E. E. Cummings Read online

  As the vision of reunion was enchanting for Cummings, perhaps it was overpowering for Marion. She had saved Cummings from the agony inflicted on him by Elaine and, by association, Nancy. On his behalf, she hated Elaine. On his behalf, she had mourned Nancy. When she met him, he had been an emotional wreck. Now it seemed impossible for her to see or understand the importance of his daughter to him or, even more, the importance a father might have to his daughter. If Nancy reappeared, Cummings would certainly be upset and probably be emotionally taken up. Marion didn’t want that.

  Marion’s plan was to keep the reunion between Cummings and Nancy from happening. When Cummings consulted with Dr. Wittels, he was told to relax and let events take their course. He would see Nancy when he was meant to see her, Wittels said.

  Cummings had not spent time with Nancy, who was now twenty-seven years old, married, and soon to be pregnant with her second child, since the days when she was his adorable Mopsy in that dreadful year when he had married Elaine in Cambridge and finally was divorced by her ten months later in Paris. Did he know then that he wouldn’t see his daughter again for more than a circumscribed visit until she was an adult?

  The last times he had seen her were long past. In September of 1923, Cummings had casually written to his sister, Elizabeth, who was living in New York, that Elaine and Mopsy might drop in on her “just to make sure the social side is taken care of.” Then, sometime in the winter of 1924, Cummings was granted three visits with Nancy in Central Park, supervised by her nanny. By this time he was heartbreakingly aware that his daughter was being slowly taken away from him. They played. He asked her to draw a picture for him. The nanny glowered. On their last of these three visits, as Cummings wrote, “he pushed all the tears of his love carefully into one corner of his mind and lifted an absurd hat to the huddled nurse who bowed and smiled.” In March of 1927, Cummings had been allowed another visit with his daughter. “Nancy and I had a wonderful time walking up and down the room, joking, imitating each other, and making fun of things in general. Then we drew pictures for each other,” Cummings wrote to his mother.

  Soon after that visit, Elaine and MacDermot had permanently moved to Ireland with Nancy, and Cummings had not seen her since. Now, as she slowly resurfaced, as his friends began to describe her as the lovely wife of Willard Roosevelt and doting mother of her own son, Simon, Cummings’s feelings for his daughter, which had been brutally repressed, began painfully to resurface, like the thawing-out of flesh that has been frozen for a long time. As feeling returned, pain returned.

  Once again in the summer of 1946, Mrs. Roosevelt decided to rent the same house on Silver Lake, where Nancy and her baby son and her husband when he was off duty could spend the summer in the cool mountain air. Cummings heard through the New Hampshire grapevine that Nancy and her family were staying just up the road. Nancy, of course, had no idea that the man who was her real father, a man she thought of as a famous poet who had been a friend of her father’s, was so close.

  If Marion was afraid that Nancy would explode like an enemy mortar into the relatively predictable life she had built around Cummings’s work, she had reason to fear. During the war years Cummings and Marion had become quiet, calmed-down older people. She had lost her astonishing looks. His satire had become more bitter, and at the same time his childlike sense of wonder continued to bubble up through his anger at the way the world was turning. He still thought about cheating on Marion and taking advantage of their so-called open marriage, but this happened more in fantasy than in reality. Sitting upstairs in his New Hampshire study, or his third-floor room at 4 Patchin Place, looking west over the low roofs of Greenwich Village and the small yards at the back of the block, he kept on working no matter what else was going on in his life. Once again his work life was thriving.

  In 1940, after the success of Collected Poems in 1938, he published 50 Poems with Duell, Sloan and Pearce, including the playful “anyone lived in a pretty how town” and the poem that is one of his longest, most famous, and most powerful. More than a decade after his father’s death, Cummings found a way in language to understand death.

  my father moved through dooms of love

  through sames of am through haves of give,

  singing each morning out of each night

  my father moved through depths of height

  this motionless forgetful where

  turned at his glance to shining here;

  that if(so timid air is firm)

  under his eyes would stir and squirm

  newly as from unburied which

  floats the first who,his april touch

  drove sleeping selves to swarm their fates

  woke dreamers to their ghostly roots

  and should some why completely weep

  my father’s fingers brought her sleep:

  vainly no smallest voice might cry

  for he could feel the mountains grow.

  Lifting the valleys of the sea

  my father moved through griefs of joy;

  praising a forehead called the moon

  singing desire into begin

  joy was his song and joy so pure

  a heart of star by him could steer

  and pure so now and now so yes

  the wrists of twilight would rejoice

  keen as midsummer’s keen beyond

  conceiving mind of sun will stand,

  so strictly(over utmost him

  so hugely)stood my father’s dream

  his flesh was flesh his blood was blood:

  no hungry man but wished him food;

  no cripple wouldn’t creep one mile

  uphill to only see him smile.

  Scorning the pomp of must and shall

  my father moved through dooms of feel;

  his anger was as right as rain

  his pity was as green as grain

  septembering arms of year extend

  less humbly wealth to foe and friend

  than he to foolish and to wise

  offered immeasurable is

  proudly and(by octobering flame

  beckoned)as earth will downward climb,

  so naked for immortal work

  his shoulders marched against the dark

  his sorrow was as true as bread:

  no liar looked him in the head;

  if every friend became his foe

  he’d laugh and build a world with snow.

  My father moved through theys of we,

  singing each new leaf out of each tree

  (and every child was sure that spring

  danced when she heard my father sing)

  then let men kill which cannot share,

  let blood and flesh be mud and mire,

  scheming imagine, passion willed,

  freedom a drug that’s bought and sold

  giving to steal and cruel kind,

  a heart to fear,to doubt a mind,

  to differ a disease of same,

  conform the pinnacle of am

  though dull were all we taste as bright,

  bitter all utterly things sweet,

  maggoty minus and dumb death

  all we inherit,all bequeath

  and nothing quite so least as truth

  —i say though hate were why man breathe—

  because my father lived his soul

  love is the whole and more than all

  Then, in 1944, Henry Holt and Company published his next collection, 1 × 1. The Cummings issue of the Harvard Wake in spring 1946 added kudos to his growing reputation from everyone in poetry from William Carlos Williams to Wallace Stevens to Conrad Aiken. By 1950, after the production of Santa Claus, his next collection, Xaipe, was ready. Here, although satire and dark humor take over a great deal of his voice, and his bitterness in one particular anti-Semitic poem has shadowed his reputation to this day, Cummings was still one of the most lyrical poets of his generation with a masterpiece like this one which mixes formal perfection of the sonnet with a wild, express
ive syntax:

  i thank You God 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

  (i who have died am alive again today,

  and this is the sun’s birthday;this is the birth

  day of life and of love and wings:and of the gay

  great happening illimitably earth)

  how should a tasting touching hearing seeing

  breathing any—lifted from the no

  of all nothing—human merely being

  doubt unimaginable You?

  (now the ears of my eyes awake and

  now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

  The poet and literary critic John Malcolm Brinnin was drinking with Dylan Thomas one night, and when Thomas mentioned that he had always wanted to meet Cummings, Brinnin marched him right around the corner to Patchin Place. Cummings and Thomas stayed up most of the night drinking and talking. They became great friends—a friendship tragically interrupted by Thomas’s death in November of 1953 at St. Vincent’s Hospital, down the street from Patchin Place, after another long night of drinking.

  Cummings was baffled by the deaths of his friends who could not control their drinking as he had—for the last decade of his life he kept to a three-drinks-a-day rule with a lot of success. No one understood that alcohol is a serious depressant, nor did we have the medical knowledge of brain chemistry that now shows us the mechanics of addiction. Later, talking to his biographer Charles Norman, Cummings described alcoholism as strangely and as well as anyone ever has. “I knew a couple of lemmings once,” he said. “Nobody could stop them. On they rushed—straight ahead—and plunged in. Hart Crane and Dylan Thomas.”

  12

  “I think I am falling in love with you”

  Summer’s end in the New Hampshire mountains is a beautiful and poignant time. The short green-growing season is over, and the apples are ripening in the orchards above Silver Lake. Great sunsets flame across the sky as if there were huge fires being banked at the edge of the world. The days grow short and the nights become cold enough for the warmth of a fire. The furnaces belch to life. The leaves have not yet begun to turn their glorious colors, the wildflowers are scarce, the lake water suddenly freezing, and it is very hard to get out from under the covers into the cold, cold morning air. The bite of deadly winter with its blizzards and howling winds, its ice storms and freezes, is now just a nip in the air. It’s a time when you can literally imagine the earth slowly shifting on its axis away from the warmth of the sun, a time of reassessment and longing.

  Finally, at the end of the summer of 1946, Cummings and Marion relented toward the woman who did not know that she was his daughter. Cummings asked his friend Billy James to bring Nancy Thayer Cummings Roosevelt and her husband, Willard, to Joy Farm for tea. Truman was in office, and the United States was a world power. Dr. Benjamin Spock had just published The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, the seminal parenting book that told mothers that they knew more than they realized. Cummings had finished writing Santa Claus, and he wrote to Allen Tate, then an editor at Henry Holt and Company, about illustrations. Even in this good time for his career and his country, Cummings kept up his questioning attitude. In another perfect English sonnet he wrote:

  when serpents bargain for the right to squirm

  and the sun strikes to gain a living wage—

  when thorns regard their roses with alarm

  and rainbows are insured against old age

  when every thrush may sing no new moon in

  if all screech-owls have not okayed his voice

  —and any wave signs on the dotted line

  or else an ocean is compelled to close

  when the oak begs permission of the birch

  to make an acorn—valleys accuse their

  mountains of having altitude—and march

  denounces april as a saboteur

  then we’ll believe in that incredible

  unanimal mankind(and not until)

  The Jameses had been Cummings’s neighbors his whole life. In Cambridge they lived at 95 Irving Street, just across from the Cummings house; in New Hampshire they lived five miles away in the house where the James family had spent the summer for generations; the James presence at Chocorua was one of the reasons Edward Cummings had been originally drawn to Silver Lake.

  The second son of the great philosopher William James, Billy James was two years older than Estlin Cummings and had always served Cummings as a kind of spiritual older brother. A few years after the death of Rebecca Cummings, when the Cummings house on Irving Street had been sold to another family, James wrote Cummings about his feelings on what was going on across the street. “There are three roofers on the roof of your house, and now there is a large black poodle barking below. I don’t like to think that there are Wagners across the way instead of Cummingses—particularly when I reflect that you were, in a sense, conceived in this room when Dad introduced your parents to each other.”

  For the moment at least, Marion’s objections about Nancy had been overcome. Nancy was delighted at the prospect of meeting the poet she admired, one who possibly had been married to her mother at one time. She hoped he would be more open about the past than Elaine had been. When the guests arrived at Joy Farm, Marion and the Jameses—all of whom knew that Cummings was Nancy’s father—stayed outside, and father and daughter walked into the cool, deepening shadows of the house together.

  Nancy was enchanted. Something was happening to her that she did not understand, but she sensed its tremendous importance. Cummings’s voice, which others had compared to the sound of an organ or a magnetic and masculine siren song, was superbly resonant to the woman who was his daughter and who had heard that voice throughout her childhood. She didn’t remember consciously, but she seemed to remember all the same. That afternoon in New Hampshire, she later told the biographer Richard Kennedy, Cummings’s voice “seemed extraordinary, like a bell, like something come from afar, almost echoing.” Little did she know that Cummings’s extraordinary voice, both whispery and powerful, was indeed something echoing—an echo from her own childhood.

  The tea at Joy Farm went well. Nancy and Willard were an attractive young couple. Marion seemed to have been soothed by the meeting, in which nothing was revealed except Nancy’s admiration of Cummings as a poet. The two families—the Roosevelts and the Cummingses—began a low-key literary friendship. The next summer, the Roosevelts did not rent a house near Joy Farm; but when Nancy gave birth to her daughter Elizabeth, she wrote a note to Cummings announcing it. No one had told Nancy that Cummings was her father. The Jameses didn’t think it was their job, and although Cummings knew that Nancy would eventually find out, there never seemed a right time to tell her. Without understanding what she was doing, she brought his painful past right into the present.

  Almost thirty years earlier, when Cummings was estranged from Elaine but still deeply attached to Nancy, when he was in the early stages of the heartbreak of being separated from his daughter, he had written about a visit with her in his journal: “goodbye dear & next time when I feel a little better we’ll ride on the donkeys and next time on the pigs maybe or you will a bicycle and I will ride a swan & next time when my heart is all mended again with snow repainted with bright new paint we’ll ride you and I.”

  In the winter of 1947 Nancy, with her two children, Simon and Elizabeth, and her husband, Willard, moved to an apartment in a complex at 5901 Thirty-ninth Street in Long Island City, across the river from Manhattan. Nancy again was invited to visit Cummings and Marion, this time in their apartment at Patchin Place. She was fascinated by her mother’s past, but Cummings wouldn’t talk about it. When Nancy tried to ask him about her mother or the man she thought was her father, his friend Scofield Thayer, Cummings changed the subject.

  At tea, Cummings asked Nancy if she would be willing to sit for a portr
ait. She happily agreed, but the two of them didn’t start work on the picture until the spring of 1948. “Always the pictures came first,” Nancy wrote years later in her book about her father, in which he becomes Charon, the aging boatman, on the river Styx. “In and out of dreams and memories; then the poems round and about them, afterwards prose to link with the broken key in the present: with absence, with Charon.” Later, she explained that “the ferryman of the Styx represents not my father but my father’s absence.”

  Nancy was a beautiful woman, with her mother’s dramatic coloring and her father’s grace and blazing blue eyes. Cummings first drew a small head of her and then started on another work, a larger, seated figure. When he and Marion returned from Joy Farm in the fall of 1948, the sittings began again. Nothing was revealed about the past. As Nancy sat for him, he entertained her with stories about his life and the lives of people he had known—omitting the one story that was of critical importance to his listener. He painted in his third-floor studio, and after the sittings the two of them went downstairs for tea. Marion seemed to hover at all times, so the conversation was cheerful and stayed on the surface. The afternoons when she crossed the East River to the row of tenements at Patchin Place and sat for Cummings became the bright spot of Nancy’s week.