E. E. Cummings Read online

  To Cummings, the child was the salvation of the adult world, and he aimed to preserve his own childlike qualities not just because that made life more fun but also because that was, he thought, the way for our world to survive. Cummings loved his father, that consummate adult; but it was his mother’s playfulness and his uncle’s rebelliousness and his own boyishness that he embraced. For Cummings, remaining a child was a sacred trust. Perhaps he didn’t want children because of the heartbreak of watching them grow up. Far from the act of irresponsibility that critics accused him of, he believed that remaining a child was the only way to save the world. Psychiatrists might say that the painful loss of two childhoods—Nancy’s and, earlier, his own, in the cold waters of Silver Lake—made his beliefs stronger; but it was with an intellectual as well as an emotional force that he refused to become one of the pompous, phony, warmongering, wisdom-spouting fakirs who seemed to be ruling the world. His poetry got sadder:

  let it go—the

  smashed word broken

  open vow or

  the oath cracked length

  wise—let it go it

  was sworn to

  go

  let them go—the

  truthful liars and

  the false fair friends

  and the boths and

  neithers—you must let them go they

  were born

  to go

  let all go—the

  big small middling

  tall bigger really

  the biggest and all

  things—let all go

  dear

  so comes love

  No one was more serious about lack of seriousness than Cummings. United States history, after all, begins with a rebellion—the colonies were the naughty children of their English father, the king. Even at its most pretentious, our country has a quality of playfulness and contrariness not found elsewhere. During the Great Depression and World War II, these qualities were scarcer than at any other time in our history. But as the war faded in memory, leaving a wake of prosperity, the country began to lighten up and realign itself in a way that was more bearable for Cummings. Once again he began to sketch and sing.

  Cummings dedicated Santa Claus to Fritz Wittels, the psychiatrist who had been his emotional mainstay and friend. As Cummings turned fifty, his life was getting better. In 1945, he won his first prize in a long time, the $670 Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. Yet the scars of the awful years when his own audience turned against him, when a close friend was locked in a cage, when illness and chronic pain seemed to infect him like a virus, were not so easily healed.

  11

  Rebecca and Nancy

  Cummings’s mother, Rebecca, was a Massachusetts Yankee in the best sense of the word; she was a descendant of the Pilgrims who believed in the twin Yankee gods of reform and good sense. She was, as Cummings wrote, “the genuine 101% New Englander!” For him she was a kind of hero, a woman who based her life on the innate goodness of human nature in general and on her son’s talents in particular.

  In the last years of her life, she lived with Cummings’s sister, Elizabeth Cummings Qualey, and her husband, Carlton Qualey, an itinerant history professor who studied Norwegian-American communities, and their two children, John and Mary, whom she adored. It was for those children that Elizabeth Qualey wrote her memoir of growing up in Cambridge at the turn of the century, When I Was a Little Girl. Although the Qualey family moved around—from New York, where Qualey taught at Columbia, to Pennsylvania, where he taught at Swarthmore, to Michigan, where he taught at the University of Michigan—Rebecca Cummings seemed to adjust to being the peripatetic old person in their academic entourage. In the summer of 1946, on a visit to his sister’s household, Cummings saw his mother for the last time.

  Both Cummings parents had always used the romantic notion of the moon in the night sky all over the world as a means of communicating with each other and with their children. For instance, when Cummings was in prison at La Ferté-Macé during World War I—the three months of incarceration that would become The Enormous Room—his father wrote to him telling him to look at the moon through the prison windows at night. His father, standing outdoors at 104 Irving Street in Cambridge on the other side of the world, would also look at the moon, and in some way the two men would connect. Now Cummings would look at the moon and think of his mother far away. As Rebecca’s influence waned, as she eventually turned the Cummings house on Irving Street over to Edward Cummings’s sister Jane, Marion’s influence waxed.

  Always honest in his own journals, after his last visit with his mother Cummings wrote that he was shocked by her appearance. How could this old, deaf person be the mythical being who was his mother? His last letter to her, in January 1947, tells a funny story passed on by his friend Cyril Connolly, the British editor of Horizon. When interviewed on American radio and asked about his religion, Connolly had answered that his religion was Cummingsism. The interviewer was horrified and asked, “Don’t you know he is a traitor?” When Connolly pointed out that she had confused Cummings with Pound, the interviewer shrugged: “It was one of those three—Eliot or Pound or Cummings.” Rebecca Cummings was always her son’s best and most appreciative audience.

  Her death that same month released him into remembering her dearness and her unconditional love. “an extraordinary human being, someone gifted with strictly indomitable courage, died some days ago,” he wrote to his friend Hildegarde Watson. “she was eighty-seven, very deaf and partially paralyzed; young of heart and whole of spirit.” In her will, Rebecca left her eyes to be given to the blind.

  Rebecca Cummings, a woman who delighted in children, had not seen her granddaughter Nancy in more than twenty years, but her death in 1947, a year in which the adult Nancy was closer geographically than she could have imagined, seems to be part of the puzzle of the three most important women in Cummings’s life: Rebecca Clarke Cummings, Nancy Thayer Cummings Roosevelt, and Marion Morehouse.

  While Cummings had been succeeding as a poet and plunging into career doldrums and floating out again, while he had been marrying and divorcing and finally finding and making a home with Marion, while he had been visiting Paris and befriending Ezra Pound and winning prizes for his work, in another part of the world his daughter, Nancy, had been living the pampered but lonely childhood of an expat daughter whose mother was married to an Irish politician. Her life got even worse when her mother had a son—Frank MacDermot’s son—when Nancy was eleven. Raised by governesses as she went from country to country with her mother and the tyrannical MacDermot, “Nancy was early treated as a doll,” writes Richard Kennedy, “something to dress up and show off to guests.” In a poem titled “deb delights, London 1938,” the eighteen-year-old Nancy wrote in an echo of the father she didn’t know about:

  There is a very rich disgust in this

  in going dancing nightly at eighteen

  because eighteen

  and the system is corrupt which is

  generally recognized which changes nothing;

  give me back my ignorance

  it was never bliss but better far

  than this contemptuous cacophony.

  There was plenty of money—Elaine’s inheritance—but very little love or affection. There was no honesty between Nancy and her mother. Enrolled in a series of boarding schools, Nancy came to despise her stepfather, and he and her mother did everything they could to erase her childhood memories of another family.

  The puny plans of human beings, especially those who hope to obscure the truth, look especially puny in Nancy’s story. An artistic girl from the beginning, she started painting and was drawn to impressionism during her early school years. Her mother told her to stop, because painting was too messy. Was Elaine also afraid that Nancy’s heritage as the daughter of a painter was going to assert itself? Nancy then started reading and writing poetry—poetry almost spookily like that of her father on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

&n
bsp; During World War II, Elaine and Frank MacDermot and Nancy headed for England to enroll in Oxford. In May of 1940, the hawkish Winston Churchill became prime minister of England, replacing the discredited Neville Chamberlain. As Germany invaded Belgium, the German army began to push British and French troops west, and at the end of May the British staged a full-scale evacuation from Dunkirk. On June 4, Prime Minister Churchill famously told his embattled countrymen: “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets … we shall never surrender.”

  Nancy traveled to Dublin to see her mother that June, only to find that she could not return to England—the borders had been closed because of the war. Faced with staying in Ireland with the MacDermots or heading west for the unknown—the United States, where she could live with Elaine’s sister Alexis—Nancy chose the unknown. In spite of the danger of an Atlantic crossing at a time when German U-boats were sinking ships at will, Nancy was determined to leave. She sailed in June 1940 on the USS United States from Galway, the last passenger ship to leave for New York from Great Britain during the war.

  Appalled and upset at her daughter’s choice, and seemingly terrified at what might happen to her in New York City, Elaine repeatedly warned Nancy against her “father”—Scofield Thayer. For reasons of her own, even twenty years later, she did everything she could to conceal the truth. Sometimes she had told Nancy that her father was dead. Now she confessed that he was alive in New York, but said that Nancy should avoid him because he had had a serious mental breakdown. Thayer had put money in trust for Nancy, and the prospect of Nancy meeting with Thayer’s lawyer may have disturbed Elaine, although the lawyer would certainly not have revealed the kind of personal details Nancy hungered for. Perhaps she hoped that by setting up a “father” whom she was not supposed to see, Elaine would prevent her daughter from finding her actual father.

  Nancy was already a passionate poet and a painter in spite of her mother’s opposition. She was her father’s daughter. “If, as has been asserted, imagination is the beginning of art, surely dreams are in the beginning of imagination or imagery; where then is the source of dreams, and which came first, the image or the experience,” she wrote in Charon’s Daughter, her collection of poetry and memoir.

  Cummings’s connection to his only child is one of the most illuminating, heartbreaking, and startling passages in his life. It is worth a book on its own. Its outlines, of a beloved and lost child who is finally restored through the whimsical forgiveness of the gods—or whatever power arranges our world—is the outline of a metaphor, a myth, a story from a storyteller. Was there an evil fairy presiding on the night of Nancy’s conception, in a bed paid for by another man with a woman married to another man? Was Nancy under a spell that was finally, belatedly, broken?

  When Nancy was a child, Cummings was still a young man. He would always be famous for his affinity to children, for his own childishness, for his inability to grow up and his contempt for the structures and hierarchies of the so-called adult world. When it came to Nancy, Cummings behaved in an admirably adult way, although he was clearly under tremendous mental stress. Yet, for all of his good intentions—he legally adopted her and married her mother—his connection to her went terribly wrong, pushed by forces he could not control. The abduction of a child—and that’s what Frank and Elaine MacDermot did, whatever prettier names they may have called it—is a great crime. It damages all concerned, and it certainly did in this case.

  Fathers and daughters have bonds that no one else can understand. The unseen forces that drew a young girl raised in Ireland and Europe inexorably toward a shabby apartment in a tenement mews off Tenth Street in Greenwich Village, first guiding her toward a remote part of New Hampshire’s Ossipee mountain range, seems just too fantastic to be coincidence. But whether it was fate or some kind of astonishing series of events coming together, the young Nancy Thayer—she refused to take the name MacDermot—was headed for a destiny that would change her world.

  In New York City, living with her aunt Alexis, Nancy looked for work. Multilingual and as skilled with language as her father was, she found work as a translator, and she also trained in Morse Code and earned a radio operator’s license. Eventually she found a job as a typist at an agency called Your Secretary Incorporated. She kept painting and writing poetry:

  New York 1943

  To the whimsical metallic moods

  of drawing-rooms that face the park in a hush of green and

  silver

  dusk is a delicate wrinkle over-

  folded until

  fills spills into the room fantastic power

  of carved and clotted colour;

  the green-and-silver sentence is embroidered with laughter

  we have fashioned a velvet contented virtue

  against the tangled dark.

  Your Secretary Incorporated was a wartime agency run by Mrs. Kermit Roosevelt, the former society beauty Belle Willard, an extraordinary woman with a glamorous and tangled history of her own. Her husband, a great explorer who had famously traveled in the Amazon basin with his father, Theodore Roosevelt, and discovered its source at the River of Doubt, had served in the British army during World War I, enlisting even before there was American involvement.

  By all accounts, Kermit Roosevelt was a hero. He had saved his father’s life while they were stranded on the Amazon, refusing to let the older man be left behind and carrying him for miles through the dense jungle. He was handsome and distinguished and brave, but as he got older he also suffered from depression and alcoholism. By 1943, when Nancy went to work for Mrs. Roosevelt, her husband had lost many jobs and finally been exiled to Alaska, where, it was hoped, he would find a way to get sober.

  Instead, in June 1943 Kermit Roosevelt committed suicide, although this was immediately covered up. His wife and children were told he had died of a heart attack, and the truth wasn’t revealed until years later. Nancy, with her own secrets—revealed and not revealed—was drawn to this family, which knew a lot about secrets. The Roosevelts had four children, and Willard, his mother’s favorite, lived in New York. He had enlisted in the navy but had not yet shipped out to the Pacific, where he would command the battleship USS Greene. He was a pianist and a musician who had already been to Paris and studied with the great Nadia Boulanger. Sometimes he stopped by the Roosevelt house to visit his mother and play the family piano to keep it in tune.

  Mrs. Roosevelt was naturally an Anglophile, and Nancy Thayer, a sophisticated, beautiful, and confused young woman with no real family, soon came to her attention. Nancy began being invited to the Roosevelt house, and there she met and began to fall in love with her boss’s musical son, Willard. This love affair was one of the linchpins in the eventual reunion of Nancy and her father.

  Willard was a young man on the brink of going to war. He had been to Groton and Harvard, and he had an aura of aristocracy and secrecy that drew in the young girl whose own family life was built on secrets and protected with money and elite connections. Kermit’s suicide was still a secret, but Nancy felt a bond with Willard, whose father, like the man she thought was hers, was distinguished, wealthy, Harvard educated, and mentally ill.

  Mrs. Roosevelt adored Nancy, and this too was a powerful force. Mothers are often irresistible and unseen forces when it comes to their children’s attractions. Remember that Anna Karenina’s love affair with Vronsky begins when she meets his mother on the train. At any rate, the romance of the moment, the war in the background and the music in the foreground, swept the two young people forward. On December 23, 1943, while Willard was home from Pacific duty for a leave, they were married in New York, and Nancy went from being Mrs. Roosevelt’s employee to being Mrs. Roosevelt’s daughter-in-law.

  Then, in 1945, in order to get out of the city during the hot weather, Mrs. Roosevelt happened to rent a summer place near Silver Lake, New Hampshire, close to the Cummings family’s Joy Farm. The Roosevelt family and the James family
were friends, and the Jameses had often urged her to try the beautiful corner of New Hampshire near Mount Chocorua. Nancy, whose husband was still in the Pacific and who was pregnant with their first child, decided to spend the summer in the coolness of the New Hampshire lake country with her mother-in-law. Of course Cummings, just a few miles down the road from his daughter, had heard about Nancy’s visit to New Hampshire. Information about her marriage and her adult life had filtered through the grapevine. Some of his old friends had seen her, and it was his friend Billy James, his neighbor in both Cambridge and New Hampshire, who told him in September of 1945 that he had become a grandfather with the birth of Nancy’s son, Simon.

  Somehow, after all the years of being unable to see Nancy, having her nearby seemed to paralyze Cummings. Richard Kennedy suggests that Marion was a factor. “Marion, for whatever reasons, urged him not to reveal himself to her or to have any contact with her because she said it would upset him and ‘interfere with his work.’ ” When it came to Nancy, Marion, who had always been extraordinarily loving and generous with Cummings’s friends and family, seemed to become a different woman. A lot of time had passed. Both Marion and Cummings had been very sick. Marion had not had a child of her own. If she wasn’t jealous of Elaine for having Cummings’s child, she was certainly jealous of Cummings’s time and energy.

  Instead of arranging a visit with Nancy during the summer, Cummings and Marion lay doggo. They avoided the Jameses. Then, in the winter of 1945–46, Cummings wrote Santa Claus, his play about the reunion of a child and parent. First published in the Cummings issue of a Harvard magazine, the Harvard Wake, it is a morality play in five scenes. It begins when Santa, feeling obsolete, agrees to trade faces with the devil. The devil rallies the crowd behind abuses in a fictional factorylike place called a wheelmine. Santa and the devil are chummy; the devil points out to Santa that “children are your specialty.” The crowd then turns on Santa Claus, but a child is able to see through the disguises. Both the child and Santa say that they are looking for something they have lost. “And I am looking for somebody too,” the child says. “Knowledge has taken love out of the world / and all the world is empty empty empty,” the Woman mourns. The play ends happily, however. The child rushes into the Woman’s arms. There is also a reunion between the real Santa, the child, and the child’s mother. The Woman kneels to Santa Claus.