The Enormous Room

Cover design for E. E. Cummings’ The Enormous Room, a memoir that details his experiences as a WWI POW in France

First among the conditions needed for finding and generating novel, creative, and ingenious human responses – in any and all circumstances – is an “enormous room.” We want this blog, and indeed all the work of Revolution of Tenderness, to open up this enormous space of possibility.

Our blog title alludes to a book by E. E. Cummings called, The Enormous Room, published in 1922. This autobiographical work describes Cummings’ imprisonment in France during World War I, and the “Room” the title describes is the barracks where Cummings was incarcerated along with about 30 other prisoners. While the “enormous room” that we want to build and that is crucial for fostering human flourishing and creativity, need not be a prison, it’s fascinating to note that Cummings’ confinement opened up a space in him where he could find and develop his poetic gift.

Two other secondary conditions for developing a richly creative and truer humanity are food and music. But not just any food (for example, not “bread alone”); and not all music will suffice for this purpose.

Cummings’ Enormous Room

E.E. Cummings was no ordinary prisoner, and the way that he experienced and narrated his involuntary detainment helps us understand the importance of cultivating our own enormous rooms. For Cummings, the space of his incarceration became a symbol for memory, for the space where he could keep the companionship of his fellow inmates alive. This “room” contained Cummings’ likewise enormous affection for all those with whom he shared it. The quality of the friendships formed within that communal cell also provides an insight into the needs of inventors, innovators, and all those whose daily work, no matter how hidden or “small,” can rebuild and unveil our humanity.

Each of us carries multitudes within. These throngs could become, over time, a faceless and colorless mob; sometimes it’s less painful to allow this degradation to happen, where memory breaks down the sharp edges of detail and leaves only a melted, vague mass of humanity. For a person to remain fully alive to her work and her environment, however, decomposition is worse than death. Distinguishing between one face and another, even between one subtle expression on a particular face and the mere flicker of a muscle that alters its meaning, could transform the essence of a relationship from ordinary to sublime. As Cummings’ notes, when describing his fellow prisoner, The Schoolmaster, in The Enormous Room: “Lessons hide in his wrinkles…” All creative contributors to a more human culture need the enormous room in order to keep track of every lesson that hides in each wrinkle.

Even more than lessons, though, the enormous room preserves and enlarges the affections among those who inhabit it. Cummings’ genius with words comes in second to his particular gift of tenderness for the subjects he writes about, even his captors. For example, during his entrance interview, he describes the petty official who interrogated him:

[He] looked as if he was trying very hard, with the aid of his beribboned glasses and librarian’s jacket (not to mention a very ponderous gold watch-chain and locket that were supported by his copious equator), to appear possessed of the solemnity necessarily emanating from his lofty and responsible office. This solemnity, however, met its Waterloo in his frank and stupid eyes, not to say his trilogy of cheerful chins–so much so that I felt like crying ‘Wie gehts!’ and cracking him on his huge back. Such an animal! A contented animal, a bulbous animal; the only living hippopotamus in captivity, fresh from the Nile.
He contemplated me with a natural, under the circumstances, curiosity. He even naively contemplated me. As if I were hay. My hay-colored head perhaps pleased him, as a hippopotamus. He would perhaps eat me. He grunted, exposing tobacco-yellow tusks, and his tiny eyes twittered.   – from The Enormous Room, by E.E. Cummings

The impulse to “crack him on the back” and cry out, “How are you?” in German brings silliness into a humiliating situation. Cummings gives us burlesque, even as he dances in the arena of his own prison. When Cummings turns his attention to his fellow prisoners, his affection deepens:

And I wondered that France should have a use for Monsieur Auguste, who had been arrested (because he was a Russian) when his fellow munition workers made la grève [a strike], and whose wife wanted him in Paris because she was hungry and because their child was getting to look queer and white. Monsieur Auguste, that desperate ruffian exactly five feet tall who—when he could not keep from crying (one must think about one’s wife or even one’s child once or twice, I merely presume, if one loves them) … -used to, start up and cry out, taking B. by one arm and me by the other:
‘Al-lons, mes amis! Chantons “Quackquackquack.”‘ [Come, my friends, let’s sing the “Quackquackquack”] Whereupon we would join in the following song, which Monsieur Auguste had taught us with great care, and whose renditions gave him unspeakable delight:
…’finirons nos desseins,
…………………………Quack.
……………………………….Quack.
……………………………………Quack.
………………………………………….Qua-
…………………………………………………ck.’
I suppose I will always puzzle over the ecstasies of That Wonderful Duck. And how Monsieur Auguste, the merest gnome of a man, would bend backwards in absolute laughter at this song’s spirited conclusion upon a note so low as to wither us all.

If only we could reprint Cummings’ depictions of all his fellow inmates: the Schoolmaster, Orange Cap, the Zulu, Emile the Bum, the Silent Man, the seeker of cigarette ends, the Turk, the Bear, and many others, who all received similar, loving treatment from Cummings’ pen, but you can read them here.

We’re all, more or less, thrown together with a raft of characters, most of whom we would not have chosen for company. Out of these personalities, we can either make beauty or a living hell. Out of the hell of his confinement, Cummings made a love poem for a good number of men he would never see again. His is the room where memory sharpens affection’s focus and gives back art.

Food

Not just any food, no matter how exquisitely prepared or how locally-sourced and organic the ingredients, will satisfy the deepest needs of the human heart. In The Hiding Place, an autobiographical account, this time by concentration camp survivor Corrie Ten Boom, Corrie and her sister Betsie arrive at Ravensbrück camp and are able, against steep odds, to hang on to their Bible and a bottle of precious vitamin drops:

My instinct was always to hoard [the vitamin drops] – Betsie was growing so very weak! But others were ill as well. It was hard to say no to eyes that burned with fever, hands that shook with chill. I tried to save it for the very weakest – but even these soon numbered fifteen, twenty, twenty-five…
And still, every time I tilted the little bottle, a drop appeared at the top of the glass stopper. It just couldn’t be! I held it up to the light, trying to see how much was left, but the dark brown glass was too thick to see through.

The vitamin drops from this episode in The Hiding Place represent what nourishes an abundant life. These drops must be rare, needed by the owners, and yet freely shared, in love, all the same.

Why take examples from a prison and a concentration camp?

If something is true under great duress, then it can also be true in any circumstance. So to validate the need for memory, for affection, and for sharing a stranger’s precious, life-giving drops, we must see whether these things have value in the harshest circumstances.

Music

The “Quackquackquack” song provided a kind of oxygen, without which the enormous room’s inhabitants would have asphyxiated from lack of joy. Likewise, without Betsie’s hymns, which she sang despite the ugliest of circumstances, those vitamin drops would have dried up.

The impulse to song – including when music takes the form of a lyrical novel, or a well-mopped floor, or a dialogue that leads to deeper friendship – must rise up in us, or even the best memory, the most playful description of one’s tormentors, or the most noble impulse to share will fall flat.

Love needs to be set to music before we can play it. Let’s form a band. We’ll call it Saxifrage.

An Interview with Angel Riley

In the Particular, We Discover the Universal

Angel Riley is an emerging American soprano embarking on a promising career. Angel’s exciting stage presence and rich vocal color distinguish her performances, resulting in her winning a coveted position as a 2020 Gerdine Young Artist with the Opera Theatre of St. Louis. Register to attend Angel Riley’s October 17 (7:30pm curtain) performance of A Woman’s Life: A Song Cycle by Richard Danielpour on the Poems of Maya Angelou. This concert is free, but requires preregistration.

by Meghan Isaacs

On October 17, the Festival of Friendship will present a song cycle by prominent American composer Richard Danielpour, entitled A Woman’s Life, to be performed by soprano Angel Riley, accompanied by Lucy Tucker Yates on piano. The seven-movement work draws on the poetry of Dr. Maya Angelou, and like so much of Dr. Angelou’s oeuvre, presents a very particular experience that manages to resonate universally.

Danielpour set out to compose a song cycle for soprano Angela Brown, and already had Dr. Angelou’s poetry in mind as the libretto when he met with the poet at her townhouse in Harlem. When he asked Angelou if she could provide the text, she immediately knew which poems to select. “I was with my wife that afternoon, and [Dr. Angelou] read seven poems to us, sometimes clapping in rhythm with the poems, sometimes repeating lines of the poem that were not actually repeated in the text. By the time she finished, I was in tears. It was one of the greatest performances in my life that I had ever witnessed,” said Danielpour.

Several years after the premiere of A Woman’s Life, emerging young soprano Angel Riley, then a vocal performance student at UCLA, first encountered Danielpour’s music through a performance of his oratorio The Passion of Yeshua, in which she participated with the UCLA chorus. Provoked by his musical language, Riley reached out to Danielpour, who suggested she explore A Woman’s Life. Riley went on to engage in an independent study with Danielpour, during which she (along with Yates as pianist) worked through much of the song cycle under the composer’s guidance. Riley (who recently completed her Master’s degree with aims to begin an artist’s diploma program in fall of 2021) took time to reflect on the music and what it has to say to audiences today. 

Tell us about your relationship to A Woman’s Life?

I’ve been with this work for a while now, and I guess the most important thing about this set is that it follows the life of an everyday Black woman in America, and it sheds a positive light on her experience. Richard Danielpour wrote this set for Angela Brown as a thank you gift for performing in his opera Margaret Garner. They both thought it was important to present a work strictly relating to Black women due to the lack of positive portrayals in art and media. This set is so important and unique in that each of the songs comes from a Black woman’s perspective. Dr. Angelou was specifically committed to uplifting Black women in her life. Because of her poetry you see this uplifting of Black women, and Danielpour’s setting of the text really highlights that.

 Do you have a favorite song in the cycle, or one you feel you most relate to?

 My favorite is the second of the set: “Life Doesn’t Frighten Me.” It’s my favorite, but it’s so difficult for the pianist. I try to capture a young Josephine Baker-type feeling. It talks about all these things — “I’m not afraid of anything; I’m confident; I’m young; There’s nothing you can do to me.”

 My other favorite is the very last piece “Many And More.” Specifically, this piece signifies a woman in old age who, although her life did not turn out the way she thought it would, manages to find joy and peace in knowing that there are many men who she’s deserving of but who are not deserving of her. In the fourth movement, she’s confident in her womanhood and sexuality, but feels like she doesn’t need to be bogged down—she can have many men. But by the final piece, she’s gone through love and she’s lost. In the end she found comfort in knowing that she doesn’t necessarily need a man and she can find peace in God. To me, it’s significant: how you can go through life, and your ideas and thoughts about what you want can change. It really signifies wisdom to me.

What was your relationship to the writing of Maya Angelou prior to this performance?

 I have always read through her collected poems. I would literally just watch videos of her reciting her poems on YouTube. I’ve often watched her lectures too because she just imparts so much wisdom.

What does this song cycle have to say to our society today?

Just in the way our society is organized, the Black woman is at the bottom. This is a set that intentionally uplifts the Black woman and sheds a positive light on Black women in America. These are beautiful images of a Black woman who has lived, loved, learned, and lost. It is spiritually refreshing and culturally uplifting to Black women in America. 

The theme of this festival is “You Will Be Found.” Was does that mean for you? How does this song cycle speak to that?

Although this piece represents Black women, I think the text is so vivid and colorful that everybody can find something in the set that they can relate to. It’s going to make the audience feel something and learn something.