“You mustn’t be so open-mined that your brains fall out.” That’s the advice avant garde poet, Marianne Moore once gave to her fellow poet, E. E. Cummings. Whether she had any influence over him or not is unknown but a new biography of the man reveals he was clear about his opinions and was willing to stand outside a crowd to throw tomatoes, if necessary. (E. E. Cummings: A Life by Susan Cheever, Pantheon, 2/11/2014.) Susan Cheever, daughter of writer John Cheever, knew Cummings as a child and describes him as a person who “despised fear,” and lived a life in defiance of all who [were] ruled by it.” (“The Prince of Patchin Place,” by Susan Cheever, Vanity Fair, Feb. 2014, pg. 20.)
Certainly the poet lived courageously for his art. He made little money at it and spent a life in elegant poverty, skirting the edges of high society with no means of keeping up. One evening, for example, after attending a swank party, Cummings discovered his pockets were empty. He hadn’t enough money for carfare to his residence. Turning to a man who had admired his top hat, he asked the stranger how much he would pay to crush it beneath his foot. The man gave him $10 and Cummings rode home in a taxi, hatless. (Ibid, pg. 120)
No matter his poverty, Commings was rich in genius. He played with language, the way Harold Pinter did, as much for its cadence and sound as for its meaning. His form of writing was spare so that, as Cheever put it, he could “reshape the triangle between the reader, the writer and the subject…” (Ibid pg. 119.)
I admire that spareness, the habit of treating words as if they were chips of gold, not feathers to be blown in the wind. But to be spare is not to be simple. To be simple is to be flat. To be spare is to squeeze the last juice of meaning from a word—mining it for its image, its sound, its rhythm and location in the sentence in an effort to reveal the nugget of intent. As to his defiance in his art and in his life, I often wonder if he was thinking of his own epitaph when he wrote:
He was a handsome man
And what I want to know is
How do you like your blueeyed boy
Mr. Death. (from “Buffalo Bill’s defunct” by e.e. cummings)
(Courtesy of www.spectator.co.uk)
(This blog orginally posted 2/11/14)
