The Wrong Answer

A Poetry Tale about E. E. Cummings, told by Hello Doggo.

Nineteen seventeen. Edward Estlin Cummings, twenty-two, is driving ambulances in France. His friend William Slater Brown is writing letters home.

The French censors opened them. Brown had written that the French soldiers were despondent, and didn’t believe Germany would be beaten. In wartime, that was enough for suspicion of espionage.

In late September, both men were arrested. By his own account, when asked whether he hated the Germans, Cummings gave an honest answer. No. He liked the French very much.

Wrong answer. Off he went to a detention camp at La Ferté-Macé, in Normandy, to sleep in one vast, filthy room with dozens of other prisoners.

Back home in Massachusetts, his family was living on cables. One said their son had sailed on the Antilles, a ship sunk by a German submarine, and was reported lost. The next called that a cruel error. Still no son.

So his father, the Reverend Edward Cummings, wrote to the President of the United States. A long, formal, furious letter. He was not speaking for his son alone, he told Woodrow Wilson. Eleven days later, Cummings was free. Whether the letter did it is doubtful. State Department files suggest his release was already on its way.

He turned the whole ordeal into a book, The Enormous Room. A man locked up over words in a letter. And in some copies of his book, someone inked out one rude word by hand.

Since feeling is first, he wrote later, who pays any attention to the syntax of things? The French censors did.