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‘A TWILIGHT SMELLING OF VERGIL’: E. E. CUMMINGS, CLASSICS, AND THE GREAT WAR*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 September 2014

Alison Rosenblitt
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Extract

The opened door showed a room,about sixteen feet short and four feet narrow,with a heap of straw in the further end. My spirits had been steadily recovering from the banality of their examination; and it was with a genuine and never-to-be-forgotten thrill that I remarked,as I crossed what might have been the threshold : ‘Mais,on est bien ici.’

A hideous crash nipped the last word. I had supposed the whole prison to have been utterly destroyed by earthquake,but it was only my door closing....

Here, in a passage taken from the novelized version of his own imprisonment in France in 1917, the American modernist poet E. E. Cummings describes the moment of confrontation with the first of his prison cells. He had volunteered for ambulance service in France during the First World War, but his service lasted only a few months before he and his friend William Slater Brown were arrested and incarcerated – wrongfully suspected of espionage – in a brutal French detention camp at La Ferté-Macé.

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 61 , Issue 2 , October 2014 , pp. 242 - 260
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 2014 

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Footnotes

*

I am grateful to Mike Webster and Jonathan Thorpe and to the journal's editors for several very useful suggestions. ‘HELEN’, ‘earth like a tipsy’, ‘through the tasteless minute efficient room’, and ‘O sweet spontaneous’ by E.E. Cummings are reprinted from E.E. Cummings: Complete Poems 1904–1962, ed. G.J. Firmage (New York: 1994) by the very kind permission of the Liveright Publishing Corporation.

References

1 Cummings, E. E., The Enormous Room (New York, 1978 [1922]), 16Google Scholar.

2 For biographical information, see Norman, C., E.E. Cummings. The Magic-maker (New York, 1972 [1958]), 66–119Google Scholar; Kennedy, R.S., Dreams in the Mirror. A Biography of E.E. Cummings (second edition, New York, 1994), 133–88Google Scholar. For Cummings own account, see Cummings (n. 1), with Kennedy's introduction to the 1978 edition.

3 Kennedy, R. S., ‘E.E. Cummings at Harvard: Studies’, Harvard Library Bulletin 24 (1976), 269–79Google Scholar, 281–2. For further scholarship on Cummings and the Classics, see Baker, S., ‘Cummings and Catullus’, Modern Language Notes 74 (1959), 231–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kennedy (n. 2), 52–72; Lind, L.R., ‘The Hellenism of Cummings.’ CML 2 (1982)Google Scholar; English, M. C., ‘Aristophanic Comedy in E. E. Cummings’ Him', CML 24 (2004)Google Scholar; Webster, M., ‘Lugete: The Divine Lost and Found Child in Cummings’, Spring: The Journal of the E.E. Cummings Society (hereafter Spring) 19 (2012), 37–49Google Scholar.

4 See Vandiver, E., Stand in the Trench, Achilles. Classical Receptions in British Poetry of the Great War (Oxford, 2010)Google Scholar, esp. xii and 1–9; Vandiver, E., ‘Homer in British World War One Poetry’, in Hardwick, L. and Stray, C. (eds.), A Companion to Classical Receptions (Oxford, 2008), 452–4Google Scholar, 463–4; also Van Wienen, M. W., Partisans and Poets. The Political Work of American Poetry in the Great War (Cambridge, 1997)Google Scholar. See Rawlinson, M., ‘Wilfred Owen’, in Kendall, T. (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry (Oxford, 2007), 114–33Google Scholar, on the problems with this constructed version of Owen.

5 Kennedy (n. 2), 142–3.

6 Cummings, E. E., Complete Poems 1904–1962, ed. Firmage, G. J. (New York, 1994), 933Google Scholar.

7 Passos, Dos, The Best Times: An Informal Memoir (London, 1966), 23Google Scholar. Regarding the Yellow Book etc., Dos Passos concedes that Cummings' literary endeavours were more progressive, but that does not affect the point about the feeling of distance from the war. The major scholarship on Cummings' poetic development during his Harvard years are Kennedy (n. 3); Kennedy, R. S., ‘E.E. Cummings at Harvard: Verse, Friends, Rebellion’, Harvard Library Bulletin 25 (1977), 253–91Google Scholar; Kennedy, R. S., ‘E.E. Cummings: The Emergent Styles, 1916’, Journal of Modern Literature 7 (1979), 175–204Google Scholar.

8 New York Evening Post, 20 May 1916; Cummings (n. 6), 876. See discussions in Kennedy (n. 2), 133–6; Sawyer-Lauçanno, C., E.E. Cummings: A Biography (London: 2006), 82–5Google Scholar.

9 Quoted from the Harvard archive in Cohen, M. A. ‘Cummings and Freud’, American Literature 55 (1983), 593CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

10 Cummings (n. 6), 874.

11 It became the opening poem of Tulips & Chimneys (1922 ms) and Tulips and Chimneys (1923); Cummings (n. 6), 3–7. See Kennedy (n. 2), 190; Sawyer-Lauçanno (n. 8), 86–9.

12 Cummings, E.E., Etcetera. The Unpublished Poems of E.E. Cummings, ed. Firmage, G. J. and Kennedy, R. S. (New York and London, 1983)Google Scholar; Cummings (n. 6), 913.

13 In Cummings, E. E. et al. , Eight Harvard Poets (New York, 1917), 70–1Google Scholar. Cf. the portrait of Helen in Rupert Brooke's ‘Menelaus and Helen’.

14 The tendency to see classical figures as archetypes was encouraged in Cummings by his interest in Freud, whose theories looked to classical figures as archetypes – most famously, of course, transforming Oedipus from a specific classical figure into a universal archetype for the Oedipal complex. For Freud in a classical reception context, see Macintosh, F., Sophocles. Oedipus Tyrannus (Cambridge, 2009)Google Scholar, s.v. Freud; Macintosh, F., ‘Oedipus in the East End: from Freud to Berkoff’, in Hall, E., Macintosh, F., and Wrigley, A. (eds.), Dionysus since 69. Greek Tragedy at the Dawn of the Third Millennium (Oxford, 2004), 313–28Google Scholar; Leonard, M., ‘Freud and Tragedy: Oedipus and the gender of the universal’, Classical Receptions Journal 5 (2013), 63–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For Cummings and Freud, see Cohen (n. 9).

15 I am very grateful to Rob Shorrock for the excellent suggestion that behind Cummings' choice of ‘sty’ is probably the description by William Simpson of Schliemann's excavated Troy as ‘Priam's pigsty’. On Simpson and Schliemann, see Allen, S. H., Finding the Walls of Troy. Frank Calvert and Heinrich Schliemann at Hisarlik (Berkeley, CA, 1999), 185–6Google Scholar.

16 Respectively from ‘little ladies more’ (Cummings [n. 6], 56–7) and ‘my sweet old etcetera’ (ibid., 275). The French reads ‘the English are nice and Americans also, they pay well, the Americans’.

17 ‘come,gaze with me upon this dome’ is Cummings (n. 6), 272. See Dayton, T., ‘“Wristers Etcetera”: Cummings, the Great War, and Discursive Struggle’, Spring 17 (2010), 116–39Google Scholar, on ‘my sweet old etcetera’ and Cummings' rejection of images and attitudes pervasive in contemporary patriotic poetry and wider discourse.

18 Dos Passos (n. 7), 25.

19 Tulips & Chimneys (1922 ms); Cummings (n. 6), 54.

20 Remarque, E.M., All Quiet on the Western Front, tr. Murdoch, B. (London, 1996), 45–6Google Scholar.

21 ‘(O to be a metope…’ from ‘MEMORABILIA’ (Cummings [n. 6], 254); Achilles from ‘one April dusk the’ (ibid., 84). The joke in ‘MEMORABILIA’ is on Robert Browning, who wrote, from Italy, ‘Oh, to be in England / Now that April's there’ (the opening lines of ‘Home-Thoughts, from Abroad’). See also Kilby, C.S., ‘Cummings, MEMORABILIA’, Explicator 12.15 (1953/4)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Barton, C., ‘Cummings' MEMORABILIA’, Explicator 22.26 (1963)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 Cummings (n. 1), 38.

23 Kennedy in Cummings (n. 1), xiv. On this scene, see also Martin, W. T., ‘Cummings’ The Enormous Room', Explicator 59 (2000)Google Scholar, and (taking a rather unkind view) Fussell, P., The Great War and Modern Memory, new edition (Oxford, 2013 [1975])Google Scholar, 174.

24 For Cummings as a painter, see, generally, M. A. Cohen, PoetandPainter. The Aesthetics of E.E. Cummings's Early Work (Detroit, MI, 1987). Note that Cummings himself described The Enormous Room as analogous to a quilt: Cohen, op.cit., 40.

25 The manuscript of Tulips & Chimneys was assembled in 1922. It was published as Tulips and Chimneys (New York, 1923)Google Scholar in heavily edited form, with fewer than half of the intended poems. Many of the missing poems were published in Cummings' next publication, & (a rebellion against the alteration of ‘&’ to ‘and’ in Tulips and Chimneys). Tulips & Chimneys (1922 Manuscript), ed. and with afterword by G. J. Firmage, introduction by R. S. Kennedy (New York, 1976), is now considered to be the authoritative version. See Kennedy's introduction and Firmage's afterword for further details.

26 There were negative as well as positive reviews, but on the whole the book made a splash. On reception of The Enormous Room, see Norman (n. 2), 106–16; Kennedy (n. 2), 242–3; Headrick, P., ‘“Brilliant Obscurity”: The Reception of The Enormous Room’, Spring 1 (1992), 46–76Google Scholar.

27 Cummings (n. 6), 207.

28 There is no knowing whether Cummings would have associated the discobolus principally with bronze, as per the lost original, or – perhaps more likely – with marble, as per surviving copies.

29 Das, S. ‘“Kiss Me, Hardy”: Intimacy, Gender, and Gesture in First World War Trench Literature’, Modernism/modernity 9 (2002), 63CrossRefGoogle Scholar: ‘The aestheticization of the male body and the eroticization of male experience one notes in Read and Nichols – poets who, unlike Sassoon or Ackerley, were not overtly concerned with homosexuality – might result from the effort to find a suitable poetic language with which to articulate the specificity of war experiences’. See also Das, S., Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature (Cambridge, 2005)Google Scholar; Bourke, J., Dismembering the Male. Men's Bodies, Britain and the Great War (London, 1996)Google Scholar. For imagery of the crucifixion in the First World War, see Fussell (n. 23), 126–9.

30 Cummings (n. 1), 132.

31 Cummings (n. 6), 271.

32 This has been studied from many angles, including Martin, M., ‘Therapeutic Measures: The Hydra and Wilfred Owen at Craiglockhart War Hospital’, Modernism/modernity 14 (2007), 35–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar, on metre; Das (n. 29 [2005]), 69, on touch and intimacy: ‘“Frightful intimacy” is perhaps as far as language can go, and the dying kiss was perhaps its true sign, the mouth filling the gap left by language.’ Stallworthy, J., Survivors' Songs. From Maldon to the Somme (Cambridge, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 24, remarks on blurring in David Jones's In Parenthesis.

33 Also in Cummings (n. 6), 945.

34 Cummings (n.1), 123–5.

35 Neither Graves nor Dos Passos slept with prostitutes, but both write about them – Dos Passos (n. 7), 71, 74; Graves in his autobiography, Goodbye to All That, revised edition (London, 2000 [1929])Google Scholar, 67, 79, 103–4, 150–1, 153, 195, 247. See also Hirschfeld, M., The Sexual History of the World War, uncredited translation from the German (Honolulu, HI, 2006 [1941]), 92–109Google Scholar, 141–70.

36 Cummings mentions his own preoccupation with the sonnet in his i: six nonlectures (New York, 1967 [1953]Google Scholar), 30. It is perfectly clear that he would consider this poem to be a sonnet. Compare the poems appearing under the section-titles ‘SONNETS – REALITIES’, ‘SONNETS – UNREALITIES’, and ‘SONNETS – ACTUALITIES’ from Tulips & Chimneys and from & [AND] (1925). See also Huang-Tiller, G., ‘Modernism, Cummings' Meta-Sonnets, and Chimneys’, Spring 10 (2001), 155–72Google Scholar, on Cummings' use of the sonnet form.

37 The OED provides sixteen citations for ‘hugger’ or ‘hugger-mugger’ between 1860 and 1900, including ‘hugger-mugger’ in Tennyson's ‘The Village Wife’. The OED is not necessarily systematic, but this forty-year window furnishes a high proportion of the OED citations, suggesting a floruit for the word.

38 Cummings (n. 1), 12.

39 Cummings (n.1), 21.

40 Cummings, E. E., i. six nonlectures (Cambridge, MA, 1967 [1953])Google Scholar, 32.

41 And it is read in this way by some scholars: e.g. Gill, J. M., ‘A Study of Two Poems: “since feeling is first” and “in time of daffodils(who know”’, Spring 5 (1996), 108Google Scholar.

42 Cummings (n. 6), 58. Its very first appearance was in the magazine The Dial in May 1920: see Cohen, M. A., ‘The Dial's “White-Haired Boy”: E. E. Cummings as Dial Artist, Poet, and Essayist’, Spring 1 (1992), 23Google Scholar. It appeared in the mangled Tulips and Chimneys as the second of two poems in ‘La Guerre’ (the first was ‘the bigness of cannon’ and the other three did not make the editor's cut). For the publication history of Tulips & Chimneys, see above, n. 25. In the Houghton Library archive, Harvard, there are various early and incomplete drafts in different contexts. It seems that, for Cummings, this poem perhaps initially hovered between a ‘spring’ poem and a ‘war’ poem. But when it came to his first collection, Cummings chose very decidedly to fix it in a war context. That setting changes the text, and this is what he later erased.

43 Cummings (n. 6), 53.

44 Cummings (n. 6), 54.

45 Cummings (n. 6), 55.

46 Cummings (n. 6), 56–7.

47 Norman (n. 2), 68.