by W. S. Merwin
Books by W. S. Merwin
POEMS
Present Company
Migration: New & Selected Poems
The Pupil
The River Sound
The Folding Cliffs
The Vixen
Travels
The Rain in the Trees
Opening the Hand
Finding the Islands
The Compass Flower
The First Four Books of Poems
Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment
The Carrier of Ladders
The Lice
The Moving Target
The Drunk in the Furnace
Green with Beasts
The Dancing Bears
A Mask for Janus
PROSE
The Ends of the Earth
The Mays of Ventadorn
The Lost Upland
Unframed Originals
Regions of Memory
Houses and Travellers
The Miner’s Pale Children
TRANSLATIONS
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Dante’s Purgatorio
East Window: The Asian Translations
From the Spanish Morning
Four French Plays
Vertical Poetry (Poems by Roberto Juarroz)
Pieces of Shadow: Selected Poems of Jaime Sabines
Selected Translations 1968–1978
Osip Mandelstam, Selected Poems (with Clarence Brown)
Asian Figures
Transparence of the World (Poems by Jean Follain)
Voices (Poems by Antonio Porchia)
Products of the Perfected Civilization (Selected Writings of Chamfort)
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (Poems by Pablo Neruda)
Selected Translations 1948–1968
The Song of Roland
Lazarillo de Tormes
Spanish Ballads
The Satires of Persius
The Poem of the Cid
Copyright © 2005 by William S. Merwin
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the Publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Merwin, W. S. (William Stanley), 1927-
Summer doorways: a memoir / W. S. Merwin
p. cm.
1. Merwin, W. S. (William Stanley), 1927—Childhood and youth. 2. Merwin, W. S. (William Stanley), 1927—Travel—Europe. 3. Poets, American—20th century—Biography. 4. Europe—Description and travel. 5. Americans—Europe—Biography. I. Title.
Text design by David Bullen
Shoemaker Hoard
An Imprint of Avalon Publishing Group, Inc.
Distributed by Publishers Group West
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
e-book ISBN 978-1-61902-814-2
To James Baker Hall and Mary Anne Taylor Hall
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
1
A summer descends to us from earlier years, heir to ancestors it never knew. The summer I was twenty-one I sailed for Europe. I left from New York, the city where I had been born, though I had not grown up there. Except for a walk with my parents across the international bridge at Niagara Falls, to step on the soil of Canada when I was, I think, eight, it was the first time I had been out of the country.
Travel from America to Europe became a commonplace, an ordinary commodity, some time ago, but when I first went such departure was still surrounded with an atmosphere of adventure and improvisation, and my youth and inexperience and all but complete lack of money heightened that vertiginous sensation. So did the fact that we went by sea, which took days, rather than a few hours by air.
Four of us were to be travelling together on the boat. At that age I was already married. That was a rash, unconsidered arrangement, not destined to last, and indeed already coming undone, but my wife, Dorothy, was with me. We planned to meet the other two who would be with us at the boat. One of them was Peter Stuyvesant, twelve years old, whom I had tutored the summer before, and the other was a school friend of Peter’s named Andrew, who was coming along so that Peter would have company his own age.
It was early July and very hot. The last week or so had been a kind of interregnum, a time of packing and packing up, of goodbyes and outings. Dorothy’s sister’s boyfriend had a new Studebaker convertible with a radiator ornament like a small airplane, and we dreamed up reasons for trips from the boyfriend’s house in Princeton, to the Jersey shore, Dorothy’s parents’ tiny old house beside the derelict canal west of the Delaware in Morrisville, Pennsylvania, and New York. We spent the last day and night in Manhattan, in a minute apartment that had been lent to Dorothy’s sister, in midtown on the East Side. It was long before the days of air-conditioning. The windows were all open to the New York summer night, and Dorothy’s sister and a friend of hers who was also spending the night there on a couch complained knowledgeably and at length about how high rents had become in New York. Someone they knew had just taken an apartment nearby, nothing but a studio with a kitchen and bathroom and balcony, and it was costing their friend ninety dollars a month.
The next morning there were traffic problems in midtown. The whole of that part of New York was tied up by a huge parade for Douglas MacArthur down Fifth Avenue. The radios were blaring commentaries on it. We heard every word through the open windows. Pundits were speculating about the possibility of his running for president. Just before we were scheduled to leave, an assistant editor from the Hudson Review arrived at the apartment bringing me the page proofs of a review I had written for the magazine, for me to correct on the voyage and send back. It was a piece about Lord Acton and Jacob Burckhardt, about historians, about history. What did I know about history? But the delivery of page proofs at that moment made me feel, as we inched through the jammed side streets, heading for our wharf across the East River, that I was really a writer.
Our passage had been booked on the Nyhorn, a Norwegian freighter registered in Panama, as I was told by one of the crew who helped with the trunks, or in Liberia, as I was informed definitively a bit later by the plump, bustling, officious young man who was the steward assigned to look after the few passengers, whose cabins and dining and sitting rooms were under the bridge.
The steward was right. It was the Liberian flag we saw on the flagstaff that first morning at sea. After we had watched the closing of the hatches and the final readying of the freighter, and had inspected each other’s cabins, we stood at the rail watching the withdrawal of the gangplank, the casting off, the gap silently appearing, growing definite, widening, between the vessel under our feet and the pilings and the wharf, the dingy brick buildings, the apparently vacant, detached back streets of Brooklyn, and then we shuddered to the bass blasts on the w
histle and felt the first vibrations of movement as the vessel was dragged, coming awake, into the channel. We watched the city, suddenly hushed, slipping past us and dropping behind, leaving us, and we were borne along into the widening estuary and looked back to see the gray cliffs receding between the two dark rivers, in the pink glow of the summer evening. The whistle notes from the harbor, the sounds of the horns and sirens from the streets, must have accompanied us part of the way, but they had scarcely seemed audible above the low throb of the freighter’s engines and the long trailing syllable of the wake. The whole outbound passage seemed to be enveloped in silence.
We managed to make certain that it was the Liberian flag by looking it up next morning in a book from a glassed bookcase in what the steward referred to grandly as the passengers’ lounge, an undefined area at the end of the one long dining table, with a few armchairs and a kind of card table under a thick mat advertising vermouth. The lounge retained all day the odor of an alley running in back of restaurants. The steward was glad to explain that the owners, whoever they really were, had registered the vessel in Liberia for financial and, as he put it, regulatory reasons, to avoid certain taxes and restrictions. That was why, he said, you saw so many ships with Liberian or Panamanian registry, as of course we had. He dropped these nuggets of insider information quickly, out of the side of his mouth, so that they could hardly be heard, to make them sound at once essential and disreputable. It was an effect that clearly had been perfected with practice.
The passengers would come to realize before long that he had a repertoire of small routines, all of them well rehearsed. He ran through several of them in the course of the first day. One that he repeated at every meal, as a ritual of his own, consisted of coming up behind someone at table, with the handle of a tall, tapering, chromium-plated pot in each hand, and asking brightly and loudly, “Café Voir”? Then without waiting for an answer, except perhaps a startled look, he would begin pouring, from a disturbing height, coffee from one spout, cream or milk from the other, managing to hit the cup with both streams remarkably often, though there were occasional wobbles and overshots into saucers and onto the tablecloth. He ignored those in grand style, moving on with the same orotund inquiry to the next speechless diner, without appearing to grasp the nature of his audience’s admiration.
We few passengers had the whole freighter to ourselves, and the boys and I explored it together, a huge, exciting new possession. As the horizon rose and fell I kept telling myself that I was on the way to Europe, and trying to make it credible.
Besides the four of us there was a young couple named Biddle who were on their honeymoon and kept to themselves much of the time, and an older man, a merchant seaman, born in Italy of Italian parents, brought up in the United States. He was on his way to see relatives in Italy, perhaps to ship out on another vessel there, he said, though for the time being he was retired. Questions about the vessel he might be joining or about his relatives led into clouds, but on the other hand he had a way of suddenly starting to tell some episode from his years at sea. His accounts may have been as rehearsed in their way as the steward’s skits, and though he told them all as pages of his own life, I came to wonder, as I listened to him, whether some of his anecdotes might not have been tales that he had heard, from somebody else’s story, and whether some of them had ever taken place at all. They seldom seemed to connect, at the beginning or end, with something that had happened before and had caused them, or with something that had followed as a consequence. Often they rose out of the silences of our wandering talk, suggested by no association that I could guess. But he told them with confidential immediacy and detail as though they were memories, and I listened to them—and so did Peter if he was around—with rapt attention.
We were headed for Genoa, and he told me that he had sailed out of that port once, in his youth, on a four-masted iron schooner loaded with a full cargo of Carrara marble that was to be delivered far up the Amazon at the suddenly rich city of Manaus, for the palatial new opera house they were building there. It was not their first cargo of that kind, and they had been all the way up the river to Manaus, with marble in the hold, before. But it was in the days before radios were required equipment at sea, or at any rate they had no radio, and it was around the autumn equinox, when weather could turn ugly. It blew hard as they crossed the Mediterranean, and worse after they sailed through the Strait of Gibraltar and started out into the Atlantic. They plowed on under shortened sail, but the storm was violent, and at night the wind and the bucking of the vessel snapped the top of one mast and then another, and the heavy gaffs, whipping at the ends of the stays, swung down, tangled in the rigging, and began to flip and hammer on the side of the schooner and to smash holes in the iron sheeting. The sea started to come in too fast for the pumps to deal with it. They could not signal for help or hope for any, in such seas. The crew took to a lifeboat and pushed off, leaving the schooner to sink with its marble. They managed to reach the African coast in the lifeboat.
Only a few days before, I had listened to another older man, a journalist just back from Brazil, describing Manaus, and the opera house as he had seen it then, with patterns of gray mold clouding its porticos and halls, rotting velvet dangling from walls and balconies, vines twining through the ceilings and over the rows of seats, the jungle reclaiming all that grandiose brief-lived architecture, and I tried to guess how old the seaman might be, and the age of his story. The opera house (I checked later) had been built in the years of the Amazon rubber boom, back in the nineteenth century. Maybe the Italian had heard about it from his grandfather.
Peter was rereading Sherlock Holmes and the Prose Edda, and I think he accorded the seaman’s stories a little of the same acceptance. The boys and I played hide-and-seek around the hatches and along the decks, and Peter and I became addicted to lying far out on the bow of the Nyhorn, hypnotized by the wave curling up under us, the knife of the prow lifting and sinking, parting the green water.
2
Five summers before that, a little earlier in the year, I was within a week of graduating from a boarding school in Kingston, Pennsylvania, across the river from Wilkes-Barre. Its name was Wyoming Seminary, founded in the 1840s to provide education for the children of Protestant ministers, to whom scholarships were still offered. The original red brick buildings, late neocolonial, with a succession of three white-columned porches and a white belfry, still stood at the corner of tree-lined back streets, with a church (Methodist) across one street and another (Presbyterian) on the street behind the campus. Since my father was a minister, the tuition, I was given to understand, was halved, and I had a working scholarship besides, which paid for my room and board in return for my waiting on table in the dining hall during my first year, and keeping the chemistry laboratory and physics classroom swept out during my second year.
I liked both jobs. The waiters constituted a kind of club, a minor guild, secret society, clan, with mores and a hierarchy, informal but fully understood, and perquisites that included the run of the kitchen. We ate together, serving ourselves, and exchanged knowing gossip in what seemed like a time apart from the tight schedule of the school day. We got out of daily chapel early. We got extra food, including dessert, if we wanted it. But the chemistry job was preferable. It was reserved for seniors, partly, I suppose, because whoever did it must be responsible for working alone. The cleaning was done in the evening, when the study hall on the ground floor had closed, and the big, square, dark red brick building that I associated, for no reason that I can remember, with the end of the Civil War and the presidency of Ulysses Grant, was empty. I had the place to myself. The black counters in the chemistry lab had to be wiped off with a damp cloth, and all the dry, splintery floors of that room, and of the hallway across the top of the stairs, and of the shallow tiers of the lecture room banked upward like a theater, and of the physics room beyond that, had to be sprinkled with an oily granular sawdust dyed green, to lay the dust, and then swept with a wide push broom tha
t I can still hear knocking against the iron legs of the desks with their folded tabletops. The last part, strewing the handfuls of green crumbs ahead of me in arcs, out of a big can, like a sower going forth to sow, went with a somewhat hypnotic slowness, but there was a smooth pleasure in sweeping the floors. When I had finished I could turn out the lights, and by the rays of the distant street lamps filtered in through the trees go to the top level of the sloped room, behind the last row of seats, to lie on the floor looking across at the windows of the girls’ dormitory, and with luck catch sight of the girls getting undressed for bed.
That was common or garden voyeurism, but in fact I was in love, and had been since I was nine or ten, with a doctor’s daughter in my father’s congregation in the Washburn Street Presbyterian Church in Scranton, with whom I was so shy that I could scarcely speak to her when I had a chance to get near her. During the last year when I was at Seminary, she had been sent to stay with friends of her family in a house just across the street behind the school, on the other side of the grass hockey lawn, where I could just see her house through the trees from my dormitory window. But it was forbidden to leave the campus except for short, prescribed periods. Our outings were watched. There was no way to reach her by telephone or to set up meetings, because she too was severely restricted. I saw her only a few times when we managed it half by chance. It seemed that we had known each other for a very long time, and that unrecorded history was like a secret understanding between us, and it gave me hope. I had not been allowed to invite girls out on dates or take them to movies when I was in grade school or high school. I had seen her then only in choir practice at the church, and on Sunday evenings after Christian Endeavor, when sometimes we gathered at each other’s houses (and occasionally, if my father was not likely to find out about it, we danced). Once I had been allowed to invite her to take a hike with me on a Saturday afternoon, and we had set out, my heart pounding, but partway up the mountain I realized that my fly was completely open. It was unbuttoned—that was in the days before zippers—and that crucially altered the tone of the outing, because I was too mortified to find a way to get my fly buttoned without calling attention to it, and when I spoke to her I stood sideways or talked over my shoulder.
