The Portrait with a Secret

A Poetry Tale about E. E. Cummings, told by Hello Doggo.

Nineteen forty-eight. A young woman sits for her portrait. The painter is E. E. Cummings, the famous poet. She’s fond of him. Rather more than fond, according to some accounts.

There’s one thing she doesn’t know.

He’s her father.

Nancy Thayer was born in December nineteen nineteen. Her mother, Elaine, was married to Scofield Thayer, the wealthy editor of The Dial — and Cummings’s friend and patron. Elaine and Cummings were lovers. Thayer gave the baby his name.

Cummings and Elaine did eventually marry, in nineteen twenty-four. It lasted less than a year. Elaine left him for an Irishman, Frank MacDermot, took Nancy away to Ireland, and Cummings, for all his visiting rights, more or less lost her.

Then, in the nineteen-forties, she drifted back into his life — by now married to a grandson of Theodore Roosevelt — and agreed to sit for him.

Now, here’s where the stories diverge. One version has Nancy confessing she was falling for him. Another has her simply asking about her father, Scofield Thayer. The accounts don’t agree on exactly what was said. But on one of her visits, with his partner out of the room, Cummings told her the truth.

And then — this is the bit that stings — he’d rather she didn’t call him Father. Estlin would do.

This is the poet who famously shrank his capital letters down to size.

Apparently that included the F in Father.