Harvard Key To Cummings Bio

Edward Estlin Cummings ’15 once remarked that his childhood home in the shadow of Harvard was “as lively as you please without ever becoming public.” Now, thanks to meticulous reconstruction by biographer and poet Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno, the details of Cummings’ multifaceted life are doing just that.

“I wanted to clue people in that he was more than just a lyrical poet of spring, flowers and love,” said Sawyer-Lauçanno, who will be discussing his new book E.E. Cummings: A Biography at the Harvard Coop on November 14 at 2 p.m.

The work is a “warts and all” biography of the esteemed poet. “My initial opinion was that Cummings was a happy-go-lucky, celebratory poet,” Sawyer-Lauçanno said, “but his private writing was far gloomier.”

Despite his enduring popularity as a poet, very few readers knew Cummings the man. Recently unsealed documents have revealed unsavory aspects of his character, such as his anti-Semitism and misogynism, as well as the cold treatment of his daughter.

“There were consistent bombshells. He was not a warm and fuzzy person,” Sawyer-Lauçanno said. “It doesn’t square with the work he produced. He was certainly struggling with himself.”

What sets the biography apart from other existing treatments of Cummings’ life is its even treatment of the poet’s many faces. It denies itself the easy route of simplification of the man to an image, positive or negative, in favor of an archival, archaeological construction of a character from its constituent facts.

“When you write the truth, you ruffle some feathers,” Sawyer-Lauçanno said. “Some people want to preserve their notion of Cummings. I was obligated to tell the truth and not gloss over his darker and less salient aspects.”

Sawyer-Lauçanno said that it was difficult to maintain an even hand. “He held many views antithetical to my own and to the mainstream. At times it was rather unnerving.”

At the outset, Sawyer-Lauçanno said he was not sure what he wanted to achieve with the biography, simply wanting to tell Cummings’ story. “Cummings has been a longtime passion for me,” he revealed. “I thought it would be interesting to put him in the context of his time and his peers.”

Also factoring in Sawyer-Lauçanno’s decision to create the biography was his feeling that Cummings “has been neglected as a major poet and writer.” The goal was not to reestablish his fame, for “if there is such thing as a popular poet, Cummings is it,” but rather to illustrate his true importance to the modern literary landscape.

In writing, Sawyer-Lauçanno said he fully realized the debt that contemporary poetry owes to Cummings. “He broke rules, the sanctity of the left margin, the splitting of words. In this way he was a pioneer.”

The synthesis in one book of Cummings the man and Cummings the poet provides a new appreciation for his body of work.

“He was an egocentrist, in single-minded pursuit of his art,” Sawyer-Lauçanno related. “He was a dedicated artist, dedicated to [Ezra Pound’s philosophy of] ‘making it new.’”

This fidelity to art led Cummings to forsake many aspects of the non-aesthetic sphere. “He never held a job in his life excepting six weeks. Work would have been a distraction: his art was paramount.”

Sawyer-Lauçanno also reported that Cummings’ time at Harvard was invaluable. “He drew off what he learned in his undergraduate years throughout his life and also depended on the associations and friends he made there,” he said.

None of these discoveries would have been possible were it not for Harvard’s Houghton Library, which made Cummings’ personal papers available to Sawyer-Lauçanno, including suicide notes and reflections on consultations with his psychiatrists. “Nearly every scrap of paper he had written was saved,” he said. They added up to hundreds of boxes of diaries, correspondence, and drafts of poetry.

The sheer bulk of this collection made research a grueling task; Sawyer-Lauçanno spent a full year simply reading through all the documents. He confesses that so overwhelming was the abundance of information, “there were times when I didn’t want to find anything else out.”

The year of research was followed by three years of intense writing, during which Sawyer-Lauçanno said he “was more attuned to the world of 1924 than 2004.” Yet for a work of this 600 page volume’s scope, he considers four years a short duration.

The archival method Sawyer-Lauçanno employed was necessary due to the time elapsed since the subject’s life. The book “was very different from [his previous biographies] in that there were few people alive that knew him during his early and even middle years to interview. In a sense I wrote it five or ten years too late.”

Though surely more difficult, Sawyer-Lauçanno said his reliance on Cummings’ own writings rather than the accounts of friends and family resulted in the truest and most comprehensive extant portrait of the poet.

One of the charges commonly levied against Cummings was that he did not develop as a poet. According to Sawyer-Lauçanno, this accusation springs from that fact that Cummings was “so good so early. For the rest of his life he continually refined early experiments.” Continuity is not a sign of weakness here, but of maturity.

Studying Cummings’ “more difficult poems that function at the syllabic or even phonemic level” along with the huge number of drafts that “vary only by one word, or the spacing of words, or in the margins” gave Sawyer-Lauçanno a reverence for Cummings’ skill. “[His poems] seem so spontaneous, so lively and so free yet they represent such craftsmanship. He appeals to the ear and to the eye,” he said.

At the book’s beginning there is a note on Cummings’ peculiar capitalization practices, explaining that as “a small eye poet” he objected to his name and the pronoun “I” being capitalized in poetry, but not in personal correspondence.

This tension between outward presentation and inner message will keep Cummings’ poetry, as well as his biography, relevant far into the future.