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E. E. Cummings: A Life

door Susan Cheever

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A major reassessment of the life and work of the novelist, painter, and playwright considered to be one of America's preeminent twentieth-century poets. Cummings was and remains controversial--called "a master" or "hideous." In Susan Cheever's rich biography we see his idyllic childhood years in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his sternly religious father and his loving, attentive mother. We see Cummings--slight, agile, playful, a product of a nineteenth-century New England childhood; his love of nature; his sense of fun, laughter, mimicry; his desire from the get-go to stand conventional wisdom on its head. At Harvard, he earned two degrees, discovered alcohol, fast cars, and burlesque, and raged against the school's exclusionary upper-class rule. He grew into a dark young man and set out on a lifelong course of rebellion against conventional authority. Headstrong and cavalier, he volunteered as an ambulance driver in World War I, working alongside Hemingway and Joyce. He permanently fled to Greenwich Village to be among other modernist poets of the day, and we see the development of both the poet and his work against the backdrop of modernism. Cheever's book gives us the evolution of an artist whose writing was at the forefront of what was new and daring and bold in an America in transition.--From publisher description.… (meer)
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E.E. Cummings made more money reading his poems than writing them. That's just one of the fascinating tidbits Susan Cheever gives us in her excellent 2014 biography “E. E. Cummings: A Life.”

Another is this: Cummings may have been a radical in his poetic style, yet he was a firm anti-communist, unlike so many of his fellow intellectuals. Friends returned from Russia with praise for what they had found there, but Cummings turned against Stalin and communism almost from the moment he entered Russia. Everyone there seemed afraid. Nobody seemed happy.

Cheever gives us plentiful examples of his poetry, often playful, sometimes angry, usually obscure, always thoughtful. These poems provide commentary on his life, from loving memories of his clergyman father to his late-in-life fondness for birds.

The poet had difficulties with women: two marriages, two divorces. He never married the love of his life, who stayed by him until the end, although she was jealous even of his own daughter.

His relationship with Nancy, his daughter, makes a wonderful story in itself, perhaps even worthy of a movie. Cummings knew her when she was a little girl, but then his ex-wife took her away to Ireland, changed her name and refused to tell her anything about her real father. Years later, after Nancy herself had become a poet, Cummings reentered her life, yet for a long time refused to tell her he was her father. Only after Nancy declared her love for him did he reveal the truth.

Like her father, John Cheever, Susan Cheever is an outstanding writer, as her other books such as American Bloomsbury, have shown. This is a fine, revealing biography, perhaps too brief to be definitive, but beautifully written. ( )
  hardlyhardy | Jan 31, 2024 |
...I value freedom; and have never expected freedom to be anything less than indecent.
e.e. cummings

E.E. Cummings: A Life by Susan Cheever is a biography of the American poet, Cheever is a graduate of Brown University, a Guggenheim Fellow, and director of the board of the Yaddo Corporation. She currently teaches in the MFA program at Bennington College and the New School. Cheever is the author of over a dozen books, including American Bloomsbury.

The book is short for a biography of a man with a long history, but it concentrates on the high and low points and avoids the lulls that are found in longer biographies. The life story, however, seems to be complete. Cheever met Cummings when she was still in school. Cummings was performing a lecture and reading at the Masters School. Her father was friends with the poet. The young Cheever was impressed by Cummings anti- established opinions. At that time, his work was compared to Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase.” The comparison is more than subject matter, but style. Duchamp attempts to capture the entire descent down the staircase, start to finish, in a single image and Cummings attempts to capture the same effect with words. It was at Cumming’s suggestion to her father that Cheever was moved from her uptight school to a very progressive one.

Rather than summarize Cumming’s life in this review, I will look at something Cheever does in the book. Late in the book Cheever compares Cummings to Wordsworth. Wordsworth’s love for the outdoors, “Tintern Abbey” for example, and Cumming’s Joy Farm. Both men idolized youth and saw that youth had a purity that was missing later in life. I also found a few parallels myself. Both men had daughters out of wedlock and were separated from them. Both men traveled a great deal for their time and class. Also, both men had a negative view of the establishment. Wordsworth support for the Republican movement in France, but was abhorred the Reign of Terror and the subsequent crowning of an emperor. Cummings also had his problems with authority and the establishment that went much further than youthful rebellion. Much like Wordsworth, revolution excited Cummings. He wanted to see the paradise that the Soviet Union had become, but left disillusioned. Cummings became disenchanted with many things in his life he hated Jews and he hated Hitler. He hated Roosevelt and he hated Stalin. He was an equal opportunity hater.

E.E. Cummings: A Life is a well researched and well written biography of one of America most read poets. Cheevers captures the life and the mind of the poet. Like most writers of his time he lived an exciting life, filled with controversy, alcohol, and prescription drugs. His life can be compared to that of a modern rock star. The highs and lows of fame. He had the groupies and the crowds. And like very few rock stars he was able to rise above the moment of fame and produce a lasting work and a lasting name.
( )
  evil_cyclist | Mar 16, 2020 |
Though I've never done justice to his poetry, for the most part simply scanning it now and then, E.E. Cummings as author of 'The Enormous Room' has had a profound influence on my life. I would have likely have still studied history without ever following my friends advice by picking it up, but Cummings busted a lot of my preconceived notions about war and America and the whole progress of Western Civilization in the 20th century.

It's safe to presume that everybody has an idea of who E.E. Cummings was. At the least he can be recalled as the guy who wrote that poem with all the blank spaces and weird punctuation. Also, likely read on the same day as the poem about the chicken and the wheelbarrow.

Unfortunately Susan Cheever's polished product of a biography misses several opportunities to break through my polite expectations for this biography. I wanted an overview of Cummings' life and work, and some broad analysis of what that meant to the Modernist movement as a whole. I got that, but I also got a lot of apologist hand-wringing and evasion concerning his antisemitism and his negligence as a parent.

Cheever is full of excuses, using boilerplate arguments about how everybody was antisemitic in Cummings' time and while that doesn't make it OK it does makes it OK. Also Cheever does go on about Cummings' love for his daughter with very little evidence to go on. The mother may have kept her expressly out of sight as a child, but Cummings did little to pursue her, even after Nancy was a married woman. He clearly felt he had better things to do, why not go into that? Her efforts to catch his severe flaws in a flattering light make all of her conclusions shallow.

If this is the only resource at hand, go ahead and read it, but the bare facts are all you can trust. ( )
  ManWithAnAgenda | Feb 18, 2019 |
Mostly about daughter, too bad
  suecrawford | Dec 4, 2017 |
I don't know much about Cummings' life, only a little about his poetry - I don't really get poetry - but I like biographies. I liked this one a lot. It's brief and to the point, and as cakecop points out, she concentrates on his relationships with people. That was a good way to go, considering how intense and dramatic so many of them were. I thought she handled his anti Communism and anti Semitism pretty well. He was a man of his time and he spent enough time in the Soviet Union to see how things really worked.
  piemouth | Nov 4, 2017 |
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A major reassessment of the life and work of the novelist, painter, and playwright considered to be one of America's preeminent twentieth-century poets. Cummings was and remains controversial--called "a master" or "hideous." In Susan Cheever's rich biography we see his idyllic childhood years in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his sternly religious father and his loving, attentive mother. We see Cummings--slight, agile, playful, a product of a nineteenth-century New England childhood; his love of nature; his sense of fun, laughter, mimicry; his desire from the get-go to stand conventional wisdom on its head. At Harvard, he earned two degrees, discovered alcohol, fast cars, and burlesque, and raged against the school's exclusionary upper-class rule. He grew into a dark young man and set out on a lifelong course of rebellion against conventional authority. Headstrong and cavalier, he volunteered as an ambulance driver in World War I, working alongside Hemingway and Joyce. He permanently fled to Greenwich Village to be among other modernist poets of the day, and we see the development of both the poet and his work against the backdrop of modernism. Cheever's book gives us the evolution of an artist whose writing was at the forefront of what was new and daring and bold in an America in transition.--From publisher description.

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