Ralph Cheever Dunning | Biography

Ralph Cheever Dunning's brief renown in Paris during the twenties was perhaps more a result of his mysterious personality and preoccupations than of his poetry. Although his work was the subject of a heated debate in 1926 on the Left Bank, it was the man himself who was most scrutinized. A native of Detroit, Dunning arrived in Paris around 1905. By 1910 his first volume of poetry, Hyllus, had been published in London by John Lane, despite the poet's noted apathy toward publication. Little more of his work appeared until the early twenties when, under Ezra Pound's influence, Dunning was persuaded to release his manuscript "The Four Winds" to Poetry and the transatlantic review, each of which published large portions of it in 1924 and 1925. The event delighted Pound but stirred his friend and protege little. (In 1929 the poems were published as Windfalls by Edward Titus's Black Manikin Press.)

It was enough for Dunning that he should write poetry, and he lived for nothing else. Markedly detached from people and things, he spent most of his life laboring slowly over a small group of poems in his room on rue Notre Dame des Champs, which Paris Tribune columnist Wambly Bald called "virtually a wooden box," furnished only with a cot, a stove, a bookcase, and a single chair. Occasionally he emerged from his "shelter" to frequent, oddly, the noisiest, most crowded cafes. There he would sit perfectly still, gripping a glass of hot milk (his principal nourishment) and a book--"an apparition," in Samuel Putnam's words, "weirdly out of place there." Dunning was said to have spoken only a few sentences throughout his twenty-odd years in Paris, and few besides Pound, Putnam, and Sisley Huddleston ever managed to converse with him. These friends did their best to take care of him, but he usually refused their offerings, having developed, thought Huddleston, "a definite dislike of eating." Huddleston deemed him, nevertheless, the most likeable man he had ever met.

Putnam defined Dunning's nature as Oriental, by which he surely meant more than the poet's addiction to opium, but the habit may have intensified his obsession with terror and death--an obsession which permeates his writings. His verse communicates a feeling of impermanency and sadness--a regret expressed, perhaps, at seeing awe inspired not by the permanent but by the transitory. Steadily his work progressed from lamenting the uselessness and meaninglessness of most elements in life, to proclaiming no permanency but in death. Above all his poetry reflects his own profound death wish.

Obviously influenced by the generation of English poets writing during his youth, Dunning adopted the styles, dialect, and regular verse forms associated with the eighteen-nineties and the Victorians. When in 1925 he received Poetry's Helen Haire Nevinson Prize, and shortly thereafter had his long poem Rococo chosen by Edward Titus to appear as the Black Manikin Press's maiden volume in 1926, a number of his contemporaries voiced their dismay. Rococo, a twenty-two-page classic love story written in faultless terza rima, was, decreed modernist critic Elliot Paul, "hopelessly antiquated" by its language, form, and "laughable philosophy." Pierre Loving's response in the Paris Times was that Dunning's "outworn and rather conventional language" enhanced "the beauty of the achievement." Pound, meanwhile, dubbed Dunning "one of the four or five poets of our time" and railed against the "hyper-modernists" and free-versifiers whose rabid insistence upon "certain properties of one kind of good poetry" blinded them to the beauty and musicality of Dunning's verse. The most caustic remarks appeared in This Quarter from Ernest Walsh, who accused Dunning of having "the soul of Dowson and Swinburne and Keats and Shelley as well as their petty agonies and florid importance of expression," and vehemently contended that Pound had mistakenly praised what he had not read but only surveyed. To this Pound suggested that "anyone who cannot feel the beauty of [Dunning's] melody had better confine his criticism to prose and leave the discussion of verse to those who know something about it." Although Rococo is neither as good nor as bad as the arguments imply, Dunning remained for some time a whetstone on which others sharpened their critical powers. None of the comments, however, seemed to make the least impression on the man whom Ford Madox Ford called "the living Buddha of Montparnasse."

Ralph Cheever Dunning's unsought fame quickly diminished after his death in 1930. Hemingway's terse diagnosis was that the man "forgot to eat"; others believed he had spent forty years of contemplation preparing for a death which he finally accomplished when at the age of fifty-two, weak from tuberculosis, he simply refused to eat. It was the ideal poet's death, declared Samuel Putnam: utterly sincere, without vulgarity or showmanship. In Paris Was Our Mistress (1947) Putnam referred to him as, simply, "a poet of the old school whose name is wholly forgotten now." This rapid and final obscurity was, perhaps, just what Dunning would have wished for.