It's very clearly a memoir written by a poet--a slightly obscure style, meandering narrative movement... and flashes of incredible momentary insight. Worth reading more than once.

While volunteering as ambulance drivers during WWI, Cummings and a friend of his ran afoul of the French government as suspicious characters. They were suspicious because they spent more time with the French than with their American compatriots, and because Cummings' friend (referred to in the book as B.) had mentioned rumors of various French plots in his letters home. Cummings' close association with B. was enough to get him hauled in alongside B. when the gendarmes came to collect him.

The book proceeds mostly chronologically for the first part, which talks of being sent to various holding facilities and then being gendarme-escorted to the site of the titular Enormous Room at La Ferte Mace (I have no idea how to do accents on the Mac so you'll have to imagine them). Once he's done describing his first day or so there, the narrative shifts to a sort of vignette format, where he talks about his fellow captives and various happenings in their imprisoned lives. He says there was really no other way to do it, as there ceased to be days once he was firmly ensconced there - everything was really just an endless present until the day he was released.

He and B. were held for 4 months, at which point B. was sent on to an official prison and Cummings was released to the American embassy and bundled off to America. (His family had at first not known his whereabouts, and then were told he had been lost at sea. Intervention from the American government got him released instead of sent off to a French town to be watched carefully for the rest of the war.)

The chronological portion was quite easy reading, but the second part was a little more difficult because of the lack of a clear structure. Cummings likes to use words in his own way - for example, he describes a guard as resembling a rooster and making a sort of "uh-ah" sound as he walks. A few paragraphs later he says, "Behind me the bedslippered rooster uhahingly shuffled." Between that and the copious amounts of French he leaves untranslated in the book, it can occasionally be difficult reading. If you're proficient in the language it would be no problem, of course, but I'm not and I often read away from a computer and easy translation. I had to use my minimal knowledge and whatever cognates I could find to get the gist of some of the conversations.

Recommended for: people who hate governments, fans of linguistic flexibility and dry humor, and people who have wondered what it's like to live in a single room with a bunch of men, fleas, and buckets to pee in.

Quote (I had a hard time choosing, there were a lot of good ones):
"...worst of all, the majority of these dark criminals who had been caught in nefarious plots against the honour of France were totally unable to speak French. Curious thing. Often I pondered the unutterable and inextinguishable wisdom of the police, who -- undeterred by facts which would have deceived less astute intelligences into thinking that these men were either too stupid or too simple to be connoisseurs of the art of betrayal -- swooped upon their helpless prey with that indescribable courage which is the prerogative of policemen the world over, and bundled it into the La Fertes of that mighty nation upon some, at least, of whose public buildings it seems to me that I remember reading: Liberte. Egalite. Fraternite."

I think this is a book for which I needed a lot of guidance in reading. Firstly, there were so much French used (understandably as protagonist is being detained in France) so not only do I not understand what they're saying but also the relevance of it in the story culturally etc. The overall feel I got was it was some gentleman's joke though it does also feel that he's got to make light of it all or he may cry.

I am calling this book 'finished' even though I have not finished it. I don't get it. It's by E.E. Cummings, the humerous poet. But I don't know if this is comedy, satire, drama, tragedy. Mostly I just found the 100+ pages that I read kind of boring. Not much happens, and I am not sure what happens when it does. It feels like a WWI 'Catch-22' in some way, but I really am not sure if it's satire. If anybody knows, do let me know!

i love e.e. cummings' poetry, but i've always wanted to know more about his time in france after world war i. this was very interesting.

As a fan of the history of WWs and as a fan of literature, I liked this book. It's fascinating to look behind the impersonality of a war, especially under the guidance of such a master of the word as Cummings. He describes the world of a concentration camp in France in a form of vignettes dedicated to the most interesting characters and events. As he states himself, the book is rather a compilation of notes than a full-fledged novel or a historical account.

Engaging absurd memoir of WWI captivity, witty and fitting to lockdown loss of sense of time as mostly vignettes of fellow prisoners, but also grotesque and bitter.

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."
― E.E. Cummings, The Enormous Room



Prison Literature as a genre is fascinating. Like war literature, there is this gap between those who have actually lived in prison and their experiences and those who imagine. Certainly the job of the fiction writer is to explore spaces unknown to most, and perhaps unknown even to the author. Science Fiction is filled with writing that follows that pattern. However, from the several novels I've read by authors who have actually been in prison (like books written by those who have actually fought in war), the experience seems to create an almost surreal or absurd view of things. E.E. Cummings who was incarcerated by the French during WWI because of letters written by his friend, portrays this absurdity of confinement in this novel, and just as Dostoevsky does in [b:Notes from a Dead House|22474925|Notes from a Dead House|Fyodor Dostoyevsky|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1417983674s/22474925.jpg|320469] or Solzhenitsyn does in [b:One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich|17125|One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich|Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1427731744s/17125.jpg|838042]. I could continue the list with works by Paul Bunyan, Cervantes, Marque de Sade, Chester Himes, O. Henry, Jack London, Jean Genet, Oscar Wilde, etc. I could also include the political writing and books by Napoleon, Hitler, Malcom X, Mussolini, etc.

Obviously, the political tracts written in prison (or even the religious tracts too) deserve a lot of attention, but 'The Enormous Room' has more in common with Kafka and the modernists than it does with any protest writing. It is the attempt by the trapped artist to create something from an experience. It is a scratch to explain, a scribble to remember, a set of words meant to make sense of the absurdity of the cell. This isn't a perfect book and I will be the first to admit I prefer E.E. Cummings poetry to his prose. But it is also an important marker. It is a novel that shows just how warped even good systems can get during war, and just how pleasant some captives really are. In many ways Cummings wasn't writing to right some wrong, or to expose some evil. He seemed to treat his experience in France as almost an illness, a temporary convalescence that served as a puparium. It wasn't an obvious transformation. He didn't walk in an innocent and exit an artist, but it seemed to be a vector of growth, an accelerant toward the artist.

As I write this I also think there is a natural pull of artist and prison. Does that seem harsh? Prisons represent the ultimate impulse to control for conformity. It is natural that this impulse seeks out and grabs the artist; the ultimate non-conformist. Society is always trying to keep the artist in check, and when the odd, the aberrant, the avante-garde appears too far ahead, too dangerous for the masses, it is often easier for society to just lock the odd up. I don't think this is likely to ever change. There will always be conflict between Pan and Panopticon.