Fairy Tales: The other cummings

Coming upon e.e. cummings's Fairy Tales is rather like coming upon his paintings: one is struck immediately by their difference from the poems for which he is so well known. Like the paintings, the fairy tales, written for his daughter when she was very young (one might guess about age four), are soft, gentle, basically romantic, even pretty rather than beautiful. They are water colors of words. Where cummings was extremely serious about his painting, however, producing a fairly large oeuvre and exhibiting as a painter, as a writer of children's stories he is clearly a father who happens to be a writer: the four stories come to some thirty pages with illustrations (how one wishes that cummings himself had illustrated them!), and their publication in 1950 seems more an afterthought than the culmination of any intent. Yet he did publish them, and they deserve consideration if only because they are the work of a major writer.

The problem with discussing the tales is the difficulty of evaluating "the other cummings" and neither damning with faint praise nor praising with faint damns. For one cannot avoid having some considerable expectations of cummings, expectations that derive from his poems for adults. To begin with, one expects verbal invention—the shaping of words and syntax, both visually and aurally, into new kinds of constructs; after all, the first thing that one experiences when reading or hearing cummings's poems is the ways in which he manipulates the appearance of language. Next one might expect intellectual "bite"—the surprise that arises from the skewing of meanings and the consequent recognition that things are just not as one thought they were. And finally, as the product of these expectations, one might well look forward to a sense of delight, even in the midst of images of ordinariness—perhaps, in fact, most especially there.

For instance:

In Just—spring   when the world is mud-luscious the littlelame balloonman

whistles   far   and wee

and eddieandbill comerunning from marbles andpiracies and it'sspring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queerold balloonman whistlesfar   and   weeand bettyandisbel come dancing

from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it'sspringand   the

     goat-footed

balloonMan   whistlesfarandwee

Simply as an aural experience even a child could be delighted by this poem; as with Blake's "The Tyger," the child need not "understand" the poem in the adult sense of that term. In the case of "The Tyger," in fact, very likely adults don't really understand it either; like children, they apprehend it in whatever emotional and intuitive way they can as an ultimately inscrutable experience, as Blake seems to be saying that the tyger itself is. cummings's poem, too, is an experience, albeit a more limited experience, and therefore a more nearly completely comprehensible one. It is spring, and the poem is at least on the most immediate level of recognition the record of a childlike apprehension of the facts. The significance of the balloonman's lameness that turns into his goatfootedness, and of his whistle that metamorphoses into (among other things) Pan's pipe, all this is secondary to the sensory world established in the imagery and the sound patterns: the world is mud, it is lucious, it is wonderful (that is, wonder-full); eddieandbill can't come any way but running—unless it's dancing with bettyandisbel. But the poem is, after all, for us adults, and its world is, after all, both far and wee; as adults we must understand that.

In his Fairy Tales cummings works with a much simpler level of understanding. The worlds of his creation are again far—the worlds of "faeries" and stars, of elephants and butterflies, of an anthropomorphic house that eats mosquito pie, of a little girl named I who meets a little girl named You—but except for the last, these are relatively conventional worlds for children's stories; their inhabitants behave not only in conventionally familiar ways, but conventionally acceptable ways. The sole possible exception from propriety is the...