E. E. Cummings

by Susan Cheever

  Cummings was one of the great talkers of the twentieth century, and his simply told stories and comic asides, which he used to lighten the silence as he painted, fascinated Nancy. He was, after all, a great poet, but he also seemed to be in every way a great man. He delighted in the sparrow and raged at the injustice of the universe. He was a successful writer, but he was as angry about bad editing as a beginner would be. “if I could make you realize how an artist feels when his work is mutilated by the very person he trusted to cherish it, you would be a wiser and sadder man,” he wrote an editor who had corrected his syntax in October of 1948. “If I were a killer, you’d be in Hell now. Being only myself, am trying as hard as I can to forgive you. But don’t commit the blunder of reviving your crime.”

  Taken up by the endless, mind-numbing dailiness of caring for two small children in an isolated apartment, Nancy found herself looking forward to the afternoons when she would sit absolutely still in his upstairs studio and listen to pigeons cooing, the distant traffic on Sixth Avenue, and the scratch of his pencil or the rough hiss of his paintbrush. Her marriage was difficult. Willard seemed lost without the structure of being a naval officer. He was trying to find work as a musician, teaching piano and playing occasional gigs. He was a brilliant composer, but that didn’t seem to translate into a paying job. Without the war or any need for action, the Roosevelt family depression seemed to be bearing down on him. The four of them were living on the dwindling trust fund left to Nancy by the man she still thought of as her father—Scofield Thayer.

  Nancy was almost thirty years old, and with some distress she realized that she was obsessed with, falling in love with, the charming fifty-four-year-old man who was painting her portrait. She thought about him all the time. With his cascades of brilliant language and his intimate smile, which seemed to say that the two of them were in a world of their own, he had taken up residence in her head and in her heart. Marion was usually with them, but Nancy felt that she and Cummings were so close that the presence of a third person didn’t matter. Her connection with this older man had become one of the most important things in her life.

  There were a hundred reasons why her feelings disturbed her. Marion was already acting jealous of her time with Cummings. At first this seemed unreasonable, but what if she was right? Nancy adored her children and believed in marriage. She decided to do the right thing and stop visiting Patchin Place, but she also decided to allow herself one last visit. It was a visit that changed everything—the culmination of a dozen coincidences.

  On that afternoon, the afternoon she had decided was her last, Nancy sat as usual for her portrait. Marion hovered. Then Marion was called away by the telephone, or someone at the door. Alone with Cummings, Nancy immediately tried to take advantage of the few minutes she knew she had before Marion returned; she began to press Cummings harder about Scofield Thayer and the past. With Marion downstairs for once, Cummings was suddenly voluble. Something had shifted. He talked about her mother, Elaine, and her mother’s sister Alexis. Flirtatiously he suggested that Alexis might have been in love with him. Laughter filled the studio. Again Nancy asked about Thayer, referring to him as her father, and Cummings looked at her strangely. After a short silence, Nancy blurted out her fears that she was falling in love with him.

  Suddenly the third-floor room was as still as a church. The pigeons cooed, traffic rumbled by far away, to the west the afternoon light was fading, the room smelled of wood and paints. Cummings required absolute silence for his work. Now the quiet seemed to require a revelation. For the four years of their casual friendship, Cummings had known the truth about Nancy and she had been kept in the dark. Why hadn’t he told her before this awful moment? Now, he asked Nancy: “Didn’t anyone ever tell you that I was your father?”

  To be told by a charming, famous, and talented man she thought herself in love with that he was in fact her father must have been nothing short of earth-shattering. “I hope never to forget the force of rejection, (at the moment of discovery) of what was too much dreamed about to be real—so that the force was the measure of the dream,” she wrote to Cummings later. When Marion came back into the room, Cummings told her, “We know who we are.”

  The deep connection Nancy had felt to Cummings was not love at all, or at least not the kind of love that she imagined. Nancy was indeed shattered. She didn’t believe it at first, but once it was out in the open all the pieces fell perfectly into place. She even looked like Cummings, with her ski-jump nose, slender body, and long, narrow face. The two of them embarked on a new relationship, one that would be difficult but based on the truth—unlike the secrets and lies that had been the foundation of all Nancy’s previous beliefs. Nancy and her father had been apart for twenty years. In the remaining fourteen years before Cummings’s death, they had a difficult, loving, and infuriating friendship. “The very thing which I’d have given my heart for 25 years ago, today knocks me down,” Cummings wrote.

  For Cummings, Nancy was confusing, but for Marion she was competition. “it seems to me that she is real, & that my life here (with M.) isn’t,” Cummings wrote later after one of Nancy’s visits to Joy Farm, which ended awkwardly. Cummings had given Nancy a pile of old letters from Thayer, Dos Passos, and Elaine. Nancy had confronted him with a card from Thayer written the day after her birth: “For Value Received.” “What are all my salutings of Chocorua & worshippings of birds & smellings of flowers & fillings of hummingbirdcups etcetc?” Cummings wrote, sounding a little bit in love himself. “They’re sorry substitutes for human intercourse generally & particularly for spiritual give-&-take with a child or a child-woman whom I adore.”

  Torn between being Nancy’s father and Marion’s lover—he apparently did not have the time or energy to be both—Cummings had to choose Marion, who had taken care of him for years. He might have been half in love with his own daughter, but he needed Marion. Physically she took care of him in a way that no one else was willing to do. He was too old to be alone. It was a painful situation all around, but Nancy Thayer was certainly the innocent—she had been lied to all her life, floated along on secrets; and now that she had stumbled onto the truth, it sometimes seemed more difficult than the lies. Cummings was torn between the past and the present. “While part of me is her tragic & immediate father,” he wrote in his journal, “I am wholly and permanently someone else.”

  Marion was far less ambivalent. In the summer of 1951, Nancy visited Joy Farm again, without her family, and slept at night in her father’s studio, which was also the guest room. One day she commented on the versions of a poem he had left scattered across his desk. Cummings bristled; no one commented on his unfinished work! The next day Marion asked Nancy to leave. “You know how hard it is for your father to have anyone around while he is trying to work,” Marion dictated. “It is time to go.”

  Nancy, always forgiving, always trying to make it work between them, recouped her standing with Cummings later the same summer. When she had the energy and wit to send a red wooden wheelbarrow—like the one in his favorite poem by William Carlos Williams—to Joy Farm as an early birthday present, he practically crowed with delight: “thank you a millionmillion times for the marvellous gift!” Later, when her first book of poetry was published and got very little attention, he wrote her a fatherly letter about the stupidity of the public. Hailing her book as a miracle, he wrote “Anyhow: from my standpoint the only thing—if you’re some sort of artist—is to work a little harder than you can at being who you are.”

  Are the sins of the fathers and mothers really visited on their children? Nancy’s connection with her father, with the charming Cummings, did not break up her marriage in the way that Nancy had feared it might when she felt herself falling in love with him. Yet the marriage, which was already shaky, certainly received its death blows in that small, cluttered studio above Patchin Place off Tenth Street. Nancy’s confused drive and furious intelligence came crashing up against her husband’s troubles with disastrous results. “She was a cri
tical person,” Robert Cabot remembers. “She didn’t give anybody any leeway. You could see it in the way she looked, she had a tight mouth. There was a lot of argumentativeness in her and a resistance to sloppy thinking.”

  Nancy was her father’s daughter—he was also a critical man with a penchant for argument. As he got older, his critical brain seemed to grow while his ability to be loving and tolerant faded. As he wrote in a late poem that might have been addressed to Nancy:

  old age sticks

  up Keep

  Off

  signs)&

  youth yanks them

  down(old

  age

  cries No

  Tres)&(pas)

  youth laughs

  (sing

  old age

  scolds Forbid

  den Stop

  Must

  n’t Don’t

  &)youth goes

  right on

  gr

  owing old

  Nancy and Cummings wrote to each other while both were living in New York, but even after Cummings’s revelation their meetings were rare. Now, raising her two children with less and less help from Willard as their marriage disintegrated, she began to feel hurt all over again by Cummings’s failure to give her the kind of welcome long-lost children dream of getting from their parents. Then, one night in New York City, Nancy went to a cocktail party for some friends of her husband’s. For once, Willard stayed home with the kids. She wore a white dress.

  Kevin Andrews, a summa cum laude Harvard classicist, was one of the Harvard class of 1947 who had dropped out of school to fight in World War II, been on the front lines in Italy, and returned to classes at the war’s end. Handsome, dashing, and a little bit crazy, Andrews found life changed when he won a fellowship to study the ancient world in Greece after college. “Really … he went to Greece and never came back,” remembers Robert Cabot, his classmate and friend. Andrews used his fellowship to work on a book about Greece, Castles of the Morea. Greece after World War II was impoverished and still at war, and the Marshall Plan, the American aid that was working so well in the rest of Europe, was being so badly administered in Greece that Andrews became convinced he should go to Washington and tell someone.

  In Washington, he stayed with the Cabots and looked for work. Disguising his epilepsy, a disease that he had always had but that had become worse after college, he went the rounds of government agencies telling his story of the disasters in Greece. No one listened. No jobs were available. He headed north for New York, where he moved in with his mother and tried again to find a job, or at least a sympathetic ear.

  Then, one night at a cocktail party in 1953, he looked across the room and saw a slender woman dressed in white. She was pretty, with long, dark hair and a look of utter detachment from the rest of the party. It was Nancy Thayer Cummings Roosevelt, and by the time he crossed the room to sit down next to her, he felt that he was being drawn to her by some mythic power. He was right. No one else had listened to him. She listened.

  “Across that vacuous room, through the circulating trays of drinks and canapés, I glimpse a young woman. Alone, sitting in a window seat, obviously bored or uncomfortable with the scene,” thinks Aidan, the character based on Kevin Andrews in Robert Cabot’s wonderful novel about his friend, The Isle of Khería. “She is different definitely different. A poet, and something about her seems seeking to escape. That’s for me. I drop whatever manners I still had, sit down beside her, announce that she and I would shortly be husband and wife.”

  Andrews talked incessantly about Greece, the country that he had used to build what became his entire identity. He was more than in love with the place and wanted desperately to share it with Nancy. He had sunk deeply into the life of the Greek villagers while writing Castles of the Morea, and he longed to return.

  “I could lie in bed all day and know the village from its sounds,” Andrews’s biographer Roger Jinkinson wrote.

  In the morning there are cockerels, in the evening the sound of goats and sheep and all day dogs bark and children play. Then there are the voices of the women, their own private language low with chuckles and laughter round the oven as they bake bread, strong as they talk to a friend, or a sister, or a child further away. The tourist boat comes at its time and leaves with the flotsam and jetsam that is the European tourist trade; Danish, Dutch, German, Italian, a babble of barbarian voices and hysterical laughter. Now and then the ferry boat arrives, chains tumbling to the sea as the anchor seeks purchase against our strong winds. I hear the winds too. They play with my shutters; Trasmontana, Sirocco, Meltemi, Maestros. These names are ancient and Venetian; they remind us of what we were and tell us something of what we are. And then there is the sea, never silent, never still, the waves washing the stones in rhythms in the summer or pounding rocks when winter comes.

  Nancy’s love affair with Kevin Andrews was the final end of her marriage to Willard Roosevelt, but it improved her fragile relationship with her newfound father. By the time he and Nancy rediscovered each other, Cummings was becoming an old man who counted on his dragon of a companion to protect him from the world he had come to despise. He and Nancy both tried hard. In a letter to Nancy, Cummings remembered his own heartbreak when she had been taken away from him. “Perhaps some day you will remember the time (in Paris) I was allowed to take you for one whole hour to some sort of little foire—where we rode a variety of tremendous animals including chevaux de bois,” he wrote to her. His heart was broken; he would “never forget how my staunch (then as now) friend Sibley Watson, by way of comforting our unhappy non-hero, gently reminded him that the great (to me) wise Freud says a child’s self … is already formed at whatever age you were when we lost each other.”

  In August of 1953, Nancy, Kevin, and her two Roosevelt children had a happy visit to Joy Farm, where Cummings and a relaxed Marion were in residence after the ordeal of the winter in Cambridge and the anxiety of the Norton Lectures. Castles of the Morea had just been published in the United States, and Andrews had studied with John Finley, who had been one of Cummings’s friends during his Norton semesters at Harvard. On his own turf and with Marion apparently placated by the presence of Nancy’s new lover and her children, Cummings was an expansive and loving father and grandfather—a personality that was often less than evident during the fourteen years he and Nancy tried to forge a new relationship as father and daughter.

  Although Nancy’s affair with Kevin Andrews was good for her relationship with her father—at least at first—it was eventually dreadful for her relationship with her children. Soon after her fine summer visit to Joy Farm with Kevin, Nancy was divorced from Willard Roosevelt. The newly constituted family—Kevin, Nancy, Simon, and Elizabeth—embarked on a slow boat to Piraeus, the Athenian seaport, and the Greek islands. The trip was glorious—until the little family arrived in the hut on the remote island of Ikaria. Here, a clueless Andrews had imagined that Nancy and her children would learn to share his love of Greece. Ikaria, named after the mythical Icarus, who despite his father’s warnings flew too close to the sun and plunged into the sea and drowned, is a tiny island off the coast of Turkey in the Aegean. Nancy and her children had never lived without heat, electricity, or running water, and they didn’t like it.

  Like much of Greece, Ikaria suffered horribly during World War II, occupied by the Italians and then the Germans and often besieged by famine. It was hardly one of the Greek islands in Homer’s wine-dark sea, or even in Andrews’s own Castles of the Morea. “You took us there in the dead of winter,” Cornelia, the character based on Nancy, remembers in Cabot’s novel. “Our home was a goatherd’s hut thirty-five dangerous minutes up a precipitous rocky track. We had plastic sheets for windows, and the roof was just rusty tin on an occasional sagging beam … Our light was a single lamp, stinking and sputtering on watery paraffin.”

  By the second winter in Greece, in 1955, Nancy’s children had rebelled against the physical hardships of life on a rocky island and the impossibi
lity of fitting in to the local school, where no one spoke English and no one wanted to help the little American children learn Greek. Nancy had little choice, and she sadly sent her children home to live with their father in New York City. Her marriage to Andrews began to be troubled—how could it not? Living in Greece was not negotiable for Kevin Andrews; not living there was just as nonnegotiable for Nancy’s children.

  Eventually, Andrews consented to move to Athens, where the ragged family—Nancy and Kevin now had an infant daughter, Ioanna—lived in a farmhouse with an orchard above Athens on Mount Lycabettos, looking down on the Parthenon and the Acropolis. “It was a treasure of a place at the edge of a park,” remembers Robert Cabot. “But their relationship was terrible. They were at each other’s throats, they were violent and throwing things at one another.” Cabot and Andrews went off on a climbing trip in the mountains and returned to Nancy’s furious jealousy. “I think she thought there was some homosexual connection between Kevin and me—which there was, but it was one-sided. Kevin was a definite bisexual,” Cabot recalls.

  Reading over Nancy’s correspondence with her father as well as Richard Kennedy’s biography, which is based on extensive interviews with her, one comes away with the heartbreaking sense of how hard both of them were trying to repair their father-daughter connection, trying to heal. Their last visit together, however, was as ill-fated as Nancy’s time with her children in Ikaria with Andrews. In the summer of 1960, Nancy suffered complications from the birth of her second daughter with Andrews—Alexis—and eventually her condition deteriorated so badly that she was flown to London, where she got the medical treatment she needed. This got her father’s attention.