The Enormous Room (1922)

While volunteering as ambulance drivers during WWI, Cummings and a friend of his ran afoul of the French government as suspicious characters. They were suspicious because they spent more time with the French than with their American compatriots, and because Cummings' friend (referred to in the book as B.) had mentioned rumors of various French plots in his letters home. Cummings' close association with B. was enough to get him hauled in alongside B. when the gendarmes came to collect him.

The book proceeds mostly chronologically for the first part, which talks of being sent to various holding facilities and then being gendarme-escorted to the site of the titular Enormous Room at La Ferte Mace (I have no idea how to do accents on the Mac so you'll have to imagine them). Once he's done describing his first day or so there, the narrative shifts to a sort of vignette format, where he talks about his fellow captives and various happenings in their imprisoned lives. He says there was really no other way to do it, as there ceased to be days once he was firmly ensconced there - everything was really just an endless present until the day he was released.

He and B. were held for 4 months, at which point B. was sent on to an official prison and Cummings was released to the American embassy and bundled off to America. (His family had at first not known his whereabouts, and then were told he had been lost at sea. Intervention from the American government got him released instead of sent off to a French town to be watched carefully for the rest of the war.)

The chronological portion was quite easy reading, but the second part was a little more difficult because of the lack of a clear structure. Cummings likes to use words in his own way - for example, he describes a guard as resembling a rooster and making a sort of "uh-ah" sound as he walks. A few paragraphs later he says, "Behind me the bedslippered rooster uhahingly shuffled." Between that and the copious amounts of French he leaves untranslated in the book, it can occasionally be difficult reading. If you're proficient in the language it would be no problem, of course, but I'm not and I often read away from a computer and easy translation. I had to use my minimal knowledge and whatever cognates I could find to get the gist of some of the conversations.

Recommended for: people who hate governments, fans of linguistic flexibility and dry humor, and people who have wondered what it's like to live in a single room with a bunch of men, fleas, and buckets to pee in.

Quote (I had a hard time choosing, there were a lot of good ones):
"...worst of all, the majority of these dark criminals who had 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 it into the La Fertes of that mighty nation upon some, at least, of whose public buildings it seems to me that I remember reading: Liberte. Egalite. Fraternite." ( )

Apparently, the young Edward Estlin Cummings spent a few months in a French prison camp during World War I. The Enormous Room is a fictionalized (or perhaps completely true) account of that life event.

The French authorities seize Cummings and his friend - fellow writer William Slater Brown (known as B. in the novel) - from their camp, where they work for an ambulance company during the War. Allegedly, B. had written a letter considered pro-German and as a result is labeled a spy. Cummings is arrested, simply because of his close friendship with B.

Once in the prison camp, Cummings casually and with a certain amount of amusement, describes the deplorable conditions of the prison and then spends nearly two-thirds of the novel simply cataloging the various characters in which he comes in contact. While some of the language is lovely and moments of sincerity do occasionally shine through, the overall tone is condescending, sneering, sometimes racist, and often ethnically bigoted (for example, Cummings had a particular dislike of Belgians, for some unknown reason). And I do realize this was published in 1922, but it’s worth pointing out.

My overall reaction to this was “ick,” but I can see an argument being made that the better portions of the novel illustrate the perseverance of the human spirit and the ability to find beauty and charm in such an unlikely place. Definitely not for me, but maybe for someone else. ( )

This is an account of a five months detention in a French prison in1917 because of a mistake. Cummings in this book is young and his future poetic style only bobs up in his prose foreshadowingly. I think he exaggerated the awfulness of onditions in the prison. ( )

THE POET, WHILE SERVING IN THE AMBULANCE CORPS IN WWI WAS INTERNED BY MISTAKE. THIS ACCOUNT OF HIS INTERNMENT IS A NEW EDITION REVISED FROM HIS PAPERS. HIS PROSE IN THIS BOOK WAS INFLUENTIAL ON MANY AUTHORS OF THE '20S INCLUDING POWELL. ( )

While Cummings is great with stringing words together, the re-telling of his experience is a bit tedious. ( )