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rushthatspeaksThere's always something of a gamble in picking up a biography because you want to read a biography of the person it is about, and not because you have heard anything good about the author or book for itself. This book is blurbed by Anita Desai and Guy Davenport and lives up to that; I am glad, because I wanted to read a biography of Cummings after The Enormous Room made me curious about what happened next.
The author was, I gather, the first writer to have complete access to Cummings' papers, diaries, notes to himself, etc., and full permission to publish them. He therefore wisely lets Cummings speak for himself a lot of the time, and uses selections from the poetry when it is relevant. But, as a good biographer should, he also presents information and analysis-- not unbiasedly, because no one does that, but in a fashion that lets you see the biases and that he is aware of them.
And Sawyer-Lauçanno's major bias is also the one which is an additional mark of a good biographer: he loves his subject. He says so straight out. He loves Cummings' work, and it has had great impact on his life. Knowing and admitting this, he can get out of his own way enough to give us the man's flaws.
Which were significant. Edward Estlin Cummings was an incredibly complicated man who changed complexities on a fairly regular basis. He was learned, kind, funny, charming, charitable, loyal to a fault, devoted to his work, devoted to an appreciation of the world, in love with the city of Paris par amours, and absolutely unwilling to be fettered by convention. He was also terrible at relationships in some truly amazing directions, never forgot a perceived slight, could not understand financial anything on either personal or larger scales, almost certainly drank too much, and--
well.
The breakup of his first marriage was an amazing debacle. His entire first marriage was, really. When I first saw the lineaments of the situation, I thought it was going to be one of the classic examples one sees in the lives of young artist-types of people Doing Polyamory Wrong, and no, it wasn't. All of those aspects were handled with grace and class. It was just that Cummings was terrible at relationships and, what is worse, had no idea why.
In brief, after carrying on an affair with the wife of one of his best friends (with said friend's full knowledge and approval), the two of them had a child. After a few years, she divorced her husband, who did not particularly mind, but she and Cummings continued to carry on exactly as they'd done before: separate establishments, separate finances, seeing each other two or three times a week.
It was getting married that was their mistake, because Cummings, although he did move in with her, had thought their way of life was perfect as it was. She wanted emotional support, an actively engaged father to their daughter, to share finances to the point of being able to travel together (they could not afford the same class of ticket), and in general to have him be her partner.
He wanted a Muse. And to see her and the kid whenever he felt like it and happened not to be working.
She filed for divorce after two months. He hadn't been expecting it at all; he was happier than he'd ever been and drastically failed to understand a single word she had to say on the subject. It unhinged him. He turned into the kind of ex who turned up at her apartment with a gun threatening to commit suicide just to show her. (She took it away from him and kicked him out.) He briefly stalked her new boyfriend, and then came to his senses before actually shooting him.
And at the end of one of their worst arguments he raped her. He describes it in his journal notes very plainly. He never regretted it or even seemed to register it as something he should not have done.
They spent the next several years fighting over custody until she and her new husband moved to Ireland, whereupon Cummings didn't see his daughter again for two decades.
The thing that makes this biography so good is that by the time he commits this crime, you have had two hundred and seventy-five pages of this man, from his six-year-old drawings of elephants (incredibly good for that age) through his translations of Horace at sixteen (incredibly good for that age) to the writing of his first masterpiece. And you've had those pages from, mostly, inside his head, because a lot of it is diary and his letters, and you've seen him being charming and witty and frightened and clever and rude about money and kind of an asshole.
But one was not expecting him to be that kind of asshole. And yet you can see quite clearly once it happens that there are several reasons he was a person who behaved this way, and that it is not incomprehensible for the man you have seen, although he has heretofore been almost entirely adorable. This does not in any way mitigate it, seeing where it comes from. Nothing does.
On the next page of the biography after the note in which he describes the rape, there is an incredibly broken, despairing, and traumatized farewell that he wrote to his daughter; he was a terrible father and knew it, but losing her nearly killed him. It is one of the most anguished pieces of writing I have ever seen.
This is the kind of biography that does not try to sway how you feel about Cummings with either set of facts: it presents them, and you know how the author of this book feels, and you are encouraged to decide for yourself. It lets Cummings speak for himself at his worst and at his best.
In short, this is the kind of biography that is a real portrait, that is structured carefully to display both the worst and the best to their greatest advantage (the juxtaposition of those two pages makes each one more powerful, which is saying something).
Which makes this a very, very good biography.
It also has a fair bit of literary criticism, talking about the poetry and what he was doing with it and his only play and the structure of the prose works and so on. This is also quite good but I could have done with slightly less of it; there are a couple of Cummings' books where I was honestly wondering whether Sawyer-Lauçanno was going to go through and analyze them poem by poem. Even when it is good criticism, and it is, this is a bit much for a book intended as a biography, especially when neither the poems nor the analysis are explicitly biographical. I understand the temptation to want to excerpt a lot of Cummings and talk about it in detail, but this material could have been moved elsewhere.
That said, I expect this will be the definitive biography for a very long time. It's a remarkable portrait of a man I am now extremely and complexly ambivalent about (I love the young Harvard student, taking five languages; I dislike the cranky older man who slipped, as the years went by, into anti-Semitism). And it makes a very good argument for the continuing and future importance of his poetry, and excerpts as I have said a lot of his previously unpublished, fascinating, and expressive prose. (Somebody should do a Collected Notebooks.)
I have therefore almost forgiven the thing for being sufficiently dense that I started it at eleven-thirty p.m., not anticipating issues given my usual rate of speed, and am writing the review at eight a.m. And we have a dinner party coming tonight. Aargh.
But the book was too good to stop reading.
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comments over there.
The author was, I gather, the first writer to have complete access to Cummings' papers, diaries, notes to himself, etc., and full permission to publish them. He therefore wisely lets Cummings speak for himself a lot of the time, and uses selections from the poetry when it is relevant. But, as a good biographer should, he also presents information and analysis-- not unbiasedly, because no one does that, but in a fashion that lets you see the biases and that he is aware of them.
And Sawyer-Lauçanno's major bias is also the one which is an additional mark of a good biographer: he loves his subject. He says so straight out. He loves Cummings' work, and it has had great impact on his life. Knowing and admitting this, he can get out of his own way enough to give us the man's flaws.
Which were significant. Edward Estlin Cummings was an incredibly complicated man who changed complexities on a fairly regular basis. He was learned, kind, funny, charming, charitable, loyal to a fault, devoted to his work, devoted to an appreciation of the world, in love with the city of Paris par amours, and absolutely unwilling to be fettered by convention. He was also terrible at relationships in some truly amazing directions, never forgot a perceived slight, could not understand financial anything on either personal or larger scales, almost certainly drank too much, and--
well.
The breakup of his first marriage was an amazing debacle. His entire first marriage was, really. When I first saw the lineaments of the situation, I thought it was going to be one of the classic examples one sees in the lives of young artist-types of people Doing Polyamory Wrong, and no, it wasn't. All of those aspects were handled with grace and class. It was just that Cummings was terrible at relationships and, what is worse, had no idea why.
In brief, after carrying on an affair with the wife of one of his best friends (with said friend's full knowledge and approval), the two of them had a child. After a few years, she divorced her husband, who did not particularly mind, but she and Cummings continued to carry on exactly as they'd done before: separate establishments, separate finances, seeing each other two or three times a week.
It was getting married that was their mistake, because Cummings, although he did move in with her, had thought their way of life was perfect as it was. She wanted emotional support, an actively engaged father to their daughter, to share finances to the point of being able to travel together (they could not afford the same class of ticket), and in general to have him be her partner.
He wanted a Muse. And to see her and the kid whenever he felt like it and happened not to be working.
She filed for divorce after two months. He hadn't been expecting it at all; he was happier than he'd ever been and drastically failed to understand a single word she had to say on the subject. It unhinged him. He turned into the kind of ex who turned up at her apartment with a gun threatening to commit suicide just to show her. (She took it away from him and kicked him out.) He briefly stalked her new boyfriend, and then came to his senses before actually shooting him.
And at the end of one of their worst arguments he raped her. He describes it in his journal notes very plainly. He never regretted it or even seemed to register it as something he should not have done.
They spent the next several years fighting over custody until she and her new husband moved to Ireland, whereupon Cummings didn't see his daughter again for two decades.
The thing that makes this biography so good is that by the time he commits this crime, you have had two hundred and seventy-five pages of this man, from his six-year-old drawings of elephants (incredibly good for that age) through his translations of Horace at sixteen (incredibly good for that age) to the writing of his first masterpiece. And you've had those pages from, mostly, inside his head, because a lot of it is diary and his letters, and you've seen him being charming and witty and frightened and clever and rude about money and kind of an asshole.
But one was not expecting him to be that kind of asshole. And yet you can see quite clearly once it happens that there are several reasons he was a person who behaved this way, and that it is not incomprehensible for the man you have seen, although he has heretofore been almost entirely adorable. This does not in any way mitigate it, seeing where it comes from. Nothing does.
On the next page of the biography after the note in which he describes the rape, there is an incredibly broken, despairing, and traumatized farewell that he wrote to his daughter; he was a terrible father and knew it, but losing her nearly killed him. It is one of the most anguished pieces of writing I have ever seen.
This is the kind of biography that does not try to sway how you feel about Cummings with either set of facts: it presents them, and you know how the author of this book feels, and you are encouraged to decide for yourself. It lets Cummings speak for himself at his worst and at his best.
In short, this is the kind of biography that is a real portrait, that is structured carefully to display both the worst and the best to their greatest advantage (the juxtaposition of those two pages makes each one more powerful, which is saying something).
Which makes this a very, very good biography.
It also has a fair bit of literary criticism, talking about the poetry and what he was doing with it and his only play and the structure of the prose works and so on. This is also quite good but I could have done with slightly less of it; there are a couple of Cummings' books where I was honestly wondering whether Sawyer-Lauçanno was going to go through and analyze them poem by poem. Even when it is good criticism, and it is, this is a bit much for a book intended as a biography, especially when neither the poems nor the analysis are explicitly biographical. I understand the temptation to want to excerpt a lot of Cummings and talk about it in detail, but this material could have been moved elsewhere.
That said, I expect this will be the definitive biography for a very long time. It's a remarkable portrait of a man I am now extremely and complexly ambivalent about (I love the young Harvard student, taking five languages; I dislike the cranky older man who slipped, as the years went by, into anti-Semitism). And it makes a very good argument for the continuing and future importance of his poetry, and excerpts as I have said a lot of his previously unpublished, fascinating, and expressive prose. (Somebody should do a Collected Notebooks.)
I have therefore almost forgiven the thing for being sufficiently dense that I started it at eleven-thirty p.m., not anticipating issues given my usual rate of speed, and am writing the review at eight a.m. And we have a dinner party coming tonight. Aargh.
But the book was too good to stop reading.
You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are
