the last book I ever read (The Beauty of Living: e. e. cummings in the Great War, excerpt eleven)

from The Beauty of Living: e. e. cummings in the Great War by J. Alison Rosenblitt:

Everything from France swirled around Cummings’s mind during these miserable months at Camp Devens: sex, prostitution, thoughts of venereal disease, Marie Louise, the poplars. In the war zone and in Paris, sex and the army and venereal disease were all of a piece. This trinity was no less operative in America. Dos wrote that the army camp to which he himself was posted in Pennsylvania was known locally as Syphilis Valley. Cummings meanwhile observed the ludicrous nature of attempts to confront VD at Camp Devens. Nothing, he said, was accomplished by designating two latrine seats as “crabs only” and “venereal only”—except that the available seats in the latrine were effectively reduced by two, since no man would ever consent to mark himself by using the crabs or venereal seats. One of Cummings’s most satirical war poems comments on “yon clean upstanding well dressed boy” who is fêted off to war, “with trumpets clap and syphilis.”

His iconic statement about the Camp Devens experience was not published until much later, in 1931 in his collection W [Viva], when he finally channeled his anger into one of his most searing indictments of brutality inflicted in the name of patriotism. In “i sing of Olaf glad and big,” Cummings immortalized a conscientious objector whom he had known at Camp Devens. The power of “i sing of Olaf glad and big” lies in the straightforward quality of Cummings’s anger, as he recounts the imagined treatment of Olaf, rolled through freezing water, beaten with fists and boots and shit-covered toilet brushes, and then anally tortured with heated bayonets, before the army concludes that his pacifism is irremediable and throws him in prison to meet his death. The story is fictionalized, but the man remembered in this poem as “more brave than me:more blond than you” did in fact die while incarcerated for his pacifism at the military prison at Fort Leavenworth. “i sing of Olaf glad and big” carries a protest in its meter as well as its subject. “i sing of . . . ” immediately signals the famous opening of Virgil’s epic Aeneid, “I sing of arms and the man . . . ,” but Cummings rejects both the hexameter meter of classical epic and the pentameter meter of many English epic poems in favor of tetrameter, a four-beat line associated with the Romantic poets and their celebration of individualism and emotional liberty. Cummings offers an epic hero in a Romantic mold—the man who is true to his own conscience, even to death.

the last book I ever read (The Beauty of Living: e. e. cummings in the Great War, excerpt ten)

from The Beauty of Living: e. e. cummings in the Great War by J. Alison Rosenblitt:

Berthe was no casual pickup. There was a genuine tenderness. Back in May, he had written a poem about her, in French, conceived through the terms of his Cubist experimentation. She was, in the language of the poem, stubborn but weary, with flesh that was green like a gourd, chewing a yellow rose between blue teeth, with red skin, heavy lips, and a mouth on fire. For her part, she cared enough about him to remember him when six months had passed, and to recognize him, changed as he was by the front and by his time in La Ferté-Macé. They smoked a cigarette, drank Champagne, “and talked gradually of the war France death my prison, all pleasant things.”

At last, as he wrote to Brown, switching delicately to the French: “J’ai perdu quelque chose.” (I’ve lost something.)

the last book I ever read (The Beauty of Living: e. e. cummings in the Great War, excerpt nine)

from The Beauty of Living: e. e. cummings in the Great War by J. Alison Rosenblitt:

A month later, on November 20, 1917, the American embassy at Paris informed the State Department in Washington that Cummings had already been released—and was dead. He was lost at sea aboard the torpedoed American vessel Antilles. But at the same time that official news of his son’s death reached the Reverend at 104 Irving Street, Norton cabled to say that Cummings would be released within the next few days. There was hope, then, of a mistake. The Reverend cabled urgently to Norton demanding to know if his son were dead or alive. Four days later, on November 24, both the American State Department and 104 Irving Street were authoritatively informed that the man lost on the Antilles was H.H., not E.E., Cummings.

It is a hard piece of fortune to go down in history for the relief felt that it was you and not another who died. No man should be collateral damage in another man’s story. I have been able to find out very little about H.H. Cummings. His was one of sixty-seven lives lost when the Antilles sank in a submarine attack. He was from Philadelphia: he was the only Philadelphian to die on the transport. He must be the same man who appears in the register of births for Philadelphia City, Pennsylvania, as Harold H. Cummings, born May 16, 1894, to Wm. P. Cummings and Clara E. Cummings. That makes him six months (minus two days) older than E. E. Cummings, and twenty-three when he died. There is nothing more to know about who he was or who he might have been had he not died on the ocean when the Antilles went down.

the last book I ever read (The Beauty of Living: e. e. cummings in the Great War, excerpt eight)

from The Beauty of Living: e. e. cummings in the Great War by J. Alison Rosenblitt:

The prisoner whom Cummings admired most was Jean, a black man who had things particularly bad, since in addition to the conditions of the prison, Jean had to contend with the racism of the guards and of many of his fellow prisoners. Jean was even more vulnerable than the other inmates. When he arrived, he had entrusted all his money—sixty francs to sustain him at the commissary where additional supplies could be purchased—to one of the plantons to deposit. The planton pocketed the money and denied everything, and Jean had no redress. “Of all the fine people in La Ferté,Monsieur Jean (“le noir” as he was entitled by his enemies)swaggers in my memory as the finest.”

These memories—of Jean and Apollyon and the gang of four and of many others—materialize in The Enormous Room in a style as dry as bone. Literary critics have referred to this book both as a novel and as a memoir, but it is best just to call it an account. Cummings never sought to define it by genre. However, he regarded it in all meaningful senses as true, and he said that, insofar as it would have any appeal to the public, it would appeal as a document. When writing, he worked closely from his own ntoes as well as from his memory, which he cross-checked with the memory of Brown, who described the result as remarkably accurate. Many of its specifics are independently verifiable. As with all autobiographical writing, we have to assume, of course, that some material—like conversation—is shaped as it filters through memory. But what we have is far more valulable than any stenographer’s transcript could have been: we have access to the internal as well as external realities of Cummings’s world. The deliberate wryness and humor of the writing in The Enormous Room is the solution Cummings found in order to speak of nearly unspeakable things. Imprisonment was not an adventure. It was a terror.

the last book I ever read (The Beauty of Living: e. e. cummings in the Great War, excerpt seven)

from The Beauty of Living: e. e. cummings in the Great War by J. Alison Rosenblitt:

Cummings had no idea even that he was under arrest. Some official-looking men arrived at the ambulance quarters. Cummings was told to collect his things and come. He witnessed them bundling Brown into one car; he himself was bundled into another. On the drive, his driver’s hat flew off in a gust of wind. The driver stopped the car and Cummings moved to collect the hat; the guard pulled his revolver. Only then did Cummings grasp the way things stood.

He was taken back to Noyon, into a civic edifice that looked to him like a feudal dungeon. He was full of adrenaline and exhaustion, demoralized by months of cleaning mud at the front, and alienated from the Americans in his ambulance unit. He was still desperate for his permission to get to Paris, but also convinced that he had been taken for a chump by his girl. He was oddly thrilled to find himself under arrest, just to shake the tedium and to feel as though something at least might happen. It was a day for impulsiveness, and it would change his life forever.

the last book I ever read (The Beauty of Living: e. e. cummings in the Great War, excerpt six)

from The Beauty of Living: e. e. cummings in the Great War by J. Alison Rosenblitt:

Brown’s drinking brought him some luck and some mishaps. When he first came round to view his prospective New York lodgings, he was so drunk (“it being about 8:30 P.M.”) that he began to regale the landlady with the full story of his time in France, leading to many exclamations of “O My God” and an offer to lower the rent by a dollar a week. He found less indulgence from Gaston Lachaise, the French sculptor living in New York who was know to Cummings as the stepfather of his friend Edward Nagle and whose modernist style had already served Cummings as inspiration and bridge between New York and the artistic world of Europe. Lachaise was an important man: famous, controversial, and at the heart of several New York artistic circles. One day, he took Brown out for lunch and asked him if he believed in reincarnation. Brown was two bottles of wine in, and averred that after death they would all rot and turn into witch hazel. He had no notion why he specified witch hazel, but he proceeded nonetheless to defend it vociferously. He wrote later to Cummings that he had no idea what Lachaise had said, having been too drunk to maks sense of a word, but he was quite sure that he himself had defended the witch hazel hypothesis with vigor and at length.

After the witch-hazel incident, Lachaise began to avoid him.

the last book I ever read (The Beauty of Living: e. e. cummings in the Great War, excerpt five)

from The Beauty of Living: e. e. cummings in the Great War by J. Alison Rosenblitt:

For the moderns, the departure from established aesthetics was fueled by a sense that exciting, explosive ideas about art were pouring out of Europe. One turning point for Cummings was provided by the controversial exhibit of painting and sculpture in New York in 1913 known as the Armory Show. It was called the Armory Show because it was held at the Armory of the 69th Infantry on Lexington Avenue. It took place from the fifteenth of February to the fifteenth of March, and it was open from ten a.m. to ten p.m., including Sundays, before traveling on to Chicago and then Boston. It was all about drawing an audience. To call it and “exhibition” barely expressed the magnitude of the event: it was a phenomenon. There were more than a thousand works of art on display, many imported from Europe. The catalogue was eye-watering. There were eleven paintings and a sculpture in wood by Paul Gauguin; a Kandinsky; eight paintings by Cézanne; two by Edvard Munch; two by Toulouse-Lautrec; seven Picasso paintings and a bronze bust; ten pieces by Henri Rousseau; four by Picabia; and fourteen by Van Gogh. There were also fourteen paintings by Matisse plus a sculpture; two works by Seurat; four by Monet; four by Pisarro; four by Renoir; five sculptures by Brancusi and two by Rodin. Beyond these, there are dozens of other names that would glitter in any lesser company.

The Cubist painter and sculptor Marcel Duchamp entered four works. Duchamp is best known for a piece displayed in 1917: a urinal, which he signed “R. Mutt 1917” and titled Fountain, and which has since spawned a hundred years of experimentation with “found” art objects that challenge or transgress traditional ideas about what constitutes art. In 1913, a piece by Duchamp, more conventional in its materials—an oil painting on canvas—became one of the celebrated controversies of the Armory Show. Painted during the previous year, 1912, and exhibited at the 1913 show, Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 presented an abstract, geometric figure with warm-toned flesh against the planes of a dark buff-brown staircase. The full descent of the staircase is shown. The figure is in motion, painted in a kind of time-lapse, with the geometric limbs and bodies superimposed in sequence on one another as the figure moves down the stairs. Even by Cubist standards, Duchamp’s attempt to grapple with motion was cutting-edge. Cubism was not simply one style but a varied and multistrand movement, and the Armory Show brought Cummings into sudden contact with Cubism as a whole world of art.