At the same time that Nancy and Cummings were trying to find a way to be friends, if not father and daughter, the rest of the world was caught up in the prosperous, stuffy years between the end of World War II and the beginning of the 1960s. If the Cambridge ladies were uptight and divorced from the natural world, they found an echo in the so-called Greatest Generation. Cummings was a man ahead of his time, and his poems would enjoy another wave of popularity after his death in the 1960s. As the poet of chaos, playfulness, and topsy-turvy rule breaking, he once again found himself out of step. Politically, Cummings was conservative, even going so far as to agree with anticommunist alarmists—he had never forgotten his terrible time in Russia.
Yet Cummings was irrepressible. Although he was often financially desperate, he never lost his gallantry or his delight in the antics of a blue jay or in the water lapping at the shores of Silver Lake or in the cherries blooming in Washington Square Park. “The poet is no tender slip of fairy stock who requires peculiar institutions and edicts for his defense,” he wrote to Mary de Rachewiltz, Ezra Pound’s daughter, quoting his hero Henry David Thoreau in a passage from A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers that might have been his own credo. “But the toughest son of earth and heaven, and by his greater strength and endurance his fainting companions will recognize the God in him. It is the worshippers of beauty, after all, who have done the real pioneer work of the world.”
Asked to lecture in the poetry series at the Manhattan YM-YWHA by his friend John Malcolm Brinnin, Cummings perfected what would become his mature lecture style. His invitation to Bennington brought far more than a pleasant evening; it was the beginning of a satisfying and lucrative new career. Much like another of his heroes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Cummings found that he was able to become a famous poet not by writing poetry but by reading poetry. Emerson’s essays owe their popularity to the rigorous speaking schedule he used to support himself and his family at the end of his life.
By the time he took the stage at the Y in December of 1954, Cummings had developed a precise and powerful way of reading his poems to an audience. He never read behind a lectern. Before he read, the organizers and the venue got a list of very specific instructions. He would need a straight-backed chair, a table, and a gooseneck lamp. He would not answer questions, sign books, or agree to any of the social folderol that usually surrounds a reading—the dinner with the English department, the interview with the local reporter, the radio interview for the town station. There would be no photographs.
For the Y, for instance, Cummings had planned a two-part program, running from 8:40 to 9:10 and then, after a ten-minute intermission, from 9:20 to 9:50. The Y officials, however, not used to such precision, allowed the standees to swarm the unoccupied seats at 9 p.m., completely disrupting the reading. The mike was also, Cummings wrote Hildegarde Watson, “as stiff as a mule.” The audience seemed half dead, Cummings told his old friend; whatever he did, they would not have noticed: “I could have roared as softly as a seashell or noiselessly dropped a demi-whisper into the very last row of the balcony.”
A Cummings reading usually started with a few prose passages and proceeded to poetry. Often Cummings reserved a poem to use as an encore after the first round of applause had died down. “He was an enormously effective and careful reader,” Brinnin told Richard Kennedy. Cummings began to draw large audiences, many of them young men and women whose experience of the poems was so intense that they seemed enrolled in a kind of Cummings cult. “must confess I attribute my physical ills to socalled nervous tension,” he wrote, summing up the good and the bad for Hildegarde Watson. “If any quite unmitigatedly perverse human being insists on deliberately insulting the powersthatseem—instead of (come toutlemonde) dutifully soft-soaping same—what can he expect? Certainly not something which happened yesterday; when a pretty young girl handed me a bunch of daffodills, saying ‘you don’t know who I am but I just wanted to give you these.’ ”
At the Y, Cummings met the series’ assistant director, Betty Kray, who became a friend, dropping by Patchin Place for tea on Fridays and serving as Cummings’s lecture agent as his audience grew. He began reading at places with a lot of prestige—the Museum of Modern Art, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Washington, DC. At Betty Kray’s urging, he began to travel to lecture and to charge higher fees—in 1955, a Cummings lecture cost $400, which quickly rose to $600 and beyond. In a typical season he read at the University of Chicago, the Chicago Art Center, Dartmouth College, the Metropolitan Museum, Queens College in North Carolina, Duke University, and Barnard.
A Cummings reading was a formal, dramatic event. It was more like a play than a reading. In the tradition of Dickens, who memorized his ninety-minute lectures and used his book only as a prop, Cummings brought a tremendous amount of theatrical skill to the art of reading. The writer Gerald Weales, who made a study of poetry readings, divided readers into three categories: performer, personality, and public speaker. Cummings was definitely a performer. On the shadowy stage, the gooseneck lamp was the only light. Cummings quietly entered and began to read, using his mimicking skills for different characters and voices to great effect. He could be side-splittingly funny and sadly sentimental within a few moments.
His voice—aristocratic, reassuring, and yet somehow filled with the wonder of childhood—was electrifying. He did all the voices, and he seemed to become the characters he had written as he read—his enjoyment of the work and the audience was easy to see. Whether he was reading something playful (“may I feel said he?”) or angry or deeply serious and sad, his voice was brilliantly adapted to the material. Cummings played his voice, letting it go loud and soft, high and low, using vibrato and falsetto, as the poems demanded.
In a line like “my father moved through dooms of love,” he would modulate his voice, drawing out the long syllables in a way that echoed with grief and longing. In the playful poems you could almost hear him smiling; in the sad ones he sounded close to tears. The words seemed to sob of their own accord. His pauses were electric; his vowels, endless and sad. Cummings understood the power of sounds and the possibilities of language in a unique, pioneering way, and this came through when he read.
Until he began to read all over the country, Cummings had been a well-respected poet among poets. His was a name well known in the small community of ideas in literature, poetry, and art, especially at Harvard and in Greenwich Village. Now, partly because of his extraordinary readings, he began to become a national celebrity.
At the same time, his ailments began to catch up with him in a more dramatic and crippling way. His back remained fragile. His skin erupted in a variety of sores and rashes. Traveling was often difficult and sometimes impossible—he had to turn down $1,000 because traveling to the University of Texas would have required a four-and-a-half-hour plane trip. “ ‘arthritis’—without or avec a soupcon of ‘fibrillation’—makes social planning something like a furbelow,& please do not think I’m complaining; if only because I am,” he wrote Archibald MacLeish.
His vocal cords got wheezy. He took more Nembutal to sleep and he took all kinds of painkillers for the pain in his back, which persisted even when he was wearing the Iron Maiden. When Hildegarde Watson suggested a trip—probably paid for by the Watsons, who were almost as ready with their loans and gifts as Rebecca Cummings had been—Cummings painted an awful picture for her. “I always glimpse a miserably exhausted me—tortured in his ‘iron maid’—waiting&waiting&waiting for some plane or train or boat or maybe hotel-room which doesn’t dream of materializing.” His misery, even to an old friend, as always was leavened by his own self-knowledge. “Tell me now, Hildegarde,” he finished up his letter of complaint about travel, “what do you think: I am suffering from what ‘the liberals’ entitled ‘failure of nerve,’ or from something else most beautifully described by Quintus H as ‘nec pietas moran’: or may my unending timidities harbour a diminutive amount of truth?”
Reading also took an emotional toll. It was Cummings’s absolute presence in the moment on the stage that made him so compelling. He paid the price in nerves and fear. “What I generally experience before a reading,” he wrote to his sister, Elizabeth, “is a conglomeration of anxieties involving bellyache, heartrouble, arthritis, diarrhea, & (temporary) blindness.” He also suffered from a frightening heart arrhythmia, a tachycardia that he controlled with doses of Quinidine.
His reputation as a lecturer increased, and he began to see that financial solvency might be possible if he could keep going. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill turned out for him. In Michigan, students lined up in a mob outside the auditorium where he was speaking, hoping for a glimpse of the famous poet. Typical of Cummings, when he was invited to be the featured reader at the Boston Arts Festival in 1957, he agreed to do it and then had second thoughts. “This invitation,” writes Charles Norman in his authorized biography, “touched off a prolonged correspondence, in the course of which Cummings withdrew his consent twice, was twice prevailed upon to reconsider, reconsidered, and at length made perhaps his most triumphant appearance as a reader.”
Lecturing was always torture for Cummings, torture mixed with the heady experience of being adored, especially by young people and students and even more especially by beautiful young women who memorized his work, sought to touch or speak with him for a moment, and in general brought an attitude of worship to everything he did. He had always spoken for the young, and now they seemed to hear him.
Still, his attitude toward money and fame remained quintessentially, gallantly, humorously Cummings. He wrote to Pound that he had “received an Honour which even I, egocentric though he may be, scarcely dare maintain we deserve.” The honor in question was an event that another man might have construed as a disheartening failure: he was turned down for a grant simultaneously by the Bollingen Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation.
After Pound was incarcerated in St. Elizabeths Hospital, he and Cummings wrote each other almost once a week. Their letters are a record of literary life after World War II in this country and they are also the record of Pound’s slow recovery from madness. The letters are all about the difficulties of finding recognition from the establishment—the despicable establishment—and about new talents and intelligent people to whom they introduced each other and whom they tried to help. Sometimes the two great poets wrote about simpler things, like blue jays. Cummings loved blue jays, handsome and naughty, and in fact this led to one of their few arguments, which began with a Cummings poem (published in 95 Poems):
demon laughshriek
ing at me
your scorn of easily
hatred of timid
&loathing for(dull all
regular righteous
comfortable)unworlds
thief crook cynic
(swimfloatdrifting
fragment of heaven)
trickstervillain
raucous rogue &
vivid voltaire
you beautiful anarchist
(i salute thee
Pound disagreed with Cummings’s critical assessment of the bird. He was a fan of blue jays. “whar yu git sech ideas re b.jays?” he asked in a letter with typical Poundian diction. Perhaps Cummings knew a lot about Russia, but Pound didn’t think he knew much about birds. “I mean I accept yu as orthority on hrooshuns but queery analysis of b.j,” he wrote.
Cummings defended himself with three long passages from books about birds. T. Gilbert Pearson’s Birds of America calls the blue jay “an amusing rascal”: “The Blue Jay is the clown & scoffer of birdland,” Cummings quotes Pearson, who also calls the bird “cannibalistic.” “Furthermore, he is one of the handsomest of American birds; also he is one of the wickedest.” F. Schuyler Mathews’s Field Book of Wild Birds asserts that “the Jay in spring is undoubtedly a reprobate”; and in Chester A. Reed’s Bird Guide, “they have a very bad reputation.”
Pound was still in many ways Cummings’s mentor, and he scolded Cummings for using secondary sources in his writing about birds. Pound wrote that Cummings was wrong about birds and, worse, that he was quoting a sloppy writer, Gilbert Pearson, who used the word “cannibalistic” to describe a bird that was certainly not a cannibal. This, Pound noted, was “vurry poor langwidge.” Furthermore, why wasn’t Cummings reading the work of Louis Agassiz, the nineteenth-century Harvard professor and bird expert, who would never have made that kind of mistake? Always the teacher, Pound put his didactic advice in a small, characteristic poem:
why even so the charmin’ blue shd be
VS yu
I still don’t make out
does the humming’s
of boids
move mr cummings
no but
other men’s woidz
erabout boids.
But Cummings’s feelings about blue jays were unabated. “I find it interesting that—large & by—birds beautiful-to-hear dress quietly,& birds beautiful-to-see can’t sing,” he wrote to Pound.
With their experimental syntax, their running-together of words and punctuation on the page, their attention to the look of words against paper, their lapsing into other languages, especially ancient Greek, and their wild use of any symbol available on the typewriter, the Pound of “The Return” and the Cummings of “Buffalo Bill’s” often got so wrapped up in the look or feel of the words that they even baffled each other. “O.K. wot are yu talking about?” Pound wrote to Cummings after a particularly dense letter combining Aristotle’s writings on dolphins and whales—to be fair, Pound had brought the subject up first—with erudite mentions of Aquinas and Hamlet.
But Cummings’s intense friendship with Pound had a less lighthearted aspect to it, which later came back to haunt him and which haunts his reputation even now. Like Pound, Cummings grew up at a time when anti-Semitism was accepted and even admired. Marion was mindlessly, socially anti-Semitic. Casting around for the reason he had not found a job during his miserable time in Hollywood, Cummings tended to blame the Jews. Before World War II and the dreadful knowledge of what had happened during the Holocaust, many Americans were anti-Semitic.
Then, in his book of poems Xaipe, published in March 1950 by Oxford University Press, Cummings did what he always did—pushed an extreme further than it had gone before, with disastrous results. One poem in the collection, a poem that had in fact been written and published previously before the war, was too offensive not to cause outrage.
a kike is the most dangerous
machine as yet invented
by even yankee ingenu
ity(out of a jew a few
dead dollars and some twisted laws)
it comes both pricked and cunted
The poem’s original editor, Theodore Weiss, had objected to the last line, which Cummings subsequently changed to “it comes both prigged and canted” for inclusion in the book. Cummings’s friend Allen Tate also objected to the poem. Cummings had tried to explain to Tate that the poem was being misunderstood. What Cummings meant was that the word “kike” had been created by Protestants to diminish Jews. Tate was unpersuaded.
Others, like his friend Paul Rosenfeld, tried to explain to Cummings why he should not include the poem. Even Hildegarde Watson, to whom the book was dedicated, asked him to reconsider its inclusion. As Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno points out in his biography, the “firestorm” of anger about the poem wasn’t really ignited until Cummings was chosen by the Academy of American Poets to receive its fellowship of five thousand dollars in the winter of 1950. Xaipe also won the Harriet Monroe Prize.
A public argument ensued. Congress Weekly devoted space to a symposium in which Cummings was attacked by an array of Jewish critics and defended by William Carlos Williams. He seemed somewhat clueless, as if he was mired in the years before World War II. “Cummings, the foe of tyranny and the defender of the underling, does not fit the definition of an anti-Semite,” wrote Richard Kennedy. “But in the matter of this objectionable epigram, he showed puzzling insensitivity.”
Others were more certain. “He was nothing but an anti-Semite,” Harvey Shapiro said in my interview with him in 2010, and he was not alone in remembering Cummings’s anti-Semitism as his principal characteristic.
Trying to re-create another time and place is difficult; trying not to let our own modern knowledge and understanding bleed into those descriptions of the past is almost impossible. On the one hand, a biographer’s responsibility is to bring the past to life on the page in all its details—including the relative knowledge and ignorance of the community described. On the other hand, shouldn’t the biographer give the reader and the subject the benefit of everything known at the time of writing? Should poems and books be understood in a vacuum—in the historical silence in which a writer connects viscerally and spiritually with a reader? Or should they be understood as pieces of the web of their own time and ours? When Cummings was writing poetry, I. A. Richards at Cambridge in England was arguing the former in his renowned New Criticism. Work should stand on its own, Richards wrote in his book Practical Criticism in 1929. What would happen if a reader knew nothing of the writer or the work—no biographical material or textual explanation?
Since Richards wrote, his ideas have been overwhelmed by the cult of personality; in our world it’s unthinkable to read a poem without knowing who the author is, what he or she intended, and what the poem is about. Biography has spawned a cottage industry of literary medical men and women writing essays in which they diagnose the illnesses of a Coleridge (heroin addiction) or a Louisa May Alcott (bipolar disorder), or a Hemingway (clinical depression and alcoholism). In our attempts to understand the past, it is important to weigh the environment then against the knowledge we have now.
Cummings was raised in a community which was casually racist—casually until Jewish students began to go to Harvard, when it became systematically anti-Semitic under President A. Lawrence Lowell. The ideal man, represented by Cummings’s barrel-chested, masculine father, was intolerant and often scary. Gender in this world was sharply defined. There was no homosexuality. Sodomy was literally illegal as well as culturally unacceptable. Men and women who found themselves attracted to people of the same sex lived in secrecy and fear. Women poured tea; men made judgments. Cambridge itself was a homogeneous microcosm of intellectual stuffiness and arrogance. It’s worth noting that Cummings hated all this. He did not, could not, would not conform to the blustering masculine ideal of his childhood, and he left Cambridge as soon as he could to find a more tolerant, less anti-Semitic and racist environment in the freedom of Greenwich Village.
At the same time, Cummings had dedicated himself to questioning any rules that came his way—the rules of grammar, of matrimony, of the Harvard overseers—and by the 1950s it was no longer acceptable to be anti-Semitic in words or conversation. The unacceptable was like a red flag of invitation for a poet as provocative as Cummings. His anti-Semitism is indefensible. There is little point in comparing him with other public figures whose anti-Semitism was far worse. Language is powerful, as Cummings knew better than anyone, and the language he used is criminal and repulsive.
Perhaps the most sensible defense of Cummings’s poem came from the American critic Leslie Fiedler, who wrote that “what is extraordinary is not that Cummings may be an anti-Semite (this he shares with innumerable jerks) but that he is able to make orderly and beautiful things out of his chaotic and imperfect heart.… Certainly when the attackers of Cummings (or Eliot or Ezra Pound or Céline) are revealed as men motivated not so much by a love for Jews as by a hatred for art, I know where to take my stand.”
Two engagements that defined Cummings’s new career as a popular and well-paid reader, a reader who had more lucrative requests for appearances than he could fulfill, were the prestigious Norton Lectures at Harvard in 1952 and the 1957 Boston Arts Festival lecture.
After finally accepting the offer of the Boston Arts Festival committee, headed by David McCord and including Archibald MacLeish and Paul Brooks, Cummings did a Cummings. Instead of a celebratory poem fit for a summer evening, Cummings wrote a bitter satirical attack on the United States in general and particularly on the way the country had failed to intervene in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Deeply moved by the Hungarians’ refusal to buckle under to Communist Russia, and personally understanding what living in the USSR was like, Cummings was heartbroken and horrified when Russian troops rolled into Budapest and took over the revolution, imprisoning its leaders and brutally reasserting their power. This was the kind of thing that kept Cummings up at night. Cursed with a vivid imagination and a disintegrating body, he felt misery which was personal as well as political. Moved by the bravery of Hungary’s rebellion, the old rebel wrote a poem in celebration and sadness. When the United Nations declined to intervene, he began doing the only thing he knew how to do—write a poem. Unfortunately, all this coincided with the Boston festival’s request that he write a poem titled “Thanksgiving (1956)” especially for the festival. They were thinking of some pastoral poem, written by one of Boston’s own. Instead they got rage:
a monstering horror swallows
this unworld me by you
as the god of our fathers’ fathers bows
to a which that walks like a who
but the voice-with-a-smile of democracy
announces night & day
“all poor little peoples that want to be free
just trust in the u s a”
suddenly uprose hungary
and she gave a terrible cry
“no slave’s unlife shall murder me
for i will freely die”
she cried so high thermopylae
heard her and marathon
and all prehuman history
and finally The UN
“be quiet little hungary
and do as you are bid
a good kind bear is angary
we fear for the quo pro quid”
uncle sam shrugs his pretty
pink shoulders you know how
and he twitches a liberal titty
and lisps “i’m busy right now”
let’s all be as thankful as hell
and bury the statue of liberty
(because it begins to smell)
Cummings, although professionally dedicated to questioning authority, was often a sweetheart in person. Sometimes he was crotchety, but when appealed to rationally, he was an unusually understanding and generous man. He was suffused by rage and delight at the same time. American politics made him sick, but he was transported by the way a hummingbird sucked pollen from the lilac bushes in the spring. He knew that he was a finicky old man, and at his best he made fun of his own eccentricities.
This was lucky for the Boston Arts Festival organizers. When they explained to him that the poem was not suitable for the pastoral occasion on June 23, and that they could not release it to the press to be published as the festival poem, Cummings obligingly wrote another poem, another kind of characteristic Cummings poem, a pretty, moving poem spoken in the voice of a little church basking in the glory of God.
i am a little church(no great cathedral)
far from the splendor and squalor of hurrying cities
—i do not worry if briefer days grow briefest,
i am not sorry when sun and rain make april
The poem, in five stanzas of conventional iambic pentameter, ends with a benediction:
… i lift my diminutive spire to
merciful Him Whose only now is forever:
standing erect in the deathless truth of His presence
(welcoming humbly His light and proudly His darkness)
At the festival itself, however, in front of seven thousand or so people crowded onto the Boston Common, Cummings read both poems. He turned the occasion into a full-dress reading. When the first lines of “Thanksgiving (1956)” were read, the audience seemed taken aback, but by the end of the poem they roared their approval. As usual Cummings had found a way to say in poetry what everyone else was feeling: the American frustration with the Cold War and the blandness of the Eisenhower administration. “He had touched something deep in their feelings that needed expression,” Kennedy writes. “He was reawakening that sense of helplessness and frustration that had descended upon the American public.”
One of the benefits of leaving Cambridge for Greenwich Village was that Cummings came of age as a poet surrounded by the most interesting and talented writers of his generation. Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore were all his friends and neighbors. Djuna Barnes lived across the mews at Patchin Place, and Cummings actually climbed in through her window to rescue her once when she had locked herself in. Greenwich Village was also a stopping place for many poets who didn’t live there—it was Cummings’s good friend Allen Tate who brought his old rival T. S. Eliot to Patchin Place for tea.