E.e. Cummings: A Biography

Rating:
Summary: Solid Biography
Review: This new biography is the first based on complete access to Cummings's papers and also quotes extensively from his poetry in exploring links between his life and work. It is quite readable and makes a good case for the significance of Cummings's poetry without claiming too much.

Rating:
Summary: Mostly words, but spacing and punctuation are unusual
Review: I read poems by E. E. Cummings before I went to Harvard, and might consider him my favorite American poet if Richard Brautigan had not written so many great little novels that seen far more comic to me than any mere poem. Cummings has the breadth, though, to require some small print for the index of poems by first line on pages 602-606 of this book, which must be a couple hundred poems at 53 lines per page. The items in the usual index on pages 591-601 have 54 lines per page, but with many more capital letters and the two columns of text covering an extra quarter inch of the page, items in the index do not seem so tiny. 31 of the 32 photographs are printed by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University, and the photo on the cover, taken by Manuel Komroff, was by permission of Columbia University's Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The pictures in black and white include a major abstract oil painting by Cummings in 1925 and numerous sketches.

The index does not attempt to capture every mention of each name in the book. The entries for Ernest Hemingway do not include page 389, on which two poems in NO THANKS are called "really nothing more than a swipe at Hemingway" playfully "provoked in part by Cumming's reading of Hemingway's celebration of bullfighting, DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON:

what does little Ernest croon
in his death at afternoon?
(kow dow r 2 bul retoinis
wus de woids uf lil Oinis ".

Author Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno also calls this "a parody of Longfellow's line in A Psalm of Life, `Dust thout art, to dust returnest.' " Modern versions of Genesis 3:19 have "you are dust, and to dust you shall return" for the familiar curse on Adam, but the King James version might have used a poetical thou, not thout. No doubt there are a few mistakes somewhere. I tried to find the verse with that line on the internet, and what Longfellow wrote was:

Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
"Dust thou art, to dust returnest,"
Was not spoken of the soul.

There are 12 lines for Harvard entities in the index, between Harry Wadsworth Clubs and Anthony Haswell, of HASWELL'S MASSACHUSETTS SPY OR AMERICAN ORACLE OF LIBERTY fame. The Preface reveals that the author shares the anti-war feeling found in many of Cummings's most famous poems, and reports that "At one of the early [fall of 1969] California Moratoriums against the war I whipped up a crowd with `my old sweet etcetera,' `plato told / him,' and `the bigness of cannon / is skillful.' When I got to `i sing of Olaf glad and big' a number of young men at the gathering set their draft cards on fire." (p. xiv). People who have some copies of poems already will want to have them nearby while reading this book to remind themselves of all that the original said, especially about his aunt and Olaf. Cummings was forty-seven when World War Two took the United States by surprise and Cummings wrote in his notes, among his definitions of War, "when the angry Jehovah gets back His Own." (p. 441). This book offers translations into English of the phonetic poems written in "a parody of bigoted (probably drunken) speech" on pages 442-443 before putting the entire `plato told' poem on pages 443-444.

E. E. Cummings developed some unique spacing and punctuation techniques that are constantly quoted throughout the book. It is inspiring to read about so many people who admired what he did and supported his work, but he could also be highly critical of such friends. The English philosopher A. J. Ayer is only listed in the index under Morehouse, Marion, affair with A. J. (Freddie) Ayer, 414, 423-424. Back in June, 1937, things like that were starting to happen a lot in Europe, and modern readers shouldn't be as surprised as someone like E. E. Cummings's father, who had been an Instructor in Political Economy offering Harvard's first course in sociology, (p. 3), but then became an assistant minister at South Congregational Church when Cummings was about six, but lost his position in a church merger in 1925, and then became a director of the World Peace Foundation. (p. 284). People who are suspicious of pointy headed intellectuals who try to believe more than they read in the newspapers might not like this book, and people who watch TV all the time will find nothing in this book that is familiar, not to mention fair and balanced, but anyone who believes that an intellectual life can be the bedrock supporting future generations might find this book educational as well as enjoyable.