A Male-Female Collaboration Research Question

I maintain a file folder about creative male-female collaborations and recently, a new case has me wondering about parallels in the early lives of such collaborating creators. Thus, I’ve begun gathering information about my subjects’ childhoods. The three main male-female collaborations that I know of so far are renowned literary figures Truman Capote with Harper Lee (Capote being virtually the co-author of Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird); the sculptor Auguste Rodin’s highly creative 10-year collaboration with his mistress and fellow sculptor Camille Claudel; and the painter Wassily Kandinsky’s spectacular creativity in Bavaria just before World War I while living and collaborating with the German painter Gabriele Munter.

My new interest is the collaboration between Kevin An-

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drews and his wife Nancy Cummings in writing The Flight of Ikaros (1959), a famous travel book about Andrews’ adventures in rural Greece during the Greek Civil War. Nancy Cummings (1919-2006) was the daughter of the poet E.E. Cummings, but she didn’t find this out until she was 27 years old. Until then, she considered herself the daughter of the art collector Scofield Thayer, who she also didn’t realize had been institutionalized for mental problems since she was nine. After learning that her father was actually E.E. Cummings, her relationship with him was troubled, as was her marriage to Kevin Andrews that began soon thereafter. Yet, despite their marriage troubles, Nancy Cummings’ literary contribution to Kevin Andrews’ remarkable book The Flight of Ikaros was immense.

Similar to his wife’s struggle with the identity of her father, Kevin Andrews (1924-1989) grew up thinking he was the son of the famous explorer Roy Chapman Andrews. Later, during combat as a U.S. soldier in Italy during World War II, he apparently acquired post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), soon followed by the beginnings of lifelong epilepsy and the revelation by his mother that he wasn’t Roy Chapman Andrews’ son after all. Nevertheless, his mother said she couldn’t reveal who his real father was.

Both before and after his military service, Kevin attended Harvard University and felt drawn to Greek studies. After graduation, he received a fellowship to study in Greece, where he soon felt very at home, especially among rural people who still led traditional lives. Despite the Greek Civil War underway, Kevin spent months in remote, dangerous parts of the Peloponnese, studying medieval and early modern castles and living with peasants. He thoroughly enjoyed his four years in Greece (1947-1951); only when his fellowships became no longer extendable did he return to the U.S. By the time he finished writing his first book, Castles of the Morea (1953), he was on close terms with Nancy Cummings, the estranged wife of his friend Willard Roosevelt.

Roger Jinkinson illustrates the uncanny parallel between Kevin’s and Nancy’s lives in American Ikaros: The Search for Kevin Andrews (2010) when he writes, “If Kevin’s origins are complicated, Nancy’s are labyrinthine.” When Nancy was 27, in 1948, she was informed by E.E. Cummings that he was her father, not the

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wealthy literary editor and art collector Scofield Thayer (1889-1982) who had been married to her mother at the time Nancy was born and was listed as her father on her birth certificate. Scofield Thayer and Nancy’s mother weren’t divorced until a year later, whereupon she married E.E. Cummings, but soon left him and married an influential Irish banker-politician. In 1924 while Nancy was still a small child, her purported father Scofield Thayer moved to Vienna to be psychoanalyzed by Freud. In 1929 when Nancy was nine, Thayer entered a mental hospital and remained institutionalized the rest of his long life.

During World War II, Nancy married Willard Roosevelt, a grandson of Teddy Roosevelt, and she bore two children. It was several years after the war that she learned her actual father was E.E. Cummings. In 1954 she divorced Willard Roosevelt and married the adventurous Kevin Andrews. Soon they moved to Switzerland, and in 1956, to Greece. Meanwhile, they collaborated on Kevin’s remarkable book The Flight of Ikaros (1959). During those years, Kevin grew increasingly disgruntled and outspoken about his identity issues, especially about his mother’s long secrecy, and meanwhile his wife Nancy grew similarly disgruntled about her own identity issues and about both her mother’s and father’s (E.E. Cummings’) long secrecy. Unlike Kevin, however, Nancy bottled up her feelings. In Kevin’s case, his love of Greece helped him more or less acquire another identity, a quasi-Greek identity, and in 1975 he renounced his U.S. citizenship and became a Greek citizen.

As for Nancy, identification with a place couldn’t help her very much. Though she, like Kevin, had been raised at sundry locations in the Eastern U.S. and Europe, she felt no affinity for Greece, especially rural Greece. She also didn’t fit in at E.E. Cummings’ summer farm home in New Hampshire due to jealousy directed against her by Cummings’ third wife, Marion Morehouse. In 1968, when Kevin began living dangerously in opposition to the rightwing Greek dictatorship of 1967-1974, Nancy took the four children (two by her first husband and two by Kevin) and left Greece for the safety of England. Although she and Kevin never divorced, they also never lived together again.

So strikingly similar are Kevin Andrews’ and Nancy Cum-

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mings” identity issues that I am left wondering if parallel identity issues likewise existed in the early lives of other successful collaborators, such as those aforementioned. It’s well-known Truman Capote and Harper Lee grew up as sometime neighbors in the small town of Monroeville, Alabama, but what I’m wondering goes beyond that, to family circumstances. I’d welcome any relevant information or insights from Clio’s Psyche readers, whether about any of the four cases of male-female collaboration that I’ve mentioned or about other cases.

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