When I turn in to Patchin Place these days it’s like going back in time. Cummings is still very much alive. Narrow sidewalks line an alley, trees shade houses with white lintels, and the iron tracery of fire escapes hangs above neat wrought-iron fences and gates. The house where Cummings lived has been opened up into a big, light living room and kitchen with hardwood floors and white sofas. The place where Dylan Thomas and Cummings sat and talked about language in front of a smoky fire while drinking gin out of cheap glasses is now the living room of a family with two children and a dachshund, but the tenement feeling is still there in the way the old wooden stairs twist, and in the feeling of many small rooms.
You walk up the warped risers to Cummings’s old studio, which is now a boy’s bedroom and has become a shrine to basketball. Where Cummings paced and agonized over how to be a formalist with the maximum amount of informality, where his long-lost daughter told him that she loved him, a young boy does his homework. Pigeons coo. Doors open and close as patients visit the psychiatrist next door. The late-afternoon light still streams in from the west through the old panes. Through the window it is still Cummings’s view—the backs of older buildings, the open garden with slate everywhere, the low roofs of the Village where it looks as if families of Italians are still making wine in barrels. Further west toward the Hudson River the sun is beginning to set.