Finally, on the first of January, 1918, he landed in New York Harbor after crossing on the Espagne and was welcomed home at an elegant luncheon given by his friends Hildegarde and Sibley Watson. Cummings was not in the mood for elegant celebratory lunches. He seemed depressed and silent compared with the energetic, playful Cummings who had left for France the previous spring. Hildegarde sadly noted that he had lost his smile.
That wasn’t all he had lost. “He was in bad shape physically as a result of his imprisonment,” Edward Cummings wrote to the Judge Advocate’s Office in Paris with some of the sarcasm and bottled-up rage that seemed to live in the family genes. He was “very much under weight, suffering from a bad skin infection which he had acquired at the concentration camp. However, in view of the extraordinary facilities which the detention camp offered for acquiring dangerous diseases, he is certainly to be congratulated on having escaped with one of the least harmful.”
Cummings would have been the first to admit that his incarceration had probably saved his life, and he certainly knew almost at once that his sketches and notes would be a large part of his young writer’s capital. Eight Harvard Poets had been published while he was in prison. Freed for the moment from military service, Cummings focused on trying to get his strength back. It was relatively easy to recover from his malnutrition and open sores; his father was having a harder time recovering from his son’s ordeal. He was in a towering, ministerial, Harvard rage. He was furious at the Red Cross and the U.S. embassy in France and the little help they had given him. He was on fire with outrage at the French government and planned to bring an international lawsuit to show the world the injustice that had been done to a U.S. citizen.
For once, the younger Cummings took on the job of calming his father down. He had changed. He offered to write a book that would be a scathing indictment of the powers that be. His father agreed that a book would be better than a lawsuit and even offered to pay his son for writing it. This would be his best revenge. But having made the deal to write a book about La Ferté-Macé and accepted a down payment from his father, Cummings did everything but write it.
First he moved back to Greenwich Village, this time renting a place with Brown. There he began to get into even more trouble than he had managed to attract on the Western Front. He and Brown, outraged first by the idea and then by the imminent passage of Prohibition, made plans to hop a merchant steamer and go to a country that suited their habits—perhaps somewhere in the Orient or South America. In the meantime, Cummings began to fall in love with Elaine Thayer, his friend and patron Scofield Thayer’s wife, who was living alone on Washington Square.
While the elder Cummings waited for his son to settle down and write the book that would finally express his fury and exonerate him, Cummings wrote poems, hung out at Khoury’s, and spent altogether too much time at Elaine’s apartment. This idyll ended when he was officially drafted in July of 1918 and ordered to report to Camp Devens in Massachusetts. According to the letters he wrote his worried parents, making himself available for the draft had been the right thing to do and he was glad to go. Again, he didn’t want to act like an elite Harvard man; his heart was with the ordinary men who had no recourse from being drafted. Furthermore, as an artist it was his job to go everywhere and see everything. “The artist keeps his eyes, ears, & above all his NOSE wide open, he watches while others merely execute orders he does things. By things I do not mean wearing gold bars or pulling wires or swallowing rot-in-general or nonsense-in-particular. I mean the sustaining of his invisible acquaintance with that life which, taken from his eyes, makes itself a house in his very-brain-itself,” he wrote his mother.
He declined officer training; he wanted to stay an enlisted man. Assigned to Company Three, First Battalion, Depot Brigade, Cummings trained as an infantryman. His identification with the ordinary, with the little man, with the people normally shunned by society, was becoming more and more intense. Partly an elitist noblesse oblige and partly a heartfelt desire to avoid the success that also seemed to avoid him, it came to be a characteristic of his work and his life. He began using even more of the lowercase i in his poems.
The six months Cummings spent in the 73rd Infantry Division at Camp Devens were far less memorable than his time at La Ferté-Macé. Perhaps because there was little danger and scant adversity, the experience wasn’t vivid or particularly interesting. One thing did interest Cummings: a big blond conscientious objector who was reading Sir Thomas Browne was brutally interrogated and transferred to an army prison. When the man refused to say he wanted to kill Germans, his interrogator furiously asked if he would kill a German who raped his sister. The CO replied that he didn’t have a sister. Cummings from the sidelines vividly imagined his fate. Although he hardly had a chance to speak with this man, and didn’t even catch his name, the CO showed up soon enough in Cummings’s great, angry antiwar poem:
i sing of Olaf glad and big
whose warmest heart recoiled at war:
a conscientious object-or
his wellbelovéd colonel(trig
westpointer most succinctly bred)
took erring Olaf soon in hand;
but—though an host of overjoyed
noncoms(first knocking on the head
him)do through icy waters roll
that helplessness which others stroke
with brushes recently employed
anent this muddy toiletbowl,
while kindred intellects evoke
allegiance per blunt instruments—
Olaf(being to all intents
a corpse and wanting any rag
upon what God unto him gave)
responds,without getting annoyed
“I will not kiss your fucking flag”
straightway the silver bird looked grave
(departing hurriedly to shave)
but—though all kinds of officers
(a yearning nation’s blueeyed pride)
their passive prey did kick and curse
until for wear their clarion
voices and boots were much the worse,
and egged the firstclassprivates on
his rectum wickedly to tease
by means of skilfully applied
bayonets roasted hot with heat—
Olaf(upon what were once knees)
does almost ceaselessly repeat
“there is some shit I will not eat”
our president,being of which
assertions duly notified
threw the yellowsonofabitch
into a dungeon,where he died
Christ(of His mercy infinite)
i pray to see;and Olaf,too
preponderatingly because
unless statistics lie he was
more brave than me:more blond than you.
What he primarily observed at Camp Devens was the horror of the monotony of war, broken only by the bloodthirsty warmongering of his commanding officers, men who said there should be guts at both ends of their bayonets. He would have preferred the enormous room at La Ferté to having to hear drill instructors talk about the pleasures of disemboweling the enemy. Although the war officially ended on November 11, 1918, Cummings still managed to spend a few more weeks at Camp Devens, mostly on KP peeling potatoes. But by January of 1919 he was ecstatically back in New York.
Living with Brown in a fourth-floor walk-up with no running water, he saw Elaine and started painting her portrait, commissioned by her husband. He exhibited at the rooftop gallery of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. He also worked on his poems, but he was not one word closer to writing the book he had promised his father.
Finally, ensconced or incarcerated at Silver Lake with his parents in the summer of 1920, Cummings began to write the book he had titled The Great War Seen from the Windows of Nowhere, but which came to have the title The Enormous Room. His restlessness seemed to fuel the book. He couldn’t wait to get back to New York and his delicious real life. Each morning he would canoe out from the shore
on the crystalline water to a remote campsite and tent at a place called Hurricane Point. After a day’s work he would canoe home for dinner, which often included fending off inquiries from his anxious father; then he would return to his tent for the night.
The notebooks he had kept at La Ferté were little help—he had done more drawing than writing—so Cummings reconstructed scene by scene from memory. Brown came up and lived with him and the two men went over every detail. Cummings wrote in a furious outpouring of memory and longing. To give structure to chaos, he decided to pattern the book on John Bunyan’s classic seventeenth-century religious work, The Pilgrim’s Progress. Like Bunyan’s Christian Everyman, the Cummings character in The Enormous Room journeys valiantly through all kinds of hazards and Apollyons and even into the Valley of the Shadow of Death before reaching redemption and the Delectable Mountains.
Some of his best descriptions mix his memories of French inquisitors with the farm he saw every day as he was writing. One of his questioners reminded him of Ichabod Crane:
His neck was exactly like a hen’s: I felt sure that when he drank he must tilt his head back as hens do in order that the liquid may run down their throats. But his method of keeping himself upright, together with certain spasmodic contractions of his fingers and the nervous “uh-ah, uh-ah” which punctuated his insecure phrases like uncertain commas, combined to offer the suggestion of a rooster; a rather moth-eaten rooster, which took itself tremendously seriously and was showing-off to an imaginary group of admiring hens situated somewhere in the background of his consciousness.
By September, when the lake got too cold for swimming and the nights began to come on earlier, he had finished enough to give to his father when the elder Cummings decamped for Cambridge. His father’s response was totally positive—no small feat, since he seemed to feel that his own reputation was in his son’s hands. “I am sure now that you are a great writer,” his father wrote. By October, as the leaves around Silver Lake began to turn red and gold, Cummings was finished with the manuscript of his first and most famous book. He had written a vivid war memoir without describing war. Publishing the book was another matter. Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, and Scribner’s all turned it down. Edward Cummings had some kind of leverage over Horace Liveright; eventually, after some discussion, Boni & Liveright decided to take it on. When Horace Liveright later met Cummings, he exclaimed, “Your father turned my hair white!”
The Enormous Room is an often-ignored piece of the astonishing literary output that characterized the survivors of the Western Front in England and America. Fittingly, Robert Graves wrote an introduction to the British publication, praising Cummings’s language. “He uses some new alloys of words, and has rare passages as iridescent as decay in meat … It seems to me so much the best American war-period book,” he wrote.
Although it was not published until 1922, five years after Cummings’s actual experience on the Western Front, The Enormous Room is still the best account of his months there, and one of the best accounts of the hidden war in which thousands of citizens were haphazardly and quixotically held in makeshift prisons. Every war has its little guys—the people and families who, because of what is happening on the battlefields, have their rights and freedoms pushed aside in one way or another. On the Western Front Cummings was their spokesman. He couldn’t write about the trenches or the horrors of the mud on the Somme, because he hadn’t been there. His portrait of what we now call collateral damage is one of the most vivid ever written.
His first morning in The Enormous Room, when he is awakened at 5:30 for cold, sludgy coffee in a tin cup, Cummings is able to see his surroundings in the grim dawn light. The room was vaguely ecclesiastical and “my mattress resembled an island: all around it … reposed startling identities.” To his great relief and delight, he was directed to his friend Brown—the book’s B—wrapped up like a mummy in a blanket. “Am I dreaming,” Cummings asked his friend, “or is this a bug-house?” Brown laughed and quickly persuaded his friend that incarceration in the enormous room was so far superior to the annoyances and limitations of service in the Ambulance Corps, with its killjoy leader constantly badgering them about their hygiene, and their doughy-faced fellow soldiers, that both men embraced prison as well as each other in a spirit of gratitude and relief.
Most of The Enormous Room takes place at the Dépôt de Triage, a setting that Cummings deftly transforms into the enormous room of his own mind and memory. He and Brown appear to have a wonderful time in spite of buckets for toilets, two meals a day of soup, infestations of various types of insects, and little more than a glimpse of the female prisoners. The other prisoners—some cultured, some not; one a man who knew Cézanne—are, he writes to his mother, “splendid comrades … You can’t begin to imagine our unimaginable glee at living safe and sound out of the nagging reach of our former owners.” The inhabitants of The Enormous Room are most of them imprisoned by mistake. They are sailors who have missed their ships, tradesmen whose stores have gone broke, men who happen to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time—which in the France of 1917, as the German army poured into the cities and countrysides, was very easy to be.
The startling identities included a gnome, a Norwegian seaman, and a disenfranchised nobleman in a swallowtail coat with impeccable, courtly manners named Count Bragard, who formerly had been a successful equine portrait painter in England. “Indeed for the first time since my arrival at La Ferté I was confronted by a perfect type: the apotheosis of injured nobility, the humiliated victim of perfectly unfortunate circumstances, the utterly respectable gentleman who has seen better days,” Cummings wrote. “You know Cornelius Vanderbilt perhaps?” Count Bragard asked Cummings as other inmates pissed in buckets or picked bedbugs off their straw mattresses. “I painted some of his horses. We were the best of friends, Vanderbilt and I.” Bragard produced Vanderbilt’s card with an affectionate note for Cummings’s perusal.
Another prisoner, Monsieur Ree-shar (Richard), was the self-appointed doctor for the shifting population although, as Cummings pointed out, “he knew probably less about medicine than any man living.”
Because the only requirement for membership in the community was a hatred of authority and a sometimes humorous recognition of the absurdity of the situation, Cummings and Brown were welcomed as charter members. They had money from home that could be spent on chocolate from the commissary, and this also made them popular.
Cummings, steeped in literature and remembering his experience, was not about to write a simple memoir. Although his language is relatively conventional, he doesn’t hesitate to twist punctuation or change parts of speech in the service of description. A great deal has been written about The Enormous Room. Richard Kennedy hailed it as a unique achievement. Charles Norman devoted an entire chapter to the mixed but thoughtful reviews the book received on publication—publication at a time when memoirs were rare and experiments with words and syntax were even rarer.
Now, decades later, Cummings’s energy and nerve are evident both in the experience he describes and in his prose. The book has two great strengths. One is Cummings’s spiritual attitude. In his pages, gallantry meets acceptance. Nothing that happens—nothing: not privation, being threatened with a gun, miles of trudging along under heavy burdens, or lack of food—will alter his ebullient and defiant attitude toward authority and everything associated with authority. Like John Bunyan’s Pilgrim, he takes the world as it is and spurns the role of victim. Even his own tragedies delight him. Whether it’s a protest over bad coffee or the sadness of seeing a fellow inmate headed for a real prison farther south, whether it’s being conned or watching as someone else sickens, all of life is experienced by the character Cummings would later call i—experienced as a lighthearted passage in which often the only leavening is humor.
Cummings’s other great achievement is his genius at setting scenes and using sensual details. Every inch of his skin and all his senses are alight with experience. “He makes us see an
d smell and sometimes hear, taste, and touch,” writes Kennedy. “We experience vividly the daily life in the Dépôt de Triage—its oozing walls, its overflowing pails of urine, its encrusted dirt, its greasy soup, the piercing cold, the noise and confusion.”
Once he had finished writing, Cummings sprang back to Greenwich Village like a man at the end of an elastic band. This was his home now. He was hard at work on paintings and on a book of poetry, which he had titled Tulips & Chimneys. He was twenty-six years old all of a sudden, and he felt the pressure to translate his early promise into some kind of significant life. And Elaine—oh, Elaine! She belonged to someone else—a friend, a patron, and a colleague—but he could not seem to resist her. He had finally lost his virginity, but this was different: scary, delightful, exciting, vibrant. Elaine was a beautiful princess, and although he was terrified by her marital situation and abashed by her wealthy, profligate way of living, he slipped into a delicious fugue state that would provide the central trauma of his life—a trauma that made his months at La Ferté look like a carefree summer vacation.
6
Greenwich Village: Elaine and Nancy
E. E. Cummings Page 9
