E.E. Cummings is a fascinating case -- admired for his poetry's formal audacity, discounted for a certain lack of ambition and, as a consequence, perhaps more often anthologized than read these days.
For all the focus on his work's daring, Cubist-inflected Modernist experimentation, Cummings was, at bottom, very much a 19th century poet -- concerned with love, nature and the possibilities of everyday life. His resolute unwillingness to engage some of the larger themes of the century to which his style so clearly belonged has dogged his reputation. "EIMI," newly reissued by W.W. Norton, makes clear that the disjunction of style and subject was the product of conscious choice rather than inhibition or aesthetic fecklessness.
"EIMI," first published in 1933, was the second of Cummings' two major prose works and is a "novelized" rendering of the diary he kept during a 35-day visit to Josef Stalin's Russia in 1931.
His first novel, "The Enormous Room," was a fictionalized account of his incarceration in a French prison camp during World War I. He had gone to France as an ambulance driver before the United States entered the war, but the pacifist views he expressed in his letters led authorities there to arrest and imprison him on suspicion of treason. The book that grew out of those experiences was published in 1922 and was a great popular and critical success. It still turns up on academic reading lists.
"EIMI" has had a different fate. None of the book's three previous editions sold more than a few thousand copies, and it has been out of print for nearly 50 years. In part, that's because in the interval between "The Enormous Room" and publication of this thinly fictionalized diary, Cummings had proceeded a long way along the idiosyncratic arc of his experimental Modernism.
As Albert Camus once remarked, "Those who write clearly have readers; those who write obscurely have commentators."
Still, "EIMI" is a very demanding but not forbidding book. Its prose is informed by Cummings' poetic method, which was to employ elaborately experimental formal structures in the treatment of the commonplace -- a kiss, say, or a flower -- so that the superstructure of everyday life might be cleared away by a fresh perspective, thereby revealing what's extraordinary in the ordinary.
