Like so any good discoveries, the novel hid on a forgotten shelf in a second-hand bookshop

This novel was for me a most delightful find. Until I found this work, my knowledge of e. e. cummings had been limited entirely to his poetry. I did not realise cummings (Edward Estlin Cummings, American, 1894–1962) was also a poet, painter, essayist, author and playwright.

Indeed, to my mind this autobiographical novel is poetry written as prose.

The work opens with a (factual) letter from cumming’s father to President Woodrow Wilson, begging for help in finding news of his son and friend, both of whom were arrested while volunteering with the French during WWI. Cumming’s father had received various notifications from French officials, including one stating his son was dead.

The Enormous Room proper begins in October 1917, when both cummings and his friend are arrested. Fluent in French, cummings had volunteered for the ambulance corp, along with his friend, who is only ever referred to as B. (Both were arrested pending investigation as traitors, following letters written by B to relatives back in America, which a censor thought too critical of the war. B wrote of ‘war weariness’.)

One of my favourite bookshops, in Venice

As evidenced by the chapter headings, the plot of the novel is based loosely on Pilgrim’s Progress. Cummings and B are sent — separately — to La Ferté-Macé, where both remained for over four months, as the commissioners in charge of reviewing cases had departed on leave. In all this time, he is never charged. At the prison cummings shares a room with some 30 other prisoners — the enormous room of the title. The room also becomes a metaphor for where cummings stores his memories; cummings writes how the prisoners who share his cell live on in the enormous room of his mind.

From the background and characters of those imprisoned with him, cummings weaves a pathos against an unescapable backdrop of the absurd. Amongst those sharing his cell are such personalities as The Count, One-Eyed David, The Mexique, The Fighting Sheeney, the Machine-Fixer and Jean le Negre.

A sense of humour and irony and runs through the work. The levity is so light played it was only on the second reading I realised to what extent the true horrors of cummings’ predicament outweighed his detached air of an ironic intellectual facing the absurd. Indeed, his first letters home are both reassuring and ironical: “days spent with an inimitable friend in soul stretching probings of aesthetices, 10 hour nights (9pm-6,45 am) and fine folk to converse in five or six languages beside you — perfection attained at last.”

The Enormous Room also belongs to a generation of American writers who, to my eyes at least, no longer exist: writers who were multilingual and trans-cultural, travelling the world and volunteering in various wars and conflicts — as exemplified by Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms.

The style of The Enormous Room, however, remains cummings’ entirely, in which he produces such gems as:

rain did, from time to time, not fall

from time to time a sort of unhealthy almost-light leaked from the large uncrisp corpse of the sky

a spic, not to say span, gentleman

gently worried about himself, delicately worried about the world

He contemplated me with a natural, under the circumstances, curiosity. He even naively contemplated me. As if I were hay. My hay-coloured head perhaps pleased him, as a hippopotamus. He would perhaps eat me. He grunted, exposing tobacco-yellow tusks, and his tiny eyes twittered.

A century on from the First World War, cummings’ The Enormous Room remains remarkably fresh and modern. The suspicion, the backstabbing, the corruption, the stupidity, the futility, the over-arching dominance of protocol and management: cummings writes of a world that is all too familiar.

In 1926 F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote: “Of all the work by young men who have sprung up since 1920 one book survives — The Enormous Room by e. e. cummings. Those few who cause books to live have not been able to endure the thought of its immortality.”

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