William James was an unofficial godfather to the young Estlin Cummings. He was Edward Cummings’s close friend, and the Cummings house on Irving Street in Cambridge was built to be close to the James house on the other side of Irving Street. Joy Farm in New Hampshire had also been purchased close to the James family summer house on Silver Lake. After all, James had indirectly been responsible for Cummings’s existence when he introduced his own research assistant, Rebecca Clarke, to his friend Edward. William James’s son Billy would become a close friend of Estlin Cummings’s.
William James helped Cummings believe that writing was a noble profession, and his work was as instructive to the young man as his life was. This was especially true with his greatest and most important book, The Varieties of Religious Experience, originally written as a series of lectures to be given at Edinburgh University in Scotland in 1901 and 1902. In The Varieties of Religious Experience James wrote about the different kinds of characters men might inhabit—especially men like Cummings who found themselves somehow on the outside of their own childhood world.
In Lecture 8, James writes about a question that fascinated him and has fascinated many creative people since: how can two or more seemingly opposite characters inhabit the same body and personality? In his lecture, James put the question through the renegade French novelist Alphonse Daudet and his confession of amoral doubleness.
“Homo duplex, homo duplex!” writes Daudet.
The first time that I perceived that I was two was at the death of my brother Henri, when my father cried out so dramatically, “He is dead, he is dead!” While my first self wept, my second self thought, “How truly given was that cry, how fine it would be at the theatre.” I was then fourteen years old.
“This horrible duality has often given me matter for reflection. Oh, this terrible second me, always seated whilst the other is on foot, acting, living, suffering, bestirring itself. This second me that I have never been able to intoxicate, to make shed tears, or put to sleep and how it sees into things, and how it mocks!”
As an adult, Cummings faced his own divided self and was sometimes sabotaged by it. The most obvious way he did this was in the use of the word “I.” In his poems and some of his prose he had created a personality for the lowercase i. There are many sources for the lowercase i, from the notes left by the unpretentious handyman at Joy Farm to the Greek poets.
On one particular summer morning at Joy Farm, while writing in his journal, Cummings looked back on his early life and contemplated the problematic dual nature of the uppercase I—in other words, E. E. Cummings. “It’s significant for me to distinguish clearly two Is,& decide which I’ll be.” In writing that reveals his self-hatred, his playfulness, and his robust sense of self, he described Cummings Duplex.
One I was his “before breakfast self,” Cummings wrote. “he’s short, hateful,& and dogmatic—especially re women. Women are either bitches or morons. They have no soul. They are always taking from you—never giving to you.” This side of Cummings’s character was bitter, snobbish, and lonely, Cummings wrote in a playful moment of self-satire. “What a pity he had to be born into this lousy world at all!”
The other I, his after-breakfast self, was “warm, cheerful, adventurous, with a quick sense of humor—the world is a perpetual amazement to him … If he makes a blunder he’s the first to laugh over it. If someone meets his affection with love, he’s loyal to the death.”
Furthermore, Cummings explained as the sun began to dry the dew on the pasture and the birds swooped in and out of the maples outside his window, he understood Montaigne’s statement that “fortune does us neither good nor evil,” for “he’s aware of millions upon millions of individuals inside him—& according to who he becomes, so will fate prove hostile or benevolent. It’s up to him. Wholeheartedly he accepts this responsibility; and recognizes it as the supreme one.”
The year 1926 and the years just after it were a time when Cummings’s divided self was under enough pressure to shatter a stronger soul. His custody battle with Elaine was reaching its final, sad chapter. He would be granted a visit with Nancy in March of 1927 after he furiously refused to cancel his adoption of her. Elaine had been sick. There were many excuses for Nancy’s unavailability. His mother had even written to Elaine in her own version of a fury at losing Nancy. Finally he was allowed an hour with his own daughter. She looked small and pale but was as spirited and playful as ever. This was the last time they would see each other until Nancy was a married adult with two children of her own.
Another loss was in the wings. Early in 1926, Edward Cummings—a man who seemed to embody the power and the mercy of God when he stood in the pulpit—lost his job as a minister. Two Cambridge churches merged and he was asked to step aside. Estlin Cummings was delighted that for once he was able to cheer his father instead of the other way around. “You can only see that you’ve lost the church, but that isn’t so,” Cummings admonished his grieving father. “He looked at me. ‘In losing the church,’ I said, ‘you’ve entered the world. You’re a worldly person: why deny it?’ We stood face to face. ‘Only a small part of you could possibly fit in that church’ I said almost angrily—‘all the rest of you had to remain outside.’ ”
His father, Cummings told him, was like a child who had slammed his finger in a door; the incident was painful, but now he was free. “I congratulate you,” he told the older man, and the conversation ended in a tender hug. In spite of Edward Cummings’s dejection, the family had a wonderful summer at Joy Farm.
Later, when Cummings was back at the studio on the third floor of 4 Patchin Place, with the low roofs of the city outside his windows and the rumble of the elevated tracks on Sixth Avenue in the distance, and his parents were at home on Irving Street in Cambridge, Rebecca sent her son a long letter as well as some neckties—for which Cummings naturally had scant use, but a mother can hope—and handkerchiefs. Cummings’s lighthearted thank-you letter to his mother was the last he would send to the house in Cambridge for a long, long time. He recommends to Rebecca the works of Sigmund Freud, which he had read on the train home to New York after the summer. He reports that he is churning out articles for Vanity Fair and that his play Him is almost finished.
With Cummings, clarity in writing seemed to come when he was happiest, almost as if obscurity were a refuge from unwanted feeling. This particular letter has all the syntactic originality of a Cummings letter but none of the veil. “Myself seems to be quite on the rampage as usual,” he writes. “If keeping busy were synonymous with keeping happy, your humble servant would claim a palm or three.”
And Cummings the poet was certainly keeping busy in the summer and fall of 1926. Tulips & Chimneys had been out for three years, and its astonishing poems were still reverberating in the public consciousness as he embarked on more poems, more paintings, and a play. He followed it up with two more collections of poems, &(AND) and XLI Poems, in 1925 and another, Is 5, in 1926. Tulips & Chimneys, published when Cummings was a very young man and inspired by the huge relief of being free from a variety of prisons, including puritanical Cambridge and La Ferté-Macé in France, collects most of the poems for which Cummings is justly famous. “All in green went my love riding,” “In Just—,” “Buffalo Bill’s,” “I was sitting in mcsorley’s,” “the Cambridge ladies”: the book is a treasure trove of astonishing poems written by a young man who was still a gallant adventurer in a world of wonders. Great losses were about to change that world.
In the old days the drive from Cambridge to Silver Lake could be a long day’s trip, first north to Concord, New Hampshire, and then west over small local roads, leaving Lake Winnipesaukee to the north and turning north again toward the Ossipee range and the sharper peaks of the White Mountains, dominated by the rocky summit of Mount Chocorua at Silver Lake and Mount Washington in the distance. On November 2, 1926, Cummings’s parents were headed back to Joy Farm for a mid-autumn visit. The couple, both in their sixties and with undiminished physical energy, drove their elegant, air-cooled Franklin, which with its huge, shiny fenders, long engine block in front of the passenger seat, and small windshield was Edward Cummings’s latest automotive pride and joy.
They were eager to get to the house at Silver Lake. Problems that darkened the world in Cambridge—Edward Cummings’s rejection by his own church, the loss of Nancy—often seemed to dissipate as they headed north. It was a clear day as they left Irving Street and drove the 122 miles north. The air still smelled of autumn apples and crushed leaves. Soon the seasonal foliage, which had been reds and golds in Cambridge, turned darker. When they crossed into New Hampshire, they saw that winter had come to the north country—many of the trees were already bare. As they approached the Ossipee range on the eastern side of New Hampshire near the Maine border, it began to snow lightly, slow flakes twirling down from what had been a blue sky. Then it began to snow in earnest. It was very early in the year for snow even this far north, and the Cummingses weren’t well prepared.
Although the Franklin was a huge improvement over the Cummingses’ first car, which had run on a chain engine, driving in 1926 was still something of an adventure, especially in northern New Hampshire. The roads were dirt as often as they were paved, and the family had had many encounters with livestock and horse-pulled country traffic on their trips in a car from Cambridge to Silver Lake. Cars in the 1920s were still prone to unpredictable breakdowns and roads to unanticipated problems.
Rebecca was driving the Franklin, and as they climbed higher into the mountains, the snow increased. Snow began to build at the sides of the road as they passed Lake Wentworth and the small town of Wolfeboro. As the snow got heavier and visibility diminished, Edward Cummings insisted that Rebecca pull the car over to the side of the narrow road and stop so that he could clear the small, high windshield. The wipers were short and primitive, doing little more than pushing the snow back and forth. He cleared off the glass with his hands, but in a few minutes the view was again obscured as Rebecca drove on, partially blinded, to the metronomic rhythm of the wipers.
Ahead, there were railroad tracks embedded in the road, cutting across the pavement at a sharp angle and now hidden by the snow. Rebecca entered a straight part of the road where, in better weather, they always had their first glimpse of Mount Chocorua’s dramatic rocky summit. The tracks are still there, with no signal and no change in the road’s surface at a place where trees line the shoulder. It’s easy to see how Rebecca, concentrating on driving forward, failed to see what was bearing down on her from her right side. The huge Boston & Maine steam locomotive emerged from the trees as it took its last run of the day north to Intervale, New Hampshire, from Rochester on the spur line. The locomotive’s engineer saw the Franklin heading for the tracks through the snow, and desperately tried to brake the engine and the coal car with their ten sets of deadly iron wheels arrayed behind the cowcatcher. It was too late. The steam-belching engine loomed above the Franklin and then cut it in half. Edward Cummings was killed instantly. Rebecca Cummings was miraculously thrown clear.
By this time the train had screeched to a stop. “When two brakemen jumped from the halted train, they saw a woman standing—dazed but erect—beside a mangled machine,” Cummings wrote. “These men took my sixty six year old mother by the arms and tried to lead her toward a nearby farmhouse; but she threw them off, strode straight to my father’s body, and directed a group of scared spectators to cover him. When this had been done (and only then) she let them lead her away.” Rebecca Cummings was taken to the hospital in Wolfeboro, the small town that the couple had driven by earlier. The unseasonable snow had knocked out the electricity all over New Hampshire, even at the hospital, and Rebecca’s head wounds were stitched up by a country surgeon working by candlelight.
Cummings was having a festive dinner at his friend Morrie Werner’s apartment with his new lady love—the sexy, forthright Anne Barton—when his sister, Elizabeth, arrived at the door with the awful news. Brother and sister took the train north the next day to Rebecca’s bedside. “My sister and I entered a small darkened room in a country hospital,” Cummings recalled. “She was still alive … why the head doctor could not imagine. She wanted only one thing: to join the person she loved most. He was very near her, but she could not quite reach him. We spoke, and she recognized our voices. Gradually her own voice began to understand what its death would mean to these living children of hers; and very gradually a miracle happened. She decided to live.” Somehow the vision of her children seemed to give her a new strength, and over the next month she was moved to Boston’s Peter Bent Brigham Hospital and continued to recover.
Within a year Cummings had lost a daughter and a father. When Scofield Thayer was institutionalized later in 1926, it was just more of the same. Cummings threw himself into his work and into his ill-fated love affair with Barton, a woman who, even at the beginning of their relationship, didn’t know how to be faithful to one man.
Cummings and Anne Barton had been introduced by Werner, a new friend of his who had been at Columbia with Brown. A biographer who had worked for the New York Herald Tribune, Werner had written books on P. T. Barnum and Brigham Young. He was married to the classy writer Hazel Hawthorne.
A pretty girl from a poor family who had been molested by her father, Anne Barton had already been married to the glamorous, unstable New York artist Ralph Barton and had a daughter with him who was a year younger than Nancy. Cummings’s typically sardonic eulogy of her, written years later, is a concise portrait:
annie died the other day
never was there such a lay—
whom,among her dollies,dad
first(“don’t tell your mother”)had;
making annie slightly mad
but very wonderful in bed
—saints and satyrs,go your way
youths and maidens:let us pray.
In character and circumstances, Anne was the opposite of Elaine; she was wild and funny and always in need of money and so sexual that she could electrify all the men in any room she entered. Not at all like the precious, protected, princessy, wealthy woman who had turned on him so bitterly, Anne represented a kind of freedom Cummings admired and craved.
The problem with Anne Barton was that she also claimed that freedom for herself, in practice as well as in principle, and as she and Cummings became a couple she continued to see other men—especially a wealthy suitor who bought her pretty things and promised to settle money on her daughter, Diana. For all his talk of liberty, this bothered Cummings a lot.
About the same time he met Anne, Cummings got a letter from his friend Sibley Watson conferring on him the annual award for poetry given by the magazine that Watson now published—the Dial Award, which came with a check for two thousand dollars and an irresistible pedigree; Tom Eliot had gotten it in 1922 and Marianne Moore in 1924.
All in all, it had seemed like a great idea to Cummings to take Anne and Diana to Paris, with a side trip to Venice, using the Dial Award money to get her away from her other boyfriends, provide her with something that no amount of money could buy, and cement her loyalties to him. Of course, this grand and expensive experiment didn’t work; but Cummings came home with more work done on his play about betrayal. He immediately went up to Silver Lake to work while Anne stayed behind and returned to her flirtations. From this New Hampshire intensity developed the revolutionary play Him, which he continued writing in the fall when he got back to New York. Just as he finished the play, he heard about the accident in West Ossipee.
It was Marianne Moore who started Cummings on drama when she asked him to do a theater issue for The Dial. Although not an intimate friend of Cummings, Moore was one of his solid patrons and admirers. As editor of The Dial she had a hand in getting him the Dial Award as well as many assignments and publications. Moore, who would later win the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for her poems, was already a formidable figure in Cummings’s community. With her capes and her tricorne hats she looked as eccentric as she was; she was also a good friend of Pound’s and a subject for Lachaise. Hildegarde Watson remembers being spellbound when she finally met Moore at a concert. “As she quickly rose to meet me I noticed her eyes, shafts of meaning darting from under the broad brim of her black sailor hat, and the shining bands, just visible, of her red hair.”
Writing about the theater, Cummings came to believe that there was no contemporary theater, no new theater as there was new poetry, written by him and Pound and Stein and Lowell, and new art, painted by Picasso and Braque and Léger. The revolution of modernism had somehow skipped the theater. The real contemporary theater was outside the theater: it was the burlesque at the National Winter Garden, vaudeville, and the circus.
Cummings hoped that Him would be the first modernist drama. Using an open stage in which the actor’s fourth wall was the invisible space between the actors and the audience, he wrote a strange play about men and women—Him and Me—filled with surreal imagery and wild dramaturgical swings. In one scene, in which Him tries to seduce Me—a scene that follows a scene in which Me gets an abortion—Cummings seems to be influenced by Freud, or perhaps by some kind of wisdom heard or learned from his experiences with Elaine and Anne. “Think that I am not a bit the sort of person you think,” Me warns Him. “Think that you fell in love with someone you invented—someone who wasn’t me at all. Now you are trying to feel things; but that doesn’t work, because the nicest things happen by themselves.”
The play seems to be ahead of the playwright when it comes to understanding the complicated dance between men and women in love. Perpetually engaged to Anne Barton, a woman who seemed to love him passionately but to love many men passionately, Cummings once again found himself in a kind of emotional agony. This time, he went to see a friend and student of Sigmund Freud’s, Fritz (Siegfried) Wittels, an Austrian who had recently set up a psychoanalytic practice in New York. Wittels was a graduate of the erotic emphases of Freud and of fin-de-siècle Vienna. He had left one sex scandal behind him when he came to New York to lecture at the New School for Social Research, and he was on the second of three wives.
Although Cummings did not submit to a full psychoanalytic treatment, he went to Wittels as a patient beginning in 1928, just after Wittels arrived in Greenwich Village, and for the rest of Wittels’s life. Wittels immediately zeroed in on Cummings’s fears about his manhood. Was he still just a boy in a man’s body? Had he acted the part of the careless, powerless boy when it came to dealing with Elaine and the manly Frank MacDermot? Was Anne Barton unable to be faithful to him because of his own failings as a man? Was his slight stature part of the problem?
Cummings did not want to marry Anne for very good reasons; but Wittels seemed to persuade him that this was his boyish, irresponsible self and that a real man would want to bear the burdens of a wife and child—even a crazy wife and someone else’s child. Wittels made the decision to marry seem like a gateway to adulthood: now, in marrying Anne, Cummings would become a man. Perhaps this was a way of mourning his father; perhaps it was just a bad idea. “We knew from Freud that repressed sex instincts made men neurotic to such an extent that an entire era was poisoned,” Wittels wrote. “What we did not know then was that former puritans running wild would not help either.”
Cummings was one of these puritans running wild. He didn’t want to marry Anne, but Wittels and Anne together were hard to resist. Cummings and Anne were married on May 1, 1929, at the Unitarian Church of All Souls on Fourth Avenue and Twentieth Street, with Rebecca and Elizabeth Cummings in attendance. Both the bride and the groom were drunk. “They had been stewed for days,” wrote Edmund Wilson, who was there. “Cummings had taken several baths, one after the other; he had felt his arms and legs getting numb … Anne went to sleep and slept for days and couldn’t wake up … awful moment just before the ceremony … when, after everything had been most nonchalant and amiable, they all began snapping at one another.”
As Cummings’s personal life took another disastrous turn, seemingly disproving his belief that fortune does us neither good nor evil, his professional life continued to get respectful attention. As a man he was spiraling toward agonizing loneliness; as a writer he was never more popular or successful. Throughout his life the personal and the professional seemed strangely divided. When one went well, the other sank, and vice versa. Now, in the 1920s, it was his professional life that seemed on a trajectory to greatness. Partly because Cummings was produced by the Provincetown Playhouse Him had gotten a great deal of review attention. Cummings adored the jacket copy, which hailed the play’s “lucid madness, adventurous gayety and graceful irreverence.” Edmund Wilson gave it a good review in the New Republic.
Him inspired loyalty and despair. Its twenty-one scenes and seventy-two characters for a cast of 105 were thrown together with Cummings’s playful energy. Some critics said they couldn’t understand it. “Fatiguing, pretentious and empty,” said Alexander Woollcott. Others embraced it. At a time when the hit plays were things like The Trial of Mary Dugan and The Shannons of Broadway, Him was more than unusual and eccentric—it was almost completely fresh and different. Walter Winchell wrote a long, mixed review, but he did say something so memorably negative that it is still often quoted by people who do not remember its subject or its author—he wrote that watching Him was “every now and then like stepping on something extremely nasty in the dark.” Only through the support of James Light and Eleanor Fitzgerald, forward-thinking directors of the Provincetown Playhouse along with Eugene O’Neill, was the play produced at all. Thus Cummings’s career in the theater was launched, controversial and over budget as it was always to be.
After the production of Him, and his honeymoon in Europe with Anne—this time without his mother or Diana, who was parked in a Swiss boarding school, the babysitter of choice for upper-class children in the 1920s and ’30s—he and Anne moved to Paris. From there Cummings decided to try to get a visa for a trip to Russia.
Russia in the 1920s was a kind of antiauthoritarian promised land, especially for men and women who were fed up with American capitalism, commercialism, and venality. For many artists, the idea of a society in which competition was replaced by a benevolent state seemed genius. They heard all about it. Russia was the scene of a successful revolution on the part of the proletariat, and most artists identified with the proletariat. The idea that goods and services should be distributed according to need rather than according to, well, greed, was immensely appealing. The John Reed Clubs, named after Cummings’s former neighbor at Patchin Place, thrived among the New York City artists and writers who abhorred the money-worshipping culture in which they found themselves. Reed himself was a kind of hero—a Harvard hero to boot.
The Russian Revolution had overthrown the twin doxologies of religion and money—two things about which Cummings had complicated and passionate feelings. As the son of a minister he had rejected religion, and as a son of Harvard and the wealthy Cambridge neighborhood where he grew up he had rejected money. So in 1931, while he was living in Paris with Anne, Cummings decided that he would like to go and see for himself what the great and glorious revolution looked like on the ground. Friends had visited Russia and come home with glowing reports of this new world where creativity was rewarded and the humble were as looked after as the wealthy. Dos Passos had been there. Morrie Werner had as well. Cummings’s Paris friend Louis Aragon couldn’t say enough great things about this new model of government. For Cummings, who had based both his life and his work on the principle of revolution and the toppling of all authority, the Russian Revolution was fascinating and irresistible. One of his Russian friends urged him to go, saying, in a suspiciously Cummings-like way, “Spring is nowhere else.” In April of 1931, Cummings cabled his mother for money. He applied for a visa to travel to Moscow and Kiev. In May, carrying gifts and his typewriter alone and in high spirits, he boarded the train for Moscow.
Trouble started on this dream excursion as soon as the train crossed the border into Russia from Poland. There it was stopped and repeatedly searched by unsmiling men in uniform. This train ride, in a second-class carriage crowded with suddenly fearful passengers, became a centerpiece for Cummings’s very funny stories about his visit to Russia. Puffing and panting as if he were a steam engine, Cummings communicated to his listeners the sharp difference between the relatively benevolent Polish landscape and the terrified citizens and terrifying officials on the wrong side of the Russian border. “Inexorably has a magic wand been waved; miraculously did reality disintegrate; where am I? … in a world of Was—everything shoddy; everywhere dirt and cracked fingernails—guarded by 1 … soldier,” so Cummings described the change from Poland into Russia in Eimi, the memoir he wrote about his journey.
When the train finally pulled in to Moscow, Cummings somehow missed a connection with the man who was supposed to meet him at the station. He ended up at the very expensive Hotel Metropol, being shown around by exactly the kind of person he had spent his life avoiding—the Harvard Brahmin Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana. Dana appointed himself Cummings’s guide to this revolutionary new world—he became in Eimi’s satiric pages Cummings’s personal Virgil. Part Ancient Mariner, part propaganda machine, Dana drove Cummings nuts.
As the Hotel Metropol drained Cummings’s bank account, his guide exhausted his patience. Dana’s conversion to everything around them, including the abolishment of religious freedom and every other kind of freedom, did not sit well with Cummings. “The whole trouble with you,” Dana tells Cummings, who is trying to take a nap, at one point, “is that, like so many people who were brought up on religion, you can’t bear the idea of anything doing away with it.” Cummings can barely grunt a response, “What?” “Of Science doing away with religion,” Dana explains. Cummings is unresponsive as Dana harangues him and calls him trivial, childish, and cheap. They went to the theater and to the Writers’ Club, and Dana introduced him to other Americans. Dana was a seemingly mindless believer when it came to communism, and it took Cummings a while to notice that their conversations were often followed by the same unsmiling men in uniform, who turned out to be members of Stalin’s feared GPU, the forerunner of the KGB.
Cummings spent a little more than a month in Russia, visiting Kiev and leaving the country through Constantinople and Turkey. In the end he met wonderful people there: Joan London, the daughter of Jack London, and her husband; Lili Brik; the great director and actor Vsevolod Meyerhold, whose ideas about the theater were parallel to his own. Yet he found Russia more than disappointing. It wasn’t just that the people were terrified of the government—perhaps totalitarianism was worse than capitalism—or that Stalin’s purges were somehow in the air. Although he and Meyerhold seemed to speak freely, for instance, Meyerhold was arrested and tortured by Stalin’s police in 1939, and in 1940 he was executed for the crimes he had confessed to under torture.
Worse, for Cummings, the Communist propaganda machine seemed to have otherwise intelligent people in its thrall. They did not seem to see what he saw. Their hypocrisy was astounding and terrifying. In spite of the fear and the searches and the disappearances that were already going on before their eyes, men and women like Henry Dana continued to spout platitudes about the noble experiment of the Russian Revolution. The combination of the general fear and the specific mindlessness of those who chose to ignore it was anathema to Cummings. The insanity and the power sucking of the men who were leading Russia under Stalin in the late 1920s were later to be perfectly lampooned in George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Cummings saw through the sham of propaganda right away.
At the time of Cummings’s visit, Stalin was just beginning the first of his great purges, sweeps in which anyone who spoke against the government or who just happened to get in the way was sent off to the gulags of Siberia or executed in the Moscow jails. Cummings was in the shadow of one of the great waves of cruelty in history, and he felt it.
Cummings had been carried along by the leftist tendencies of his friends in Greenwich Village and Paris. Now he did a political about-face. Communism under Stalin scared and horrified him. He hated what it did, and he hated its effect on the people forced to go along with it. For the rest of his life he would take the Communist threat seriously because of the terror and disruption he had seen in the eyes of Stalin’s subjects. Communism had been an idea; now it became a devil. Later, when the rest of the world had changed its mind again, Cummings never forgot his trip to Russia, where he had seen for himself the price people can pay when their supposedly benevolent government goes out of control.
Cummings had left for Russia on May 10, 1931. By June 14 he was headed for New York, where his personal life was brewing the kind of disappointment on an intimate level that communism had turned out to be on a political level. Almost as soon as he left Paris, Anne discovered she was pregnant. Not just because he was traveling but because of Communist censorship, Cummings failed to get the letters she sent. She decided on an abortion and returned to New York to have the operation. In her hour of need, her husband was nowhere to be found; and so she turned to other friends, including the wealthy man who had been Cummings’s rival for her affections all along. By the time Cummings got back to New York with Diana, whom he had picked up in Switzerland, his second marriage was beginning to fall apart.
Now his marriage became a nightmare. Anne’s ex-husband, Ralph Barton, Diana’s father, had killed himself on May 19, and the emotional fallout as she grieved for a man she had left was more than Cummings could handle. In retrospect, it seems clear that Anne was an alcoholic. At the same time, on the death of Edward Cummings, Rebecca Cummings had deeded Joy Farm to her son and, in an ill-advised fit of generosity, his wife. Rebecca loved children, and perhaps she had been moved by Diana’s enjoyment of the country. Now, because of this legacy, Anne started threatening to take Joy Farm. She turned to other men. She got drunk and embarrassed Cummings in front of his friends, complaining that his penis was inadequate and bragging about men who were better lovers.
But Anne’s infidelity would be her own undoing and Cummings’s salvation when it came to the ownership of Joy Farm and his legal freedom. By the end of 1931, she had another steady lover, an assertive dental surgeon who, some thought, beat her. Soon she was pregnant with her lover’s child. In June she went to Mexico for a divorce decree. She was still unwilling to part with her share of Joy Farm, and both she and Cummings hired lawyers. Negotiations ensued.
Cummings threatened to have the Mexican divorce nullified. After his first marriage, he had lost his innocence, his friend and patron Scofield Thayer, and his daily connection to his daughter. After his second marriage he balked at losing the place in the world where he felt most at home.
In May of 1932, Cummings got word that his friend Hart Crane had died. He had jumped overboard from a ship on the way home from Mexico, apparently a suicide.