Eimi, Cummings’s second memoir, begins on Sunday, May 10, 1931, when he boards the train from Paris for Russia through Poland, and it ends 443 pages later on Sunday, June 14, when, again on a train, he crosses from Switzerland back into France. The title, Greek for “I am,” is an assertion of identity provoked by Cummings’s month-long visit.
After his visit to Russia in 1921, a decade earlier, journalist Lincoln Steffens famously exclaimed, “I have been over into the future, and it works.” Many of Cummings’s friends and colleagues agreed. But a July 1931 interview with a reporter from the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune, just after he returned from Russia, shows the first hints of a controversial, surprising reaction to Cummings’s own journey to Russia. His opinion of what was happening there would sharpen and get angrier over time as the situation under Stalin got worse.
The Russians, Cummings explained to Tribune reporter Don Brown, were very scared and very serious. Cummings liked the Russians, but he did not like Russia and, more amazingly, he did not like communism. “Are the Russian people happy? They struck me like this: they just love to suffer and they’re suffering like hell, so they must be happy. You know Dostoevski … People talk about the strain and tension of life in the United States. It is nothing to that in Moscow,” he said. “If you said ‘boo’ to some of these people they might drop dead … they are in a particularly nervous condition.”
“Cummings went to the Soviet Union with his eyes open and without an agenda,” writes Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno. “But his experiences there, in which he witnessed first-hand the privation and sadness of the Stalinist state, certainly helped him develop an agenda.”
By the time he sat down to write Eimi, using his Russian journals as a template, Cummings had become furious about the condition of Russia and what he saw as the failure of the great Communist idea. His natural perversity had added heat to his observations. Later he referred to Russia as the “subhuman communist superstate, where men are shadows & women are nonmen. This unworld is Hell.”
Eimi describes a terrifying, hellish place where frightened people trudge along in their desperate, monotonous ruts, preyed upon by political tourists come to see the Great Experiment and kept in line by the menacing men of the GPU, who know everything about everyone. Perhaps as a relief from this oppression, there is a great deal of drinking in the Eimi story, even for Cummings, who was never stingy or reluctant when it came time to drink or smoke. Because of his questioning attitude and because he immediately started taking long, aimless walks in Moscow, the GPU seems to have concluded that Cummings was a spy. He was followed almost everywhere he went, which probably did not improve his impression of the place.
He also decided to write in a stream-of-consciousness style with experimental words and a completely original syntax like that of the better-known James Joyce’s Ulysses. Eimi has been published as a novel and as a memoir, but whether he was writing nonfiction or fiction, Cummings remained at heart a poet and a visual artist. Like many of his poems, Eimi has a pattern of words that varies completely from page to page to suit the content. As a poet and painter, Cummings was continually trying to merge the two forms of creativity. His account of his first dinner with Joan London and her husband, for instance, is a typical descriptive sentence from the book. “next: in the very diningroom where vodkaful romp romped while the alarmed flowerbuyer fluttered and ex-sulked vodkaless, a pompously incoherent conversation fetters 9 tensely untogether—e.g. to my right, a ‘Russian actor’ who doesn’t speak anything else.”
Cummings is more famous for style than for substance. Even today, he is better known for abjuring uppercase letters than for his poems or books. Everyone makes the same joke about him. Eimi is a good example of Cummings’s prose, which, with its pell-mell words and images and reinvented grammar, rewards careful study but is not easy to read. “He avoids the cliché first by avoiding the whole accepted modus of English,” his friend William Carlos Williams wrote about Cummings’s prose style. “He does it, not to be ‘popular,’ God knows, nor to sell anything, but to lay bare the actual experience … He does it to reveal, to disclose, to free a man from habit. Habit is our continual enemy as artists and as men.”
The book was published first as a novel—editors at Covici, Friede, which had published Cummings’s two previous books, thought it worked best as a novel. Cummings created many different characters—versions of himself—as narrators, using a kind of pidgin Russian to name them: Kemminkz, Peesahtel (a scan of the Russian word for writer), Hoodozhnik (artist), and the “heroless” hero. Also, of course, he writes as the ubiquitous Cummings i. “i is small, usually inconspicuous, but nimble and resilient and completely committed to its liberty,” writes Madison Smartt Bell. “It runs around inside the wainscots of Soviet Russia like the mouse in a Tom and Jerry cartoon.”
Loosely based on Dante’s visit to the underworld—Cummings calls Russia the “unworld”—the story features the silly, waspy Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana as the Virgil of the Metropol Hotel. A friendlier guide for Cummings was Joan London, who in Eimi becomes the author’s Beatrice.
In New York City in the 1920s, in Cummings’s community, there was a lot of dreaming about the beauties of Lenin’s new government and the glorious revolution on the other side of the world. American capitalism seemed to be failing, especially after the stock-market crash of 1929. The great American ideal of freedom seemed to exist only for the rich, while working-class people and the poor were stranded in a backwater of democracy where scarcity and deprivation were the rule. With the wealthy, oblivious Herbert Hoover as president—a president who seemed to purposefully fail to understand what was happening—our country seemed to be sailing over the edge of the civilized world.
In Communist Russia, on the other hand, authority had been overthrown, and the dream of a workers’ government had been realized. Writers like Malcolm Cowley, Sherwood Anderson, Alfred Kazin, and even Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald eagerly embraced the idea that Russia had succeeded where America had failed.
Perhaps Cummings was just too late. By 1931, things had begun to turn sour in Russia. Lenin had died in 1924, and the resulting power struggle ended with Joseph Stalin, already paranoid when he ascended in 1928. Trotsky had been exiled a year later. The dream of the Soviet Union was nine years old, and Cummings visited it at the beginning of its bloody, criminal end. No one was better suited to pick up on the fact that the government by the people had turned into a government against the people. Hoover was a bad president, but he was a bad president in the context of a democratic system that worked.
The year 1931 was a fascinating moment in world history, a moment when democracy and socialism passed each other, going in two different directions—one toward success and the other toward failure. When Eimi was first published, Cummings’s account of Russia was shocking and deeply disturbing to his own friends and community in Greenwich Village, where many people still needed to believe that the Russian ideal was working. He lost friends, and people crossed the street to avoid him. Malcolm Cowley and Edmund Wilson were horrified at what seemed to them, accurately, to be a sudden veering into right-wing conservatism on the part of their erstwhile left-wing drinking buddy. George Jean Nathan called Eimi the worst book of the month. The poet Karl Shapiro wrote that it was “a four hundred page garland of bad fruit thrown at the Soviet Union, [which] missed the mark entirely.” Other reviewers complained about the way the book was written. “If only Cummings would condescend to let his readers read him,” wrote Lewis Gannett in the Herald Tribune.
Cummings’s disgust for communism wasn’t restricted to the pages of Eimi. In one poem he decried both the Russians’ fear and their lack of hygiene:
kumrads die because they’re told)
kumrads die before they’re old
(kumrads aren’t afraid to die
kumrads don’t
and kumrads won’t
believe in life)and death knows whie
(all good kumrads you can tell
by their altruistic smell
moscow pipes good kumrads dance)
kumrads enjoy
s.freud knows whoy
the hope that you may mess your pance
of quite unmitigated hate
(travelling in a futile groove
god knows why)
and so do i
(because they are afraid to love
Having little money had never bothered Cummings—in fact, it seemed to delight him. Cummings was thrilled at being able to act the part of a Yankee aristocrat who lived on crumbs and ate humble fare off ancestral china. He had grown up in a world where money didn’t matter, and he embraced the shabby eccentricity of intellectual Cambridge where professors were too wrapped up in the world of ideas to care if their clothes were shabby or their roofs leaked.
Poverty was unbearable for Anne. She certainly did not have in mind riding out the Great Depression with a penniless artist who wasn’t even interested in having a job. All around her, people seemed to have lost everything they had. Edmund Wilson was living in a furnished room. Cummings’s friend Jim Light was so poor he slept on a doctor’s operating table. Her own wealthy lover—the man who had caused Cummings so much jealous pain—had also lost his money. Where could she turn for security? By October she was having an affair with a dentist who, Cummings heard, regularly hit her. Soon she was pregnant, by the dentist. His second marriage was over.
Then, in the spring of 1932, an extraordinary thing happened. Anne had left him, and of course he was interested in meeting women. Cummings loved women. On June 23, 1932, Jim and Patti Light—he had directed Him at the Provincetown Playhouse—took him backstage after the performance of a play in which another friend of theirs, Marion Morehouse, had a small part. Marion was a woman with a murky past who had come to New York in the 1920s to make it as an actress, but who instead had already had phenomenal success as a model. Like Cummings, she adored the theater and longed to be part of it; also like Cummings, she didn’t think much of the clothing industry that had become her career. The four went to dinner at Felix’s restaurant. “As soon as you saw her,” Cummings wrote much later in his journals, “something in yourself told you, ‘she’s too tall for me.’ ”
Indeed, the gorgeous young actress was twelve years younger than the thirty-seven-year-old Cummings and almost six feet tall. Long-legged, with huge eyes and a pretty face, she was sexually generous—a trait that would delight and torture Cummings in the years to come—and charmed by Cummings’s animation, humor, and lack of pretension. Edmund Wilson found her stagy and “not spontaneous,” but Cummings had enough spontaneity for the two of them.
Marion was not interested in reading or in the arts, except for the theater—and she was not interested in the intellectual part of the theater, either. She had probably not graduated from high school. She was not an intellectual, she was averse to becoming one, and she didn’t like Cummings when he launched into his brilliant monologues—monologues that featured two Harvard degrees and one of the best minds of his generation. “During one of your early meals with her in a little wop speakeasy which she knew of, you were soaring along in your natural way—& she looked at you imploringly; as if to say ‘please! Don’t be intellectual with me: I’m just a woman!’ ” he wrote later. “whereupon you came down to earth … &have been there ever since.”
Yet Marion was beautiful—officially, famously beautiful—and she was also obliging and charmed. In fact, his first night with Marion was the beginning of thirty years of love and friendship between them—the kind of love and friendship that had previously been impossible for him. Cummings was always a man who made lemonade out of lemons—writing about his problems with women, he described the way in which “the curse becomes a blessing, the disappearance an emergence, the agonizing departure an ecstatic arrival.” Still, his history with women was as much a failure as it could possibly be, with its two failed marriages and its lost daughter, Nancy.
Cummings was an angry man, an anger that became more of an irritation with the entire world when he drank and as he aged. The anger was a problem with the women he had picked. Yet the story of his life is the story of a man who reaped the benefits of anger. He was able to turn defiance into creative force and to express for all of us his delight in the world and his fury at the world and the men and women in it.
Cummings’s story, as his biographers tell it and as he told it, is hard to understand in our modern context. He had two of the most disastrous marriages imaginable—marriages that featured adultery, lies, deceit, the loss of a child, and constant heartbreak. The psychological wisdom of the twenty-first century is that we carry our problems within ourselves. Somehow, either Cummings just met the right person when he met Marion, or he had changed. He had been seeing a psychoanalyst, Fritz Wittels; he was older. Perhaps he was also wiser.
Marion was a very different woman from Elaine or Anne. She was a self-invention. Her story of being born in South Bend, Indiana, to Roman Catholic parents who moved to Hartford, Connecticut, where she was educated at a school called St. Ann’s, turns out not to be true. Wherever she came from, she arrived in New York hoping to make it as an actress. Marion was an inspired chameleon. As Edward Steichen pointed out, when she put on a gown or a riding habit, she became the woman who would wear those clothes.
With Cummings, too, she was a chameleon. Far more successful on her own than either of his other wives, she was at the same time less stubbornly set in her identity. She was also less desperate. Elaine had been an aristocratic princess who had been rejected by her prince and was hungry for affection; Anne had been the mistress of a man who wouldn’t marry her. Marion was fine without Cummings, and she decided sometime in that night at Felix’s that she would also be fine with him. Marion brought him back to earth, and he found that earth had its benefits.
With Marion, Cummings became less pretentious and more appreciative of simpler pleasures—food, friends, and sex. Marion didn’t have children, and this gave Cummings plenty of space in the relationship to be the mischievous boy he sometimes seemed to be. Of course, with his quicksilver mind, he also saw the problems with this, which eventually unfolded as the two of them grew old together. Cummings already had a child; he did not want another, not even with Marion. “When you refused to let her have a child (unless she ‘do her share’ in supporting it),” he wrote enigmatically, “you sealed your own doom: making yourself her child, her baby—and herself your all-protecting mother.” In this mood, Cummings even saw Marion’s learning to cook his favorite dishes as a manipulative ploy to control him.
Yet, by the time he met Marion, Cummings had also changed. His marriage to Anne had been precipitated by a realization he had had on Fritz Wittels’s couch—that it was time for him to stop being a boy and start being a man. With his complicated relationship to authority and the energy he got from being a rebel, this shift from boyhood to manhood was not as simple as it had seemed. His marriage to Anne Barton seemed a high price to pay for manhood. Marion didn’t make demands the way Anne had, and she didn’t cheat on him, either—at first.
Another difference between Marion and Anne and Elaine was that Cummings specifically chose to be with Marion. She was available and he courted her and won her. Elaine, on the other hand, had found him desperately in love with her and led him into their sexually unsatisfying affair. Anne, too, had needed someone and chosen him. His courtship of Marion, with flowers and love notes and drawings of elephants, was tender and two-sided. Their connection was less about neediness and more about affection; their love was free to grow and blossom.
And Marion provoked some of Cummings’s most beautiful and intelligent love poems, including one sonnet that is almost a paraphrase of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116, “Let me not to the marriage of true minds / admit impediments.”
love’s function is to fabricate unknownness
(known being wishless;but love,all of wishing)
though life’s lived wrongsideout,sameness chokes oneness
truth is confused with fact,fish boast of fishing
and men are caught by worms(love may not care
if time totters,light droops,all measures bend
nor marvel if a thought should weigh a star
—dreads dying least;and less,that death should end)
how lucky lovers are(whose selves abide
under whatever shall discovered be)
whose ignorant each breathing dares to hide
more than most fabulous wisdom fears to see
(who laugh and cry)who dream, create and kill
while the whole moves;and every part stands still:
Cummings’s mother, Rebecca, having successively loved and cared for Elaine and Nancy and Anne and Diana, was now more than willing to love Marion. The difference was that Marion, not bedeviled by her own needs and unmet desires, loved Rebecca back with a warmth and genuine feeling that never turned to jealousy or anything like it. Marion played well with others. Marion didn’t complain that Cummings had too little money, as Anne had complained, or that he didn’t love her enough, as Elaine had. She seemed to have no complaints. So although in one way Cummings had changed through his treatment with Wittels and through the process of aging—he was approaching forty—and perhaps through the process of heartbreak, he had also finally met the right woman, a woman who could give him the space to work and the warmth he needed; a woman he was proud to be with.
That autumn, Cummings had applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship. Henry Allen Moe, the principal administrator of the Foundation, was an admirer. Cummings wasted no words on his application, writing that he would produce “a book of poems.” His plan was that when he got the money, $1,500, in the spring, he would take Marion to Paris on a trip they had both longed for.
Marion had never been abroad; the closest she had come was seeing friends off on the glamorous, sleek ocean liners docked at the piers on the west side of Manhattan. She had always longed to travel. A week after Cummings officially got the award, he and Marion were headed for France. In Paris they were able to sublet near the Porte d’Orléans. Marion learned to cook, and Cummings bought their wine. When Marion dropped by the offices of French Vogue just to say hello, her looks caused a small sensation. Soon she became the talk of the Paris fashion world and the favorite model of the glamorous photographer Baron George Hoyningen-Huene. Marion’s Paris career brought in extra money and an invitation to the baron’s villa in Tunisia.
Cummings was always delighted by Marion’s success, both when she worked as a model and later when she became a photographer herself. In fact, he was disappointed by her inability to succeed as an actress. This was part of his boyishness, an attractive aspect of his sometimes androgynous nature. Marion’s successes never threatened him. He was not brittle and macho and insistent on some form of masculinity. He was thrilled to have the most beautiful woman in the world on his arm and thrilled to have a playmate who brought her own connections and talents to the table. Marion did not care about literature, but she was an adoring and appreciative student when it came to all things Paris.
For Cummings, physical size had an almost metaphorical resonance. He had been teased for his smallness and had felt overwhelmed by his father’s great, masculine bulk. He had small, delicate hands and feet. If Elaine’s ephemeral, birdlike beauty had made him feel like a big man, Marion’s masculine lankiness sometimes bothered him. Still, he was falling in love with a woman who literally leaned on him whenever she took his arm, because of her physical height. “The physical act is an expression of a spiritual attitude,” Cummings worried, although Marion’s ambition to be an actress made him think she would not be leaning on him emotionally as Elaine and Anne had.
He emerged from his marriage to Elaine feeling inadequate sexually as well as in every other way. He was too slight, too short, too indecisive. As a result, he had lost his wife and daughter. Being with Marion, a large-boned gazelle of a woman who sometimes seemed to tower over him—so much so that it disturbed Ben La Farge years later—was a way to challenge that old idea of himself. There was a sweetness to Marion, a willingness to love that he had never experienced before in a sexual partner. Her height seemed to vanish as the two became closer. The two of them together shattered the conventional image of a couple just because of their size, and although he had had his doubts about this, Cummings came to relish it.
Age also worked in their favor. Cummings was almost forty, a man with a great deal of success behind him and a lot of experience. It was easy for him to have a relaxed authority with the twenty-seven-year-old Marion, the kind of authority that transcends the problems of masculine and feminine. Cummings was already a distinguished and celebrated artist, and Marion, for all her accomplishments, was still a girl.
The two set up housekeeping in Paris and were happy. They entertained the Pounds and anyone else they could find. Marion cooked and modeled; Cummings wrote and painted. “Marion’s my new pride and joy: as you’ve probably guessed,” he wrote his mother from Paris almost a year after he and Marion met. “Coming to a new language or world she immediately took it by storm … The Vogue people are doting on her slightest whim, creeping the boulevards on hands and knees to buy her orangejuice (with just the necessary goût of champagne) etc—as for Baron Huene, photographer de luxe, he wants us to visit him in Africa whenever he can stop snapping ‘the most beautiful woman and the most poised in Paris.’ A nice fellow, by the way.”
Paris during the twenties and early thirties was the center of the New York literary world. Although Ernest Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley, had already drunk themselves out of their marriage and Hemingway had married the second of his four wives and decamped for the United States, many of New York’s most important artists and patrons were still there. Lincoln Kirstein was also in Paris that summer, and when Cummings lost his passport and letter of credit after a particularly wild evening, which involved a great deal of drinking and also some dancing on the tops of cars, Kirstein lent him money.
Kirstein is an odd figure hovering in the background of the twentieth century and its creative community. Born wealthy, he cultivated eccentricity and apparently worshipped the ability to make art. While still an undergraduate at Harvard he had started a new magazine, The Hound and Horn, in which Cummings and almost everyone else published. Later he was a founder with George Balanchine of the New York City Ballet and one of the founders of the Museum of Modern Art. Already fascinated by dance, Kirstein asked Cummings if he wanted to write a ballet. Marion suggested a ballet of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Kirstein wrote the check.
Elaine, now officially Mrs. Frank MacDermot, also happened to be in Paris that summer of 1933—and as usual she wanted something from Cummings. MacDermot had decided to run for a seat in the Irish parliament. He hoped to represent County Roscommon. Doing this required him to have been married in the Roman Catholic Church. Elaine, twice divorced, could only be married in the church if both of her previous marriages were officially annulled.
An annulment, unlike a divorce, is a document stating that the marriage in question never happened. The annulment cites circumstances that invalidated the marriage from the beginning. If the marriage is never sexually consummated, for instance, it can be annulled—this is how Henry VIII wangled a legal marriage to his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, formerly his brother’s wife, from the Church of Rome—something he was unable to do for his subsequent marriages. If one or the other party to the marriage was mentally ill at the time, it can be argued that the marriage never happened; if one of them was unfit to decide that they should be married, it could be decreed by the church that they had never really been married even if there were children involved.
Annulment is a medieval concept that the modern church still embraces. Elaine had already managed her annulment from her marriage to Thayer by testifying that he was mentally unstable and therefore unable to make the decision to marry. Ipso facto they had never “really” been married in the eyes of the church. Annulling her marriage to Cummings was a more difficult problem. Elaine’s argument was that since she and Cummings had verbally agreed to let each other out of the marriage if that was what either of them desired, they had never really had a marriage. It was a thread of an idea, but apparently she was desperate to please and accommodate her new husband. She had even found a Parisian priest who was willing to facilitate the annulment if Cummings would meet with him.
But Cummings wasn’t interested in obliging Elaine, the woman who, after all, had heartlessly severed his connection to his only child. He refused to answer her messages. What did he want with her now? She coaxed and pressured and wheedled, using their mutual friends. Finally she caught up with him, running after him on the street and calling his name. Always the gentleman, he agreed to meet with her.
He brought Marion to their lunch at a small restaurant in the Rue de l’Echelle, inwardly crowing that he was with a woman so beautiful and loving that Elaine could eat her heart out. But it was Cummings whose heart had been continuously eaten out by the loss of his daughter. As always, Elaine had the upper hand. She didn’t care that Cummings had moved on to taller and more beautiful things. She wanted what she wanted. Cummings once again seemed helpless in front of her onslaught. At least he got his first news of Nancy, who was now thirteen, in seven years. She was at school in Bexhill in England, Elaine said. But when Cummings said he would like to meet MacDermot as a way of seeing Nancy, Elaine burst into tears.
So for a minute or two, Cummings had the upper hand. Elaine and Frank needed something from him, and he needed something from them—visitation with his daughter for himself and his mother. But once again, in this negotiation, Cummings backed away from winning. Was it that his newfound happiness with Marion made the painful disconnection from Nancy seem best left in the past? What did Marion think about Nancy? Cummings had made it clear to her that he wasn’t willing to have more children, although at that point she certainly had plenty of time before making such an important decision. She was more beautiful than Elaine and younger than Elaine and a million times more loving than Elaine, but Elaine would always be the mother of Estlin’s child. Cummings had drafted a telegram to Elaine saying there would be no annulment unless there was something definite about Nancy. Elaine appeared to relent, and Cummings wrote to MacDermot, who gave a friendly but noncommittal reply.
Cummings dutifully did his part. Still a Yankee at heart, he couldn’t quite believe that there were people—the MacDermots, for instance—who could make promises and then break them. He seemed stunned, like prey before a strike, that Elaine could be so charming and so agreeable and then seem to forget what she had promised altogether as soon as she got what she wanted. Cummings visited the priest with Elaine and agreed that the marriage had always been provisional. Then Elaine, Marion, Cummings, and MacDermot all went out to dinner.
But no arrangements were made for Cummings to see his daughter. Rebecca Cummings, writing that she was delighted to hear that her son was happy to be in Paris with Marion, then wistfully added: “I only wish I might have a photograph of Nancy & know whether she has ever received my birthday gifts.” The upshot of all this was pathetic. Once again Cummings’s way of engaging with the world was cooperative and ineffectual—the opposite of his father’s. Instead of seeing Nancy and getting to know her again, Cummings settled reluctantly for a few snapshots finally sent to his mother, and a few schoolgirl thank-you notes for gifts without any acknowledgment of the importance of the giver. Was this what he really wanted? Had the idea of Nancy become part of a painful past, while the present was all the adored Marion? At any rate, it’s what he got.
By the end of the summer Marion and Cummings had accepted Hoyningen-Huene’s offer and were ensconced in a Moorish palace by the sea. “There in Africa were flamingoes and fairies and burros with long warm strong thonglike ears and even an occasional scorpion,” Cummings wrote to Hildegarde Watson. “Born under Libra, Estlin did not see the scorpion; which disappeared into a double you sea. Marion saw it, but she was not afraid and so their existence passed like a day in the night. Effrica …”
After this amazing year together, the couple left Tunisia for Italy—Estlin wanted Marion to see the Sistine Chapel—and finally in December sailed for New York on the Bremen. Their time abroad cemented the two as a couple, and they would be together for the rest of their lives—they always considered each other, wept and raged at each other’s misfortunes, and supported each other through the many difficulties ahead. Later in their life together, as Cummings and then Marion became seriously ill, they took turns taking care of each other. As far as women were concerned, Cummings had found his soul mate. Cummings-and-Marion became a one-word way of describing them. Within a year of their return from Europe, Marion had found a small apartment to rent on the ground floor of 4 Patchin Place, downstairs from Cummings’s studio.