Cummings thayer nancy (1 Ergebnisse)

FIRST EDITION, a couple of tiny faint spots at head of prelims, pp. 61, royal 8vo, original cream wrappers printed in red and black to front in facsimile of the author's holograph, a few very faint spots to margin of front, the top corner of rear cover slightly creased, foot of backstrip gently abraded, edges roughtrimmed with a few little spots, very good. Inscribed by the author on the flyleaf: 'Hermann Riccius, from Nancy'. The recipient was an an associate - his financial and legal advisor - of her father, Scofield Thayer, whose principal literary legacy is as the editor of 'The Dial' magazine. By the time of this book, Scofield Thayer had succumbed to the mental health problems that would incapacitate him for the second half of his life, and his daughter had discovered that she was actually the child of another poet - E.E. Cummings. Nancy's mother, Elaine Orr, had, in 1916, married Thayer, a Harvard friend of Cummings and subsequently his publisher and patron; Cummings had been commissioned to write an 'Epithalamion' in celebration of the nuptials, but soon found himself more intimately embroiled, falling in love with Elaine and beginning a long affair that resulted in the birth of Nancy, who was raised under the impression that she was Thayer's daughter, at the end of 1919; though Cummings was an intermittent presence in her early years, culminating in his adoption of Nancy and marriage to Elaine in the Spring of 1924, their divorce in December of the same year brooked a more definite severance from his responsibilities. Decades passed, during which disclosure of his paternity got no further than a passing remark from her mother that she had briefly been married to a poet that Nancy admired, E.E. Cummings; at the end of the 1940s, now married to Willard Roosevelt, Nancy found herself staying close to Cummings' Joy Farm in New Hampshire, and a succession of meetings finally elicited the revelatory remark from Cummings, who had been painting her portrait: 'Did anyone ever tell you I was your father?' In the poem dedicated to Cummings that prefaces this collection (his influence throughout is evident, as one might expect), she declares that 'I try to find your shadow where it sings' and refers to 'all the love I never lived'. Thayer went on to publish 'Charon's Daughter' in 1977, under the name Nancy Cummings de Fôret 'Charon' her mythic figuration of the absent father in whose thrall the life of her 'autobiography' was lived, only in brief part knowingly.…