The Enormous Room
by E. E. Cummings 
On This Page
Description
"In 1917, after the entry of America into World War I, E. E. Cummings, arecent graduate of Harvard College, volunteered to serve on an ambulance corps in France. Arrived in Paris with a new friend, William Slater Brown, the two young men set about living it up in the big city before heading off to their assignment. Once in the field, they wrote irreverent letters about their experiences which attracted the attention of the censors and ultimately led to their arrest. They were held for months show more in a military detention camp, sharing a single large room with a host of fellow detainees. It is this experience that Cummings relates in lightly fictionalized form in The Enormous Room, a book in which a tale of woe becomes an occasion of exuberant mischief. A free-spirited novel that displays the same formal swagger as Cummings' poems, a stinging denunciation of the stupidity of military authority, and a precursor to later books like Catch-22 and MASH, Cummings' novel is an audacious, uninhibited, lyrical, and lasting contribution to American literature"-- show lessTags
Recommendations
Member Reviews
Let me start by saying that The Enormous Room is not exactly 'fun' to read, despite its youthful charms. This is the only extended work of prose that Cummings ever published, yet he so often blurs the line between verse and prose, making for a remarkably modernist flavor.
The Enormous Room is a fictitious retelling of Cummings' real life experience being incarcerated in a French military detention camp for vaguely defined traitorous behavior during the first World War. There is very little narrative structure or sequence of events, but rather a series of portraits of his fellow inmates, descriptions of the camp itself, and particular events that broke up his monotonous days of pain and drudgery.
It is through these whimsical, lively show more portraits that Cummings critiques his idiotic captors: the cops, the camp guards and bureaucratic leaders, and the French government as a whole. The hommes et femmes entombed in La Ferté-Macéhe have not actually be tried for anything. This is simply a way-station they are held in until their cases can be brought in front of a traveling board of judges. A dark cloud hangs over everyone, as they wonder if they will be released with little explanation, or be sent to an 'actual' prison for the duration of the war.
Despite these critiques, Cummings portrays this time as wildly fulfilling and joyous. Cummings can not think of a better group of people to spend the war with than the rejects and causalities of the military. The act of committing to his principles and sticking by his friend (only referred to as B) releases him from the expectations of a system he hates. Indeed, his rose colored glasses can be so powerful as to make the reader forget the grim reality of his circumstances: the overflowing buckets of human waste, the dank, cold, and dark solitary confinement cells, the greasy lukewarm soup, and the abusive guards. It is here the book shows its strongest ability: to take the hellscape of imprisonment and turn it into a farcical adventure story.
If nothing else, The Enormous Room's buoyant, youthful energy provides an unusual perspective on the horror of detention. That being said, the text itself is difficult to read. I'm sure you'd get more out of it if you had a rudimentary knowledge of French, because it's littered everywhere, whole paragraphs of it. It takes the wind out of Cummings' wry sense of humor when you are required to translate every other sentence. There's also tons of references to the The Pilgrims Progress, a work that I am unfamiliar with. It's entirely possible that my struggles with the The Enormous Room fall mostly upon my own ignorance of its style and substance. C'est la vie. show less
The Enormous Room is a fictitious retelling of Cummings' real life experience being incarcerated in a French military detention camp for vaguely defined traitorous behavior during the first World War. There is very little narrative structure or sequence of events, but rather a series of portraits of his fellow inmates, descriptions of the camp itself, and particular events that broke up his monotonous days of pain and drudgery.
It is through these whimsical, lively show more portraits that Cummings critiques his idiotic captors: the cops, the camp guards and bureaucratic leaders, and the French government as a whole. The hommes et femmes entombed in La Ferté-Macéhe have not actually be tried for anything. This is simply a way-station they are held in until their cases can be brought in front of a traveling board of judges. A dark cloud hangs over everyone, as they wonder if they will be released with little explanation, or be sent to an 'actual' prison for the duration of the war.
Despite these critiques, Cummings portrays this time as wildly fulfilling and joyous. Cummings can not think of a better group of people to spend the war with than the rejects and causalities of the military. The act of committing to his principles and sticking by his friend (only referred to as B) releases him from the expectations of a system he hates. Indeed, his rose colored glasses can be so powerful as to make the reader forget the grim reality of his circumstances: the overflowing buckets of human waste, the dank, cold, and dark solitary confinement cells, the greasy lukewarm soup, and the abusive guards. It is here the book shows its strongest ability: to take the hellscape of imprisonment and turn it into a farcical adventure story.
If nothing else, The Enormous Room's buoyant, youthful energy provides an unusual perspective on the horror of detention. That being said, the text itself is difficult to read. I'm sure you'd get more out of it if you had a rudimentary knowledge of French, because it's littered everywhere, whole paragraphs of it. It takes the wind out of Cummings' wry sense of humor when you are required to translate every other sentence. There's also tons of references to the The Pilgrims Progress, a work that I am unfamiliar with. It's entirely possible that my struggles with the The Enormous Room fall mostly upon my own ignorance of its style and substance. C'est la vie. show less
Written when Cummings was very young, this records his experience of internment in France towards the end of WW1. It is very conciously stylised, both in the writing (perhaps not too surprising given he went on to make his name as a poet) and in his approach to his subject matter. His constant elegantly constructed jibes at the stupidity and brutish pettiness of the system and those running it complement an expressed positive delight in his circumstances in spite of their unpleasantness. This in turn underpins his appreciation of those he finds himself imprisoned with. His vignettes of these characters form the core of the book and he achieves what might be thought impossible: to express what seems to be a genuine admiration and respect show more of his fellow prisoners without hiding the many challenging aspects of their character and behaviour. The skill with which he pulls together all these varying elements is what makes this book. The challenge is to follow all the different characters under their various - and varying - apellations through Cummings' intricately constructed sentances. Quite hard work but ultimately rewarding for its positive affirmation of humanity and the skill of the writing. 3 October 2018. show less
The story is simple: Cummings and a good friend, Brown, moral objectors to the war, were assigned as ambulance drivers in France during WWI. They are a couple of free spirits, comfortable in French after a month or so lying around Paris and enjoying all that it had to offer, and as such, they run right up against their commanding officer who believes that the Americans are there to teach the French how to do everything from winning the war to living their lives. Cummings and Brown find their American colleagues dense and thoroughly unexciting and spend all of their spare time with the French workers in the group. They even apply to join the French airforce, but express a reluctance to kill Germans. Following on this, Brown reports in show more letters home the defeatist and exhausted attitude of many of the French troops; for this he is arrested by the French authorities, and so is Cummings for no other reason than that he is Brown's best friend, and in this, Cummings sees the hand of their commanding officer. The book describes Cummings's voyage to prison, where he is reunited with Brown, and then details their daily lives (they were held through the fall of 1917), but most especially describes the wealth of interesting characters with whom they live in one enormous room. The third part of the book describes their separation when Brown was transferred to another prison for the duration of the war, and Cummings was set free to return to the USA.
The book is not so much a classic war memoir, as it is a masterpiece celebrating the power and worth of the individual against the moral blindness and ineptitude of almost any kind of authority, and especially any associated with the government of France. Cummings ranks, in order of obtuseness and stupidity, the gendarmes of France at the bottom, just underneath the plantons, the guards of the prison who are soldiers not on active duty. Cummings misses no opportunity to ridicule the authorities that would "safeguard" the integrity of the country by arresting almost any of the people he meets in the enormous room (small time crooks, pimps, some arrested simply because of their foreign nationalities, some clearly mentally deficient) against those same authorities, or that same system, sending millions to their deaths in a pointless war.
The style of writing is wonderful. Cummings presents everything as a great lark. He is delighted beyond measure with being arrested and taken out of the hated ambulance battalion. He thinks his transit prison cell, with its stinking toilet pail, is wonderful; he savours his freedom of thought and actions within his cell. At no single point does he bemoan his fate (except towards the end with Brown is transferred to another prison, but again that is the loss of his friend), even when describing the indescribably foul food and soup that they daily received in the prison, and when there was no indication of how or when their futures might be decided by the authorities.
The writing style is also a joy. This, apparently, was the first modern novel to include foreign-language phrases, in this case, French. But more intriguing is Cummings's use of language to describe things. The way, for instance, he uses and strings together unexpected similes:
The shrinking light which my guide held had become suddenly minute;it was beating, senseless and futile,with small 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 bought against the monstrous atmospheric slime which hugged a sweet unpleasant odour. Staring ahead,I gradually disinterred the pale carrion of the darkness–an altar.
[The Commission] told me...that my friend was a criminal...and I told it with a great deal of well-chose politeness that I disagreed. In telling how and why I disagreed I think I managed to shove my shovel-shaped imagination under the refuse of their intellects. At least once or twice.
The punctuation reproduced here is also accurate to the book: Cummings left no space after a comma or semi-colon, thus giving a sense of the words moving more quickly together.
The real joy is the central part of the book in which Cummings describes characters with whom he and Brown shared the enormous room. It is hard to imagine a more disparate group, and he and Brown assigned wonderful names to each and every one of them: The Zulu, The Machine-Fixer, Mexique, The Young Skipper, The Washing Machine Man, Jean Le Negre, Bill the Hollander, The Clever Man, The Schoolmaster, Orange Man, The Silent Man, The Turk, The Young Russian, The Barber, Garibaldi, The Holland Skipper, Judas, The Skipper, Afrique, Young Pole, Emile the Bum, and others. Each is described through an impressive wealth of detail and imagination concerning physical appearance and actions so that each comes very much alive as an individual. And this is Cummings's central theme: the value and the depth that there are within each individual, even those who live on the margins of society and who have no "future" in terms of that society, because it is the individual worth that matters, not the trappings or categories of artificial society and government structures. They are not all nice people, but in each of them, through Cummings's descriptions, you get a glimpse of the complex histories, fears, and hopes that comprise each and every individual person. The following perhaps best summarizes Cummings's feelings:
Despite their natural puzzlement [at Brown and Cummings collecting various coloured objects] everyone (plantons excepted) was extraordinarily kind and brought us often valuable additions to our chromatic collection. Had I,at this moment and in the city of New York,the complete confidence of one-twentieth as many human beings I should not be so inclined to consider the Great American Public as the most aesthetically incapable organization ever created for the purpose of perpetuating defunct ideals and ideas. But of course The Great American Public has a handicap which my friends at Le Perté did not as rule have–education. Let no one sound his indignant yawp at this. I refer to the fact that,for an educated gent or lady,to create is first of all to destroy–that there is and can be no such thing as authentic art until the bons trucs(whereby we are taught to see and imitate on canvas and in stone and by words this so-called world) are entirely and thoroughly and perfectly annihilated by that vast and painful process of Unthinking which may result in a minute bit of purely personal Feeling. Which minute bit is Art.
A book that I thoroughly enjoyed. show less
The book is not so much a classic war memoir, as it is a masterpiece celebrating the power and worth of the individual against the moral blindness and ineptitude of almost any kind of authority, and especially any associated with the government of France. Cummings ranks, in order of obtuseness and stupidity, the gendarmes of France at the bottom, just underneath the plantons, the guards of the prison who are soldiers not on active duty. Cummings misses no opportunity to ridicule the authorities that would "safeguard" the integrity of the country by arresting almost any of the people he meets in the enormous room (small time crooks, pimps, some arrested simply because of their foreign nationalities, some clearly mentally deficient) against those same authorities, or that same system, sending millions to their deaths in a pointless war.
The style of writing is wonderful. Cummings presents everything as a great lark. He is delighted beyond measure with being arrested and taken out of the hated ambulance battalion. He thinks his transit prison cell, with its stinking toilet pail, is wonderful; he savours his freedom of thought and actions within his cell. At no single point does he bemoan his fate (except towards the end with Brown is transferred to another prison, but again that is the loss of his friend), even when describing the indescribably foul food and soup that they daily received in the prison, and when there was no indication of how or when their futures might be decided by the authorities.
The writing style is also a joy. This, apparently, was the first modern novel to include foreign-language phrases, in this case, French. But more intriguing is Cummings's use of language to describe things. The way, for instance, he uses and strings together unexpected similes:
The shrinking light which my guide held had become suddenly minute;it was beating, senseless and futile,with small 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 bought against the monstrous atmospheric slime which hugged a sweet unpleasant odour. Staring ahead,I gradually disinterred the pale carrion of the darkness–an altar.
[The Commission] told me...that my friend was a criminal...and I told it with a great deal of well-chose politeness that I disagreed. In telling how and why I disagreed I think I managed to shove my shovel-shaped imagination under the refuse of their intellects. At least once or twice.
The punctuation reproduced here is also accurate to the book: Cummings left no space after a comma or semi-colon, thus giving a sense of the words moving more quickly together.
The real joy is the central part of the book in which Cummings describes characters with whom he and Brown shared the enormous room. It is hard to imagine a more disparate group, and he and Brown assigned wonderful names to each and every one of them: The Zulu, The Machine-Fixer, Mexique, The Young Skipper, The Washing Machine Man, Jean Le Negre, Bill the Hollander, The Clever Man, The Schoolmaster, Orange Man, The Silent Man, The Turk, The Young Russian, The Barber, Garibaldi, The Holland Skipper, Judas, The Skipper, Afrique, Young Pole, Emile the Bum, and others. Each is described through an impressive wealth of detail and imagination concerning physical appearance and actions so that each comes very much alive as an individual. And this is Cummings's central theme: the value and the depth that there are within each individual, even those who live on the margins of society and who have no "future" in terms of that society, because it is the individual worth that matters, not the trappings or categories of artificial society and government structures. They are not all nice people, but in each of them, through Cummings's descriptions, you get a glimpse of the complex histories, fears, and hopes that comprise each and every individual person. The following perhaps best summarizes Cummings's feelings:
Despite their natural puzzlement [at Brown and Cummings collecting various coloured objects] everyone (plantons excepted) was extraordinarily kind and brought us often valuable additions to our chromatic collection. Had I,at this moment and in the city of New York,the complete confidence of one-twentieth as many human beings I should not be so inclined to consider the Great American Public as the most aesthetically incapable organization ever created for the purpose of perpetuating defunct ideals and ideas. But of course The Great American Public has a handicap which my friends at Le Perté did not as rule have–education. Let no one sound his indignant yawp at this. I refer to the fact that,for an educated gent or lady,to create is first of all to destroy–that there is and can be no such thing as authentic art until the bons trucs(whereby we are taught to see and imitate on canvas and in stone and by words this so-called world) are entirely and thoroughly and perfectly annihilated by that vast and painful process of Unthinking which may result in a minute bit of purely personal Feeling. Which minute bit is Art.
A book that I thoroughly enjoyed. show less
I found e.e. cumming's novel "The Enormous Room" to be a challenging and dull read.
It's an autobiographical story about the time he was imprisoned in France following his service as an ambulance driver during World War I for (erroneous) suspicions of treason.
He is transported to a series of prisons where he meets a variety of people, which he describes in great detail, before his eventual release four months later.
I was just bored by this book -- which has dense prose and plenty of French sprinkled through it -- my mind kept wandering and I frequently was wondering if I missed something that makes this tale interesting. I'm glad cummings mostly stuck to poetry.
It's an autobiographical story about the time he was imprisoned in France following his service as an ambulance driver during World War I for (erroneous) suspicions of treason.
He is transported to a series of prisons where he meets a variety of people, which he describes in great detail, before his eventual release four months later.
I was just bored by this book -- which has dense prose and plenty of French sprinkled through it -- my mind kept wandering and I frequently was wondering if I missed something that makes this tale interesting. I'm glad cummings mostly stuck to poetry.
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 show more 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." show less
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 show more 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." show less
In lists of books that are “forgotten,” I would not be surprised to see this one. However, its so “forgotten” that I think even such lists would not include it. Straightaway, right now, I want to tell you that I give this five stars and will include it in my favorites. That’s “permanent collection” and “highly necessary” level fiction.
Subversive, aesthetic, heartbreaking, delightful.
Subversive, aesthetic, heartbreaking, delightful.
This autobiographical tale of the four months E E Cummings spent in a French jail during the First World War is told in a strange way. E E Cummings paints vivid character portraits of the other prisons and the guards. The Enormous Room, that is the prisoner's dormitory. There is a lot of French in the book and this was sometimes irritating and the structure of the sentences made reading a chore at times.
Members
- Recently Added By
Lists
1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die
1,448 works; 1,132 members
Fiction Set Primarily in a Prison
52 works; 22 members
Ten Books That Have Stayed With Me
160 works; 29 members
THE WAR ROOM
813 works; 24 members
Global Reads: Books Set in Western Europe
186 works; 10 members
Five star books
1,755 works; 107 members
What are your favourite books?
121 works; 11 members
Best Books of the 20th Century
193 works; 5 members
Favorite Books from the 1920s
33 works; 3 members
Modernism
140 works; 8 members
American Lit for Eng 11 Research Project
368 works; 6 members
Favourite Books
1,817 works; 316 members
LibraryThingers' 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die
442 works; 30 members
Books with racist aspects you wished you had been warned about
29 works; 10 members
Books Read in 2004
200 works; 7 members
1920s
141 works; 6 members
In and About the 1920s
181 works; 31 members
1,001 BYMRBYD Concensus
723 works; 27 members
My TBR
371 works; 3 members
For Further Reading: A List of 160 Novels from 15 Literatures
160 works; 4 members
World War I books
32 works; 8 members
War Literature
101 works; 19 members
Vlogbrothers Book Recommendations
307 works; 4 members
Talk Discussions
Past Discussions
Group Read, August 2022: The Enormous Room in 1001 Books to read before you die (August 2022)
Author Information
194+ Works 14,577 Members
E. E. Cummings has a Legacy Library. Legacy libraries are the personal libraries of famous readers, entered by LibraryThing members from the Legacy Libraries group.
Some Editions
Awards and Honors
Series
Belongs to Publisher Series
Work Relationships
Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- The Enormous Room
- Original title
- The Enormous Room
- Original publication date
- 1922
- People/Characters
- e. e. cummings; Abaddon
- Important events
- World War I
- First words
- We had succeeded, my friend B. and I, in dispensing with almost three of our six months' engagement as Conducteurs Volontaires, Section Sanitaire Vingt-et-Un, Ambulance Norton Harjes, Croix Rouge Americaine, and at the Moment... (show all) which subsequent experience served to capitalise had just finished the unlovely job of cleaning and greasing (mettoyer is the proper word) the own private flivver of the chef de section, a gentleman by the convenient name of Mr A.
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)The tall, impossibly tall, incomparably tall, city shoulderingly upwards into hard sunlight leaned a little through the octaves of its parallel edges, leaningly strode upwards into firm, hard, snowy sunlight; the noises of America nearingly throbbed with smokes and hurrying dots which are men and which are women and which are things new and curious and hard and strange and vibrant and immense, lifting with a great ondulous stride firmly into immortal sunlight . . .
- Original language*
- English
*Some information comes from Common Knowledge in other languages. Click "Edit" for more information.
Classifications
Statistics
- Members
- 1,662
- Popularity
- 13,405
- Reviews
- 30
- Rating
- (3.72)
- Languages
- 8 — Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish
- Media
- Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 101
- UPCs
- 2
- ASINs
- 41