From a review of a new bio of e.e. cummings.

[Mark Kohut]

Pynchon uses the simple normal phrase to describe the room where GR opens
but has anyone read cummings' novel for possible uses or inspiration?  "Vivid
character sketches".....in spiritual terms including a pilgrim, etc...


"Quite a different Cummings emerges from “The Enormous Room” (1922), his
imaginative account of his and Brown’s internment in the French prison camp
at La Ferté-Macé, starting in September 1917. Brown had written letters to
a friend in the States which the authorities deemed subversive. When they
came to arrest Brown, Anderson spotted a chance to rid himself of both men,
and gave them the innocent Cummings as well. Cummings’s account of their
ordeal is wry and imaginative, enumerating the petty tyrannies of his
captors and the absurdist doldrums of the camp. Named for the large
communal space where the prisoners slept, the book was something of a
command performance. His father had worked feverishly for his son’s release
and demanded a written account, in return for “financial support.”

“The Enormous Room” comprises a number of vivid character sketches, ranging
from Cummings’s eccentric and sympathetic fellow prisoners, to the
officials he depicts as soulless drones. He frames his ordeal in spiritual
terms, reserving the name Apollyon, the “foul fiend” from Bunyan’s
“Pilgrim’s Progress,” for his nemesis. Cummings’s rants about his fellows
are uproarious, but their behavior imparts a sobering lesson: “It struck me
at the time as intensely interesting that, in the case of a certain type of
human being, the more cruel are the miseries inflicted upon him the more
cruel does he become toward anyone who is so unfortunate as to be weaker or
more miserable than himself.”