Photo Gallery
All (save one) of the photographs below show material held in the E. E. Cummings collections at the Houghton Library (Harvard). All sketches and notes by E. E. Cummings are © The Cummings Trust and may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.
All photographs were taken by me, and not by the lovely people at the Houghton Library who take much better quality photographs! At the time when I worked in the Houghton archives, photography was permitted for personal research use only. Photographs were simply a form of additional note-taking, and so I took no especial care over framing or lighting. The Houghton have subsequently changed their policies, and now they very generously allow the sharing of researchers’ own photographs. I have cleaned up my old photography as best I could. I hope you will enjoy this insight into the archival material, however casual the photographs. I have included some photographs that are also in the book since here they can be viewed in color.
GALLERY 1: E. E. CUMMINGS IN FRANCE.
These images document Cummings’s time in France from May 8, 1917 to December 22, 1917.
Photo credits, from top (left to right) and bottom (left to right).
(a) Ham. The main base for Cummings’s ambulance unit, S.S.U. XXI, was just outside the town of Ham. E. E. Cummings Papers, 1870-1969, MSAm 1823.7 (16).
(b) Roupy rear. A sketch of Roupy, a tiny hamlet clustered along a road that gripped Cummings’s imagination. E. E. Cummings Papers, 1870-1969, MS Am 1823.7 (10).
(c) Route map drawn in a notebook showing one of Cummings’s ambulance drives, with landmarks noted in French. E. E. Cummings Papers, 1870-1969, MS Am 1823.7 (11).
(d) Postcard showing the seminary at La Ferté-Macé that became a WWI detention center where Cummings was imprisoned.
(e) Notebook chaos from a notebook used in prison. E. E. Cummings Papers, 1870-1969, MS Am 1823.7 (9).
(f) The color palette that Cummings created while in prison at La Ferté-Macé. E. E. Cummings Papers, 1870-1969, MS Am 1823.7 (19).
(g) In the same notebook, Cummings cut slits and tucked leaves full of autumn color, now brown. On this page, a fern tendril is also tucked between the stems of two leaves. The faded pencil writing underneath is a draft of a letter to Marie Louise. E. E. Cummings Papers, 1870-1969, MS Am 1823.7 (19).
(h) An emergency passport photograph taken in December 1917, so that Cummings could obtain the papers he needed to sail back to America on the Espagne, departing on Dec. 22. E. E. Cummings Additional Papers, 1870-1969, MS Am 1892.11 (92).
(i) Cummings later typed up some of his notes from France. This page of typed notes shows how embedded he had become in a blur of English and French language. E. E. Cummings Additional Papers, 1870-1969, MS Am 1892.7 (78).
(j) Mementoes from his time in prison at La Ferté-Macé, which Cummings kept until the end of his life. E. E. Cummings Papers, 1870-1969, MS Am 1823.8 (48).
GALLERY 2: E. E. CUMMINGS — SKETCHES, PAINTINGS, AND POETRY.
There are over 9,000 sheets of sketches and watercolours in the Houghton Library collection, not to mention further drawings in sketchbooks, on drafts of poetry, on the back of used envelopes, hotel receipts, cancelled checks… I have included just a few sketches and paintings here to try to convey the vividness of Cummings’s eye.
I also include an image of the handwritten fair copy of ‘through the tasteless minute efficient room’, written in 1918 at Camp Devens (Mass.) about Montmartre and the war. The notes below the poem appear to be a partial draft of a letter to Cummings’s friend Sibley Watson, including a reference to the end of Dubliners: “the last ¶ of Dubs. is some good, about snow i mean but geesus.” Cummings also asks for “December L.R.” — he must mean the December issue of The Little Review.
Photo credits from top (left to right) and bottom (left to right):
(a) Untitled. [Perseus rescuing Andromeda, from Classical mythology.] E. E. Cummings Additional Papers, 1870-1969 (Houghton Library, Harvard), MS Am 1892.8 (1).
(b) Untitled. [Crucifixion.] E. E. Cummings Additional Papers, 1870-1969 (Houghton Library, Harvard), MS Am 1892.8 (1).
(c) ‘through the tasteless minute efficient room’, on Camp Devens notepaper. E. E. Cummings Additional Papers, 1870-1969 (Houghton Library, Harvard), MS Am 1892.5 (704).
(d) R.H.C. [Rebecca Haswell Cummings, E. E. Cummings’s mother]. E. E. Cummings Additional Papers, 1870-1969 (Houghton Library, Harvard), MS Am 1892.8 (1).
(e) Untitled. E. E. Cummings Additional Papers, 1870-1969 (Houghton Library, Harvard), MS Am 1892.8 (1).
(f) Untitled. E. E. Cummings Additional Papers, 1870-1969 (Houghton Library, Harvard), MS Am 1892.8 (1).
GALLERY 3: E. E. CUMMINGS AND SCOFIELD THAYER.
Scofield Thayer was a driving force in American modernism, co-owner of The Dial, and a complicated figure in Cummings’s own life. Cummings sketched a remarkable number of portraits of Thayer. Here is a selection (including for comparison one sketch of Christ). The sketches show Cummings’s early idealization of Thayer. They also show his increasing awareness that there was something deeply wrong with Thayer — a realization that Cummings was better able to express in portraits than in words. For Thayer’s life, see James Dempsey’s biography, The Tortured Life of Scofield Thayer (2014).
Photo credits from top (left to right) and bottom (left to right):
(a) Scofield Thayer, (b) Scofield Thayer, Oct — ‘15 [1915], (c) Christ, (d) - (l) Untitled [Scofield Thayer]. All from E. E. Cummings Additional Papers, 1870-1969 (Houghton Library, Harvard), MS Am 1892.8 (1).