Believe You Me Crocodile - Eigner Cummings The Typewriter & A Poem

In my essay "The Text as an Image of Itself" in the Stanford University Press edition of the Collected Poems of Larry Eigner [Edited by Curtis Faville & Robert Grenier, 2010], I reference Larry Eigner's acknowledgment of E. E. Cummings's influence on his work. Crucially, both Cummings and Eigner composed their poems on the typewriter, though for somewhat different purposes. Eigner, who was disabled from birth, was unable to write with sufficient ease longhand, and the typewriter enabled him to compose poems. Cummings, on the other hand, actually preferred the typewriter as a medium, believing that it allowed him to make a visually organized impression. Cummings was both a writer and a plastic artist, and liked to refer to himself as a "draughtsman of words" and an "author of paintings." This sense of composition--conceiving of writing poems as both a visual, as well as an aural process--is a key element of some post-Modern literature, and the work of Eigner presents one of its most direct expressions. Below is an image of Cummings's portable typewriter. In our edition of Eigner's poems, we chose as the frontispiece of volume I, a photo of Eigner's battered old typewriter. The image of this device, at the beginning of the collection, is intended to foreground our apprehension of Larry's work as a poetry which originates, and is expressed through the mechanical characteristics of this handy tool of modern technology, now rapidly becoming extinct since the inception of the computer age, and the personal cathode ray tube projection screen, with connected keyboard and accompanying automatic printer.                   

 

 

 

From an historical perspective, the era of the typewriter--assuming that its use is never revived in the future--looks like a transitional device in the development of the mechanization of print technology, mid-way between the invention of the printing press (with later augmentations and efficiencies) and the arrival of the personal computer. The effect of this device upon writers and artists in the 20th Century has been largely ignored, but it's likely to be recognized, going forward, as an important, integral component of the creative process during the segment of its effective life (1900-1995)--just as computer technology is influencing the writing of literature in the present era. Just as the typewriter enabled writers to generate their own print text, without the intermediate step of writing it out longhand or dictating it beforehand, the computer has expanded the capabilities of writers to compose texts visually, using different fonts and spatial arrangements with a great facility, and has brought, too, a capability for rapid reproduction of text, incorporating the data-driven copy machine. We're just beginning to understand how this may affect literature--the generation of material and non-material texts--in the future.         

 

     

By any measure, E.E. Cummings was a fascinating man. Raised in a cultured milieu--his Father was a Harvard professor and Unitarian minister--Cummings was a precocious child, who began writing and drawing while still in his teens. At Harvard, Estlin (as he was called, to distinguish himself from his Father) graduated cum laude in 1916 with a Master's Degree in English and Classical Studies, delivering a commencement address on "The New Art" in which he noticed important new Modernist trends. A minor controversy ensued. For the rest of his life, Cummings would resist convention, maintaning an iconoclastic profile with respect both to intellectual pretension, and popular opinion. 

 

The familiar account of Cummings's enlistment in the ambulance corps in WWI, his unjust imprisonment, and his book about this, The Enormous Room [1922], are all well-documented. Of more pertinent interest, here, is the incredibly prolific burst of literary production which began after his release, continuing up through the mid-1920's, during which period he wrote over 1000 pages of startlingly original, and unusually skillful poetry (only some of which was published in a sequence of books--Tulips and Chimneys [1923], & [1925], XLI Poems [1925], is 5 [1926], ViVa [1931]). Composed about equally of classically inspired sonnets, and eccentrically set lyrics and satires, it forms a body of work--both in its mood and appearance on the page--unlike anything that had come before in the history of literature.

 

What Cummings noticed, uniquely, was that the way a poem looked on the page was an integral part of how it was perceived. As a serious plastic artist, he was sensitive to the ways in which a text expressed both our sense of the progression of its unfolding (as read), as well as the overall design and energy of its visual shape. These were revolutionary ideas in 1920, ideas which virtually no one else was exploring at the time. 

 

As a teenager in the early 1960's, I was immediately attracted to Cummings's love poems, which were, and continue to be, among the most direct, frank and romantically lyrical ever written. Their apparent innocence, sense of mischief, and adventurousness were all aspects likely to interest young people, as they have done now for the last four or five generations. The sense of fun--of the "virtual pin-ball" quality of their typographical structure--not only moving words and phrases around on the page, but fussing with punctuation, capitalization, spelling, and grammar--to suggest alternate kinds of address--is irresistible, especially in contrast to the air of gravity and solemnity with which poetry is usually presented in the classroom and on the podium.                              

  

         

One of my favorite Cummings poems, which I must have read when I was perhaps 13, long before I could have understood, really, what it meant, was "MEMORABILIA". Unlike most of Cummings's poems, it has a title, which is an immediate tip-off about tone, and what it sets out to accomplish. MEMORABILIA is a satiric rant, a full-fledged swipe at the ugly American tourist class, so dear to Henry James and Edith Wharton, who made the "pilgrimage" to Europe along the Grand Tour route, spending conspicuously and looking for suitable matches among the landed class.    

 

  

MEMORABILIA   

 

stop look &

 

listen Venezia: incline thine 

ear you glassworks 

of Murano; pause 

elevator nel 

mezzo del cammin’ that means half- 

way up the Campanile, believe   

 

thou me cocodrillo—   

 

mine eyes have seen 

the glory of   

 

the coming of 

the Americans particularly the 

brand of marriageable nymph which is 

armed with large legs rancid 

voices Baedekers Mothers and kodaks 

--by night upon the Riva Schiavoni or in 

the felicitous vicinity of the de l’Europe   

 

Grand and Royal 

Danielli their numbers   

 

are like unto the stars of Heaven….   

 

I do signore 

affirm that all gondola signore 

day below me gondola signore gondola 

and above me pass loudly and gondola 

rapidly denizens of Omaha Altoona or what 

no enthusiastic cohorts from Duluth God only, 

gondola knows Cincingondolanati I gondola don’t   

 

--the substantial dollarbringing virgins   

 

“from the Loggia where 

are we angels by O yes 

beautiful we now pass through the look 

girls in the style of that’s the 

foliage what is it didn’t Ruskin 

says about you got the haven’t Marjorie 

isn’t this wellcurb simply darling” 

                                                          --O Education: O 

 

thos cook & son   

 

(O to be a metope 

now that triglyph’s here) 

 

I'm not sure whether, as readers, feeling warm about Venice, Italy matters much in one's appreciation of this mockery of American speech and upper middle-class pretension. As with most Cummings poems, the vituperation and ill-humor seems less important than the delight he takes in lampooning hapless targets, in twirling webs of impish tricolor bunting around the over-dressed ingenues and their matronly escorts, like mummies being readied for entombment.

 

But the first aspect of the poem that catches my attention is its mimicry of American advertising "ad-speak" or annunciatory journalese. "Stop, look & listen" is like the huckster's command, except that here it is addressed to the city of Venice [Venezia]. Then we get the quotation from Dante nel mezzo del cammin ("mid-way upon the journey--of life"), meaning, here, the interrupted "elevator" ride up the picturesque red-brick Campanile (bell-tower) in the main plaza in Venice. Believe you me, crocodile! In the mock language, then, of The Battle

Hymn of the Republic--"mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Americans particularly the brand of marriageable nymph which is armed with large legs rancid voices Baedekers Mothers and kodaks." At night, strolling the esplanade along the water's edge before the stylish hotel Danielli their numbers are legion, we hear the palaver of English and Italian voices mingling in the warm night air--

 

I do signore 

affirm that all gondola signore 

day below me gondola signore gondola 

and above me pass loudly and gondola 

rapidly denizens of Omaha Altoona or what 

no enthusiastic cohorts from Duluth God only, 

gondola knows Cincingondolanati I gondola don’t  

 

--the repetition and enjambment (Cincinnati/gondola) of the word gondola like a chant or frustrated mimicry of the tourists arguing with the gondoliers. The unimpeded translation of this sequence would be I do affirm, all day below me and above me pass loudly and rapidly denizens of Omaha Altoona (or what?), no!, enthusiastic cohorts from Duluth, God only knows!, I don't! Followed by the jumbled tour-guide/lady's companion (Baedecker guidebook in hand) summoning (invoking!) Ruskin (The Stones of Venice) to inspire the attention of Marjorie to notice the pretty well-curb, all in furtherance of her Education (!). Whence interferes the office name of Thomas Cook & Sons, the venerable travel agency and money-changing office, even then a by-word for foreign travel exigencies. 

 

(O to be a metope 

now that triglyph’s here) 1

 

I suppose I maundered over that couplet for several years, before finally discovering that it referred to the bas-relief sculptured figures along the channeled tablet of a Doric freize, which are common in classical architectural detail. Just the sort of specific detail, of course, which tourists would be commanded to appreciate. Indeed, the implication clearly suggests that these "substantial dollar-bringing virgins" from America have become themselves a brand of metope along the metaphorical triglyphs (promenades) of modern-day Venice. 

 

Like many Cummings poems, this one manages to look and feel thoroughly contemporary, while rehearsing what is, in substance, a very traditional broadside against the pretensions of the ruling class, a class which served as the subject for a whole segment of our literature (a la James and Wharton)--of the relationship between the old and new worlds, the 2000 year old culture of Europe (and beyond that, of the ancient Mediterranean world), and that of the grand spanking, brand new world of Am-MARE-ee-ka! The "content" of the poem, again ostensibly about the old world revulsion at the crudity of the new, is really about the objectification of speech through an autonomous projection of a disembodied voice. In 1920, the technology of media was in its relative infancy: there was the telephone, and radio, still quite novel in their use; crude motion pictures were just beginning; musical and voice recordings were very new. The objectification of speech--as projected autonomously through a device--spontaneously inspires the sense of language (and sound) as a kind of oral-visual environment. Different levels of address--shifting, conflicting contexts of prose, lyric, advertisement, signage, noise--mix chaotically as tapestries of raw data, received haphazardly and discerned as accidental dialectic and atonal progressions. In the Cummings poem, these voices intertwine and mix in a cacaphony of competing economic and cross-cultural currents--a dance of conditions--an anthem to the procession of history across continents, a parody of the modern mating-dance ("nymphs").             

 

The Modernist American poets of the first half of the Twentieth Century--Eliot, Pound, Stevens, H.D., Marianne Moore, Zukofsky, Oppen, Stein, Williams, Crane and Cummings--broke with European formalist models, choosing to create works out of native materials, or re-casting traditional models within new contexts. The post-Modern poets built upon the experiments of Modernism, though they were largely freed from the impinging conflicts of repudiating convention as a social act. A poet like Larry Eigner could treat the page, and the occasion of writing a poem, as a much freer and uninhibited adventure than Cummings could, in 1920, not having, as his predecessor had, to defend his right to make new statements about the world in a way no one had ever thought of doing before. What Cummings had tried, 30 years before, opened a pathway that led to further experiment. But while Cummings had been hemmed in by strict categories of literary purpose--love, satire, pastoral--Eigner was able to concentrate, for instance, upon pure perception or imaginative flight, without the interposition of a classical address. The Cummings poem, then, is a classical exercise, not unlike something Catullus might have appreciated, in satirical vituperation, though couched in what looks superficially like modern public address speech. Nevertheless, its form, and movement, suggest new different ways of scoring words in space, and this is what Larry picked up when he first read Cummings's work in the late 1940's.                            

 

On a metaphysical level, Cummings's visual/typographical experiments suggest a multi-dimensional approach to subject-matter, in which the ostensible matter of referents is revolved like a prism, separating constituent colors, textures and caricatures into helixes of language, pulling or jamming grammar and syntax apart or together, to create gigantic mobiles of free-form word-sculptures, the poet either bound up in the persona of the poem's voices, or standing back, manipulating its means. Thinking of a poem's potential in this way was an entirely novel notion in 1920, one that would have seemed profoundly alien to writers in earlier centuries. To achieve it required a consciousness sufficiently objective in its relation to the material text--the print technology derived from mechanical means (the printing press)--that it could imagine moving words, stanzas, phrases, individual letters even, like pieces on a board. The independence from the tyranny of externally produced, mechanically generated alphabetical texts, clearly made this imaginative leap possible. Sitting at his manual portable typewriter, inspired by the new techniques from painting and sculpture and music, Cummings realized that he was engaged with a machine which could perform--within given limits--the same kind of functions which a paint-brush could on a canvas. Not abstract shapes or actual colors or textures, but linguistic settings, variable in sound and movement, within the space--line, increment and grid--of the typewriter page. 

  

Neither Cummings nor Eigner went so far down the road of alphabetical disintegration that they literally tampered with the symbolic system of writing itself. But they were able to adapt it to their respective interests: in Cummings's case, the jagged vernacular mimicry of colloquial slang, the playful toying with punctuation and capitalization, the lightly-inflected sense-&-nonsense-puns and so on; in Eigner's case, the subtle vectored intuitive leaps, covertly hidden inside conversational observations and asides, the multi-dimensional forward and back through time and space, placing the reader in a speculative position with respect to sequence, locus, and meaning.

 

Eigner's authorial persona is of the static observer, whose power to move about freely in a poetic space is not bound by fixed intervals of prosodic extent, or by the narrative flow of the poem's "argument". That persona is neither in a dialectic with the "reader" nor omniscient in the old sense in which he's totally in control of everything that "happens" inside the parameters of the poem. The typewriter page is a work space--it looks a little messy because it's "unfinished" during its process.

 

The evolution from the inter-spliced voice-ings of the Cummings satire, to Eigner's spacial arrangements is a clear instance of a progression in the development of the influence of media over literary form, and the way in which an incrementally expanding sense of linguistic contexts occurs. The linkages may seem indirect and slightly gratuitous, until we look at the minute particulars of each writer's work. Their respective differences are a measure of the rapidity of change occurring over a half century of cultural time.                                 

      

___________

1. Parodic take on Robert Browning's poem "Home Thoughts From Abroad"--the line "Oh to be in England / Now that April's there." 

Painting above by E.E. Cummings, "Fourth Dimensional Abstraction", copyright the Estate of E.E. Cummings.