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Paul Spalding-Mulcock
Features Writer
@MulcockPaul
7:41 AM 11th August 2020
arts

Review: The Beauty Of Living - E.E. Cummings In The Great War By J. Alison Rosenblitt

 
In his poem ‘The Rainbow’ (1802), William Wordsworth (1770–1850), gives us the oft quoted line, ‘The Child is father of the Man’. This axiomatic pronouncement of course moves beyond Wordsworth’s coterminous delight as both boy and man, in the presence of a radiantly beautiful rainbow. The line strikes at the very centre of the Nature vs. Nurture debate and perhaps reflects the co-dependence of these binaries, rather than the unnuanced fallacy of accepting one whilst disregarding the other. The Beauty of Living is a newly published biography of E.E. Cummings by J. Alison Ronsenblitt and the follow up to her highly regarded work E.E. Cummings’s Modernism and the Classics (2016). Rosenblitt demonstrates in this scintillating and extremely readable work that both Nature and Nurture combined to produce the unconventional poetic brilliance of E.E. Cummings.

Assiduous and rigorously disciplined scholastic excellence underpins her latest work, yet the chief virtue of this enjoyable and enlightening book is the non-academic sensitivity with which Rosenblitt seduces her reader’s attention. I read this engaging study in three relatively short sittings and never once felt intimidated by its author’s sparkling intelligence or the complexity of her subject matter, despite my variegated interest and understanding of poetry. Let’s face it, serious literary biography can be disappointingly turgid, esoteric and occasionally, heavy going even if competently presented. All too often, a reader might need a specialist interest in the subject matter to weather a crossing from cover to cover. However, it can also be one of literature’s most satisfying forms and this book is an expression of the genre in its most enjoyable and accessible mode.

Boswell’s classic Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) and Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) both represent biography in its definitive ‘life’ form. However, as A.N. Wilson’s Tolstoy (1989) and Lyndall Gordon’s The Imperfect Life of T.S Eliot (1998) show, biography can move far beyond the conveyance of fact and become something altogether more elucidating. Rosenblitt does not attempt to present us with a dry, crusty academically comprehensive last word on Cummings’s life. What she gives us is the far more rewarding opportunity to revise our understandings of the man and his works, based upon a close examination of the factors operating upon Cummings whilst his poet soul was mutable, unformed and striving for self-actualisation.

Contrary to general thinking, she tells us plainly that, ‘In The Beauty of Living, my argument is that Cummings is indeed a war poet, and that we must understand this period of his life if we wish to understand his ideas about love, justice, injustice, humanity and brutality’.

For Rosenblitt, E.E. Cumming’s (1894-1962) early life, service as an ambulance driver in World War One, and subsequent imprisonment at La Ferté-Macé, represent the crucible in which he was artistically made. However, echoing Wordsworth’s line again, Rosenblitt first gives us a forensically researched account of Cummings’s early childhood in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This fly on the wall narrative technique then lets us intimately witness the forming of his spirit and emerging character, more defined by the boundaries he encountered, than the self-assertion of a confidently articulated persona. Oppression, repression and dogmatism clash swords with his innate, if fragile, individualism and the compassion for mankind that would eventually underpin his pacifism and rejection of authority in all its guises.

J. Alison Rosenblitt
J. Alison Rosenblitt
Rosenblitt then gives us an astutely observed account of the intellectual formation of Cummings’s gloriously unfettered poetic mind whist studying at Harvard’ in 1916. Immersed in the Modernist movement, Cummings and his gifted cohort explored Cubism, Futurism and the Imagist experiments of Amy Lowell together with literary Decadence and even Dada and Surrealism. Steeped in classical paganism, he innovatively, perhaps even rebelliously, eschewed conventional syntactical modes, metre and punctuation, to find something akin to the creative vitality and originality Cézanne had achieved with his colourist three-dimensional artworks. Though utilising revered aspects of poetic literary tradition, including the sonnet form, Cummings had set forth on his maverick artistic journey. He would go onto become renowned for his stylistic and structural originality, writing nearly three thousand poems, two autobiographical novels, four plays and even exhibiting his own Modernist artworks.

Having given us a lucid account of Cummings’s poetic talent burgeoning within the academic safety of Harvard, Rosenblitt then gives us an equally thorough examination of his encounter with the horrendous realities of World War One in France. This chapter of Cummings’s tumultuous life illustrates ‘the brutality inflicted in the name of patriotism’. Cummings had been incarcerated for eleven weeks by the French who wrongly accused him of at best being anti-American, and at worst, by dint of his close friendship with William Slater Brown, a potentially treacherous malcontent. Brown was a close friend from Harvard and his overtly seditious, anti-allied letters home had been intercepted by paranoid French censors, in a desperate bid to keep the American public ignorant of calamitous military failings and nascent mutiny within French ranks.

Cummings stoically stood by his old friend, and personal integrity, moral courage and fidelity earned him a front row seat at a pantomime of horrors as a prisoner at La Ferté-Macé between September 1917 and December of the same year. Only an appeal to the US President Woodrow Wilson would ultimately see Cummings released and sent back to the front on active service.

However, Rosenblitt’s ground-breaking ace in her biographical pack, is her uncovering of and focus upon the delicate love affair between Cummings and a French prostitute, Marie-Louise Lallemand. He met Marie in Paris, shortly after voluntarily joining the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps in support of the allied efforts against their German adversaries. She was a beautiful young woman forced to sell herself on the streets of Paris along with an estimated 75,000 other such woman. Marie becomes the cynosure through which we understand Cummings, both as a sexually diffident man and as a profoundly sensitive intellectual.

Their physically clumsy but emotionally graceful relationship was reciprocally cathartic. Two spiritually wounded souls communing, comforting each other in a world gone mad. Cummings began the lifelong process of reconciling deeply rooted contradictions within his troubled psyche and emotionally immature hinterland. Women would continue to play a seminal role in Cummings’s response to, and interpretation of, life, however none more so than Marie-Louise. The provocative erotic register of much of his subsequent poetry, Aubrey Beardsley-esque pen sketches and indeed his complex emotionally repressed sub-structure itself, has its roots in Cummings’s love of Marie. This catalysing artistic force, if not unequivocally actuated by Marie, was unconsciously liberated by her. To some extent, Marie-Louise became his version of Wordsworth’s rainbow, a muse he would never forget.

E.E. Cummings
E.E. Cummings
Rosenblitt succeeds with aplomb in making her stated case; Cummings, ‘was a war poet until the end of his life. His sympathy with the smallest of creatures, and the beauty that he saw in the world, came out of the destruction that he saw during the war’. She goes on to say convincingly, ‘he wrote about the war but also …his aesthetic of chaos and art was shaped while he encountered the meaninglessness of war and the inner death of confinement’. His epistemic universe was both populated and resolutely influenced by his experience of war and those caught up in its invidious entrails. He would never shake off this malign spectre or rather magnificently, abandon his sympathy for mankind, search for artistic authenticity, or his belief in the ‘the beauty of life’.

Stylistically, Rosenblitt is of a lamentably rare breed of scholastic biographer. Though the book boasts an impressive bibliography, comprehensive reference section and helpful synopsis of all the characters who play their part in Cummings’s early life, our author has the deft touch of a skilled teacher. Indeed, so fine is her writing that both the general reader and the ardent academic might consider the book a delight. This story is told by an author so utterly sure of her factual ground that she can adopt the gentlest of narrative personas, guiding us with informed humility, rather than the ugly intellectual browbeating employed by lesser talents.

Most impressive for this poetically naïve reader was the panache with which Rosenblitt distils her technical analysis of chosen pieces of Cummings’s canon. Biographical points are lucidly evinced, and their light exquisitely revealed by dint of her straightforward literary analysis. Only an author entirely comfortable with her subject could render the intellectually confounding, evident and simplistically apparent. The poet and his work become indivisible, yet the ideas and technical virtuosity of the artist are clinically examined without the leeching away of poetic force or emotional resonance.

The book is not entirely objective in sentiment or thematic thrust. The author does on occasion give her subject the benefit of the doubt, and if not actually defensive of his foibles or character flaws, certainly indulges the charitable inclinations of a devotee. The Dionysian outlook upon his world is never allowed to foster the reader’s suspicions that Cummings was, if not a tad idiosyncratic, then perhaps a little morally unsound and vulnerable to mental instability. That said, this is not a strong complaint, more a reflection of Rosenblitt’s commitment to her truth as she sees it. Either way, the reader is not manipulated or cajoled into sympathy with the author whilst under her gentle tutelage, and this observation need not, therefore, derogate the integrity of the biography.

Randell Jarrell claimed of Cummings that, ‘no one else has ever made avant-garde, experimental poems so attractive to the general reader’. Having read this absorbing delight, perhaps even I may approach the poetry of Cummings with a little more understanding and a lot more enthusiasm. For me, any reader would be likely to enjoy the story Rosenblitt so engagingly tells, delight in her perspicacious insights and close this book feeling nothing but gently enlightened and dexterously entertained.



The Beauty of Living - E.E. Cummings in the Great War is published by W.W. Norton