The Enormous Room, E. E. Cummings

I confess that I approached a book of prose by E. E. Cummings with some trepidation. His poetry never impressed me; or rather, it is well crafted, but not my cup of tea, so to speak. I read the brief bio-sketch at the opening of the book, and was less interested in the reading. Having grown up in Boston, I have some preconceived notions about Boston’s Brahmin society – to which the sketch made it sound like Cummings belonged; a Unitarian minister father, a Harvard education, a Brahmin in the making despite his Greenwich Village foray. But I persevered; an assignment is an assignment.

The Introduction offered some comparisons that I found at least interesting, James Joyce, Brendan Behan, and the overt allegorical Pilgrim’s Progress subtext. But I maintained my resistance, although it did weaken slightly with the Whitmanesque reference, “Cummings, the Harvard rough-neck.” (xv) I squirmed with the text’s opening words, a seven line sentence. I prepared to be annoyed by the Brahmin-like arrogance that infused an American text with a French vocabulary. I was fully prepared to be bored.

Mais, au contraire, I found the text fascination et divertissement avec mon Français rouillé. I did struggle with the foreignness, at first, but je me suis adapté rapidement. I considered that perhaps Cummings, with his classical education, was being snobbish, trying to look better than his fellow Americans. But much of his French vocabulary consisted of more colorful words that one learned on the streets, not at school. I found myself looking in the glossary for words such as putain, chiez, fontue. My traditional French classes had taught me none of these words that one learns on the streets of Paris. I decided he wasn’t trying to impress me nor was he looking down on his audience. He had something to say. I began to relax into the text.

I found his prose, albeit it slow reading (I felt as though I were making a pilgrim’s progress), to be peppered with snide witticisms, critical commentary—not only of the world around him (the French Government in particular), mais de sien capacité d'exister dans le monde. From the outset he acknowledges the ridiculousness of his situation—the ridiculousness of the world around him. One can find the humor in drastic situations—or one can go insane. Cumming clearly chose the high road and viewed his world cynically.

I found myself scanning—squeamishly—passages about urine, and spitting—and locked basement rooms, but reading attentively his descriptions of people—les gens and most especially conversations. Rooms are described as “altogether American,” (10) people speak “sanitary English,” (11) and altars hold “the efficient implements for eating God.” (45) His ironic tone forces the reader to focus on the insanity of the entire situation; the war, the death, the absurdity of the political machine that destroyed human spirits and imprisoned what it did not understand. Lives could be destroyed by that which one refused to acknowledge, or so I read in Cummings innuendo and commentary in microcosm of the world at large.

Within the text Cummings works to see the individuality of the “characters” he’s presenting to us. His vivid descriptions paint clear and concise portraits such as, “a fragile, minute, queer figure, remotely suggesting an old man,” (57) or his description of the Turk’s reaction to the suggestion that he sing, “he merely blushed as if he were remembering (or possibly dreaming of) something distant and too pleasant for utterance.” (94) This passage in particular struck me as Joyce-like; Cummings leads the reader to the fountain—but allows each of us to drink for ourselves drawing more personal conclusions. The character is presented, and interpreted through Cummings’ eye, but the reader is left to draw inferences or conclusions. For Cummings, even in la masse de l'humanité at the prison, where individuality is consciously being stripped away—il n'y a rien mais l'individu pour Cummings. A very modernist, very American perspective.

Je dois admettre that, as yet, I have not completed the text yet, but at the halfway point I am feeling engaged intellectually—I am reading something different, something new, I am listening to a man at the dawn of our bravez le nouveau monde. And he is not feeling like Woodrow Wilson, that American democracy will save the world, like Ezra Pound he seems to think it is a botched civilization, and the best we can do is to seek happiness in every adventure laid before us. I find myself curious to see where Cummings goes with his text—will he remain true to this bohemian self, or surrender to the Brahmins of Boston.