Cummings revealed

E.E. Cummings made more money reading his poems than writing them. That's just one of the fascinating tidbits Susan Cheever gives us in her excellent 2014 biography E. E. Cummings: A Life.

Another is this: Cummings may have been a radical in his poetic style, yet he was a firm anti-communist, unlike so many of his fellow intellectuals. Friends returned from Russia with praise for what they had found there, but Cummings turned against Stalin and communism almost from the moment he entered Russia. Everyone there seemed afraid. Nobody seemed happy.

Cheever gives us plentiful examples of his poetry, often playful, sometimes angry, usually obscure, always thoughtful. These poems provide commentary on his life, from loving memories of his clergyman father to his late-in-life fondness for birds.

The poet had difficulties with women: two marriages, two divorces. He never married the love of his life, who stayed by him until the end, although she was jealous even of his own daughter.

His relationship with Nancy, his daughter, makes a wonderful story in itself, perhaps even worthy of a movie. Cummings knew her when she was a little girl, but then his ex-wife took her away to Ireland, changed her name and refused to tell her anything about her real father. Years later, after Nancy herself had become a poet, Cummings reentered her life, yet for a long time refused to tell her he was her father. Only after Nancy declared her love for him did he reveal the truth.

Like her father, John Cheever, Susan Cheever is an outstanding writer, as her other books such as American Bloomsbury, have shown. This is a fine, revealing biography, perhaps too brief to be definitive, but beautifully written.

The quest for perfection

Iris Murdoch

"Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea," novelist Iris Murdoch said.

William Faulkner said something similar: "All of us failed to match our dream of perfection." Faulkner's thought can be expanded to include not just writers but everyone else. None of us quite achieve our dreams, not all of them anyway. Perfection is impossible in a universe where Murphy's Law seems to rule. Our dreams are one thing. Reality is another.

I once heard another novelist, Ann Patchett, say something along this same line, although I don't remember her exact words. The story she writes is never quite the story she imagined in her mind, she suggested. And this from someone who, like Murdoch and Faulkner, has written wonderful books.

Is this failure to achieve perfection as unfortunate as it seems? In Christian thought, imperfection when it is recognized — or repentance, if you will — is what opens the door to grace. It also inspires Christians to strive always to do better.

Faulkner saw it similarly for writers. "That's why he keeps on working, trying again; he believes each time that this time he will do it, bring it off," he said. "Of course he won't, which is why this condition is healthy. Once he did it, once he matched the work to the image, the dream, nothing would remain but to cut his throat, jump off the short side of that pinnacle of perfection into suicide."

Early success can spoil writers, just as it can spoil those in other pursuits. And success isn't even perfection. Actual perfection could destroy us. We all need struggle — and grace.

In black and white

I kept focusing on Nancy and the drive-in and that little pet cemetery. My American dream, drenched in blood and greed, but I didn't care. I wanted what I wanted.

Joe R. Lansdale, More Better Deals

Reading Joe R. Lansdale's More Better Deals (2020) is like watching classic film noir from the 1940s or 1950s. You might even imagine Fred McMurray and Barbara Stanwyck playing the key characters.

Appropriately enough, Lansdale's story takes place in the 1950s. Ed Edwards sells used cars for a shady Texas dealer. He doesn't like cheating people, but it's a living. When he goes to repossess a Cadillac from the owner of a drive-in theater, the man is away, but his beautiful wife is home and quickly seduces Ed. Before long Nancy convinces him to help her kill her abusive husband. His reward: Nancy, the drive-in, a pet cemetery sideline business and a hefty life insurance payment.

Things don't go as planned, of course, and soon enough Nancy has talked Ed into another brainless scheme.

Ed isn't doing all this just for himself and Nancy. He and his beloved younger sister had a black father but are passing as white. He wants to use some of the money to get her a fake birth certificate and a college education. His life may be a mess, but hers doesn't have to be.

Lansdale keeps things moving, and as dark and grisly as the story becomes the reader nevertheless finds something in Ed, if not Nancy, to like. But in this kind of story, justice finds a way. 

On rereading books

Susan Sontag

"No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading," Susan Sontag said. Do I agree? Well, yes and no.

Yes

I used to say something similar: "Any book worth reading is worth keeping." I said that to justify having more than 5,000 books in my home. I believed it then and I would believe it now if I were younger and still had room for that many books.

But why keep books one has already read? Because they inspire memories, because they can be handy references for someone who writes about books and because they are worth rereading. I have reread many books, sometimes with more pleasure the second or third time than the first time. Good books, like good movies, reward you for revisiting them.

Books require much more time than movies, however. Even to read them once takes hours out of our lives. And so we might ask, why read them even once if they are not worth reading again?

No

Yet time is short and books are plentiful, and we don't really know how good a book is until we read it. Do we really want to devote our entire lives to reading relatively few books over and over again?

And do we even always want to read high-quality books?

I have rarely reread a murder mystery or a thriller. In fact, I can't think of any. And yet, like most readers, I enjoy a good mystery or a good thriller now and then. Must we deprive ourselves of books that entertain more than they enlighten? Can't a book be worth reading just once?

Old secrets

It may be more difficult to keep secrets in a small town, but Mary Alice Roth has managed to keep her secrets for years in The Old Place (2022) by Bobby Finger.

The former high school math teacher in Billington, Texas, Mary Alice did not retire gracefully. She even shows up to harass the new math teacher on the first day of school. She is a tormented woman who sees it as her mission to torment everyone else. She lost her husband to suicide, one of the secrets she keeps, then lost her son, Michael, soon after Kenny, his best friend and the son of Ellie, her neighbor, died in an accident.

As the novel begins, Mary Alice and Ellie have finally restored their broken friendship and have begun having morning coffee together. But then Katherine, Mary Alice's estranged younger sister, returns, threatening to reveal Mary Alice's even bigger secret. Her son isn't really dead — he had sent his own obituary to the newspaper — and is now at Katherine's house in Atlanta. She wants to take Mary Alice to him.

Ever obstinate, Mary Alice agrees to go, but only after the community picnic, which she is, as always, in charge of. And this delay leads to the final crisis.

The title, which for most of the novel seems odd, refers to a lakeside cottage owned by Mary Alice, which she has not visited in years. So isolated is it that its location is itself something of a secret. Yet so much of the back story happened there.

This is fine novel with many layers that offers much for discussion groups to talk about.

Getting the joke

One needs to know a lot to read Mad informatively, and it confirms one's sense of intelligence.

M. Thomas Inge, college professor

A joke isn't funny if you don't get the joke. In other words, you have to know something. The informed will always find more to laugh at than the uninformed.

When I read Mad magazine as a teenager there were a lot of jokes I didn't get. But these gags made me want to get them. They made me want to know more about the movies and books being parodied, about the politicians being ridiculed and so forth. Reading Mad made me a better newspaper and magazine reader, I believe. I wanted to get the jokes.

Thus, that magazine that many teachers and parents thought was a waste of time was, to my mind, educational. The magazine made me smarter, and the smarter I got the more I enjoyed the magazine.

The above quotation from M. Thomas Inge, a pop culture writer, suggests the satire magazine even had a certain snob appeal. It was to teenagers what Harper's or The Atlantic Monthly was to adults, a suggestion to peers of a certain level of intellectual elitism. You must know something if you read this magazine.

Gone Mad

Long-time readers of Mad magazine — by which I mean old men like me —will love Bill Schelly's Harvey Kurtzman: The Man Who Created MAD and Revolutionized Humor in America (2015).

In the biography, richly illustrated with Kurtzman drawings, one encounters such names as Jack Davis, Bill Gaines, Wallace Wood, Al Feldstein, Dave Berg, Al Jaffee and Will Elder, all of which appeared prominently and frequently in the magazine during its prime. Gaines was the publisher, the others comic artists and writers.

Kurtzman, then working as a comic book artist and writer for Gaines, got the idea for Mad at just the right time. Not only was the world ready for a humor magazine of this sort in the 1950s, but Gaines was in financial trouble. Comic books were under assault for supposedly poisoning the minds of youngsters, especially the violent kind of comics that Gaines specialized in. Mad was a different kind of comic book, and very soon it evolved into a real magazine, not a comic book at all.

Yet Kurtzman and Gaines didn't get along, and Kurtzman actually worked on only a handful of issues of Mad, yet his influence remained throughout its long life. Years later he returned to the magazine briefly.

After he left Mad, Kurtzman struggled for many years. He started a number of other humor magazines, such as Humbug, Trump and Help!, but none of them caught on as Mad did. Mostly he lacked the financial backing to keep his magazines going until they found their audience. Then Hugh Hefner of Playboy came to his rescue. Soon Kurtzman and Elder were producing the Little Annie Fannie comic strip that appeared in the magazine for years. Kurtzman soon lost interest in the strip and hated Hefner's constant interference, yet it paid the bills.

Kurtzman's work, as well as his career as a teacher of comic art, influenced a great many younger artists, including Robert Crumb and Terry Gilliam. Feminist Gloria Steinem, briefly his assistant on Help! as Gilliam was later, also features prominently in his life.

This biography is thick, heavy and constantly entertaining, even if one chooses to read only the comics it contains.