Thinking a bit about the various variations of my chosen profession, writing, had me reminiscing a bit about a man I spent a lot of time with in the late ‘80s. Out of choice, initially, and then because he’d kind of moved in and couldn’t be evicted.

The man was American poet E. E. Cummings and in an impulsive rush in the pub one night I elected to study his work ‘in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts’. The thing about studying the work of one artist like this is that you get to know them way too well. You read everything they wrote. You read their biography, their autobiography if they wrote one, their collected letters, their juvenilia and their ephemera.

You find out about their parents, their education, their sex life, what made them write, and what their contemporaries thought of them. You read literary theorists in a bid to create a framework by which to understand their works. If, like me, you struggle to string together a coherent argument over, say, 160 pages, this can be a painful process.

But the worst part is that, getting to know someone as well as this can destroy any illusions you may have about them. With Cummings, I was fascinated that this modernist whose fame seems based on his irregular use of punctuation and capital letters actually wrote 230-odd sonnets – which are quite a strict formal genre of poetry strongly associated with love.

That’s a good problem to try to solve in a short dissertation, but believe me, over a period of four years’ part-time study interspersed with various odd jobs to pay the bills, it gets tired really quickly.

I learned that he built his modernism on a thorough education (at Harvard) in the classics – Greek and Latin – as well as more than passing proficiency in French and Russian. He was passionate about being an artist – not just a published poet, but a painter and playwright as well. His young idealism led him to volunteer as an ambulance driver on the Western Front in 1917, only to be imprisoned by the French for expressing anti-war sentiments.

A child of privilege, he lived in Paris in the ‘20s, hanging out with Hemingway and weirdos like Gertrude Stein, having affairs with prostitutes and pursuing the life of a dissolute romantic poet. He married three times – the first to his best friend’s ex-wife and the third to a beautiful model.

But this idealist committed the ultimate sin – he grew old. He published antisemitic and rather racist poems; he expressed approval and support for Senator Joseph McCarthy; he refused to allow his beautiful model wife to play music while he was working. His charmingly eccentric typography was created through a tyrannical attention to detail that had him climbing into the printing press to carve the tail off a comma so it became a full-stop.

All in all, for a poet whose love lyrics are quite often recited at weddings, he was a pretty good hater: later in life he’d scornfully point out the failings of ordinary folk, who he called ‘mostpeople’, compared to the noble superiority of the artistically gifted.

There were times, in beating my brains out over some gnomic statement or other in Cummings’s writings, that I just became exasperated with the twee artifice of it all. How do you create  a structure to explain something that is carefully designed to evade structures? Why work so hard at being incomprehensible?

But what does all this have to do with Corner Cottage? Not a lot, directly, I’d say; but an old friend recently shared a link to some of Cummings’s paintings with me on Facebook and it brought back memories about the disappointment that is E. E. Cummings. It’s not really about writing at all – it’s about growing old without becoming a grumpy, bitter old fart.

I think Braidwood and Corner Cottage are how we’re going to go one better than old E. E. and buck the ageing process – mentally, if not entirely on the physical front. A life in the corporate world would have had me crawling into the printing press, obsessively changing punctuation: here we can live a life a bit less fraught, staying closer to family and engaging with good things like food and gardening.

There may need to be the odd brush with corporate life – paying the bills, you know – and we’ll want to travel much more than Covid is allowing, but being here for this period is a chance at greater happiness than Edward Estlin Cummings seems to have managed in later life — even if his stuff gets read out at weddings and mine . . . doesn’t.