E. E. Cummings by Susan Cheever

Author:Susan Cheever [Cheever, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-90867-4
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2014-02-11T05:00:00+00:00

8

Eimi and Marion Morehouse

Eimi, Cummings’s second memoir, begins on Sunday, May 10, 1931, when he boards the train from Paris for Russia through Poland, and it ends 443 pages later on Sunday, June 14, when, again on a train, he crosses from Switzerland back into France. The title, Greek for “I am,” is an assertion of identity provoked by Cummings’s month-long visit.

After his visit to Russia in 1921, a decade earlier, journalist Lincoln Steffens famously exclaimed, “I have been over into the future, and it works.” Many of Cummings’s friends and colleagues agreed. But a July 1931 interview with a reporter from the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune, just after he returned from Russia, shows the first hints of a controversial, surprising reaction to Cummings’s own journey to Russia. His opinion of what was happening there would sharpen and get angrier over time as the situation under Stalin got worse.

The Russians, Cummings explained to Tribune reporter Don Brown, were very scared and very serious. Cummings liked the Russians, but he did not like Russia and, more amazingly, he did not like communism. “Are the Russian people happy? They struck me like this: they just love to suffer and they’re suffering like hell, so they must be happy. You know Dostoevski … People talk about the strain and tension of life in the United States. It is nothing to that in Moscow,” he said. “If you said ‘boo’ to some of these people they might drop dead … they are in a particularly nervous condition.”

“Cummings went to the Soviet Union with his eyes open and without an agenda,” writes Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno. “But his experiences there, in which he witnessed first-hand the privation and sadness of the Stalinist state, certainly helped him develop an agenda.”

By the time he sat down to write Eimi, using his Russian journals as a template, Cummings had become furious about the condition of Russia and what he saw as the failure of the great Communist idea. His natural perversity had added heat to his observations. Later he referred to Russia as the “subhuman communist superstate, where men are shadows & women are nonmen. This unworld is Hell.”

Eimi describes a terrifying, hellish place where frightened people trudge along in their desperate, monotonous ruts, preyed upon by political tourists come to see the Great Experiment and kept in line by the menacing men of the GPU, who know everything about everyone. Perhaps as a relief from this oppression, there is a great deal of drinking in the Eimi story, even for Cummings, who was never stingy or reluctant when it came time to drink or smoke. Because of his questioning attitude and because he immediately started taking long, aimless walks in Moscow, the GPU seems to have concluded that Cummings was a spy. He was followed almost everywhere he went, which probably did not improve his impression of the place.

He also decided to write in a stream-of-consciousness style with experimental words and a completely original syntax like that of the better-known James Joyce’s Ulysses.

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