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Chapter Fourteen 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).
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