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PARTISAN REVIEW
vomit, and so on) which can itself, uncriticized, become disgusting: (6)
a youthful, not very well-balanced religiousness, a "reverence for life"
combined with a youthful refusal to accept death as a fact ("No young
man thinks that he will ever die...."), leading, of course, to a morbid
preoccupation with death: (7) indecency, scatology, even here and
there something that strikes me as very like pornography-physical frus–
tration leading to emotional frustration, and making even physical ful–
fillment finally emotionally frustrating, and final emotional fulfillment
the object of a kind of private religion. To sum all this up: Mr. Cum–
mings's sense of life is the "lyrical" rather than the "tragic" or "comic"
sense. The poet who has not learned to accept "society," "others," the
idea of the City in some sense, will never become sufficiently mature for
tragedy or comedy. Mr. Cummings's satire is an aggressive-defensive
maneuver on behalf of his small private corner in a for him still un–
sullied Garden of Eden; salesmen, politicians, generals, the late Presi–
dent Harding and the late S. S. Van Dine must keep out. Some such
drastic preliminary "limiting judgment" is necessary if we are to do
justice to Mr. Cummings's achievement within his limits.
Part of that achievement is readability.
Poems,
1923-1954 is a
volume of 468 pages and can be read straight through like an American
novel of the 1920s, or a volume of essays by Mencken. It is, indeed, of
Mencken, Scott Fitzgerald, early Dos Passos that I
think
when I read
Cummings and not--except for turns and tricks, and moods, that some–
times remind me of Pound--of other poets.
If
Mr. Cummings were a
less raw and vulnerable, a more balanced and integrated person his
poems would not
be
such a magnificent documentation of the stresses
of the American scene. Some of them have value, perhaps,
merely
as
documentation:
yoozwiddupoimnuntwaiv un dU}'Yookusumpnruddur givusuhtoonundup–
hugnting
(anglice:
youse with the permanent wave and the yuke or somethin' or
other
give us a tune on the ****ing thing!)
Others, like the deliciously funny epitaph on President Harding (a foot–
note to Mencken's essay), call up in us a tolerant nostalgia for the
simpler stupidities of yesterday:
...
if he wouldn't have eaten them Yapanese Craps
somebody might hardly never not have been unsoTry, perhaps
As a clown, Cummings can make us laugh aloud. But he is at his best
