Posts From Author: elaine thayer

Are You For Sale?

Where might you find French resistance fighters, E.E. Cummings, a Broadway critic with a freewheeling approach to life, Bessie Smith singing the blues, and a Wimpy Kid with a passion for Brazilian TV? Only at the House of SpeakEasy… Susan Cheever was first up this month, answering the evening’s main question right off the bat: “E.E. Cummings was certainly for sale!” Now acknowledged as one of the twentieth century’s greatest poets, Cummings wasn’t beneath hawking his poetry round the publishing houses back in the twenties and thirties, even dedicating one poetry collection (No Thanks) to the fourteen publishers who’d turned him down. Last month Cheever published E.E. Cummings: A Life (Pantheon), and it was from this that she took her tale for the night. Cummings had one child, Nancy, from his first marriage, to Elaine Orr. “Everything went well until Elaine fell in love with someone else — a real son of a bitch called Frank McDermott,” as Cheever recalled. Elaine annulled her marriage to Cummings and took the baby with her to Ireland to live with McDermott. “Finally, Cummings didn’t see Nancy any more. And Nancy led a kind of expat princess life, knowing absolutely nothing about her past.” Two decades later, through a series […]
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“everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes”: Susan Cheever’s E.E. Cummings: A Life

Susan Cheever’s new biography of E.E. Cummings (Pantheon Books, 2014), “one of the great and most important American poets”, begins with the two of them meeting. By the second half of his career Cummings had become a successful public speaker, supplementing the income he brought home with his poetry by accepting invitations to colleges and public venues across the US, and in 1958 he addressed Cheever’s girls’ school. Afterwards Cheever and her father, also a famous writer at this point, drove Cummings back to New York. He’d made quite an impression. “It wasn’t those in authority who were always right,” recalls Cheever; “it was the opposite. I saw that being right was a petty goal — being free was the thing to aim for.” Cummings’s life and work, in Cheever’s splendid book, exist in a state of constant tension between these forces of freedom and authority. Edward Estlin Cummings was born into a well-to-do family in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1894. He was well loved and received generous encouragement in his artistic development from his mother, who greatly desired a poet-son, and his uncle George, one of many influences on his early poetic development. Estlin’s was a mostly happy childhood — […]
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