Chris Wallace-Crabbe's review in the Age today of a biography of Cummings.
Hmmm. Anyone know this book?
E.E. Cummings
Reviewer Chris Wallace-Crabbe
July 30, 2005
E.E. Cummings
By Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno
Methuen, $49.95
No poet in the language left a more distinctive mark on the wall of modern
poetry than Edward Esslyn Cummings.
Better known as e.e. cummings, he was cheekily nicknamed "mister lower-case
highbrow", and his typographical habits affected a mighty army of subsequent
poets, most popularly don marquis who invented the comic figures of archy
and mehitabel, sternly abjuring dull capital letters.
In some ways, modernist though he appeared, Cummings went out of his way to
bring the lightness of madrigals or of Caroline lyrics into the strenuously
ambitious world of American poetry. To me it seems interesting that he had
so little contact with T.S. Eliot when they were both undergraduates at
Harvard; no doubt Eliot was the more puritanical and shy, while Cummings
moved with a somewhat faster set.
All this we learn from a plump new biography by Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno,
who has previously written on other exotic topics such as American writers
in post-war Paris, and the much-overrated Paul Bowles.
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Visually inventive, Cummings had learned some things from Ezra Pound, but he
certainly didn't rant like old Ez, not in his developing days at least. In
this book Sawyer-Laucanno shows how influential for him was the layout of
Pound's early poem, The Return . It set him on the cheerful path that led to
typewriter-spacing. And even late-modern poets owe Cummings a debt, seldom
acknowledged, when they use the white spaces of the wide page, letting their
pied poems dance across it.
In E.E. Cummings , the biographer starts out with the boy, a privileged
Cambridge boy who adored his father's versatility. And surely every creative
writer wishes for a father who's a jack-of-all trades. Growing up, he goes
to Harvard, like many other boys of his class: like lots of American poets,
indeed.
There is something odd about the biographies of poets, even of writers in
general, since what they do from day to day is so externally boring: they
just sit there and write. If we're lucky, they notice things as well. Very
few can boast exciting lives such as that of Yeats, or of Bob Adamson or
Pound.
Like those two poets, Cummings spent some time imprisoned, an experience
that makes for the most rapid-moving part of this book, indeed the most
moving. Sceptical about the Great War, he had nevertheless enlisted in the
ambulance corps. The military life in France chafing, he and a friend wrote
injudicious letters from the front, but "A war zone is not a university, nor
is it a democracy". The result was three months of detention and, a decade
later, his politically divisive prose work, The Enormous Room , which was
seen to be deeply unpatriotic.
After the war, he was frequently back in Paris, along with the crowd of
empty beautiful people, and ambitious writers.
At least it can be said that he preferred the latter group, but his first
wife didn't. Formerly married to Cummings' rich patron, Scofield Thayer, she
failed to enjoy a brief marriage to the poet, taking off in mid-Atlantic
with a rich merchant banker. Often, I'm afraid, we are feeling these events
from far outside.
In the Paris chapters there are too many walk-on characters or, at worst,
catalogues of famous names.
Obsessed with writing poetry, Cummings' relations with women were ardent and
prurient, desirous and repulsed.
This old-fashioned mix of emotions runs through the life story, alongside
the poems that so often have an erotic drive, as did his drawing.
And the book mildly raps his little knuckles, noting that "the portrayal of
sex and women is hardly commendable".
Sawyer-Laucanno writes as one who has long been delighted by the poet's
lyrical sprezzatura, his high jinks on the white page. Yet he has different
narratives to mix and mingle. There are the poems, freely and frequently
quoted; the love life, which settles down into a long relationship; the
publishing scene; and the effects, both of the two World Wars and of a
dispiriting visit to the Soviet Union. Sometimes they are only glued
together.
But the latter war gave us the moving lyric, plato told and the savage
couplet, "a politician is an arse upon/ which everyone has sat except a
man".
On the other hand, the author only touches on the elements of anti-Semitism
and late-onset homophobia in Cummings. Perhaps he has tried to digest too
much disparate material. He certainly quotes too many poems.
After all, e.e. cummings may be ignored by critics these days, but he is
widely read. His poems do very well in the anthology stakes, and surely most
readers have enjoyed anyone lived in a pretty how town at some time or
other.
Chris Wallace-Crabbe is a poet. Most recently he co-edited with Judith Ryan
Imagining Australia: Literature and Culture in the New World (Harvard
University Committee on Australian Studies).
Alison Croggon
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
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