‘Not in the least realizing what this might mean, I grinned.’ 

Described as autobiographical, this novel draws on Mr Cummings’s experience as a captive at a ‘dépot de triage’ at La Ferté-Macé in Normandy during the autumn and winter of 1917. Edward Estlin Cummings (1894-1962) and his friend William Slater Brown (1896-1997) served as ambulance drivers with the American Red Cross in France during World War I. Several of Brown’s letters, expressing anti-war sentiments, fell foul of the military censors. He was arrested as a consequence, while Cummings was arrested as his staunch friend. The pair were at La Ferté-Macé awaiting the verdict of a military commission to rule on their guilt. 

Much of the novel is taken up with Mr Cummings’s description of people and place at La Ferté-Macé. The enormous room is a description of where the prisoners were housed. This is largely a tale of friendship, of how various prisoners worked together to minimise their hardship. 

After some months, the military commission arrived, and their decision was handed down. Brown (‘guilty’) was transferred to prison, while Cummings (classified as a ‘suspect’) was permitted to travel to a remote commune where he was kept under observation. Following American intervention, Cummings was released and arrived back in the USA on January 1, 1918. 

I struggled at times: my rudimentary French required me to take frequent detours for translation, and that slowed me down, but didn’t deter me. Although I should confess that I only read this novel because it met the criteria for one of the reading challenges I am undertaking.  

‘To convince the reader that this history is mere fiction (and rather vulgarly violent fiction at that) nothing perhaps is needed save that ancient standby of sob-story writers and thrill-artists alike—the Happy Ending.’ 

Jennifer Cameron-Smith 

E. E. Cummings reputation always precedes him. He was a gadabout, a busybody, a fly by night, an operator, an early and more sentimental Charles Bukowski, a lover and a madman too. Sometimes he was said to be a pornographer. However, Cummings books from the Twenties display the thought and feelings of a serious writer and a serious man. He was later to be photographed with pink plush toy elephants, but in the Twenties, he worked hard. Everything he wrote was experimental, different, new, visual. He combined words, cut them in half, was cavalierly and faithfully innovative with line breaks and disrupted every line and thought if he could. He was also often funny. Cummings was first recognized for the candor and clarity of his “war memoir” The Enormous Room, published by Boni & Liveright in 1922 and reprinted with corrections in 1927 (after Cummings had become more famous). It is a book of disillusion and disenchantment, a book of the individual against the state, an anti-war book. In 1933 after a trip to the Soviet Union, which similarly disillusioned him as it had many before and after, Cummings produced an equally cogent account, Eimi (Covici Friede, 1933). During the Twenties Cummings published three books of poetry, Tulips and Chimneys (T. Selzer, 1922), XLI Poems (Dial Press, 1925) and Is 5 (Boni & Liveright, 1926). During the first two years of the Thirties, he produced three more, By E. E. Cummings (Covici-Friede, 1930), CIOPW (Covici-Friede0 and VV: Viva (Liveright) both published in 1931. It is largely upon this amazing outpouring that his reputation should rest.

e. e. cummings paints pictures of ugliness so tender and beautiful they'll make you cry, so pure and noble that your heart will beat, so childlike you'll laugh.
I'm still thinking about the line, "the wonderful chocolate carpet of his skin."
Who says stuff like that?
This book is challengingly poetic, has very little plot, and is sometimes hard to follow – but at its core it is an honest, conscious look at what it's like to be a lantern in the darkness.