E.E. Cummings was a Harvard man from a prestigious Cambridge family who lived a mostly bohemian life in Greenwich until his death in 1962. His big idea was freedom—both in art and life—yet for all his experiments with typography and punctuation, he was deeply indebted to traditional poetic forms, particularly the sonnet. He believed in a divine power but had no time for religion. He hated communism and the New Deal, loved sex and Paris, and was a staunch supporter of McCarthyism.
Susan Cheever’s new biography, E. E. Cummings: A Poet’s Life, gets off to an unpromising start. She opens with the day Cummings read at her secondary school and caught up with her father, the short story writer John Cheever, afterwards: “Cummings bellowed ‘JOEY!’—my father’s boyhood nickname. The two men heartily embraced as the school’s sour founders and headmistresses glared down from their gold-framed portraits on the paneled walls.”
On the drive home, Cummings and Cheever, with daughter in tow, stopped for dinner:
When we stopped for burgers at a White Castle in the Bronx, heads turned at Cummings’s uncanny, hilarious imitation of the head of the Masters School English Department. In that well-lighted place, late at night, my father produced a flask and spiked the coffee. I was already drunk on a different kind of substance—inspiration. It wasn’t those in authority who were always right; it was the opposite. I saw that being right was a petty goal—being free was the thing to aim for.
What’s the problem with such passages? They raise the question of objectivity, for one. They also show a penchant for false distinctions and overstatement. Are those against authority always right? Aren’t both truth and freedom important? Was Cummings—to take another example—really “this country’s only true modernist poet”? Is it accurate to say, categorically, as Cheever does, that Cummings “despised fear” and that “his life was lived in defiance of all who ruled by it”?
Yet, while Cheever clearly admires Cummings, the portrait that emerges, perhaps partly against her intentions, is of a gifted poet who acted, much of his life, like a charming, self-absorbed, angry adolescent—a view that is in line with other biographies.
Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to upper-middle class parents. His father was a Unitarian minister and a professor at Harvard. His mother, Cheever writes, “was the aristocrat of the family; her forebears … had been distinguished Unitarian writers, judges, and adventurers.” She was also, it seems, the perfect mother, loving Cummings “to the fullest measure.”
The Cummings household was relatively relaxed. “Children came over to play on the swings and in a sandbox,” Cheever writes, “and in a tree house built for their delight in spaces that, in neighboring houses, might have been groomed and manicured.” The family spent summers in New Hampshire on Silver Lake, where Cummings would run free with his faithful dog, Rex.
Cummings began Harvard at 16 in 1911, but he continued to live with his parents until he moved into a dormitory in Harvard Yard for his senior year. All of a sudden, it seems, he became a sex-obsessed, angry, rebellious provocateur. “His behavior changed,” Cheever writes, “from that of a rule follower and believer in the Unitarian Church and all its puritanical precepts, as embodied in his powerful, hulking father, to being a trickster.”
How did this happen? As Cheever tells it, Cummings’ childhood was idyllic except for two events. The first was watching “two smooth cows being driven to the slaughterhouse”—an example of the neighborhood’s “dark side,” according to Cheever. The second was the drowning of his dog, Rex. Cummings, his sister, and the dog turned over in a canoe on Silver Lake far from shore. The dog panicked and began climbing first on Cummings’ sister, then on Cummings. In order to save himself and his sister, the young Cummings held Rex under water until he stopped struggling, left the dog and swam to shore.
The rebelliousness that suddenly surged to the surface in his senior year at Harvard, Cheever speculates, was rooted in the drowning of his dog and resentment against his too-perfect father: “His experiences as a boy, after the death of Rex and with his overwhelmingly excellent father, may have laid the groundwork for his anger.”
That Cummings’ rebellion had anything to do with the drowning of his dog is wildly unlikely, but it certainly had something to do with his father’s preoccupation with social issues and unwavering high moral principles, as Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno notes in what is still the definitive biography. “My father,” Cummings wrote, “was a walking Platonic triad—the good, the true, the beautiful.” Because Cummings felt he could not match his father’s goodness, so this reading of his life goes—and perhaps sensed that 19th-century Unitarianism provided a rather weak foundation for such morality—he chose a different path.
It could also be that Cummings was simply spoiled. His parents doted on him, and his mother hoped that Cummings would one day become a great poet. During his freshman year at Harvard, Cummings wrote, “I am of the aristocracy of this earth … . All the advantages that any boy should have are in my hands. I am a king over my opportunities.” What may have been the cute playfulness of a somewhat self-absorbed boy developed into something not so cute as he grew older. In a poem that Cheever inexplicably calls a “lovely picture” of Cummings’ senior year at Harvard, Cummings writes of visiting a burlesque theatre in Cambridge with some classmates:
I saw two rah-rahs—caps, soft shirts,
Match-legs, the kind of face that hurts,
The walk that makes death swear—Ted Gore
And Alec Ross; they had that whore
Mary between them. Don’t know which,
One looked: and May said: “The old
bitch
Lulu, as I’m a virgin, boys!”
And I yelled back over the noise:
“Did that three-legged baby croak
that you got off the salesman-bloke?”
Much of Cummings’ life would be marked by this sort of selfishness. After Harvard, he worked for three months in the shipping department of the Collier publishing house—his first and last full-time job—and joined a private ambulance corps to avoid being forcibly enlisted. He and another volunteer were held up in Paris because of a bureaucratic hitch. When Cummings finally arrived at the front five weeks later, he seemed to view the whole experience as a game, angering French soldiers, his fellow volunteers, and those in charge. Cummings was arrested as a possible traitor. And while he was not convicted, he spent three months in a large holding cell, which was the topic of his prose work The Enormous Room.
When he returned from his three-month imprisonment, Cummings took up with Elaine Eliot, the wife of his friend Scofield Thayer. Cummings and Elaine would marry shortly after she and Thayer divorced. The marriage was short and unhappy. Elaine seemed to want a traditional relationship, but Cummings was too often inattentive. When her sister died of pneumonia, the event hardly registered for Cummings. Cheever writes:
An old-fashioned husband would have been on hand to help with the legal and emotional complications of such an intimate loss … . Cummings, however, was the new kind of husband, and he hardly paid attention. Cummings may have had an idée fixe of right and wrong, but when it came to managing the adult world with all its aggravations and necessities, he was useless.
(He would be equally useless taking care of his mother after his father died in a car accident.) Cummings married a second time, which ended badly, but eventually found a loving and reliable (if not always faithful) partner in the tall, beautiful Marion Morehouse, with whom he would live for the rest of his life.
While Cummings was largely uninterested in politics early in his life, this changed when he visited Russia in 1931. His friends had given glowing reports of the revolution, and Cummings himself was sympathetic to any person or persons who had thrown off the shackles of authority. But Russia was not what Cummings had expected. Instead of freedom, he found oppression, fear, and hypocrisy. It disgusted him.
Never one to back away from a fight, Cummings eviscerated the Russian experiment in Eimi, a novelistic memoir that takes Dante’s Inferno as its example. His friends in Greenwich were not impressed, and Cummings, who had never had a problem publishing, temporarily found it difficult to place his work. But the publication of his Collected Poems in 1938—an idea suggested by his agent since much of his work was out of print—changed everything. It was a success with critics and readers alike and was shortlisted for a Pulitzer. “Cummings,” Cheever writes, “was hailed as an important poet.”
Cummings continued to write, and his reputation continued to grow. He reunited briefly with his daughter and took up a lucrative but demanding schedule of readings during the last ten years of his life.
While he is remembered for his use of lower-case letters and non-standard punctuation and for his biting satires, Cheever reminds us that Cummings was also a gifted lyricist who was often preoccupied with nature: “i thank You God,” Cummings writes, “for most this amazing / day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees / and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything / which is natural which is infinite which is yes.” R. P. Blackmur’s remark that Cummings’ poetry is “a kind of baby-talk” is unfair. No doubt some of Cummings’ poems can be dismissed as little more than this, but his best work shows great craft, pitch-perfect diction, and masterful syntax. Cummings was, in many ways, more of a Romantic or a Georgian than a modernist, and behind the surface play of much of his work is a folk wisdom and wit.
If Cheever too often dismisses real shortcomings in Cummings’ character, and has a penchant for unfounded generalizations, she has a gift for storytelling that provides a concise, engaging account of the poet’s life. In one of his final poems, Cummings writes: “o purple finch / please tell me why / this summer world (and you and i / who love some to live) / must die.” The finch answers: “if I / should tell you anything” / (that eagerly sweet caroling / self answers me) / “I could not sing.”
This is Cummings at his best, and it is for poems like these that he will always be read.
Micah Mattix is an assistant professor of writing and literature at Houston Baptist University and a senior contributor at The American Conservative.
Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.