The Enormous Room, by e.e. cummings
The Enormous Room, by e.e. cummings
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. As a matter of fact, it makes not the smallest difference to me whether anyone who has thus far participated in my travels does or does not believe that they and I are (as that mysterious animal “the public” would say) ‘real’. I do however strenuously object to the assumption, on the part of anyone, that the heading of this my final chapter stands for anything in the nature of happiness.
That’s odd. All this time, I thought e.e. cummings was English, mostly because he was eccentric about spelling his name in all lowercase letters and doing odd things with line justification and such. Turns out he was American, and Americans can maybe do that, too.
Anyhow, this is a partly autobiographical novel, and I’m not sure what parts are true. Apparently, cummings really was arrested in WWI France, and put in a concentration camp mostly because French officers were dicks. The Enormous Room purports to be his account of what happened. The “enormous room” in the title doubles both as the big dorm full of cots where several dozen prisoners must sleep without privacy, and as the vast reaches of “inner space” into which cummings and his imagination can flee. They can’t follow him there.
I had a hard time determining whether the story was a bit of historical autobiography, a Kafka-esque nightmare of bureaucratic nonsense, or an episode of Hogan’s Heroes. More than half of the book consists of character sketches of various lengths, of the various people cummings meets in the camp, from the guard he nicknames Appolyon, who tries to be a vicious badass and who comes across as a French version of Colonel Klink, to the prisoners called “The Zulu”, “The Fighting Sheeny”, etc. France apparently being the world’s foremost tourist mecca, even during wartime, there was quite a heterogenous mix of people there.
Cummings noticed that the French officers appeared to have learned nothing from their humiliation in the Dreyfus affair a few decades earlier, and he knew that his book would probably, over time, be the most likely medium in which these particular officers would be remembered, and so his purpose was to document the nasty thing they did by way of exposition (his family was wrongly informed he had been killed, and when that was retracted, told for several months that his whereabouts were unknown), and with that out of the way, to have a little fun within the “enormous room” of his imagination. Dave Carroll may have had similar feelings when writing a song about how United Airlines had broken his guitar.
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. As a matter of fact, it makes not the smallest difference to me whether anyone who has thus far participated in my travels does or does not believe that they and I are (as that mysterious animal “the public” would say) ‘real’. I do however strenuously object to the assumption, on the part of anyone, that the heading of this my final chapter stands for anything in the nature of happiness.
That’s odd. All this time, I thought e.e. cummings was English, mostly because he was eccentric about spelling his name in all lowercase letters and doing odd things with line justification and such. Turns out he was American, and Americans can maybe do that, too.
Anyhow, this is a partly autobiographical novel, and I’m not sure what parts are true. Apparently, cummings really was arrested in WWI France, and put in a concentration camp mostly because French officers were dicks. The Enormous Room purports to be his account of what happened. The “enormous room” in the title doubles both as the big dorm full of cots where several dozen prisoners must sleep without privacy, and as the vast reaches of “inner space” into which cummings and his imagination can flee. They can’t follow him there.
I had a hard time determining whether the story was a bit of historical autobiography, a Kafka-esque nightmare of bureaucratic nonsense, or an episode of Hogan’s Heroes. More than half of the book consists of character sketches of various lengths, of the various people cummings meets in the camp, from the guard he nicknames Appolyon, who tries to be a vicious badass and who comes across as a French version of Colonel Klink, to the prisoners called “The Zulu”, “The Fighting Sheeny”, etc. France apparently being the world’s foremost tourist mecca, even during wartime, there was quite a heterogenous mix of people there.
Cummings noticed that the French officers appeared to have learned nothing from their humiliation in the Dreyfus affair a few decades earlier, and he knew that his book would probably, over time, be the most likely medium in which these particular officers would be remembered, and so his purpose was to document the nasty thing they did by way of exposition (his family was wrongly informed he had been killed, and when that was retracted, told for several months that his whereabouts were unknown), and with that out of the way, to have a little fun within the “enormous room” of his imagination. Dave Carroll may have had similar feelings when writing a song about how United Airlines had broken his guitar.