77. No Thanks by EE Cummings

In the summer of 1934 the normally buoyant EE Cummings was in low water. His ballet Tom, based on Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, had been pronounced undanceable by George Balanchine, and had been dropped by the American Ballet. A Hollywood screenwriting offer worth around $10,000 had been made in August but then inexplicably withdrawn. He had been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship worth $1500, but the money had run out. More brutally, the poems he had written with the Guggenheim money had proved unpublishable. Tentatively entitled 70 Poems, the volume had been turned down by fourteen publishers.

The Depression was taking a toll on American publishers and American readers. Poetry, never anything less than a luxury, was selling very badly, and Cummings’ brand of experimental verse was doing worse than most. In the 1920s he had found publishers for his poetry because of his one indisputable hit, the novel The Enormous Room. But his poetry had never sold well. In the first half of 1935 Cummings’ publishers Liveright sold 13 copies of Is 5 and just two copies of ViVa, and Covici-Friede managed to push exactly one copy of Eimi.

In spite of all this Cummings knew that in 70 poems he had achieved some of his best writing to date. It was a highly-wrought, precisely-structured collection, organized into a schema which alternated sonnets with free verse poems, representing the descent from heaven to earth and back to heaven. Thematically the volume focussed on the natural world, the doings within the miniature cosmoi of grasshoppers, ants and mice, the joy of spring awakenings, the sun’s and moon’s rises and settings, and love between man and woman.

No-one wanted it though.

After his fourteen failures Cummings gave up, and turned to his mother for the funds to self-publish the volume. She gave him $300, with which he was able to approach the printer Samuel Jacobs to bring out the volume in three different formats of nine, ninety and nine hundred copies (the attention to detail omnipresent) under his own imprint, the Golden Eagle Press. The title was changed from 70 Poems to No Thanks. The allusion was to the polite refusals of the publishers who had rejected it. To put the final nail in the coffin Cummings included on the dedication page of the book a witty concrete poem, arranging the fourteen publishers in the form of a funeral urn:

NO
THANKS
TO
Farrar & Rinehart
Simon & Schuster
Coward-McCann
Limited Editions
Harcourt, Brace
Random House
Equinox Press
Smith & Haas
Viking Press
Knopf
Dutton
Harper’s
Scribner’s
Covici-Friede

Consulted:
Cummings, EE: No Thanks (introduction by Richard S Kennedy, Liveright, 1978)
Friedman, Norman: ‘Not "e. e. cummings" Revisited’, Spring 5 (1996).
Sawyer-Lauçanno, Christopher: E.E. Cummings: A Biography (Methuen, 2005)

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