The Enormous Room
Page 36
Harper’s, to whom Dr. Cummings had sent a copy of the manuscript, turned it down, as had Harcourt. Then on March 21, Horace B. Liveright of Boni & Liveright wrote to inquire about the book at the suggestion of Mary Heaton Vorse, another Liveright author who had read Cummings’ manuscript and enthusiastically recommended it. “I believe,” wrote the publisher, “it is an account of his experiences in a French prison. If you have not already arranged for publication of this book, I’d like very much to read it with a view of publishing it.” A copy of the manuscript was sent to Boni & Liveright sometime after July 7, on which date Dr. Cummings wrote to Will Howe of Scribner’s, who were considering publication themselves, to ask him to forward it on. Liveright must have read the manuscript shortly after he received it; for on the twenty-sixth of August he wrote to Cummings’ mother in Silver Lake—Dr. Cummings was in Europe attending a World Peace Foundation meeting in Geneva—to inform her of his decision to publish the book. Dr. Cummings himself acknowledged the good news on the seventeenth of October following his return to Cambridge and, with an authorization from his son, whom he had visited in Paris, he asked Liveright to draw up the contract. The contract was signed and returned to the publisher on the fourth of November.
A letter from Liveright that accompanied the contract states that he was anxious “to set this book up as soon as possible and get all the advance publicity we can.” All that remained for Dr. Cummings to do was to forward the drawings his son had selected to illustrate the book and a two-paragraph addition to the “Jean Le Nègre” chapter Cummings had written in Paris to Liveright, which was done on the twelfth of November, and help the publisher choose a title for the book. Liveright suggested the book be called “Hospitality,” a title that Dr. Cummings thought “would be attractive” but believed he could improve upon given the time. A list of twenty-six suggestions followed on the fifteenth of November: “The Enormous Room,” “Held on Suspicion,” “Caught in the French Net,” and “Unwilling Guest,” among them. The author, however, had the final word. On the morning of November 25 a cable reached Dr. Cummings from Paris. It read: “Title of book The Enormous Room.”
The Boni & Liveright edition of The Enormous Room, which was published on April 27, 1922, used only one drawing by the author on its dust wrapper; and the text, which omitted passages equivalent to twelve pages of the final “fair copy” of the manuscript, translated many of the French passages into English, and restored most of the punctuation that had been deliberately removed by the author, raised temperatures on both sides of the Atlantic. But in the absence of any firm evidence, it is impossible to apportion the blame for these “omissions, mistakes in punctuation, and other stupidities,” as Cummings referred to them in an undated letter to his father. The changes, alterations, and deletions were probably made in the first set of galley proofs by some well-meaning copyeditor and passed on to Cummings’ father, who accepted them without comment.
The Jonathan Cape edition, which was published in England in July 1928, and the “Modern Library” edition, which was based on the English text and published on January 25, 1934, are both textually complete. However, the manuscript from which the Cape edition was set—a reasonably accurate retyping of the corrected second “fair copy” of the original—shows many signs of “editorial” tampering with Cummings’ punctuation and improvements, rather than corrections, of his French.6 Neither of these later editions includes any of the author’s drawings.
The present edition, it is hoped, represents The Enormous Room as its author would have wished to see it published. Typographically, it reproduces the text as Cummings himself created it in the final draft he typed for his father; i.e., without a space after medial punctuation marks and without the added emphasis of italics for the French and other languages of La Ferté-Macé. The absence of space after punctuation marks in Cummings’ work has long been an accepted element of his style; however, it now appears that this “style” is equally applicable to the author’s prose writings, even his type-written letters and notes. Since it is the intention of the present edition to present the text of The Enormous Room as Cummings wrote it, his “style,” rather than that of his father’s typist and the book’s previous publishers, has been followed throughout. This is also the reason for printing the foreign terms in the text in a roman face. The copy of the manuscript upon which the text is based reveals that the use of italic for languages other than English was an editorial decision of the publishers and not the author.
Textually, this edition follows the second “fair copy” of the manuscript and incorporates all of the corrections, additions, and amendments in the author’s hand. Only three kinds of changes have been made to the text: (1) Anglo-Saxon four-letter words have been printed in full, as they were in Cummings’ final draft; (2) obvious misspellings of words, especially place names, have been corrected; and (3) clearly unintentional inconsistencies in spelling and capitalization have been made to conform with the manuscript’s established style. Dr. Cummings’ suggested change of name for the character now known as “Judas”—he was called “Jesus Christ” in the final draft—has been retained.
The illustrations by Cummings that adorn the text have been taken from the “two note-books,containing drawings à propos” referred to earlier, and thirteen other notebooks, all in The Houghton Library’s collection of the “Papers of Edward Estlin Cummings.”7 The fifteen notebooks have been identified as dating from the period of the author’s stay in France in 1917 and contain hundreds of drawings in pen and pencil associated with his stop-over in Paris, his impressions of the front, and his internment in La Ferté-Macé. For the present edition, only drawings associated with matters relevant to the text have been used. The titles that appear are Cummings’ own.
* * *
1. Clifton Waller Barrett Library, University of Virginia, Deposit 6246-a.
2. All quotations from the letters of E. E. Cummings and Edward Cummings are taken from the copies in The Houghton Library, Harvard University. Edward Cummings’ letters are cataloged under bMS Am 1823 (296), 1823.10 (12), and 1892 (193). E. E. Cummings’ letters are cataloged under bMS Am 1823.1 (152) and 1892.1 (32).
3. Only six incomplete chapters of the author’s final draft have survived: Chapter IV (7 pages), The Houghton Library, bMS Am 1892.6 (25), and the University of Virginia, Deposit 6246-a; Chapter V (2 pages), The Houghton, bMS Am 1823.4 (3); Chapter VI (6 pages), The Houghton, bMS Am 1892.6 (26); Chapter VII (8 pages), The Houghton, bMS Am 1823.4 (3) and 1892.6 (26); Chapter XII (1 page), The Houghton, bMS Am 1823.4 (3); and Chapter XIII (3 pages), The Houghton, bMS Am 1823.4 (3).
4. The 265-page original of the first “fair copy,” with the author’s holograph corrections and alterations and his typed additions to the text, is at The Houghton Library (bMS Am 1892.12) together with Chapters XII and XIII of the carbon copy (bMS Am 1823.4 (2)). The remaining chapters of the carbon copy are at the University of Virginia (Deposit 6246-a).
5. The 280-page original of the second “fair copy,” with Cummings’ final corrections and alterations and his father’s “Introduction” to the first edition, is at The Houghton Library (bMS Am 1823.4 (1)). The University of Virginia holds the carbon copy of this manuscript (Deposit 6246-a).
6. The printer’s copy used for the text of the first English edition is at the University of Virginia (Deposit 6246-a). It includes copies of Robert Graves’ “Introduction,” Edward Cummings’ “Foreword” (the “Introduction” to the earlier American edition), and a set of designs for the layout of the book.
7. bMS Am 1823.7 (7–20) and 1892.8 (1).
Copyright © 2014 by Susan Cheever
Copyright © 1978 by the Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust
Copyright © 1978 by George James Firmage
Copyright © 1978 by Richard S. Kennedy
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Cummings, E. E. (Edward Estlin), 1894–1962, author.
The enormous room / E.E. Cummings ; a typescript edition with drawings by the author ; introduction by Susan Cheever ; edited, with a note on The Enormous Room, by George James Firmage ; afterword by Richard S. Kennedy.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-87140-928-7 (pbk.)
1. World War, 1914–1918—France—Fiction. 2. Concentration camp inmates—Fiction. 3. Concentration camps—Fiction. 4. Americans—France—Fiction. 5. Ambulance drivers—Fiction. 6. La Ferté-Macé (France)—Fiction. 7. Autobiographical fiction. 8. War stories. I. Firmage, George James, editor. II. Title.
PS3505.U334E56 2014 813'.52—dc23 2014019907
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