In spite of the earnest social criticism, the thematic emphasis in The Enormous Room is rather upon affirmation and particularly upon the values of individualism and the virtues of primitivism. The characters who become friends of B. and C. are simple, gentle, harmless people—even Christlike. They are especially pathetic because of their vulnerability—they are weak, or small, or crippled, or illiterate, or mentally deficient—and they are in one respect or another childlike.
This is especially true of those venerated companions whom C. has designated the Delectable Mountains. For example, the little man named Surplice is, B. and C. think, Polish, but “nebbish” is a word more applicable. He is the one who is always ignored, forgotten, silent in the background—except when selected for group derision and teasing, when he becomes wide-eyed with bewildered wonder that anyone would notice him. He has an intuitive talent for music, and a childish toy, the harmonica, is his special instrument. As the characterization develops he becomes an archetype of the Holy Fool. He is “intensely religious” and so oblivious to the things of this world that he does not know there is a war going on. What Cummings emphasizes is his ignorance of the terrible things that civilization has developed—like submarines. He is not only childlike in his naiveté, but also oblivious to dirt, as if he were a three-year-old still picking up anything he finds on the floor or still fascinated with paddling in feces. Surplice sweeps up the spilled sand from the spitting box; he salvages the saliva-soaked cigarette butts for his pipe; each day he voluntarily carries down to the sewer the pails of solid excrement.
If the holy child Surplice is pathetic, Jean Le Nègre is the comic child, full of natural high spirits. He likes to pretend—he tells outrageous stories of his life and exploits. In his play he invents games in which he can play a role. He reads aloud nonexistent news out of a newspaper. He carries on a hilarious conversation with a friend through the imaginary telephone of a stove pipe. But he can also throw tantrums or have periods of the sulks.
In developing the character, Cummings intensifies the feeling about Jean by beginning with high-jinks and then dropping down to the troubles that beset him. The sequence is brought to its crisis in the account of an unjust punishment of solitary confinement. It is here that Cummings brings in poignantly the basis of the child’s emotional disequilibrium. He wails, “Everybody puts me in the cabinot because I am black” and smashes his head against a pillar. C. cements his friendship with Jean by defending him against the punishment and, when he is powerless to prevent it, by personal gifts including the coat off his back. It is one of those moments, frequent in American literature, of interracial masculine bonding.
Part II is a relatively static section of the book. In prison, time stands still. Every day is like the next. The only things worth considering are the people who inhabit the prison and the variations from the prison routine. Thus this middle section of the book is filled with portraits and anecdotes. Part III picks up the narrative again and moves the story to its conclusion. Change comes with the verdicts of the examining commission. B. is sent to a permanent prison and C. is to be freed but placed under surveillance in a French town. With this turn of events, C.’s mental attitude changes too. With the departure of B., the Depôt is no longer “the finest place on earth.” C. goes about in a numbed state, captured, we might say, by the Giant Despair. From those clutches he is rescued by a deus ex telegramma: he is ordered released to the American embassy and sent on his journey home. The final allusive detail comes when the return by ship to New York is described as if it were a cubist view of the spires of the Celestial City: “The tall,impossibly tall,incomparably tall,city shouldering upward into the hard sunlight leaned a little through the octaves of its parallel edges.. . .”
III
A narrative of the sort we have just examined would have had its vogue in the 1920s and then faded into the obscurity of a wartime document were it not for the fact that it was written by an artist who had plunged himself fully into the modern movement as an experimental poet and a cubist painter. By 1920, when The Enormous Room was written, Cummings had already completed the first volume of poems, Tulips & Chimneys (see the complete version published by Liveright in 1976), and some of his radically arranged and unusually punctuated poems had begun to appear in The Dial. He was spending most of his time painting and had exhibited for the first time in the Society of Independent Artists Show of 1919 with two controversial cubist canvases, “Noise” and “Sound.” The spirit of twentieth-century poetry and art, then, invigorates The Enormous Room.
Cummings brings the narrative alive by recording sensations whenever he can. He makes us see and smell and sometimes hear, taste, and touch. We experience vividly the daily life in the Depôt de Triage—its oozing walls, its overflowing pails of urine, its encrusted dirt, its greasy soup, the piercing cold, the noise and confusion. To give a sense of what it was like to be surrounded by sounds of a foreign language, Cummings judiciously laces his text with simple French words and phrases, most of which are understandable from the context. Even the punctuation and other features of the styling for print are adapted to the narrative: no spaces occur after the commas, a practice which creates a faster flow of the words; when dashes separate dialogue within a paragraph, the give-and-take becomes more dramatic; abbreviation or unusual capitalization conveys special meaning or emphasis.
The linguistic exuberance of the style is in harmony too with the philosophy of individualism and it immediately comes into conflict with the prevailing wartime rhetoric. On the very first page, Woodrow Wilson’s “characteristic cadence” is made fun of in the summary of the trouble with Mr. A. As the narration goes on, the slanginess gives vigor, and the occasional lift into formal circumlocution provides irony. More than this, lively and unusual figures of speech give ready bounce to passages over and over again: C. waits in a moment of excitement: “my blood stood on tiptoe”; a gendarme gets ready for duty: he “buckled on his personality.” Surplice speaks with a “shrugging voice”; an ineffective and isolated prison guard stands “like a tragic last piece of uneaten candy in his box at the end of the cour”; the gypsy’s little son has “lolling buttons of eyes sewn on gold flesh.”
There is no standard narrative style. Cummings tries out everything. We have, for instance, impressionism, a style invented by Stephen Crane and developed by Joseph Conrad, in which the impressions are recorded as falling on the consciousness of the narrator. This is a view of the jail at Creil:
A wall with many bars fixed across one minute opening. At the opening a dozen,fifteen,grins. Upon the bars hands,scraggy and bluishly white. Through the bars stretchings of lean arms,incessant stretchings. The grins leap at the window,hands belonging to them catch hold,arms belonging to them stretch in my direction. . .an instant;then new grins leap from behind and knock off the first grins which go down with a fragile crashing like glass smashed : hands wither and break,arms streak out of sight,sucked inward.
That style carried further can become interior monologue, a very good means for conveying unusual states of mind. Here is the narrator, dazed by his sudden release, leaving La Ferté-Macé by train:
A wee tiny absurd whistle coming from nowhere,from outside of me. Two men opposite. Jolt. A few houses a fence a wall a bit of neige float foolishly by and through a window. These gentlemen in my compartment do not seem to know that La Misère exists. They are talking politics. Thinking that I don’t understand. By Jesus,that’s a good one. “Pardon me,gentlemen,but does one change at the next station for Paris?” Surprised. I thought so.
He tries out his synaesthetic style, in which he merges, linguistically, the words which apply to one of the senses with those which apply to another (the sort of writing better known in some of his poems, such as “i was sitting in mcsorley’s”). For example, the description of C.’s first observation of the prison chapel when the Surveillant leads him through it in the darkness.
The shrinking light which my guide held ha
d become suddenly minute;it was beating,senseless and futile,with shrill fists upon a thick enormous moisture of gloom. To the left and right through lean oblongs of stained glass burst dirty burglars of moonlight. The clammy stupid distance uttered dimly an uncanny conflict—the mutterless tumbling of brutish shadows. A crowding ooze battled with my lungs. My nostrils fought against the monstrous atmospheric slime which hugged a sweet unpleasant odour. Staring ahead,I gradually disinterred the pale carrion of the darkness—an altar. . . .
There are passages, too, as we have seen, that are somewhat like set pieces, done in variations of his cubist style—the description of the roadside crucifix and the culminating portions of each of his views of a Delectable Mountain.
It is this linguistic display, along with the allusions to Pilgrim’s Progress and the hints of a mythic dimension, that takes The Enormous Room out of the humble category of the war memoir and that keeps it out of the workaday category of the realistic novel. It is then merely a prose work of literary art. There had never been anything quite like it before and there has never been anything like it since.
Temple University
September 1976
* * *
1. Unpublished letter, 18 April 1917, in the Cummings collection of the Harvard Library.
2. I am grateful to William Slater Brown for his reminiscences of the months that he spent in France with Cummings.
3. Charles Norman, E. E. Cummings the Magic Maker (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972), pp. 83–88, prints in full the three letters Brown wrote which troubled the censors.
4. Unpublished notes in the Cummings collection, Harvard Library.
A Note on The Enormous Room
GEORGE JAMES FIRMAGE
Partial drafts of seven chapters, three complete fair copies, and two carbon copies of The Enormous Room manuscript have survived the half century since the book’s publication. A detailed examination of these drafts and copies and the family correspondence in The Houghton Library, Harvard University, and the Clifton Waller Barrett Library, University of Virginia, reveal that the earliest of the drafts—a nine-page version of Chapter One typed on the family typewriter and heavily corrected in the author’s hand1—was probably written in Cambridge, Massachusetts, sometime after Cummings’ return to the United States from La Ferté-Macé on New Year’s Day 1918 and before his departure two months later for New York City to find living quarters of his own. At least one thing is certain: on March 5, 1918, Cummings reported from New York to his father in Cambridge “that [the manuscript] progresses gradually,tho’possibly not at the 20th C[entury] L[i]m[i]t[e]d speed which you dictaphone my so-called conscience.” In his reply of the nineteenth, the author’s father reminded his son of “the manuscript you contracted to produce as rapidly as circumstances would permit. . . . But I daresay your silence covers a multitude of type-written pages. With which oracular utterance, I leave you to your conscience. . . .”2
While little progress was made on the manuscript itself during the months that followed, William Slater Brown’s return to the United States on March 12, 1918 and his reunion with Cummings early in May did give the fellow-prisoners an opportunity to talk at length about their experience in La Ferté-Macé. “W,” Cummings wrote to his father on May 8, “is very amusing noting down the thousand et one incidents of ex-convictdom in the course of let us say a two hour conversation. . . .Soon I shall have a pretty fair skeleton on which to erect as I see fit.” But any plans he may have had to continue his work had to be abandoned when he was drafted and, on July 26, left for Camp Devens, Massachusetts. Cummings was stationed at Camp Devens until his discharge on January 18 the following year.
There does not appear to be any further mention of the manuscript in the family correspondence until November 3, 1919 when, in a letter to his mother, Cummings reports that “The ‘French Notes’ are by no means in their final shape,but should near it presently.” This statement apparently raised hopes in Cambridge for the book’s early completion, so much so that on the twenty-fifth of the month, the author was obliged to explain:
As for the Story Of The Great War Seen From The Windows Of Nowhere,please don’t expect a speedy conclusion or rather completion of this narrative;for this reason : that in consenting( it almost amounted to that )to “do the thing up” I did not forego my prerogative as artist,to wit—the making of every paragraph a thing which seemed good to me,in the same way that a “crazy-quilt” is made so that every inch of it seems good to me. And so that if you put your hand over one inch,the other inches lose in force. And so that in every inch there is a binding rhythm which integrates the whole thing and makes it a single moving ThingInItself.—Not that I am held up in my story,but simply that progress is slow. I am sure the result will say( eventually that is ) that no other method was possible or to be considered. It is not a question of cold facts per se. That is merely a fabric : to put this fabric at the mercy of An Everlasting Rhythm is somethingelse.
Cummings’ other interests, particularly an opportunity to enter a painting in the Spring 1920 exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, further delayed his work on the manuscript. “Until I get ready for the Independent,” he wrote his mother on January 29, “the French notes will remain( as all else )in the background.” And there the manuscript remained until June 26 when his father wrote to report the safe return of Cummings’ mother from a visit to New York and to confirm an offer to finance a trip to South America for his son and Slater Brown. “I have not had time,” Dr. Cummings noted, “to look at the French notes which your mother brought back. If you will only put those in shape for publication, I will show you how the record of one voyage can be made to pay the cost of another.”
By the middle of July 1920 the author was back with his family in Cambridge and, by August 1, in Silver Lake with Brown working on the “French notes.” It seems likely that a complete rough draft of the book was ready sometime in September; for when Cummings’ father and mother went back to Cambridge at the end of that month, they took with them the final draft of the first four chapters.3
On October 4, Dr. Cummings wrote:
I am sending you 21 pages of your own manuscript and the 33 pages of fair copy. We will try to ship you some more tomorrow night. You will observe that I am retaining one of the fair copies. Miss [Mary J.] MacDonald and I hope that your rather miscropic [microscopic] interlinear notes have been interpreted with some degree of success.
The initial installment of the first “fair copy” and the corresponding pages of the final draft reached Silver Lake by October 6 when Cummings wrote to say “thanks for your kind not to say appreciative efforts! . . . Also the paper( which is first-rate )and the MS. I have already got some 30 more pages typewritten, which I will send you when Miss MacDonald and yourself have waded through the original as far as La Ferté-Macé Itself.” Then on the eighteenth Cummings informed his father:
Last night,you will be pleased to learn,I completed the final chapter of my French notes. Not that it,as well as others,will not have to be worked over. Nor that certain insertions will not have to happen here and there.
As I expect to leave in a few days,please don’t send any more copy than you have already placed on the way. The two chapters which I have done since you left with Mother a few days since make together sixteen pages. I may place another chapter after these,summing up my impressions in general—but I doubt it. In any event there is nothing more to be done till I can work over the copy as a whole in New York—I mean the entire book,or all the chapters together.
If I don’t find any more MS in today’s mail, no matter at all : in fact,just as well.
Three days later, on October 21, Brown and Cummings left Silver Lake for Cambridge and, after a brief visit, returned to New York where Cummings moved in with his friend and Harvard classmate John Dos Passos.
By the eighteenth of November, Dr. Cummings was able to report that he an
d Miss MacDonald—a typist for the World Peace Foundation of which the author’s father was then General Secretary and on the back of whose discarded letterhead most of the first fair copy of the manuscript had been typed—“are getting about through with your French notes.” Without the chapter entitled “Jean Le Nègre,” which Cummings had taken with him to New York, “there will be about 250 pages of our fair copy.” The initial typing of all but the missing chapter was finished by the end of the month; and sometime between the first and the fourteenth of December, the missing chapter itself was complete, copied and posted to the author in New York. In this first “fair copy” of the manuscript, the nineteen pages devoted to “Jean Le Nègre” are numbered “208a” to “208s.”4
Cummings apparently read through the “fair copy” of the manuscript almost at once, correcting, amending, and altering as he went along. By the twenty-eighth of December at least some of the corrected copy must have been sent to Dr. Cummings for the latter to write that, following a visit to the Boston publishers Ginn and Company, “we have started in making two copies according to . . . specifications” they had given him.
The second “fair copy,” incorporating all of the author’s earlier corrections and alterations, was probably completed by February 1, 1921 when the author’s father wrote to suggest that Cummings contact Will D. Howe, “formerly of Harcourt, Brace & Howe, and now of Scribner’s,” with whom Dr. Cummings had discussed the as yet untitled manuscript. Whether Cummings got in touch with Howe or any other publisher is not recorded. All we know for certain is that by the end of February the author and his friend Dos Passos had made plans to go to Paris via Lisbon and Madrid; and after a brief visit to Cambridge, they sailed for Portugal on the sixteenth of March. The second “fair copy” of the manuscript, to which Cummings had added some final revisions5 and which Brown wanted to read, was left in the latter’s care with instructions to forward the corrected copy, together with “two note-books, containing drawings à propos,” by registered mail to the author’s father, who received them sometime after the twenty-sixth of March.
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