During most of his youth, he had breathed a heavy atmosphere of pacifism. His father, a Unitarian minister in Boston, was the Executive Secretary of the World Peace Foundation. His friends at Harvard were mostly pacifists. But when President Wilson’s war message to Congress called for the United States entry into the European war, declaiming “that the world must be made safe for democracy,” and when war was declared on April 6, this atmosphere changed. His father strongly supported Wilson, and his friends very soon began to don one sort of uniform or another.
On April 7, Cummings himself volunteered for duty with the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Service, a Red Cross unit serving the French army. He took the step for a complex of reasons. In the first place, conscription threatened to take single and unemployed men of his age into the army. But the prospect of adventure was a strong attraction, too, for Norton-Harjes sent its groups to France as soon as they were formed. As Cummings wrote to his father: “I’m glad to be out of here by the 1st of May, when everybody is to be tabulated on pink, violet, yellow, (and I dare say orange) cards, for the benefit of conscription. It will mean everything to me as an experience to do something I want to, in a wholly new environment, versus being forced to do something I don’t want to & unchanging scene. I only hope I shall see some real service at the front.”1
The choice of the ambulance service by young intellectuals and especially by young literary men is quite understandable. They usually were pacifist by inclination and this was noncombatant duty. They were classed as officers, yet did not have to bear the burdens of command or the responsibilities of giving orders to others. The ambulance service carried all the prestige of dangerous military duty with a minimum of risk. It required no long, dull training period; anyone could drive a car. They signed on for only six months, and if they did not like it, they could get out, rather than having to endure two to six years of service. Most important, they would share in the experience of their time, yet do so on their own terms with the least amount of regimentation and the maximum amount of freedom.
Soon after Cummings sailed for France, he struck up a friendship with William Slater Brown, a college student from the Columbia School of Journalism, who had just returned from a pacifist demonstration in Washington and had joined the ambulance unit with a mixture of impulses similar to those that Cummings followed. They both shared many interests in literature and the arts, and as lively, witty companions they made a good team.
Through a mishap on their arrival in Paris, they were separated from their unit and, as a result, spent five glorious weeks on an impromptu holiday while waiting to be assigned to duty. Their pleasures ranged widely, from attendance at the Ballet Russe (where they saw Stravinsky’s Pétrouchka twice) to the Folies Bergères and the Olympia Music Hall. In their favorite restaurants and in the company of beautiful French girls, “the finest girls god ever allowed to pasture in the air of this fresh earth,” they became fluent in the French language. In time, they became the daily companions of two handsome streetwalkers who patrolled the Boulevard des Italiens, and from them learned the argot of the streets.
When they were finally sent to the Front, to Section Sanitaire XXI at Germaine, a small village between St. Quentin and Ham from which the Germans had withdrawn in the spring, they found the life of an ambulance driver was not as exciting as they expected. The sector was very quiet during the three months that Cummings and Brown stayed there, and the ambulance group and its twenty vehicles spent most of the time merely standing by in one muddy French village or another. Duty assignments came seldom, much of the time was occupied in cleaning mud from the vehicles, the food was poor.
But the real problem was their fellow Americans. Cummings and Brown loathed the men in their outfit—Midwesterners who were not college graduates, whom they regarded as provincial and uncouth—and they hated their chef de section, a Mr. Anderson, whom they found stupid and overbearing. As a consequence, they spent a great deal of time with the eight Frenchmen who were assigned to their unit as cooks, auto mechanics, and menials. Unlike their compatriots, they now spoke French with colloquial ease and they used their ability well. From the French soldiers of the nearby units, they heard, over bottles of wine, all the gossip of the French Army. They heard all the bitterness that boiled up in the ranks, and in particular they learned the details about the best-kept secret on the Western Front, the mutiny in the French Army after General Nivelle’s disastrous campaign on the Aisne. Their talk about what they heard and their pacifist views in general did not go down well with the Americans in Section Sanitaire XXI.
Also, this fraternization with the French was a violation of the wishes of the chef de section, who wanted “to show those bastards how they do things in America” by keeping spic and span and pretending superiority. Cummings and Brown preferred relaxation and mud-stained, grease-marked uniforms—and wine when they could get it. They were welcomed and questioned by the French, especially as they displayed a friendliness that had not usually been found among the English in that Sector. One time in Chevincourt, they had a hilarious drinking session with the neighboring French soldiers, who wanted to learn songs in English. Brown and Cummings did not know the words to most of those which were requested, but Cummings improvised anyway. Brown remembers himself and Cummings standing on a table, with Cummings leading the singing:
And to her maidenhead
He very softly said:
It’s a long way to Tipperary
It’s a long way to go.2
Their dislike of the group they served with, plus problems with the censorship of outgoing mail, combined to cause real trouble for them as time went by. Brown and Cummings, having heard of the Lafayette Escadrille, had hoped perhaps to get out of their ambulance unit by joining the French army as aviators. On the advice of a friendly French lieutenant, they naively wrote a joint letter to the under-secretary of French aviation volunteering their services but expressing their reluctance to kill Germans. This strange proposal alerted the censors, who then watched their mail carefully. Brown was writing to friends in the United States and, in a manner that looks like a deliberate teasing of the censors, he reported a good deal of the gossip of the French troops. He reported that “the French soldiers are all despondent and none of them believe that Germany will ever be defeated.”3 This and other opinions about the spirit of the troops and the progress of the war made him appear dangerous to the jumpy French intelligence authorities. They ordered the arrest of Brown and his accomplice. The oddity of Cummings’ arrest merely because he was Brown’s friend made Cummings realize that Anderson, too, played some part in the decision. Thus began the series of events that form Cummings’ autobiographical narrative The Enormous Room.
II
Cummings’ whole career is marked by creative surprise and his first book is no exception: he produced a unique work. Here was a story of oppression, injustice, and imprisonment presented in a high-spirited manner as if it were a lark. Nothing in the book is handled in any way that could be expected—the experience is peculiar, the linguistic style is experimental, the mixing of French words and sentences in with the English is a practice that no modern literary work had attempted, the characters are a crew of incredible grotesques, and, finally, Cummings even forbids the reader from interpreting his release and return home as a “happy ending.”
All this is most appropriate for a work whose central theme is romantic individualism. Earlier, Cummings had tried, not quite successfully, to set forth his outlook on life when he wrote an appraisal of the sculptor Gaston Lachaise in The Dial magazine. It can perhaps be called “a child’s vision of the world,” for it proclaims the virtues of the untutored mind responding to phenomena and not reasoning about them. In dealing with life, the natural intelligence, he says, functions “at intuitional velocity.” It expresses itself like “the child who has not yet inherited the centuries” and like “the savage whose identity with his environment has not yet become prey to civiliz
ation.”
In The Enormous Room Cummings works this primitivistic view of life into his autobiographical narrative very skillfully. He not only upholds the child’s vision of the world when he considers human behavior but he even carries it to the heights of political anarchism, seeming to echo Thoreau’s basic position, “That government is best which governs not at all.” In the book, Cummings mounts a symbolic attack upon all governmental structures whatsoever; indeed, he offers the proposition that authority of any kind stifles the development and the expression of individual being.
In The Enormous Room, Cummings is quite explicit about what that essential being of each person is. Different words have been used for centuries to describe an essential self—Socrates called it a daimon, Plato called it a psyche, Duns Scotus called it thisness, Shelley called it genius, Bernard Shaw called it life force, Freud called it Id. Cummings called it an “IS.” One can best understand what he means by looking at a series of notes that he jotted down sometime in 1921:
IS=the cold 3rd singular of the intense live verb,to feel.
Not to completely feel=thinking,the warm principle.
incomplete thinking=Belief,the box in which god and all other nouns are kept.4
Once we recognize the pejorative coloration that he throws over the word “belief,” we can understand more clearly his description of the IS as he applies it to the character named Zulu, who exhibits “an effortless spontaneity”:
There are certain things in which one is unable to believe for the simple reason that he never ceases to feel them. Things of this sort—things which are always inside of us and in fact are us and which consequently will not be pushed off or away where we can begin thinking about them—are no longer things;they,and the us which they are,equals A Verb; an IS.
The book, without ever saying so, presents the narrator as an IS in action. In discussing the book I am going to refer to the narrator as C. in order to distinguish my comments about him as a character from those about Cummings as the creator of this work.
The structure of The Enormous Room is fairly simple, dividing into three main parts. Part I covers the arrest of C. and his journey to the detention center at La Ferté-Macé. It jumps right into the incident of the arrest without any preliminaries and later we gradually learn the details of the problem. The bouncing jollity of Cummings’ language scarcely hints of his predicament as he is driven off to Noyon by car, escorted by a helmeted soldier. But when the driver’s hat blows off and C. helpfully starts to get out to retrieve it, he is in for a sudden shock. The soldier draws his pistol to stop him. The narration continues to be ebullient, however, through the next episodes: his eating déjeuner under detention, his being scarched, and his interrogation at a security hearing in the Gendarmerie. During the questioning he passes his first test: he refuses to be in any way deferential toward his examiners, and when he is asked the crucial question that will determine his case, “Do you hate the Germans?” his own Socratic daimon rises up and forbids him to say yes.
When the door of his jail cell in Noyon slams upon him, he has no misgivings. “I put the bed-roll down. I stood up. I was myself.” The whole sequence of this first day in jail reverberates with joy, although the grimmest details are available for an indulgence in self-pity. When he inspects a toilet can in the corner of the cell, he is filled with a sense of human companionship upon finding a recently deposited turd. It reminds him of Robinson Crusoe’s discovery of a footprint in the sand. Such is the emphasis on life in this book that an animism frequently transposes things into beings: the toilet can gets a name, Ça Pue (It Stinks), and becomes an animate presence in the cell. A surge of pleasure at reunion with his friend B. comes over him when he hears someone in another cell whistling a melody from Pétrouchka. He answers the whistle and they communicate musically as he remembers the satisfactions of Paris and of friendship. He soon has the pleasure of more company, “a little silhouette” who comes along the windowsill and nibbles at a piece of his chocolate. “He then looked at me,I then smiled at him,and we parted,each happier than before.” Night falls; a sliver of a moon appears—another animation, feminine this time, not Madame la Lune, as in the song, but Mademoiselle. He is happy. Imagination provides him company, “My friends : the silhouette and la lune, not counting Ça Pue, whom I regarded almost as a part of me.”
As the series of ordeals continues, a literary development takes place which adds extra dimension to the work. Cummings begins a series of allusions to Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, the best-known allegory in English literature, and this continues throughout the book. Bunyan’s story of Christian, who leaves home, wife, and children, setting out on a journey to the Celestial City, is filled with allegorical episodes. Christian falls in the Slough of Despond, he is imprisoned in the castle of the Giant Despair, he has to do battle with the monster Apollyon in the Valley of Humiliation, but at length he reaches the Delectable Mountains and attains the Celestial City.
But Cummings does not use Bunyan’s work as a structural device the way Joyce did with the Odyssey. He does not duplicate all the episodes and significances of Pilgrim’s Progress. Rather he merely employs an accumulation of allusions in order to elevate and intensify the misadventures that befall the narrator. Because of the reference to Pilgrim’s Progress, the heavy load of gear which C. has to carry on his three-day journey to La Ferté-Macé is seen to be like the burden that Christian must carry and thus becomes heavier and mythically more credible (150 pounds is the weight given) as C. staggers with it from station to station. The muddy area of the ambulance unit in which he and B. are stuck without getting any permission (leave) is made muddier and more dispiriting by the allusion to the Slough of Despond. The cruel Directeur at La Ferté-Macé seems the more threatening because he is referred to as Apollyon. And so on. But these are selective allusions and we would do wrong to see the whole narrative in terms of Christian’s journey or to look among the characters for representations of Mr. Worldly Wiseman, Mr. Facing-Both-Ways, and all the rest of Bunyan’s personifications.
This raising of the narrative above the level of realism has made possible other variations in the fictional mode. As C. makes his way to La Ferté-Macé in the custody of the two stupid, prodding gendarmes, he is given help and comfort by a series of strangers, and Cummings lets the characters take on a mythic nimbus by using the language of religious supernaturalism. On the train another prisoner, a “divine man,” humble in speech and demeanor, helps him with his burden and shares with him his wine and sausage. A kindly woman in Noyon who serves him food and offers comforting words is revealed to be the marraine (godmother) of all the prisoners: “I love them and look after them. Well, listen : I will be your marraine too.” When the train reaches Paris, it is a holy place: The people on the streets are “divine,” a motherly woman sells C. coffee, a “sacredly delicious” brew. All these figures draw strength from association with Christian folklore, which is full of tales of sudden appearances of saintly helpers or even of Jesus himself. In a scene no doubt inspired by the episode in which Christian is relieved of his burdens when he stands before a cross, Cummings arranges a final beatification for the narrator himself, carrying the religious identification a good deal farther now than he has with the minor characters. In a passage full of cubistic obliquities, he identifies the suffering C. with the Christ figure and the two gendarmes with the two thieves who were crucified on either side of Him. The scene takes place at night near the end of the journey to La Ferté-Macé when the prisoner and his guards come upon a large roadside shrine:
I banged forward with bigger and bigger feet. . . .Uphill now. Every muscle thoroughly aching, head spinning,I half-straightened my no longer obedient body ; and jumped : face to face with a little wooden man hanging all by itself in a grove of low trees.
—The wooden body clumsy with pain burst into fragile legs with absurdly large feet and funny writhing toes;its little stiff arms made abrupt cruel equal angles with
the road. About its stunted loins clung a ponderous and jocular fragment of drapery. On one terribly brittle shoulder the droll lump of its neckless head ridiculously lived. There was in this complete silent doll a gruesome truth of instinct,a success of uncanny poignancy, an unearthly ferocity of rectangular emotion. . . .
Who was this wooden man?. . .I had seen him before in the dream of some mediaeval saint,with a thief sagging at either side,surrounded with crisp angels. Tonight he was alone;save for myself,and the moon’s minute flower pushing between slabs of fractured cloud.
I was wrong, the moon and I and he were not alone. . . .A glance up the road gave me two silhouettes at pause. The gendarmes were waiting.
Part II of the book begins in the Depôt de Triage when C. wakes to find himself in the new world of The Enormous Room and is reunited with B. We are taken through his bewildered introduction to this world, its laws and punishments, its meager recreations, and its remarkable inhabitants, Harree, Pom-Pom, Bathhouse John, the Schoolmaster, Garibaldi, the Machine-Fixer, and all the rest who bear the colorful labels by which B. and C. identify them. It is in Part II that we get the most explicit presentation of the world-view of the book.
It is a world in which everything is upside down. Although they are imprisoned, it is “the finest place on earth.” It is a fine place for B. and C. because they have escaped from the oppressive ambulance unit, but it is a fine place for the group as a whole because they are in a limbo away from the world at war. In the world outside, it is suggested, the Schoolmaster was perhaps considered a corrupter of youth for telling “the children that there are such monstrous things as peace and goodwill.” Civilization is seen as a bad kind of development for nations, compared to a place like Algeria, “uncivilized, ignorant, unwarlike.” The harsh rule of the Depôt de Triage and the oppression and injustice that it perpetrates are very gradually seen as symbolic of all governmental structures. Although it is identified with and apostrophized as the French government, it stands for civilized governments all over the globe. When Bill the Hollander is returned to the Netherlands to be jailed as a deserter, the narrator remarks, “Much as le gouvernement français would like to have punished Bill on its own account and for its own enjoyment,it gave him up—with a Christian smile—to the punishing clutches of a sister or brother government.”
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