Prose that’s fine and true

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.

The novel’s reception also was influenced by the prevailing politics of the time. Cummings was very much at home in New York’s Greenwich Village and on Paris’ Left Bank, where fervent admiration of the Soviet experiment was general. His novel, in fact, stands squarely at the intersection of two great early 20th century trends -- the Modernist novel as initiated by James Joyce, whose “Ulysses” appeared the same year as “The Enormous Room,” and the “I’ve-been-over-into-the-future-and-it-works” genre of Russian travel memoirs. The problem Cummings’ book encountered was that he loathed the Soviet Union and everything about it. The account he delivers is one of unremittingly physical and spiritual dreariness, of banality, kitsch and a sinister, delusional piety.

As Joyce did, Cummings adopts a classical model for his narrative -- in this cause Dante’s “Inferno.” Thus in “EIMI,” the Harvard scholar and Soviet apologist Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana, who helped introduce the poet around official Moscow, becomes Virgil. Jack London’s daughter Jean, who then was living in the Soviet capital with her husband, Charles Malamuth, becomes “Beatrice.”

The selection of the book’s title is key, taken from the Greek “I am.” In fact, the first edition’s cover bore the subtitle (“I AM”), making it impossible to misread the author’s insistence that his view is that of the individual set against the collective and all its coercive ambitions.

The white hot center of “EIMI” is the obligatory visit Cummings made to Lenin’s tomb on May 31, 1931. The long descriptive sequence of his literal descent to the mummified remains is one of the sequences that most powerfully evokes Dante’s model, as a “reeking” line of fellow pilgrims carries the author downward toward “death’s deification.” The ritual circumnavigation of the casket with its partial glass lid occupies but a few lines in this long sequence:

“Now;a, Pit: here . . . yes -- sh!

“under a prismshaped transparency

“lying (tovarisch-to-the-waist

“forcelessly shut rightclaw

“leftfin unshut limply

& a small-not-intense head & a face-without-wrinkles & a reddish beard).”After the ascent back out of the tomb, there is this magnificent reflection: “Certainly it was made of flesh And I have seen so many waxworks which were actual (some ludicrous more horrible most both) so many images whose very unaliveness could liberate Is,invent Being (or what equally disdains life and unlife) -- I have seen so very many better gods or stranger,many mightier deeper puppets; everwhere and elsewhere and perhaps in America and (for instance) in Coney Island . . .

“now(breathing air,Air,AIR)decide that this how silly unking of Un-,thishow trivial idol throned in stink,equals just another little moral lesson. Probably this trivial does not liberate,does not invent,because this silly teaches;because probably this little must not thrill and mot not lull and merely must say --

“I Am Mortal. So Are You. Hello.

. . . another futile aspect of ‘materialistic dialectic’ . . . merely again(again false noun,another fake ‘reality’)the strict immeasurable Verb neglected,the illimitable keen Dream denied.”

Put aside the conventions of punctuation and syntax. Read that passage aloud a few times, letting the author’s oh-so-cunning spacing dictate your breath -- and savor something fine and true written at a moment when both qualities were in rather short supply.

In Auden’s “low, dishonest decade,” Cummings -- of all people -- turns out, like Orwell, to be one of the aesthetic handful who got things right.

A year after “EIMI’s” first publication, Cummings refers to it in the “dialog” between Public and Author that he wrote to introduce a new edition of his far more successful first novel, “The Enormous Room”:

“Public: And you have only just finished your second novel?

“Author: So called.

“Entitled ee-eye-em-eye?

“Right

“And pronounced?

“ ‘A’ as in a, ‘me’ as in me; accent on the ‘me’

“Signifying?

“Am.

“How does Am compare with The Enormous Room?

“Favorably.”

That is, to say the least, understatement.

Norton has done a great service by bringing back into print an unfairly neglected landmark in the history of literary Modernism. It’s possible that “The Enormous Room” was not only a bestseller in its day, but remains the best known of Cummings’ prose works because it is -- at root -- an optimistic prison diary. For all its formal pyrotechnics, “EIMI” is a more austere, bleakly confrontational work.

It also is an oblique critique of the reservations that have colored Cummings’ reputation over the last few decades. Consider how disastrously so many of his most talented Modernist colleagues veered left and right, toward the 20th century’s blood-stained abstractions.

“EIMI” reminds us that this New England poet’s 19th century preoccupations -- the love between men and women, a regard for nature and a playful delight in the transcendent possibilities of daily life -- don’t seem so quaint after all.

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timothy.rutten@latimes.com