** spoiler alert ** Although I have always been a tremendous fan of cummings' poetry, even going so far as to purchase one of his paintings, I was truly pleased when one of my professors loaned me his personal copy of this book. It soon became uncomfortably clear that cummings and I had certain similarities, mosty centered around insisting that we do things which only fit our narrow moral compass...and making flippant remarks concerning such to those in charge of our lives.
While this story is about cummings when he went to WWI as an ambulance driver in France, his lack of enthusiasm for the cause of war in general got him thrown into a French jail for 4 months. He was, after all, a suspicious character and it is the easiest thing in the world to round up suspicious characters.
The jail is a real... hole and the reader feels the sinking feeling being forced upon him quickly as he realizes just how much stark reality of depravity is staring him in the face. Nevertheless, this book is a story about not just coming to grips with his cell mates, but humanizing each of them in a wonderful way. cummings achieves a kind of solitude, one guesses, which he had always sought, but had been unable to find. In truth finding solitude at a young age is next to impossible only because of the things playing on in one's own head.

In a way, this is a story of Dante's own pathway through hell and finally a kind of heavenly modern salvation. It was at least something I could understand in my opinionated twentieth century soul... and the sounds rang perfectly clear. cummings essentially does find a kind of salvation by having everything reasonable about the world wrested from him... and he rises to the occasion to achieve it. While no doubt the experience was far more terrible than this book depicts, one can understand not only the generation of his thoughts, but his friendships with others there... and the impression he must have made finally on them.
As I recall, cummings would never say anything further about this period of his life in public or to his friends. When one is tempted, it seems to me, to ask a question, one should simply read this book again and find the answer. It is in prose, of course, but it is written much like a poem. It is evocative and it is powerful beyond the words used in it.
While I have suggested that in this he achieved a kind of salvation, perhaps it is better put another way: one has to achieve this kind of salvation before one understands what the real thing actually is. If nothing else, this book is quite capable of shutting down that spurious noise of the life you think is important and forcing you to look hard into the darkness for one's own answers.