Secrets of Literature: NYT's Susan Cheever on the Untimely Death of E. E. Cummings's Father

Susan Cheever, author of the recent E.E. Cummings biography, writes about her experience researching and visiting the site of Cummings's parents's car crash. From The New York Times:

As Edward and Rebecca Cummings passed the town of Center Ossipee, N.H., in their new 1926 Franklin sedan, it began to snow. They left their home in Cambridge, Mass., hours before, driving a car with high seats, no defroster and a top speed of about 50. Rebecca took over the driving for the last part of the trip to their summer place at Silver Lake.

As she steered the car north toward Mount Chocorua, a southbound Boston & Maine steam locomotive loomed over the right side of the car, then cut the Franklin in half, killing Edward instantly and throwing Rebecca out into the falling snow. “When two brakemen jumped from the halted train, they saw a woman standing — dazed but erect — beside a mangled machine, with blood ‘spouting’ (as the older said to me) from her head” — that’s how their son, the poet E. E. Cummings, described it to a Harvard audience in the first of his Charles Eliot Norton lectures (Cummings called them nonlectures) in the fall of 1952. “These men took my 66-year-old mother by the arms and tried to lead her to a nearby farmhouse; but she threw them off, strode straight to my father’s body and directed a group of scared spectators to cover him. When this had been done (and only then), she let them lead her away.”

At the time of the accident, 11 years after his graduation from Harvard, E. E. Cummings had published two acclaimed poetry books and an important war memoir, “The Enormous Room,” about his World War I service and incarceration, which had been written at his beloved father’s urging. “It was my miraculous fortune to have a true father and a true mother and a home, which the truth of their love made joyous,” Cummings wrote about his extraordinary parents. By 1926, Cummings had settled in Greenwich Village for good to become part of the wild crowd of poets and writers who lived there before and after World War I. Eugene O’Neill was their playwright, Edna St. Vincent Millay was their country girl, William Carlos Williams was their doctor, a working physician who traveled in from New Jersey after work most nights to hang out with the poets and writers.

The night of the accident, Cummings and his sister, Elizabeth, headed for New Hampshire by train. By the time they arrived, Rebecca was in the Wolfeboro hospital wavering between life and death. When Cummings and his sister appeared, Rebecca seemed to understand what her death would do to them, and she decided not to join her husband. She would have more than 20 more years to live, but the death of Edward Cummings was a turning point for her and for her son. It catapulted Cummings into an adulthood that included his disastrous second marriage and the crisis of confidence that led him into therapy. It also inspired one of the finest dirges ever written, a glorious requiem mass of words, the poem that begins: “My father moved through dooms of love/through sames of am through haves of give/singing each morning out of each night.” [...]

Learn more at New York Times. And to read more Cheever on Cummings, check out Claire Luchette's interview with Susan Cheever here.