Lit Hub Reprints 1927 e.e. cummings Editorial

At Lit Hub, e.e. cummings is given some copy, with a republication of the poet's 1927 op-ed for Vanity Fair, "America May Be Going to Hell But At Least She Isn't Standing Still." "Your fashionably brained American . . . is very fond of twisting the fact that America’s bigness has encouraged a lot of drivel into the falsehood that America is drivelling because she is big," wrote the poet. More:

Hereupon, the Saint Michaels cry “What do you mean ‘alive’? You mean ‘efficient’ and ‘progressive.’ Having observed that the typical American business man is too busy with his business to digest his luncheon, you have probably run amuck in your typical American way and have credited the entire American nation with a superior degree of vitality. Like a host of other materialists, you are mistaking motion for movement, tempo for rhythm, mere liveliness for life. Half drowned in the typical American inferiority complex, you clutch desperately at appearances. You pretend that at the root of existence lies the almighty dollar. You deliberately ignore spiritual values. The things which make life living for sensitive people mean nothing to you. What of Art, for instance? Is anything so vital as Beauty? And where, in the whole expanse of noisy, vulgar, ugly America, can you find a museum like the Louvre or a cathedral like the cathedrals of Chartres, Notre Dame and a score of other masterpieces?”

The answer to all such questions is itself a question: “Where, in the entire smallness of France or in the unmitigated amplitude of anywhere else, can you find a painter ‘like’ John Marin, a sculptor ‘like’ Gaston Lachaise and a phenomenon ‘like’ Niagara Falls?” But by “more alive” the present writer meant something which does not contain itself in such adjectives as “efficient” and “progressive.” He meant that France has happened more than she is happening, whereas America is happening more than she has happened.