"If Beatrice and Edoardo had known the scandalous truth that lay behind the poem, they might have chosen another piece of verse." Photo / AP
"If Beatrice and Edoardo had known the scandalous truth that lay behind the poem, they might have chosen another piece of verse." Photo / AP
No poem ever seemed more romantic than the one read aloud at the wedding last Friday of Princess Beatrice: "I carry your heart with me (I carry it in my heart)."
Those lines, recited by the bride's mother Sarah Ferguson, were written by the American poet e e cummings (who avoided capital letters and most other forms of punctuation). The groom posted them on social media, too — though he apparently had second thoughts, and deleted them minutes later.
Many people, if they've heard of Cummings at all, will know him for the phrase "the moon's a balloon", in another blissfully romantic poem in which "everyone's in love and flowers pick themselves". The actor David Niven chose that childlike image as the title for his bestselling autobiography.
It's unlikely that either Beatrice or her bridegroom, property developer Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi, let alone the other royals listening to the wedding-day poem, could have guessed how that ditty had its first inspiration.
Edward Estlin Cummings had many muses. He was married three times and, in his later years, was a darling of female poetry fans, who adored him for his risqué and sometimes sexually frank verses.
But his first love that he never forgot — the first heart that he carried with him — belonged to a Parisian prostitute during World War I.
When the naive and scholarly 22-year-old from a sheltered, middle-class family in Massachusetts first encountered the putains or whores of the French capital's red-light district in 1917, he was thrilled and scandalised in equal measure.
Some he slept with. Some he immortalised in poems. One obsessed him. Her name was Marie Louise Lallemand and in one verse he called her "the putain with the ivory throat".
Cummings was besotted with her. He wrote reams of love letters to her, pouring out his desire: "Darling Marie Louise, you who are more to me than the scarlet poppies which are mown ... take the kiss which I give you, that kiss, without value, because it comes from a soul which loves you."
Though he desperately wanted to sleep with her, he was also terrified of catching venereal disease because he couldn't face the shame. His religious upbringing had left him deeply repressed. "Fear and sex go together in my life," he complained. In his final year at Harvard, in 1916, he wrote: "I led a double life, getting drunk and feeling girls up but lying about this to my father and taking his money all the time."
He remembered his adolescent fumblings in a later poem: "May i feel said he/i'll squeal said she/just once said he/it's fun said she/let's go said he/ not too far said she/what's too far said he/where you are said she."
One evening, Cummings borrowed his father's car to visit a brothel in Boston with a classmate, Tex. They parked it outside, only to discover when they emerged in the small hours that the car had been towed away.
Poet e.e. cummings. Photo / Getty Images
Mr Cummings Snr received a call at 3am to inform him his car had been discovered outside prostitutes' lodgings and impounded.
Thoroughly ashamed of his own behaviour, Cummings volunteered to serve on the Western Front as soon as the US formally joined the war against Germany in April 1917. But his ambivalence to sex was mirrored by conflicted feelings about the war. He wanted to be involved but he didn't want to fight, so he joined the ambulance corps, attached to the Red Cross.
Arriving in Paris with a friend, Slater Brown, he discovered they were a day late. So there was nothing for Cummings to do — except meet prostitutes, who fascinated him. He captured them in a series of poems. One begins: "Wanta spend six dollars, Kid? Two for the room and four for the girl. The woman was not quite 14."
Describing a woman's "lazy strut", another poem read: "The breasts look very good, firmly squirmy with a slight jounce." Kitty, Mimi, Marjorie, Lucienne, Minette, Marie Louise — he called them his "little ladies". Cummings, who drew as avidly as he composed verse, sketched Marie Louise, conveying her beauty and wariness in a few lines.
After five weeks, the pleasure-hunting ended. Cummings and Brown were posted to a series of camps on the front line. Appalled by what they saw, both men began writing letters home — and Brown was especially frank about the low morale of the French and the spread of venereal disease among US troops.
They were offended, too, by the menial tasks, such as cleaning their commanding officer's car. Other volunteers regarded them as arrogant and aloof. Certainly, as an adult, Cummings would develop racist views that would repulse most people today.
In one 1950 poem, using a racist slur that cannot be printed here, he wrote that Jews were "the most dangerous machine as yet invented by even yankee ingenuity" and claimed that Jewish people produced nothing but "a few dead dollars and some twisted laws". Scarcely surprising, then, if Cummings and Brown were disliked.
They certainly made enemies. In September, a French officer and two American soldiers arrived at their base and arrested them in front of their comrades. Cummings tried to make a joke of it: "Gentlemen, friends ... I am going away immediately and shall be guillotined tomorrow!"
"Oh, hardly guillotine," murmured one of the soldiers, with a chilling sarcasm. Cummings suddenly realised that he and Brown were in serious trouble.
They were accused of treason and espionage because of their unpatriotic comments in the letters. Without a friend to help them in France, they were sent to a military detention camp in Normandy and held with dozens of others in a dormitory for more than three months.
At first, Cummings's anxious parents were informed that he would be released without charge. Then they heard he had embarked on the troop ship SS Antilles, which was sunk in the Atlantic by a German U-boat, with the loss of 67 lives. A week later, they were told their son had not drowned — but no one knew where he was. It took two more months, and a handwritten plea from his father to the President, Woodrow Wilson, before Cummings was released from the detention centre.
He arrived home in Massachusetts on New Year's Day, 1918. But before he left France, Cummings sent one last impassioned letter to Marie Louise, begging to meet her: "If you think that I have forgotten the days and nights that we spent together, then you are mistaken." But he never heard from her again.
It's a sad and sordid story. And perhaps, if Beatrice and Edoardo had known the scandalous truth that lay behind the poem — not to mention the vile anti-semitism that flowed alongside it — they might have chosen another piece of verse for their otherwise glorious wedding day.
