Dreams in the Mirror

Biographer Kennedy, in his introduction, admits to this book being a distillation of research originally planned for two volumes; much if not all literary criticism is thus dispensed-with in favor of a straightforward and readable bearding of Cummings' life. The son of a well-known Boston Unitarian minister, Estlin Cummings went to Harvard but detested Cambridge (site, ironically, of his largest triumph - the 1952 Norton "nonlectures" in poetry), preferring instead the Paris-Greenwich Village bohemian axis; and he never strayed from those environs even in later years when his views became anti-Semitic, McCarthyite, and bitterly galled. Cummings' personal life was pretty much a shambles: first wife stolen from a best friend (and their child only guiltily half-recognized until she was an adult), cuckolded on a second try, and finally finding his life's companion in the third - patient, classy, ex-model Marion. Kennedy's book turns especially sad when he discusses Cummings' tortured relationship with his daughter; he spots, rightly it seems, a double vein in Cummings' personality, romantic individualism but also the "petit garcon" with women: a shyness and irresponsibility. But how sorely this book lacks any real perspective on the work of the man! Was Cummings, our supreme poet of punctuation, a truly major figure (he seemed unsure of this himself); or was he a typographically hyperactive sentimentalist, a Rod McKuen with Cubist pretensions carried over from his avocation as a painter? In leaving out serious discussion of the poetry, Kennedy keeps us attending a life that's like a story without a middle, without a core. (Kirkus Reviews)