Manifesto

EIMI--e. e. cummings--Covici, Friede

($3).

Compared with the utterances of Ezra Pound (TIME, March 20), the writing of Edward Estlin Cummings is as simple as ABC. Though to many a lay reader his typographical idiosyncrasies suggest a linotyper's nightmare, he is not really so difficult. Not a writer to be nodded over or dipped into at random, neither does he try to catch the reader napping. If he is read as carefully as he writes, he has few Joycean perplexities (aside from portmanteau words and puns); what looks like a puzzling shorthand will resolve itself into a longhand of his own invention, painstaking and descriptive. His latest, like his best-known book (The Enormous Room), is a diary; it is also a manifesto of the rights of man-as-artist, man-as-individual, especially man-as-e.e.cummings.

In 432 pages Cummings meticulously chronicles a 36-day trip from Paris to Moscow, Kiev, Odessa, Istanbul and back to France again. His account of Russia is not friendly. To his ironic and individualist eye, the U. S. S. R. is the dreary nadir of materialism and mass-compulsion, an "unworld." Sample of cummingsesque: "unstructure with eagles. Despair. A on filthy floorless sitting perhaps drunken nonman. Confusion, timidly. ("See the" )whispers("nomads")Turkess . . . (stolid hugely faces poke from rags & bags: sullen squat drearily scratching lost ghosts. Men. Grunt nonmen. Their pyramid--of fear, surfaced with asquirm naked babies--does not move. None have any shoes but some are wearing instead baskets, i is smoking). Turk drops coinlesses, a machine spews quai-tickets. Now (baggageladen 2)3 comrades, through despair timidly through confusion through perhaps wearily and through (you cannot turn the wheels of) irrevocable un, move . . . beneath curving steel-and-glass nonroof now finding (asleep, forever-fully)tattered train."

In a nice and necessary gesture on the back flyleaf "the author joins with the publishers in congratulating S. A. Jacobs; who designed the format of Eimi, solved all technical problems connected with the typesetting and printing, and from start to finish personally supervised this book's production."

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