This week on StoryWeb: E.E. Cummings’s book The Enormous Room.

While in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, I was fortunate enough to take a class on literature of the 1920s. Taught by Professor Walter Rideout, the seminar featured both classics from the decade – such as Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby – as well as lesser-known works such as Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons and Elizabeth Madox Roberts’s The Time of Man.

I was captivated by the many literary works we studied throughout the course of the semester. One piece that completely captured my attention was E.E. Cummings’s autobiographical 1922 book, The Enormous Room. Before this time, e e cummings (with lower-case letters) had been to me “merely” a poet. As lovely and brilliant as his poetry is, I am a lover of prose, of story. (Why else would there be StoryWeb?!)

The Enormous Room fit the bill for me. Whether you classify it as a memoir or as an autobiographical novel, it is beautifully written and magnificently illustrated with Cummings’s pen-and-ink drawings. The book tells of Cummings’s experiences as an American prisoner in a French detention camp during World War I.

After having delivered a “daring commencement address on modernist artistic innovations” at Harvard University and having thus declared the trajectory of his creative career, Cummings left for France with his college friend John Dos Passos and enlisted in the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps. Though he had been raised in a pacifist family (his father, Edward Cummings, was perhaps the best-known Unitarian minister in Boston), Cummings wanted the excitement of being near the front.

But things did not play out exactly as Cummings had planned. Through an administrative mix-up, he was not assigned to an ambulance unit for five weeks. Based in Paris while he awaited his assignment, he fell in love with the city and its women and, from all accounts, whiled away his time quite delightfully.

Eventually, he did get attached to an ambulance unit, where he befriended another American, William Slater Brown. Known as B. in The Enormous Room, Brown was a pacifist, and in letters back home, both he and Cummings wrote about their pacifist leanings. Both were arrested by the French military “on suspicion of espionage and undesirable activities.”

Cummings and Brown ended up at the Dépôt de Triage in La Ferté-Macé in Orne, Normandy. They were imprisoned with other detainees in a large room – which Cummings dubbed “the enormous room.” In the resulting book, Cummings sketches characters, describes the prison barracks and the prison yard, and ultimately details his spiritual triumph over adversity, using John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress as his literary model. He does all this with his trademark quirky use of language, enriched here by his liberal use of French phrases, which he intersperses freely into the text. Woven throughout the text are Cummings’s pen-and-ink sketches of prison life and those other prisoners whose quirks and eccentricities he brings to life in words – and images.

Cummings ended up spending just three-and-a-half months at the prison camp, and he went on to become a great poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright. In addition to his prose books, plays, and essays, he wrote approximately 2,900 poems and created numerous paintings and drawings.

The Library of American website has an insightful essay on The Enormous Room. Kelsey Osgood’s article on the creation of Cummings’s signature style in The Enormous Room is also helpful.

To learn more about Cummings and the rest of his literary career, visit the Poetry Foundation website. A wide variety of resources related to Cummings and his literary creations can be found at the Modern American Poetry website. An excellent article on Cummings and his rebellious legacy can be found at the alumni magazine for his alma mater, Harvard. His biographer, Susan Cheever, describes Cummings and his literary reputation in “The Prince of Patchin Place,” published in Vanity Fair. Poet Billy Collins contributed an article to Slate titled “Is That a Poem? The Case for E.E. Cummings.”

If you’re interested in Cummings’s impressive output as a cubist painter, visit the E.E. Cummings Art Gallery. You can learn more about his work as an artist at ArtFixx. A full roster of Cummings links – from literature to art – is available at the E.E. Cummings Society website.

Ready to add some of Cummings’s work to your library? Of course, you’ll want to have a copy of The Enormous Room (and you’ll want to make sure it’s the version Cummings intended, complete with his illustrations). If you want to delve into Cummings’s poetry, look no further than e.e. cummings: complete poems, 1904-1962 or, if you want something a bit more abbreviated, check out 100 Selected Poems.

Some have said that The Enormous Room is a sophomoric work, not reflective of the mature Cummings. But for me, The Enormous Room is vastly underrated: it is a sheer pleasure to read that most people miss. Yes, it is grim in places – but in its expression of spiritual joy, joy gained after much suffering, and struggle, it is exquisite. In his expression of boundless joy in the very midst of human suffering, Cummings reminds me of Ludwig van Beethoven and his composing of The Ninth Symphony, especially “Ode to Joy.” (See my post on Immortal Beloved, a biopic on Beethoven, to learn more about the transcendent “Ode to Joy” scene.)

It has been more than thirty years since I’ve read The Enormous Room, but I still remember the sorrow and the joy Cummings expressed in its pages. I’m so glad Professor Rideout included The Enormous Room in his course on the 1920s. F. Scott Fitzgerald – another American writer who was enamored of Paris – said, "Of all the work by young men who have sprung up since 1920 one book survives—The Enormous Room by e e cummings.” Unfortunately, the book has not survived in the way Fitzgerald thought that it would, but it’s very much a book worth reading. Cummings emerges as a person of great sensitivity: a poet of spiritual wonder shines through.

Visit thestoryweb.com/cummings for links to all these resources and to hear Cummings read his poems at the 92nd Street Y in 1949 and at YMHA Poetry Center in New York in 1959.

Listen now as I read an excerpt from Chapter 5, “A Group of Portraits,” from The Enormous Room.

 

With the reader's permission I beg, at this point of my narrative, to indulge in one or two extrinsic observations.

In the preceding pages I have described my Pilgrim's Progress from the Slough of Despond, commonly known as Section Sanitaire Vingt-et-Un (then located at Germaine) through the mysteries of Noyon, Gré and Paris to the Porte de Triage de La Ferté Macé, Orne. With the end of my first day as a certified inhabitant of the latter institution a definite progression is brought to a close. Beginning with my second day at La Ferté a new period opens. This period extends to the moment of my departure and includes the discovery of The Delectable Mountains, two of which---The 'Wanderer, and I shall not say the other---have already been sighted. It is like a vast grey box in which are laid helter-skelter a great many toys, each of which is itself completely significant apart from the always unchanging temporal dimension which merely contains it along with the rest. I make this point clear for the benefit of any of my readers who have not had the distinguished privilege of being in jail. To those who have been in jail my meaning is at once apparent; particularly if they have had the highly enlightening experience of being in jail with a perfectly indefinite sentence. How, in such a case, could events occur and be remembered otherwise than as individualities distinct from Time Itself? Or, since one day and the next are the same to such a prisoner, where does Time come in at all? Obviously, once the prisoner is habituated to his environment, once he accepts the fact that speculation as to when he will regain his liberty cannot possibly shorten the hours of his incarceration and may very well drive him into a state of unhappiness (not to say morbidity), events can no longer succeed each other: whatever happens, while it may happen in connection with some other perfectly distinct happening, does not happen in a scale of temporal priorities---each happening is self-sufficient, irrespective of minutes, months and the other treasures of freedom.

It is for this reason that I do not purpose to inflict upon the reader a diary of my alternative aliveness and nonexistence at La Ferté---not because such a diary would unutterably bore him, but because the diary or time method is a technique which cannot possibly do justice to timelessness. I shall (on the contrary) lift from their grey box at random certain (to me) more or less astonishing toys; which may or may not please the reader, but whose colours and shapes and textures are a part of that actual Present---without future and past-whereof they alone are cognizant who, so to speak, have submitted to an amputation of the world.

I have already stated that La Ferté was a Porte de Triage ---that is to say, a place where suspects of all varieties were herded by le gouvernement français preparatory to their being judged as to their guilt by a Commission. If the Commission found that they were wicked persons, or dangerous persons, or undesirable persons, or puzzling persons, or persons in some way insusceptible of analysis, they were sent from La Ferté to a 'regular' prison, called Précigné, in the province of Sarthe. About Précigné the most awful rumours were spread. It was whispered that it had a huge moat about it, with an infinity of barbed-wire fences thirty feet high, and lights trained on the walls all night to discourage the escape of prisoners. Once in Précigné you were 'in' for good and all, pour la durée de la guerre, which durée was a subject of occasional and dismal speculation---occasional for reasons (as I have mentioned) of mental health; dismal for unreasons of diet, privation, filth, and other trifles. La Ferté was, then, a stepping-stone either to freedom or to Précigné, the chances in the former case being---no speculation here---something less than the now celebrated formula made famous by the 18th amendment. But the excellent and inimitable and altogether benignant French government was not satisfied with its own generosity in presenting one merely with Précigné---beyond that lurked a cauchemar called by the singularly poetic name, Isle de Groix. A man who went to Isle de Groix was done.

As the Surveillant said to us all, leaning out of a littlish window, and to me personally upon occasion

'You are not prisoners. Oh, no. No indeed. I should say not. Prisoners are not treated like this. You are lucky.'

I had de la chance all right, but that was something which pauvre M. le Surveillant wot altogether not of. As for my fellow-prisoners, I am sorry to say that he was---it seems to my humble personality---quite wrong. For who was eligible to La Ferté? Anyone whom the police could find in the lovely country of France (a) who was not guilty of treason, (b) who could not prove that he was not guilty of treason. By treason I refer to any little annoying habits of independent thought or action which en temps de guerre are put in a hole and covered over, with the somewhat naïve idea that from their cadavers violets will grow whereof the perfume will delight all good men and true and make such worthy citizens forget their sorrows. Fort Leavenworth, for instance, emanates even now a perfume which is utterly delightful to certain Americans. Just how many La Fertés France boasted (and for all I know may still boast) God Himself knows. At least, in that Republic, amnesty has been proclaimed, or so I hear.---But to return to the Surveillant's remark.

J'avais de la chance. Because I am by profession a painter and a writer. 'Whereas my very good friends, all of them deeply suspicious characters, most of them traitors, without exception lucky to have the use of their cervical vertebræ, etc., etc., could (with a few exceptions) write not a word and read not a word; neither could they faire la photographie as Monsieur Auguste chucklingly called it (at which I blushed with pleasure): worst of all, the majority of these dark criminals who bad been caught in nefarious plots against the honour of France were totally unable to speak French. Curious thing. Often I pondered the unutterable and inextinguishable wisdom of the police, who---undeterred by facts which would have deceived less astute intelligences into thinking that these men were either too stupid or too simple to be connoisseurs of the art of betrayal---swooped upon their helpless prey with that indescribable courage which is the prerogative of policemen the world over, and bundled same prey into the La Fertés of that mighty nation upon some, at least, of whose public buildings it seems to me that I remember reading

Liberté. Egalité. Fraternité.

And I wondered that France should have a use for Monsieur Auguste, who had been arrested (because he was a Russian) when his fellow munition workers made la grève, and whose wife wanted him in Paris because she was hungry and because their child was getting to look queer and white. Monsieur Auguste, that desperate ruffian exactly five feet tall who---when he could not keep from crying (one must think about one's wife or even one's child once or twice, I merely presume, if one loves them) 'et ma femme est très gen-tille, elle est fran-çaise et très belle, très, très belle, vrai-ment elle n'est pas comme moi, ---un pe-tit homme laid, ma femme est grande et belle, elle sait bien lire et écrire, vrai-ment; et notre fils ... vous de-vez voir notre pe-tit fils . . .'----used to, start up and cry out, taking B. by one arm and me by the other:

'Al-lons, mes amis! Chan-tons "Quackquackquack."' Whereupon we would join in the following song, which Monsieur Auguste had taught us with great care, and whose renditions gave him unspeakable delight:

'Un canard, déployant ses ailes ..........................................(Quackquackquack) II disait à sa canarde fidèle ..........................................(Quackquackquack) Il chantait (Quackquackquack) Il faisait (Quackquackquack) ....Quand' (spelling mine) 'finirons nos desseins, ..............................Quack. .....................................Quack. ..........................................Quack. .................................................Qua- .........................................................ck.'

I suppose I will always puzzle over the ecstasies of That Wonderful Duck. And how Monsieur Auguste, the merest gnome of a man, would bend backwards in absolute laughter at this song's spirited conclusion upon a note so low as to wither us all.