The Coast of Utopia

There is a type of literary talent that functions best and most highly under tight formal restraints. Perhaps the purest example of such a talent is Edward Lear, whose long-frustrated creative impulses found wild and disturbing expression through limericks and nonsense songs, forms both deeply (if mechanically) rigorous.In suggesting that the poet E.E. Cummings possessed such a Learian talent, I mean no criticism. There are, of course, surface resemblances between the two poets — most notably a penchant for telling stories of innocence and good endangered by the corrupt and mundane, sometimes ravaged and destroyed, sometimes saved. But Lear and Cummings have a deeper, temperamental connection. Cummings’s best work, his most inventive, is found not among his looser free-verse pieces, but in the oddly metered quatrains he produced, which have an uncanny ability — in their broken, almost childish rhythm, their masterfully performed ingenuousness, and the acrobatic whimsy of their imagery — to burn themselves permanently in the mind:neck and senecktieare gentleman ppoyd’seven whose recktieare covered by lloyd’sThe punning wit of these lines, the bizarre and instantly recognizable cultural story they tell, is inseparable from their quick-stepping, syncopated feet and their clipped enjambment. Cummings’s poetry, light though it may appear at first reading (and as mawkishly polemical though it may appear at second), impresses deeply at these moments. But his success under such enormous constraint, indicative of great talent, should also leave one somewhat dismayed at the thought of such a talent attempting to work in the most sprawling, polymorphous literary medium imaginable: modernist prose.“Eimi,” Cummings’s intensely observed and intricate account of a visit in the early summer of 1931 to the Soviet Union, does not, as you may imagine, exhibit a great deal of literary restraint. The book first appeared in 1933 and went through two more editions, the last being the Grove of 1958. Norton’s decision to republish “Eimi” deserves praise: They’re bringing back to light a singular artifact of American literary modernism. “Eimi” is crammed with incident, as is to be expected: Cummings’s travel from Paris to Moscow, to Kiev and Odessa, through Istanbul, Turkey, and back to Paris, in the care variously of a pro-Soviet American scholar, a female writer, and other characters, each of whom has several names and sobriquets. Cummings himself figures prominently in his own narrative, as Kemminkz, as Poietes, as I, C, or K.This is not necessarily a bad thing. As Madison Smartt Bell notes in the book’s foreword, there is something delightful about the idea of Cummings attacking the edifice of Stalinist power with formal anarchism. Here is Cummings on a supporter of the Soviet project:Stabbing each Bad which feebly god wafts against U.S.S.R., wafts against the choochoo train, feebly against socialism, this wild old sudden man reverses it and it brutally back hurls; brutally with Good pinning his opponent. Such a marksman! how robust an insanity! … Russia’s miraculous … nothing like Russia … never anything approached it.The satire is cutting, and the sheer virtuosity of the language itself is a comment on the old man’s invincible orthodoxy. But, as closely constructed and inventive as this language is, it has a rather wearying cumulative effect. This is a book with a clear aim: to record the artist’s sojourn in modern Russia. It is given an explicitly factual setting (albeit one hard to recognize at times). Cummings’s prose runs, by its nature, counter to clarity and narrative straightness, which undercuts the book’s central reason for existing: Given that Eimi takes place over a specific period of time in a historically actual age and nation, given that it purports to recount the quotidian experiences of its author, it seems pointless to develop such an idiosyncratic prose for such a journalistic purpose. (Cummings wrote his other major prose work, “The Enormous Room,” in relatively plain English.) There exists, of course, huge variety of style in literary tours of Russia, a genre that encompasses everything from Chekhov’s letters from Solovki to Knut Hamsun’s hypnotic “In Wonderland” to (in a sense) Edmund Wilson’s “To the Finland Station.” Cummings’s book is a unique entry in this genre, but its final opacity keeps it from fulfilling its alleged purpose, except in the most arcane way: as a formal comment on the stupidity and rigor of the country’s institutions.Cummings was a painter and a draftsman as well as a writer. His work in those fields has been largely forgotten; his reputation rests on a handful of lyric poems. Turning to “Eimi,” one hopes to discover previously unrevealed facets of cummings’s talent. Instead, we see him applying his poetic method in a medium sadly unsuited to it. “Eimi” is a singular book, and an admirable one. But it does not suggest that Cummings should be remembered as more than a poet, and as a strange and limited one at that.Mr. Munson is the online editor of Commentary. He last wrote for these on John Updike.

The Coast of Utopia

The Coast of Utopia

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