E.E. Cummings: A Biography

by Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno

Book Overview

Throughout the forty-five years of his professional writing life, Edward Estlin Cummings consistently celebrated the ordinary, reviled pretentiousness, scourged conformity, experimented boldly with words and syntax and punctuation, and wrote some of the most erotic and tender love poetry in the English language. Yet Cummings could also be difficult, truculent, opinionated, wrong-headed, emotional, bigoted and egotistical. Dubbed by Ezra Pound as "Whitman's...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1570717753
• ISBN13: 9781570717758
• Release Date: October 2004
• Publisher: Sourcebooks
• Length: 624 Pages
• Weight: 2.51 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.9" x 6.6" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

A Man Of Means

Cummings is a wonderful poet and three cheers for C. Sawyer-Laucanno for attempting to give us a full-scale new reading of the complete works, while trying to clear a space so we can understand his complicated life a bit better. I wound up seeing the life clearly, and noticing for the first time the extreme high reaches of class privilege that made Cummings' poetry possible. I suppose I had been reading this through the screen of Cummings' novel, THE ENORMOUS ROOM, with its bleak descriptions of prison poverty and deprivation, so without really thinking about it I just assumed that EE Cummings was sort of our American Genet, born of poverty, a hero of the underclass, an outsider artist who just scraped by, like Darger. Far from it, Sawyer-Laucanno reveals. Everything he did seems to have been paid for by generous friends or family, and even in the French jail he was able to buy cartons of cigarettes, razors, books, and fruit from the concierge, because he had a huge trust fund. Later, during the 1920s when he was writing all his masterpieces, the discerning Scofield Thayer became his patron. Thayer was a complicated case; as editor of THE DIAL his taste helped usher in a new American modernism. He married a beautiful and refined heiress, Elaine, and when Cummings fathered her daughter through an adulterous union, he assumed paternity of little "Mopsy" in a an act of upper-class generosity. A few years later, he granted Elaine a divorce and she married Cummings, although only for two months. Thayer began a descent into madness that lasted until his death in 1982. He had apparently been gay the entire time and nurtured a secret passion for underage boys which got him in hot water from time to time, and perhaps he was in love with Cummings himself. Why not, everyone else was. Cummings must have had something, erotically speaking, for many women were drawn to him and not a few men. In any case we can see, bleakly, how spoiled and privileged Cummings was. No matter what harm he did to others, or to himself, someone would come along with a large checkbook and clean up after him. It's appalling the selfishness, and yet if great poems come in the wake of such self-love, what real harm and what real benefit? It's a stumper. Sawyer-Laucanno argues that Cummings' play, HIM, is a major ignored work of the American theater. Such is his conviction that it fairly sweeps the reader into feeling the same way, or at any rate wanting to see a first rate production. My idea is that HIM might make a really good movie--by Lars Von Trier perhaps. I can see it on the screen of my imagination, thanks to Sawyer-Laucanno's persuasive, always elegant argumentation. As for the reviewer in the Washington Post Book World, I honestly don't know what to make of someone whose idea of the three great American poets is Whitman, Frost and Cummings. What kind of mind comes up with that combo? It's like the boys who formed the "Troika" in the later episodes of B

Blissful biography of much-loved poet

Before reading this great slab of a book, I had little idea of who E.E. Cummings was, besides knowing he had an unconventional attitude towards punctuation. Thankfully, Sawyer-Laucanno manages to shed much light on the poet and his work in a way which is both accessible to newcomers and meaningful to more seasoned Cummings enthusiasts. In particular, I liked the way in which the author juggles so many competing demands. He had access to a wealth of archive material and Cummings had a long and eventful life. Yet S-L manages to give play to all aspects of Cummings' activities whilst maintaining the pace and flow of his narrative. I especially appreciated the almost equal weight given to critiquing Cummings' work as opposed to describing his life. An analysis of how "Buffalo Bill's defunct" came into being, based on early drafts of the poem, gives a particularly rare and precious glimpse of how a fully-formed poem is grown from a few choice phrases. Another dilemma which L-S addresses, is the fact that Cummings was an enthusiastic and successful painter. It would have been easy to overlook or underplay this aspect but here the paintings are seen as an integral part of Cummings' artistic achievement. I spotted one or two faults. I don't think Dylan Thomas would relish being called an English poet - he was a Welsh one - and there is a misplaced bracket (horror!) on p.533. I think E.E. Cummings would have appreciated the way this biography manages to find space for a number of small anecdotes aside from the great sweep of the life story. I loved the description of the humming birds bobbing goodbye before migrating south from Joy Farm. This was both heart-warming and highlighted Cummings' love of natural history. Overall, I found "E.E. Cummings: A biography" to be absolutely compelling. At first daunted by its length I soon found myself regretting it was so soon coming to an end. Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno more than meets the challenge of enlightening us about Cummings' life. He is no mean story-teller and this work is a masterful achievement.

Solid Biography

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.

Mostly words, but spacing and punctuation are unusual

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 b