—Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon

Perhaps no author better chronicled the disastrous, soul-crushing European political experiments of the middle half of the twentieth century than Arthur Koestler. The Hungarian-born author wrote magisterially (in English, no less; he first published in Hungarian, German, and Russian) of the follies of the Pink Decade of the 1930s in a series of political novels. Unfortunately, they’re all but forgotten in today’s university curricula. The world requires constant reminders of what actually happens once citizens acquiesce to big-government solutions.

George Santayana wrote: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” and Koestler’s body of work from the 1930s to 1950s proves the contemporary relevance of Santayana’s admonition. Perhaps in no other time besides the era in which they were originally published are Koestler’s literary themes more topical than the present, as our own government expands exponentially to bail out and control our country’s financial and automotive industries; mire other industries to the point of stagnation with cumbersome regulations; redefine such basic individual choices as health care and education as prescribed “rights”; and enact wide-ranging schemes to insinuate bureaucratic reach into nearly every aspect of our lives, from the Internet and use of recreational and/or medicinal inebriants to surveillance cameras at every traffic stop.

As this year officially marks the 70th anniversary of the publication of Koestler’s seminal novel, Darkness at Noon, and the 60th anniversary of his essay “The Initiates,” it’s a convenient opportunity to revisit both works as a reminder of what awaits all democratic societies eager to abandon liberties for the sake of utopian ideologies.

Seventy years ago, as war engulfed nearly every continent and the Axis peril seemed poised to destroy two millennia of civilization, Koestler published Darkness at Noon on another, completely different threat to individual freedom: communism. Ten years later “The Initiates” appeared as one of six essays in The God That Failed, a volume featuring the voices of many of the twentieth century’s greatest writers who had embraced the Stalinist enterprise as the singular political corrective to economic misery before abandoning it as contrary to human nature and profoundly detrimental to humanity in general. However, none of Koestler’s fellow travelers—Richard Wright, Ignazio Silone, Andre Gide, Louis Fisher, Stephen Spender—wrote more authoritatively or convincingly against communism than he.

Darkness at Noon is the third novel in Koestler’s quartet depicting what occurs when centralized governments seize control of the means of production and attempt to mitigate the individualist impulse. Briefly, Darkness is bookended by The Gladiators (1938) and Arrival and Departure (1943), and followed by The Age of Longing (1951). In the first, Koestler novelizes the slave revolt commanded by the gladiator Spartacus; in Arrival and Departure he conjectures on the psychological motivations behind a character who alternately embraces communist and Nazi ideologies; and The Age of Longing is a futuristic novel exploring the irreconcilable nature of religious faith and totalitarianism in Paris of the mid-1950s. But it is in Darkness, in my humble estimation, that Koestler succeeds most in capturing the mindset of the collectivist fantasy in order to completely dispel its flawed precepts.

Encapsulating a Century

“If any figure could claim to have encapsulated in his own life—and recorded—the political, intellectual, and emotional tribulations of the twentieth century, it is [Koestler],” wrote Theodore Dalrymple in “A Drinker of Infinity,” an essay that appeared in The City Journal, Spring 2007, and that took its title from a later work by Koestler.

Koestler’s life leading up to the writing of Darkness at Noon reads like a novel (or several) itself. Born to Jewish parents in Budapest in 1905, he displayed an affinity for math and science that led him to study engineering in Vienna. Before he could graduate, however, Koestler embraced radical Zionism (although biographies report he wasn’t an observant Jew), which led him to live briefly on a kibbutz in Palestine. He subsequently became the Palestine correspondent for a German newspaper group, the Ullstein Trust, was based for a while in Paris, and wound up simultaneously serving as science editor and foreign correspondent for two Ullstein-owned newspapers in Germany.

After Ullstein fired Koestler (some sources assert he resigned) for his political leanings, the writer threw the full weight of his intellectual and physical energies behind Marxism (fully detailed in “The Initiates”). He traveled extensively throughout the USSR in 1932 and 1933 at the invitation of the Revolutionary Writers of Germany, a Comintern front agency. When the Spanish Civil War erupted in 1936 Koestler was writing communist propaganda in Paris and accepted an assignment from a British newspaper to file reports from Francisco Franco’s fascist army headquarters. In Spain he was arrested as a communist spy and sentenced to death. He documented his internment in Spanish Testament (1937). Once released—through international efforts resulting in a Republican swap of Koestler for a fascist prisoner—he returned to France to continue writing for the communist cause. He severed ties with the party over his disagreement with the 1938 Soviet show trials and set about writing Darkness at Noon.

Koestler again found himself imprisoned—this time in a French concentration camp, as a hostile alien—in the first months of World War II. After another international effort, he was released and sought to avoid another arrest by joining the French Foreign Legion. He made his way to Lisbon, then illegally flew to London. British authorities promptly arrested him; he corrected galleys of Darkness at Noon during his six-week incarceration.

“The sin of nearly all left-wingers from 1933 onwards is that they have wanted to be anti-Fascist without being anti-totalitarian,” George Orwell wrote in an essay on Koestler’s early works. “In 1937 Koestler already knew this, but did not feel free to say so.” By 1938, however, Koestler had broken with the Communist Party and sought to educate Western Europe and the New World on happenings in the Soviet Union.

Darkness centers on the incarceration of Rubashov, a Bolshevik from the 1917 Revolution, for presumed counterrevolutionary activities and sentiments. Although the reader sympathizes with Rubashov, as one would for any prisoner condemned without due process, his significant shortcomings readily become apparent. For one, he served on the Central Committee in the early years of Hitler’s Germany, expeditiously silencing operatives no longer possessing Party utility by betraying them to Nazi police. Even though Rubashov convinces himself these actions are the justified means by which the revolution’s ends will be met, his conscience is haunted by his betrayal of his secretary and lover, Arlova.

The Here and Now

Rubashov is based loosely on Nikolai Bukharin, a Bolshevik who became president of the Soviet Comintern. According to Goronwy Rees, Bukharin’s 1938 arrest, trial, confession, and execution represented “a kind of monstrous reductio ad absurdum of the Great Purge, in which it was proved to everyone’s satisfaction that not only the whole of the original leadership of the Bolshevik Party had become spies and traitors but that the case against them had been conducted by one who shared in exactly the same crimes.” Critics note that Koestler lifted the bulk of Rubashov’s confession from Bukharin’s real-life document.

Two of Koestler’s acquaintances contributed the necessary details of Soviet oppression. Painter and ceramicist Eva Weissberg, a childhood friend, emigrated to the Soviet Union with her husband, physicist Alexander Weissberg, who became a researcher at the Ukrainian Institute for Physics and Technology. Eva related the Weissbergs’ subsequent persecution during Stalin’s Great Purges to Koestler, who used the experiences as background material. His own solitary confinement in Spain lent credibility to his descriptions of Rubashov’s incarceration.

What differentiates Koestler’s work from other highly lauded literary attacks on collectivism by George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, and Stanislaw Lem is perspective. Whereas the other writers projected the results of communism in novels depicting dystopian futures—Lem by necessity since he was living in Soviet-controlled Poland; Orwell and Huxley by choice—Koestler, recognizing the Soviet Central Committee’s initiatives to reconstruct all history as a class struggle between the bourgeoisie and proletariat, documented what had already occurred under Stalin’s reign of terror during a decade of famine, the Great Purge, and the Moscow show trials. While the famines and purges resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of Soviets, the show trials are characterized as an absurd travesty of Kafkaesque proportions in which Soviet apparatchiks obtained public confessions from old-guard Bolsheviks on trumped-up charges, resulting in the coerced “confessions” of counterrevolutionary activities and subsequent executions.

The historical perspective speaks to readers sympathetic to the Soviet cause but baffled as to why multitudes of Old Guard Bolsheviks would confess to crimes against the State for almost certain execution. For those readers unsympathetic to or unaware of Uncle Joe’s brand of totalitarianism, Koestler depicted the result of clashing Marxist-inspired ideologies—paranoia and death on the one hand and paranoia, deprivation, and inhumanity on the other. Koestler portrays the former as no longer willing to accept that all means justify Stalinist ends, and conversely portrays those who accept all means to further the Soviet agenda as amoral monsters:

[I]n the interests of a just distribution of land we deliberately let die of starvation about five million farmers and their families in one year. So consequent in the liberation of human beings from the shackles of industrial exploitation that we sent about 10 million people to do forced labor in the Arctic regions and the jungles of the East, under the conditions similar to those of antique galley slaves. So consequent that, to settle a difference of opinion, we know only one argument: death, whether it is a matter of submarines, manure, or the Party line to be followed in Indo-China. Our engineers work with the constant knowledge that an error in calculation may take them to prison or the scaffold; the highest officials in our administration ruin and destroy their subordinates, because they know they will be held responsible for the slightest slip and be destroyed themselves; our poets settle discussions on questions of style by denunciations to the Secret Police, because the expressionists consider the naturalists counter-revolutionary, and vice versa. Acting consequentially in the interests of the coming generations, we have laid such terrible privations on the present one that its average length of life is shortened by a quarter. . . . We have built up the most gigantic police apparatus, with informers made a national institution, and with the most refined scientific system of physical and mental torture. We whip the groaning masses of the country towards a theoretical future of happiness, which only we can see. . . .

Taking nothing from the substantial literary accomplishments of Orwell, Huxley, and Lem, the sheer headline immediacy and empirical evidence substantiating the claims of Darkness at Noon’s protagonist, Nicolas Salmanovitch Rubashov, in the above speech given to his old comrade and current prosecutor, Ivanov, conveys a verisimilitude seldom attainable in speculative fiction.

Orwell wrote that no Englishman could’ve written Darkness at Noon, as his countrymen only experienced Soviet duplicity and deceit peripherally as part of the communists’ alliance with the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War. H. G. Wells, for example, could acknowledge Soviet cruelty while simultaneously justifying it: “Much that the Red terror did was cruel and frightful. It was largely controlled by narrow-minded men, and many of its officials were inspired by social hatred and fear of counter-revolution,” adding, “Apart from individual atrocities it did on the whole kill for a reason and to an end.”

As today’s political systems totter once again toward statist cardiac arrest, albeit masked at first as more kind and gentle than the Soviet model—at least until government coercion increasingly becomes imperative to enforce its rule—we should heed Santayana and remember the history documented by a writer who was able to divorce himself from the Soviet lie. Arthur Koestler suffered from none of the delusions Wells formulated from afar. He had seen firsthand the horrors of the twentieth century and documented its cruelties and dehumanization from the insidious interior chambers of collectivism’s heart of darkness.

For the nearly 250,000 people who signed Jones’s online petition, the arts are touted as critical to our national identity and even a source of spiritual sustenance. Use of the term “art,” however, is rife with conflict—raising more questions than answers. For the purposes of this essay, let’s agree that art, as a result of its examination of the myriad states of the human condition, can be a repository of both empirical and received knowledge and lore, an outlet for specialized creativity, and a cultural bonding agent. But to speak in the high-flown language of art’s ability to convey a national identity is to make teleological claims that can be neither substantiated nor dispelled. It sounds cool, sure, but so does visualizing world peace and (for some) levitating the Pentagon. And the claims for spirituality are best left to the theologians. My heart leaps when I behold a rainbow in the sky, for example, but I’m afraid those refracted light rays may leave others colder than Miss Havisham on her wedding night or a Jack London character attempting to strike his last remaining match.

Different Art, Different Audiences

Defining art and its many purposes and intended audiences is tricky. Classicists, for example, probably would say that art can be appreciated only from a distance of 100 years or more, assuring historical validation from critics, academics, and a refined general public. For this audience, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, and Beethoven are art’s sine qua non. Only recently—within the past 50 years or so—have they been convinced that James Joyce, Virgil Thompson, and Joan Miró belong to the canon.

Others position art at the vanguard of culture—always one step ahead of the rest of us with self-referential and highly individualized creations that eventually percolate to the fringes of the mainstream and exert a huge influence on subsequent generations.

The Cherry Pickers

In between the snobs and the avant garde are the cherry pickers, the multitude who have no trouble bouncing from Mozart and Mahler to Berry Gordy and the Beatles. “It doesn’t have to be old to be classic, it just has to be good” was the classic-rock radio tagline a few years back. Informed cherry pickers recognize that cultural uplift—however pristine or watered-down—can be found at the local cinema, on television programs, and even sandwiched in the spaces between those programs. The 1968 eight-million-selling record “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing (In Perfect Harmony),” for instance, began as a group effort between gurus at advertising agency McCann Erickson and their client Coca-Cola. It became a hit single.

Cherry pickers can immerse themselves in many different art forms, increasingly blurring the distinctions between high art and low art. High art often borrows from popular (or low) art as evidenced by the work of Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol.

Conversely, popular art borrows freely from high art. The artist Hieronymus Bosch, for example, may be well-known to some, while others know his work only from the use of his “Garden of Earthly Delights” as cover art for an album by folk-rock group Pearls Before Swine or the song “OK, Hieronymus” by British-born rocker Graham Parker. Shakespeare references abound on such television programs as Star Trek. Even Barry Manilow cribbed from Chopin.

In short, let’s acknowledge that art is important for most of us and that the enjoyment thereof is a matter of degrees. One man’s Proust is another man’s Pelecanos. One woman’s Bach is another’s Bachman Turner Overdrive. Cherry pickers are dilettantes, but that need not be used in a pejorative sense, since they can—and often do—create a wider cultural perspective through aesthetic cross-pollination across genres and the blending of high and popular art.

Government-Funded Art

Because art is many things to many different people, how can government-funded agencies hope to anticipate the aesthetics of a wide-ranging, diverse population? The question is moot, of course, but the larger questions remain: Can government money create a nation of renaissance men and women equally conversant in the realms of visual, written, and performance art—and are such ends desirable in the first place? Have government subsidies sparked the creation of any prominent new art, reintroduced the best of historically validated art to new generations with lasting impact, acculturated immigrants to the best of Western thought, ideals, and talent, or led to anything remotely resembling the equivalent of Italy’s fifteenth-century Rinascimento? Whither art without my tax dollars?

In his 2008 book Money for Art, David A. Smith presents a detailed history of U.S. government funding for the arts, beginning in 1817 when Congress commissioned four paintings by John Trumball. Nine years later, Trumball unveiled four historical paintings depicting events of the U.S. Revolution. According to Smith, Trumball was paid $32,000, a sum that rankled several politicians. One disgruntled senator reportedly believed the paintings unworthy of 32 cents, while Smith quotes one congressman’s observation that “if the Fine Arts cannot thrive in this country without government jobs . . . let them fail.”

By the end of the nineteenth century art flourished largely due to the largess of successful businessmen. The Gilded Age captured in the literature of Mark Twain and Edith Wharton was highly fruitful for the nation’s art, witnessing the establishment of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1870, New York), the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Philadelphia Museum of Art (both 1876), the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts (1879), and the Corcoran (1869, Washington). All opened their doors without government money, as did a plethora of other museums, private collections, and art schools.

By the end of the century, art school alumni were producing a surfeit of fine art, which coincidentally is the title of a Jacques Barzun essay warning that government subsidies for art could produce such a large quantity of high-quality art that the nation would be unable to discern between what is merely good, what is very good, and what will stand the test of time.

When Theodore Roosevelt became president, he helped infect the American population with his passion for art. But Roosevelt’s views on art were somewhat provincial. He famously disparaged Modernist art in a review of the 1913 New York Armory Show and openly sneered at American painters who traveled abroad for their subject matter. Before leaving office in 1910 he ordered the establishment of the Commission of Fine Arts (CFA) to encourage arts and culture in Washington. Proving the wisdom of Ronald Reagan’s adage: “The nearest thing to eternal life we will ever see on this earth is a government program,” the CFA received $10,426,000 in 2008 federal money. For 2009 the CFA requested only $2,234,000—covering only department salaries.

The New Deal of the 1930s found innovative ways to fund art by offering commissions to artists seeking work. In 1933 some out-of-work artists formed the Unemployed Artists Group, which eventually became knows as the Artists’ Union (AU). The AU unsuccessfully sought the establishment of a cabinet-level Department of Fine Arts.

Although the New Deal programs for artists expired when the nation emerged from its financial travails, they left an indelible imprint on the nation’s cultural mavens. As Smith so aptly states: “The New Deal’s most important legacy to artists . . . was a mild sense of entitlement among professional artists and the beginnings of strong organization and collective action to pressure the government to respond to artists’ needs.”

While FDR’s administration was busy inventing new sleight-of-hand parlor tricks to divert tax dollars to individual artists, others took a more honorable route. Automotive scion Edsel Ford and his wife Eleanor, for example, became the Detroit Institute of Art’s (DIA) greatest benefactors by commissioning art from the likes of Diego Rivera and purchasing with their combined fortune works for the DIA’s permanent collection. They even took it upon themselves to cover the museum’s payroll during the Great Depression.

Fiscal restraint for government arts funding fell like dominoes in the 1950s and 1960s. Eisenhower approved the National Cultural Center (completed with government funds and renamed the Kennedy Center during the Johnson administration) in 1958; Kennedy ordered Congress to establish the National Council on the Arts, which during the LBJ administration became the overseer of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Reports of the first meeting of the Council mention that work progressed only in the morning, because members Harper Lee and John Steinbeck needed to sleep off their lunch-hour tippling—auspicious beginnings for an institutionalized steward of American tax dollars with a budget that reached $176 million in 1992 and receded to $145 million in 2009 plus the $50 million stimulus supplement.

Artists In Their Own Words and Works

Most artists believe that without government subsidies, quality art would disappear. “The voice of the artists has been relegated to entertainment or a marketable commodity or to a nuisance, but neither the political class nor the mainstream media are paying attention to what the artist is saying and that to me is worrisome,” Mexico-born performance artist and National Public Radio commentator Guillermo Gómez-Peña told me in a 2008 interview. “We can see since the mid-’90s art has been defunded systematically throughout the world not just in the U.S. but also in European societies that were leaders in that funding in places like Germany, the U.K., France or even Eastern European countries that took very good care of their artists. Even Mexico, for centuries paid very careful attention to its artists.”

Although Gómez-Peña, a very articulate, intelligent, and accomplished artist, adopts a pessimistic view of art without government support, he attaches to it an almost religious urgency: “In a sense, this systematic attack on the arts by the political class, the corporations, and the mainstream media has resulted in the spiritual impoverishment of society.”

Likewise, Dolores Wilber, a Chicago filmmaker I interviewed in 2006, believes public funding of private art is a net positive for the American people: “Art is a reflection of the society and it’s about creativity and being alive and has provided a lot of positive things in the social fabric with every society whether it’s democratic or a totalitarian government. . . . I think it’s a great thing about our country that in general we do support art making.”

Serious art and serious artists can survive—and have survived—without subsidy. In fact many of the greatest poets of the past 100 years pursued careers that greatly enhanced the literature they produced: William Carlos Williams was a doctor; Wallace Stephens was an insurance broker; former NEA head Dana Gioia worked as an advertising/marketing manager for General Foods; T. S. Eliot was a banker and editor; and Gary Snyder worked as a lumberjack and fire lookout. Many current artists are also tenured faculty at esteemed universities that pay them healthy sums to court their respective muses.

Gómez-Peña and Wilber are earnest, but one also senses a degree of hubris in their overstatements of art’s transformational and spiritual powers—as well as their belief that it’s the public’s responsibility to pay for it. After all, we can accept the importance of art privately without the concomitant expectation of having to pay for someone else’s transcendent experience. In fact, it wasn’t government largess that created and distributed HBO’s The Wire and The Sopranos, arguably the pinnacle of the last ten years of visual storytelling; Coppola’s Godfather epic; the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper; or even initially transferred millions of consumer dollars to Robert Mapplethorpe and his estate—it was talent, drive, unfettered creativity, and the public’s willingness to purchase these works on their own terms rather than the whims, opinions, and highly subjective tastes of government bureaucrats.

Eimi is a difficult yet rewarding literary exercise, depicting as it does the true nature of collectivist ideology as practiced during the relatively early years of the Stalinist regime. Although Cummings regarded the work as a novel, some critics consider it a travel book, while others consider it a polemic against communism as practiced in the Soviet Union. This reader would argue that Cummings’s penchant for coining new words by combining two or more terms—technically referred to as portmanteau words—carried over to his expansion of his coded travel journals for Eimi, which, like his poetry, is wildly inventive, syntactically jumbled, frequently comic, presented in a fashion that must’ve given typesetters nightmares, and unmistakably original. In short, Eimi is all of the above—a novel, travel journal, and polemic. Most of all, however, it is a deeply personal expression of the author’s primary thematic concerns of retaining one’s individuality in the face of social and political pressures to conform to the collective.

An Unpopular Work

Immensely unpopular with the Western cultural left because of its negative assessment of the restrictive nature and infertile artistic soil inherent under tyrannical rule, Eimi burned Cummings’s bridges with a host of writers and editors. According to teacher and editor Jenny Penberthy, writing in the Dictionary of Literary Biography:

In fact, the book was briefly out of print after its initial 1933 publication, was reprinted in 1949 and 1958—the same year Cummings was awarded the Bollingen Prize—then wasn’t reprinted again until 2007.

The tenor of the times during which Eimi was inspired and written—colored as it was by the remembered horrors of World War I—was rife with leftist political remedies to perceived social ills. Freedom and free markets all took a beating from the New Deal programs of the Roosevelt administration; the rise of Marxist governments in Spain, Eastern Europe, and Asia; fascism in Italy; and national socialism in Germany. The cultural intelligentsia served as useful idiots for centralized governments, from Wyndham Lewis writing of his favorable impressions of early Nazi Germany to Ezra Pound notoriously broadcasting fascist propaganda to Allied troops from Italy during World War II.

The Literati and Marxism

Marxism in general and the Soviet experiment in particular, however, held an even greater appeal for the literary cognoscenti, beginning with playwright George Bernard Shaw’s work espousing socialist ideas in the early twentieth century and blossoming with the Oxford poets Stephen Spender, W. H. Auden, and Cecil Day-Lewis in the 1930s and such American writers disillusioned with capitalism as the Group Theatre playwright, folk singers Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, and novelist John Steinbeck. Other notable writers immersed in communist folly included Arthur Koestler, Richard Wright, Ignazio Silone, Louis Fischer, and André Gide—all of whom repudiated their youthful indiscretions in five individual essays (joined by another essay by Spender) collected in The God That Failed (1949). As for Auden, he famously rejected political solutions when he wrote, “[P]oetry makes nothing happen” in his “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” which was written as the world once again prepared for wide-scale war in the late 1930s.

Eimi also found disfavor among literary critics and the public at large because of the experimental and sometimes impenetrable nature of Cummings’s prose style. Even Pound, not known for writing easily understood poetry, complained that a work exceeding 400 pages could benefit from extended passages of clarity: “BUT, the longer a work is the more and longer shd. be the passages that are perfectly clear and simple to read.” Indeed, reading the book does require patience and intense concentration; even then, whole pages can leave even the most dedicated reader scratching his head. Some of this confusion was alleviated by a preface Cummings added for the 1958 edition.

Yet the book’s importance as both a literary achievement and exposé of Soviet repression can’t be expressed sufficiently. No less a critic than Pound assessed Eimi as the final volume of the quintessential Modernist prose trilogy begun with James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Wyndham Lewis’s The Apes of God (1930). The poet Marianne Moore declared that Eimi wasn’t a prose work at all, but “a large poem” in the Modernist tradition of, presumably, T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” Archibald MacLeish’s “The Hamlet,” and Pound’s “The Cantos.” Critic Richard Kennedy’s close reading of the book contains a fitting depiction of Cummings’s attempt to reveal the dehumanizing elements of the Soviet system:

The Artist and Individuality

Prompted by fellow writer John Dos Passos, Cummings traveled to Russia via Paris to witness firsthand the presumed artists’ paradise. Dos Passos, incidentally, also passionately and famously denounced communism as “groupthink” after his extended stint as a fellow traveler—with the concomitant decline in book sales and popularity all too common for writers who failed to adhere to the Communist Party line.

In Eimi, as in most of his poetry, Cummings was more interested in the ideal circumstances under which an artist could express his or her individuality rather than aligning with one political solution over another. Nowhere is this theme more apparent than in the title of the book, which is Greek for “I am.” For Cummings, to live in the “was” rather than the “is” or “am” is a manner of existence that he perceived as subhuman and lifeless.

Appreciating Cummings’s idiosyncratic sensibility is critical to understanding the bulk of his art. Cummings’s worldview was shaped by his youth in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where his father was a Unitarian minister and sociology professor at Harvard. As a poet and painter, he fully adopted the tenets stressing the artistic freedom and individuality of the New England Transcendentalist and English Romantic traditions, which he later adapted to the Modernist ambition of capturing a moment or movement as espoused by Pound, Gertrude Stein, and the Cubist painters. He also was an ardent follower of popular culture, especially burlesque theater. He wrote in the preface to his poetry collection “is 5” (1926):

Documenting the Effect of Soviet Rule

An adherent of no specific political stripe, but a staunch defender of his own individuality, Cummings documented the grayness of what he called the un-people populating the Russian cities he visited, as well as what he perceived as the sorry state of art in a country that required its poets, filmmakers, dancers, and composers to celebrate the proletariat.

Cummings’s first experience with the stifling nature of Soviet rule appears in the book’s opening chapter. He approaches a half-bald clerk at a Polish railway station, which leads to the following encounter:

Much as Joyce borrowed the framework for his Modernist novel Ulysses from Homer’s Odyssey, Cummings borrows the schematic for Eimi from Dante’s Divine Comedy, with his Soviet experience echoing Dante’s descent into Hell. As he clarified in his 1958 preface:

A Modern Inferno

In Cummings’s novel, the role of Dante’s Underworld guide Virgil is filled by the American theater critic Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana. Dana was a longstanding friend of Cummings’s from their days at Cambridge and an ardent communist and promoter of Soviet theater.

After falling out with Dana—whom he eventually finds too ideologically hidebound—Cummings abandons him without leaving so much as a goodbye note. Cummings then takes up with Joan London, daughter of Jack London (another American writer with socialist sympathies), and her husband, Charles Malamuth. Cummings, after Dante, nicknames London “Beatrice.” By the time Cummings (referred to as Comrade Kem-min-kz in the book) arrives in Moscow, the couple has reached the end of their patience with the Soviet design, as articulated by Malamuth to a Midwestern American tourist couple the trio encounters:

By the time Cummings leaves the USSR, he has seen enough to color his view of the collective spirit and government sponsorship of the arts for the remainder of his life. As his train nears the Turkish border, he seethes:

Throughout Eimi Cummings describes the Soviet Union as a shut window. The book opens: “SHUT seems to be The Verb”; and closes powerfully as Cummings returns to Paris with the lines:

Learning from Eimi

Poetry is seldom taught thoroughly in many schools today, and when it is, the canon has become shockingly slight. If Cummings is taught at all, it is only a few of his thousands of poems that remain anthologized: “next to of course god america i,” “Buffalo Bill’s,” and “the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls”; or isolated incidences of poetic devices such as “anyone lived in a pretty how town” and “the world is mud-luscious . . . and puddle-wonderful.” Even sparser in class curricula is the gravity of Cummings’s documentation of his brief but memorable visit to the Soviet Union in 1931, which could serve as a beneficial entrée into the oeuvre of a writer who has for far too long received short shrift by cultural arbiters. More important, however, is the value of Eimi as a social-studies lesson for students, public-policy wonks, government officials, and artists willing to endure a first-person account of government oppression of the arts disguised as patronage.