The United States and Spain: Two Cultures Easily Mixed in E. E. Cummings’ Works María Teresa González Mínguez I.E.S. Manuel E. Patarroyo (Parla, Madrid)

Abstract

E. E. Cummings was a true-blue New Englander who spent his life surrounded by the multicultural sounds and sights of New York. He was at ease when he mixed with the different peoples and races who populated it, to later reflect everything in his works. Although Cummings is said to reject everything west of the Appalachians, he really enjoyed discovering new countries and their inhabitants so as to enrich himself and transmit his knowledge to the audience. Cummings had his first contact with the Spanish culture at Harvard University and visited Spain in 1921. The writer was so fascinated with the country that memories of it pervaded his mind forever. The aim of this paper is twofold: first, to demonstrate how Cummings used his appreciation of the Spaniards to confirm how the experience and mentality of an ancient European country can mix with the naivety and modernity of the New World in order to create rich works of art and second, to prove that he really initiated his process of self-construction leaving America temporarily behind and using the European civilization as one more strategy to find himself.

E. E. Cummings was a true-blue New Englander who spent his life surrounded by the multicultural sounds and sights of New York. He was at ease when he mixed with the different peoples and races who populated it to later reflect their speech and ways of living in his works. Although Cummings is said to reject everything west of the Appalachians, he really enjoyed discovering new countries and their inhabitants so as to enrich himself and transmit his knowledge to the audience. Cummings had his first contact with Spanish culture at Harvard University. In his sophomore year, he enrolled on a course called The Art and Culture of Spain. Its aim was to teach the character of the Spaniards through their art and literature. Here Cummings learnt about painting, sculpture, art history and the works of Spanish artists. His college friend John Dos Passos, who like Cummings gave much importance to the study of language, had recommended this course to him, and their life long friendship was mainly defined by their admiration of the Spanish culture. In fact, Dos Passos was Cummings’ travel companion when he first went to Spain and Portugal in April 1921. Cummings and Dos Passos embarked for Lisbon in March, 1921. Out of the two and a half years Cummings was to remain in Europe, a month was spent touring Spain. After visiting the Azores Islands, Coimbra, and Port and filling his notebooks with innumerable sketches of churches, oxcarts, windmills, ships, uniformed soldiers, dancing gypsies, and cafés with meditative drinkers in wide black hats, the two young men headed inland to Salamanca. After admiring its numerous monuments, they determined to hitchhike to Extremadura. In a letter sent to his mother from Seville on April 22nd 1921, he says he has seen Plasencia and describes it as “a tiny one, full of storks, where there was a procession on Sunday morning with candles.” Later in Cáceres, he remembers when his friend and himself climbed a hill and saw the Roman ruins while quietly waiting for the train for nearly half an hour(Selected Letters 74-75). Unfortunately, the trip through Extremadura was disrupted when Cummings developed a toothache which got worse as they travelled south on that train to Seville. In Seville a Spanish dentist lanced Cummings’ abcess and saved his trip. John Dos Passos acted as an interpreter between him and the doctor quite successfully. Settled in the city, Cummings wrote, “ [...] Seville is the finest–never have I seen so many,so intricate,and so delicate streets” (Selected Letters 75). They stayed at

Pensión Don Marcos, at 6 Abades Street, behind the cathedral and other religious monuments in the very city centre. The two Americans visited the famous Arab Alcázar with marvellous gardens and the neighbouring Barrio de Santa Cruz, where most of the events took place. It was the time for “Feria de Abril” —the annual springtime fair full of music and colour, where people from many countries enjoyed the products of the region. For Cummings the feria was seen through a double perspective. On the one hand, people’s joy and their freedom when dancing, eating and drinking in the streets day and night and on the other, toros. They saw two bullfights at La Maestranza, and according to the description in the letter to his mother mentioned before, he seemed to understand the process of bullfighting very accurately. Using a concise and objective style, Cummings’ aim, as Antonio Ruiz points out, was to transmit a similar sensation to the one felt by himself (1998: 127). One of the fights took place on April 20th. Juan Belmonte –the best bullfighter at that moment– was expected to participate in the event, but he was injured the day that Dos Passos and Cummings arrived in Seville. On the report of the ABC’s April 21st morning edition, brave Belmonte’s condition was improving, but he was not well enough to be exposed to such a danger, and he had to be substituted by Rafael el Gallo and Chicuelo, also mentioned with admiration in the letter to Mrs. Rebecca Cummings. Cummings erroneously says Rafael Yallo, possibly because of the difficulties in transcribing the Spanish pronunciation. For the writer, a bullfight is not a cruel killing, as courage and continence can transform it into a ritual. It can be even compared to the circus performances that he loved. In fact, this was not the last bullfight that Cummings would see. In 1935, when he and his third wife, Marion Morehouse, spent a Mexican holiday on his way to California, he took her to her first bullfight and filled sheets with sketches of picadors, horses, bulls and bullfighters. In Seville, the poet was also shocked by the outdoor entertainment of the merry-go-round –where Dos Passos and himself took a ride and nearly got sick–, the amazing gypsy dresses worn by Andalusian girls, their colours, the sound of castanets, private clubs, and, above all, the laughter of thousands of people. Then the friends headed north contemplating castles on hilltops in the wide Castillian plains, finally arriving in Toledo. They found this city the most fascinating one in Spain. Its Alcázar, mosques, Roman ruins, Jewish quarter and synogagues marvelled the travellers and Cummings sketched the old Gothic cathedral (Selected Letters 74-75). By May 1st they were in Madrid, but they did not find interesting things there— not even the Prado Museum, which had too much eighteenth-century work and too many Rubens for Cummings’ taste. But many years later he still remembered Madrid. In April 1938, in a response to a letter from Erza Pound and to the latter’s question whether he had seen Mahler, Cummings said that he had bought a book about the composer somewhere in this city (Pound/Cummings 130). When they finished their visit to the nation’s capital, they turned northeast, stopping at the breath-taking Segovia Alcázar. When they saw the Roman aqueduct in the centre, they departed through the cathedral city of Burgos up to the Basque Country. Here Cummings fell in love with the unspoiled rural territory in the French border. He sketched its people with their oxen and goats, wearing their typical berets. In 1923 in a letter to his friend William Slater Brown from the Café de Madrid in Guéthary, he described them as “a thick(if not sturdy)race with black hair,boinas [sketch of cap],or whatever are called, and a kat-like curiosity to put it mildly.” Fascinated by their peculiar language he added that they spoke “a tongue or patois approximating Esquimaux […] ” (Selected Letters 96). Later they crossed the French border and went to St. Jean de Luz. Cummings did not come back to Spain until 1956, this time to show Marion Morehouse this part of Europe. By then, Cummings’ and Marion’s health was rather precarious but they

were still so fond of travelling. Initially it was going to be a twelve-week tour, but they returned home after five weeks. “Spain was icy” (Kennedy 1980: 472), was their comment after feeling the contrasting temperatures of continental climates. Cummings took delight in using words from different tongues. Spanish was not an exception. He could not speak Spanish in the same way that he could do with French, but he was curious about its words and phrases. In a letter sent to his sister from Paris in 1923, he wrote: “Yes we have no bananas no I am learning Spanish” (Selected Letters 102). His correspondence contains quite a lot of Spanish terms that he assimilated as his own, making the other addressees share them as something natural and amazing at the same time that he woke up their interest for new meanings and significance. In the letter to his sister quoted before, he even makes couplets mixing English and Spanish. His drinking tastes, some trade marks and his dislike of the sea, sound funny in this sentence: “I prefer fine calvados,detest “mar”,distrust Anis del oso, and drink beer also.” He even dares start the letter with “¿A cuántos estamos?” A sentence significant enough for Elizabeth Cummings to feel that her brother did not have a clear conscience of how fast time went by in the French capital. Perhaps the biggest concentration of Spanish vocabulary appears in the letter to his mother from Seville.1 Here he mentions the feria, the food they ate –cerveza (beer) and buñuelos (hollow fritters)– and the description of a bullfight –matador or espada (the head bullfighter who kills the bull), quadrillas (the group of secondary bullfighters who help him), banderilleros (those secondary bullfighters who distract the bull and stick barbed darts into its neck), the padded picador (a man on a horse holding a sort of spear who points and yells at the bull in order to weaken it). Then he alludes to the national currency saying pesatas. Finally mantillas (ornamented veil, mainly white, black or beige, worn by ladies not only in Andalucia but also in the rest of Spain, especially at weddings) illustrate what to wear on special occasions. Other Spanish words and phrases appear in various letters and some of his poems. “Hooray for The Salamander!” is the translation for “¡Evviva El Salamandro!!.” Although not well spelt, —¡Viva el Salamandro!! would be correct— he demonstrates an interest for the language, when he transmits this cryptic phrase to Mr and Mrs John Peale Bishop from Paris in 1922 (Selected Letters 92). In 1923 he wrote a more serious missive to his father in which he discussed topics like religion. He did not write a single word in Spanish but trying to establish a difference between the Midi Inquisition and the Spanish one, he confirmed that he knew about the history of Spain in the sixteenth century (Selected Letters 103). In June 1935 in a letter to his aunt Jane from Mexico D. F., he writes “antes de ayer,” “nada,” and, “a cambio,” and explains to her the meaning of the words Selected Letters 142). Back in the United States, temporarily established in sunny California –a Spanish-speaking state–, Marion and himself write to Ezra Pound and wish him “salud” instead of “all the best” (Pound/Cummings 78). From his New York home at 4 Patchin Place, he ironically refers to T. S. Eliot as “that hombre,” (that man), in one of the numerous missives to his friend, the British zoologist Sir Zolly Zuckerman (Selected Letters 178). Hombre also appears in “from the cognoscenti,” an elaborated phonetic poem in ViVa, which the inclusion of the foreign word makes more intriguing. In one of his few poems with a title, “NOISE” (Reflections 1918, ETC), Cummings uses a word in Spanish instead of the term in his mother tongue: in describing a sunset in New York, the poet employs vistas instead of views, giving the stanza a certain air of mystery. Amor, the Spanish term for love, appears in “it)It will it”(ViVa), a visual poem full of nominalizations and typographical effects. The “Apple of Discord” is mentioned in

1 Antonio Ruiz classifies this letter as a mixture of journalistic chronicle and short story within Cummings’ styles in prose (1998: 130).

“EPITHALAMION” under the more imposing “Discordia’s apple,” a nominal group which sounds more sentencious for an argument between fair goddesses. The word vino in poem 5 of No Thanks sounds more exotic than the English term wine, but the writer was more likely to have thought in Italian than in Spanish, as this term is identical in both languages and is followed by “spaghetti” in the same verse. The same happens with the word villa –mansion– in poem VII of section “Three” in is 5, and ViVa, the title of his “bookofpoems” written in 1931. Spanish vocabulary is not the only feature related to Spain which appears in his letters and works of prose and poetry. The figure of a remarkable Spanish painter, Greek-born el Greco, influenced Cummings’ works powerfully. The first time he came into contact with him was at Harvard. As Cummings remarks, his friend S. Foster Damon opened his eyes and ears not merely to Theotokopoulos and William Blake, but to all ultra modern music, poetry and painting (nonlecture three 5). Damon also took him to an El Greco exhibit at the Fogg Museum. All this encouraged young Cummings to write his term paper for Fine Arts 9b on “The Significance of El Greco,” as he considered this painter among the Modernists. One can perceive the emotion that he felt when he saw his most representative painting Burial of Count Orgaz on his visit to Toledo in 1921. In an article published in 1925 for Vanity Fair entitled “How I Do Not Love Italy,” he says that “one small church at San Tomé (Spain), which contains El Greco’s Burial of Count Orgaz, houses more aesthetic intensity than does the whole Galleria degli Uffizi” (Norman 151). It was the picture’s sense of aliveness what moved Cummings and he tried to transmit this feeling in his poems. This way, in the Foreword to is 5, he points out that his poems are competing with El Greco. More Spanish writers are mentioned in his correspondence. In a congratulatory letter to Norman Friedman, he associates Cervantes’s character Don Quixote to Professor Gulick, a friend of his father’s (Selected Letters 181). Discussing the translations of the Andalusian poet Federico García Lorca with Marion, Cummings reproduces their conversation to Ezra Pound (Pound/Cummings 182). Unfortunately these translations might not have been accurate enough to express how Lorca and Cummings shared a taste for the adjective “green” in their poems. However, the two poets could have done it personally at 4 Patchin Place, because García Lorca was sometime at his apartment sitting in his rocking chair (Wegner 1996: 59). Politicians and other artists appear as well. Francisco Franco, is referred to as “Herr Franco” (Kennedy 1980: 379), when he had just captured Bilbao and was crushing the Basque resistance in Northern Spain. In poem number 38 in Xaiρe, Cummings, fighting against power imposed by force mentions the word “generalissimo.” The bombardment that isolated Bilbao in Cummings’ admired Basque Country during the Spanish Civil War was conveyed by the violent imagery that only the Andalusian painter Pablo Picasso was able to do in Guernica (1937). For Cummings, the Cubist painter was a sculptor among “uninteresting landscapes made interesting by earTHQuake” (Moore 1984: 46). Like him, he saw the intensity that might follow the distortion of line and immensity of form and, especially in Tulips and Chimneys and The Enormous Room he composed pieces that the reader could feel just like a painting. The Picasso works which Cummings saw in the Museum of Western Art in Moscow represented, as he later recounted in Eimi, one of the few pleasant experiences on his whole trip to Russia in 1931. His lyrical tributes to Picasso are two poems in the section “PORTRAITS” in Tulips and Chimneys. The existence of different nations and cultures is not an obstacle for people’s understanding. On the contrary, thanks to multiculturalism and multilinguism we can obtain different perspectives of the same idea and decide which one is the best for our interests. People are people wherever you go and knowing their customs and traditions help to solve problems and be wiser. Human beings and their environment

contribute to enrich common people and geniuses’ personalities. Cummings’ appreciation of the Spaniards confirmed how the experience and mentality of an ancient European country can mix with the naivety and modernity of the New World in order to create an extraordinary fusion which produces rich works of art. Cummings began his process of self-construction leaving America temporarily behind and using the European civilization as one more strategy to find himself. Cummings did certainly make solid castles in his dream world after visiting Spain.

References

Cummings, E. E. 1994. E. E. Cummings. Complete Poems 1904-1962. Ed. George J. Firmage. New York: Liveright. Cummings, E. E. 1972. Selected Letters of E. E. Cummings. Eds. Dupee, F. W. and George Stade London: André Deutsch. Cummings, E. E. 1996. Pound/Cummings. The Correspondence of Ezra Pound and E. E. Cummings. Ed. Barry Ahearn. Ann Arbor: The U of Michigan Press. Cummings, E. E. 1954. i:sixnonlectures. 1996. Harvard: Harvard University Press. Kennedy, Richard S. 1980. Dreams in the Mirror. A Biography of E. E. Cummings. New York: Liveright. Moore, Marianne. 1926. “People Stare Carefully.”. Dial 80: 49-52. Rpt. in Critical Essays on E. E. Cummings. 1984. Ed. Guy Rotella. Boston, Mass.: G. K. Hall. 46-49. Ruiz, Antonio. 1998. “The Sharp Pen: Cummings, Spain and the Bullfight.” Spring. The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society 7: 124-131. Wegner, Robert. 1996. “A Wegner Miscellany.” Spring. The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society 5: 51-70.