The Enormous Room by ee cumings, known and loved far and wide for his playful erotic, anarchic, love-full, meaning-full poems, has long been on my reading list.  And a peculiar book it turns out to be, with many and many a beguiling phrase, his syntax reversal, elisions and compressions of image for which he became well known, showing itself in its early stages. As an added treat, he gave plenty of chances to practice my French.

Offered as a “autobiographical novel,” it is a strange hybrid, written during and after four months in a French WW I concentration camp in the fall of 1917.  Cummings had gone, along with John Dos Passos,  as a volunteer to a private ambulance service under the auspices of the International Red Cross.  Being good friends of another American, William Slater Brown, [B in the book] whose letters were scanned by French censors and deemed seditious for their anti-war comments, both were hauled of to contemplate their crimes in a Dépôt de Triage [literally, a sorting out depot] in Ferté-Macé, France

As a novel it’s odd because plot and character development, relations built over time, a story arc,  give way, as in a well-worked journal, to a linear account of the days, multiple interesting, but not particularly connected, sketches of fellow inmates,  descriptions of  the mud, the cold, the fights, the daily drudgery of life in The Enormous Room. 

Now Cummings gives an explanation for this which, however interesting as view of prison,man and time, fails to completely make up for the episodic nature of the tale.

Beginning with my second day at La Ferté a new period opens. This period extends to the moment of my departure. [and] 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. … 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 happenings, does not happen in a scale of temporal priorities—each happening is self-sufficient, irrespective of minutes, months and the other treasures of freedom.

Interesting also to contemporary readers the title refers to a large barracks with room for some 60 pallaises, in what seems to be a combination prison/military camp.  No one has individual cells unless confined to the dreaded cabinot, which are small, cold, damp, dark solitary confinement cells.  Doubly interesting is that the men’s prison is  proximate to another for women — mostly, it seems, brought in on morals/prostitution charges– with whom a common court yard is shared. Men and women are allowed outside at separate times but there are opportunities for mutual appreciation, ass-grabbing, and lots of raucous laughter.

…in response would come peals of laughter from the girls’ windows, shrill peals and deep guttural peals intersecting and breaking joints like overlapping shingles on the roof of Craziness.

or

Her deep sensual voice had a coarse richness.  Her face, dark and young, annihilated easily the ancient and greyish walls.  Her wonderful hair was shockingly black.  Her perfect teeth, when she smiled, reminded you of an animal.  The cult of Isis never worshiped a more deep luxurious smile.  This face, framed in the night of its hair, seemed (as it moved at the window overlooking the cour des femmes) inexorably and colossally young.

or

In the cour Jean was the mecca of all female eyes.  Handkerchiefs were waved to him; phrases of the most amorous nature greeted his every appearance.  To all these demonstrations he by no means turned a deaf ear….

Along with our m0dern surprise at mixed prison populations and group rooms instead of cells is that, along with all the expected brutality and cruelty, fraternal, even at times, happy relations break out.

Monsieur Auguste was broken-hearted.  We did our best to cheer him we gave him a sort of Last Supper at our bedside; we heated some red wine in the tin-cup and he drank with us.  We presented him with certain tokens of our love and friendship, including–I remember–a huge cheese…

 Like all prison literature, and I suppose all prisons, there are no names but “handles,” street names, nick-names: Black Holster, Old Hat, The Frog, The Fighting Sheeney, Mexique, the Zulu [we never know what his own might be.]  Cummings describes them in detail. One chapter is simply called “A Group of Portraits” and that it is.  Pages of character studies,  like notebooks Matisse or Picasso might have left, a torso, a face, a man pushing a broom, a woman climbing stairs.   More detailed than sketches but essentially sequences of descriptions; a promise of something larger, more enfolding.

Not that this is unpleasant.  His playful language makes me think of Chagall characters leaping about the page. But they don’t, together, make a novel.  Some of his later chapters are devoted to one person and his interactions with the rest.   Jean Le Negre is particularly fine, and might have lifted off into a story on its own, or been the center of a more traditional novel.

 I was personally surprised to find that, contrary to my lightly set expectations, The Enormous Room was not a war novel at all.  The war which pushed them all together is scarcely mentioned.

I had the honor of being a member of Section Sanitaire Vingt-et-Un, which helped evacuate the venereal hospital at Ham, with whose inhabitants (in odd moments) I talked and walked and learned several things about la guerre.  Let the reader– if he does not realize it already–realize that This Great War for Humanity, etc, did not agree with some people’s ideas, and that some people’s ideas made them prefer to the glories of the front line the torments (I have heard my friends at Ham screaming a score of times)_ attendant upon venereal diseases. 

Among the character sketches and descriptions of life in the camp, deeper reflections appear, on war and life, but as small individualities  in a passing stream of impressions.

It struck me at the time as intensely interesting that, in the case of certain types of human being, the more cruel are the miseries inflicted upon him the more cruel does he become toward anyone who is so unfortunate as to be weaker or more miserable than himself.  Or perhaps I should say that nearly every human being, given sufficiently miserable circumstances, will from time to time react to those very circumstances (whereby his own personality is mutilated) through a deliberate mutilation on his own part of a weaker or already more mutilated personality.

or

Surplice, being unspeakably lonely, enjoyed any and all insults for the simple reason that they constituted or at least implied a recognition of his existence.  To be made a fool of was, to this otherwise completely neglected individual, a mark of distinction; something to take pleasure in; to be proud of. 

or

Men in La Misereas well as anywhere else rightly demand a certain amount of amusement; amusement is, indeed, peculiarly essential to suffering; in proportion as we are able to be amused we are able to suffer..

So, as I finish, I am satisfied that I’ve finally read this first, and most successful of ee cummings novels, even though it doesn’t settle to the deeper levels of appreciation I’d expected to have.  It fills in a small space in the WW I literature I’ve been interested in — trying to understand the collapse of anti-war feeling in a matter of months and explosion into pro war euphoria.  I’m glad to have enjoyed his language inventions […the roof of Craziness; …framed in the night of her hair…], and seen his writing mannerisms take shape in their early stages, still on the whole understandable, unlike, as many have complained, in his later Eimi: A Journey Through Soviet Russia  [Marianne Moore review .  Carla Blumenkranz review.]

I’m glad to have read this from his youth not yet caught in the nets of conservative political behavior — this poet of love and tenderness— to become an admirer of the grotesque Senator Joseph McCarthy.