E. E. Cummings Read online

  Frantically, Cummings tried to place a transatlantic call, and he finally reached her at the hospital in London. Belatedly he decided that, as her father, he should rush to her and be helpful. In those days, rushing was a slower matter than it is today, especially for Cummings and Marion, rushing to the aid of the daughter Marion had never quite accepted. At the end of September Cummings and Marion sailed for Europe on the Vulcania. More solvent than they had ever been, they treated themselves to a visit to Italy, which depressed them. By this time, Nancy had returned to Greece from London, and so Cummings and Marion headed south.

  Finally, in Athens to visit Nancy—which had been the original goal of the trip, although typically Cummings had not mentioned this to Nancy—he and Marion checked in to the Hotel Grande Bretagne. Cummings immediately objected to the hotel’s recent renovation, which, it seemed to him, had turned a grand hotel into a series of little boxes. Unmoved by the hotel’s luxury status or by its astonishing view of the Parthenon, which seemed to float like an apparition from the ancient world just outside the windows, Cummings became his worst self—crotchety, impossible to please, sulky, and deferential to Marion.

  To make things worse, his back immediately went into painful spasms, and the heating pad brought from New York didn’t work with the Greek electrical system. The hotel staff was no help. Nancy and Kevin Andrews had no phone and no way of knowing that Nancy’s father was fuming just a few miles away. By the time Marion had reached them by mail, Cummings’s funk had achieved epic proportions—abetted by Marion, who was furious, too. When Kevin Andrews himself appeared with a Greek heating pad, Marion slammed the hotel room door in his face. She angrily plugged in the new heating pad without following Andrews’s directions, and it blew a fuse. This was the limit! With the help of the hotel staff, the heating pad finally started to work, but Marion’s mood was not amenable to a new plug—she had already blown her fuse. Finally Nancy, who had still not seen or spoken to her father, wrote him a heartbreaking note, delivered to the hotel. In it she called him by his given name, as he had requested, rather than calling him “Father.” “We are as Kevin tried to say, at your disposal at all times but, not wishing to intrude & being perhaps rather too much aware of this possibility it seems best to leave the modus up to you—even at the risk of seeming, Estlin, less loving toward yourself than I feel; this has always seemed the lesser / or better / risk & very possibly I have always been wrong; I have very little to go on.”

  When Cummings and Marion finally appeared at the Andrewses’ lovely farmhouse, anxiously shepherded by Nancy, Marion “behaved in a hoity-toity fashion about being invited to a mere family lunch with grandchildren present, implying that Cummings was too important a man to be asked to join the children at the family table,” Kennedy writes.

  On another day Cummings, Marion, Andrews, and Ioanna climbed Mount Hymettus to see a monastery. Whenever Marion was in the same room with Nancy, her displeasure was enough to make the experience unpleasant for everyone. A few days later, when Nancy and her father were finally alone in order to say the goodbye that turned out to be their final meeting, he seemed tremendously uncomfortable, Nancy told Kennedy. He commented on her love for her children. He said that he had come to see her and that he was glad she was well; this was the first time Nancy learned that he had traveled to Athens just to see her. The discomfort didn’t lift until Cummings and Marion were leaving. Personal encounters were hard for both father and daughter. Letters were easier.

  In a voluble letter to Nancy in London in 1961, the year before he died, Cummings complimented her on her poems, and asked her to help him with a translation of Rilke’s poem “The Panther” if she had time. Writing about those years that, in retrospect, seemed like a golden dream for their father-daughter connection, he revisited the time before Elaine separated them and erased any memory Nancy might have had of her real father, before their twenty years apart, before their supremely uncomfortable reunion. In the story he included in the letter, he had gone to visit the MacDermots on the promise of getting to see her. What he was allowed during the visit was to watch her sing. “Your pluck was wonderful!” he wrote. “You hated being made to showoff, but your singing teacher’s reputation was at stake & you didn’t hate me. Long before, your mother had assured you your father was dead (or a little bird?) but you sang your best. The song was enchanting.”

  In another letter—he was much more loving in letters than in person, perhaps because Marion didn’t vet his correspondence—he sent Nancy an old snapshot of himself in his twenties, a glamorous-looking kid with a lot of combed-back hair and a mustache. “Do you know at all, I wonder, what you sent me?” she asked in her reply. The photograph seemed to have produced a shock of memory; she wrote, “Strange that I should be able to forget so long.”

  Cummings trusted his analyst, Fritz Wittels, and he had come to respect the ideas of Sigmund Freud. Certainly the story of Nancy Thayer Cummings Roosevelt Andrews suggests that the damage done in childhood—especially the damage in relation to people of the opposite sex—plays itself out over and over in adulthood. “You can not turn the wheels of history backward,” Cummings has Sophia say in Eimi.

  Nancy Cummings had married two intensely intellectual, distinguished, and difficult men, and both marriages ended badly. Andrews, who was born in China, was a famously flamboyant guy, a “wild man” with epilepsy and a passion for all things Greek, who ended up swimming out into the sea and drowning—perhaps accidentally, perhaps as a suicide. He and Nancy had already separated. In 1968, complaining that she didn’t want to raise her children in a country ruled by a corrupt junta, but really sick to death of her marriage to Andrews, Nancy took her children and moved back to London, where she spent the rest of her life. “I always had the feeling she was on the verge of depression,” Robert Cabot remembers. “Later I saw her while she was living alone in her flat in London—a very solitary soul, quiet and judgmental still. She spent a lot of time doing yoga.”

  13

  Readings: A New Career

  At the same time that Nancy and Cummings were trying to find a way to be friends, if not father and daughter, the rest of the world was caught up in the prosperous, stuffy years between the end of World War II and the beginning of the 1960s. If the Cambridge ladies were uptight and divorced from the natural world, they found an echo in the so-called Greatest Generation. Cummings was a man ahead of his time, and his poems would enjoy another wave of popularity after his death in the 1960s. As the poet of chaos, playfulness, and topsy-turvy rule breaking, he once again found himself out of step. Politically, Cummings was conservative, even going so far as to agree with anticommunist alarmists—he had never forgotten his terrible time in Russia.

  Yet Cummings was irrepressible. Although he was often financially desperate, he never lost his gallantry or his delight in the antics of a blue jay or in the water lapping at the shores of Silver Lake or in the cherries blooming in Washington Square Park. “The poet is no tender slip of fairy stock who requires peculiar institutions and edicts for his defense,” he wrote to Mary de Rachewiltz, Ezra Pound’s daughter, quoting his hero Henry David Thoreau in a passage from A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers that might have been his own credo. “But the toughest son of earth and heaven, and by his greater strength and endurance his fainting companions will recognize the God in him. It is the worshippers of beauty, after all, who have done the real pioneer work of the world.”

  Asked to lecture in the poetry series at the Manhattan YM-YWHA by his friend John Malcolm Brinnin, Cummings perfected what would become his mature lecture style. His invitation to Bennington brought far more than a pleasant evening; it was the beginning of a satisfying and lucrative new career. Much like another of his heroes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Cummings found that he was able to become a famous poet not by writing poetry but by reading poetry. Emerson’s essays owe their popularity to the rigorous speaking schedule he used to support himself and his family at the end of his life.

  By
the time he took the stage at the Y in December of 1954, Cummings had developed a precise and powerful way of reading his poems to an audience. He never read behind a lectern. Before he read, the organizers and the venue got a list of very specific instructions. He would need a straight-backed chair, a table, and a gooseneck lamp. He would not answer questions, sign books, or agree to any of the social folderol that usually surrounds a reading—the dinner with the English department, the interview with the local reporter, the radio interview for the town station. There would be no photographs.

  For the Y, for instance, Cummings had planned a two-part program, running from 8:40 to 9:10 and then, after a ten-minute intermission, from 9:20 to 9:50. The Y officials, however, not used to such precision, allowed the standees to swarm the unoccupied seats at 9 p.m., completely disrupting the reading. The mike was also, Cummings wrote Hildegarde Watson, “as stiff as a mule.” The audience seemed half dead, Cummings told his old friend; whatever he did, they would not have noticed: “I could have roared as softly as a seashell or noiselessly dropped a demi-whisper into the very last row of the balcony.”

  A Cummings reading usually started with a few prose passages and proceeded to poetry. Often Cummings reserved a poem to use as an encore after the first round of applause had died down. “He was an enormously effective and careful reader,” Brinnin told Richard Kennedy. Cummings began to draw large audiences, many of them young men and women whose experience of the poems was so intense that they seemed enrolled in a kind of Cummings cult. “must confess I attribute my physical ills to socalled nervous tension,” he wrote, summing up the good and the bad for Hildegarde Watson. “If any quite unmitigatedly perverse human being insists on deliberately insulting the powersthatseem—instead of (come toutlemonde) dutifully soft-soaping same—what can he expect? Certainly not something which happened yesterday; when a pretty young girl handed me a bunch of daffodills, saying ‘you don’t know who I am but I just wanted to give you these.’ ”

  At the Y, Cummings met the series’ assistant director, Betty Kray, who became a friend, dropping by Patchin Place for tea on Fridays and serving as Cummings’s lecture agent as his audience grew. He began reading at places with a lot of prestige—the Museum of Modern Art, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Washington, DC. At Betty Kray’s urging, he began to travel to lecture and to charge higher fees—in 1955, a Cummings lecture cost $400, which quickly rose to $600 and beyond. In a typical season he read at the University of Chicago, the Chicago Art Center, Dartmouth College, the Metropolitan Museum, Queens College in North Carolina, Duke University, and Barnard.

  A Cummings reading was a formal, dramatic event. It was more like a play than a reading. In the tradition of Dickens, who memorized his ninety-minute lectures and used his book only as a prop, Cummings brought a tremendous amount of theatrical skill to the art of reading. The writer Gerald Weales, who made a study of poetry readings, divided readers into three categories: performer, personality, and public speaker. Cummings was definitely a performer. On the shadowy stage, the gooseneck lamp was the only light. Cummings quietly entered and began to read, using his mimicking skills for different characters and voices to great effect. He could be side-splittingly funny and sadly sentimental within a few moments.

  His voice—aristocratic, reassuring, and yet somehow filled with the wonder of childhood—was electrifying. He did all the voices, and he seemed to become the characters he had written as he read—his enjoyment of the work and the audience was easy to see. Whether he was reading something playful (“may I feel said he?”) or angry or deeply serious and sad, his voice was brilliantly adapted to the material. Cummings played his voice, letting it go loud and soft, high and low, using vibrato and falsetto, as the poems demanded.

  In a line like “my father moved through dooms of love,” he would modulate his voice, drawing out the long syllables in a way that echoed with grief and longing. In the playful poems you could almost hear him smiling; in the sad ones he sounded close to tears. The words seemed to sob of their own accord. His pauses were electric; his vowels, endless and sad. Cummings understood the power of sounds and the possibilities of language in a unique, pioneering way, and this came through when he read.

  Until he began to read all over the country, Cummings had been a well-respected poet among poets. His was a name well known in the small community of ideas in literature, poetry, and art, especially at Harvard and in Greenwich Village. Now, partly because of his extraordinary readings, he began to become a national celebrity.

  At the same time, his ailments began to catch up with him in a more dramatic and crippling way. His back remained fragile. His skin erupted in a variety of sores and rashes. Traveling was often difficult and sometimes impossible—he had to turn down $1,000 because traveling to the University of Texas would have required a four-and-a-half-hour plane trip. “ ‘arthritis’—without or avec a soupcon of ‘fibrillation’—makes social planning something like a furbelow,& please do not think I’m complaining; if only because I am,” he wrote Archibald MacLeish.

  His vocal cords got wheezy. He took more Nembutal to sleep and he took all kinds of painkillers for the pain in his back, which persisted even when he was wearing the Iron Maiden. When Hildegarde Watson suggested a trip—probably paid for by the Watsons, who were almost as ready with their loans and gifts as Rebecca Cummings had been—Cummings painted an awful picture for her. “I always glimpse a miserably exhausted me—tortured in his ‘iron maid’—waiting&waiting&waiting for some plane or train or boat or maybe hotel-room which doesn’t dream of materializing.” His misery, even to an old friend, as always was leavened by his own self-knowledge. “Tell me now, Hildegarde,” he finished up his letter of complaint about travel, “what do you think: I am suffering from what ‘the liberals’ entitled ‘failure of nerve,’ or from something else most beautifully described by Quintus H as ‘nec pietas moran’: or may my unending timidities harbour a diminutive amount of truth?”

  Reading also took an emotional toll. It was Cummings’s absolute presence in the moment on the stage that made him so compelling. He paid the price in nerves and fear. “What I generally experience before a reading,” he wrote to his sister, Elizabeth, “is a conglomeration of anxieties involving bellyache, heartrouble, arthritis, diarrhea, & (temporary) blindness.” He also suffered from a frightening heart arrhythmia, a tachycardia that he controlled with doses of Quinidine.

  His reputation as a lecturer increased, and he began to see that financial solvency might be possible if he could keep going. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill turned out for him. In Michigan, students lined up in a mob outside the auditorium where he was speaking, hoping for a glimpse of the famous poet. Typical of Cummings, when he was invited to be the featured reader at the Boston Arts Festival in 1957, he agreed to do it and then had second thoughts. “This invitation,” writes Charles Norman in his authorized biography, “touched off a prolonged correspondence, in the course of which Cummings withdrew his consent twice, was twice prevailed upon to reconsider, reconsidered, and at length made perhaps his most triumphant appearance as a reader.”

  Lecturing was always torture for Cummings, torture mixed with the heady experience of being adored, especially by young people and students and even more especially by beautiful young women who memorized his work, sought to touch or speak with him for a moment, and in general brought an attitude of worship to everything he did. He had always spoken for the young, and now they seemed to hear him.

  Still, his attitude toward money and fame remained quintessentially, gallantly, humorously Cummings. He wrote to Pound that he had “received an Honour which even I, egocentric though he may be, scarcely dare maintain we deserve.” The honor in question was an event that another man might have construed as a disheartening failure: he was turned down for a grant simultaneously by the Bollingen Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation.

  After Pound was incarcerated in St. Elizabeths Hospital, he and Cummings wrote each other alm
ost once a week. Their letters are a record of literary life after World War II in this country and they are also the record of Pound’s slow recovery from madness. The letters are all about the difficulties of finding recognition from the establishment—the despicable establishment—and about new talents and intelligent people to whom they introduced each other and whom they tried to help. Sometimes the two great poets wrote about simpler things, like blue jays. Cummings loved blue jays, handsome and naughty, and in fact this led to one of their few arguments, which began with a Cummings poem (published in 95 Poems):

  crazy jay blue)

  demon laughshriek

  ing at me

  your scorn of easily

  hatred of timid

  &loathing for(dull all

  regular righteous

  comfortable)unworlds

  thief crook cynic

  (swimfloatdrifting

  fragment of heaven)

  trickstervillain

  raucous rogue &

  vivid voltaire

  you beautiful anarchist

  (i salute thee

  Pound disagreed with Cummings’s critical assessment of the bird. He was a fan of blue jays. “whar yu git sech ideas re b.jays?” he asked in a letter with typical Poundian diction. Perhaps Cummings knew a lot about Russia, but Pound didn’t think he knew much about birds. “I mean I accept yu as orthority on hrooshuns but queery analysis of b.j,” he wrote.

  Cummings defended himself with three long passages from books about birds. T. Gilbert Pearson’s Birds of America calls the blue jay “an amusing rascal”: “The Blue Jay is the clown & scoffer of birdland,” Cummings quotes Pearson, who also calls the bird “cannibalistic.” “Furthermore, he is one of the handsomest of American birds; also he is one of the wickedest.” F. Schuyler Mathews’s Field Book of Wild Birds asserts that “the Jay in spring is undoubtedly a reprobate”; and in Chester A. Reed’s Bird Guide, “they have a very bad reputation.”