His most popular book, The Enormous Room, was recently reprinted for its 100th anniversary.
The Enormous Room, by E. E. Cummings, New York Review Books, 288 pages, $16.95
Exactly a century after it first appeared, E.E. Cummings’ novel The Enormous Room has been republished, reminding us that its author may have been the most profoundly libertarian writer in American literature. Beginning as a critic of authoritarian social situations, he wrote here mostly about his imprisonment in a French military detention camp at La Ferté-Macé during World War I. Eccentric and yet evocative, this classic is no less visceral a century later.
As a congenital free spirit, Cummings felt confined more than most. “The right-hand long wall contained something like ten large windows, of which the first was commanded by the somewhat primitive cabinet,” he wrote. “There were no other windows in the remaining walls; or they had been carefully rendered useless. In spite of this fact, the inhabitants had contrived a couple of peep-holes—one in the door-end and one in the left-hand long wall; the former commanding the gate by which I had entered, the latter a portion of the street by which I had reached the gate. The blocking of all windows on three sides had an obvious significance: les hommes were not supposed to see anything which went on in the world without; les hommes might, however, look their fill on a little washing-shed, on a corner of what seemed to be another wing of the building, and on a bleak lifeless abject landscape of scrubby woods beyond—which constituted the view from the ten windows on the right.”
