Review of EE Cummings the Enormous Room

Review of EE Cummings the Enormous Room

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I recently read EE Cummings’s anti-war novel the “Enormous Room” as part of my reading the classics efforts.  EE Cummings is best known for his wonderful and quirky poems but he wrote many other works during his prolific literary career in the the early to mid-20th century.

This book was written based on his experience as a prisoner in a French prison during World War 1.  He had gone to France to serve as an ambulance driver and got into trouble with the French authorities because of anti-war comments made by his fellow American friend.  He served three months in a detention camp filled with mostly foreigners who had been accused of espionage, hampering the war effort, or associating with people so accused.  He was never formally charged and after three months was released.

Co-Piot provided some more background information:

“E.E. Cummings’ The Enormous Room is indeed rooted in his real-life experiences during World War I. Here’s what I found:

Cummings’ Role in the War and Imprisonment: During World War I, Cummings volunteered as an ambulance driver for the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps in France. However, his service was cut short when he and his friend William Slater Brown were arrested by French authorities. They  were suspected of espionage due to Brown’s anti-war sentiments expressed in letters. Cummings, who stood by his friend, was detained at the La Ferté-Macé internment camp for over three months.  This harrowing experience became the foundation for The Enormous Room, where he vividly recounts his
time in captivity and critiques bureaucracy and Authoritarianism”

I found his critique of authoritarianism,  bureaucracy,  the French prison system, and anti-war sentiments to be still quite relevant over one hundred years later. His novel is filled with details about the many different prisoners from all over the world he met and became friends with during his stay in the French detention center.  The novel also filled my literary references as EE Cummings studied classics at Harvard before volunteering to go to France to help in the war effort as an ambulance driver.  He quotes Dante’s Divine Comedy, and Bunyan’s The Pilgrims Progress throughout the novel, particularly calling some of his fellow prisoners “delectable mountains” referencing their defiance of the petty and absurd rules of the prison.

In reading the classics, one thing that can be offputting to modern English readers is the liberal use of untranslated foreign language phrases. The Enormous Room is set in a French prison in World War 1. The writer uses a lot of untranslated French phrases throughout. Most modern literature provides English translations in parentheses of foreign phrases.  Older literature usually does not not put translations of foreign text assuming perhaps that their readers would understand the foreign phrases or skip over them.

Fortunately we now have Kindle and Kindle does offer translations on the fly which is a very useful feature as well as dictionary definitions.

Of course, the other problem that I have addressed elsewhere is the causal racism, sexism etc in much older literature which can be off-putting to modern readers.  The solution is to simply note it, and read on taking into account the novel or story was written in the context of its time when racism and sexism were just not concerns for most writers or readers.

In this novel, he befriends three African prisoners and discusses how one of the prisoners had been imprisoned due to the racist attitude of the police against Africans residing in France.

The prison had a women’s section and a male section, and fraternization was prohibited but still occurred.  Many of the women prisoners had been imprisoned for suspected prostitution and carried out that trade in prison.  Several of the male prisoners had been imprisoned for being pimps, and some for smuggling and other crimes.

The conditions in the prison were quite stark and brutal. All the prisoners slept in one large “enormous room” that contained around 100 prisoners at a time.  they were allowed out once a day to go for a walk in the yard and were assigned chores His duty was as a water carrier taking water from a communal well and taking it to the kitchen where they prepared soup for the prisoners. Prisoners were fed twice a day soup and bread for the most part, and horrid coffee in the morning.   He did get one cup of real coffee per day from the cook grateful for his assistance in hauling water and helping in the Kitchen from time to time.  Prisoners were able to afford wine cigarettes and chocolate from the Canteen.

Most prisoners lost a lot of weight, and many became sick from scurvy and STDs picked up from visiting the women prisoners or contracted before their arrival.  A few had TB and other serious illnesses.  The doctor was a bit of a quack and did not have adequate supplies.

Most prisoners stayed for three to four months before the Commission in charge decided to either send them to a real prison after a trial or release them.  EE Cummins was released and with the help of the US Embassy, allowed to leave France without any charges ever being filed against him.

Quotes from The Enormous Room

> “To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.”

“I imagine that yes is the only living thing.”

> “Humanity I love you because when you’re hard up you pawn your intelligence
to buy a drink.”

E.E. Cummings: A Brief Biography

Full Name: Edward Estlin Cummings

Born: October 14, 1894, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

Died: September 3, 1962, in North Conway, New Hampshire, USA

Education: Cummings graduated from Harvard University with a B.A. in  Classics in 1915 and an M.A. in 1916.

Career Highlights:

Early Life:

Cummings was born into a well-educated, upper-class family in Cambridge, Massachusetts1. His father was a professor at Harvard University and later became a minister

World War I:

During the war, Cummings served as an ambulance driver in France. He was briefly imprisoned in a French detention camp, an experience that inspired his novel “The Enormous Room.”

Literary Career:

Cummings published his first collection of poetry, “Tulips and
Chimneys”, in 1923. He is known for his unconventional use of punctuation,
syntax, and capitalization, which became hallmarks of his poetic style

Notable Works: Cummings wrote approximately 2,900 poems, several novels, and plays. Some of his most famous works include Tulips and Chimneys, The
Enormous Room, EIMI, and the play HIM1.

Here are some of E.E. Cummings’ notable works:

Poetry Collections:

Tulips and Chimneys (1923)
ViVa (1931)
No Thanks (1935)
1 x 1 (1944)
XAIPE: Seventy-One Poems (1950)
95 Poems (1958)

Novels:

The Enormous Room (1922)
EIMI (1933)

Plays:

Him (1927)
Santa Claus: A Morality (1946)

For more information see the following:

1. E. Cummings – Wikipedia

‘A TWILIGHT SMELLING OF VERGIL’: E. E. CUMMINGS, CLASSICS, AND THE GREAT WAR on JSTOR

1. E. Cummings: Biography, Most Famous Poems & Facts

Delectable Mountains | The Pilgrim’s Progress Wiki | Fandom

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