CONTENTS
Introduction
BY SUSAN CHEEVER
Introduction to the First Edition (1922)
BY EDWARD CUMMINGS
THE ENORMOUS ROOM
ONE I Begin a Pilgrimage
TWO En Route
THREE A Pilgrim’s Progress
FOUR Le Nouveau
FIVE A Group of Portraits
SIX Apollyon
SEVEN An Approach to The Delectable Mountains
EIGHT The Wanderer
NINE Zoo-loo
TEN Surplice
ELEVEN Jean Le Nègre
TWELVE Three Wise Men
THIRTEEN I Say Good-Bye to La Misère
Glossary of Foreign Terms
Afterword
BY RICHARD S. KENNEDY
A Note on The Enormous Room
BY GEORGE JAMES FIRMAGE
Introduction
SUSAN CHEEVER
On April 7, 1917—the day after the United States entered the First World War—E. E. Cummings did what was expected of a young man in his prime. A twenty-three-year-old Harvard graduate who knew how to drive a car, he joined the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps and headed for the battlefields of France. Everything that happened after that was entirely unexpected.
On board the La Touraine to Europe, the seasick Edward Estlin Cummings made friends with a fellow Ivy Leaguer named William Slater Brown, a wealthy Columbia School of Journalism student who shared Cummings’ rebellious sense of mischief. Brown and Cummings were marooned in Paris for five weeks—the end of April and May in Paris—before they were fitted for uniforms and sent to the Western Front to serve under the command of Harry Anderson, a former garage mechanic from the Bronx who disliked the French.
Cummings and Brown adored the French, had already learned to speak good French, and had had a glorious time in Paris. They liked the French soldiers near their encampment between Ham and St. Quentin and made friends with them. The Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps, established by wealthy Harvard man Richard Norton primarily for other Harvard men, consisted of about fifty men and twenty vehicles—mostly Fords and Fiats.
Although Cummings was now on the Western Front a few miles from the Somme, which at the time was one of the most dangerous places on earth for poets—Rupert Brooke had already been killed there the year before and Wilfred Owen would follow shortly before the Armistice—there was a lull in the fighting in the summer of 1917. Cummings and Brown, both copious letter writers, carelessly wrote home, describing demoralization among the French troops and incompetence among the American officers. Brown especially made no secret of his scorn for the Allies. Both men were challenging and annoying to their superior officers. Before long, French and American officials began to scrutinize their letters looking for evidence of treason.
Cummings always reacted to authority with rebellion and so he and Anderson—his commanding officer—quickly became enemies. It did not take long for Cummings and Brown to be reassigned from ambulance drivers to ambulance washers and polishers. When Anderson refused Cummings and Brown a pass to visit Paris, Cummings was furious. “I took a mouthful of cigarette smoke and blew it flat in his face,” he wrote his mother.
Eventually one day when the Corps was encamped at Ollezy, Cummings and Brown were arrested and questioned. Cummings was asked to say that he hated the Germans. “I love the French very much,” was all he would say. He was asked to agree that Brown was disloyal to the Allies; he refused. He stayed in custody, was transported by car and then by train further west to a holding camp in Normandy—Le Depôt de Triage de La Ferté-Macé.
He arrived at the Depôt, a grim former seminary, at night and was led into a room so dark he could see nothing at all. Yet in that darkness he heard the sounds of many men, a strained cough here, the rustle of straw as someone rolled over on a pallet there, the sound of water sloshing in a bucket—this was actually an enormous room, about eighty by forty feet, where he and Brown would spend the next three months with forty or so men as the most literary, gallant, and lighthearted of prisoners.
Although being moved west away from the Somme made Cummings and Brown much safer from the dreadful battlefields of the Western Front, conditions at La Ferté-Macé were grim. A holding center for dozens of different kinds of men—defectors, pacifists, troublemakers, or men who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time—it had scant provisions for its inmates, who slept in the same room on bug-infested straw pallets with buckets serving as latrines. The floors were cold, the walls wet from condensation in the old chapel. The daily routine began at 6:30 and included some exercise in a courtyard and two meals of watery soup. Cummings and Brown, who had miraculously ended up in the same place, were gallant as always and pretended to be delighted by the turn of events that landed them in prison.
All his life, Cummings acted as if the world was a lighthearted place, which would reward his gallant faith with resources and benevolence. More than just an aristocratic noblesse oblige, his attitude was that delight and generosity would be repaid with safety. He leaned into the universe with a trust that sometimes seemed risky but always rewarded him.
As a result, Cummings as a prisoner had a better time than his worried parents back in cushy Cambridge. “You can’t imagine, Mother mine, how interesting a time I am having,” he wrote Rebecca Cummings. After describing the snoring in the room at night and the smells that, if knives had been permitted, could have been cut with a knife, he joked, “Not for anything in the world would I change it . . . I know you will believe me when I reiterate that I am having the time of my life!” At last, Cummings decided, he and Brown were free of the brutal stupidity of Harry Anderson and the military caste system and free to enjoy the variety of the world—free that is in a manner of speaking.
In letters home, Cummings cheerfully described the bucket toilets as well as the panoply of characters he came across in the holding camp. Cummings met a man named Count Charles Bragard who had known the painter Paul Cézanne; Fritz, a Norwegian ship’s stoker; a handsome bearded gypsy whom Cummings dubbed “The Wanderer”; and “The Bear,” a handsome Pole. Another prisoner had been a brilliant equine portraitist—he asked if Cummings knew his friend Cornelius Vanderbilt. “I was confronted by a perfect type,” Cummings cheerfully wrote in his memoir, “the apotheosis of injured nobility,the humiliated victim of perfectly unfortunate circumstances,the utterly respectable gentleman who has seen better days.”
While Cummings was drinking watery coffee, scratching an increasingly itchy skin, and hobnobbing with exotic strangers, his father was in the kind of towering, fearful rage a Harvard professor and Unitarian minister could muster. After getting a telegram from Richard Norton, founder of the ambulance corps, saying that their son was in a concentration camp, Edward Cummings went into action. First he wrote to the American Embassy in Paris, then to the United States State Department, who gave him a bureaucratic runaround. No one knew where Cummings’ son was; it was wartime in France.
On October 26, the State Department made an error that compounded Edward Cummings’ fury—he got a telegram saying that his son, one H. H. Cummings, had gone down on the ship Antilles, torpedoed by the Germans. In the two days it took for this mistake to be corrected, Edward Cummings’ anger doubled. Finally, he wrote a letter to President Wilson, a plea from one father to another, asking for information on his son’s whereabouts. Whether his letter did the trick, or whether La Ferté-Macé was designed for three-month stays, Cummings was finally released and sent home in January.
For all his gallantry, for all his ballyhoo over the delights of prison, Cummings arrived home skinny and sick, exhausted and dep
ressed, and plagued by malnutrition and a variety of skin problems. His friend Hildegarde Watson, who gave a fancy lunch in New York to celebrate his return, noted that her friend Estlin Cummings had lost his smile.
Edward Cummings, in the meantime, had not lost his rage. He planned to bring an international lawsuit against the Red Cross, the French government, and perhaps the United States State Department. Luckily for us, E. E. Cummings was not too sick to realize the futility of his father’s anger. Instead of a lawsuit, he suggested to his father that he would write a book that would be an indictment of the powers that be and a furious account of the dreadful way the Cummings family had been treated. Edward agreed and even offered to pay his son for writing it.
The Enormous Room is a vivid, detailed memoir of three months, but in some ways it is also the key to all of Cummings’ voluminous work in prose and poetry. Here are the physical details described so graphically that the reader feels hungry and exhilarated and faint. Here is the delight in all the things that others see as adversity. Here is the collision of an aristocratic Yankee gentleman’s code with physical hardship. Here is the strength of character, the furious elegance, and the assumption that the world is good that drove everything E. E. Cummings would write in the forty years ahead of him.
Introduction
to the First Edition (1922)
“FOR THIS MY SON WAS DEAD, AND IS ALIVE AGAIN; HE WAS LOST AND IS FOUND.”
He was lost by the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps.
He was officially dead as a result of official misinformation.
He was entombed by the French Government.
It took the better part of three months to find him and bring him back to life,—with the help of powerful and willing friends on both sides of the Atlantic. The following documents tell the story.
104 Irving Street,
Cambridge, December 8, 1917.
President Woodrow Wilson,
White House,
Washington, D.C.
Mr. President:
It seems criminal to ask for a single moment of your time. But I am strongly advised that it would be more criminal to delay any longer calling to your attention a crime against American citizenship in which the French Government has persisted for many weeks,—in spite of constant appeals made to the American Minister at Paris; and in spite of subsequent action taken by the State Department in Washington, on the initiative of my friend Hon.—.
The victims are two American ambulance drivers,—Edward Estlin Cummings of Cambridge, Mass., and W— S— B—. . . .
More than two months ago these young men were arrested, subjected to many indignities, dragged across France like criminals, and closely confined in a Concentration Camp at La Ferté-Macé; where according to latest advices they still remain,—awaiting the final action of the Minister of the Interior upon the findings of a Commission which passed upon their cases as long ago as October 17.
Against Cummings both private and official advices from Paris state that there is no charge whatever. He has been subjected to this outrageous treatment solely because of his intimate friendship with young B—, whose sole crime is,—so far as can be learned,—that certain letters to friends in America were misinterpreted by an over-zealous French censor.
It only adds to the indignity and irony of the situation, to say that young Cummings is an enthusiastic lover of France, and so loyal to the friends he has made among the French soldiers, that even while suffering in health from his unjust confinement, he excuses the ingratitude of the country he has risked his life to serve, by calling attention to the atmosphere of intense suspicion and distrust that has naturally resulted from the painful experience which France has had with foreign emissaries.
Be assured, Mr. President, that I have waited long—it seems like ages—and have exhausted all other available help before venturing to trouble you.
1. After many weeks of vain effort to secure effective action by the American Ambassador at Paris, Richard Norton of the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps to which the boys belonged, was completely discouraged, and advised me to seek help here.
2. The efforts of the State Department at Washington resulted as follows:
i. A cable from Paris saying there was no charge against Cummings and intimating that he would speedily be released.
ii. A little later a second cable advising that Edward Estlin Cummings had sailed on the Antilles and was reported lost.
iii. A week later a third cable correcting this cruel error, and saying the Embassy was renewing efforts to locate Cummings,—apparently still ignorant even of the place of his confinement.
After such painful and baffling experiences, I turn to you,—burdened though I know you to be, in this world crisis, with the weightiest task ever laid upon any man.
But I have another reason for asking this favor. I do not speak for my son alone; or for him and his friend alone. My son has a mother,—as brave and patriotic as any mother who ever dedicated an only son to a great cause. The mothers of our boys in France have rights as well as the boys themselves. My boy’s mother had a right to be protected from the weeks of horrible anxiety and suspense caused by the inexplicable arrest and imprisonment of her son. My boy’s mother had a right to be spared the supreme agony caused by a blundering cable from Paris saying that he had been drowned by a submarine. (An error which Mr. Norton subsequently cabled that he had discovered six weeks before.) My boy’s mother and all American mothers have a right to be protected against all needless anxiety and sorrow.
Pardon me, Mr. President, but if I were president and your son were suffering such prolonged injustice at the hands of France; and your son’s mother had been needlessly kept in Hell as many weeks as my boy’s mother has,—I would do something to make American citizenship as sacred in the eyes of Frenchmen as Roman citizenship was in the eyes of the ancient world. Then it was enough to ask the question, “Is it lawful to scourge a man that is a Roman, and uncondemned?” Now, in France, it seems lawful to treat like a condemned criminal a man that is an American, uncondemned and admittedly innocent!
Very respectfully,
Edward Cummings
This letter was received at the White House. Whether it was received with sympathy or with silent disapproval, is still a mystery. A Washington official, a friend in need and a friend indeed in these trying experiences, took the precaution to have it delivered by messenger. Otherwise, fear that it had been “lost in the mail” would have added another twinge of uncertainty to the prolonged and exquisite tortures inflicted upon parents by alternations of misinformation and official silence. Doubtless the official stethoscope was on the heart of the world just then; and perhaps it was too much to expect that even a post-card would be wasted on private heart-aches.
In any event this letter told where to look for the missing boys,—something the French Government either could not or would not disclose, in spite of constant pressure by the American Embassy at Paris and constant efforts by my friend Richard Norton, who was head of the Norton-Harjes Ambulance organization from which they had been abducted.
Release soon followed, as narrated in the following letter to Major— of the Staff of the Judge Advocate General in Paris.
February 20, 1918
My dear Mr.—
Your letter of January 30th, which I have been waiting for with great interest ever since I received your cable, arrived this morning. My son arrived in New York on January 1st. He was in bad shape physically as a result of his imprisonment: very much under weight, suffering from a bad skin infection which he had acquired at the concentration camp. However, in view of the extraordinary facilities which the detention camp offered for acquiring dangerous diseases, he is certainly to be congratulated on having escaped with one of the least harmful. The medical treatment at the camp was quite in keeping with the general standards of sanitation there; with the result that it was not until he began t
o receive competent surgical treatment after his release and on board ship that there was much chance of improvement. A month of competent medical treatment here seems to have got rid of this painful reminder of official hospitality. He is, at present, visiting friends in New York. If he were here, I am sure he would join with me and with his mother in thanking for the interest you have taken and the efforts you have made.
W— S— B— is, I am happy to say, expected in New York this week by the S. S. Niagara. News of his release and subsequently of his departure came by cable. What you say about the nervous strain under which he was living, as an explanation of the letters to which the authorities objected, is entirely borne out by first-hand information. The kind of badgering which the youth received was enough to upset a less sensitive temperament. It speaks volumes for the character of his environment that such treatment aroused the resentment of only one of his companions, and that even this manifestation of normal human sympathy was regarded as “suspicious.” If you are right in characterizing B——’s condition as more or less hysterical, what shall we say of the conditions which made possible the treatment which he and his friend received? I am glad B—— wrote the very sensible and manly letter to the Embassy, which you mention. After I have had an opportunity to converse with him, I shall be in better position to reach a conclusion in regard to certain matters about which I will not now express an opinion.
I would only add that I do not in the least share your complacency in regard to the treatment which my son received. The very fact that, as you say, no charges were made and that he was detained on suspicion for many weeks after the Commission passed on his case and reported to the Minister of the Interior that he ought to be released, leads me to a conclusion exactly opposite to that which you express. It seems to me impossible that any well-ordered Government would fail to acknowledge such action to have been unreasonable. Moreover, “detention on suspicion” was a small part of what actually took place. To take a single illustration, you will recall that after many weeks’ persistent effort to secure information, the Embassy was still kept so much in the dark about the facts that it cabled the report that my son had embarked on The Antilles and was reported lost. And when convinced of that error, the Embassy cabled that it was renewing efforts to locate my son. Up to that moment, it would appear that the authorities had not even condescended to tell the United States Embassy where this innocent American citizen was confined; so that a mistaken report of his death was regarded as an adequate explanation of his disappearance. If I had accepted this report and taken no further action, it is by no means certain that he would not be dead by this time.
The Enormous Room Page 1