EIMI: A Journey through Soviet Russia (review)

It would be hard to imagine an American sensibility so little attuned to the Soviet Union in 1931 as that of e. e. cummings. So restlessly at odds with what he saw, so disinclined to accept the propaganda he was fed, so repelled by almost everything he encountered during his thirty-six-day visit to the “beacon of revolution,” the poet responded in a cascade of thoughts, impressions, reactions, reflections, notions large and small, and an endless stream of observations in this “diary”—first printed in 1933 and now reprinted. It is, alas, almost impossible to read. This impossibility arises from the very feature of cummings’s mind that made it so antipathetic to the Soviet mind: for cummings, the singular, unique, and irrepressible self came first. The entire book is not so much a record of what the poet saw that month, but of what he could in language and punctuation do with the feelings he had about the thoughts he had about the initial sensations he had. Which is all very good if you are e. e. cummings. But there is something always to be said in favor of lucid prose, neatly delivered, if you are in a strange place and you want to write home.