Biography: When the body of EE Cummings was buried forty-three years ago, the spirit of the poet "ee cummings" was widely expected to live on in his books and many admirers.
Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno all but concedes that his new biography is an attempt to rehabilitate a posthumous reputation that has entered the twenty-first century with a whimper.
The distinction between upper and lower case selves is sufficiently important to merit a separate prefatory note. When Cummings's first book of prose appeared in his absence, he instructed that the author's name must be in initialised capitals. This is the version that he used throughout his life in personal correspondence and therefore the one to which Sawyer-Laucanno adheres.
As much as any other poet, however, Cummings put pressure on the poem's received typography to create a visual dimension for a traditionally oral/aural genre. In that spirit, his poetry publications had an exclusively lower case author, as if 'ee cummings' were a parallel identity or Yeatsian mask for the man E.E. Cummings. 'I am,' he once explained in a letter to his mother, 'a small-eye poet.'
Edward Estlin Cummings was born in Cambridge, MA, in 1894, to a Harvard professor and a mother so doting she was transcribing his "poems" by the time he was three-and-a-half, so certain of her son's academic future she crocheted an "H" onto his first sweater. Perhaps Estlin's most notable achievement at Harvard was to woo a female undergraduate away from a senior, Tom Eliot.
For a handful of months of the first World War he served in a "de luxe Harvard section" of the ambulance corps, saw no action, was imprisoned for patriotic equivocations expressed in letters home, was freed after pressure from his family and their influential friends, and made his name with the resulting memoir, The Enormous Room.
Between that moment and his death in 1962 came a dozen or so collections, three wives, an imposing father who got his comeuppance at a level crossing, a treatment for a ballet based on Uncle Tom's Cabin that somehow was never performed and a path beaten between abodes in Patchin Place, Manhattan, and Joy Farm, New Hampshire.
That relationship between old money and new-fangled modernism is well known. Cummings was blessed throughout his life with a plethora of minted well-wishers. Although broke from time to time, he knew he could always fall into the economic safety net that his family and social contacts provided. That knowledge cannot influence our judgement of the work, but it does render the circumstances under which the work was written frequently uninteresting.
Whether experimental tyro rubbing shoulders with the great in Pigalle or embittered grandmaster spouting reactionary bile, Cummings emerges from these pages as a self-absorbed codger. In 1937, for example, he squandered his last $1,000 on a bust of himself and then cabled his mother for a top-up. In 1952 he gave a series of six lectures at his alma mater, the subject of each being the collected works of the lecturer.
The only person he appears to have considered before himself from time to time, his estranged daughter, Nancy, also provides one of the book's more bizarre sub-plots. Reared by her mother, Cummings's first wife, Elaine, and Elaine's third husband, Frank MacDermot (a TD for Roscommon in the 1930s), Nancy never knew Cummings was her father. When, in her late 20s, she spent time with the famous poet, Cummings tactfully said nothing.
Tact backfired when his daughter fell in love with him. The embarrassed never-to-be-bridged distance that the truth inevitably created remained a source of genuine sorrow for the remainder of Cummings's life.
Ideally, the narrative of a significant writer's life will throw up otherwise inconsequential details to enhance our understanding of the work. All too often, the genre reverts to using the work to explain the life. The bitter truth for all literary biographers, ultimately, lies in the fact that the most memorable actions of their subjects' lives were imaginative and took place usually in silence and solitude. No amount of well-researched words, or celluloid for that matter, will get within an ass's roar of those moments.
We are left with a litany of details that remain, with respect to the significant writer's significant others, inconsequential. Or, in Cummings's case, of marriages, trips to and from Paris, flings, periods of minor hardship, threatened suicides, awards, standing-room-only readings late in life, a corset for arthritis and the panegyrics of his peers.
Sawyer-Laucanno battles manfully in Cummings's cause. He is the first biographer to have access to personal papers and journals, and uses them extensively. He writes elegantly and with sincere sympathy for the personality, without attempting to sidestep its many failings: homophobia, racism, anti-Semitism. The version we are offered is convincing if largely unoriginal: a flawed but gifted man, by turns bullish and self-doubting.
Sawyer-Laucanno's argument founders only when it comes to making claims for Cummings's legacy. Among poetry's original superstars, like his carousing buddy Dylan Thomas, Cummings reached a mass audience through many memorable public readings of his own work. His voice is deemed to speak both to and for those millions who inexplicably feel as if they should like poetry but who, in truth, don't.
As a result, Cummings is one of those poets whose posthumous popularity far outweighs his critical reputation. Sawyer-Laucanno argues that the two are related, that "a writer of broad appeal can be dismissed" by envious commentators. If this were true, then surely Robert Frost, unarguably the century's most popular American poet both during and since his own life, would have long since become a critical non-entity.
Any judicious Selected of Cummings is bound to have its moments. But the work is simply not at the races compared to the depth of achievement of contemporaries like Wallace Stevens, whose first collection, Harmonium, appeared the same year as Cummings's, or Frost, who died a handful of months after Cummings. The idea that he was "one of the foremost innovators of modernism" is now untenable. Cummings's poems have long since begun rotting in their own sentimentality. What must have seemed innovatory to their first readers has proven over time to be a staid lyric gift disguised by typing - albeit typing of a particularly snazzy order.
Djuna Barnes, author of the extraordinary modernist novel Nightwood, broke her leg in her Greenwich Village apartment in the mid-1950s. She telephoned Cummings who lived across the street. He "rescued" his friend in a feat of derring-do that involved fire escapes and trees. For years afterwards he would holler sardonically across the afternoon silence, "Djuna, are you still alive?"
Nowadays, one could be forgiven for making a similar inquiry of the poetry of ee cummings.
Conor O'Callaghan's new collection of poems, Fiction (Gallery Press), is a current Poetry Book Society Recommendation
EE Cummings: A Biography by Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno Metheun, 606 pp. £25