Susan Cheever, author of the recently-released e.e.cummings: A Life, reveals a mystery that haunted her while working on the poet’s biography: his father was killed and his mother injured in a 1926 car accident caused by driving over railroad tracks into the path of an oncoming train. How could the pair have missed it hurtling toward them? The incident, never fully explained in previous books about Cummings, made her think about the research methods available to biographers (NYT):
Three official types of research are the foundation of writing biography: Primary-source research uses original papers found in libraries, archives or occasionally an attic; secondary-source research uses the work of other writers and researchers; interviews can be with experts, people whose memories are useful or other writers and researchers. There is a fourth kind of research. It doesn’t have a fancy name; it is just going to the places where the story happened. Landscapes often speak, and houses hold ancient scenes and memories and secrets.
She reveals how this fourth research method helped her solve what happened that night in New Hampshire almost nine decades ago:
Once I saw the crossroads, the accident made perfect sense. The tracks were perfectly flush with the road and came toward it at a 45-degree angle from the right — Rebecca Cummings’s blind side in the driver’s seat, especially in the snow. I walked around a bit, noticing which of the trees were second growth and which might have been there in 1926. I could almost hear the screech of brakes from the locomotive and the dreadful sound of metal crushing the wooden frame of the Franklin and shattering the windshield. I could see the brakemen running through the snow and imagine Rebecca’s insistence that her husband’s body be covered. The Chevy engine ticked quietly. An occasional car passed going north. Then the dachshund began to whine. I was back in 2012. I said a small prayer for the soul of Edward Cummings and got in the car for the short drive up to Silver Lake.
(Image: self-portrait of e.e. cummings)
The Dish 