an enormous stride
(and drawing thy mouth toward
my mouth, steer our lost bodies carefully downward)
would have melted with as brittle freshness on the senses of the readers of The Dial as melted the brown-encrusted oblongs of ice-cream in the mouths of tired stenographers and their beaux. Can it be that people like ice-cream and only pretend to like poetry?
Therefore it is very fortunate that this book of E. E. Cummings' has come out under the disguise of prose. The average reader is less self-conscious and more open to direct impressions when reading prose than verse; the idea that prose is Art will have closed the minds of only a few over-educated people. Here at last is an opportunity to taste without overmuch prejudice a form, an individual's focus on existence, a gesture unforeseen in American writing. The attempt to obscure the issue, on the paper cover blurb and in the preface, will fool no one who reads beyond the first page. It's not as an account of a war atrocity or as an attack on France or the holy Allies timely to the Genoa Conference that The Enormous Room is important, but as a distinct conscious creation separate from anything else under heaven.
Here's a book that has been conceived unashamedly and directly without a thought either of the columnists or the book trade or Mr Sumner, or of fitting into any one of the neatly labelled pigeon-holes of novel, play, essay, history, travel book, a book that exists because the author was so moved, excited, amused by a certain slice of his existence that things happened freely and cantankerously on paper. And he had the nerve to let things happen. In this pattern-cut generation, most writers are too afraid of losing their private reputations as red-blooded clear-eyed hundred-percenters, well-dressed, well-mannered and thoroughly disinfected fashion plates, to make any attempt to feel and express directly the life about them and in them. They walk in daily fear that someone will call them morbid, and insulate themselves from their work with the rubber raincoat of fiction. The Enormous Room seems to me to be the book that has nearest approached the mood of reckless adventure in which men will reach the white heat of imagination needed to fuse the soggy disjointed complexity of the industrial life about us into seething fluid of creation. There can be no more playing safe.
