Box of Shakespeare
Every year my jolly friend A.E.W-M and I attempt to go on some sort of adventure to a new city together. One trip ago we were kind of half broke and having to do something on the cheap and not too far away, so we decided to go to Columbus the weekend of S.P.A.C.E. (a small but cute comic-con- I got a blue bunny there that is still decorating my inspiration board.)
Columbus itself was kind of on the dreary and depressing side, but after a couple hours of driving around we managed to find the good independent bookstore, a rambling almost musty old house stuffed full of used, bargain, and strange books of all kinds.
The way to go bookshopping is to wander through and look around till something calls you, it took me two times through all manner of windy hallways and crowded rooms till I saw it. e.e. cummings? I always notice his name because it looks so ridiculous. is that poetry or something? no - it’s a novel. The Enormous Room. Hm, I didn’t know he had a novel. This looks interesting. It got read almost immediately upon returning home, and has never really left me since.
It’s an account of mr. cumming’s adventures serving in an ambulance corps during WWII. Well not exactly - he had a best friend and a smart mouth and a good old time, till they annoyed the boss that had a severe hate on for them so much that he got cummings and his best friend sent off to a french concentration camp on some kind of trumped up “they have a treasonous attitude” charges.
I guess something like this could have been pretty scary, but they were young and arrogant enough still to relax into the absurdity of the experience. Throughout the book cummings goes in to great detail about the people and conditions and daily life of being a prisoner at that time and in that place, all the colorful characters they met, and all the dramas that played out before their eyes, but he never directly talks about himself or his best friend. It seems more like the book was about all of the things that he and his friend talked about to amuse each other while they were there. A recounting of a years worth of private jokes.
Towards the end of the book cumming’s friend gets sent off to the very bad and scary prison where no one that goes there ever comes back from alive, and the sense of heartbreak coming out of the book after that happens is almost unbearable. The day that the box of gorgeous leatherbound Shakespeare editions that he and his friend finangled for months trying to get their hands on arrived, e.e. just shoved them away and didn’t look at them at all. And I just keep feeling sad for that box full of Shakespeare that missed being read by those crazy and brilliant young men to a bunch of illiterate war orphan hoodlums in an enormous wet room at the tail end of WWII. That probably would have been a lot of fun.
Originally published at Unicorn Tea Party. You can comment here or there.