I adore e. e. cummings, prose and poetry alike, but found this to be an enormous waste of my time.

The Enormous Room was astonishingly good. I highly recommend it. It's not even really a World War I book, and it's not really a memoire; I'm not really sure what it is. I do know, however, that is definitely worth reading.

eight stars, ten stars, a moon. This book was everything I wanted from a book. It's populated poetry. Descriptions (of the indescribable) are complete and impressive. Metaphors. Wanderer. Cummings himself-- his voice is the same as in his poems.
Only, I wish I knew French. Which just makes it better.

For the 2019 Book Riot challenge to read something written in prison. The poet's prose memoir recounts his military service in World War I, when a comedy of errors led to his unjust arrest and imprisonment for treason.

I read this as because it is one of the 1001 Books to Read in Your Lifetime. I chose it because I love cummings’s poetry, was unaware that he had been imprisoned in France during WW1, and equally ignorant of the fact that he wrote a fictionalized account of his ordeal.

The book itself is anticlimactic. It recounts the days before his arrest, the days he spent in the eponymous enormous room, and a bit of what happened after his liberation. What makes this book special is the glimpse into cummings’s wry humor. While it will not be among my all-time favorite books, I know I will use what I learned when I teach my students about his life and works.

Puha. Den var hård at komme igennem. Et relativt højt engelsk lixtal (forfatteren har virkelig et sprog, der vil rundt i hjørnerne) kombineret med utallige franske sætninger, gjorde det svært at komme igang.
De første 100 sider var ikke nogen stor fornøjelse. Efter 150 sider var jeg meget tæt på at droppe bogen. Og så blev den bedre. Eller blev jeg bare vant til stilen? De siste 45 % af bogen var i hvert fald ganske fine. Og undervejs i de første 150 sider var der nok til, at jeg alligevel følte, at jeg burde læse bogen færdig. Der er f.eks. noget skæv humor gemt flere steder undervejs.

War-time Japes

The Enormous Room, the fictionalised account of Cummings's arrest and incarceration by the French on charges of sedition during WWI, reads like a Billy Bunter story. The protagonist is obnoxious and endearing in about equal measure.

The various French authorities (and for that matter American, Cummings accommodates everyone), from the snobbish regional police chief to his medievally minded jailers are more or less treated with the disdain a clever 12 year old feels, but rarely shows, for his boarding school headmaster.

But Cummings does show what he feels on every possible occasion. One finds it necessary to be more English than the English if sufficiently provoked, '"Very well, gentlemen," I said. "You will allow me to tell you something." (I was beet-colored.) "In America that sort of thing isn't done."' His Back Bay breeding can't be faulted for lack of pluck.

Cummings was nothing if not an all-appreciating aesthete: "The door was massively made, all of iron or steel I should think. It delighted me. The can excited my curiosity. I looked over the edge of it. At the bottom reposefully lay a new human turd." Quickly, however, Cummings engages more fully with his Kafka-esque situation. He doesn't know why he has been arrested or where he is to be detained. But even then the mystery is another opportunity for appreciative admiration, "everything seemed ridiculously suppressed, beautifully abnormal, deliciously insane."

The adventures in a French underworld of deserters, spies, war prisoners, and various unfortunates continue like a sequel to the Count of Monte Cristo. Cummings never loses his Bostonian noblesse oblige and sang froid : "I contemplate the bowl which contemplates me. A glaze of greenish grease seals the mystery of its content, I induce two fingers to penetrate the seal. They bring me up a flat sliver of cabbage and a large, hard, thoughtful, solemn, uncooked bean. To pour the water off (it is warmish and sticky) without committing a nuisance is to lift the cover off Ça Pue. I did."

And of course one's true calling can never be denied even in extreme duress: Lacking a pencil or other suitable drawing instrument, he must make do: "So I took matches, burnt, and with just 60 of them wrote the first stanza of a ballade. To-morrow I will write the second. Day after to-morrow the third.Next day the refrain. After—oh, well." The finest etiquette must always be observed, even, no perhaps especially, when it serves no social purpose: "I did not sing out loud, simply because the moon was like a mademoiselle, and I did not want to offend the moon."

The Enormous Room is, I believe, Cummings first literary effort. It is a practice piece in sustained irony that suggests much about where he is going and some of where he did not. An interesting, periodically entertaining, piece of dark humour. And probably excellent therapy for his PTSD.