Susan Cheever

E.E. Cummings made more money reading his poems than writing them. That's just one of the fascinating tidbits Susan Cheever gives us in her excellent 2014 biography “E. E. Cummings: A Life.”

Another is this: Cummings may have been a radical in his poetic style, yet he was a firm anti-communist, unlike so many of his fellow intellectuals. Friends returned from Russia with praise for what they had found there, but Cummings turned against Stalin and communism almost from the moment he entered Russia. Everyone there seemed afraid. Nobody seemed happy.

Cheever gives us plentiful examples of his poetry, often playful, sometimes angry, usually obscure, always thoughtful. These poems provide commentary on his life, from loving memories of his clergyman father to his late-in-life fondness for birds.

The poet had difficulties with women: two marriages, two divorces. He never married the love of his life, who stayed by him until the end, although she was jealous even of his own daughter.

His relationship with Nancy, his daughter, makes a wonderful story in itself, perhaps even worthy of a movie. Cummings knew her when she was a little girl, but then his ex-wife took her away to Ireland, changed her name and refused to tell her anything about her real father. Years later, after Nancy herself had become a poet, Cummings reentered her life, yet for a long time refused to tell her he was her father. Only after Nancy declared her love for him did he reveal the truth.

Like her father, John Cheever, Susan Cheever is an outstanding writer, as her other books such as American Bloomsbury, have shown. This is a fine, revealing biography, perhaps too brief to be definitive, but beautifully written.… (más)

This is one of the most insipid books I've read in a long time, and I'm amazed I stuck it out to the end (I thought about giving up several times). The author writes with no emotion whatsoever. I felt absolutely no connection to the author, and none of what she wrote had any feeling or resonance to it at all.

Every sentence in this book is simple and follows the same recipe: subject, verb, object. I just opened to a random page and here it is: "I would have won the fight. He would be so sorry. Nothing would be good enough for me. He would beg for my forgiveness. I would give it conditionally." That's pretty consistent with the rest of the book. Every now and again she will spice things up with two clauses in a sentence, but never deviates from subject, verb, object.

So not only is the book boring AF and lacking in any emotion whatsoever, the author is a spoiled, rich asshole who has horrible relationships with terrible men. She also name drops about a million people I've never heard of and don't care about.

Definitely skip this book. As a memoir, as a book about addiction, as just a book in general, it is a total failure. No thanks.… (más)

I found this book incredibly disappointing. The structure was impossible discern and there were so many obvious gaps in the portraits of the people in question. Cheever shifted back and forth in time in ways that made no sense, but made me feel as though she had cut the manuscript up in the middle of each paragraph and then pasted them together. There were so many paragraphs that literally were two discrete trains of thought merged together that I ended up rereading passages multiple times just to make sure I wasn't missing something. Also annoying was Cheever's heav-handed insertion of her own personal philosophies into the book, philosophies that were either trite or poorly constructed or both.… (más)