Reviewing e e cummings' "The Enormous Room"

“Don’t be sad, my little son, everybody falls out of trees, 

they’re made for that by God,” 

~ The Enormous Room, e e cummings, pg. 102

Flitting about the online book world I came across a video by vlogbrothers, “18 Books You Probably Haven’t Read.”* Although I hadn’t read any of these books, I don’t feel too bad for not rushing out to read ALL of them since frankly Green goes through them so fast I couldn’t process whether I wanted to read them or not. The one exception which stood out was The Enormous Room, the autobiographical account of poet/author/playwright/artist e e cummings** and his time in a French prison in 1917.  

For an educated gent or lady, to create is first of all to destroy—that there is and can be no such thing as authentic art until the bons trucs (whereby we are taught to see and imitate on canvas and in stone and by word this so-called world) are entirely and thoroughly and perfectly annihilated by that vast and painful process of Unthinking which may result in a minute bit of purely personal Feeling. Which minute bit is Art. ~ pg. 145

For poetry nuts familiar with this time period, this is the era of the avant-garde, the “cubist” poets like Gertrude Stein, the minimalists like Ezra Pound, and of course the best poet of all time T.S. Eliot.*** Lots of American artists of both the visual and literary strain expatriated and formed their own little community in Paris.  

“You are hungry?” 

It was the erstwhile-ferocious speaking.  A criminal, I remembered, is somebody against whom everything he says and does is very cleverly made use of.  After weighing the matter in my mind for some moments I decided at all cost to tell the truth, and replied:

“I could eat an elephant.” ~pg. 4

With half-shut eyes my Ego lay and pondered: the delicious meal it had just enjoyed; what was to come; the joys of being a great criminal... ~ pg. 5

Arrested by the French military on suspicion of espionage whilst serving in the Ambulance Corps during the First World War, cummings and a fellow American spend months in a military detainment camp. Having read some of cummings’ more absurdist poems in college, I wasn’t surprised at the light, almost Wodehouse-ian tones of some of the earlier chapters, the inventive turns of phrase, or even the darker, almost surreal philosophical tones of the later chapters. 

He courted above all the sound of words, more or less disdaining their meaning.  ~ pg. 128

cummings is famous for his creative grammar and syntax, but that doesn’t mean he lacks Style; it’s more as if he, as an artist, were making quick sketches, making broad strokes in fine-tipped sharpie, only instead of drawing images he’s writing words. 

It struck me at the time as intensely interesting that, in the case of a certain type of human being, the more cruel are the miseries inflicted upon him the more cruel does he become toward anyone who is so unfortunate as to be weaker or more miserable than himself. Or perhaps I should say that nearly every human being, given sufficiently miserable circumstances, will from time to time react to those very circumstances (whereby his own personality is mutilated) through a deliberate mutilation on his own art of a weaker or already more mutilated personality.  ~ pg. 122

Plotwise, not much happens in the book, but cummings is an astute spectator of human life, and begins to describe with each chapter the people he comes across in the detainment camp, their personal challenges and triumphs and failures, as if the prison were really a microcosm, a ship in a bottle showing a little sample of different lives. 

I daresay it all comes down to a define definition of happiness.  And a definition of happiness I most certainly do not intend to attempt; but I can and will say this: to leave La Misère with the knowledge, and worse than that the feeling, that some of the finest people in the world are doomed to remaining prisoners thereof for no one knows how long—are doomed to continue, possibly for years and tens of years and all the years which terribly are between then and their deaths, the grey and indivisible Non-existence which without apology you are quitting for Reality—cannot by any stretch of the imagination be conceived as constituting a Happy Ending to a great and personal adventure.  ~ pg. 148-149

* My sister, being much more current with the blog/vlog/youtuber scene, informed me after the fact that this guy is the same John Green who has taken YA readers by storm. For my part, I was really only interested in what books he recommended.

** Which is how his name is printed next to his poetry; after reading it thus so much, it seems unnatural to capitalize.

***Which is scientifically proven to be my biased opinion.