{"id":134932,"date":"2019-03-25T15:40:11","date_gmt":"2019-03-25T19:40:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=134932"},"modified":"2019-03-25T15:40:11","modified_gmt":"2019-03-25T19:40:11","slug":"letters-from-w-s-merwin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/03\/25\/letters-from-w-s-merwin\/","title":{"rendered":"Letters From W. S. Merwin"},"content":{"rendered":"

Grace Schulman shares snippets from a lifetime of correspondence and friendship with the poet W. S. Merwin, who died on March 15, 2019.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

A young W. S. Merwin. (Credit: Estate of W. S. Merwin)<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cWe must not vanish all at once; it\u2019s too hard on the survivors,\u201d W. S. Merwin wrote in a letter to me late in his life, referring obliquely to the passing of his contemporaries, John Ashbery and Galway Kinnell. In the dark hours following Merwin\u2019s own vanishing on March 15, I thought of how he first appeared in my life.<\/p>\n

Our friendship began in 1972, during my first week as poetry editor of The Nation<\/em>. Inside a box of submissions was his packet of poems with the usual stamped self-addressed envelope. Besides my predilection for his poetry, I\u2019d known that he\u2019d held my job at The Nation<\/em> in 1962, and that he\u2019d written for them an eloquent plea for the containment of nuclear power. His poetry came on October 14, 1972, a date I remember because exactly two years before, during the Vietnam War, he had famously refused to sign a loyalty oath before a reading at the State University of Buffalo (SUNY), and went home refusing his badly needed check. Still, knowing what I did, I was unprepared for the lines I read:<\/p>\n

I have to trust what was given to me
\nif I am to trust anything
\nit led the stars over the shadowless mountain
\nwhat does it not remember in its night and silence
\nwhat does it not hope knowing itself no child of time<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Over the din of office typewriters, I heard the music and silence of those lines, the surprise of faith in one who is accustomed to doubt, the rhetorical questions suggesting all memory, all hope. He\u2019d sent that poem, \u201cThe Gift,\u201d along with others from his forthcoming book, Writings<\/em> to<\/em> an<\/em> Unfinished<\/em> Accompaniment<\/em>, hoping that The Nation<\/em> might feature them before the book appeared in 1973. \u00a0It had been The Nation\u2019s<\/em> practice to print one poem at a time, often as filler. I asked the publisher, James Storrow, Jr., for space to print not just one but the cluster Merwin sent, and when he looked askance, I read him the closing lines of \u201cThe Gift,\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I call to it Nameless One O Invisible
\nUntouchable Free
\nI am nameless I am divided
\nI am invisible I am untouchable
\nand empty
\nnomad live with me
\nbe my eyes
\nmy tongue and my hands
\nmy sleep and my rising
\nout of chaos
\ncome and be given<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Mr. Storrow nodded, and granted the space.<\/p>\n

Then we met, Merwin and I. At first he evinced formality, even when introducing himself as William. But soon afterward, he dropped his initial reserve. He talked to me about his deepest concerns, such as his regard for animals. When we walked through Greenwich Village, William greeted every dog we met, once lifting a terrier and looking into its eyes as though searching for its ancestors. There were warm evenings at Harry and Kathleen Fords\u2014Harry had been his editor at Knopf. There were drives to his zendo in Riverdale, where William, a Zen Buddhist, sat zazen and I watched from a bench for the unenlightened. In 1983, I attended his beautiful Zen Buddhist wedding to Paula Schwartz Merwin. And later we became a rollicking foursome, William, Paula, my husband, and I.<\/p>\n

William was not always nearby. The poet was born in New Jersey, he\u2019d lived in Spain and owned a farm in France, and, finally, he moved to Hawaii in the late seventies, where he turned a barren, abandoned pineapple plantation into a lush forest. He lived and died there.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, the geographical distance did not diminish our friendship. We wrote letters. Paula and I exchanged messages, as well. She wrote of how she missed her friends in New York but knew her garden well. When I sent her a photo of what I thought was a hydrangea, she answered, \u201cBut Grace, that\u2019s an azalea.\u201d<\/p>\n

William\u2019s handwritten missives continued until around 2007. After that, when his eyesight began to fail, the letters were typed, though he always added handwritten comments. I was especially moved when I received his handwritten note in April, 2016, his pen strokes seemingly put down with faith that they would not miss the page, evoking times when I used to fall off bikes. Referring to an honor I\u2019d received, he wrote, \u201cYour Frost Award, long overdue, takes me back to the days when you fell over handlebars and before…\u201d<\/p>\n

Rereading the letters, I am struck by how they emphasize his complexity. He enjoyed traveling abroad, and yet felt most himself at home. A poet of many languages and cultures, an activist for nuclear containment, a protester of loyalty oaths in the seventies, W. S. Merwin was a characteristic American. Even his remarkable translations from French, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Sanskrit show an adventurousness in our native variety.<\/p>\n

He craved solitude and yet thought continually about his friends. About my husband, Jerry, who had been disabled, he wrote:<\/p>\n

Does Jerry have a walking stick? The Chinese poets all love their walking sticks and I now have three and I use them because my eyes are not trustworthy on the slopes of this garden. For a while I kept tripping over things but since I have my stick with me I have stopped doing that.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When Jerry died in June 2016, William and Paula wrote soothing condolences, and William phoned to say, \u201cYou must miss him terribly. You will see him in the animals.\u201d<\/p>\n

Merwin\u2019s contradictions affirmed his vastness. He was sui generis and yet felt himself to be an integral part of the community. Most of all, his letters expressed a twin desire for city and country, nostalgic for the former, choosing the latter.<\/p>\n

About his Hawaii home, he wrote in 2014:<\/p>\n

We love our very quiet life surrounded by palm trees and bird song. The garden is not a petunia bed\u2014it\u2019s nineteen acres. We\u2019ve made a Conservancy of it hoping to save it into the future.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And again:<\/p>\n

I am surrounded by palms all of which I planted. The world\u2019s greatest taxonomist, John Dransfield, who came here last year to re-document the garden told me that there are more species in this garden than there are in any botanical garden in the world.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And yet in another letter of 2014 he writes of his love for the metropolis:<\/p>\n

If I have one city in the world at all, it\u2019s New York. I long ago realized that I didn\u2019t want to live in a city again. But I miss my friends there…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

His correspondence recalls themes in his poetry: the beauty of the natural world and the danger of human alienation from nature. The<\/em> Compass<\/em> Flower<\/em> (1977), Opening<\/em> the<\/em> Hand<\/em> (1983), and The<\/em> Rain<\/em> in<\/em> the<\/em> Trees<\/em> (1988) contain powerful poems that urge preserving the countryside, for, as he writes, \u201cIn the dark \/ there is only the sound of the cricket.\u201d Other poems, those of the seventies and eighties, show the city in all its vivid particulars. Of \u201cSt. Vincent\u2019s,\u201d for example, a hospital (now gone) which he could see out the window of his Seventh Avenue apartment, he is lyrical: \u201cI have seen the building drift moonlit through generations \/ late at night when trucks are few.\u201d He attends closely to the details:<\/p>\n

inside it the ambulances have unloaded
\nafter sirens\u2019 howling nearer through traffic on
\nSeventh Avenue long
\nago I learned not to hear them
\neven when the sirens stop<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

then asks in his concluding line: \u201cwho was St Vincent.\u201d<\/p>\n

That question is a profound inquiry, not an invitation for research. The poet tells us all about a subject in detail while retaining mystery at its heart. That quality recalls the medieval English ballads, in which there might be \u201cfour white horses,\u201d for example, and yet we don\u2019t know just why they ride. Merwin sings of all that is incomplete, disrupted, attenuated\u2014just as life itself. Over and again he returns to the fragmentary, and to the elusiveness of everything we mistakenly think we possess. That song is heard in his greatest poems, early and late, which offer details and yet withhold the answers. In \u201cWhat Can We Call It\u201d from Garden Time<\/em>, written near the end of his long career, the questions prevail:<\/p>\n

where were we where are we where will it be
\neach time it has taken us by surprise
\nand vanished before we knew what to say
\nbut who could have taught us what to call it
\nit can join in our laughter and sometimes
\nstartle us for a moment in our grief
\nit can be given but never be sold
\nit belongs to each one of us alone
\nyet it is not anyone\u2019s possession
\nwild though it is we fear only its loss<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Those unanswered questions may save us, for they are addressed to our deepest fears, losses, and loves.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Grace Schulman is the author of\u00a0 the memoir <\/em>Strange Paradise. Her most recent of seven books of poems is <\/em>Without a Claim.\u00a0She was awarded the Frost Medal for Lifetime Achievement in American Poetry in 2012. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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