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).
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