Th Enormous Room

I have just finished The Enormous Room by E. E. Cummings. Cummings was many things:  playwright, artist and novelist, but is most famous for being a poet in the first half of the Twentieth Century. The Enormous Room is a memoir of the time he spent in a French prison during World War I.

With America not yet in the war, he and a friend volunteered for ambulance duty. Letters home intercepted by censors caused the French to think these two Americans were undesirables, possibly even German spies because they dared to state that they did not hate Germans. They were sent to a holding prison until their fates could be determined. All the men in the prison were housed in one ‘enormous room’ with minimal comforts and sanitation. Meals were sparse (when his friend was finally released, he was found to have scurvy). Some of the fellow prisoners probably (like Cummings and his friend) were no threat to France or anybody. But some of the prisoners were bad seeds. The good and the bad were all housed together in the same room. It seems so ludicrous that these two men who volunteered to drive ambulances for the Allies, should be treated so shabbily by the French bureaucracy. Yet, Cummings gives us a portrayal of life in the prison that was often carefree and even joyful.  I guess life is what you make of it.

Not surprisingly, Cummings style is poetic and metaphoric. He uses so many euphemisms and cryptic names for his fellow prisoners that it is sometimes hard to keep track of who he is talking about. Yet he paints a picture of prison life much the way an impressionist artist would paint a scene, giving us the feel of life and character. And when he is reporting something one of his French companions (or guards) is saying, he writes it in French, usually with no translation. If you are someone like me who doesn’t know French, you have to puzzle out the meaning from the context in which it was said. This was not as big a barrier as I might have thought, as I was usually able to figure it out (or anyway, I assigned some meaning to it that worked for me, whether it was right or wrong).

This bureaucratic nightmare, despite moments of pain, was not a depressing tale. There was something uplifting about it. His spirit, and the spirit of his friend remained strong. It gives one hope.

(My science fiction novel Star Liner, is now available in paperback or as an e-book through Amazon and other online sources).

Link to Star Liner