[In the following essay, Cohen addresses the influence of Freud on Cummings’s early aesthetic and technique.]

when I see you I shall expect you to be conversant with two books: The Interpretation of Dreams, and WIT and the Unconscious. Both are by FREUD. GET WISE TO YOURSELF!!¹

So wrote E. E. Cummings to his younger sister Elizabeth in May 1922. In some ways, Cummings' enthusiasm for Freud was very much a part of its time: a post-war Modernist in the arts could scarcely resist Freudian theory as the concomitant “modernism” of psychology. As Frederick Hoffman has shown in Freudianism and the Literary Mind, Freud's theories were readily available in America by 1915 and were eagerly snapped up by Greenwich Village intellectuals, among whose ranks was E. E. Cummings.

But Freud's meaning to these bohemians was distorted by their desire to repudiate bourgeois morality and to adopt sexual mores free of “Puritanical” repression. As Hoffman observes, “Freud did not bring about this revolution in sex morality. The revolution simply drew upon him … as a means of justifying its opinions and acts.”² Cummings fits this pattern rather closely. He too felt Freudian theory would remove the sexual inhibitions of his upbringing and sanction his rebellion. He was equally prone, therefore, to misconstrue Freud for his own ends.

But Cummings' interest in Freud differed from that of his contemporaries in ways that justify a careful study of Freudian influence on his life and writing. First, unlike many Village and Left Bank intellectuals who merely bandied Freudian ideas, Cummings read Freud extensively and carefully. The Interpretation of Dreams, Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, and Totem and Taboo are among those books he mentions reading in his letters, and some of his heavily annotated copies still exist.³ Second, Cummings attempted to apply Freudian theory both to his life (by analyzing himself and by undergoing formal psychoanalysis) and, more important, to the aesthetics and techniques of his early poems and plays. While Freudian influence on Cummings' life and on his play Him has recently been noted in Richard Kennedy's biography, Dreams in the Mirror, Freud's influence on Cummings' other writings has received almost no critical attention, although much evidence suggests that this influence, in the late teens and twenties, was profound.⁴

I

Freudian references are not hard to come by in Cummings' writings. They pepper his private letters and recur increasingly in his published essays of the 1920s, suggesting his growing fascination with Freudian theory—a fascination that culminated in his psychoanalysis by Dr. Fritz Wittels in 1928-29. The written references begin in 1920, when Cummings urged his mother to continue reading Freud.⁵ Such a recommendation implies that he was already familiar with at least some works by Freud in the late teens, perhaps as early as his last years at Harvard in 1915-16. There he had learned of the latest intellectual and artistic movements, almost as soon as they emerged, from such well-posted friends as Scofield Thayer. Since Thayer underwent psychoanalysis by Freud himself in 1922-23, it seems likely that Thayer's interest in psychoanalysis—an interest he likely passed along to Cummings—began at Harvard.⁶ The dating is important, for since Cummings formulated both his aesthetics and his innovative poetic techniques in these years (ca. 1916-20), his early awareness of Freudian theory establishes the possibility of its influence on his art.

Freud's ideas profoundly impressed the young Cummings and marked a turning point in his life. Recalling this awakening, he mused in notes dated 1940: “I wonder if, from my Keats period, I wasn't opened into reality via Freud (per Thayer) and Wittels. …”⁷ “Keats Period” refers to the poems modeled after Keats and Rossetti that Cummings wrote in his early years at Harvard; the phrase may, however, also refer to his generally romantic, naive, and sheltered attitudes towards his family and towards sex in these years. But what did he mean by “reality”? Most likely, it was (as he construed it) the importance Freud ascribed to sex in explaining both psychological maturation and the conflicts between unconscious wishes and conscious repression. For Cummings, such repression was a triple inheritance: from Puritanism, from the stifling propriety of bourgeois Cambridge, and more immediately, from the prudery of his upbringing under the aegis of Reverend Edward Cummings.⁸ Cummings spoke in his Nonlectures [i: six nonlectures] of trying to break free of Cambridgian respectability by immersing himself in the honky-tonk night-life of Boston and, later, of Paris. Thus, if Scollay Square and the Left Bank became his college of the senses, Freud became his professor, providing the intellectual rationale for this self-education.⁹

Precisely this distorted view of Freud as sexual liberator informs part of Cummings' advice to his sister (quoted in the epigraph) on how to “get wise” to herself: “SEX IS EVERYTHING (as Freud says): You either know this or you don't. If you don't you don't. It's not what can be taught! J'espere, in your connection!” Practicing what he preached, Cummings sought to “get wise” to himself, by reading A. A. Brill's Psychoanalysis¹⁰ and by attempting his own psychoanalysis in late 1923.¹¹ Here again, he was following fashion as well as personal necessity. Two of his closest friends, Scofield Thayer and Edward Nagle (a fellow-painter), had undergone psychoanalysis at about this time; Thayer's had not yet proven a failure, and Nagle's, as Cummings wrote his mother, left him “entirely changed … he paints very finely now.”¹² Freud's apparent contribution to freeing an artist's creative potential was not lost on Cummings.

Like any good disciple of a new religion, Cummings sought to spread the word, chiefly in articles he wrote for Vanity Fair in the mid-twenties. In “I Take Great Pleasure in Presenting,” he discusses the differences between “consciousness” and the unconscious, using the penguin as “a living symbol” of these dual “selves.” His claims for the unconscious are extravagant: it is “the function which determines or fulfills each human being's destiny and which contains the essence or meaning of all destiny. … Not only does the Unconscious exist—it is existence: and moreover the best part of existence—an illimitable realm in which the human mind flies, as contrasted with a microscopic domain in which the mind's wings are next to useless [i.e., consciousness].”¹³ A more humorous tone informs “The Secret of the Zoo Exposed.” The decidedly psychoanalytical “secret” is that the animals “are in reality living mirrors, reflecting otherwise unsuspected aspects of our own human character … of our true or invisible selves.” Similarly, the animal-monsters of our dreams, “if properly analyzed, lose their terror and become deceptive appearances, harmless symbols of our own hates and loves. For further enlightenment on this subject I can only refer you to the works of Dr. Freud and other psychoanalysts.”¹⁴ Cummings continued to refer his family to Freud as well, urging them to read A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis and Totem and Taboo in 1926.¹⁵

Behind the glib didacticism of his essays and advice, however, Cummings suffered a series of emotional crises in these years. In 1919 he fathered an illegitimate child by Thayer's wife, Elaine Orr, and then refused either to acknowledge his paternity (though the fact was known to Thayer and others) or to assume any responsibility for raising his daughter. When he finally did marry Elaine in March 1924, she left him three months later to marry another man. The subsequent divorce proceedings of 1924-25 left Cummings depressed and dispirited. In late 1926, his father was killed in an automobile accident. In between these shocks, he began a turbulent relationship with Anne Barton. His instability, as well as his unhappy relationship with Anne, led him to undergo a complete psychoanalysis in 1928-29 by Dr. Fritz Wittels. The results were good. As Richard Kennedy observes: “Dr. Wittels bolstered Cummings enormously in dealing with his problems. He is referred to [by Cummings] as another father, as someone who saved his life, as someone who set him free. It is apparent that Wittels' method both reinforced Cummings' own philosophy of individualism and helped him to stand firm and live out his philosophy.”¹⁶

Several changes in Cummings' life and art of this time reflect his increasing self-confidence and stability. His painting had already abandoned Modernist, geometric abstraction for a more personal, semi-figurative style.¹⁷ Now his poetry increasingly championed the cause of the feeling and loving individual against all mechanistic collectivities. His politics grew iconoclastically conservative, and following his divorce from Anne in 1932, his marital life stabilized into a happy, if placid, pattern of domesticity with Marion Morehouse.

In the decades that followed, Cummings continued to value the insights he gained through self-analysis and through Freudian theory. His later notes contain numerous snippets of self-analysis, and he remained close friends with Dr. Wittels. Even his letter belittling Freud as a “religion”¹⁸—an echo of his earlier reverence of “Saint Freud”—attests more to the strength of his individualism and hatred of ideologies than to a repudiation of psychoanalytical principles. He remained, as he put it in the same letter, “one who fought for Freud against many.”

II

Freudian theory left Cummings far more than a successful psychoanalysis, however. For in Freud's descriptions of the workings of the unconscious, he found models that confirmed, and perhaps even inspired, the artistic techniques he was then devising to realize his aesthetics.

One aesthetic goal that Cummings pondered in his notes and that was especially receptive to Freudian theory was to convey a sense of three-dimensional form in painting and poetry by non-traditional methods. Cummings termed this three-dimensional aesthetic “seeing around.” His basic method of achieving it was to juxtapose contrasting words, themes, and verbal structures in his poems, and colors, shapes and visual structures in his paintings. This technique of juxtaposition had several sources. As Roger Shattuck observes, it was a signal feature of Modernism in nearly all of the arts of the early twentieth century.¹⁹ And certainly, Cummings' study of the color theory and practice of Cézanne and of the Neo-Impressionists directly influenced his technique of juxtaposing complementary colors to create what he called “bumps and hollows,” or advancing and receding planes. What Freud provided was a description of how juxtaposition worked as an unconscious mental process applying both to words and to dream-thoughts. He thus gave Cummings a way of conceiving of language and personality as having “three-dimensional” form achieved through the juxtaposition of opposites. One immediate result of Freud's model was Cummings' technique of pairing contradictory words or “oxymorons.”

In his excellent analysis of Cummings' poetic art, Norman Friedman found himself stumped when trying to explain Cummings' early use of oxymoron:

He used it with much greater frequency in his first volume [Tulips and Chimneys] than ever again, and it seems there a sign of youthful exuberance resulting in a kind of ambiguity which is puzzling to evaluate. What are we to say about “the noise of petals falling silently,” “peaceful terrors,” “evident invisibles,” “large minute hips,” “Precise clumsy,” “grim ecstasy,” “the dusty newness of her obsolete gaze,” “obscure and obvious hands,” or “obscene shy breasts”? … One gets a sense of verbal excess, of a sometimes arbitrary creative flamboyance.²⁰

Most critics politely ignore the technique altogether; and one who has perceptively identified its aesthetic origins and parallels, Rushworth Kidder, does not analyze how the oxymorons themselves work.²¹ Yet the technique simply cannot be put aside, for, as Friedman shows, it occurs often in Cummings' early poems. Here are some more examples, followed by their pagination in Poems 1923-1954:

a skilful uncouth/prison (55)
the seren nervous light (66)
the whirlingPeaceful furious street (81)
an impenetrable transparency (109)
whose careless movements carefully scatter (114)
taste the accurate demure/ferocious rhythm
          of precise laziness (122)
with twists spontaneously methodical (127)
a personal radiance sits hideously (126)
fiercely shy and gently brutal (157)
frail firm asinine life (160)
the sharp days slobber (211)
a wise/and puerile moving of your arm (217)
whispering fists of hail (215)

To examine one jarring example in detail, consider the closing two lines of the following poem:

the bed is not very big
a sufficient pillow shoveling
her small manure-shaped head
one sheet on which distinctly wags
at times the weary twig
of a neckless nudity
(very occasionally budding
a flabby algebraic odour
jigs
          et tout en face
always wiggles the perfectly dead
finger of thitherhithering gas.
clothed with a luminous fur
poilu
                    a Jesus sags
in frolicsome wooden agony).

&, “Sonnets-Realities,” V; in Poems 1923-1954, p. 106.

“Frolicsome”? What could be further from “agony,” less appropriate to the spiritual gravity of the Crucifixion? True, this verbal contradiction expresses the incongruous image preceding it (“clothed with a luminous fur / poilu / a Jesus sags”): the crucifix above the prostitute's bed is apparently “clothed” with a sensuous, nappy fur (“poilu”). But the shock of the verbal contradictions between “frolicsome” and “agony” surpasses this visual incongruity, and Cummings heightens the verbal shock by isolating the final lines containing it. Yet, for all its startling incongruity, the phrase somehow works. “Frolicsome”'s anomalous presence intensifies the agony that “sags” begins and “wooden” continues; grossly inappropriate, it points ironically back to the suffering

But how do we know that the oxymoron should work this way? To answer this, we must consider Cummings' sources. Certainly, as a literary device, the oxymoron has a long tradition of which Cummings was doubtless aware. He would not have failed to note its use by the English Metaphysical poets, by his beloved Keats, or (particularly apt here) by Petrarchan sonnets to express “love's contradictions,” a theme we shall return to below.²² But in his 1925 essay “You Aren't Mad, Am I?”²³ Cummings reveals two far less likely sources: burlesque and Freud.

Burlesque, writes Cummings, has the ability to convey three-dimensional form by making “‘opposites’ occur together.” To illustrate this he carefully narrates an example that, because it illuminates his own technique, is worth quoting. A burlesk comedian, Jack Shargel, is handed a rose. He receives it with elaborate seriousness and “rapturously” inhales its fragrance:

then (with a delicacy which Chaplin might envy) tosses the red rose exquisitely, lightly, from him. The flower describes a parabola—weightlessly floats downward—and just as it touches the stage there is a terrific, soul-shaking, earthquake-like crash: as if all the glass and masonry on earth, all the most brittle and most ponderous things of this world, were broken to smithereens. Nothing in “the arts,” indeed, not even Paul Cézanne's greatest painting of Mont Sainte-Victoire, has moved me more, or has proved to be a more completely inextinguishable source of “aesthetic emotion,” than this knowing around the Shargel rose; this releasing of all un-roselike and non-flowerish elements which—where “rose” and “flower” are ordinarily concerned—secretly or unconsciously modify and enhance those rose—and flower—qualities to which (in terms of consciousness only) they are “opposed.” (Cummings' emphasis)

There are several important points here. First, “knowing around” (a conceptual equivalent to “seeing around”) the rose involves a clash, a juxtaposition of opposites: the rose's qualities and their antitheses. By defining what the rose is not, is furthest from, these “un-roselike and non-flowerish elements” secretly “modify and enhance” what the rose is, just as “frolicsome” enhances “agony.” But most important, these unroselike qualities are opposite only “in terms of consciousness.” On another level—the unconscious—they can coexist with the rose's qualities naturally, without what the conscious mind calls “opposition.” The language here is Freudian, and Cummings leaves no doubt of his source when he discusses the same aesthetic of opposition in words themselves: “language was not always blest with ‘opposites.’ Quite the contrary. A certain very wise man has pointed out (in connection with the meaning of dreams) that what ‘weak’ means and what ‘strong’ means were once upon a time meant by one word” (p. 127). By tracing the origins of these ideas in Freud's writings—The Interpretation of Dreams, the review of Karl Abel's The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words, and Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious—we may determine the nature and perhaps even the extent of Freudian influence on Cummings' technique.²⁴

In the quotation above, Cummings alludes to a footnote in Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams:

I was astonished to learn from a pamphlet by K. Abel, The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words (1884) (cf. my review of it …)—and the fact has been confirmed by other philologists—that the most ancient languages behave exactly like dreams in this respect [i.e., combining opposites]. In the first instance they have only a single word to describe the two contraries at the extreme ends of a series of qualities or activities (e.g., “strong-weak,” “old-young,” “far-near,” “bind-sever”); they only form distinct terms for the two contraries by a secondary process of making small modifications in the common word. …²⁵

Freud appended this footnote to a passage that describes one aspect of the “dream work”:

The way in which dreams treat the category of contraries or contradictories is highly remarkable. It is simply disregarded. “NO” seems not to exist so far as dreams are concerned. They show a particular preference for combining contraries into a unity or for representing them as one and the same thing. Dreams feel themselves at liberty, moreover, to represent any element by its wishful contrary; so that there is no way of deciding at a first glance whether any element that admits of a contrary is present in dream-thoughts as a positive or as a negative.

(p. 318, my emphasis)

Cummings appears to paraphrase this passage when he states that the “opposition” between the rose's qualities and their antitheses exists “in terms of consciousness only,” and that “secretly or unconsciously” these antithetical qualities “modify and enhance” the rose's qualities. Although Freud does not specify the content of these oppositions except as “elements,” he does say that “words are treated in dreams as though they were concrete things and for that reason they are apt to be combined in just the same way as presentations of concrete objects” (Standard Ed., IV, 295-96).

Freud's review of Abel's pamphlet not only surveys the various ways in which ancient languages combined opposite meanings into a single word (and sometimes reversed the sounds and letters of the original in its antonym), but also attributes the same word-play to children and to the unconscious. All three of these sources of word-play—ancient languages, children, and dreams—were integral to Cummings' aesthetics.²⁶ Moreover, his poetry employs all manner of word-play including acrostics, palindromes, and juxtaposed anagrams (e.g. “gas / sags” in the poem “the bed” above, and “god / dog” in the poem “Who / threw the silver dollar …” [&, “N,” IV]).

Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious probably had the greatest influence on Cummings' technique of juxtaposing antonyms. The “Relation” involves many of the same unconscious processes of the dreamwork applied to words, when a thought from the “foreconscious” descends briefly into the unconscious, in transformed, and then emerges from the unconscious as a witticism.²⁷ Of the many techniques of wit Freud cites, one is “representation through the opposite” or “outdoing wit.” It occurs when the opposite of the appropriate response “owing to its context, is equivalent to a still stronger” version of the appropriate response. Freud continues: “The contradiction takes the place of an exaggerated confirmation” (p. 674, my emphasis). Here, in a sentence, is the psychoanalytic rationale of “frolicsome wooden agony.” As in wit-technique, one side of the opposition can be made, by context, to “secretly enhance” (Cummings) or act as “an exaggerated confirmation” (Freud) of the other side. The contexts of our associations regarding the rose (delicacy) or the Crucifixion (suffering) are so firmly established that the antitheses of these contexts (the crashing rose, “frolicsome” agony) stand out glaringly enough to point back to—and “secretly enhance”—the original contextual qualities.

Of course, there are significant differences between Freud's model and Cummings' application. In Freudian theory, the juxtaposition between context and contradiction originates in the unconscious and manifests itself in the witticism or dream. Cummings reverses the process: the juxtaposition originates as a conscious artistic technique, but it appeals to the reader's memory of and unconscious associations with a particular context. Then too, not all of Cummings' verbal oppositions are as imbalanced as “frolicsome wooden agony.” Some, for example “obscene shy breasts,” seem more evenly balanced—either adjective could control the image—and thus fail to resolve the tension of their opposition. Here, we must consider the thematic context of these poised tensions to discover both their origin and function. Often, the themes are sexual and divided—torn between the speaker's attraction and repulsion to his lover. Once again, Freudian theory will help explain Cummings' puzzling dichotomies.

III

A sizable number of poems from Cummings' first three volumes, particularly the “Sonnets-Realities,” describe sex explicitly and imaginatively. But it is sex that is “enjoyed no sooner, but despisëd straight.” For these poems reveal, in varying degrees of balance, a disturbing tension between the speaker's lust for his partner (often a prostitute) and his aversion to her. Significantly, both the speaker's delight in her body and in the sensations of intercourse and his attendant or subsequent disgust are conveyed in incisive—and often shockingly repugnant—metaphors.

The balance between attraction and repulsion varies with each poem. If we reexamine “the bed is not very big,” we find almost no balance at all: the portrait of this prostitute is unrelentingly sordid. Her manure-shaped head, neckless nudity, odorous body, and bad breath lack even the integration of belonging to a complete person: they “jig,” “wag,” and “wiggle” in spasmodic isolation. Conversely, “i like my body when it is with your / body” is all delight:

i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite new a thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body. I like what it does,
i like its hows. i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which i will
again and again and again
kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,
i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz
of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh. … And eyes big love-crumbs,
and possibly i like the thrill
of under me you so quite new

&, “Sonnets-Actualities,” XXIV; in Poems 1923-1954, p. 129.

Most often, however, the sex poems bring both attraction and repulsion into head-on conflict:

the dirty colours of her kiss have just
throttled
                                        my seeing blood, her heart's chatter
riveted a weeping skyscraper
in me
                    i bite on the eyes' brittle crust
(only feeling the belly's merry thrust
Boost my huge passion like a business
and the Y her legs panting as they press
proffers its omelet of fluffy lust)
at six exactly
                                                            the alarm tore
two slits in her cheeks. A brain peered at the dawn.
she got up
                                        with a gashing yellow yawn
and tottered to a glass bumping things.
she picked wearily something from the floor
Her hair was mussed, and she coughed while tying strings

&, “Sonnets-Realities,” III; in Poems 1923-1954, p. 105.

The octet is all lust. The speaker delights in describing the sensations that his lover—or rather, the parts of his lover—arouse in him. But at the same time, he degrades her humanness: the colors of her kiss are “dirty”; her heart can only “chatter”; her eyes have a “brittle crust”; her thrusting, if merry, is also “a business.”

The sestet presents “the morning after” and transfers the night's sexual energy into violent, slashing images of morning. His lust only a memory, the speaker watches his lover with the aesthetic detachment and acuity of a painter. While he conveys a trace of sympathy for her fatigue, she remains, as during the night before, only an agglomeration of parts: a “yellow yawn,” a “brain,” “mussed” hair, undone strings.

How are we to explain these sexual polarities? They derive, I think, from three quite different sources: from the purely literary tradition of the Petrarchan sonnet, from Modernist aesthetics of juxtaposition and (in Cézanne and Cubism, at least) of emotional detachment between painter and subject, and most important, from sexual conflicts within Cummings himself—conflicts that Cummings, aided by Freudian theory, attempted to objectify and thus resolve.

That most of these sexual polarities (and verbal oppositions) occur in sonnets is no accident. As a lover of the sonnet form, Cummings had mastered Petrarch's and Shakespeare's models idealizing the qualities of the beloved. By turning love into sex and an idealized lady into a squalid whore, Cummings pays homage to the Petrarchan tradition by inverting it, much as Shakespeare did in “My Mistress' Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun.” Petrarch's idealized lady hovers as a kind of ghostly after-image—a photographic negative—of Cummings' repulsive prostitute in “the bed is not very big.” She is the unmentioned standard against which the whore is measured. By simply being everything the prostitute is not, she mockingly reinforces the tawdriness of the real experience. Thus, the literary context functions here precisely as it does in Cummings' imbalanced verbal oppositions, such as “frolicsome wooden agony” of this same poem: “the contradiction takes the place of an exaggerated confirmation.”

As we have seen, Cummings valued juxtapositon as a form-creating technique in his Modernist painting and poetry. If complementary colors and oxymoronic words could be juxtaposed, then why not opposing sexual attitudes? In treating his subject as a thing, moreover, Cummings achieves an icy detachment that permits him to render her features with an imaginative clarity purged of sentimentality—to paint her as still life, much as Cézanne painted his wife.

Both these explanations assume a purely aesthetic intent, removed from any sexual conflicts within the poet himself. But given what we know already of Cummings' fascination with Freud as sexual liberator and of his rebellion against his prudish upbringing, we should look more closely at his life vis-à-vis Freudian theory—just as Cummings himself did—to explain these sexual tensions more fully. In his Introduction to the 1922 Manuscript Edition of Tulips & Chimneys, Richard Kennedy writes: “Some of these poems reveal the tensions and uncertainties about sex which were common among the middle-class young men of the early 1920's, who, like Estlin Cummings, the minister's son, were just breaking free of the puritanical attitudes of earlier decades. A combination of fascination and repulsion wobbles through most of [the sex poems] …” (p. xiii). Kennedy groups these poems in a style he calls the “Satyric,” which “frequently treats [sex] as a dirty but necessary function” (p. xii).

Sex as “dirty but necessary” does not account for the unvarnished lust in these poems—the “attraction” side of Cummings' ambivalence. And it overlooks other expressions of this sexual interest, such as the scores of erotic drawings he made in these years. Yet Kennedy's thesis that the sexual polarities reflect Cummings' own “tensions and uncertainties” makes good sense. In fact, the thesis finds independent support in Freud's 1912 essay, “On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love” (Standard Ed., XI, 179-90). Freud describes how a neurotic male becomes fully potent only with a “debased” woman, never with a “virtuous” one. The latter is uncomfortably close to the male's home life: she recalls a mother or sister to whom he has formed an “incestuous fixation” in his youth. Conversely, the debased woman is sexually attractive because she appears aesthetically and “ethically” inferior to the male and can thus function solely as a “sexual object.”

Several details of Cummings' early life fit this neurotic pattern. As Kennedy observes in Dreams in the Mirror (p. 103), Cummings was closely attached to his mother and sister and underwent an “Oedipal crisis” with his father. In one “primal scene,” Cummings overheard his mother crying out his father's name during intercourse; he thereupon resolved never “to take any more of my F[ather]'s hypocrisy.” Another time, overhearing his father berating his mother, he recalls his response: “I REVOLT ag[ainst] my F[ather]: would like to KILL HIM.” Taking his mother' side in parental quarrels was only one expression of his Oedipal aggression. Another was his investigation of the low life that his father, a pillar of Unitarian propriety, must have abhorred. And paralleling Freud's profile of the neurotic male, Cummings' sexual initiation occurred relatively late: at twenty-three, according to Kennedy (p. 157).

Cummings' unresolved Oedipal conflicts, then, would seem to have disposed him to be both sexually attracted to and aesthetically repelled by the prostitutes in his sex poems. This aesthetic-erotic dichotomy perhaps explains why the adjectives and metaphors describing the lover's ugliness are as intensely vivid as those describing the speaker's pleasurable sensations of intercourse. Certainly, Cummings was not oblivious to these conflicts. His enthusiasm for Freud and for psychoanalysis derived, as we noted above, from a desire to discover and thereby free himself of them. Thus, the ambivalence in his sex poems does not seem merely an unconscious expression of sexual conflict. Rather, the balanced tensions of lust and disgust, the clinical dissections of the repellent lovers show aesthetic distance, as if Cummings is presenting the competing sides of his sexual ambivalence, shaping and ordering their tangled relation, and thereby gaining aesthetic control of them.

IV

Freudian theory exerted probably its greatest influence on Cummings in his 1927 play Him—a play often called “Expressionistic” and even “Cubist,” but rarely “Freudian.” Yet, as Richard Kennedy notes, in the play's first draft, Cummings “was trying to present Freudian ideas in symbolic action” by having the characters represent “consciousness or the ego,” “the subconscious,” etc.²⁸ Although Him's final version is not so schematic, it abounds with heavy-handed, Freudian references: an Englishman struggles with a heavy trunk on his back labeled “the unconscious” (II, vi); the protagonist meets his alter-ego, or libido, in the park (III, v); the protagonist's lover makes an obviously “Freudian” slip of saying “hump” when she means “pocket” (I, ii); “Will” and “Bill” play musical chairs with their identities (II, iv); one of the chorus of the “Three Weirds” refers to “the gospel according to Saint Freud”; and so forth.

Gratuitous as these allusions seem, they offer repeated clues to the psychological action of the play: the conflicts between and within the central characters, “Him” and “Me.” “Him,” as playwright and lover of “Me,” must somehow reconcile his iconoclastic, artistic persona (dubbed “Mr. O. Him, the Man in the Mirror”) with his social need of Me's love and companionship. “Me,” as Him's mistress, must reconcile her desire to have Him's child with her newly-emergent sense of herself and of her growing incompatibility with Him. Having the child, in fact, becomes the very hub of the play around which these conflicting identities revolve; but this hub is buried in fears as repressed wish and, until the denouement, is visible only in symbolic images.

While the entire second act is given over to the burlesque skits of Him's play,²⁹ the important scenes between Him and Me progressively reveal deeper layers of their relationship and of their psyches—a kind of psychoanalytic strip tease. This uncovering occurs simultaneously on three levels. Physically, the stage setting revolves with each successive scene to reveal a new side of the room in which Him and Me live. Since they remain oriented to the original room arrangement, each shift presents a new facet of their physical presence. This Cubist device (an expression of Cummings' “seeing around” aesthetic) serves as a perceptual metaphor for the social and psychological “seeing around” of personality. Socially, each scene between Him and Me discloses a new fragment of their progressively disintegrating relationship. Psychologically, the Him-Me scenes descend ever deeper into Him's psyche, chiefly through his monologues. For our purposes, however, I shall consider only the last of these disclosures.

Perhaps because Him, as playwright, suffers from writer's block—he cannot give birth to his play—he begins literally to “psychoanalyze” himself: to break down his psyche into Freudian components, using mirrors as both the means and symbol of his analysis. In the mirror, he confronts his artistic persona, “Mr. O. Him” (I, iv). Later, he meets his libidinous alter-ego (III, v). In both confrontations, he wants to kill his other self (or, rather, see it kill itself) but cannot. Finally, in “a still deeper mirror,” beneath “the windows of sleep,” Him glimpses an image from the nether-most region of his psyche, his unconscious, in the form of the child he “wishes—and fears—to have.”

In Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious. Freud defines the nucleus of a dream as a repressed wish “that should appear foreign to conscious thinking or … supply consciousness with reinforcement from unknown sources” (Modern Library Ed., pp. 746-47, 761). Cummings goes to considerable lengths of make Him's wish “foreign” to conscious thinking and yet still present in veiled allusions, dream-like gestures, and images. Not until Him actually recounts the dream-image itself (III, v), and again at the denouement in the midway scene (III, vi), does the child emerge into full view. But even when visible, its significance is shrouded. Some critics take it literally as the baby Me actually has. But there is as much reason to suppose that it is no more than the unrealized dream-wish of Him and Me.³⁰

First, as noted above, it never appears directly but always in allusions, symbols, images, and dream references, until the two climactic scenes of Act III. In the first of these scenes Him recounts to Me in loving detail a dream in which he beholds their child. But when he sees Me's response is “a different nothing”—and she tells him outright that the dream “was made of nothing”³¹—Him's response is to “throw it away … into the mirror.” And in the mirror, that is, in Him's unconscious, is exactly where the dream resides in the next scene, where it emerges as his nightmare. The setting is a carnival freak-show whose last attraction (introduced by a barker, alias the doctor, named “nascitur”) is Me disguised as a princess of necessity (“anankay”). Him, as dreamer, watches “from the outskirts”; when he sees Me holding up a baby and “proudly” revealing her identity, he “utters a cry of terror,” while the scene plunges into “total darkness” and “confused ejaculations of rage dwindle swirlingly to entire silence.”

Both scenes suggest that each character wants—and at the same time fears—to have the child. Perhaps their failure to realize the dream results from their inability to reconcile the divergent sides of themselves. Certainly, Him cannot reconcile the demands of his artistic persona, which creates beauty, with this still-deeper longing for love, union, and wholeness that can create new life:

ME:
Now you want—truth?
HIM:
With all my life: yes!
ME:
You wanted beauty once.
HIM:
(Brokenly) I believed that they were the same.
ME:
You don't think so any longer?
HIM:
I shall never believe that again.
ME:
What will you believe?
HIM:
(Bitterly) That beauty has shut me from truth;

(III, v)

Little wonder, then, that Him recoils in horror when confronted with the fact of his failure: the baby itself.

One point seems clear: the baby represents the possibility of unification, or in Jungian terms, of the “transcendent function” that integrates the opposing sides of personality. It can reunite Him and Me, as it can reintegrate the fragmented selves of Him's personality by putting Him in touch with his deepest longings and most submerged wishes. Moreover, the baby stands for a self-transcendence, an extension of the union between Him and Me, a new oneness growing out of their oneness. But the possibility ends in the still-born images of “total darkness” and “entire silence.” Consequently, the psychological action, like the social, moves toward fragmentation rather than reintegration: the “seeing around” reveals selves rather than self.

In sum, the staging of the scenes between Him and Me works in tandem with the play's psychoanalytic imagery to create three-dimensional “seeing around”: perceptual, social, and psychological. As the revolving room parses the personalities of Him and Me horizontally to reveal evolving sides of their relationship, the imagery and symbols parse Him's personality vertically to disclose progressively deeper levels of his psyche. Both movements compose a cube that one can see only part way around at any one time.³² Here, in short, is psychoanalytical cubism. And ultimately, the psychoanalysis is Cummings' own; for Him's ambivalence toward the child mirrors Cummings' tangled feelings toward his daughter; fear of responsibility, desire for paternity, guilt over neglecting her, and finally, bitterness in blaming her for his failed marriage to Elaine.

V

Given the breadth of Cummings' early aesthetic interests, it would be foolish to claim Freudian theory as the sole or even the chief influence on the techniques discussed in this study. As a Modernist painter, Cummings knew of and used techniques of juxtaposition for complementary colors and planar structures. As a Modernist poet, he had studied—and advocated—the poetic precedents for juxtaposing contradictory words, images, themes, and syntactic structures.³³ The structural techniques of his own abstract painting, moreover, directly influenced his poetry, as witness the planar structures and dynamic lines in so many early poems.

Thus, what Freudian theory signified for Cummings was, first, an exact confirmation, from a quite different perspective, of the aesthetics and techniques he had gleaned from Modernist painting and poetry. Freud's ideas inspired Cummings to apply Modernist aesthetics of three-dimensionalism to personality: to adapt juxtaposition to psychological states of mind, to construct dynamic tensions of opposites for words and themes as he had done for colors, planes, and syntactic motifs. Finally, in addressing not just an object in space but the human mind, Freudian theory enabled Cummings to bring the events and concerns of his personal life into closer conjunction with his art. It provided a model by which he could express—and aesthetically order—his own unresolved sexual conflicts and structure the psychological conflicts in Him. And in emphasizing the anti-rational nature of the unconscious, Freudian theory bridged an important gap between the objectivity of Cummings' Modernist aesthetics and the subjectivity of his personal philosophy that always asserted “feeling is first.”

Cummings thus joins the ranks of Sherwood Anderson and Eugene O'Neill in exploring the intersections between Freudian theory and Modernist aesthetics, and in making of Freud's writings something more substantive and lasting for literature than could be found in the parlor talk of Greenwich Village.

Notes

1. Selected Letters of E. E. Cummings, ed. F. W. Dupee and George Stade (New York: Harcourt, 1969), p. 86.

2. Freudianism and the Literary Mind (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1957), pp. 52, 63.

3. The first and third books listed here, as well as Group Psychology and The Analysis of the Ego, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, The Problem of Lay Analysis, The Future of an Illusion, and Moses and Monotheism, are in the Cummings papers at the Houghton Library, Harvard University (hereafter: Houghton).

4. To date, the only study relating Freud to Cummings is J. Haule, “E. E. Cummings as Comic Poet: The Economy of the Expenditure of Freud,” Literature and Psychology, 25 (1975), 175-80. Haule tests the efficacy of Freud's conditions for the operation of the comic by applying them to a poem by Cummings. His article focuses on Freud rather than on Cummings.

5. Letter to Rebecca Cummings, 13 Dec. 1920 (Houghton). Reprinted by permission of the Houghton Library and the E. E. Cummings Trust. All unpublished letters and notes of Cummings are copyright © The E. E. Cummings Trust 1982.

6. Thayer's interest may have been aroused by Professor James J. Putnam, an early Freudian at Harvard—Hoffman, p. 47.

7. Houghton.

8. Richard Kennedy describes Edward Cummings' paternal attitude towards sex as “repressive” and “remonstrative,” impelling the son “to seek … release from the inhibitions of New England Puritanism”—Dreams in the Mirror: A Biography of E. E. Cummings (New York: Liveright, 1980), pp. 49, 88, 90.

9. i: Six Nonlectures (New York: Atheneum, 1962), pp. 31, 48.

10. Cummings' notes on Brill's Psychoanalysis (Houghton) use pagination different from the 1922 edition, suggesting that he read an earlier edition.

11. Kennedy, pp. 246-47.

12. Letter of 13 Jan. 1922 (Houghton).

13. Vanity Fair, Feb. 1926; rpt. in E. E. Cummings: A Miscellany Revised, ed. George J. Firmage, (New York: October House, 1965), p. 140—hereafter: A Miscellany Revised.

14. Vanity Fair, March 1927; rpt. in A Miscellany Revised, p. 177.

15. Letter to Rebecca Cummings, 13 Sept. 1926, in Selected Letters, p. 111.

16. Kennedy, pp. 301-02.

17. Freud's “liberating” influence also appears here in Cummings' penchant for unusual colors. In notes dating from the early 1940s, he wonders: “a release for me (in painting) via The Dream? this would free me from representative colors—which, in turn, I feel, would free me from literal forms” (Houghton).

18. In 1949, Cummings wrote to A. J. Ayer that “viewed (et pourquoi pas?) as the founder of a religion of the entocosm, Freud strikes me as pitifully sans—about as s[ans] as Marx(mesocosm) & Einstein(ectocosm)”—Selected Letters, p. 194.

19. The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885-World War One (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969), pp. 332-33.

20. E. E. Cummings: The Art of His Poetry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1960), pp. 96-97.

21. “‘Author of Pictures’: A Study of E. E. Cummings' Line Drawings in The Dial,” Contemporary Literature, 17 (1976), 478.

22. Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1974), p. 596.

23. Vanity Fair, Dec. 1925; rpt. in A Miscellany Revised, pp. 127-28.

24. As shown above, Cummings read and recommended both Dreams and Wit (which had been available in English since 1913 and 1916, respectively). The first English translation of Freud's review of Abel appeared in 1925 in the Collected Papers. Cummings, however, was fully capable of reading the original version of 1910, having studied German at Harvard and having translated into rough English Julius Meier-Graefe's Cézanne und sein Kreis (4th ed, 1920)—Houghton.

25. Strachey trans., Vol. IV of Standard Ed. (London: Hogarth Press, 1958), p. 318, n. 3. Although Cummings owned the Brill translation, Strachey's version is substantially the same as Brill's (Modern Library Ed., p. 346, n. 1).

26. See, for example, his comments on primitivistic naiveté and children's art in his essay, “Gaston Lachaise,” (Dial, Feb. 1920; rpt. in A Miscellany Revised, pp. 18-19).

27. Brill trans., Modern Library Ed. (New York: Random House, 1938), pp. 758-59.

28. Dreams in the Mirror, p. 290.

29. Even here, Freud's influence may be present. Kennedy asserts that in the burlesk skits of Him's first version, “Cummings was attempting to present the realm of the unconscious—the unconscious thoughts of both characters “—Dreams in the Mirror, pp. 290-91.

30. Norman Friedman writes in E. E. Cummings: The Growth of a Writer (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1964): “And, of course, her baby is born at the end.” He cites as support a letter Cummings wrote him in 1961 stating: “Me's underlying ambition is to be entirely loved by someone through whom she may safely have a child” (pp. 55, 58). But Cummings' exegesis refers to Me's “ambition” to have a child, not to the fact of her having it.

31. Friedman is forced to interpret this response as Me's misunderstanding of Him's meaning (p. 71)—an unconvincing explanation in view of the carefully detailed narration of the dream itself.

32. In notes contemporaneous with Him, Cummings diagrammed as cubes the spatial relationships between consciousness and the unconscious and among the “seen and unseen faces” of a character (Houghton).

33. Cummings' Harvard essays confirm his early familiarity with Imagism, Symbolism, and Stein's Tender Buttons. See, for example, “The New Art” (Houghton) and “The Poetry of a New Era” (Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin).