From the author of American Bloomsbury, Louisa May
Alcott, and Home Before Dark, a major
reassessment of the life and work of the novelist, painter,
and playwright considered to be one of America’s preeminent
twentieth-century poets. At the time of his death in 1962,
at age sixty-eight, he was, after Robert Frost, the most
widely read poet in the United States.
E. E.
Cummings was and remains controversial. He has been called
“a master” (Malcolm Cowley); “hideous” (Edmund Wilson).
James Dickey called him a “daringly original poet with more
vitality and more sheer uncompromising talent than any other
living American writer.”
In Susan Cheever’s
rich, illuminating biography we see Cummings’s idyllic
childhood years in Cambridge, Massachusetts; his Calvinist
father—distinguished Harvard professor and sternly religious
minister of the Cambridge Congregational Church; his
mother—loving, attentive, a source of encouragement, the
aristocrat of the family, from Unitarian writers, judges,
and adventurers.
We see Cummings—slight,
agile, playful, a product of a nineteenth-century New
England childhood, bred to be flinty and determined; his
love of nature; his sense of fun, laughter, mimicry; his
desire from the get-go to stand conventional wisdom on its
head, which he himself would often do, literally, to amuse.
At Harvard, he roomed with John Dos Passos;
befriended Lincoln Kirstein; read Latin, Greek, and French;
earned two degrees; discovered alcohol, fast cars, and
burlesque at the Old Howard Theater; and raged against the
school’s conservative, exclusionary upper-class rule by A.
Lawrence Lowell.
In Cheever’s book we see that
beneath Cummings’s blissful, golden childhood the strains of
sadness and rage were already at play. He grew into a dark
young man and set out on a lifelong course of rebellion
against conventional authority and the critical
establishment, devouring the poetry of Ezra Pound, whose
radical verses pushed Cummings away from the politeness of
the traditional nature poem toward a more adventurous,
sexually conscious form.
We see that Cummings’s
self-imposed exile from Cambridge—a town he’d come to hate
for its intellectualism, Puritan uptightness, racism, and
self-righteous xenophobia—seemed necessary for him as a man
and a poet. Headstrong and cavalier, he volunteered as an
ambulance driver in World War I, working alongside
Hemingway, Joyce, and Ford Madox Ford . . . his ongoing
stand against the imprisonment of his soul taking a literal
turn when he was held in a makeshift prison for
“undesirables and spies,” an experience that became the
basis for his novel, The Enormous
Room.
We follow Cummings as he permanently
flees to Greenwich Village to be among other modernist poets
of the day—Marianne Moore, Hart Crane, Dylan Thomas—and we
see the development of both the poet and his work against
the backdrop of modernism and through the influences of his
contemporaries: Stein, Amy Lowell, Joyce, and Pound.
Cheever’s fascinating book gives us the evolution of an
artist whose writing was at the forefront of what was new
and daring and bold in an America in transition.
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