___________
KITTY, MIMI, MARJ, AND FRIENDS
LIKE ANY NORMAL young fellow, Cummings was fascinated with sex in his early years, but since he was a minister’s son growing up surrounded by the repressive Puritanism of Cambridge, Massachusetts, he had plenty of fear and trepidation about this hush-hush subject. Even so, his fascination continued to increase in his late teens and early twenties when he brushed close to commercial sex in Boston or New York. But his attitude toward the prostitutes he saw, heard about, or even talked to was ambiguous—like that of the “clever drolls” in the poem “kitty” who “keep their Sunday flower.”
When he was shipped to France as a driver for the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps in 1917, he was surprised to find an open and unselfconscious attitude toward sex among the French. During their month in Paris, he and his friend Slater Brown struck up acquaintance with two beautiful prostitutes, Marie Louise Lallemand and her sidekick, Mimi, whom they dined with and escorted about in the same way they would treat American dates. His poem “little ladies more,” with its collage of the street invitations and chatter of the prostitutes, reflects this Parisian sojourn.
Charcoal sketch by E. E. Cummings
Houghton Library, Harvard University
But Cummings was still too apprehensive about venereal disease to engage in any intercourse with Marie Louise, in spite of the fact that on one occasion he spent the night with her. It was not until he had been imprisoned in a French detention camp for four months (see his book The Enormous Room for an account of this ordeal) that his apprehensions about sex disappeared. Upon release, he sought Marie Louise in Paris but could not find her. Finally, on the day before he sailed back to the United States, he had his first complete sexual experience with a waitress in a couscous restaurant, who took him home for the night. He was twenty-three years old at the time.
During the next year, while he was in the army at Camp Devens, Massachusetts, he wrote a great many poems about prostitutes, usually in sonnet form, which he delighted in using because his subject matter stood in such high contrast to the sonnet tradition. Actually, Cummings was not a sexually promiscuous person nor one who patronized prostitutes, although he knew a good deal about them from his living in Greenwich Village before and after his adventures in France. He was “a one-woman man,” according to Slater Brown, and at the time he wrote most of these poems he was carrying on a love affair with Elaine Thayer. But in these poems about the sex trade, Cummings reveled in being a source of shock to his contemporaries by striking an iconoclastic pose, and he enjoyed disturbing the proprieties of the Boston-Cambridge world of his father.
The poems themselves seesaw in their attitudes. Some of them display disgust or revulsion in their imagery: “her hair was like a gas/ evil to feel,” or “the dirty colours of her kiss.” Others imply regret or a deglamorized morning after: “Dead stars stink. dawn. Inane,/ the poetic carcass of a girl,” or “she picked wearily something from the floor/ Her hair was mussed, and she coughed while tying strings.” Yet still other poems show an honest appreciation for what these women provide, for instance, the praise that the working men whose “fingers toss trunks/shuffle sacks spin kegs” have for Marj’s “cleancornered strokable/ body,” or the speaker’s confession that Marjorie’s “fragrance hurls/ me into tears.” Moreover, there is no mistaking the warm remembrance that emanates from the poems with a Parisian setting.
Quite frequendy, the poems feature surprise or humor, and the care that went into the sound and wordplay makes them distinctive works. Although they contributed to Cummings’ early reputation as a Peck’s Bad Boy of poetry, these literary creations are memorable for more than their shock value.
wanta
spendsix
dollars Kid
2 for the room
and
four for the girl
thewoman wasnot
quite Fourteen till she smiled
then
Centuries she
soft ly
repeated
well whadyas ay
dear
wan
taspend
six
Dollars
twentyseven bums give a prostitute the once
-over. fiftythree(and one would see if it could)
eyes say the breasts look very good:
firmlysquirmy with a slight jounce,
thirteen pants have a hunch
admit in threedimensional distress
these hips were made for Horizontal Business
(set on big legs nice to pinch
assiduously which justgraze
each other). As the lady lazily struts
(her
thickish flesh superior to the genuine daze
of unmarketable excitation,
whose careless movements carefully scatter
pink propaganda of annihilation
goodby Betty,don’t remember me
pencil your eyes dear and have a good time
with the tall tight boys at Tabari’
s,keep your teeth snowy,stick to beer and lime,
wear dark,and where your meeting breasts are round
have roses darling,it’s all i ask of you—
but that when light fails and this sweet profound
Paris moves with lovers,two and two
bound for themselves,when passionately dusk
brings softly down the perfume of the world
(and just as smaller stars begin to husk
heaven)you,you exactly paled and curled
with mystic lips take twilight where i know:
proving to Death that Love is so and so.
little ladies more
than dead exactly dance
in my head,precisely
dance where danced la guerre.
Mimi à
la voix fragile
qui chatouille Des
Italiens
the putain with the ivory throat
Marie Louise Lallemand
n’est-ce pas que je suis belle
chéri? les anglais m’aiment
tous,les américains
aussi....“bon dos,bon cul de Paris”(Marie
Vierge
Priez
Pour
Nous)
with the
long lips of
Lucienne which dangle
the old men and hot
men se promènent
doucement le soir(ladies
accurately dead les anglais
sont gentils et les américains
aussi,ils payent bien les américains dance
exactly in my brain voulez-
vous coucher avec
moi? Non? pourquoi?)
dead precisely dance
where has danced la
guerre j’m’appelle
Manon,cinq rue Henri Monnier
voulez-vous coucher avec moi?
te ferai Mimi
te ferai Minette,
dead exactly dance
si vous voulez
chatouiller
mon lézard ladies suddenly
j’m’en fous des nègres
(in the twilight of Paris
Marie Louise with queenly
legs cinq rue Henri
Monnier a little love
begs,Mimi with the body
like une boîte à joujoux,want nice sleep?
toutes les petites femmes exactes
qui dansent toujours in my
head dis-donc,Paris
ta gorge mystérieuse
pourquoi se promène-t-elle,pourquoi
éclate ta voix
fragile couleur de pivoine?)
with the
long lips of Lucienne which
dangle the old men and hot men
precisely dance in my head
ladies carefully dead
“kitty”. sixteen,5′I″,white,prostitute.
ducking always the touch of must and shall,
whose slippery body is Death’s littlest pal,
skilled in quick softness. Unspontaneous. cute.
the signal perfume of whose unrepute
focusses in the sweet slow animal
bottomless eyes importantly banal,
Kitty. a whore. Sixteen
you corking brute
amused from time to time by clever drolls
fearsomely who do keep their Sunday flower.
The babybreasted broad “kitty” twice eight
—beer nothing,the lady’ll have a whiskey-sour—
whose least amazing smile is the most great
common divisor of unequal souls.
the poem her belly marched through me as
one army. From her nostrils to her feet
she smelled of silence. The inspired cleat
of her glad leg pulled into a sole mass
my separate lusts
her hair was like a gas
evil to feel. Unwieldy....
in her fierce laziness tried to repeat
a trick of syncopation Europe has
—. One day i felt a mountain touch me where
i stood (maybe nine miles off). It was spring
sun-stirring, sweetly to the mangling air
muchness of buds mattered, a valley spilled
its tickling river in my eyes,
the killed
world wriggled like a twitched string.
when you rang at Dick Mid’s Place
the madam was a bulb stuck in the door,
a fang of wincing gas showed how
hair,in two fists of shrill colour,
clutched the dull volume of her tumbling face
scribbled with a big grin. her sow-
eyes clicking mischief from thick lids.
the chunklike nose on which always the four
tablets of perspiration erectly sitting.
—If they knew you at Dick Mid’s
the three trickling chins began to traipse
into the cheeks “eet smeestaire steevensun
kum een,dare ease Bet,an Leelee,an dee beeg wun”
her handless wrists did gooey severe shapes.
nearenbreath of my breath:take not thy tingling
limbs from me:make my pain their crazy meal
letting thy tigers of smooth sweetness steal
slowly in dumb blossoms of new mingling:
deeper:blood of my blood:with upwardcringing
swiftness plunge these leopards of white dream
in the glad flesh of my fear:more neatly ream
this pith of darkness:carve an evilfringing
flower of madness on gritted lips
and on sprawled eyes squirming with light insane
chisel the killing flame that dizzily grips.
Querying greys between mouthed houses curl
thirstily. Dead stars stink. dawn. Inane,
the poetic carcass of a girl
the dirty colours of her kiss have just
throttled
my seeing blood,her heart’s chatter
riveted a weeping skyscraper
in me
i bite on the eyes’ brittle crust
(only feeling the belly’s merry thrust
Boost my huge passion like a business
and the Y her legs panting as they press
proffers its omelet of fluffy lust)
at six exactly
the alarm tore
two slits in her cheeks. A brain peered at the dawn,
she got up
with a gashing yellow yawn
and tottered to a glass bumping things,
she picked wearily something from the floor
Her hair was mussed,and she coughed while tying strings
in making Marjorie god hurried
a boy’s body on unsuspicious
legs of girl. his left hand quarried
the quartzlike face. his right slapped
the amusing big vital vicious
vegetable of her mouth.
Upon the whole he suddenly clapped
a tiny sunset of vermouth
-colour. Hair. he put between
her lips a moist mistake,whose fragrance hurls
me into tears,as the dusty new-
ness of her obsolete gaze begins to. lean....
a little against me,when for two
dollars i fill her hips with boys and girls
between the breasts
of bestial
Marj lie large
men who praise
Marj’s cleancornered strokable
body these men’s
fingers toss trunks
shuffle sacks spin kegs they
curl
loving
around
beers
the world has
these men’s hands but their
bodies big and boozing
belong to
Marj
the greenslim purse of whose
face opens
on a fatgold
grin
hooray
hoorah for the large
men who lie
between the breasts
of bestial Marj
for the strong men
who
sleep between the legs of Lil