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The Rebellion of E.E. Cummings the Poet’S Artful Reaction Against His Father—And His Alma Mater by Adam Kirsch

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The Rebellion of E.E. Cummings the Poet’S Artful Reaction Against His Father—And His Alma Mater by Adam Kirsch Cummings-final 2/8/05 5:59 PM Page 48 the rebellion of e.e. cummings the poet’s artful reaction against his father—and his alma mater by adam kirsch 48 March - April 2005 Cummings-final 2/8/05 5:59 PM Page 49 iterary critics have found any number of With the rebellious enthusiasm of a true poetic “son,” he ele- ways to divide writers into opposing teams. Isa- vated it to a moral and even a cosmic principle: his poems are iah Berlin distinguished between “hedgehogs,” constantly exhorting us to be original, independent, self-reliant. who know one big thing—Tolstoy, Dante—and And he is scornful of everyone who takes refuge in received ideas “foxes,” who know many di≠erent things—Dos- and conventional standards—all the cumbersome traditions that toevsky, Shakespeare. Philip Rahv taught a gen- parents pass on to their children. This is the constantly repeated Leration of readers to look at American literature as a combat be- message of his poetry: tween aesthetic “palefaces“ like Henry James and vigorous “redskins” like Walt Whitman. But when it comes to the poetry i mean that the blond absence of any program of the twentieth century, perhaps the most useful distinction is except last and always and first to live the one between parents and children. Some poets present them- makes unimportant what i and you believe; selves as fathers or mothers—thoughtful, serious, eager to claim not for philosophy does this rose give a damn... authority and accept responsibility. Others are determined to re- main sons or daughters—playful, provocative, in love with “So far as I am concerned,” Cummings once declared, “poetry games and experiments, and defiant of convention in language as and every other art was and is and forever will be strictly and in life. distinctly a question of individuality....Nobody else can be alive The most notorious and beloved child in modern American for you; nor can you be alive for anybody else.” poetry is E.E. Cummings. Even readers who seldom read poetry Yet this declaration of independence was issued, paradoxi- recognize the distinctive shape that a Cummings poem makes on cally, in the most grandly institutional of settings: from the stage the page: the blizzard of punctuation, the words running to- of Sanders Theatre, in one of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures gether or suddenly breaking part, the type spilling like a liquid that Cummings delivered in 1952 and 1953. To compound the from one line to the next: irony, this was the very same stage from which Cummings gave a Commencement address at his Harvard graduation in 1915—an one address that praised “The New Art” in terms calculated to scan- dalize an audience of proper Bostonians. Throughout his life, t Harvard was an inescapable presence in Cummings’s moral uni- hi verse: a place where conventions were imposed and where they s could be fought against, a place endowed by the fathers but pop- ulated by the sons. To understand Cummings’s achievement, and snowflake the limits of that achievement, Harvard is the best place to start. The full scope of the University’s role in Cummings’s life can (a be fully appreciated only now, thanks to a new biography of the li poet by Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno. E.E. Cummings: A Biography ght is a definitive account of the poet’s turbulent life, a 600-page saga in that includes some of the most colorful personalities of the Mod- g) ernist period: Hart Crane and Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore and John Dos Passos. Cummings, born in 1894, was part of the gener- is upon a gra ation that returned from World War I ready to demolish Victo- rian illusions and experiment with all kinds of liberation, sexual v and social as well as literary. As he told his Sanders Theatre audi- es ence in the 1950s, he belonged to “what some wit once nick- t named a ‘lost generation,’” whose defining characteristic was a joyful, almost nihilistic embrace of risk. “I don’t think we enjoyed one courting disaster,” Cummings recalled; “I do feel we liked being born.” Cummings was not the first poet to use a typewriter, but as Cummings may have resisted the journalistic label of the “lost this poem shows, he was the first to take advantage of its power generation,” but his life helped to define its now-mythic itiner- to control the exact spacing and shape of every line, and thus to ary. He was thoroughly disa≠ected by his wartime experiences, make a poem’s visual appearance as important as its musical which he described in his autobiographical novel, The Enormous rhythms. What looks like a thin trickle of letters becomes, to a Room. He was glad to escape the regimentation of army life for reader who has learned Cummings’s tricks, a picture in print: the the artists’ playground of Greenwich Village, where he threw snowflake “alighting” in a twirl, the severe vertical of the “grave- himself into writing, painting, and sexual adventure. (Cum- stone.” This playful tinkering with language is the most obvious mings would run through two marriages and many love a≠airs and appealing sign of Cummings’s originality; as he once wrote, before settling down with the former model Marion Morehouse, it is “such minutiae as commas and small i’s,in which...my First- his companion for the last 30 years of his life.) Like so many of ness thrives.” his fellow Modernists—Edmund Wilson, Ernest Hemingway, But “Firstness” was not just a quality of Cummings’s style. F. Scott Fitzgerald—he made the pilgrimage to Paris in the Opposite page: Undated painting of Cummings as a child by 1920s, finding it a liberation and a revelation: “an actual mar- Charles Sydney Hopkinson riage of material with immaterial things…an immediate recon- Portrait gift of Marion M. Cummings, 1965. Houghton Library, *65M-72, Harvard Magazine 49 Harvard College Library, ©President and Fellows of Harvard College Cummings-final 2/9/05 11:43 AM Page 50 ciling of spirit and flesh, forever and now, heaven and earth.” neighbour, dwelling (at a decent distance) behind us, was For the rest of his life, Cummings would reside in Greenwich Roland Thaxter, primarily the father of my loveliest playmate Village—his apartment at 4 Patchin Place became one of the and ultimately the professor of cryptogamic botany. To our right, most famous literary addresses in America—and make regular on Irving Street, occurred professors James and Royce and War- visits to Paris. And as time passed, his odd-looking poetry, ren; to our left, on Scott Street, transpired professor of econom- which first appeared in little magazines and ephemeral editions, ics Taussig.” won an ever-larger readership. It turned out that Cummings’s And Estlin, as he was known rebellion against social and sexual convention, far from being a all his life, was the son of Ed- lonely fight, brought him exactly in sync with the national ward Cummings, a member of mood. His rejection of sexual puritanism, his insistence on the the University’s fledgling de- freedom of the individual to think and explore and create, res- Counterclockwise from below, onated perfectly with the increasing permissiveness of Ameri- left: Cummings in a hammock with can culture. One might say that Cummings was just a few years his father and sister, Elizabeth; his 1915 Harvard graduation ahead of his generation, attacking old values and institutions photograph; Private Cummings at that were on the verge of surrender. By the time he died, in 1962, Fort Devens, Massachusetts, 1918. he had become perhaps the most beloved and widely read of partment of sociol- American Modernist poets. His popularity, like that of his con- ogy. Genealogy, even temporary Edna St. Vincent Millay, owed a great deal to his more than geogra- ability to capture the Bohemian mystique of the Village and the phy, put Harvard at Left Bank, where literary and sexual experimentation seemed to the center of the go hand in hand: young poet’s mental and emotional life. i like my body when it is with your As he grew up, his body. It is so quite new a thing. feelings about the Muscles better and nerves more. world of Harvard i like your body. i like what it does, and Cambridge were i like its hows.... always informed by his strong, conflict- The readers who delighted in such poems might have been ing responses to his surprised to learn that, in fact, Edward Estlin Cummings came father, and vice ver- from the most respectable quarter of Cambridge, Massachusetts. sa. And it is no exaggeration to say that having a father like Ed- His childhood home was at 104 Irving Street, just a few blocks ward Cummings—physically strong and spiritually intrepid, a from where the Science Center now stands. He grew up sur- dominant presence in his home and his city—helped to make rounded by Harvard, and his first playmates were professors’ E.E. Cummings one of the eternally rebellious “sons” of modern children. As he recalled in his Norton lectures: “Our nearest American poetry. 50 March - April 2005 All photographs and sketches courtesy of the Houghton Library, Manuscripts Department. Harvard College Library, ©President and Fellows of Harvard College. Cummings-final 2/8/05 5:59 PM Page 51 Cummings’s rebellion against social and sexual convention, far from being a lonely fight, brought him exactly in sync with the national mood. While Edward Cummings’s family had been in Massachusetts Edward Cummings’s decision to join divinity with sociology since the 1630s, he was hardly a Boston Brahmin.
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