10 SUNDAY, AUGUST 9, 2020EDWARD ESTLIN CUMMINGSbelonged to
the generation of modernists — Wallace
Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Mari-
anne Moore, Hart Crane — who changed
American poetry. You might say they did it
by making the language more worldly and
less English, but for Cummings, in particu-
lar, the discovery of Europe and the experi-
ence of war were inseparable motives of
that change. His formal innovations also
owed much to his study of Greek and Latin
verse, which may be why J. Alison Rosen-
blitt, a classics professor at Oxford, found
an affinity with his work.
“The Beauty of Living,” Rosenblitt’s ac-
count of the formative influences on Cum-
mings’s life and work, begins with his
childhood in Cambridge, Mass. His mother
doted on him and preserved his earliest ef-
forts as a writer. His father, Edward Cum-
mings, a Unitarian minister and liberal-
minded in public, was a rigorous moralist
at home. As a student at Cambridge High
and Latin School, Cummings excelled in
French and twice failed “deportment.” At
Harvard, he fell in with a literary society
that included S. Foster Damon, Robert
Hillyer and John Dos Passos. The group fa-
vored the sensualists among the late Vic-
torians — Rossetti and especially Swin-
burne — and Rosenblitt brings out their
“pagan” aestheticism as it emerged in il-
lustrations and motifs of the faun and the
goat-god Pan. She offers a plausible specu-
lation that Cummings’s fondness for re-
arranged letters or syllables may have
been due to dyslexia: “That twitch of the
mind can also bring an extraordinary facil-
ity in handling reversals of other kinds” —
as in his grasshopper poem, “r-p-o-p-h-e-s-
s-a-g-r.”
Cummings and his Harvard circle were
enchanted by the European art first shown
in America at the Armory Show, which
came to Boston in 1913. He was a partisan
of the new by the time he arrived in Paris,
in May 1917; and on his way to serve as a
volunteer in an ambulance unit, he joined
his friend William Slater Brown at the de-
but of the Satie-Cocteau ballet “Parade.”
During those first weeks in Paris, he fell in
love with a prostitute, Marie Louise Lalle-
mand. On the intensity of his feelings and
his later self-reproach for “cruel” treat-
ment of her (the details of which remain
obscure), Rosenblitt writes some of her
most original and interesting pages. His
time at the front, as she tells it, was brief
and uneventful: The war was ugly and fu-
tile; Army regimentation was a horror in
itself. “However busy 60 men may be kept
suffering in common,” he would later ob-
serve, “there is always one man or two or
three who can always find time to make
certain of their comrades enjoying a little
extra suffering.”
He was recalled from service and sent to
prison for a cause he couldn’t know at the
time. His friend Brown had written home
about the spread of syphilis among Ameri-
can troops and reported conversations
about French, English and American sol-
diers contriving to kill their officers infriendly-fire accidents. Army censors
reading the correspondence were unlikely
to be good-natured at a moment when, as
Rosenblitt points out, General Haig “was
utterly persuaded that German morale
was on the point of breaking any day.”
Cummings was interrogated, for good
measure, after Brown, and (though not
knowing Brown’s offense) refused to disso-
ciate himself from his friend. When offered
an easy way out — would he at least avow
that he hated the Germans? — he declined
the invitation and answered only that he
loved the French.
In France, between May and December
1917, Cummings filled more than a dozen
notebooks, and “The Beauty of Living” re-
lies largely on these. Rosenblitt doesn’t at-tempt a general assessment of his autobio-
graphical war novel, “The Enormous
Room”; an odd omission, since that book is
the main reason people associate him with
the war at all. From evidence in the note-
books, however, she does confirm many
details of Cummings’s descriptions of the
men who filed into and out of the Enor-
mous Room — his name for the fourth-floor
living and sleeping quarters of the camp de
triagewhere he was interned for his of-
fense. In the novel, we get to know the men
by their nicknames: Mexique, Judas, One-
Eyed Dah-veed, Monsieur Pet-airs, the
Young Pole, Bill the Hollander, Garibaldi,
Surplice, the Woodchuck and so on. The ty-
rannical directeur is alternately nick-named Apollyon, after the hellish beast
(fish, dragon, bear and lion) from “The Pil-
grim’s Progress.” Cummings hardly fig-
ures as a character except by his own ex-
plosive or muffled reactions to events. An-
ger and ridicule lie close to the surface in
every sentence.
His poems were known early on for their
wildness, but typography and page layout
(capitals, punctuation, spacing) had as
much to do with their fame as any deeper
inventiveness. “The Enormous Room”
leans on similar extrinsic or importable
means of excitement. The book is strewn
with French words and phrases; much of
the result is vivid, but just as often the
words slide onto the page as proof of Cum-
mings’s fluency, and to throw the reader offbalance and introduce the typographical
entertainment of italics. We get les
hommes, la villeand tout le monde where
“the men” and “the town” and “the whole
world” would do; or again, on the draw-
backs of buying cigarettes: “Why do you
dépenser pour these?... Better to buy du
tabac and faire yourself.”
The texture of “The Enormous Room” is
keyed-up and rather loose, at once frenetic
and static, the notations as wandering and
improgressive as day after day in prison
must be. Two incidents stand out: Cum-
mings’s arrival in the dark, with his first
groping impressions of bodies and filth on
the floor; and an account of the near-incin-
eration of prostitutes in a locked chamber
after guards stuff the cracks with straw
and set it on fire. “In telling how and why I
disagreed” with his inquisitors, Cummings
writes, “I think I managed to shove my
shovel-shaped imagination under the
refuse of their intellects.” On being in-
formed of his impending release, a guard,
he says, “gave me such a look as would
have turned a mahogany piano leg into a
mound of smoking ashes, and slammed the
key into the lock.”
Cummings returned to Paris for a sec-
ond short stay, lost his virginity to a wait-
ress, Berthe, and went home to America,
where he was drafted into the Army. Mean-
while, Cummings’s father carried a longer
grudge than young Edward Estlin: To re-
dress the injustice of the false arrest and
imprisonment, he hoped to sue the govern-
ment of France for a million dollars; but to
make the charge stick, he needed a full ac-
count of Cummings’s experiences. By then,
the poet had revolted against his father’ssevere morality, yet he felt obligated to pay
a debt of honor. He owed his freedom to his
father’s persistence in arousing a diplo-
matic protest. His war book was in this
sense a command performance, executed
under compulsion by a reluctant but duti-
ful son.
As moving as any page of “The Enor-
mous Room” is a prose statement, “Armi-
stice,” that Cummings wrote five years af-
ter the novel’s publication. The worst thing
about war, he said, is that “it is a fake.... It
is that colossal fake of fakes in which whole
nations indulge, secretly hoping that it will
give them a beauty or a courage which
they inherently fail to possess.” War can
break out only because it appeals to na-
tions rather than individuals, and “millions
of people simultaneously delude them-
selves into believing that they will be re-
born through the same magic formula.”
Rebirths, as Cummings recognized with
the scorn of an unembarrassed atheist, can
last a long time and require a great many
deaths. 0The Room Where It Happened
How World War I shaped the poetry of E.E. Cummings.
By DAVID BROMWICH
THE BEAUTY OF LIVING
E.E. Cummings in the Great War
By J. Alison Rosenblitt
Illustrated. 335 pp. W.W. Norton & Company.
$35.
E.E. Cummings in 1938.PHOTOGRAPH FROM ASSOCIATED PRESSCummings’s fondness for
rearranged letters or syllables
may have been due to dyslexia.DAVID BROMWICHteaches English at Yale
University and is the author, most recently, of
“How Words Make Things Happen.”