On a winter evening in January of 1917, a ragtag bunch of revolutionaries—including the artists Marcel Duchamp and John Sloan and actors from the nearby, experimental Provincetown Playhouse—staged a takeover of Washington Square Arch, the Stanford White–designed marble wedding cake that had been built at the bottom of Fifth Avenue in 1892. After climbing the 110 iron stairs to the top, they posed next to the statue of George Washington that gives the arch its name and proclaimed the “free and independent republic of Greenwich Village.” Duchamp released a cloud of red balloons into the snowy air. These hardy, inspired, and somewhat tipsy souls were members of the bohemian Liberal Club and the harbingers of what would be the most fruitful and fervent decades in this country’s history of arts and ideas.
Greenwich Village has always been more a state of mind than another urban neighborhood. Its golden age began at the end of World War I, when artists, writers, actors, and creative camp followers flooded the twisty, Old World, tree-lined streets between Fifth Avenue and the Hudson River below Fourteenth Street, drawn by low rents, a hobohemian lifestyle (including lots of drinking and sex), and the thrilling prospect of a new way of seeing the world, a new way of painting, and, especially, a new way of writing. They came from Harvard (Cummings, Dos Passos, John Reed, Malcolm Cowley); they came from Princeton (Edmund Wilson, John Peale Bishop, Eugene O’Neill). William Carlos Williams drove his Ford flivver in from New Jersey after a long day’s work as a doctor. They came, as one of them famously wrote, to burn their candles at both ends.
Although Edna St. Vincent Millay was from Maine, she was already an honorary Villager at birth—she had been named in gratitude after the local Greenwich Village hospital, St. Vincent’s, where her uncle had been nursed back to health after an accident. And they wrote about it. O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh is set in the Village dives of this era, the Golden Swan and Romany Marie’s. O’Neill, Millay, and the novelist Theodore Dreiser were all Greenwich Village veterans who would be on hand to help the blue-blooded young aristocrat from Harvard.
When O’Neill, the resident playwright at the Provincetown Playhouse on Macdougal Street, migrated north to Broadway in 1920 for the production of Beyond the Horizon, which won the Pulitzer Prize, he was replaced, among others, by the twenty-nine-year-old E. E. Cummings and later with his irreverent first play, Him. Him was experimental, revolutionary, and sassy, and included a send-up of O’Neill. In those early days, Malcolm Cowley published Cummings and nearly everyone else in The New Republic, which he helped edit; his wife, Peggy, later ran off to Mexico with Hart Crane. Edmund Wilson and John Peale Bishop were both hopelessly in love with Edna St. Vincent Millay. When she decided to sleep with them simultaneously, all of them remembered, there were heated discussions about who would get the top of her and who the bottom.
John Reed returned to Russia and became the only American to be buried inside the Kremlin. Millay would meet Dutch businessman Eugen Boissevain at a house party in Croton-on-Hudson, marry him, move to the country, and win a Pulitzer Prize. On the way home from Mexico on the ship Orizaba Hart Crane jumped over the side to his death. Cowley moved to Connecticut. Cummings stayed on in the Village.
When he got there, the Village was already a storied place, once home to Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and Henry James. Typically for the Village, Reed was Mabel Dodge’s lover while she ran a salon that boasted Sigmund Freud and Margaret Sanger as visitors. Typically, too, Reed’s wife, Louise, was also having an affair with Eugene O’Neill.
In the forty-four years that Cummings lived in the Village, his neighbors and friends included a dozen influential poets, writers, and photographers, including Crane, Cowley, the famous bum Joe Gould, Wilson, Marianne Moore, Thomas Wolfe; Walker Evans and James Agee started the collaboration that became Let Us Now Praise Famous Men while walking the streets of the Village.
Yet Cummings’s first return to Greenwich Village from Camp Devens in 1919 was shadowed by the complicated and passionate feelings he was coming to have for his patron Scofield Thayer’s beautiful and unhappy wife, Elaine, whom he had first met in the spring of 1916. Cummings was then already a young success; his work would soon appear in Eight Harvard Poets.
When he first met Elaine, Thayer’s nineteen-year-old fiancée, Cummings was immediately stunned by her retiring, soft-spoken, slender beauty. Her ethereal delicacy was the opposite, he noted, of his mother’s stout, good-humored kind of femininity. Elaine, Cummings thought, was like a princess, and indeed she was a kind of Jamesian American princess, educated in the finest finishing schools, but shadowed by the tragedy of her very wealthy father’s early death.
Cummings’s life, as he wrote in his journals, had already been upended by the influence of Scofield Thayer—dapper, sophisticated, feminine, very rich, and on his way to Vienna to be psychoanalyzed by none other than Sigmund Freud. Thayer was an admirable antithesis of the masculine archetype of Edward Cummings with which Cummings had been raised. “ST—the world, money, Freud—&took me away from EC (Whereby nyc supplanted Cambridge) much to his rage.” If it was Scofield Thayer who had enabled Cummings to break with his parents, partly through his payment of $1,000, then it was the fragile Elaine who would wean Cummings away from her husband. Freud himself, Cummings wrote, had urged Thayer to make Cummings marry Elaine.
Cummings was fascinated by sex, but he was a Puritan through and through. Still almost a virgin himself, he had written “Epithalamion” out of what seem to be his own vivid fantasies of sex between Thayer and Elaine: “Love, lead forth thy love unto that bed …,” and then, changing the point of view, “felt on her flesh the amorous strain / of gradual hands and yielding to that fee / her eager body’s unimmortal flower …”
Later, in an investigation of what Cummings believed was his perversion and enantiodromia, a term from Heraclitus coined by Jung to mean the compulsion toward opposites and which Cummings used to explore what would become his love-hate relationship with Elaine, he wrote: “the first time I saw Elaine—she belongs to my friend Thayer (money*I-XXinferior, playing up to him … he: rich aggressive, i: passive.”
“I never saw anything prettier than Elaine,” wrote Hildegarde Watson after a lunch at Chicago’s Blackstone Hotel with the Thayers on their way home from their European honeymoon. Hildegarde, who had been courted by Thayer before he met Elaine while traveling in England, was happily married to Cummings’s other best friend, James Sibley Watson, and living with him in the Midwest. But even the newlywed Hildegarde sensed that all was not marital bliss with the Thayers. “What an unsettled luncheon that appeared to me, full of unrest,” she wrote of their meeting. “The Thayers were, before long, to separate, there was the prospect of war, and all were confused by patriotic and pacifist feelings.”
So when the sexually confused Cummings and the sexually rejected Elaine both found themselves in Greenwich Village and within a few blocks from each other, the girl who Cummings had written “would make any man faint with happiness” and the witty young poet were suddenly free to be friends and even more than friends. Thayer lived in a luxurious apartment on Washington Square East in a building reserved for bachelors; Elaine rented a first-floor apartment on Washington Square North. Sex was meant to be free, everyone said. And as Cummings’s friend Dos Passos wrote, “Those of us who weren’t in love with Cummings were in love with Elaine.”
For months, Cummings was just one of many who gathered at Elaine’s cozy apartment of an evening to drink and dance and chat about this and that. Seeing that she was lonely, he often tried to get her to come with him to a party or a restaurant. Cummings began to sympathize with Elaine’s plight. She was married to a man who wasn’t interested in her and who sometimes publicly belittled her. Thayer had paid Cummings for the wedding poem, and now he sent Cummings another check to help with his expenses in entertaining Elaine.
Thayer himself seemed to be having some kind of sexual crisis over his preference for adolescent boys, and he didn’t seem concerned at all with Elaine. It was springtime in the Village; the cherry blossoms bloomed on the narrow streets with their romantic wrought iron and billowy brick fronts and flowers and trailing vines blooming in the stairways. Birdsong caromed around the big trees in Washington Square, where fountains splashed just beyond Elaine’s windows. Springtime in New York City is irresistible after the long city winter, and Elaine was equally irresistible in a way that Cummings didn’t seem at first to notice. In his conscious mind, Cummings had embraced this new world of honesty, openness, and freedom; but one night in the spring when Elaine made it clear that she would like to sleep with him, he was as horrified as he was delighted and left the apartment as fast as he could.
“I see E. not as she is—a dissatisfied girl who needs a fuck … nor do I want to fuck her, much—no, no I want to love, PROTECT deserve her,” Cummings wrote in his journal. “I HAVE AN IDEE FIXE OF RIGHT & WRONG.” Cummings was still a prude, but he couldn’t stay away from Elaine. “there’s no way out,” he wrote in his journal. “she is the only beautiful person (UNCANNY), small delicate, exquisite … incredible refinement … mind: unfoolable … no pose … interested-in-everything, everyone, everywhere utterly alive.” He cast her as the unhappy Guinevere with Thayer as King Arthur and himself as a gallant Lancelot. Soon the two were spending nights lying in bed together trading caresses and kisses. Cummings tried to persuade himself that the whole thing was Elaine’s idea and that he had no real responsibility. Then he tried to persuade himself that screwing her would be an act of gallantry. He was more successful in persuading himself that Thayer wouldn’t mind.
In his own musings, the falling in love with Elaine brought up all of Cummings’s confusion about what it means to be a man. If Edward Cummings was a man—bluff, large, loud—then what kind of man was his fine-boned, agile, quiet-loving son? He could only woo Elaine in the conditional. “If I hadn’t changed,” he told her after one night when he had put on evening clothes at her apartment, “I’d have come in here … & fallen on you & I wouldn’t have cared, I’d have been so happy.” Elaine moaned. Cummings wanted her to take responsibility for what was happening between them; he held back physically while courting her with words. Cummings, he noted, was as much as asking if Elaine would be won, “instead of being aggressive, a man, & and winning her.” By early summer, with Elaine urging him to “go in, oh please go in,! … You took me & put me inside with your hand …” the two were lovers.
“I didn’t want to possess her,” he wrote, “I wanted: to do as she liked, to please her.”
Then, disaster. In May of 1919 Elaine told Cummings that she was pregnant with his child. It was one thing to be free, gloriously free, about sex and love and art. It was quite another thing to contemplate taking on the financial and emotional burdens of a child. How could he continue to work as an artist and as a poet if he was saddled with a family? Cummings balked. He urged Elaine to have an abortion. Thayer also urged her to have an operation to terminate the pregnancy. A doctor was consulted who apparently prescribed a pill to induce a miscarriage, which didn’t work. But Elaine, until now so delicate and pliable, decided that she wanted to have the child. For once in her life she would not be bullied by men.
Thayer agreed to adopt the child, and the Thayers became closer again, inviting Cummings to spend a summer month with them in Martha’s Vineyard. There the three pretended that the events of the last three years had not happened. Cummings slept apart from the married couple. What kind of man was he then? Elaine confided in him that she still loved Thayer; Thayer confided in him that he no longer loved Elaine. All these people believed, or said they believed, in the twin principles of freedom and creativity. Under the civilized surface of their lives, a lot was going on.
Over the next four years all would be buffeted about by their own feelings: Cummings was still in love with Elaine and would soon love the child she was carrying. Thayer himself was still attached to Elaine and might also have been a little bit in love with Cummings. Cummings himself had once had that serious physical crush on Sibley Watson. Elaine was naturally terrified, as most mothers-to-be are, and couldn’t see herself finding safety with any of the alternatives available to her. For the moment, though, the façade of principle was intact. Soon enough it would come dreadfully undone.
Later that summer, at Silver Lake, far from the pregnant Elaine, Cummings wrote the poem that enshrines her in memory from the golden time before she had the temerity to get pregnant. “Puella Mea” is a long love poem to the “fragile lady,” the “dexterous and fugitive,” “the immanent subliminal,” and in many ways it reads like a farewell. Certainly the blithe sexuality, the world without responsibility, the freedoms that seemed so important but that were so dependent on other people’s money and other people’s tolerance, had all come to an end for Cummings and Elaine, even in the free air of Greenwich Village.
Back in New York on Washington Square with her pregnancy showing, Elaine felt deserted by both Thayer and Cummings, a bitter experience that may have shaped what happened later. She was only nineteen when she first met Thayer; and the dramatic and painful few years of her marriage, her time as Cummings’s mistress, and now the birth of her child may well have wounded her in ways that are hard to measure. On December 20, 1919, she gave birth to a baby girl, who was named Nancy Thayer. It was Thayer who went to the hospital for the birth and posed as the child’s father. Cummings learned of his only child’s birth in a phone call—he was not asked to visit. Thus began the long and difficult musical-chairs fathering to which Nancy would be subjected for much of her life. Using the image of a wheelmine from her father’s play Santa Claus, Nancy Thayer later described her own origins. “Out of a very ancient wheelmine comes my folktale, like a family pieced together from precious fragments recovered or missed,” she wrote in an introduction to a book of poems, Charon’s Daughter, after the death of both her parents.
Cummings and Thayer didn’t have time for a baby anyway; they were preoccupied with Thayer’s acquisition of the fortnightly literary magazine The Dial. As an editor, Thayer promised not to edit Cummings and was ready to publish seven poems from his new manuscript titled Tulips & Chimneys as well as four Cummings drawings of the ladies of the National Winter Garden burlesque show.
On the surface, Cummings, Thayer, and Elaine were a highly civilized threesome dedicated to personal freedom and the idea that creative work had to come before personal lives. Still, Cummings couldn’t help crowing over the adorable, tiny daughter who was finally put in his arms when she was a bit more than a month old. He boasted to his sister that she had a lot of hair. Before Nancy turned a year old, her parents seemed to have come back together in a permanent reunion—although of course the idea of anything permanent was anathema to them and to their community. After spending the summer in New Hampshire writing The Enormous Room at his father’s insistence—and because his father agreed to pay for his travel in Europe if he finished the book—Cummings moved back to the Village to an apartment he shared with Brown on Bedford Street.
It was sweet to be with Elaine and play with Nancy, whom Cummings always called Mopsy. He had the freedom of being an artist and the loving joy of being a father. To underscore his freedom, Cummings took off for Lisbon in March of 1921, with Dos Passos as his companion on the Mormugão—this trip was courtesy of Edward Cummings as payment for the completion of the book that the senior Cummings seemed to care about more than his son did, perhaps because of what he and Rebecca had been through while their son was incarcerated. Cummings didn’t like Lisbon much, and by May he and Dos were back in Paris, the city that Cummings liked to think of as his second home.
They wandered the streets and ate beautifully, and in June Elaine and Nancy arrived, almost as they would have if they had been part of a more conventional kind of family. With Paris in the background, Elaine and Cummings seemed to fall in love all over again. Paris allowed them to retain their fantasies of who they were: Elaine and Nancy were wealthy Americans who stayed at the Hôtel d’Iéna with a full staff; Cummings was a romantically impoverished itinerant poet who lived in a cheap hotel on the Left Bank.
They saw each other every day and night, and being in Paris enabled them to play family in a new and unencumbered way. When Thayer arrived in Paris on his way to Vienna and Sigmund Freud, he and Nancy were officially divorced on July 28. Thayer settled a fortune on Nancy ($100,000, or about a million in today’s dollars), introduced Cummings to Ezra Pound when they ran into him on the street, and, like the gentleman he was, left them all alone together again as he headed west for Austria and what he hoped would be increased mental stability.
Throughout the summers and falls of the next two years, Cummings and Elaine played at being the family with no strings attached, the uncommitted parents of the increasingly adorable Nancy, who was now a toddler and had begun to speak enough to be great company for her father. It is from this time that Nancy’s only recollection of her father survived. “One solitary recollection in Paris of my father (who was later to celebrate his own home as supremely natural) would be guillotined and muffled in confusion so total, that many years later in America between two families of my own, I met him as a stranger.”
Elaine left Paris for New York in December 1921, but she was back with her full entourage of nanny and personal maid to check in to the Hôtel Wagram on the Right Bank’s Rue de Rivoli in May. She brought two copies of the American edition of The Enormous Room. Cummings was delighted to see her but furious when he examined his book, which had been altered by editing and cutting in ways he found horrifying.
Still, for a while it seemed as if they had it all. Cummings was passionate about his work and free to be passionate. His first solo volume of poems, Tulips & Chimneys, was published by Thomas Seltzer while Cummings was still abroad, and well reviewed in New York. He painted when he felt the urge to paint; he wrote when he felt the urge to write. Most of the time he could also husband and father when he felt the urge to husband and father. In June of 1922, Cummings, Nancy, and Elaine traveled to the south of France so that Cummings could paint in Cézanne country. The next summer they all decamped to the Atlantic coast of France, with Elaine and Nancy checking in to the Hôtel Carlton in Biarritz and Cummings renting a maid’s room in a nearby village. They loved each other, and they left each other free—that was the idea. It’s an idea that has often cropped up in human history; an idea that rarely works out, especially when there are children involved.
Cummings was poor and Elaine was rich, but that didn’t matter! They weren’t married, but that didn’t matter! Their daughter was still legally the daughter of another man, but that didn’t matter! They (or at least Cummings) occasionally slept with other people, but that didn’t matter! They had left all those rules and oppressive customs behind and broken through into a new way of living. In the ancient struggle between the rights of art and the rights of living artists and their families, Cummings and Elaine seemed to have reached a happy compromise. “I am essentially an artist, secondarily a man,” Cummings wrote. “but SHE is primarily a woman.”
By March of 1924, Elaine was restless and wanted to marry him. When it came to his work, Cummings was furiously defensive; in his life he seemed strangely passive. In his journals he is aggressively furious at himself for being so passive. Elaine wanted to get married, so they got married. The Reverend Edward Cummings married his son, E. E. Cummings, to Elaine Orr Thayer at noontime in the living room at 104 Irving Street in Cambridge. Marriage didn’t change much, and both promised that they would immediately release the other if that was wanted. Cummings half-moved into Elaine’s apartment on Washington Square and kept his old apartment as a studio. By April the three were so much a family that Cummings even legally adopted his own child. Was this altogether too much bourgeois claptrap?
Although his private journals have dozens of pages of exploration of his relationship to Elaine and Nancy, what it all adds up to is a lot of confused feeling. In his own way, Cummings seemed quite happy to be married and even happier to be a father to the increasingly companionable Mopsy. He loved telling her stories and playing with her. His parents now recognized Nancy as their grandchild and adored having her as a visitor in Cambridge and New Hampshire. It all seemed like paradise.
The utopian strain in American belief is one of the strongest in our history. Greenwich Village in the 1920s was, in its own way, just another utopian community within the confines of an urban neighborhood. Cummings and Elaine were not alone in believing that the human soul—if left unencumbered—could grow and create beyond all previous accomplishments. Like Amos Bronson Alcott at the beginning of his utopian experiment Fruitlands, or like George Ripley at Brook Farm or John Humphrey Noyes at Oneida, Cummings and his fellow writers and the community they drew around them seemed to believe that, free from the ancient social institutions that had bound them and their parents, human beings would thrive. The restrictions had caused the problem, they believed, not the other way around.
Soon after Elaine and Cummings were married, Elaine’s sister Constance, who had seen her through her pregnancy and childbirth, caught a bad cold that became a fatal pneumonia. Elaine was devastated. The woman who had mothered her was gone. An old-fashioned husband would have been on hand to help with the legal and emotional complications of such an intimate loss. There was the funeral in Troy, Elaine’s hometown, to manage; the estate to be settled; the grieving to be done. Cummings, however, was the new kind of husband, and he hardly paid attention. Cummings may have had an idée fixe of right and wrong, but when it came to managing the adult world with all its aggravations and necessities, he was useless. Because a third sister was abroad, and perhaps because she wanted to be away from her new husband, Elaine, taking Nancy along with the nurse, left for Paris. It was May, and Cummings had a lot to do as the author of The Enormous Room and Tulips & Chimneys and as a contributor to The Dial. Because of Elaine’s absence, he moved his easel and paints into the nursery in Elaine’s Washington Square apartment.
Something had pushed Elaine to a breaking point. The form her unhappiness took was a love affair with a handsome Irish banker, Frank MacDermot, almost the minute she stepped onto the boat to France. Cummings was happily oblivious.
First, Elaine wrote Cummings a letter that he experienced as a lightning strike. She told him that she was in love with another man and she wanted a divorce. Then she appeared in New York, showing up in his studio just as he was painting a portrait of Nancy. Cummings could hardly believe his ears: Elaine was adamant. It’s easy to guess why she was overwhelmingly attracted to a man like MacDermot, the son of a self-made man, who had been attorney general for a British-ruled Ireland. MacDermot didn’t have time for poetry and jokes and the vicissitudes of the creative life. For him, life was serious, and he was seriously in love with Elaine. For Cummings, nothing was serious—or at least that was the myth he had lived by.
Cummings was devastated, and the loss of Elaine was to lead to the most serious breakdown of his life. He turned for help to his family and friends. His father came to New York to urge him to hire a good lawyer, to sue MacDermot, and if necessary, to attack the man physically. Cummings visited Cambridge and Maine, and he found some comfort in the Adirondacks with his dear friends the Watsons. From Watson he also obtained a .38 caliber pistol, and this gun was the prop for scene after scene that would have led to an arrest and institutionalization in a less free society. Cummings threatened MacDermot; that’s what a real man would do. Then he showed up at Elaine’s with the gun and threatened to kill himself. He also considered murdering Elaine and then killing himself, but the thought of Nancy stopped him. In the end he capitulated to Elaine and agreed to a divorce. Watson found his broken, deserted friend a place to live in a third-floor room at Patchin Place, a quiet mews of tenements off Tenth Street near the elevated train tracks that ran above Sixth Avenue. Women would come and go in Cummings’s life; he worked in the third-floor studio at 4 Patchin Place for almost forty years.
Built as housing for the Basque workers of the long-gone Brevoort House hotel, Patchin Place is on land given to Aaron Patchin by his father-in-law, Samuel Milligan, who built Milligan Place next door. Built in the 1840s before the Civil War when Tenth Street and even Sixth Avenue were sleepy thoroughfares, the three-story brick row houses, adorned with fire escapes, look like a stage set, complete with one of the oldest lampposts in the city, whose gas has been changed to electricity. In 1917 the houses were modernized, with indoor plumbing and steam heat, and in 1920 the last member of the Patchin family sold the cul-de-sac to a realty company, which split the houses up into small one-room apartments—usually two rooms to each floor, divided by narrow hallways and staircases. Across the street stood the campanile of the Jefferson Market Courthouse.
The poet’s relationship to the enchantment of Patchin Place was one of the strongest and most benevolent in his life. Cummings hated noise—a radio two floors away could drive him nuts. He despised size for the sake of size, as in the vast drawing rooms of Cambridge and Boston, which seemed to be built for intimidation. The small, cozy, cramped landscape of Patchin Place, with its eerie quiet and old-time details, could not have been farther away from the majestic, self-conscious architecture of Harvard College. If Patchin Place had not existed, Cummings would have had to invent it. “For a couple of decades the topfloorback room at 4 Patchin Place, which Sibley originally gave me, meant Safety & Peace & the truth of Dreaming & the bliss of Work,” Cummings wrote in a letter to Hildegarde Watson in 1949.
By November, at Elaine’s request, Cummings was again in Paris, but this time it was to get their divorce. He saw more and more of the delightful Nancy, although later she would remember only a scrap of their time together. They rode the merry-go-round at the Champs-Élysées. He once again tried to argue Elaine out of the divorce. He had brought the pistol to Paris and again contemplated shooting MacDermot or himself or both.
He was so disturbed that he came close to shooting a friend who was visiting Elaine one afternoon—he had been listening to voices behind the door of her apartment and convinced himself that one of them was MacDermot’s. Cummings’s journals of this time are agonizing to read. He excoriates himself, and draws diagrams showing where he went wrong with Elaine and where he went wrong as a man. He anguishes over the loss of his daughter. “I love her more than anything alive,” he wrote, “she does not love me … I will help her—although it’s the last thing I desire to do, I will give her up. BUT!! If the motivation really is: I REALLY DON’T WANT Elaine and Mopsy ENOUGH TO FIGHT for them both: … I am giving them up because I am a coward then______I had better DIE.” The divorce decree was issued on December 4, and a devastated Cummings headed back to New York on the Leviathan.
During the two years after Cummings and Elaine were finally divorced, all kinds of things seemed to come between him and his daughter. Although Elaine married MacDermot and they moved back to New York—first to the suburbs and then to the city—Elaine was sick, Nancy was sick, lawyers got involved, Cummings was distracted by his work and by a new love affair and by a fresh family tragedy. Although he was able to visit with Nancy two or three times, always chaperoned—and once, as he heartbreakingly remembered years later, got to hear the seven-year-old sing—the visits were short and uncomfortable. Cummings and MacDermot hated each other, and in 1926 the MacDermots moved with “their” daughter permanently back to Ireland. Their plan was to obscure Nancy’s history with both her adoptive father and her real father. Nancy was not told until many years later that E. E. Cummings was her father, and then it was a piece of information that would tilt her world on its axis. She didn’t see him again for twenty-two years.