Tales of the Mermaid Tavern E.E. CUMMINGS PRESENTATION COPY IN SAWYER FINE BINDING
Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1924.
Leather bound. This fine presentation binding by C.J. Sawyer of London holds an inscription stamped in gilt on the front doublure, reading: "LESBIA FROM E.E. / JANUARY 27 1926," a previously unrecorded association copy connecting this gift-bound volume to the American poet E.E. Cummings.
The inscription's "Lesbia" borrows the name that Catullus, the classical Roman love poet, gave to his own celebrated lover in verse, a choice very much in character for Cummings, who studied Catullus at Harvard and was already lifting his language for the women in his life. He closed a 1917 letter to Scofield Thayer with a salutation to Elaine Orr—Thayer's fiancée and Cummings' own future first wife—by borrowing an endearment straight from Catullus's love poetry, "deliciae meae puellae."
The likeliest recipient of this book, however, is Cummings' second wife, Anne Minnerly Barton, whom Cummings met in mid-1925 and would marry in 1929. By his biographers' account, Barton drew him out of a period of personal crisis amid his divorce to Orr and subsequent custody battle. A fellow divorcee with a young daughter, Anne Minnerly Barton offered personal insight and consolation that eased Cummings' suicidal thoughts regarding the dissolution of his family at the same time as she offered a welcome escape from it. "At a social gathering Barton could usually be found with a lipstick-smudged cigarette in one hand, a glass filled with liquor in the other...she was the ultimate 1920s flapper," according to Cummings' biographer Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno, who describes their routine festivities: "Cummings was also pleased that Barton, unlike Elaine, was quite happy to accompany him on his nightly rambles with friends from restaurant to speakeasy to perhaps a friend's apartment for a nightcap (or two or three)." Sawyer-Laucanno goes on to describe the impact this time with Barton had on Cummings' poetry: "the modicum of happiness that came from his relationship with Barton freed him from his agony sufficiently that the poems began to flow more readily. The work became lighter in spirit and love could again be a topic no longer only associated with pain. It was during this period that he produced one of his greatest love poems, 'since feeling is first,'" which concludes: "laugh,leaning back in my arms / for life's not a paragraph // And death i think is no parenthesis".
The book within this presentation binding speaks to the raucous literary scene Cummings enjoyed with Barton in their whirlwind first months together; Tales of the Mermaid Tavern invites the reader to imagine travelling backward in time, into a cycle of imagined pub talk among Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, Donne, and their Elizabethan crowd, at their favorite 16th-century Cheapside haunt, the titular Mermaid Tavern. Cummings, no great admirer of Noyes' more conservative verse, would have perhaps been drawn to this work's conceit of a timeless, late-night literary fellowship as a form of self-mythologizing, offering the gift as an invitation to join him within that same imagined party of literary greats, making it an apt offering from Cummings regardless of the recipient's identity.
The date inscribed in gilt to the interior of this crushed Morocco fine binding, January 27, 1926, falls within the same month Cummings' Dial Award was announced, bringing him $2,000 and a sudden surge of literary fame: a fitting moment for a gift to the woman he credited with reviving him. The date 1924, stamped in gilt to the spine, reflects the publication date of the book within, Alfred Noyes' Tales of the Mermaid Tavern; the presentation binding and inscription are dated January 1926, and the two dates should not be conflated. This volume was bound by the London fine binder, bookseller, and publisher Charles J. Sawyer (1876–1931). No published source we could identify confirms this identification outright, so it is offered here as a well-supported speculation rather than settled fact. The Grolier Club holds the Sawyer firm's surviving account books, so further research there may settle the question definitively.
From the estate of an Indiana University professor and lifelong Cummings collector. References cited include Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno's E.E. Cummings: A Biography, the website of The Journal of the E.E. Cummings Society, and Wikipedia.
7 1/4" X 5". 181pp. Bound in full navy blue crushed morocco over gilt-ruled boards, with spine lettered and decorated in gilt within five raised bands, with date 1924 stamped at foot of spine, referring to the publication date. Gilt-stamped presentation inscription to front doublure: "Lesbia from E.E. January 27 1926". Stamp of "C.J. Sawyer Ltd. of 12 Grafton Street W." in small text at foot of verso of front free endpaper. Marbled endapers. Mild wear to binding, with rubbing to extremities, gentle wear to external hinges, and light scuffing and faint dust soiling to boards, else bright, firm, square, and sound. Likewise light scuffing to otherwise bright all-gilt edges of text block. Pages are clean and unmarked. Very good +. Item #17745
Price: $8,500.00