Forgotten Treasures: A Symposium

“The Enormous Room” by E.E. Cummings, a neglected American masterpiece, written in the author’s early 20s, his first book and a true story, was published by Boni & Liveright in 1922. John V.A. Weaver praised the book as “a literary achievement of the highest order . . . the most interesting book the war (WWI) has produced.” Cummings, who had earned his Harvard M.A. in 1916, volunteered a year later for the Red Cross ambulance corps in France with his friend, “W.S.B.” Censors intercepted B.’s wild letters, critical of stupid French bureaucracy, whereupon he and Cummings--guilty by association--were carted off, without being charged or tried, to the camp at Orne called Forte de la Triage de la Ferte. All kinds of suspects were herded into one enormous “oblong room, about 80 by 40” feet, with a vaulted ceiling. Cummings, an innovative writer who became a celebrated poet, kept his sanity by observing how the hundreds of inmates, ranging from one artist who knew Cezanne to the lowest dregs of humanity, were viciously treated by guards. They come alive in the book as individual characters--Jean le Negre, Apollyn, Mexique, One-Eyed Dahveed, Garibaldi, Judas, Rockyfeller, Young Pole, the Zulu and so on--from the admirable to the swinish. The author and W.S.B. escape after brutal months only because Cumming’s father, the Rev. Edward Cummings, a Unitarian minister, could not learn from French authorities where his son was located, after which the U.S. embassy in Paris cabled that his son had left France on a ship that had sunk and a week later that they were mistaken, until his memorable letters to President Wilson, quoted in the preface, effected their release. T.E. Lawrence of Arabia brought about the book’s publication in London (Cape) in 1928, with a preface by Robert Graves extolling its “truthfulness” and calling it “modern in feeling” and “new-world in pedigree.” Both editions are out of print. I was Cummings’ editor in the 1950s and edited his “Poems: 1923-1954” and couldn’t acquire the rights to “The Enormous Room.” This 20th century classic deserves to be republished.