Selected Books (4)
Dreams in the Mirror
The ceremony of innocence was never drowned in E. E. Cummings. In 1923 it looked as though he was an innovator in the fabulous generations of Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Stevens, Robinson and William Carlos Williams. But soon he lacked their ways of sustaining innovating idiom with the pressure of participating in the doubts, catastrophes and triumphs of the years between the wars. When all is said and respected of his springy joy in joy —
(such a sky and such a sun
i never knew and neither did you
and everybody never breathed
quite so many kinds of yes)
— and his burlesque of the capitalist way of life, it has to be said that he tried to perpetuate holiday for ever in poems which have poured forth in their innocent hundreds since Eight Harvard Poets in 1917. The romanticism of God-made country and man-made city is boring and Cummings is boring after a dozen short poems on it. His new analyst and apologist, Mr Friedman (1), calls him with approval ‘a non-anti-intellectual moralist’ whose claim to be heard is ‘the immaturity of the visionary’. In other words, here is the poetic Fool again, with, in Cummings’s case, an obverse side of foolish arrogance which begins in bohemian Village barracking and ends in detachment from common humanity. Or maybe the beginning was Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1932, when he was thirty-eight, he sweeps the board with a swaggering dialogue between himself and a sceptical investigator:
Thanks to I dare say my art I am able to become myself.
Well, well! Doesn’t that sound as if people who weren’t artists couldn’t become themselves?
Does it?
What do you think happens to people who aren’t artists? What do you think people who aren’t artists become?
I feel they don’t become: I feel nothing happens to them; I feel negation becomes them.
What did this anarchist of the thirties propose that was so positive in his art and better than what he calls ‘most people’ and ‘manunkind’? He created a persona for assertive, yea-saying poems whose initial revolutionary idiom atrophied into a charming sameness, and a deliberately restricted range which lacks daring, variety of emotion and penetrating intelligence. Cummings’s own selection (2) of one hundred poems from ‘eleven booksofpoems’ published since 1923 only brings out his limitations: it omits most of the familiar puzzles and enigmas and the more violent invective. In 1958 his scaffolding of vocabulary, syntax and typography is as it was in the beginning, and April is still not the cruellest month. In fact April, sun, spring, joy, new, awakening and dawn create a stifling cage, which is certainly not the poet’s intention. The reason is that he writes about the generalized experiences of that kind of vocabulary, where Lawrence or even Kenneth Patchen pull the reader into a new experience for which the words are wonderful and satirical signs. The best example of his main form, the love lyric, is No. 97, a touching and tactful piece about the need to seal off love from a callous world, which is Cummings’s governing position:
i carry your heart with me (i carry it in
my heart) i am never without it (anywhere
i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling . . .. . . here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life: which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars aparti carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)
Innumerable trials for saying this over a lifetime lie behind the formal utterance, and it is enough in itself. But Cummings and Mr Friedman claim more. Not admitting a range too narrow for a clever technique, they insist on a sententiousness which seems to be inseparable from a certain arrogance. To cut through the series with unfair brevity: in 1923 Cummings’s love scenes are like Fitzgerald and Hemingway in the twenties and the manner is often Elizabethan-lyrical; in 1925 his Saroyan or Pangloss manner fills out the persona with whimsical profundity and Steinisms. By 1926, the burlesque of city, politics and capitalism is done in tough (i.e. soft and slangy) New Yorkese. The targets are the right ones, in a general way — advertising dishonesty, jingoism, officialese, the identification of business with the nation — and occasionally language and material work out effectively:
take it from me kiddo
believe me
my country, ‘tis ofyou, land of the Cluett
Shirt Boston Garter and Spearmint
Girl With the Wrigley Eyes (of you
land of the Arrow Ide
and Earl
& Wilson
Collars) of you i
sing: land of Abraham Lincoln and Lydia E. Pinkham,
land above all of Just Add Hot Water And Serve . . .
This is better than the wretched insistence of ‘again slo-wly; bare,ly nudg.ing (my/lev-er . . .’ which is a sort of Purcelian baroque Gestallt meant to propel you into actually changing gear. Meanwhile Cummings issues his programme:
i mean that the blond absence of any program
except last and always and first to live
makes unimportant what i and you believe;
nor for philosophy does this rose give a damn . . .
Or as it appears in a later poem: ‘my blood approves/ and kisses are a better fate/ than wisdom’. But political and social pressures threatened the Little Man Cummings championed, and in 1931 he writes sharply of the bullying this Strube figure is exposed to from the military: ‘i sing of Olaf glad and big/ whose warmest heart recoiled at war;/ a conscientious object-or’. Olaf says No in the name of anti-authority and against bullying: ‘I will not kiss your f.ing flag’, and, finally: ‘there is some s. I will not eat’. The trouble is that since the robust and humane recording of human resistance to the military and bureaucratic machine in The Enormous Room in 1922, Cummings’s persona never committed itself to action and opinion that might change the man-made process which tortured Olaf. ‘kumrads die because they’re told’ (1935) is anti-Communist propaganda as brutally unreasoning as the condition it attacks. ‘conceive a man, should he have anything’ relates ‘man’ to the seasons, opposes him to thinking, and concludes with a trite piece of sexual challenge: ‘open your thighs to fate and (if you can/withholding nothing) World, conceive a man’. ‘Jehovah buried, Satan dead’ tells what prevents that conception: relative values instead of the plain man’s good and bad, ‘Gadgets’ which murder, ‘the cult of Same’, and ‘illustrious punks of Progress’, all unspecified. The poems ends with a rare appeal to ‘King Christ’; generally Cummings reverts safely to himself: ‘come fair come foul/he goes alone’.
The contrast with Blake would be cruel but correct because Blake showed it is possible to be self-confident, politically radical, and use a conventional vocabulary, and still love actual human beings without pretending to be the ark of truth. Playing the Fool is one thing; writing in 1938 like this is to ape the ostrich:
may my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secrets of living
whatever they sing is better than to know . . .. . . for whenever men are right they are not young.
But then, in ‘my father moved through dooms of love’ (1940), a much praised poem, Cummings reduces the man he heroicizes, in the ‘nonlectures’, as his Emersonian beau ideal, to an irritating little Capra hero, cussed individualist with a heart of gold and no social acumen or sense of living responsibly in human history. In 1944, the anarchist of 1923 still sings April, but a satire which begins ‘a salesman is an it which stinks Excuse/Me’ identifies salesman and the president of the ‘you were say, at that time Roosevelt. But then ‘a politician is an arse upon/which everyone has sat except a man’. Not surprisingly Cummings is adept at the double generalization: ‘pity this busy monster, manunkind, not’ / ‘Progress is a comfortable disease’. The diagnosis is typical:
we doctors know
a hopeless case if — listen: there’s a hell
of a good universe next door; let’s go.
Later in the same book Cummings is chanting: ‘yes is a pleasant country’. But by this period most of his affirmations have become exercises in his established manner. Love still does not extend to ‘that incredible/unanimal mankind’ (1950); there is still nothing to touch the compelling warmth and insight of Lawrence’s ‘Last Words to Miriam’ or ‘Snapdragon’. Cummings is content with the skeletons of the ‘pop’ lyric:
— the great (my darling) happens to be
that love are in we, that love are in we.
‘Thanksgiving’ (1956) attacks, once again, the ‘unworld’, man — ‘a which that walks like a who’, ‘democracy’, and ‘the u s a’. Nothing was done about Hungary because the UN is democratic and soft: liberty ‘begins to smell’. And this from a man who has done nothing but simplify human issues all his life. His cherubic irresponsibility is unnerving. After his USSR trip, written up in Eimi (1933), he sat on his arse until the time was ripe to let fly at the UN.
Cummings’s nonconforming snobbery is typical of one attitude between the wars and it is worth looking into. Mr Friedman overstates his case and does not discriminate enough:
Cummings never had much patience with the modern psychologically enlightened attitude toward sexual perversion. Homosexuals, especially of the literary sort, receive nothing but his mockery, scorn and ridicule — especially British, communistic, poetic homosexuals (honi soit qui mal y pense!) . . .
The deadly effect of this satire on Communism-Fascism-Nazism is intensified tenfold by the clearly recognizable allusions to the nursery rhymes . . .
Worksheets, rescued ‘from oblivion’ by Mrs Cummings, are used to show how the poet’s celebrated spontaneities were worked up, but the six pages defending his ‘immaturity’ are not convincing. Mr Friedman approves of his absence of tragic vision, verbal ambiguity, metaphysical wit, mythic fragments and a climax of spiritual conversion simply because he believes they have become standard in twentieth century poetry. Against them he sets Cummings’s immature vision, invariable forms, sometimes unintelligible diction, purposelessness and lack of development, denies the accusations and claims a major poet. His analysis of the vocabulary is interesting for the bases of egoism it shows: first, private references to self through magic, miracle, secret and mystery, and second, a series of simplifying pairs used as opposites with the first word preferred in each case — for example, born/was, here/where, now/never, new/same, yes/but, who/which, why/because, dare/fear, give/keep, fail/succeed, sing/say, dying/undying, living/death. These set up a Peter Pan system of pseudo-choices. Everything depends on self-reliance, on being born and not made. A man is judged by this establishment, and from his Pisgah the poet sneers at the ‘slaves’ of economic security. From the world beyond self he only delights in the familiar round of bar, brothel, gangsterdom, burlesque show and circus, that apparatus of the Bohemian and artist which, unlike Picasso or Hemingway, Cummings is unable to transmute into value. Mr Friedman’s ‘immaturity of the visionary’ includes keeping out of commitments to Right or Left between the wars, and not meditating on doubt, natural violence, guilt and sin, and the difficult evolution of a living community.
Mr Friedman plays Cummings off against Frost and Eliot, and oddly enough the poet is both New Englander and Harvard man. But in fact he lives in a revised version of Emerson’s New England unitarian self-reliance, inherited from his Cambridge forbears, exacerbated by the circumstances of war and capitalism, searing the youth of 1917 as it also affected Dos Passos, Hemingway and others of that lost generation. His is the proud anarchism suggested in Emerson’s words: ‘And truly it demands something godlike in him who has cast off the common motives of humanity, and has ventured to trust himself for a taskmaster. High be his heart, faithful his will, clear his sight, that he may in good earnest be doctrine, society, law, to himself, that a simple purpose may be to him as strong as necessity to others!’ But this ‘law’ was inherited by Emerson’s disciples, Whitman and Thoreau, as a dilemma: how to be both self-reliant and good in a non-agrarian, urban, industrialised democracy, rooted in laissez-faire theory practised as a natural philosophy. With Cummings the simple purpose is living, in Mr Friedman’s words, as ‘a detached observer and commentator rather than participant’. He became what William James calls the type of the mystic, dreamer, insolvent tramp or loafer. A slight prophetic poet, defiantly unsuccessful by worldly standards, he glares hubristically through the glass, as impotent as O’Neill’s Larry in The Iceman Cometh and of the same generation as O’Neill. But Larry at least was once an active political anarchist.
Sympathy for the generation growing up with this century stops short of Cummings as his own example of the unique true man. His joy, so much praised because admittedly so rare in the poetry of our time, is really the emotion of Narcissus with no truth but himself to worship:
in the mirror
i see a frail man
dreaming
dreams
dreams in the mirror
So he sings of Love and his two-dimensional, almost Provençal, Lady and celebrates eternal Now. His persona is the mask of the American anarchist, bum or beat, living in an everlasting ‘young Now’. As Emerson put it: ‘society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members’. The only solution is to cultivate self and swear at society. Cummings stands between Emerson and the Beat Generation writers, themselves taking Whitman and Thoreau as their heroes. Selfhood must be achieved in spite of the world of ‘must’ and sham. Self-reliance, at least with Cummings, is observation of society from a safe hole. He transcends his world by dividing it into good and bad, right and wrong, and maintaining a private world of love and oneness where relationship is simply ‘1 X 1’. Jack Kerouac was telling John Clellon Holmes a few years ago that beat means beatific, and now Mr Friedman tells us that Cummings ‘has reached that state of beatitude’ which is the soul’s after resurrection, and quotes a Donne sermon as text. But Cummings is not dead and the other side of his blessedness is abusive scorn for the mankind he is always saying he loves, in a general sort of way.
But his real evil is ‘Mind’. ‘Let’s love suddenly without thinking’ is fine, but surely anti-intelligence, in love or out, is self-defeating. Mr Friedman defends the euphoria but it still looks more like romantic egoism of the prelapsarian, sensitive-child cult, and it is difficult to respect personality achieved at the expense of intelligence and responsibility. Childish olympianism in a man, over a creative life of forty years, is a curious thing. One result is a poem which sums up so much of that career, a vision of universal destruction viewed with the equanimity of an anglican archbishop:
what if a much of a which of a wind
gives the truth to summer’s lie;
bloodies with dizzying leaves the sun
and yanks immortal stars awry?
Blow king to beggar and queen to seem
(blow friend to fiend; blow space to time)
— when skies are hanged and oceans drowned,
the single secret will still be man . . .
The poem goes on to rejoice in cosmic doom, but since ‘the most who die, the more we live’, Cummings emerges finally as the lyricist of wretched passivity, joyfully crowing in inaction over his blessed self. After such knowledge, it is simply an unpleasant hoax to hear him proclaim: ‘the mightiest meditations of mankind/cancelled are by one merely opening leaf’. His code of eternal youth, endless present tense of life, and practically monothematic lyricism — the April-Love syndrome — is not to be trusted because he and his lady have not earned the right to be rejuvenated year after year. He must hate Rembrandt. He hates most people but rarely specifies, although he names and points, because he cannot particularize man, woman or emotion. He has the American outsider’s fear of the mob which he believes controls democracy. So he aristocratically blasts both manipulated and manipulators and retires in beardless triumph to his tent.
(1) E. E. Cummings: the art of his poetry by Norman Friedman. Oxford University Press.
(2) E. E. Cummings, Selected Poems 1923-1958. Faber.
poetrymagazines note: reproduced by kind permission of the Mottram collection at King's College London Archives.
Page(s) 83-90
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