Cummings’s mother, Rebecca, was a Massachusetts Yankee in the best sense of the word; she was a descendant of the Pilgrims who believed in the twin Yankee gods of reform and good sense. She was, as Cummings wrote, “the genuine 101% New Englander!” For him she was a kind of hero, a woman who based her life on the innate goodness of human nature in general and on her son’s talents in particular.
In the last years of her life, she lived with Cummings’s sister, Elizabeth Cummings Qualey, and her husband, Carlton Qualey, an itinerant history professor who studied Norwegian-American communities, and their two children, John and Mary, whom she adored. It was for those children that Elizabeth Qualey wrote her memoir of growing up in Cambridge at the turn of the century, When I Was a Little Girl. Although the Qualey family moved around—from New York, where Qualey taught at Columbia, to Pennsylvania, where he taught at Swarthmore, to Michigan, where he taught at the University of Michigan—Rebecca Cummings seemed to adjust to being the peripatetic old person in their academic entourage. In the summer of 1946, on a visit to his sister’s household, Cummings saw his mother for the last time.
Both Cummings parents had always used the romantic notion of the moon in the night sky all over the world as a means of communicating with each other and with their children. For instance, when Cummings was in prison at La Ferté-Macé during World War I—the three months of incarceration that would become The Enormous Room—his father wrote to him telling him to look at the moon through the prison windows at night. His father, standing outdoors at 104 Irving Street in Cambridge on the other side of the world, would also look at the moon, and in some way the two men would connect. Now Cummings would look at the moon and think of his mother far away. As Rebecca’s influence waned, as she eventually turned the Cummings house on Irving Street over to Edward Cummings’s sister Jane, Marion’s influence waxed.
Always honest in his own journals, after his last visit with his mother Cummings wrote that he was shocked by her appearance. How could this old, deaf person be the mythical being who was his mother? His last letter to her, in January 1947, tells a funny story passed on by his friend Cyril Connolly, the British editor of Horizon. When interviewed on American radio and asked about his religion, Connolly had answered that his religion was Cummingsism. The interviewer was horrified and asked, “Don’t you know he is a traitor?” When Connolly pointed out that she had confused Cummings with Pound, the interviewer shrugged: “It was one of those three—Eliot or Pound or Cummings.” Rebecca Cummings was always her son’s best and most appreciative audience.
Her death that same month released him into remembering her dearness and her unconditional love. “an extraordinary human being, someone gifted with strictly indomitable courage, died some days ago,” he wrote to his friend Hildegarde Watson. “she was eighty-seven, very deaf and partially paralyzed; young of heart and whole of spirit.” In her will, Rebecca left her eyes to be given to the blind.
Rebecca Cummings, a woman who delighted in children, had not seen her granddaughter Nancy in more than twenty years, but her death in 1947, a year in which the adult Nancy was closer geographically than she could have imagined, seems to be part of the puzzle of the three most important women in Cummings’s life: Rebecca Clarke Cummings, Nancy Thayer Cummings Roosevelt, and Marion Morehouse.
While Cummings had been succeeding as a poet and plunging into career doldrums and floating out again, while he had been marrying and divorcing and finally finding and making a home with Marion, while he had been visiting Paris and befriending Ezra Pound and winning prizes for his work, in another part of the world his daughter, Nancy, had been living the pampered but lonely childhood of an expat daughter whose mother was married to an Irish politician. Her life got even worse when her mother had a son—Frank MacDermot’s son—when Nancy was eleven. Raised by governesses as she went from country to country with her mother and the tyrannical MacDermot, “Nancy was early treated as a doll,” writes Richard Kennedy, “something to dress up and show off to guests.” In a poem titled “deb delights, London 1938,” the eighteen-year-old Nancy wrote in an echo of the father she didn’t know about:
There is a very rich disgust in this
in going dancing nightly at eighteen
because eighteen
and the system is corrupt which is
generally recognized which changes nothing;
give me back my ignorance
it was never bliss but better far
than this contemptuous cacophony.
There was plenty of money—Elaine’s inheritance—but very little love or affection. There was no honesty between Nancy and her mother. Enrolled in a series of boarding schools, Nancy came to despise her stepfather, and he and her mother did everything they could to erase her childhood memories of another family.
The puny plans of human beings, especially those who hope to obscure the truth, look especially puny in Nancy’s story. An artistic girl from the beginning, she started painting and was drawn to impressionism during her early school years. Her mother told her to stop, because painting was too messy. Was Elaine also afraid that Nancy’s heritage as the daughter of a painter was going to assert itself? Nancy then started reading and writing poetry—poetry almost spookily like that of her father on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.
During World War II, Elaine and Frank MacDermot and Nancy headed for England to enroll in Oxford. In May of 1940, the hawkish Winston Churchill became prime minister of England, replacing the discredited Neville Chamberlain. As Germany invaded Belgium, the German army began to push British and French troops west, and at the end of May the British staged a full-scale evacuation from Dunkirk. On June 4, Prime Minister Churchill famously told his embattled countrymen: “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets … we shall never surrender.”
Nancy traveled to Dublin to see her mother that June, only to find that she could not return to England—the borders had been closed because of the war. Faced with staying in Ireland with the MacDermots or heading west for the unknown—the United States, where she could live with Elaine’s sister Alexis—Nancy chose the unknown. In spite of the danger of an Atlantic crossing at a time when German U-boats were sinking ships at will, Nancy was determined to leave. She sailed in June 1940 on the USS United States from Galway, the last passenger ship to leave for New York from Great Britain during the war.
Appalled and upset at her daughter’s choice, and seemingly terrified at what might happen to her in New York City, Elaine repeatedly warned Nancy against her “father”—Scofield Thayer. For reasons of her own, even twenty years later, she did everything she could to conceal the truth. Sometimes she had told Nancy that her father was dead. Now she confessed that he was alive in New York, but said that Nancy should avoid him because he had had a serious mental breakdown. Thayer had put money in trust for Nancy, and the prospect of Nancy meeting with Thayer’s lawyer may have disturbed Elaine, although the lawyer would certainly not have revealed the kind of personal details Nancy hungered for. Perhaps she hoped that by setting up a “father” whom she was not supposed to see, Elaine would prevent her daughter from finding her actual father.
Nancy was already a passionate poet and a painter in spite of her mother’s opposition. She was her father’s daughter. “If, as has been asserted, imagination is the beginning of art, surely dreams are in the beginning of imagination or imagery; where then is the source of dreams, and which came first, the image or the experience,” she wrote in Charon’s Daughter, her collection of poetry and memoir.
Cummings’s connection to his only child is one of the most illuminating, heartbreaking, and startling passages in his life. It is worth a book on its own. Its outlines, of a beloved and lost child who is finally restored through the whimsical forgiveness of the gods—or whatever power arranges our world—is the outline of a metaphor, a myth, a story from a storyteller. Was there an evil fairy presiding on the night of Nancy’s conception, in a bed paid for by another man with a woman married to another man? Was Nancy under a spell that was finally, belatedly, broken?
When Nancy was a child, Cummings was still a young man. He would always be famous for his affinity to children, for his own childishness, for his inability to grow up and his contempt for the structures and hierarchies of the so-called adult world. When it came to Nancy, Cummings behaved in an admirably adult way, although he was clearly under tremendous mental stress. Yet, for all of his good intentions—he legally adopted her and married her mother—his connection to her went terribly wrong, pushed by forces he could not control. The abduction of a child—and that’s what Frank and Elaine MacDermot did, whatever prettier names they may have called it—is a great crime. It damages all concerned, and it certainly did in this case.
Fathers and daughters have bonds that no one else can understand. The unseen forces that drew a young girl raised in Ireland and Europe inexorably toward a shabby apartment in a tenement mews off Tenth Street in Greenwich Village, first guiding her toward a remote part of New Hampshire’s Ossipee mountain range, seems just too fantastic to be coincidence. But whether it was fate or some kind of astonishing series of events coming together, the young Nancy Thayer—she refused to take the name MacDermot—was headed for a destiny that would change her world.
In New York City, living with her aunt Alexis, Nancy looked for work. Multilingual and as skilled with language as her father was, she found work as a translator, and she also trained in Morse Code and earned a radio operator’s license. Eventually she found a job as a typist at an agency called Your Secretary Incorporated. She kept painting and writing poetry:
To the whimsical metallic moods
of drawing-rooms that face the park in a hush of green and
silver
dusk is a delicate wrinkle over-
folded until
fills spills into the room fantastic power
of carved and clotted colour;
the green-and-silver sentence is embroidered with laughter
we have fashioned a velvet contented virtue
against the tangled dark.
Your Secretary Incorporated was a wartime agency run by Mrs. Kermit Roosevelt, the former society beauty Belle Willard, an extraordinary woman with a glamorous and tangled history of her own. Her husband, a great explorer who had famously traveled in the Amazon basin with his father, Theodore Roosevelt, and discovered its source at the River of Doubt, had served in the British army during World War I, enlisting even before there was American involvement.
By all accounts, Kermit Roosevelt was a hero. He had saved his father’s life while they were stranded on the Amazon, refusing to let the older man be left behind and carrying him for miles through the dense jungle. He was handsome and distinguished and brave, but as he got older he also suffered from depression and alcoholism. By 1943, when Nancy went to work for Mrs. Roosevelt, her husband had lost many jobs and finally been exiled to Alaska, where, it was hoped, he would find a way to get sober.
Instead, in June 1943 Kermit Roosevelt committed suicide, although this was immediately covered up. His wife and children were told he had died of a heart attack, and the truth wasn’t revealed until years later. Nancy, with her own secrets—revealed and not revealed—was drawn to this family, which knew a lot about secrets. The Roosevelts had four children, and Willard, his mother’s favorite, lived in New York. He had enlisted in the navy but had not yet shipped out to the Pacific, where he would command the battleship USS Greene. He was a pianist and a musician who had already been to Paris and studied with the great Nadia Boulanger. Sometimes he stopped by the Roosevelt house to visit his mother and play the family piano to keep it in tune.
Mrs. Roosevelt was naturally an Anglophile, and Nancy Thayer, a sophisticated, beautiful, and confused young woman with no real family, soon came to her attention. Nancy began being invited to the Roosevelt house, and there she met and began to fall in love with her boss’s musical son, Willard. This love affair was one of the linchpins in the eventual reunion of Nancy and her father.
Willard was a young man on the brink of going to war. He had been to Groton and Harvard, and he had an aura of aristocracy and secrecy that drew in the young girl whose own family life was built on secrets and protected with money and elite connections. Kermit’s suicide was still a secret, but Nancy felt a bond with Willard, whose father, like the man she thought was hers, was distinguished, wealthy, Harvard educated, and mentally ill.
Mrs. Roosevelt adored Nancy, and this too was a powerful force. Mothers are often irresistible and unseen forces when it comes to their children’s attractions. Remember that Anna Karenina’s love affair with Vronsky begins when she meets his mother on the train. At any rate, the romance of the moment, the war in the background and the music in the foreground, swept the two young people forward. On December 23, 1943, while Willard was home from Pacific duty for a leave, they were married in New York, and Nancy went from being Mrs. Roosevelt’s employee to being Mrs. Roosevelt’s daughter-in-law.
Then, in 1945, in order to get out of the city during the hot weather, Mrs. Roosevelt happened to rent a summer place near Silver Lake, New Hampshire, close to the Cummings family’s Joy Farm. The Roosevelt family and the James family were friends, and the Jameses had often urged her to try the beautiful corner of New Hampshire near Mount Chocorua. Nancy, whose husband was still in the Pacific and who was pregnant with their first child, decided to spend the summer in the coolness of the New Hampshire lake country with her mother-in-law. Of course Cummings, just a few miles down the road from his daughter, had heard about Nancy’s visit to New Hampshire. Information about her marriage and her adult life had filtered through the grapevine. Some of his old friends had seen her, and it was his friend Billy James, his neighbor in both Cambridge and New Hampshire, who told him in September of 1945 that he had become a grandfather with the birth of Nancy’s son, Simon.
Somehow, after all the years of being unable to see Nancy, having her nearby seemed to paralyze Cummings. Richard Kennedy suggests that Marion was a factor. “Marion, for whatever reasons, urged him not to reveal himself to her or to have any contact with her because she said it would upset him and ‘interfere with his work.’ ” When it came to Nancy, Marion, who had always been extraordinarily loving and generous with Cummings’s friends and family, seemed to become a different woman. A lot of time had passed. Both Marion and Cummings had been very sick. Marion had not had a child of her own. If she wasn’t jealous of Elaine for having Cummings’s child, she was certainly jealous of Cummings’s time and energy.
Instead of arranging a visit with Nancy during the summer, Cummings and Marion lay doggo. They avoided the Jameses. Then, in the winter of 1945–46, Cummings wrote Santa Claus, his play about the reunion of a child and parent. First published in the Cummings issue of a Harvard magazine, the Harvard Wake, it is a morality play in five scenes. It begins when Santa, feeling obsolete, agrees to trade faces with the devil. The devil rallies the crowd behind abuses in a fictional factorylike place called a wheelmine. Santa and the devil are chummy; the devil points out to Santa that “children are your specialty.” The crowd then turns on Santa Claus, but a child is able to see through the disguises. Both the child and Santa say that they are looking for something they have lost. “And I am looking for somebody too,” the child says. “Knowledge has taken love out of the world / and all the world is empty empty empty,” the Woman mourns. The play ends happily, however. The child rushes into the Woman’s arms. There is also a reunion between the real Santa, the child, and the child’s mother. The Woman kneels to Santa Claus.
As the vision of reunion was enchanting for Cummings, perhaps it was overpowering for Marion. She had saved Cummings from the agony inflicted on him by Elaine and, by association, Nancy. On his behalf, she hated Elaine. On his behalf, she had mourned Nancy. When she met him, he had been an emotional wreck. Now it seemed impossible for her to see or understand the importance of his daughter to him or, even more, the importance a father might have to his daughter. If Nancy reappeared, Cummings would certainly be upset and probably be emotionally taken up. Marion didn’t want that.
Marion’s plan was to keep the reunion between Cummings and Nancy from happening. When Cummings consulted with Dr. Wittels, he was told to relax and let events take their course. He would see Nancy when he was meant to see her, Wittels said.
Cummings had not spent time with Nancy, who was now twenty-seven years old, married, and soon to be pregnant with her second child, since the days when she was his adorable Mopsy in that dreadful year when he had married Elaine in Cambridge and finally was divorced by her ten months later in Paris. Did he know then that he wouldn’t see his daughter again for more than a circumscribed visit until she was an adult?
The last times he had seen her were long past. In September of 1923, Cummings had casually written to his sister, Elizabeth, who was living in New York, that Elaine and Mopsy might drop in on her “just to make sure the social side is taken care of.” Then, sometime in the winter of 1924, Cummings was granted three visits with Nancy in Central Park, supervised by her nanny. By this time he was heartbreakingly aware that his daughter was being slowly taken away from him. They played. He asked her to draw a picture for him. The nanny glowered. On their last of these three visits, as Cummings wrote, “he pushed all the tears of his love carefully into one corner of his mind and lifted an absurd hat to the huddled nurse who bowed and smiled.” In March of 1927, Cummings had been allowed another visit with his daughter. “Nancy and I had a wonderful time walking up and down the room, joking, imitating each other, and making fun of things in general. Then we drew pictures for each other,” Cummings wrote to his mother.
Soon after that visit, Elaine and MacDermot had permanently moved to Ireland with Nancy, and Cummings had not seen her since. Now, as she slowly resurfaced, as his friends began to describe her as the lovely wife of Willard Roosevelt and doting mother of her own son, Simon, Cummings’s feelings for his daughter, which had been brutally repressed, began painfully to resurface, like the thawing-out of flesh that has been frozen for a long time. As feeling returned, pain returned.
Once again in the summer of 1946, Mrs. Roosevelt decided to rent the same house on Silver Lake, where Nancy and her baby son and her husband when he was off duty could spend the summer in the cool mountain air. Cummings heard through the New Hampshire grapevine that Nancy and her family were staying just up the road. Nancy, of course, had no idea that the man who was her real father, a man she thought of as a famous poet who had been a friend of her father’s, was so close.
If Marion was afraid that Nancy would explode like an enemy mortar into the relatively predictable life she had built around Cummings’s work, she had reason to fear. During the war years Cummings and Marion had become quiet, calmed-down older people. She had lost her astonishing looks. His satire had become more bitter, and at the same time his childlike sense of wonder continued to bubble up through his anger at the way the world was turning. He still thought about cheating on Marion and taking advantage of their so-called open marriage, but this happened more in fantasy than in reality. Sitting upstairs in his New Hampshire study, or his third-floor room at 4 Patchin Place, looking west over the low roofs of Greenwich Village and the small yards at the back of the block, he kept on working no matter what else was going on in his life. Once again his work life was thriving.
In 1940, after the success of Collected Poems in 1938, he published 50 Poems with Duell, Sloan and Pearce, including the playful “anyone lived in a pretty how town” and the poem that is one of his longest, most famous, and most powerful. More than a decade after his father’s death, Cummings found a way in language to understand death.
my father moved through dooms of love
through sames of am through haves of give,
singing each morning out of each night
my father moved through depths of height
this motionless forgetful where
turned at his glance to shining here;
that if(so timid air is firm)
under his eyes would stir and squirm
newly as from unburied which
floats the first who,his april touch
drove sleeping selves to swarm their fates
woke dreamers to their ghostly roots
and should some why completely weep
my father’s fingers brought her sleep:
vainly no smallest voice might cry
for he could feel the mountains grow.
Lifting the valleys of the sea
my father moved through griefs of joy;
praising a forehead called the moon
singing desire into begin
joy was his song and joy so pure
a heart of star by him could steer
and pure so now and now so yes
the wrists of twilight would rejoice
keen as midsummer’s keen beyond
conceiving mind of sun will stand,
so strictly(over utmost him
so hugely)stood my father’s dream
his flesh was flesh his blood was blood:
no hungry man but wished him food;
no cripple wouldn’t creep one mile
uphill to only see him smile.
Scorning the pomp of must and shall
my father moved through dooms of feel;
his anger was as right as rain
his pity was as green as grain
septembering arms of year extend
less humbly wealth to foe and friend
than he to foolish and to wise
offered immeasurable is
proudly and(by octobering flame
beckoned)as earth will downward climb,
so naked for immortal work
his shoulders marched against the dark
his sorrow was as true as bread:
no liar looked him in the head;
if every friend became his foe
he’d laugh and build a world with snow.
My father moved through theys of we,
singing each new leaf out of each tree
(and every child was sure that spring
danced when she heard my father sing)
then let men kill which cannot share,
let blood and flesh be mud and mire,
scheming imagine, passion willed,
freedom a drug that’s bought and sold
giving to steal and cruel kind,
a heart to fear,to doubt a mind,
to differ a disease of same,
conform the pinnacle of am
though dull were all we taste as bright,
bitter all utterly things sweet,
maggoty minus and dumb death
all we inherit,all bequeath
and nothing quite so least as truth
—i say though hate were why man breathe—
because my father lived his soul
love is the whole and more than all
Then, in 1944, Henry Holt and Company published his next collection, 1 × 1. The Cummings issue of the Harvard Wake in spring 1946 added kudos to his growing reputation from everyone in poetry from William Carlos Williams to Wallace Stevens to Conrad Aiken. By 1950, after the production of Santa Claus, his next collection, Xaipe, was ready. Here, although satire and dark humor take over a great deal of his voice, and his bitterness in one particular anti-Semitic poem has shadowed his reputation to this day, Cummings was still one of the most lyrical poets of his generation with a masterpiece like this one which mixes formal perfection of the sonnet with a wild, expressive syntax:
i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday;this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)
how should a tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any—lifted from the no
of all nothing—human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?
(now the ears of my eyes awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)
The poet and literary critic John Malcolm Brinnin was drinking with Dylan Thomas one night, and when Thomas mentioned that he had always wanted to meet Cummings, Brinnin marched him right around the corner to Patchin Place. Cummings and Thomas stayed up most of the night drinking and talking. They became great friends—a friendship tragically interrupted by Thomas’s death in November of 1953 at St. Vincent’s Hospital, down the street from Patchin Place, after another long night of drinking.
Cummings was baffled by the deaths of his friends who could not control their drinking as he had—for the last decade of his life he kept to a three-drinks-a-day rule with a lot of success. No one understood that alcohol is a serious depressant, nor did we have the medical knowledge of brain chemistry that now shows us the mechanics of addiction. Later, talking to his biographer Charles Norman, Cummings described alcoholism as strangely and as well as anyone ever has. “I knew a couple of lemmings once,” he said. “Nobody could stop them. On they rushed—straight ahead—and plunged in. Hart Crane and Dylan Thomas.”