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Summary
The Enormous Room is Cummings’s autobiographical narrative of the time he spent in La Ferté Mace, a French concentration camp a hundred miles west of Paris. Cummings and a friend, both members of an American ambulance corps in France during World War I, were erroneously suspected of treasonable correspondence and were imprisoned from August, 1917, until January, 1918. In this book, Cummings describes the prisoners with whom he shared his captivity, the captors who subjected their victims to enormous cruelty, and the filthy surroundings of the prison camp.

Written in the form of a pilgrimage and modeled after John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), Cummings’s narrative also shows the influence of early American black autobiographies. Like Christian in Pilgrim’s Progress and the slaves who wrote their own stories, the narrator in Cummings’s self-portrait faces an arduous journey to freedom, a voyage not unlike the ones described in many early black autobiographies also modeled on Bunyan’s classic. In Cummings’s voyage, the autobiographer emphasizes and celebrates his belief in individuality, especially as it is seen in the characters of the prisoners, including the gypsy dubbed Wanderer, the childish giant named Jean le Nègre, and the clownish captive called Surplice.

In The Enormous Room, the reader follows the enslaved Cummings along three legs of his journey: first, the period before La Ferté Mace; then, the period beginning with the second day in the enormous room; and finally, the departure from the French prison. During the first part of the autobiographical journey, Cummings appears as a rebellious American soldier parodying the rhetoric of wartime communication in his description of dissension within the ranks:To borrow a characteristic-cadence from Our Great President: the lively satisfaction which we might be suspected of having derived from the accomplishment of a task so important in the saving of civilization from the clutches of Prussian tyrany [sic] was in some degree inhibited, unhappily, by a complete absence of cordial relations between the man whom fate had placed over us and ourselves. Or, to use the vulgar American idiom, B. and I and Mr. A. didn’t get on well.

Rebellious and independent, the young Cummings quickly learns the price of asserting these two qualities: He is imprisoned and joins a multitude of other captives who try desperately, and usually successfully, to retain their individuality despite their captors’ efforts to rob them of this quality.

Enclosed in the space he calls “the Enormous Room,” Cummings is entrapped in an oblong room eighty feet by forty feet. This room in La Ferté Mace both restricts and unites an international menagerie of humanity (Dutch, Belgian, Spanish, Turkish, Arabian, Polish, Russian, Swedish, German, French, and English), including the American animal, E. E. Cummings. Among the most memorable of these fellow prisoners is Surplice—the court jester of the enormous room, the fool, the scapegoat, the eternal victim—who occupies an important spot in both the prison and the world, as Cummings...

from eNotes

I have requested this book from the library and it is on its way. It sounds intriguing.

Just starting this...

3.5 stars

This is a fictionalized memoir/semi-autobiographical novel based on Cummings experiences as a prisoner of war in a French concentration camp for four months during WWI. The title refers to the large cell in which the male prisoners were kept.

Cummings paints rich descriptions of his fellow inmates (you can see a lot of his talent as a poet here). He even throws in a bit of humor from time to time, despite the harshness of the surroundings. Their are also a few jabs aimed at the French government.

Overall, a good book, although Cummings sometimes tends to go a bit overboard with his descriptions of characters and day to day life in the prison. Also, not a lot really happens here. Again, the book is mainly descriptive. It also seems a bit disjointed at times.

I found this book an interesting look at a unique experience-being a quasi prisoner of war because of suspicious, unproven activities. I wonder how long he would have remained there if his family did not make the effort to locate him.
It also showed the injustice of the system due to bungling officials and the corruption of those at the highest level, represented by the Directeur.
At times the style was poetic and lyrical, especially when the author was describing his emotions towards the end of the book.