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The Beauty of Living: E. E. Cummings in the Great War
E. E. Cummings is one of our most popular and enduring poets, one whose name extends beyond the boundaries of the literary world. Renowned for his formally fractured, gleefully alive poetry, Cummings is not often thought of as a war poet. But his experience in France and as a prisoner during World War I (the basis for his first work of prose, The Enormous Room) escalated his earliest breaks with conventional form the innovation with which his name would soon become synonymous.
Intimate and richly detailed, The Beauty of Living begins with Cummings’s Cambridge upbringing and his relationship with his socially progressive but domestically domineering father. It follows Cummings through his undergraduate experience at Harvard, where he fell into a circle of aspiring writers including John Dos Passos, who became a lifelong friend. Steeped in classical paganism and literary Decadence, Cummings and his friends rode the explosion of Cubism, Futurism, Imagism, and other “modern” movements in the arts. As the United States prepared to enter World War I, Cummings volunteered as an ambulance driver, shipped out to Paris, and met his first love, Marie Louise Lallemand, who was working in Paris as a prostitute. Soon after reaching the front, however, he was unjustly imprisoned in a brutal French detention center at La Ferté-Macé. Through this confrontation with arbitrary and sadistic authority, he found the courage to listen to his own voice.
Probing an underexamined yet formative time in the poet’s life, this deeply researched account illuminates his ideas about love, justice, humanity, and brutality. J. Alison Rosenblitt weaves together letters, journal entries, and sketches with astute analyses of poems that span Cummings’s career, revealing the origins of one of the twentieth century’s most famous poets.
Intimate and richly detailed, The Beauty of Living begins with Cummings’s Cambridge upbringing and his relationship with his socially progressive but domestically domineering father. It follows Cummings through his undergraduate experience at Harvard, where he fell into a circle of aspiring writers including John Dos Passos, who became a lifelong friend. Steeped in classical paganism and literary Decadence, Cummings and his friends rode the explosion of Cubism, Futurism, Imagism, and other “modern” movements in the arts. As the United States prepared to enter World War I, Cummings volunteered as an ambulance driver, shipped out to Paris, and met his first love, Marie Louise Lallemand, who was working in Paris as a prostitute. Soon after reaching the front, however, he was unjustly imprisoned in a brutal French detention center at La Ferté-Macé. Through this confrontation with arbitrary and sadistic authority, he found the courage to listen to his own voice.
Probing an underexamined yet formative time in the poet’s life, this deeply researched account illuminates his ideas about love, justice, humanity, and brutality. J. Alison Rosenblitt weaves together letters, journal entries, and sketches with astute analyses of poems that span Cummings’s career, revealing the origins of one of the twentieth century’s most famous poets.
327 pages, Kindle Edition
First published July 21, 2020
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
September 29, 2021
The Beauty of Living is a modest biography of E. E. Cummings that carries some new, bold ideas. It covers his childhood and early development into manhood in, as the title specifies, the Great War.
J. Alison Rosenblitt's detailing of the life of the young Cummings is fairly conventional and, I think, offers little we didn't already know. And it's told well enough that all the relevant facts are brought to light.
Most interesting to me was the time of his imprisonment by the French in La Ferte-Mace, the infamous episode he furiously related in his memoir The Enormous Room. Because I've never read it, mostly because in my browsing through many labyrinthine, dusty aisles of used bookstores I've never encountered a copy (New York Review of Books will publish a new edition next May, an event already on my calendar) Rosenblitt's account was engaging news. After La Ferte-Mace his return to America to settle in New York City and to begin writing the poetry we know him for is told without breaking new ground. It's the interpretation of his experiences in France that startle.
Arriving in France as a volunteer ambulance driver with his close friend William Slater Brown, they had a month-long deferment of service in Paris because they were without uniforms. There Cummings had a romance with a prostitute named Marie Louise Lallemand. While he was at the front they wrote each other intense letters. Yet when he was released from prison and returned to Paris he couldn't find her and never saw her or heard from her again. It's Rosenblitt's idea that Marie Louise was a major love--maybe the love--in Cummings's life and that earlier biographies assigned her "to the margins because she was a sex worker" and refused to recognize her importance in Cummings's emotional development. Her other extraordinary point is that Cummings was a war poet and that "his ideas about love, justice, injustice, humanity, and brutality" flowed into his life's work from his experiences in the Great War. In my reading the book I didn't see where she provided contextual arguments supporting either of these ideas. She comments on other biographies and faults them for missing the point, but she herself doesn't make her point. Especially that as war poet, I think. It's true his experience at the front and in prison were too harrowing for such a naive and sensitive man, and it's true he wrote some poems about the war. However, I don't think his poetry addresses the total cataclysmic and human ruin that was the Great War. We have Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, David Jones, and Robert Graves for that, allowing us to keep E. E. Cummings in "Just/spring" as "the little/lame balloonman" whistling "far and wee."
J. Alison Rosenblitt's detailing of the life of the young Cummings is fairly conventional and, I think, offers little we didn't already know. And it's told well enough that all the relevant facts are brought to light.
Most interesting to me was the time of his imprisonment by the French in La Ferte-Mace, the infamous episode he furiously related in his memoir The Enormous Room. Because I've never read it, mostly because in my browsing through many labyrinthine, dusty aisles of used bookstores I've never encountered a copy (New York Review of Books will publish a new edition next May, an event already on my calendar) Rosenblitt's account was engaging news. After La Ferte-Mace his return to America to settle in New York City and to begin writing the poetry we know him for is told without breaking new ground. It's the interpretation of his experiences in France that startle.
Arriving in France as a volunteer ambulance driver with his close friend William Slater Brown, they had a month-long deferment of service in Paris because they were without uniforms. There Cummings had a romance with a prostitute named Marie Louise Lallemand. While he was at the front they wrote each other intense letters. Yet when he was released from prison and returned to Paris he couldn't find her and never saw her or heard from her again. It's Rosenblitt's idea that Marie Louise was a major love--maybe the love--in Cummings's life and that earlier biographies assigned her "to the margins because she was a sex worker" and refused to recognize her importance in Cummings's emotional development. Her other extraordinary point is that Cummings was a war poet and that "his ideas about love, justice, injustice, humanity, and brutality" flowed into his life's work from his experiences in the Great War. In my reading the book I didn't see where she provided contextual arguments supporting either of these ideas. She comments on other biographies and faults them for missing the point, but she herself doesn't make her point. Especially that as war poet, I think. It's true his experience at the front and in prison were too harrowing for such a naive and sensitive man, and it's true he wrote some poems about the war. However, I don't think his poetry addresses the total cataclysmic and human ruin that was the Great War. We have Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, David Jones, and Robert Graves for that, allowing us to keep E. E. Cummings in "Just/spring" as "the little/lame balloonman" whistling "far and wee."
June 30, 2020
Thank you to NetGalley and W. W. Norton Company for this advanced e-copy of The Beauty of Living: E. E. Cummings in the Great War.
This was a really wonderfully edited book that explores poet E. E. Cummings's early life. Rosenblitt follows Cummings from his early years and education at Harvard, to his time during the Great War. In this biography you will find that it is created by letters, sketches, poem analyses, and journal entries. It is a wonderful origin story of such a great and famous poet.
It is always hard to review and rate a biography, especially one of such a profound writer and poet, but learning more about E. E. Cummings and his early years and how that shaped him as a writer was a really wonderful history lesson and learning experience.
This was a really wonderfully edited book that explores poet E. E. Cummings's early life. Rosenblitt follows Cummings from his early years and education at Harvard, to his time during the Great War. In this biography you will find that it is created by letters, sketches, poem analyses, and journal entries. It is a wonderful origin story of such a great and famous poet.
It is always hard to review and rate a biography, especially one of such a profound writer and poet, but learning more about E. E. Cummings and his early years and how that shaped him as a writer was a really wonderful history lesson and learning experience.
July 16, 2021
If you're interested in the poetry of E. E. Cummings, then do not miss this absorbing biography of the young Cummings, through his experiences in the Great War and a bit after. Rosenblitt makes a completely convincing case for his interpretation of what was going on in Cummings' mind at each step of the way during these developmentally crucial years. I felt like I saw the poet whole and understood his passionate intensity clearly and for the first time. As such, Rosenblitt has rendered the world a great service. If his writing is very occasionally a little on the pompous side, don't let that deter you. He's earned his right to pontificate on Cummings and his time.
August 31, 2020
"Latrines were not a suitable subject in the days when censors still held considerable power. The first American translation of Erich Maria Remarque's ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT censored three passages: the first to do with prostitution and the third concerning sex between a soldier and his wife; the second passage, omitted from the American edition, described soldiers playing cards on the latrine" (148).
"In 1927, Cummings sat down to try to explain how he felt about the war. He came up with the following:
[...]
In the nine years which have elapsed since the armistice, many things have been said about our so-called 'great' war: it was an international crime, a blot on the scutcheon of civilization; it revealed at once the noblest and most ignoble characteristics of mankind; it constituted the darkest moment in human history. These and a thousand other sentiments have been echoed and reechoed by innumerable orators.
Briefly: this war was like other wars.
[...]
We have heard of the 'art' of war. Let us therefore turn to Art Itself: in Michaelangelo's painting of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, bigness and deepness combine. But Michaelangelo's ceiling is truly great, not because it is big--it is great because, beyond the fact of its bigness, it is *deep*. By 'deep' we mean that it does not merely astonish or overwhelm or destroy the spectator. We mean that it leads the spectator into itself and escorts him through all its intricacies, in such a manner that when he finally emerges he is *more alive* than when he entered.
The 'great' war did not make people more alive. It made them less alive or else it killed them.
[...]
And yet most of us will part with anything more readily than with our illusions.
Rather than admit frankly that we have been tricked by war, most of us will prefer to cling to the essentially cowardly notion that there is something profound and lofty in war. But should we not, at any cost, be honest with ourselves? How comes it that--only nine years after the biggest war in human history--we have almost forgotten that this war existed? And do not you and I find ourselves wondering when the next 'war to end war' will occur? Why, then, should we persist in attributing something fundamental or glorious to the most trivial of all tricks, the most pernicious of all panaceas--the fatal fake of war?
[...]
It is high time the human race as a whole stopped admiring death and began to try to live.
It is high time we, as individuals, realized that to live is deeper and more beautiful and more difficult than to die.
Men will be the fools of glory, peoples will exterminate peoples and civilization will tremble to its very foundations so long as death is glorified at the expense of living. But when living comes into its own--when not to die, but to *live*, becomes the most heroic deed of which anyone is anyone is humanly capable--war will cease" (247-250).
"In 1927, Cummings sat down to try to explain how he felt about the war. He came up with the following:
[...]
In the nine years which have elapsed since the armistice, many things have been said about our so-called 'great' war: it was an international crime, a blot on the scutcheon of civilization; it revealed at once the noblest and most ignoble characteristics of mankind; it constituted the darkest moment in human history. These and a thousand other sentiments have been echoed and reechoed by innumerable orators.
Briefly: this war was like other wars.
[...]
We have heard of the 'art' of war. Let us therefore turn to Art Itself: in Michaelangelo's painting of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, bigness and deepness combine. But Michaelangelo's ceiling is truly great, not because it is big--it is great because, beyond the fact of its bigness, it is *deep*. By 'deep' we mean that it does not merely astonish or overwhelm or destroy the spectator. We mean that it leads the spectator into itself and escorts him through all its intricacies, in such a manner that when he finally emerges he is *more alive* than when he entered.
The 'great' war did not make people more alive. It made them less alive or else it killed them.
[...]
And yet most of us will part with anything more readily than with our illusions.
Rather than admit frankly that we have been tricked by war, most of us will prefer to cling to the essentially cowardly notion that there is something profound and lofty in war. But should we not, at any cost, be honest with ourselves? How comes it that--only nine years after the biggest war in human history--we have almost forgotten that this war existed? And do not you and I find ourselves wondering when the next 'war to end war' will occur? Why, then, should we persist in attributing something fundamental or glorious to the most trivial of all tricks, the most pernicious of all panaceas--the fatal fake of war?
[...]
It is high time the human race as a whole stopped admiring death and began to try to live.
It is high time we, as individuals, realized that to live is deeper and more beautiful and more difficult than to die.
Men will be the fools of glory, peoples will exterminate peoples and civilization will tremble to its very foundations so long as death is glorified at the expense of living. But when living comes into its own--when not to die, but to *live*, becomes the most heroic deed of which anyone is anyone is humanly capable--war will cease" (247-250).
January 27, 2024
I've always enjoyed the works of e. e. cummings, though I must admit in a rather shallow way. Rosenblitt has put together a thoroughly researched biography of cummings's early formative stages of his life. I had no idea how many young college grad writers went to Europe to be ambulance drivers. I mean, I feel like everybody knows Hemingway did, but this book informed me a lot of cummings's college buddies went that route. The rather unique part of his story is his time in a French prison. Yes. French, as in our ally. At any rate, this book added greatly to my understanding of this unique poet's development and the background for many of his works. If you enjoy e. e. cummings I believe you will find this book very interesting.
February 13, 2024
Fascinating. Thankfully, Rosenblitt's account of Cummings' early years and especially his time in "the enormous room" in a French prison during WWI, includes numerous valuable insights into Cummings' poetry and prose, uncovering its structure and sometimes elusive meaning.
Cumming' take on modernism and synthetism - not to mention much of his poetry and brilliant analysis of war (in "Armistice") from which the title here is taken - remain fresh, provocative and powerful.
Cumming' take on modernism and synthetism - not to mention much of his poetry and brilliant analysis of war (in "Armistice") from which the title here is taken - remain fresh, provocative and powerful.
September 29, 2020
Rosenblitt is an E. E. Cummings scholar. (She says the small e's he used in his name were for publication purposes only.) She has been troubled that the importance of his first love, a Parisian prostitute during WWI, has been minimized in his biographies and work. This is her attempt to explain how that individual and period had a lasting influence on his life and works.
March 13, 2022
Disappointing biography of E.E. Cummings before and during WW 1. Reads like a PHD Thesis expanded into a book. Too bad.
November 15, 2022
Interesting, and unexpectedly fruitful, to have a man this sensual, guileless, witty, and erudite be jammed up in a human pen during one of the worst of all wars.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews