Born on October 14, 1894, Edward Estlin Cummings later became e. e. cummings, the lower case letters being an important element of his signature, though some editors and/or writers have become lax about honoring cummings wish to print his name without upper-case letters. It would be interesting if that laxness were a form of revenge. Any editors wishing to revenge themselves are likely long retired and/or dead, but they apparently had reason to be bitter; cummings--I was once told by a copyeditor who as a young woman, she said, had worked in an editorial department that had dealings with him--was particularly fussy about the way his poems appeared in print. When granting permission to reprint a poem, he demanded, she said, the right to approve the way it would appear on the page; his corrections often involved the movement of letters by a millimeter or so and making them held up production schedules, even though to the untrained eye those letters appeared just as they did in the original publication. The copyeditor who told me this story went on to say that when news of cumming's death arrived in her department in 1962, a sigh of relief could be felt. Measuring for millimeters, it was thought, would come to an end; cumming's last wife, Marion Morehouse, however, turned out to be just as particular, if not more so, as cummings, and other kinds of sighs could be heard in her department for another seven years.

     I don't know if the story that was told to me is true, although it seems to indicate something about cummings that it can be told and not simply condemned as nonsense. The particular copyeditor, in any case, was old enough to have begun her publishing career in the early 1960s or late 1950s, but beyond finding out that biographical fact about her life, I have never sought to find evidence to verify her story. I tell it here not to present it as fact but to segue into a consideration of cummings apparent indifference to the boundary many feel should divide fiction from nonfiction. The truth or falsity of a story may be a particularly important thing for people to know in some contexts, in a criminal trial or a political debate, for example. We shouldn't want anyone to vote for or against someone or something based on the most compelling bits of misinformation that can be manufactured, although, it must be admitted, that we are often less inclined to condemn falsehoods if we are in favor of the way a vote goes. 

     When it comes to a work of art, however, does it really matter that the story we are reading is true or imagined? I'm inclined to think not and believe cummings would have agreed. After all, his first book,

The Enormous Room  (1922), the material for which was developed out of cumming's incarceration in France during the First World War, was marketed during cummings' life, and continues to be marketed, as both a memoir and a novel, and cummings seems to have fostered the confusion. In 1922, it is true, he lacked the sort of control over his work that he could take later, and when the first edition of The Enormous Room was published as a work of nonfiction, according to the February 11 Publishers' Weekly, the version that was printed was considerable different from the manuscript that the publisher had been given; the British edition that was published six years latter was based on cummings' manuscript, not the book released by his American publisher. It would take another six years, when The Modern Library republished the book, for an American edition that followed cummings' manuscript more closely to appear.

     By the time the second American edition saw print, The Enormous Room was a novel and remembered to have always been a novel, as one reviewer recalled that when it first appeared it was "loudly hailed as one of the first really realistic war novels." Yet The Modern Library Edition seems to go to great lengths to establish the veracity of the story, even while calling the book a novel on the inside flaps, for it prints letters written by cummings' father, Edward Cummings, to get his son released from prison, the enormous room of the novel's title, and in his own introduction, cummings seems to willfully fudge the issue, writing in an interview format the following exchange:

So you're thirty-eight?

Correct.

And have only just finished your second novel?

So called.

    In the end, The Enormous Room's value for cummings lies not in its status as fiction or nonfiction but in its aesthetic value and perhaps its ability to alter "The Great American Public," which he describes near the end of the book, "as the most aesthetically incapable organization ever created." Are aesthetic values or an author's veracity more important to you?