Books'Did anyone ever tell you I was your father?'
In 1946, EE Cummings learned that the daughter he had not seen for 20 years was staying nearby. Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno reveals what their meeting meant to each of them, in this second extract from his new biography of the poetEE Cummings was by the 1940s an established poet and painter, living in New York with the former model Marion Morehouse. He had not seen his daughter Nancy Thayer since 1927, when she was seven years old. In the same year, Scofield Thayer, Cummings's friend and patron who had assumed responsibility for Nancy at her birth, had a catastrophic mental breakdown from which he never recovered.
An entry in Cummings's journal for February 1943 reads: "Marion points out the announcement of Nancy's marriage in the paper [New York Times]. I stare at the photo, recognize no one, feel nothing. Later have the feeling: good, Now I'm free."
Although the marriage of Nancy to Joseph Willard Roosevelt, grandson of Theodore Roosevelt and a naval officer, was surprising news, Cummings had known for at least two years that his daughter was in the United States. John Dos Passos had seen her in New York in 1941, and had told Cummings about their meeting. Cummings wrestled with seeing her himself, but Marion strongly advised against it. She reasoned that doing so would only disturb him and interfere with his work. He discussed the matter with his psychiatrist, Fritz Wittels, but he, too, felt that Cummings should not rush in, further telling him that he was certain that at some future point the matter would work itself out in a more natural way. Cummings also apparently confided in his young friend Dorothy Case, for in May 1941 she offered to take Nancy to lunch and give Cummings her opinion of how Nancy was and what she was like. By this point Cummings had obviously decided to heed the advice of Marion and Wittels, since he declined Dorothy's offer.
Nancy was still under the impression that she was the daughter of Scofield Thayer. On July 28, 1941, she contacted Thayer's lawyer, Hermann Riccius, to learn more about her "father" and stated that if Thayer needed anything she would be willing to help. She also asked Riccius not to inform her mother, Elaine, of the enquiry. Shortly before Nancy left for the United States, Elaine had urged her not to look up Thayer when she got to New York. Thayer had long ago gone mad, Elaine told her daughter, and was shut off from the world. The news fell hard on Nancy, who had only thought previously that her "parents'" lack of communication was a consequence of their divorce.
When she arrived in New York in June 1941 Nancy, apparently, did not immediately tap into the large trust fund that Thayer had set up for her some 20 years before. Instead she took a job as a typist in the office of Your Secretary Incorporated, owned by Mrs Kermit Roosevelt. It was there that Nancy met Mrs Roosevelt's son, Willard, who was to become her husband.
Once engaged, Nancy moved to Virginia, near Willard's Norfolk naval base. Because she was fluent in French and German and had a good command of Italian, she obtained work as a translator with the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service in Washington, DC. But after she married Roosevelt in 1943, when he was on leave, she quit her job and settled down as a navy wife at a house near the Norfolk base.
In the summer of 1945, Nancy's mother-in-law rented a summer place in the mountains of New Hampshire, just up the road from Joy Farm, EE Cummings's summer home. Since Nancy was pregnant and Willard was in the Pacific, Mrs Roosevelt invited her to spend the summer there, away from the oppressive Virginia heat. Cummings's old friend Billy James, son of William James, lived nearby and over the summer became quite friendly with the new residents. In early August, James invited Cummings and Marion over for lunch. Also present was Mrs Roosevelt. Over the course of the visit, Cummings learned, as he told a friend later, that her son was Nancy's husband. "Apparently Nancy has just left Chocorua [the nearby mountain] for New York to have a baby."
Cummings spent the following summer and early autumn, as usual, at Joy Farm. Perhaps because he realised that Nancy and her husband, now back from commanding a ship in the Pacific, were also in residence just up the road, Cummings decided to ask his friend Billy James to bring Nancy and her husband to Joy Farm for tea. Nancy immediately accepted the invitation, eager to meet not only a poet she admired, but one who had even been married, though briefly, to her mother. When they arrived, Marion kept Roosevelt and the Jameses outside so that Nancy and Cummings could enter the house alone. "His voice seemed extraordinary, like a bell, like something from afar, almost echoing," recalled Nancy. When the others joined them, Nancy was left "with no place to put this feeling," as the afternoon was consumed in chit-chat and pleasantries.
There were probably a couple of other visits after that one, for when the following August Nancy gave birth to a second child, she felt friendly enough with Cummings to write him the news. By then she had moved into an apartment in Long Island City. Late in 1947 she called on Cummings at his New York apartment and he asked her if she would be willing to sit for a portrait. With two small children, it was hard for her to get away alone and she was unable to take Cummings up on his offer until the following May. Even then her visits were few, and though she enjoyed talking with Cummings, she found him very reluctant to talk much about Elaine or Thayer, whom she still presumed to be her father. She usually stayed for tea, but because Marion was always present, there was no possibility of real discussion of matters important to her.
Some time in the autumn of 1948, Nancy made a decision to cease sitting for portraits. (By now Cummings was at work on a second, larger canvas). Her reason was that she found herself falling in love with the 54-year-old painter and felt that if she continued to sit for him, she would succumb to his charm. Her marriage, as it was, was shaky, and she felt that she did not need any extra push from her infatuation with Cummings. She resolved, however, to finish the sessions, as there was just one more needed.
On that day the conversation, as usual, was light. But when Marion was called away, Nancy took the opportunity to ask directly about his brief marriage to her mother, Elaine, which took place three years after Elaine's divorce from Scofield Thayer and lasted just over a month. This time, Cummings was more forthcoming. According to one account, he talked about Elaine and Elaine's sisters, confessing to Nancy that he always suspected that her aunt Alexis was in love with him. Finally, Nancy asked about Thayer, whom she referred to as her father. The conversation came to an abrupt halt. After a long pause, Cummings looked at her directly, and asked, "Did anyone ever tell you I was your father?"
"You cannot mean it," she replied.
"You don't have to choose between us," said Cummings.
Just at that moment Marion returned. Sensing the stillness and the tension in the air, she asked what was happening. "We know who we are," answered Cummings.
There is also another version of what happened that day. According to a close male friend of Nancy, who told him repeatedly about it, in the course of the session she confessed to Cummings that she was in love with him. Cummings responded, "But didn't anyone ever tell you that I was your father?"
Regardless of how the revelation came about, Nancy was bewildered to the point of being devastated. Throughout her life she had always assumed that the mysterious Scofield Thayer was her father. But Elaine refused to speak at all about her past. For years, she had not even revealed to her daughter that she had once been married to Cummings. Nancy learned this only when she was a teenager and Elaine carelessly let drop in conversation the phrase, "when I was married to Cummings". Nancy, who by then had read The Enormous Room, Cummings's successful memoir of his experiences in the first world war, and some of the poetry, pressed her mother for details, but Elaine would only say that the marriage was brief and a long time ago.
Now, at 27, she had finally learned the truth and it did not set her free. Nancy did not linger at Cummings's apartment. But at his invitation she returned. At first, she still refused to believe that he was telling the truth, but she came to realise that she bore a fairly striking resemblance to her father. As a baby, in fact, she had looked so much like Cummings that a friend of Elaine's and Thayer's had remarked, "I looked in the carriage and saw Cummings looking up at me."
Once Nancy was able to accept the reality, on subsequent visits she learned more and more about how she had come into the world, about Cummings's long affair with her mother - with the approval, and indeed encouragement of Scofield Thayer - about Cummings's profound despair over the break-up of their subsequent marriage and the loss of his daughter, about the pleasant times he had spent with her as a baby and young child. Curiously, she remembered nothing consciously of her early visits with him and pressed him for details in an attempt to jog her memory. But her memory would not be jogged, and she had to be content with making new memories from Cummings's accounts. And while Cummings was forthcoming about events, he dissuaded her from calling him "father", telling her that his name was Estlin. Too many years had gone by for him to feel that "father" was a proper address.
Before long, however, Marion's jealousy became more and more ascendant, and she resented there being anyone else in Cummings's life except her. She refused to allow Nancy simply to drop by the apartment, forcing her to make appointments. When Nancy called on the phone, Marion refused to allow her to speak to her father, always using the excuse that he was working and could not be disturbed. When she was able to see Cummings, Marion was rather cold, letting it be known that she would prefer she did not visit.
Cummings apparently did not try to overcome Marion's sentiments. A journal entry from around that time reveals his own feelings: "am aware that my child's loveliness is like a summer, a season or surface; that while a part of me forever is the tragic & immediate father, wholly I (shall be &)am(& have been always) somebody whose fate is never of this world ... so that while part of me is her tragic & immediate father, I am wholly & permanently someone else."
Over the next year or so, the visits became less frequent. Father and daughter maintained a cordial, but still fairly distant relationship. Amazingly, Nancy did not inform her mother that she knew Cummings was her father.
In August 1949, Nancy wrote to her father asking if she and her family could come to Joy Farm. After some deliberation, he replied that she was welcome to "'spend a night or two'; why not 3?'" As it turned out, the visit did not take place until July 1950, and Nancy came alone.
On the second evening of her visit, in response to further inquiries from her about the past, Cummings hauled out letters from Thayer, John Dos Passos, Elaine and others that he had long stored in his old Harvard footlocker.
"N's eager to see the letters,& I give her the whole group, explaining that I don't know what's in it. Later she confronts me with a card from S[cofield] T[hayer],reading:"For value received." I suggest it's something he wrote when he was crazy, "But it isn't" N states almost vehemently "look at the date!" I look,sans enlightenment. "Do you know when that was?" she asks intensely. "No," "The day after I was born." Well(I tell her) I still don't understand the message:unless "it's a grim attempt at humour". Half contemptuously,wholly disgruntled, saying something like "well I don't want it!(with a laugh of horror)and I feel how distinctly her opinion of ST has fallen
"did I do right or wrong?"
One more day passed before Nancy boarded a train back to New York. Cummings tried to help her with her luggage, but as the train was about to depart he simply dumped the bag on the first available seat and made an exit. "I turned to glimpse a gentle pitying look on my child's face;her indulgent but a little sad smile as picked the big thing up to move it elsewhere. My failure(at the climactic moment)upset me so fearfully that I almost didn't stand & wait for her car to pass - almost but not quite."
The feeling of failure did not subside:
"The day after N's going, have a severe depression.
"It seems to me that she is real,& that my life here(with M[arion]isn't. What are all my salutings of Chocorua & worshippings of birds & smellings of flowers & fillings of hummingbirdcups etetc? They're sorry substitutes for human intercourse generally & particularly for spiritual give-&-take with a child or a child-woman whom I adore-someone vital& young-&gay!"
The public poet
From the 1950s, Cummings became something of a celebrity, in demand at college campuses and art centres throughout the US. Everywhere he went, the audiences were large and enthusiastic. The only other poet in that era who commanded such audiences and attention was Cummings's friend Dylan Thomas. But by November 1953, Thomas was dead, a victim of alcoholism.
As Robert Creeley remarked, "Cummings was one of the few poets ... whose art moved out of the enclosure of validated 'literature' to the common world of readers and writers and speakers of every kind." It was not exactly a bringing of poetry to the masses, but a reading by Cummings was an event. It brought in not just those avid about poetry, but a great many more who ordinarily did not attend readings regularly. By the mid- to late 1950s, Cummings was among the most popular poets in America, no longer just famous among the famous, but famous among "most people."
Which is not to say that discerning listeners were not still among the audience. William Carlos Williams, amazed by the crowd that turned out to hear Cummings at a reading in New York, noted: "It is an experience to listen for the cadence and not, even in the sonnets, to walk over the open grid of an iambic pentameter - with hot air coming up and the subway rumbling under."
Because of the crowds which showed up at his readings, and to protect himself from the mob, Cummings decided on "rules of engagement" with the audience. In advance of every reading Cummings demanded that, "There will be no provision for autographing books, attending dinners, receptions and other social functions ... and there will be no commentary with the reading." It was not always easy to avoid the fawning public. At one reading, "a bevy of officials whisk[ed] (for I'd stipulated NO Autographs)our ex-speaker out & downthrough a secretbackentrance."
From his many public appearances he was easily recognisable, and particularly on the streets of Greenwich Village he was often approached by fans. He usually rebuffed - courteously but firmly - their desire for conversation, but occasionally was happily surprised: "a pretty young girl handed me daffodils, saying 'you don't know who I am but I just wanted to give you these'."
One admirer of his verse he never met was Marilyn Monroe. Playwright Arthur Miller, Monroe's husband in the late 1940s and early 1950s, remembered Monroe's discovery in a bookstore of Cummings's verse:
"It was odd to watch her reading Cummings to herself, moving her lips - what would she make of poetry that was so simple yet so sophisticated? ... There was apprehension in her eyes when she began to read, the look of a student afraid to be caught out, but suddenly she laughed in a thoroughly unaffected way at the small surprising turn in the poem about the lame balloon man - "and it's spring!" The naive wonder in her face that she could so easily respond to a stylised work sent a filament of connection out between us. "And it's spring!" she kept repeating on our way out to the car, laughing again as though she had been handed an unexpected gift. How pleased with her fresh reaction Cummings would have been."
EE Cummings: A Biography, by Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno is published by Methuen price £25
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