make a series of repulsive radio broadcasts in favor of Nazi Germany and its leaders. The war was the end of Ezra Pound as a respected poet, critic, and friend.

  Cummings, however, had more lives left to live, although the hardships of the late 1930s and early ’40s made changes in his character and in his hermetically sealed relationship with Marion that would affect the rest of his life. Cummings’s health was never again robust, but with the help of Dr. Ober, a variety of pharmaceutical painkillers, and judicious amounts of alcohol he was able to go on. His sweetness and his delight in the natural world saved him from the bitterness and insanity of some of his friends—Hart Crane, Joe Gould, and now Pound. Also, he found the buoyancy and support of another a less lonely career than writing poems.

  The fury against all rules and authority that seemed to take hold of Cummings in his late teenage years and when he was at Harvard was tremendous fuel for a writer and painter. Oh, there were so many rules to break! There were so many phonies. There were so many men in authority who didn’t know what they were doing, or who used their power to hurt. From A. Lawrence Lowell to the moronic United States officers who hated the French army they had gone to the Western Front to help, Cummings’s life was a great feast of bogus authority just waiting to be consumed. A generation before L. Frank Baum wrote the great parable of phoniness, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Cummings was already at it, drawing back the curtain to reveal anything he could that was fake or pretentious or unnecessarily rigid.

  Anger doesn’t age well. Angry young men are sexy; angry old men are less appealing. The progression from heralded poetic prodigy in the 1920s to sharply criticized loner in the 1930s had taken its toll. Cummings didn’t care about the fakirs of the establishment, but he was tired. As the war came to its dreadful and victorious endings with D-day and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there was little celebration at 4 Patchin Place. Although he was hardly involved, Cummings agreed with his friend Pound in thinking that the war was a campaign to save capitalism, a kind of conspiracy by the superior forces he hated so much.

  News of Pound’s fate after 1945 trickled in to Patchin Place in horrifying detail. In the past, when Cummings had been the naughty boy, Pound had often played his forgiving father. Cummings’s real father was ill equipped to understand what his son was up to; Pound understood perfectly. For four years, from November 1941 to December 1945, Cummings’s letters to Pound’s address in Rapallo went unanswered.

  During World War II Pound had come unhinged and been politically transformed into one of the most active and most self-destructive writers in the history of literature. He had sent off thousands of increasingly loony letters and visited the United States to see anyone in Washington, DC, who would let him in to rant. In 1943, because of his radio broadcasts against the United States in general and against Jews in particular, he had been charged in absentia with treason. During the liberation of Italy, Allied partisans took Pound from his house in Rapallo. As he left home for the last time, he stuffed a copy of Confucius in his pocket.

  Pound was far from contrite. He wanted to telegram President Truman and deliver a final broadcast. He told a reporter that Hitler was a saint like Joan of Arc and that Mussolini was a good man who had gone astray. Pound’s mug shot from his 1945 arrest shows a handsome man with a lined, intelligent face and wild, crazy eyes. On May 24 he was transferred to a training center north of Pisa, where he apparently made more enemies.

  In Pisa, a temporary U.S. commander had him detained in a six-by-six-foot steel cage lit up at night by floodlights. With no exercise, eyes inflamed by dust, no bed, no belt or shoelaces and no communication with other human beings, Pound slowly went mad. Whatever vestiges of his former brilliance remained in him were wiped out by the three weeks he spent like a caged animal in American custody. He had not yet been tried. Confinement in a floodlit cage is torture, against the law, cruelty beyond imagining. Pound was sixty years old. Later, he recorded some of what happened in The Pisan Cantos, Canto 80, when Odysseus drowns “when the raft broke and the waters went over me.” In July he was finally diagnosed with a mental breakdown and transferred to a tent and given reading material.

  Pound’s fate, in spite of his own erratic attacks on his own country and especially on Jewish people and institutions, as well as the brutal, illegal punishment for that, certainly underlined many of Cummings’s worst fears about the dark forces behind the news and the political scene. By December of 1945, when Pound ended up in a Washington, DC, mental hospital, Cummings brightly wrote him: “Welcome home!” the letter began. He had met with Pound’s lawyer, Julien Cornell, who had filled him in on some of the circumstances of Pound’s arrest and hospitalization; and he had sent his friend, via Cornell, a book by Charles Norman in Pound’s defense. The rest of the letter is the kind of chatter that hopes to alleviate unbearable circumstances. “Marion’s been in the hospital a year with one kind of arthritis: I’ve entertained(off & on) another kind … Now we’re both of us much better, and shall leave for Arizona … whenever a train will take us. If, in the meantime, our mutual state of health permits, we’ll naturally stagger down to Washington & say hello to you & stagger back again. But if not, here’s our love.”

  But Pound was a different man, broken by the brutality of the Allied forces, his own government, the so-called good guys. The first note he sent Cummings from St. Elizabeths, the mental hospital where he would be incarcerated until 1958, was a pathetic, un-Poundian one-liner postmarked January 25, 1946: “I like getting letters.” Cummings wrote back, but it’s hard to measure the effect Pound’s experience had on him. The bitterness of the war, the isolation within his marriage, the fury at all those in authority who claimed to have right on their side but thought it was fine to torture an old man—these came together in a cumulative paranoia that scarred Cummings for the rest of his life.

  Some days everything seemed to test their courage. One spring afternoon Marion, standing in the rain waiting to cross Sixth Avenue, was hit by a car pulling out of a parking space. Nobody knocked down Marion Morehouse. She got into the car that had hit her and made the driver take her to Patchin Place, meanwhile taking his number. Once home, she “changed her clothes, lay down for a few minutes, then arose, made tea for me an a couple of guests, and rang the big elephant-bell,” Cummings wrote to Hildegarde Watson. “I hereupon descended from my pied-a-ciel to find her radiantly entertaining the company.”

  During those awful years, Marion, who had been Cummings’s mainstay and protector, suddenly had her own, intensely painful bout with arthritis, as he had written to Pound. She was hospitalized and rehospitalized. Cummings was thrust into the role of caretaker, which he tried
to fulfill but which did not come naturally to him. Finally the couple, at the urging of friends, decided to spend a few months in Arizona, where the dry air was thought to be a cure for many things, including arthritis. Cummings’s friend James Angleton’s wife, Cicely d’Autremont, had parents with a big place in Tucson who invited both Marion and Cummings to stay. Whether this actually helped the situation, or whether changing everything was the cure—as it often is—they both felt better by the time they returned to New York.

  Nancy had never been far offstage in Cummings’s life, although he hadn’t seen her for more than a decade. She was a young woman now, he knew that much. He had missed most of her childhood. Cummings was always on the side of children, and in those awful years he began writing another play, Santa Claus, in which he once again debunked the blatant warmongering of American culture. In the play, which is about a reunion between a parent and a child, Death tries to masquerade as Santa Claus, and the only person who can see through the mask is a child.

  Like the little boy who pointed out that the emperor had no clothes, Cummings’s children were all both innocent and profoundly sophisticated. Since the invention of childhood at the beginning of the nineteenth century, conventional views of children had shifted from the idea that they were evil beings who had to be civilized by adults—the preacher and educator Jonathan Edwards called them “vipers”—to the idea that children were angelic beings who were corrupted by adults and adult civilization.