e. e. cummings: A Life
Though I've never done justice to his poetry, for the most part simply scanning it now and then, E.E. Cummings as author of 'The Enormous Room' has had a profound influence on my life. I would have likely have still studied history without ever following my friends advice by picking it up, but Cummings busted a lot of my preconceived notions about war and America and the whole progress of Western Civilization in the 20th century.
It's safe to presume that everybody has an idea of who E.E. Cummings was. At the least he can be recalled as the guy who wrote that poem with all the blank spaces and weird punctuation. Also, likely read on the same day as the poem about the chicken and the wheelbarrow.
Unfortunately Susan Cheever's polished product of a biography misses several opportunities to break through my polite expectations for this biography. I wanted an overview of Cummings' life and work, and some broad analysis of what that meant to the Modernist movement as a whole. I got that, but I also got a lot of apologist hand-wringing and evasion concerning his antisemitism and his negligence as a parent.
Cheever is full of excuses, using boilerplate arguments about how everybody was antisemitic in Cummings' time and while that doesn't make it OK it does makes it OK. Also Cheever does go on about Cummings' love for his daughter with very little evidence to go on. The mother may have kept her expressly out of sight as a child, but Cummings did little to pursue her, even after Nancy was a married woman. He clearly felt he had better things to do, why not go into that? Her efforts to catch his severe flaws in a flattering light make all of her conclusions shallow.
If this is the only resource at hand, go ahead and read it, but the bare facts are all you can trust.
