"As I Go Along"

E.E. (for Edward Estlin) Cummings is a poet who is generally at odds with the world, and a painter who is at peace with nature. In the catalogue for his exhibition at a Manhattan gallery last week, Cummings expressed both attitudes in quick succession. ". . . Come let us adjust," he wrote, "until the whole world's an infrahuman ultrafamily of supersub-morons delightedly drowning in telejuke-movieradiovision." And he followed that bitter advice with the happy reminder that "Art is a question of being alive."

Cummings' fame rests on such books as Eimi and The Enormous Room and volumes of poetry written with the freakish punctuation and typography that have become his trademark. His sunny, splashy little portraits and paintings of apple trees in blossom and luminous, leggy nudes are all done with slapdash delight; they have none of the sharpness or strangeness that make his books memorable, infuriating or a bore. Compared with his writings, Cummings' art seems as soft and wholesome as fresh butter.

Cummings explains, "I have no sentimental fear of sentimentality. There's a great pressure on soft people today to try to be hard, and I think that's very shoddy, very ugly. Now my painting complements my writing--if I go without one or the other I miss it--and since my writing is hard then the natural thing would be that my paintings are soft.

"But I'm just making this up as I go along."

Cummings and his tall, black-haired wife (whom Photographer Edward Steichen once called "the most beautiful model in New York") spend their winters in Patchen Place, a tree-lined Greenwich Village alley, and their summers at Silver Lake, N.H., where most of the poet's paintings are conceived. At 54 he is a wry, wiry Yankee with the gentle discursiveness and cracker-barrel wit of a farmer taking his ease at the store. Writing about his own mild, middle-of-the-road paintings in the current Art News, Cummings sideswiped most of his fellow artists, abstractionists and realists alike, in a single sentence:

"And your stupid wiseguy doing his worst to deny Nature equals your clever fool who did his best to possess Her."

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