THE ENORMOUS ROOM
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The Enormous Room is Cummings’s account of the three months he and a friend, called only B. in the novel, were interned at La Ferte Mace concentration camp during the last days of the First World War. Like many other idealistic men of their generation, Cummings and B. had volunteered for the ambulance corps, expecting the war to be a nonstop adventure. In fact they found wartime life in France to be less than exciting. Cummings and B., who didn’t get along very well with their commanding officer, spent much of their time washing cars, cleaning out latrines, and doing other low-status jobs around camp. That all changed when B. wrote some fairly scathing remarks ahout the French in his letters home, which the French censors interpreted as proof that B. was a German spy. Both B. and his alleged accomplice Cummings were promptly arrested and interrogated by the authorities.
Fortunately, the French didn’t have enough evidence to prosecute either Cummings or B. for treason (or they might have been hanged). Instead, the French did the next best thing and threw the two into La Ferte Mace, an administrative limbo. Dubbed “The Enormous Room” by Cummings, La Ferte Mace was really a concentration camp for people the French suspected of being disloyal to the cause but could not justly imprison (or execute). In a word, the camp was a dumping ground for eccentrics, nonconformists, and misfits, the perfect company for a mildly bohemian proto-poet and his friend B. (The authorities made it very clear that the prisonlike camp was not a prison, and that the occupants of the nonprison were not prisoners–they just couldn’t leave.)
More surprising, however, is the way neither actor even tries to speak in Cummings’s dry, laconic, raised-and-educated-in-Cambridge (Massachusetts) way, nor does either of them look particularly like the poet (or any poet, for that matter). The handsome Todd Weeks plays Cummings as an upper-middle-class suburbanite (Cummings as Northwestern undergraduate). And Terry Green, looking quite dapper, plays the narrator Cummings as far more prosperous than you’d expect. (Going by the clothes alone you’d believe that spending time La Ferte Mace prepared Cummings quite well for success in the business world.) At no time would either of them ever be confused with the round-headed, almost bald, vaguely oriental-looking Cummings.
