E. E. Cummings

by Susan Cheever

  Pound was still in many ways Cummings’s mentor, and he scolded Cummings for using secondary sources in his writing about birds. Pound wrote that Cummings was wrong about birds and, worse, that he was quoting a sloppy writer, Gilbert Pearson, who used the word “cannibalistic” to describe a bird that was certainly not a cannibal. This, Pound noted, was “vurry poor langwidge.” Furthermore, why wasn’t Cummings reading the work of Louis Agassiz, the nineteenth-century Harvard professor and bird expert, who would never have made that kind of mistake? Always the teacher, Pound put his didactic advice in a small, characteristic poem:

  why even so the charmin’ blue shd be

  VS yu

  I still don’t make out

  does the humming’s

  of boids

  move mr cummings

  no but

  other men’s woidz

  erabout boids.

  But Cummings’s feelings about blue jays were unabated. “I find it interesting that—large & by—birds beautiful-to-hear dress quietly,& birds beautiful-to-see can’t sing,” he wrote to Pound.

  With their experimental syntax, their running-together of words and punctuation on the page, their attention to the look of words against paper, their lapsing into other languages, especially ancient Greek, and their wild use of any symbol available on the typewriter, the Pound of “The Return” and the Cummings of “Buffalo Bill’s” often got so wrapped up in the look or feel of the words that they even baffled each other. “O.K. wot are yu talking about?” Pound wrote to Cummings after a particularly dense letter combining Aristotle’s writings on dolphins and whales—to be fair, Pound had brought the subject up first—with erudite mentions of Aquinas and Hamlet.

  But Cummings’s intense friendship with Pound had a less lighthearted aspect to it, which later came back to haunt him and which haunts his reputation even now. Like Pound, Cummings grew up at a time when anti-Semitism was accepted and even admired. Marion was mindlessly, socially anti-Semitic. Casting around for the reason he had not found a job during his miserable time in Hollywood, Cummings tended to blame the Jews. Before World War II and the dreadful knowledge of what had happened during the Holocaust, many Americans were anti-Semitic.

  Then, in his book of poems Xaipe, published in March 1950 by Oxford University Press, Cummings did what he always did—pushed an extreme further than it had gone before, with disastrous results. One poem in the collection, a poem that had in fact been written and published previously before the war, was too offensive not to cause outrage.

  a kike is the most dangerous

  machine as yet invented

  by even yankee ingenu

  ity(out of a jew a few

  dead dollars and some twisted laws)

  it comes both pricked and cunted

  The poem’s original editor, Theodore Weiss, had objected to the last line, which Cummings subsequently changed to “it comes both prigged and canted” for inclusion in the book. Cummings’s friend Allen Tate also objected to the poem. Cummings had tried to explain to Tate that the poem was being misunderstood. What Cummings meant was that the word “kike” had been created by Protestants to diminish Jews. Tate was unpersuaded.

  Others, like his friend Paul Rosenfeld, tried to explain to Cummings why he should not include the poem. Even Hildegarde Watson, to whom the book was dedicated, asked him to reconsider its inclusion. As Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno points out in his biography, the “firestorm” of anger about the poem wasn’t really ignited until Cummings was chosen by the Academy of American Poets to receive its fellowship of five thousand dollars in the winter of 1950. Xaipe also won the Harriet Monroe Prize.

  A public argument ensued. Congress Weekly devoted space to a symposium in which Cummings was attacked by an array of Jewish critics and defended by William Carlos Williams. He seemed somewhat clueless, as if he was mired in the years before World War II. “Cummings, the foe of tyranny and the defender of the underling, does not fit the definition of an anti-Semite,” wrote Richard Kennedy. “But in the matter of this objectionable epigram, he showed puzzling insensitivity.”

  Others were more certain. “He was nothing but an anti-Semite,” Harvey Shapiro said in my interview with him in 2010, and he was not alone in remembering Cummings’s anti-Semitism as his principal characteristic.

  Trying to re-create another time and place is difficult; trying not to let our own modern knowledge and understanding bleed into those descriptions of the past is almost impossible. On the one hand, a biographer’s responsibility is to bring the past to life on the page in all its details—including the relative knowledge and ignorance of the community described. On the other hand, shouldn’t the biographer give the reader and the subject the benefit of everything known at the time of writing? Should poems and books be understood in a vacuum—in the historical silence in which a writer connects viscerally and spiritually with a reader? Or should they be understood as pieces of the web of their own time and ours? When Cummings was writing poetry, I. A. Richards at Cambridge in England was arguing the former in his renowned New Criticism. Work should stand on its own, Richards wrote in his book Practical Criticism in 1929. What would happen if a reader knew nothing of the writer or the work—no biographical material or textual explanation?

  Since Richards wrote, his ideas have been overwhelmed by the cult of personality; in our world it’s unthinkable to read a poem without knowing who the author is, what he or she intended, and what the poem is about. Biography has spawned a cottage industry of literary medical men and women writing essays in which they diagnose the illnesses of a Coleridge (heroin addiction) or a Louisa May Alcott (bipolar disorder), or a Hemingway (clinical depression and alcoholism). In our attempts to understand the past, it is important to weigh the environment then against the knowledge we have now.

  Cummings was raised in a community which was casually racist—casually until Jewish students began to go to Harvard, when it became systematically anti-Semitic under President A. Lawrence Lowell. The ideal man, represented by Cummings’s barrel-chested, masculine father, was intolerant and often scary. Gender in this world was sharply defined. There was no homosexuality. Sodomy was literally illegal as well as culturally unacceptable. Men and women who found themselves attracted to people of the same sex lived in secrecy and fear. Women poured tea; men made judgments. Cambridge itself was a homogeneous microcosm of intellectual stuffiness and arrogance. It’s worth noting that Cummings hated all this. He did not, could not, would not conform to the blustering masculine ideal of his childhood, and he left Cambridge as soon as he could to find a more tolerant, less anti-Semitic and racist environment in the freedom of Greenwich Village.

  At the same time, Cummings had dedicated himself to questioning any rules that came his way—the rules of grammar, of matrimony, of the Harvard overseers—and by the 1950s it was no longer acceptable to be anti-Semitic in words or conversation. The unacceptable was like a red flag of invitation for a poet as provocative as Cummings. His anti-Semitism is indefensible. There is little point in comparing him with other public figures whose anti-Semitism was far worse. Language is powerful, as Cummings knew better than anyone, and the language he used is criminal and repulsive.

  Perhaps the most sensible defense of Cummings’s poem came from the American critic Leslie Fiedler, who wrote that “what is extraordinary is not that Cummings may be an anti-Semite (this he shares with innumerable jerks) but that he is able to make orderly and beautiful things out of his chaotic and imperfect heart.… Certainly when the attackers of Cummings (or Eliot or Ezra Pound or Céline) are revealed as men motivated not so much by a love for Jews as by a hatred for art, I know where to take my stand.”

  Two engagements that defined Cummings’s new career as a popular and well-paid reader, a reader who had more lucrative requests for appearances than he could fulfill, were the prestigious Norton Lectures at Harvard in 1952 and the 1957 Boston Arts Festival lecture.

  After finally accepting the offer of the Bo
ston Arts Festival committee, headed by David McCord and including Archibald MacLeish and Paul Brooks, Cummings did a Cummings. Instead of a celebratory poem fit for a summer evening, Cummings wrote a bitter satirical attack on the United States in general and particularly on the way the country had failed to intervene in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Deeply moved by the Hungarians’ refusal to buckle under to Communist Russia, and personally understanding what living in the USSR was like, Cummings was heartbroken and horrified when Russian troops rolled into Budapest and took over the revolution, imprisoning its leaders and brutally reasserting their power. This was the kind of thing that kept Cummings up at night. Cursed with a vivid imagination and a disintegrating body, he felt misery which was personal as well as political. Moved by the bravery of Hungary’s rebellion, the old rebel wrote a poem in celebration and sadness. When the United Nations declined to intervene, he began doing the only thing he knew how to do—write a poem. Unfortunately, all this coincided with the Boston festival’s request that he write a poem titled “Thanksgiving (1956)” especially for the festival. They were thinking of some pastoral poem, written by one of Boston’s own. Instead they got rage:

  a monstering horror swallows

  this unworld me by you

  as the god of our fathers’ fathers bows

  to a which that walks like a who

  but the voice-with-a-smile of democracy

  announces night & day

  “all poor little peoples that want to be free

  just trust in the u s a”

  suddenly uprose hungary

  and she gave a terrible cry

  “no slave’s unlife shall murder me

  for i will freely die”

  she cried so high thermopylae

  heard her and marathon

  and all prehuman history

  and finally The UN

  “be quiet little hungary

  and do as you are bid

  a good kind bear is angary

  we fear for the quo pro quid”

  uncle sam shrugs his pretty

  pink shoulders you know how

  and he twitches a liberal titty

  and lisps “i’m busy right now”

  so rah-rah-rah democracy

  let’s all be as thankful as hell

  and bury the statue of liberty

  (because it begins to smell)

  Cummings, although professionally dedicated to questioning authority, was often a sweetheart in person. Sometimes he was crotchety, but when appealed to rationally, he was an unusually understanding and generous man. He was suffused by rage and delight at the same time. American politics made him sick, but he was transported by the way a hummingbird sucked pollen from the lilac bushes in the spring. He knew that he was a finicky old man, and at his best he made fun of his own eccentricities.

  This was lucky for the Boston Arts Festival organizers. When they explained to him that the poem was not suitable for the pastoral occasion on June 23, and that they could not release it to the press to be published as the festival poem, Cummings obligingly wrote another poem, another kind of characteristic Cummings poem, a pretty, moving poem spoken in the voice of a little church basking in the glory of God.

  i am a little church(no great cathedral)

  far from the splendor and squalor of hurrying cities

  —i do not worry if briefer days grow briefest,

  i am not sorry when sun and rain make april

  The poem, in five stanzas of conventional iambic pentameter, ends with a benediction:

  … i lift my diminutive spire to

  merciful Him Whose only now is forever:

  standing erect in the deathless truth of His presence

  (welcoming humbly His light and proudly His darkness)

  At the festival itself, however, in front of seven thousand or so people crowded onto the Boston Common, Cummings read both poems. He turned the occasion into a full-dress reading. When the first lines of “Thanksgiving (1956)” were read, the audience seemed taken aback, but by the end of the poem they roared their approval. As usual Cummings had found a way to say in poetry what everyone else was feeling: the American frustration with the Cold War and the blandness of the Eisenhower administration. “He had touched something deep in their feelings that needed expression,” Kennedy writes. “He was reawakening that sense of helplessness and frustration that had descended upon the American public.”

  One of the benefits of leaving Cambridge for Greenwich Village was that Cummings came of age as a poet surrounded by the most interesting and talented writers of his generation. Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore were all his friends and neighbors. Djuna Barnes lived across the mews at Patchin Place, and Cummings actually climbed in through her window to rescue her once when she had locked herself in. Greenwich Village was also a stopping place for many poets who didn’t live there—it was Cummings’s good friend Allen Tate who brought his old rival T. S. Eliot to Patchin Place for tea.

  14

  Victory and Defeat

  In the winter of 1961, Cummings’s familiar world was threatened when Hugh Keenan, the owner of Patchin Place, decided he was sick of paltry rents from dozens of tenants and planned a complete renovation of the ancient mews, with its narrow curbs and lush ailanthus trees and rent-controlled apartments. Thanks to the generosity of friends and Cummings’s furious sensitivity to sounds and smells—he refused to let Marion clean with bleach—Cummings controlled all the rooms at 4 Patchin Place except the second floor in the front.

  This wasn’t the first attack on the tiny mews, which had become Cummings’s refuge from the dirtier, noisier city. Robert Moses had designated Patchin Place as well as the brick spire of Jefferson Market for demolition, but that edict had been overturned. Now, Marion went to court to fight Hugh Keenan. Finally, someone apparently alerted Mayor Robert Wagner to the fact that the famous poet E. E. Cummings was being evicted, and Keenan’s permits were revoked. “To a human being, nothing is so important as privacy—since without privacy, individuals cannot exist: and only individuals are human,” Cummings gratefully wrote the mayor in March of 1962. “I am unspeakably thankful that the privacy of 4 Patchin Place will be respected; and shall do my best to be worthy of this courtesy.”

  As sweet as he was to Wagner, Cummings was still furiously antigovernment. In May, when President and Mrs. Kennedy requested Cummings’s presence at a black-tie White House dinner, Cummings angrily turned them down and made fun of Mrs. Kennedy’s invitation (“not transferable!!!”) to a young protegée in a letter.

  Cummings slept late, and on a typical day he woke up in the late morning and wandered downstairs for breakfast. Because of his delicate intestinal tract, he took Donnatal for digestion. After breakfast, like clockwork, he jammed an old hat on and walked along Tenth Street to Washington Square Park, where he sat on a bench, did some sketches in his notebook, and then wandered back to Patchin Place. There he retired to his third-floor studio and worked most of the day.

  At teatime Cummings would come downstairs for a cup of Lapsang Souchong, perhaps spiked with brandy. “Marion would be in and out from the tiny curtained-off kitchen with the tea things,” wrote Richard Kennedy in a lyrical description of Cummings’s days in New York. “Estlin would be perhaps eating a pear in the French manner—with a fork piercing its top as he sliced chunks off the side. Or he might be tilting back and forth on his straight-backed rush-bottomed chair, offering his latest complaint about a decision of the Supreme Court or describing his latest putdown of an authority figure.… If the weather were pleasant there might be an evening stroll.” Cummings drank and smoked throughout the day, sometimes taking a painkiller if his back was sore. At night he took Nembutal to sleep.

  Life at Joy Farm had also changed for the better, or at least for the more comfortable. Between his lecturing and reading fees and a few more grants and prizes, money was less a problem than it had been for a lot of his life. Cummings always returned to his better sel
f when he swung the car’s wheel up the dirt road to Joy Farm. Now he had electric wiring installed so that Marion could print photographs and have a refrigerator. Lincoln Kirstein’s sister Mina arranged to have a heating system installed. Cummings’s sister Elizabeth with her husband Carlton Qualey and their children came back to the farm every summer, so it remained a family place.

  In the summer of 1962, Marion and Cummings were just finishing a collaboration on a book of fifty of her photographs, with gnomic captions by Cummings, titled Adventures in Value. Cummings was thrilled by the book, and he also kept writing poems for a volume to follow 95 Poems, which had been published in 1958 and had won the prestigious Bollingen Prize.

  Many of the poems he wrote that year are about his twin obsessions: aging and the natural world. Even the creatures of Patchin Place—mice, squirrels, and pigeons—seemed to grow closer to Cummings’s consciousness as he aged. One of his last poems immortalizes a dying creature in a way that sings Cummings’s own sense of being a dying creature.

  Me up at does

  out of the floor

  quietly Stare

  a poisoned mouse

  still who alive

  is asking What

  have i done that

  You wouldn’t have