In the winter of 1961, Cummings’s familiar world was threatened when Hugh Keenan, the owner of Patchin Place, decided he was sick of paltry rents from dozens of tenants and planned a complete renovation of the ancient mews, with its narrow curbs and lush ailanthus trees and rent-controlled apartments. Thanks to the generosity of friends and Cummings’s furious sensitivity to sounds and smells—he refused to let Marion clean with bleach—Cummings controlled all the rooms at 4 Patchin Place except the second floor in the front.
This wasn’t the first attack on the tiny mews, which had become Cummings’s refuge from the dirtier, noisier city. Robert Moses had designated Patchin Place as well as the brick spire of Jefferson Market for demolition, but that edict had been overturned. Now, Marion went to court to fight Hugh Keenan. Finally, someone apparently alerted Mayor Robert Wagner to the fact that the famous poet E. E. Cummings was being evicted, and Keenan’s permits were revoked. “To a human being, nothing is so important as privacy—since without privacy, individuals cannot exist: and only individuals are human,” Cummings gratefully wrote the mayor in March of 1962. “I am unspeakably thankful that the privacy of 4 Patchin Place will be respected; and shall do my best to be worthy of this courtesy.”
As sweet as he was to Wagner, Cummings was still furiously antigovernment. In May, when President and Mrs. Kennedy requested Cummings’s presence at a black-tie White House dinner, Cummings angrily turned them down and made fun of Mrs. Kennedy’s invitation (“not transferable!!!”) to a young protegée in a letter.
Cummings slept late, and on a typical day he woke up in the late morning and wandered downstairs for breakfast. Because of his delicate intestinal tract, he took Donnatal for digestion. After breakfast, like clockwork, he jammed an old hat on and walked along Tenth Street to Washington Square Park, where he sat on a bench, did some sketches in his notebook, and then wandered back to Patchin Place. There he retired to his third-floor studio and worked most of the day.
At teatime Cummings would come downstairs for a cup of Lapsang Souchong, perhaps spiked with brandy. “Marion would be in and out from the tiny curtained-off kitchen with the tea things,” wrote Richard Kennedy in a lyrical description of Cummings’s days in New York. “Estlin would be perhaps eating a pear in the French manner—with a fork piercing its top as he sliced chunks off the side. Or he might be tilting back and forth on his straight-backed rush-bottomed chair, offering his latest complaint about a decision of the Supreme Court or describing his latest putdown of an authority figure.… If the weather were pleasant there might be an evening stroll.” Cummings drank and smoked throughout the day, sometimes taking a painkiller if his back was sore. At night he took Nembutal to sleep.
Life at Joy Farm had also changed for the better, or at least for the more comfortable. Between his lecturing and reading fees and a few more grants and prizes, money was less a problem than it had been for a lot of his life. Cummings always returned to his better self when he swung the car’s wheel up the dirt road to Joy Farm. Now he had electric wiring installed so that Marion could print photographs and have a refrigerator. Lincoln Kirstein’s sister Mina arranged to have a heating system installed. Cummings’s sister Elizabeth with her husband Carlton Qualey and their children came back to the farm every summer, so it remained a family place.
In the summer of 1962, Marion and Cummings were just finishing a collaboration on a book of fifty of her photographs, with gnomic captions by Cummings, titled Adventures in Value. Cummings was thrilled by the book, and he also kept writing poems for a volume to follow 95 Poems, which had been published in 1958 and had won the prestigious Bollingen Prize.
Many of the poems he wrote that year are about his twin obsessions: aging and the natural world. Even the creatures of Patchin Place—mice, squirrels, and pigeons—seemed to grow closer to Cummings’s consciousness as he aged. One of his last poems immortalizes a dying creature in a way that sings Cummings’s own sense of being a dying creature.
Me up at does
out of the floor
quietly Stare
a poisoned mouse
still who alive
is asking What
have i done that
You wouldn’t have
It was in New Hampshire that Cummings seemed to bond intensely with the copious creatures of the field and the singing birds of the air. More and more, the sixty-seven-year-old Cummings had lost interest in his own species and become fascinated with the New Hampshire flora and fauna. The fearless raccoons and the porcupine mother who seemed to be teaching her child to eat apples, a red fox in the bank above the lake, woodchucks, mischievous chipmunks with their striped backs, all got his attention in a new, vivid way. Cummings still had the Remington .38 pistol Sibley Watson had gotten him when he was on fire with murderous hatred for Frank MacDermot and wild with a despair that made him think of killing himself. Once he had been half-crazy, a feral man with nowhere to turn. Now the thoroughly domesticated Cummings used that haunted gun to protect the farm’s chipmunks from a neighborhood cat.
The New England summer birds became his pride and joy. He too was a singer; he too was given a short season in which to spread his melodic song.
all(beyond win
or lose)good true
beautiful things
god how he sings
the robin(who
’ll be silent in
a moon or two)
Poring over his bird books, he studied a recording of bird songs to help him identify the to-wit-to-wee of the thrushes, the high and low notes of the nuthatches, the oriole’s complicated symphony, the scornful creak of the roguish blue jay, the high shrill of the occasional tanager, the steady trill of the purple finch, and the low buzz of the hummingbirds that came up to the porch in the morning to drink from the tiny tubes of sugar water Cummings put out for them. Sometimes the birds seemed to be singing to him.
“o purple finch
please tell me why
this summer world(and you and i
who love so much to live)
must die”
“if i
should tell you anything”
(that eagerly sweet carolling
self answers me)
“i could not sing”
Joy Farm, with its built-in exercise—building, chopping wood, clearing brush—was where Cummings always felt at his best.
By September, New Hampshire mornings are cold, but during the day the warming sun still hits the green of the meadows. As summer ends there is a kind of sunset effect—like sunsets, many things are more intense just before they end completely. The growing season is so short and the winter to come will be very long. It’s a time to prepare, to harvest the last potatoes and split wood.
On the morning of September 2, after he fed the hummingbirds, Cummings was delighted by an out-of-place, late-blossoming, bright blue delphinium in Marion’s flowerbed. In the afternoon, he went out to the barn like many other New Hampshire men in that season, to split some wood for the winter. It was a hot day, filled with the smells of new-mown hay and the cool darkness of the barn. The motion of wood splitting—the wedge, the axe, the downward strokes—was another rhythm clouded in the musty smells of the wood and the barn hay. As he was finishing for the day, Marion came to the kitchen door in the fading light and called out that it was time for dinner.
He told her he would be there as soon as he sharpened the axe. He stacked the wood he had split, whetted the axe blade against the grindstone so that it would be sharp for the next day, and put it up against the wall just as he had been taught to do by his father when he was a boy. He went inside the house and walked upstairs to wash for dinner. Marion heard him crash to the floor in the hallway. He was unconscious, felled by a cerebral hemorrhage. Marion called an ambulance, but he never regained consciousness and died in the hospital the next morning.
Three days later, Cummings was buried in the family plot in Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston. In spite of his fame, it was a small, private funeral. Nancy was in Europe but sent her two teenage children, Simon and Elizabeth. Marion was too devastated to let many people know. His tombstone is a slab of New Hampshire granite engraved with his name and dates.
Marion lived for less than seven years after Cummings, dying of throat cancer in 1969 when she was just sixty-three. She still took photographs in those years, but her real profession was Cummings’s legacy. She oversaw the publication of his final, posthumous book, 73 Poems, and sold his hundreds of boxes of papers, drafts, and letters to the Houghton Library at Harvard. His paintings went to a summer camp in Rhode Island that Nancy’s children had attended.