The Enormous Room

by E. E. Cummings, Nicholas Delbanco (Introduction)

Overview

A rambunctious modern novel by the twentieth century's most inventive poet.

Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1894, Edward Estlin Cummings rebelled against the prevailing values of his Harvard and Unitarianism-- steeped milieu. His relentless search for personal freedom led him to Greenwich Village in early 1917, where he established himself as a Modernist, composing his sui generis poems and abstract paintings. Later that year, he impulsively joined the war, serving in a Red Cross ambulance unit on the Western Front. His free-spirited, combative ways, however, soon got him tagged as a possible enemy of La Patrie, and he was summarily tossed into a French concentration camp at La Ferte-Mace in Normandy.

Unexpectedly, under the vilest conditions, Cummings found fulfillment of his ever-elusive quest for freedom. The Enormous Room (1922), the fictional account of his four-month confinement, reads like a Pilgrim's Progress of the spirit, a journey into dispossession, to a place among the most debased and deprived of human creatures. Yet Cummings's hopeful tone reflects the essential paradox of his experience: to lose everything--all comforts, all possessions, all rights and privileges--is to become free, and so to be saved. Drawing on the diverse voices of his colorful prisonmates--Emile the Bum, the Fighting Sheeney, One-Eyed Dah-veed--Cummings weaves a "crazy-quilt" of language, which makes The Enormous Room one of the most evocative instances of the Modernist spirit and technique, as well as "one of the very best of the war-books" (T. E. Lawrence).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781681376196
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	07/26/2022
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	176,875
Product dimensions:	4.90(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

E. E. Cummings (1894–1962) was a renowned poet, novelist, playwright, and painter best known for the unique syntax and orthography that he employed in his written work. During World War I, while serving in the ambulance corps in France, he was arrested by the French military on suspicion of espionage due to perceived anti-war sentiments in his letters home. He was freed after several months and soon returned to the United States, where he was drafted into the army and served on a base in Massachusetts until the end of the war. The Enormous Room was published four years later.

Nicholas Delbanco is the author of more than thirty books of fiction and nonfiction, including, most recently, the memoir Why Writing Matters, the essay collection Curiouser and Curiouser, and the novel The Years. He is the Robert Frost Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan. He lives in Cape Cod and New York City.

Editorial Reviews

"Cummings’s memoir-cum-novel is valuable for its outlook, as the author, who would publish his first poetry collection a year later, uses his wry voice to counteract the cruelties of war." —Benjamin Shull, Los Angeles Review of Books

"The canonical works of the First World War are most frequently concerned with the squandered lives of young men, yet Cummings’s report invaluably expands the reader’s grasp of the catastrophe. . . . The Enormous Room was originally published before Cummings’s debut collection of poems. . . and exhibits much of the fragmentary style and lively spirit for which his poetry would become known. Yet beneath these flourishes lies a sincere and biting critique of those responsible for the conflict, which rings as true now, in the book’s centenary year, as it did then." —Kathleen Rooney, The TLS

“The Enormous Room is a good book, an unusual book, an exciting book.” —Robert Graves

“I went through The Enormous Room again . . . and from it knew, more keenly than from my own senses, the tang of herded men, and their smell. The reading is as sharp as being in prison, for all but that crazed drumming against the door which comes of solitary confinement.” —T. E. Lawrence

“The Enormous Room lives on, because those few who cause books to live have not been able to endure the thought of its mortality.” —F. Scott Fitzgerald

From the Publisher