The Enormous Room by E.E. Cummings
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

War-time Japes

The Enormous Room, the fictionalised account of Cummings's arrest and incarceration by the French on charges of sedition during WWI, reads like a Billy Bunter story. The protagonist is obnoxious and endearing in about equal measure.

The various French authorities (and for that matter American, Cummings accommodates everyone), from the snobbish regional police chief to his medievally minded jailers are more or less treated with the disdain a clever 12 year old feels, but rarely shows, for his boarding school headmaster.

But Cummings does show what he feels on every possible occasion. One finds it necessary to be more English than the English if sufficiently provoked, '"Very well, gentlemen," I said. "You will allow me to tell you something." (I was beet-colored.) "In America that sort of thing isn't done."' His Back Bay breeding can't be faulted for lack of pluck.

Cummings was nothing if not an all-appreciating aesthete: "The door was massively made, all of iron or steel I should think. It delighted me. The can excited my curiosity. I looked over the edge of it. At the bottom reposefully lay a new human turd." Quickly, however, Cummings engages more fully with his Kafka-esque situation. He doesn't know why he has been arrested or where he is to be detained. But even then the mystery is another opportunity for appreciative admiration, "everything seemed ridiculously suppressed, beautifully abnormal, deliciously insane."

The adventures in a French underworld of deserters, spies, war prisoners, and various unfortunates continue like a sequel to the Count of Monte Cristo. Cummings never loses his Bostonian noblesse oblige and sang froid : "I contemplate the bowl which contemplates me. A glaze of greenish grease seals the mystery of its content, I induce two fingers to penetrate the seal. They bring me up a flat sliver of cabbage and a large, hard, thoughtful, solemn, uncooked bean. To pour the water off (it is warmish and sticky) without committing a nuisance is to lift the cover off Ça Pue. I did."

And of course one's true calling can never be denied even in extreme duress: Lacking a pencil or other suitable drawing instrument, he must make do: "So I took matches, burnt, and with just 60 of them wrote the first stanza of a ballade. To-morrow I will write the second. Day after to-morrow the third.Next day the refrain. After—oh, well." The finest etiquette must always be observed, even, no perhaps especially, when it serves no social purpose: "I did not sing out loud, simply because the moon was like a mademoiselle, and I did not want to offend the moon."

The Enormous Room is, I believe, Cummings first literary effort. It is a practice piece in sustained irony that suggests much about where he is going and some of where he did not. An interesting, periodically entertaining, piece of dark humour. And probably excellent therapy for his PTSD.

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