The Jealous Muse, Chapter Four — E.E. Cummings : The Enormous Womb

Across The Margin / ATM Publishing presents Chapter Four of Arthur Hoyle’s The Jealous Muse — E.E. Cummings : The Enormous Womb…

Chapter Four — E.E. Cummings : The Enormous Womb

The poetry of E. E. Cummings is widely anthologized in high school and college English literature textbooks. Readers know him as the author of innovative and playful poetry characterized by bold departures from conventional syntax, grammar, spelling, punctuation, and typography. His poems celebrate the intuitive life of feeling, of knowing the world through the senses and the emotions rather than the mind. He reveres the integrity of nature and its processes, and distrusts the artificial world that man has created through science and the exercise of his reason. For Cummings, feeling is the source of unity with the natural world and wholeness of self. Reason, man’s analytical tool, through which he strives to gain control over nature, separates, isolates, and fragments reality, thus cutting man off from his essential self.

To achieve union with nature, to maintain wholeness of self, Cummings—as artist and man—seeks to preserve the child-mind that has not fallen from natural grace into disunity and the realm of dualisms. This child-mind that Cummings insists on inhabiting served his art effectively, yielding poems (and paintings) of startling and unusual beauty. But the strategy carried a price—his inability or refusal to address the issues and circumstances of his life as a responsible adult. He knew that about himself and admitted it on more than one occasion. Late in his life he summed it up succinctly in French: ‘je suis faible dans la vie” (I am feeble in life).

One of Cummings’s best known and most iconic poems written from the child-mind is “in Just-/spring,” a short lyric composed in 1916 when he was a twenty-two year old graduate student at Harvard. Spring was a frequent subject in Cummings’s poetry, important as a natural symbol of the process of continual renewal that people must allow if they are to remain fully alive. The poem also displays many of Cummings’s signature compositional innovations. The typography shows the child-mind at play.

The poem was published in 1923 in the volume Tulips & Chimneys, the first collection of Cummings’s verse. It was placed in a section with the heading “Chansons Innocentes,” an obvious reference to the “Songs of Innocence” of William Blake, an earlier poet-painter whom Cummings admired greatly.

The poem presents a scene from childhood, with boys and girls outside on the street playing innocent games and indulging in their fantasies. Their world is “mud-luscious” and “puddle-wonderful.” Into this idyllic world a disturbing figure enters—the balloonman. He is old, but “little” like a child. He is also “lame,” queer,” and “goat-footed.” That he is a balloonman suggests the circus or a faire. He whistles to attract the children away from their innocent play. The balloons are his lure. Balloons delight children because they are magical—they defy gravity and float in the air like spirits. But the balloonman is carnal, a balloonMan, and his queerness makes him faintly sinister. Being “goat-footed” turns him into a satyr, a mythical figure half-man, half-goat associated with Dionysius and rites of spring that involve drinking and sexuality. Since Cummings is alluding to Greek mythology, the balloonman’s lameness brings to mind the story of Oedipus (swollen foot), whose feet were bound when he was an infant as one of the measures his parents took to foil the prophecy that Oedipus would one day kill his father and marry his mother. These associations place the balloonman into the fallen realm of adults. He whistles a second time to draw the children to him. The poem ends with the children suspended between the world of their innocent games and the fallen world of the balloonman. Cummings strove to remain in this “no man’s land” for all of his life.

We do not have to look further than Cummings’s own childhood to find the origins of the child-mind that he clung to so determinedly. Cummings was born in 1894 in Cambridge, Massachusetts into a stable, comfortable, loving home. Both his parents came from old New England stock and moved in sophisticated circles. They were introduced by William James, under whom Cummings’s father Edward had studied at Harvard. Edward was preparing for a career in the ministry, but his interest in understanding the changes in social conditions brought on by the industrial revolution led him to study sociology. In 1891 he was appointed to a professorship in sociology at Harvard and in June of that year he married Rebecca Clarke. His writing and activism on behalf of social reforms made him a well-known and respected figure in the community, and when the minister of the South Congregational Church of Boston (Unitarian) retired, Edward was named to replace him even though he had not been ordained as a minister.

Rebecca was by all accounts a generous, kind, and devoted wife and mother. She was fond of poetry, encouraged Cummings’s early efforts at verse writing, and home schooled him until he was eight. The Cummings household in Cambridge was a busy and dynamic place, home to grandparents, aunts, a literary uncle who played with E.E., a cook, a negro handyman who came during the day, and pets—all spread out in a three-story house with thirteen fireplaces. The yard was a welcome playground for the neighborhood children (“My father liked to have us play in the yard and used to say he was raising children, not grass,” wrote E.E.’s sister Elizabeth in an unpublished memoir), and Edward built his son a tree house sturdy enough for him to sleep in overnight. (Sawyer, p. 16)

Edward also acquired a summer home called Joy Farm in Silver Lake, New Hampshire, and on it he built a second house bordering the lake. He dammed a stream that ran across the property, giving the children a pond for swimming. E.E. spent summers exploring the woods, caring for livestock, riding his horse—laying the foundation for his lifelong love of nature.

Cummings was in awe of his father, a mythic figure whom he described in Bunyanesque terms during a lecture he delivered at Harvard in 1952.

He was a New Hampshireman, 6 foot 2, a crack shot & famous fly fisherman & a firstrate sailor (his sloop was named The Actress) & a woodsman who could find his way through forests primeval without a compass & a canoeist who’d still paddle you up to a deer without ruffling the surface of the pond & an ornithologist & taxidermist & (when he gave up hunting) an expert photographer (the best I’ve ever seen) & an actor who portrayed Julius Caesar in Sanders Theater & a painter (both in oils and watercolors) & a better carpenter than any professional & an architect who designed his own houses before building them & (when he liked) a plumber who just for the fun of it installed all his own waterworks . . . (Six Nonlectures, p. 8)

The litany of accomplishments and abilities continues through Edward’s contributions to sociology, to his congregation, to world peace. What emerges is a portrait of a man with whom Cummings—5’ 8” tall, thin, unathletic, shy, solitary, fearful of confrontation—could not possibly hope to compete. Instead, he chose another path, poet-painter, on which he could not possibly be compared to his father. “I make poems because it is the thing I know how to do best,” Cummings wrote when he was about thirty years old.  “In fact it is about the only thing I know how to do.”  (Norman, p. 191)

Though Cummings would rebel against his father’s value system and model of manhood as a way of separating from him and pursuing his own individuality, he remained dependent on him and grateful to him. “No father on this earth ever loved or ever will love his son more profoundly,” Cummings told his audience at the Harvard lecture. (Six Nonlectures, p. 9) Some years after his father’s violent death in 1926 in an automobile accident, Cummings wrote his moving tribute to him, “my father moved through dooms of love.”

Cummings also paid tribute to his mother during the lecture, calling her “the most amazing person I’ve ever met.” (Six Nonlectures, p. 11) After her husband’s death, Rebecca continued to parent Cummings, offering him emotional and financial support as he struggled to pursue his career as poet and painter. He commemorated her in a poem that begins with the tender line “if there are any heavens my mother will (all by herself) have/one.”

Cummings recognized that his childhood had been exceptionally happy and idyllic. He told his Harvard audience, “I was welcomed as no son of any king and queen was ever welcomed. Here was my joyous fate and my supreme fortune.” (Six, p. 11) Cummings concluded this lecture, the first of six that he gave at Harvard during the 1952-1953 academic year, by reading William Wordsworth’s Ode “Intimations of Immortality From Recollections of Early Childhood,” a poem that begins with the line “The child is father to the man.” The poem renders the mystical vision of reality experienced by the child, a vision that fades with the onset of adulthood: “Heaven lies about us in our infancy!,” Wordsworth wrote. But “At length the man perceives it die away/And fade into the light of common day.” This unwelcome but necessary passage from innocence to experience Cummings resisted.

When he was eight, Cummings entered private school in Cambridge, attending Peabody for a year and then matriculating to Cambridge Latin School. Given the literary atmosphere in his home and Rebecca’s encouragement, it is no surprise that he showed high aptitude for languages. He studied Latin, Greek, and French in high school. He disliked math and science, disciplines that called for analysis and precise measurement. As a poet, one of his favorite words was “illimitable.” Cummings preferred mystery to certainty. He was writing verse at this time and had already begun his experiments with unconventional ways of presenting language on the page. He wrote a poem a day.

In 1911 he passed an early entrance exam for Harvard and joined the freshman class at age sixteen. He continued to live at home. He was socially awkward, a loner who spent hours in the college library reading.

His social life picked up in his sophomore year when he joined the editorial board of the Harvard Monthly, a literary magazine. There he met a number of aesthetes who shared his interests, among them John Dos Passos, S. Foster Damon, Scofield Thayer, and Sibley Watson. These young men became lifelong friends and supporters of Cummings. Thayer and Watson, both independently wealthy, provided generous patronage to Cummings as he struggled to support himself with his writing and painting. S. Foster Damon, who went on to become a scholar noted for his explication of William Blake’s metaphysical system, made Cummings more worldly. He introduced him to the moderns in painting, music, and literature—Picasso, Stravinsky, Pound—and brought Cummings to the fleshpots of Boston—burlesque houses, saloons, girls of the street—where his father’s values were trampled.

An amusing episode occurred when Cummings borrowed his father’s car and parked it in front of a prostitute’s house. The police, recognizing the car as Edward’s, towed it and called the minister in the dead of night. In the argument between Cummings and his father that ensued, Edward lamented, “I thought I had given birth to a god.” (Sawyer, p. 69) Cummings was shamed, but did not mend his ways. “I led a double life,” he wrote, “getting drunk and feeling up girls but lying about this to my father and taking his money all the time.” (Sawyer, p. 56)

Cummings graduated magna cum laude from Harvard with a degree in English literature in June 1915. In his senior year he wrote the beautiful ballad “all in green went my love riding.” He also delivered a commencement address on “The New Art” that bewildered his audience with incomprehensible quotations from Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein. He remained in Cambridge for another year, studying for his master’s degree and taking advantage of free room and board under his father’s roof while he wrote. It was during this period that he composed “in Just-/spring.”

In June 1916 Cummings’s close friend Scofield Thayer married Elaine Orr, a beautiful New England socialite. Cummings was attracted to her. Thayer paid Cummings $1,000 to compose an epithalamion for the occasion, and with these funds Cummings temporarily broke free of financial dependence on his father. In January 1917 he moved to New York, sharing a one-room apartment in Greenwich Village with Arthur Wilson, a painter and fellow Harvard alumnus. He found employment at a New York publishing house, P.F. Collier, but was assigned to the mail order department rather than editorial work. He left after two months to devote himself to painting. While at his Collier’s desk, on company stationery, he wrote another of his iconic poems, “Buffalo Bill’s/defunct,” after reading William Cody’s obituary in The New York Times.

While Cummings painted and wrote, World War I was raging in Europe. He adopted a cavalier, one might say puerile, attitude towards the conflict, writing his mother, “I don’t know why I talk of this ‘pseudo war’ as I have no interest in it—and am painting and scribbling as ever . . .I read but one paragraph of Wilson’s speech, being taken with a fit of laughter.” (Cummings, Selected Letters, p. 14) Nevertheless, one day after the United States entered the war in April, Cummings, in order to avoid certain conscription, joined the Norton-Harjes Volunteer Motor Volunteer Ambulance Corps. He sailed for Europe April 28 and on the voyage befriended a young American, William Slater Brown. Before long, their friendship would bring them into the clutches of the French military justice system.

Almost from the moment of their arrival in France, Cummings and Brown distanced themselves from the rest of their unit. On the train from Bordeaux, they became separated from the unit when they disembarked at the wrong station in Paris. The Norton-Harjes offices were closed when they attempted to check in, so they took a room at a cheap hotel. They reported for duty the next day, but the administration there immediately lost track of them and did not discover their error for five weeks. In this interlude, Brown and Cummings sampled the delights of Paris, tramping the city, attending performances of the Ballets Russes, and courting Mimi and Marie, two prostitutes they met on the street. They paid the women for their time but squired them through the evenings as though they were ordinary couples out on a date. Cummings slept with Marie but did not have intercourse with her from fear of contracting venereal disease. Edward’s stern warnings still rang in Cummings’s ears. When their unit finally located them, they were reprimanded, then sent off to Ham, a small village in the northeast of France.

The Germans had withdrawn from the area, so there was no military action requiring ambulance services. Brown and Cummings again set themselves apart from the rest of their unit. They were careless about their appearance and idled with French soldiers, whose company they preferred to their fellow Americans. This behavior brought down on them the ire of the section chief, Anderson, who took away their driving privileges and assigned them menial tasks such as washing vehicles. Unhappy in their section, they applied to become French aviators but were turned down when they admitted they had no desire to kill Germans.

Brown and Cummings were writing letters home. Brown was indiscreet in his descriptions of the low morale of the French soldiers with whom they had been fraternizing and came under suspicion by the French military censors. Lacking an ally in Anderson to defend them, they were transferred to La Ferté Macé, a detention camp in Normandie. The camp was not considered a prison, because Brown and Cummings were regarded as suspects, not criminals, but the circumstances of their life at La Ferté Macé were indistinguishable from prison life.

Brown and Cummings were detained at La Ferté Macé for three months, during which they befriended many of their fellow sufferers enduring the misery of the camp. It was a motley group—English, Poles, Belgians, Russians, even a Mexican—all of whom had been picked up either by mistake or on the flimsiest of grounds. The Mexican had been taken into custody when he asked a gendarme for directions to a ship he was about to board. The men were herded together in a single “enormous room” where they slept, relieved themselves in slop pails, and socialized to pass the time. The camp had a canteen where inmates with cash could purchase food, tobacco, and wine.

At the end of three months, Brown and Cummings were interrogated by a commission of three men. After his interrogation, Brown was sentenced to a prison in Précigne for the duration of the war and transferred away from Cummings. Cummings was set free, with the stipulation that he must remain in France for the duration of the war in a place of his choosing, and report monthly to the chief of police. Cummings chose a small village in the French Pyrenees that had been recommended to him by another inmate. But before he departed, he was summoned to the Director’s office and told to board the next train for Paris, where a man from the American Embassy was waiting for him. Since learning of his son’s incarceration, Edward had been frantically working through American diplomatic channels to secure his release. Cummings sailed for New York a few days before Christmas and arrived there on January 1, 1918.

Cummings had not asked his father for help. From the outset of his ordeal, he had treated the whole degrading experience as a lark, a youthful adventure he was sharing with his friend Brown. After being taken into custody by the officials in Ham, Cummings was questioned sympathetically by three Frenchmen and encouraged to exonerate himself. He was incriminated not by anything he had done, but rather by his association with Brown, who was suspected of being a German spy. But Cummings chose loyalty to Brown over his own freedom. He defended Brown’s character and insisted on his innocence, and when asked the pivotal question, “Do you hate the Germans?” he sealed his fate by answering, “No. I love very much the French.”

Shortly after his arrival at La Ferté Macé, Cummings wrote a reassuring letter to his mother, telling her, “I am having the time of my life.” (Sawyer, p. 121) Upon learning that his father was undertaking efforts to secure his release, Cummings wrote him that he wanted to “see the thing thru alone . . .” (Sawyer, p. 122) He acted as though his imprisonment, for that’s what it was, was actually a liberation. At the end of the first day at the camp, as he was turning in for the night in a room full a filthy men lying on flea infested mattresses and breathing air fouled by the smell of urine and excrement rising from slop pails, Cummings said to Brown, “This is the finest place I’ve ever been in my life.” (Enormous Room, p. 97) His insouciance may have been only an ironic defense against the horror of his situation. But Cummings did find something transforming and illuminating in his experience as a prisoner: the realization of what it means to be truly free. His freedom came not from being released, but from discovering the power of human love in comradeship with other innocents like himself who were enduring the injustices of a brutal and corrupt society that had incarcerated them blindly and cruelly.

Cummings shared this realization with others through the book he wrote about his arrest and detention, The Enormous Room. The book was written at the insistence of his father, who was incensed at the treatment his American son had received at the hands of the French. Edward planned to sue the French government but was dissuaded when Cummings agreed to write the book if it were not used in any legal action. He completed the book at Joy Farm during the summer and fall of 1921 and was paid $1,000 by Edward for the work. It was published in 1922 by Liveright, largely as a result of Edward’s efforts.

The book recounts the series of events leading to his detention at La Ferté Macé, describes the dreary routine of the place—sleeping, eating, walking in the courtyard, eating, walking again, sleeping again—and skewers the brutish, inhuman men who rule and police the camp. But the main focus of the book is the other inmates—their histories, their character, their coping mechanisms. Cummings discovers he is living out of time. “Events can no longer succeed each other . . . each happening is self-sufficient.” (Enormous Room, p. 99) In this suspended state, where no meaningful activity is possible, the uniqueness of each individual becomes vivid. The men become archetypes, called not by their given names, but referred to by their distinguishing features or attributes: The Machine-Fixer, The Barber, Judas (a snitch), The Wanderer, The Russian, The Clever Man, The Bear, The Lobster, Zulu, The Magnifying Glass, The Hat.

Cumming calls out four men for special notice. Three of them he calls Delectable Mountains, alluding to places of rest and refreshment in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. Each is an island of spiritual repose for Cummings. The Wanderer was a Gypsy whose wife and children came to the camp to join him. His closeness to his family made love palpable in the camp. “I think The Wanderer, with his wife and children whom he loved as never have I seen a man love anything in this world, was partly happy; walking in the sun when there was any, sleeping with his little boy in a great gulp of softness.” (Enormous Room, p. 181) When it was time for him to be interrogated by the commission, The Wanderer was sentenced to prison and sent away from his family to Précigne. “With him disappeared unspeakable sunlight, and the dark keen bright strength of the earth.” (Enormous Room, p. 185)

Zulu was the second Delectable Mountain. He possessed the supreme Cummings value—“ISness” —the capacity to be. His gift was the ability to communicate entirely by body language through his ISness. A Pole, he had come to France to earn money and been arrested. He brought to the camp the gift of laughter, amusing the inmates with his constant mime.

The third Delectable Mountain, Surplice, was a Fool, disabled by a fall from a scaffolding, the butt of jokes and ridicule, a role he accepted with grace. One day he astonished his comrades with a musical performance on a harmonica. After he played, silence fell on the enormous room. The men begged for more, but Surplice had done. He sat on his mattress and wept. The commission also sent him to prison. What had he done? “I made them dance and they put me in prison.” (Enormous Room, p. 217) Cummings sends him off with an apotheosis: “For he has the territory of harmonicas, the acres of flutes, the meadows of clarinets, the domain of violins. And God says—O you who put the jerk into joys, come up hither. There’s a man up here called Christ who likes the violin.” (Enormous Room, p. 217)

And finally there was Jean Le Négre, a mountain of strength with the mind of a child. He radiated simplicity and joy. He had been arrested for impersonating an English military officer. He had spotted a uniform for sale in a shop window, purchased it, and then decorated it with medals. He promenaded around Paris, returning the deferential salutes of other soldiers, most of whom bowed in respect of the signs of his heroism. He was given to pranks and foolishness that brought joy to the men, and sometimes landed him in solitary confinement. Cummings delighted in his child-mind. “His mind was a child’s. His use of language was sometimes exalted fibbing, sometimes the purely picturesque. He courted above all the sound of words, more or less disdaining their meaning . . . He was never perfectly happy unless exercising his inexhaustible imagination.” (Enormous Room, pp. 229, 227)

For Cummings, Jean embodied the solution to the problem of La Ferté Macé—the problem of society’s repression of the individual. He had achieved transcendence, the ability to be joyous in the midst of misery, to be whole, and wholly independent. He offers Jean a tribute. “—Boy, Kid, Nigger, with the strutting muscles—take me up into your mind once or twice before I die . . . Quickly take me up into the bright child of your mind, before we both go suddenly all loose and silly . . .” (Enormous Room, p. 238)

Cummings arrived in New York at the start of the year 1918 in poor health. He had lost twenty pounds from his slender frame, was suffering from vitamin D deficiency, and his skin was mottled with flea bites. He went to Cambridge to recuperate, and from there aided Brown’s family in securing his friend’s release. He returned to Greenwich Village in February and was joined there in April by Brown. Cummings was again writing and painting, with his father’s support.

He often attended social gatherings at the home of Elaine Thayer. Scofield had separated from her after discovering that he preferred the company of young boys. He was often away in Chicago working at The Dial, a political journal whose editorial board included such heavyweights as Thorstein Veblen and John Dewey. Thayer continued to support Elaine, and when Cummings began to court her, he encouraged their relationship, even to the extent of reimbursing Cummings for expenses he incurred taking her out.

Their romance was interrupted in July when Cummings was conscripted into the Army and stationed at Camp Devens in Massachusetts. He was back in the grip of the war machine that he hated. The staff invited him to train as an officer, but Cummings had no interest in becoming a leader of men. He preferred the company of plain soldiers, as he had in France. It was at Camp Devens that Cummings met the pacifist he called Olaf and wrote the bitter anti-war poem “I sing of Olaf glad and big/whose warmest heart recoiled at war.” Following the armistice in November 1918 Cummings was discharged from the Army. He returned to Greenwich Village, again living with Brown, and resumed his courtship of Elaine. To help support him, Thayer bought his paintings.

According to biographers Richard Kennedy and Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno, Cummings was a shy and reluctant lover, daunted by Elaine’s high social standing and wealth, and conflicted about having sexual intercourse with a woman he was idealizing in his poetry. His virginity had come to an end in Paris after his release from La Ferté Macé, when he had a tryst with a waitress who had served him in a restaurant. But he was no lothario. He wrote yearning poems to Elaine in the manner of a courtly lover, leaving it to her to take the initiative sexually, which she finally did during a night of heavy petting.

In the spring of 1919 Elaine discovered she was pregnant. Scofield and Cummings both urged her to abort, but the medication she took did not work and on December 20, 1919 a girl given the name Nancy was born. Scofield claimed paternity on the birth certificate. Cummings retreated from the situation into his painting and writing. Thus began a deception that would haunt Nancy’s life until she was herself married and a mother, many years later.

During this period, in addition to working on the manuscript of The Enormous Room, Cummings was assembling the collection of poems he was calling Tulips & Chimneys (he had a fondness for the ampersand). The collection included a number of Cummings’s well-known, often anthologized poems—among them “when god lets my body be,”  “in Just-/spring,” “Buffalo Bill’s/defunct,” and “the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls.” The manuscript was making the rounds of publishers and being rejected. But Thayer and Sibley Watson had purchased The Dial and turned it into a literary magazine. They published several of Cummings’s poems. Edward, who believed in his son’s writing, continued to support him. Cummings kept his distance from Nancy and Elaine. Some years later he would write, “I don’t really, want to participate in my own child! Assume responsibility of ménage! be husband with Elaine as my wife!” (Sawyer, p. 162) He feared he could not be both an artist and a family man.

In the spring of 1921, The Enormous Room and Tulips & Chimneys behind him, Cummings left for Europe with his friend John Dos Passos. The travelers landed first in Portugal, which Cummings did not like, then moved on to Paris. Scofield and Elaine were there with Nancy, arranging their divorce, which was finalized on July 28. Dos Passos left for the Middle East, and Cummings spent the next two and a half years touring Italy and France with Nancy and Elaine, who were accompanied by a maid and governess. They stayed in separate hotels. Cummings, then living on the $85 Edward sent him every month, could not afford the luxury accommodations that Elaine chose, and he did not want to think of himself as a kept man. This arrangement also allowed him to maintain the fiction that he was not bound to them in any way, although he was drawn to the child and showed great affection for her.

In the fall of 1923 Elaine returned to New York with Nancy. She wanted Cummings to marry her and wrote to summon him. Tulips & Chimneys had just been published. Edward sent his son $1,000 as a reward. Cummings returned to New York in December and accepted Elaine’s proposal of marriage. The ceremony was conducted by Edward at the Cummings home in Cambridge on March 19, 1924. Five days later Edmund Wilson’s review of Tulips & Chimneys appeared in The New Republic. He wrote, “Cummings’s style is an eternal adolescent, as fresh and often as winning but as half-baked as boyhood.” (Sawyer, p. 230) On April 24, Cummings legally adopted Nancy, but did not assert his paternity or change her name from Thayer. He acknowledged in his diary the limitations of his role as husband and father. “i am nearest happiness—I feel that i possess E [Elaine] and M [Mopsy] i do no work for them, i am free, i assume no responsibilities—yet i have them to love: to praise: to be proud of.” He saw his family members as self-objects. Within three months of their marriage, Elaine asked for a divorce.

Elaine had been made to realize the shallowness of Cummings’s commitment to her by his reaction to the sudden death from pneumonia of her sister Constance two weeks after the marriage. Cummings failed to provide Elaine with emotional support or to assist in arranging the details of the funeral. It became necessary for Elaine to travel to Europe to confer with her other sister Alexis on settling Constance’s estate. She took Nancy and her entourage with her, leaving Cummings to continue his bachelor ways in Greenwich Village. On board the ship, Elaine met and fell in love with Frank MacDermot, an Irishman who worked for a bank in New York. She wrote Cummings from Europe asking for a divorce, reproving him for wanting to “be like a child,” (Sawyer, p. 244), and reminding him that they had hedged their marriage vows by agreeing to uncontested divorce.

Cummings, thrown into crisis, was at a loss how to recover Elaine. He pleaded, he wept, he threatened suicide, he contemplated murdering MacDermot, but he did nothing to reinstate himself with Elaine. His behavior only deepened her resolve. They were divorced in Paris in December, two weeks before Nancy’s fifth birthday. In a child’s voice, he wrote his daughter a letter she never received:

goodbye dear & next time when I feel a little better we’ll ride on the donkeys & next time on the pigs maybe or you will bicycle & 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 & I

& next time

I’ll ride with you in heaven with all the angels & with the stars & a new moon all gold between me & you & we’ll ride together goodbye dear you and i both of us having yellow hair quietly will always be just touching each other’s hands ride (Sawyer, p. 266)

But it would be a year before there was a “next time,” and longer intervals after that. Cummings had failed to make provisions in the divorce agreement for visitation and custody rights. When Edward learned that he might never see his grandchild he engaged a lawyer in Paris to modify the agreement. Although Cummings was granted unlimited visitation rights and three months custody, Elaine and MacDermot prevented him from seeing his daughter. MacDermot moved the family to Ireland when Nancy was seven. She was never informed that Cummings was her father, or that he had been married to her mother. MacDermot, a Catholic, did not want Elaine’s reputation stained by the revelation that she had borne an illegitimate child while married to Thayer. Cummings did not see Nancy again until she was an adult.

On the rebound from his humiliating break-up with Elaine, Cummings fell into the arms of Anne Barton, a divorced fashion model twenty-six years old with a four-year-old daughter named Diana. Anne was a troubled woman who had been sexually abused by her policeman father. She drank heavily, was sexually free, and kept company with a wealthy older man named Douglas who showered her with gifts. She liberated Cummings sexually but also tormented him with her promiscuity.

At the end of 1925 The Dial awarded Cummings $2,000 “for distinguished service to American letters.” Two collections of his verse—& and XLI Poems—had been issued in 1925. These volumes brought to the reading public memorable poems such as “Spring is like a perhaps hand,” “gee i like to think of dead,” “I will wade out/till my thighs are steeped in burning flowers,” and “Humanity i love you.” With the funds from the award, Cummings took Anne and Diana to Europe, where they spent three months, mostly in Paris. While there, Cummings began work on a play he called Him. The other major character, a woman, was named Me. The play—dedicated to Anne— was long, verbose, surrealistic, and often unintelligible. Though he tried to dismiss it as merely sensible nonsense that borrowed elements from the circus and burlesque, the very incoherence of the play exposed the psychic torments that Cummings was undergoing in his relationships with women. The play was subsequently staged in 1928 at the Provincetown Playhouse in Greenwich Village, where it ran for twenty-seven performances to full houses. But critics were baffled by it, and it was never produced again.

On their return from Europe, Anne resumed her affair with Douglas. To offset this, Cummings initiated a romance with the socialite Emily Vanderbilt, hoping to make Anne jealous. Rebecca, in an attempt to salvage the relationship, paid for psychiatric treatment for Anne. The doctor offered a pessimistic assessment. Her incestuous relationship with her father had doomed her to promiscuity. Cummings also submitted to analysis, from which he learned, “I have never grown up/assumed the responsibilities of a man/I prefer to have a mistress because it won’t hurt me so much/When I lose her (as a wife)/self-pity=comfort.” (Sawyer, p. 322)

Despite these warning signs, Cummings decided to marry Anne to demonstrate that he could behave responsibly. The wedding took place on May 1, 1929. Dos Passos was best man; Rebecca and Cummings’s sister Elizabeth witnessed. Cummings and Anne were drunk at the ceremony, which took place in New York at the Unitarian Church of All Souls.  The couple honeymooned in Europe, taking Diana with them, but the child became a source of quarrels between them. They returned to the US and spent the summer at Joy Farm. Rebecca, in another attempt to shore up their relationship, deeded the property to them in joint tenancy. Anne now owned half of Joy Farm.

In November 1930 they again went to Europe. Diana was placed in a convent in Switzerland while Anne and Cummings visited Paris, Lausanne, Munich, Vienna, Budapest, Prague, and Berlin. Cummings decided to visit Russia alone to observe first-hand the experiment in communism. During his absence, Anne discovered she was pregnant. They agreed to abort the pregnancy, and Anne returned to New York in company with Douglas, who helped her obtain the abortion.

Cummings’s experience in Russia was a turning point for him politically. Though he had never been politically active, or dealt with politics in his writing, his sympathies lay with the many leftists he counted as friends, men like Dos Passos, Max Eastman, and Edmund Wilson. What he found in Russia—grey, humorless lives surrounded by squalor—reinforced his exaltation of individuality and his utter scorn for political solutions to the central problems of life. He became a conservative who loathed Franklin Roosevelt and sympathized with Joseph McCarthy. The book he wrote about his travels in Russia, called Eimi (“I Am” in Ancient Greek), presents Russia as “this gruesome apotheosis of mediocrity in the name of perfectibility, this implacable salvation of all through the assassination of each, this reasoned enormity of spiritual suicide.” (Six Nonlectures, p. 103) It was published in 1933.

When Cummings rejoined Anne in New York, bringing Diana with him, their relationship deteriorated. They carried on a four-way affair with another couple. She tormented him with infidelities and ridiculed his sexual prowess in front of their friends. After she formed a relationship with a well-to-do surgeon and became pregnant with his child, she divorced Cummings in Mexico and demanded payment for her half of Joy Farm, a request that Cummings denied. Anne married the surgeon in October 1932 and in April 1933 deeded her share of Joy Farm back to him.

In the same month (June 1932) that Anne Barton divorced him in Mexico, Cummings attended a play in New York with his friends Patti and Jimmy Light. Jimmy had directed Him when it was performed at the Provincetown Playhouse, and Cummings had had a brief affair with Patti during his marriage to Anne. After the performance, the Lights introduced Cummings to Marion Morehouse, a beautiful model and actress trying to break into show business.

Marion was twenty-six, tall and dark-haired with fair skin and flawless features. She had been born in South Bend, Indiana, raised as a Roman Catholic, and had left home without finishing high school to pursue an acting career in New York. She found work as a model, posing for Edward Steichen. At the time she met Cummings, she was living in a house on Long Island with several other theater people.

Cummings courted her fervently, and in August she moved to an apartment in Greenwich Village near 4 Patchin Place, the little artists’ colony where Cummings had been living since 1924. They became a couple, and remained together for the rest of Cummings’s life, though they never formally married. Marion brought beauty, love, and steadiness into the poet’s life, enabling him to experience with her the love and joy he celebrated in his poetry. They never had children, and over time, Cummings became Marion’s child, a reality he acknowledged in his journal. “When you refused to let her have a child (unless she ‘do her share’ in supporting it), you sealed your own doom: making yourself her child, her baby—and herself your all-protecting mother.” (Cheever, p. 204)

The patterns of Cummings life had now been set. He spent winters in New York at Patchin Place, summers at Joy Farm in New Hampshire. Whenever his finances allowed, he traveled to Europe, often for extended periods of time. He favored Paris and Italy, but also went to England and Greece. He published collections of his poetry at frequent intervals and exhibited his paintings. His art did not support him, and he remained financially dependent on his mother, who gave him a monthly allowance of $150, and on the generosity of friends like Thayer and Watson.

In April 1933 Cummings was awarded a $1500 Guggenheim Fellowship. The award stipulated that Cummings serve the Fellowship in Europe. Cummings took Marion with him to Paris, where they sublet an apartment from the American poet Walter Lowenfels. While there, they dined with the MacDermots, and Cummings’s troubled history with Elaine surfaced again. Frank MacDermot wanted to run for political office in Ireland but could not because his wife was a divorcee. Elaine wanted Cummings to agree to an annulment of their marriage, on the grounds that their vows had been invalid because of their prenuptial agreement to uncontested divorce. If Cummings would acknowledge this fact to a Catholic priest, the annulment would be granted by the church. As bait, the MacDermots offered to let Cummings visit his daughter. Cummings agreed to this arrangement, but was unable to visit Nancy, who was away in boarding school.

In Paris, Marion found work modeling for Paris Vogue. She was photographed by Baron George Hoyingen-Huene, who considered her the most beautiful woman in Europe. Cummings also found work in Paris. He was contracted by Lincoln Kirstein to write a ballet for George Balanchine based on Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a project suggested by Marion. Cummings wrote the ballet, but Balanchine rejected it, and it was never performed, though Cummings had it published. The Baron invited Cummings and Marion to stay at his villa in Tunisia. They returned to Paris via Rome and Venice, and in December they were back in New York.

In 1935 Cummings sought publication of a new collection of poems, his first since 1931. His books were not selling. Eimi, his account of travels in Russia, had come out in 1933 and was met with hostility by critics and even some of Cummings’s friends, who were unhappy with his depiction of the Soviets. His new manuscript was turned down by fourteen New York publishers. Rebecca paid the cost of having it privately printed. Cummings dedicated the volume, which he titled No Thanks, to the fourteen publishers, whose names were printed on the page in the shape of a funeral urn.

In May Cummings and Marion went to Hollywood seeking work in the movie industry. Eric Knight, a friend writing screenplays at Fox Studios, encouraged their visit. They traveled by car with another couple, had a falling out in Mexico City, and ran out of money. Cummings wired Rebecca for funds with their last five dollars, which he found in a trousers’ pocket. They flew to Los Angeles and rented a small apartment in Santa Monica. With no prospect of employment for either of them at a studio, they returned to New York after two months, again using funds sent by Rebecca. They hunkered down at Joy Farm. Cummings’s snobbish attitude towards the Hollywood community, and his poorly disguised anti-Semitism, undoubtedly did not win him friends in the movie business.

In 1937 a young editor at Harcourt, Brace, one of the fourteen, persuaded the publishers to issue Cummings’s Collected Poems. The volume held three hundred fifteen poems, including twenty-two new ones. Cummings wrote a rather off-putting Introduction that made clear his sense of isolation from others, his loneliness. It begins, “The poems to come are for you and for me and are not for mostpeople—it’s no use trying to pretend that mostpeople and ourselves are alike . . . You and I are human beings; mostpeople are snobs.” The statement exposes the stark divisions of reality that formed the basis of Cummings’s personal aesthetic and philosophy of life. It is the worldview of an alienated child who has retreated into himself.

With the advance from Harcourt, Brace, Cummings took Marion to England. There, in an expression of the strain she was under as Cummings’s companion, Marion briefly took a lover. She confessed her infidelity to Cummings, who forgave her, but after their return to New York she had a longer affair with a British film director that rattled Cummings. At his request, she terminated the affair, but her show of independence weakened Cummings’s position in their relationship, making him even more a supplicant for her love.

While in London, Cummings and Marion had tea with the MacDermots, but again he was unable to see Nancy, who was staying with a friend in Vienna. Nancy was seventeen, and she did not know who her father was.

During the war years, Cummings and Marion suffered health breakdowns. Cummings was afflicted with sciatica and acute osteoarthritis that kept him in continuous pain. He wore a corset and took pain-killing drugs. In 1945, Marion was hospitalized for nine months with rheumatoid arthritis. Sibley Watson paid both their medical bills, with help from Cummings’s Aunt Jane. Cummings, opposed to US entry into World War II, retreated from it to Joy Farm. His response was the morality play Santa Claus, a title that conjures the world of children and the magic of Christmas.

The play was dedicated to Cummings’s therapist, Fritz Willels. In five short scenes, Cummings presents a fable about the relationship among understanding, knowledge, love, and death. The characters are Santa Claus, Death, a mob (mostpeople), a little girl, and a bereft woman. Santa Claus encounters Death and complains that no one wants what he has to give, which is understanding. (The parallels to Cummings’s verse and the reading public are obvious.) Death advises Santa Claus that people do not want understanding, they want knowledge, the knowledge that science provides. Science=death. Death persuades Santa Claus to change places with him, in order to offer people knowledge instead of understanding. He won’t even have to give it; he can sell it. Death tells Santa Claus that in the name of science he can sell people something that doesn’t exist—shares in a wheelmine. “The less something exists, the more people want it,” Death tells Santa Claus. Death and Santa Claus exchange masks, and in the guise of Death Santa Claus sells wheelmine shares to the greedy mob.

An accident at the non-existent wheelmine stirs the mob into a frenzy, and it pursues Santa Claus, still masked as Death. His innocence is confirmed when a little girl sees through his mask and recognizes him as Santa Claus, a being that the mob knows does not exist. Santa Claus is spared the fury of the mob.

Death then exchanges physical appearance with Santa Claus in order to pursue a woman. He admits to Santa Claus that he has never loved a woman—it’s a “mistake” he has avoided. The little girls returns and recognizes Santa Claus even though he now looks like Death. “I like you any way—if you’re you,” she tells him. Authentic individuality is all that matters to the child. The child is looking for a woman— “very beautiful and very sad.” The missing woman enters, weeping because “knowledge has taken love out of the world and all the world is empty, empty, empty.”  Santa Claus, still in the appearance of Death, comforts her. She recognizes his voice as the voice of “him I loved more than my life.”

The mob returns with the corpse of Death, who is still disguised as Santa Claus. The little girl says, “That isn’t Santa Claus,” whereupon the mob exits with the corpse, laughing because it knows that there is no Santa Claus. Santa Claus removes his disguise as Death, and he and the child and the woman become “ours” —rather like the holy family that Christians celebrate at Christmas.

The play is full of resonances from Cummings’s personal life and stands as his attempt to resolve in art the issues that he was unable to resolve in life: the childless Marion as the bereft woman, the little girl as the fatherless Nancy, Death as the reality principle that Cummings fought against.

Nancy had come to New York in 1941 to escape the war in Europe. She took a job as a typist. Cummings learned of her presence from John Dos Passos, who had bumped into her, but he made no effort to contact her after Marion and his therapist advised against it, out of concern that his work would suffer if she re-entered his life. Nancy married Joseph Willard Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt’s grandson, in February 1943. Cummings learned of the marriage when Marion read the announcement in The New York Times. The couple lived in Norfolk, Virginia, where Willard served in the Navy. On September 6, 1945, Cummings became a grandfather when Nancy delivered a boy who was named Simon.

In the summer of 1946 Nancy, Willard, and Simon were staying with friends who lived near Silver Lake, and when Cummings learned they were nearby, he invited them to tea at Joy Farm. Nancy was strangely stirred by Cummings’s voice, which must have sounded like an echo from her childhood. Though Cummings avoided being alone with Nancy for more than a few minutes, contact between them had finally been re-established. They stayed in touch, and in the fall of 1948 Nancy, now living with her husband and two children on Long Island, came to visit Cummings at Patchin Place.

Cummings asked Nancy to sit for a portrait, a way of becoming intimate with her through his art. During the sittings, Nancy became charmed by Cummings’s conversation and manner with her. Her marriage cracking, Nancy found herself falling in love with the painter. She resolved not to return to Patchin Place once the portrait was finished. On her last visit Cummings revealed that he was her father. She told no one what she had learned.

Marion became jealous of the burgeoning relationship between Cummings and Nancy and threw obstacles in their way. Nancy communicated with her father through the mail, sending him letters and poems. But Cummings remained reluctant to take on the role of parent. While she visited him at Joy Farm in the summer of 1950, he told Nancy that her children were to call him Estlin, not grandpa. But after she left, he was melancholy, and wrote in his journal, “it seems to me that she is real, & that my life here (with M) isn’t. What are all my salutings of Chocorua [a local mountain] & worshippings of birds & smellings of flowers & fillings of hummingbirdcups etc etc? They’re sorry substitutes for human intercourse generally & particularly for spiritual give-&-take with a child-woman whom I adore—someone vital & young—& gay.” (Sawyer, p. 474) Cummings looked back into his life from the realm of his art and felt regret.

Nancy came to visit again the following summer, and on this occasion Marion found a pretext to ask her to leave. Nancy had read an unfinished poem that was lying on Cummings’s desk, and when she asked him about it, he became upset. She had trespassed on his art. Two years later, divorced, she moved to Austria with her children. Cummings next saw her in June 1953 when she returned to Joy Farm, bringing her two children and her fiancé, Kevin Andrews.

In the 1950s, Cummings finally achieved financial independence as honors and recognition were showered on him. As late as 1950, at age 56, Cummings was still dependent on family and friends for income. Rebecca had died in 1947, leaving Aunt Jane as his principal benefactress. But in 1950 he received $500 as the Harriet Monroe Poetry Prize from Poetry magazine. Then the Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets awarded him $5,000. Since the Collected Poems had come out, he had published 1 X 1 [One Times One] in 1944 and XAIPE in 1950. In February 1951 Aunt Jane died, leaving him $17, 423. He and Marion traveled to Europe, and after their return he was offered the Charles Eliot Norton Professorship at Harvard for the academic year 1952-1953. The position required him to deliver six hour-long lectures, for which he would be paid $15,000. He and Marion moved to Cambridge for the year, and Cummings delivered his Six Nonlectures to turn-away crowds at Sanders Theater.

After giving a reading at the YM-YWHA Poetry Center in New York, he was approached by Betty Kray, a literary agent who began to book him on tours of colleges and universities. Cummings was a skilled reader who performed his poems with drama and emotion. Audiences loved him. He became a celebrity on the university circuit, able to charge up to $700 for a reading. But the demands of travel and preparation took their toll on him. Sitting on planes aggravated his back, and performance anxiety kept him awake at night. He was taking pain medication for his back, and a tranquilizer for the anxiety. He eventually buckled under the stress, canceling a 1958 appearance at UCLA to deliver two Ewing Lectures for $2500. That year, he was awarded the Bollingen Prize ($1,000), one of the most prestigious honors bestowed on poets. And in 1959, the Ford Foundation granted him $15,000. Cummings had become a national institution.

In 1960, Cummings paid one final visit to Nancy. She was then living in Athens, married to Kevin Andrews, and raising an additional two children. Cummings and Marion came to Greece, but the visit was awkward. They had difficulty making contact, and when they finally did, Marion was rude to Kevin. She wanted Cummings all to herself. Back in the US, Cummings remained an isolated man. He turned down an invitation to attend a dinner for artists at the Kennedy White House, signaling his contempt for the world of politics. Or perhaps he was simply uncomfortable in company with other artists. He once told Henry Miller, whom he met in Paris during the 1930s, that he did not read the work of other writers.

On September 2, 1962, while at Joy Farm, Cummings collapsed from a cerebral hemorrhage after returning to the house from chopping wood. He died at hospital the next day. A small private funeral was held in Boston. Marion died in 1969 from throat cancer.   

We remember E. E. Cummings for the uniqueness of his poetic voice. His style sets him apart from all other poets, a distinction he avidly sought. No one, certainly no modern writing in English, took such liberties with the conventions of the language. His style suited his subjects. He was drawn to the world of the child, a world where the irrational reigns, because the child embodies what Cummings called “ISness” —a state of continuous becoming that is aligned with the always-changing processes of nature. He resisted the fall into adulthood, which brought the threat of stasis, of unliving and unloving, that he saw as the fate of “mostpeople.”

These choices left him in the realm of dualisms, and prevented him from achieving the “higher innocence” of a mystic like William Blake, who also cherished the world of the child, but insisted that continuous growth required a passage through experience in order to reach the more exalted state of awareness in which all our human faculties—sensation, emotion, intuition, and reason—are integrated, making us whole (and holy). Cummings was afraid of “the goat-footed balloonMan,” and did not make the passage. But few of us do.

Samples of Cummings’s visual art can be seen here. 

Further Reading

Cheever, Susan. e.e.cummings: a life. New York, Pantheon Books, 2014.

Cummings, E. E. 95 Poems. New York, London: Liveright, 1958.

——————–. The Enormous Room. New York: Liveright, 1922.

——————–. Three Plays and A Ballet. New York, October House, 1967

Kennedy, Richard S. Dreams in the Mirror. A Biography of E.E. Cummings. New York, Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1980

Chapter Five

Arthur Hoyle (www.arthurhoyle.com) is the author of The Unknown Henry Miller: A Seeker in Big Sur and Mavericks, Mystics, and Misfits: Americans Against the Grain. He reviews biography for the New York Journal of Books. His Substack newsletter Off the Cuff offers periodic commentary on the American cultural scene. Subscribe at https://arthurhoyle.substack.com.