Incorrect English

Experiments in Style Calculated to Make the Purist Turn Over in His Grave

JOHN PEALE BISHOP

THE supreme test of a book," Ezra Pound says somewhere, "is that we should feel some unusual intelligence working behind the words. I have expressly written here not 'intellect' but 'intelligence'. There is no intelligence without emotion." And the first thing which one would like to say of The Enormous Room of E. E. Cummings is that it is intelligent. Behind the disordered, elaborated and frequently beautiful play and interplay of words, one is conscious of a sensitive, pitying and ironic mind, and of varied and intensely felt emotions. In bare outline, the book is the record of three months spent in a French prison for political spies and suspects; but, though one cannot well doubt a single related fact, so evident is the necessity for honesty, The Enormous Room is hardly to be taken as a document, another account of indignities and injustices endured and now to be told. It is rather a presentation of emotions, the tale of "the long and difficult way" through which a young man had to come before he could discover the richness of life at its poorest. A loose analogy with the Pilgrim's Progress is preserved, and at the end are the Delectable Mountains who are none other than a gypsy, a negro thief, a none too honest Pole, and a poor abject creature named Surplice.

Nervous Rage

HE simple facts are these: Cummings and his friend B were in October, 1917, serving with the Norton Harjes Ambulance as members of a Sanitary Section affiliated with the French Army. An overzealous French censor decided that B's letters betrayed dangerous if not revolutionary opinions; Cummings and his friend were arrested as suspicious characters and despatched to a miserable and unspeakably filthy detention camp there to await at the autumn's end the commission which was to send B. to Precigne for the duration of the war and to allow Cummings his liberty. I will leave it to others to comment on the justice and wisdom of this arrangement. It need only be said that Cummings never permits himself either a shriek or a whine throughout the length of the book. What he has to say concerning the greatness and goodness of the French Government in permitting him to live at La Ferte is spoken very quietly, now with a gentle contempt and now with a terrible controlled indignation. There are moments of self pity when he looks firmly at his fellow prisoners to stem his own misery; there are times when his very gentleness seems the effort of a mind trembling upon hysteria.

"And his ghastly and toylike wizened and minute arm would try to make a pass at their lofty lives," he says, speaking of a crippled, impotently indignant little Belgian, whom with an irony perhaps not unconscious, he calls the Machine-Fixer—for his talk with the little man is almost always on those machines by which peoples are governed. Then follows this passage which will indicate as well as any this vein beautifully incisive and ironic of Cummings.

"O gouvernement francais, I think it was not very clever of you to put this terrible doll in La Ferte; I should have left him in Belgium with his little dollwife if I had been you; for when governments are found dead there is always a little doll on top of them, pulling and tweaking with his little hands to get back the microscopic knife which sticks firmly in the quiet meat of their hearts."

The emotional and visual memory are closely balanced; Mr. Cummings can recall with a full nervous exactitude the look and feel of the scene; he can elaborate with precision the emotions of a given moment. To be able to do both these things is rarer than it would seem and to show how the sensuous and emotional are fused in his mind I cite those sentences in which The Wanderer is introduced.

Unruly Overtones

NOT that he always succeeds in bringing out his effects; there are passages enough where the main thought is out-thundered by the overtones, where adjectives and nouns break from his control in a verbal Bedlam. Yet when the subject is one of essential importance to his narration he can and does build up a scene, character intensely and imaginatively alive. Celina confronting le Directeur, the chapters named for Jean le Negre, The Wanderer and Surplice represent Cummings at his best and that best seems to me to give him a definite claim to be considered among the important living American writers. I doubt if any other could have informed physical squalor, beastliness and degradation with so splendid a spiritual irradiance.

So far as I am concerned, the trouble with The Enormous Room is exactly that which is to be found in practically all the experimental prose in America, which is simply that not enough time has been taken to bring the form to completion.

The Enormous Room is written in a gamey personal idiom which moves in one direction toward a highly organized, rhythmic prose, and in the other toward the last crudities of the vernacular. His vocabulary shows equally the dustiness of the dictionary and the muck of the street. His interest in extending the limits of prose is obvious. He is quite willing to employ an adverb to modify a noun—"three very formerly and even once bonnets" or another noun—"softnesses eyes" and he has not hesitated to use words not commonly accepted in print. If Cummings needs a defence for having done so, it is provided for him in Havelock Ellis's essay on Zola in Affirmations. I have neither the desire nor the ability to add anything to what is said there.

"Introducing Irony"

IN Introducing Irony Maxwell Bodenheim has likewise performed with violent skill upon English speech, though the charge of impatience cannot be made against him as against Cummings. He has, since the beginning of his career some ten years ago, cultivated a small and quite private garden where he weds orchids and gilliflowers, sprays the morning-glories with vitriol, sprinkles the grass with rust, and puts drugs at the roots of his hydrangeas to turn them blue. When he pauses in these pursuits it is to express his contempt for the people on the highway.

Bodenheim's style is decadent, by which I mean to imply that it represents the furthest extreme from the classical. There is the decadent insistence of the line above the poem, the word above the line. But in his decadence he is probably more akin to Poe than to the imitative poets of the 90's. He is to be found at his best in Seaward from Mars, Insanity and a Simple Account of the Poet's Life. Impidsive Dialogue offers an excellent and dispassionate critique of his own art. I heartily recommend the book to anyone the least interested in American poetry.