by W. S. Merwin
By the summer of 1944 civilian students on the Princeton campus were a small minority among military trainees in the v-5 and v-12 programs. (These were officer training programs, and I knew what the designations meant at the time, but I have forgotten.) Older men were there in the AMGOT (Allied Military Government of Occupied Territory) program, which was preparing business and professional men to run countries liberated from the Nazis as soon as the war was over. The servicemen sat in on some of the lectures with the civilians, but they marched in formations around the campus and otherwise lived apart. The eating clubs, which had been the setting of Princeton’s elitist (“fast,” as my mother said) social life in the years between the wars, were closed, except for Tiger Club, which was used as a dining hall for the few civilian students, and Prospect, next door, as a kind of sitting room. At Tiger, as part of my working scholarship, I waited on table. The small number of civilians, and the fact that most of us were in one way or another irregulars, either physically unfit for military service or too young to be called up, obscured for a while how incongruous it was for me, and for others of my friends on scholarships, to be virtually or completely penniless in a university famous for its rich, privileged student body and mores. By the time I had been there for two semesters, so many of the civilian students had been called up, as they turned eighteen, to go into uniform, that only 143 were left in my class.
The old red sandstone library, on the eve of being shunted aside by the construction of the new one nearby, was at once a capacious, spellbinding realm. The stacks were open, the building remained open late, and my reading led me to further curiosity, new names and subjects and lives. I noted them down, perused the card catalogues looking them up, prowled the glass-floored walkways between the stacks, and made my way back to my room laden with books. I read far outside the assignments, and often on wild tangents, forgetting the assignments themselves, from which I had been distracted by siren allusions. It was the literature courses that held and then impelled me, but I must have been exasperating to most of my professors.
Most of my social life, during the first semesters there, consisted of friendships with other scholarship students, many of whom waited on table, first at Tiger Club, and later on, when the civilian student body began to expand again, in the high-ceilinged neo-Gothic dining hall known as the Commons. It was there, one August evening, that I turned up to put on my white waiter’s jacket and eat with the other waiters before dinner and found them excitedly discussing something called the atomic bomb, which the United States had dropped on Japan. At first I thought it was a movie they were talking about, or a new work of science fiction, or a sinister joke. When I realized that they were serious and learned details of what they were talking about, I felt a wave of cold, then of disbelief and denial, reactions that have affected the world ever since that evening.
Some of my friends still looked very young, and others had obvious physical handicaps that made it clear why they were not in the service while the war was on, but not all of the reasons for their being out of uniform were apparent. One evening I stood waiting in a movie queue in town, with a tall, robust-looking friend, talking about our shared passion for Thomas Mann. My friend had an incurable kidney disease. (At that age, utterly unable to confront or imagine such a thing, we pretended to ignore it, and so I have felt ever since that I must have seemed unaware of it, or even indifferent to it, and I feel now how inadequate whatever I said to him about it was. He died of the disease a year or so later.) A small, white-haired birdy lady behind us suddenly reached up to tap my friend on the arm, and asked, “Young man, why aren’t you in the service?” He smiled down at her indulgently and said, “I have syphilis, madam.”
Among the remaining civilians there were a few hard-drinking, high-living types used to having money and spending it, who discoursed at length about their wild weekends in New York or Washington. Some of them sported Confederate flags above their mantelpieces and left their doors standing open. There was a silent gulf between these relics of the school’s country-club legend and the shabbier, nerdier, motley skeleton crew on working scholarships. Then there were exceptions who were neither one nor the other, afloat between both, more serious and disenchanted than the tyro playboys, and far more worldly-wise than the likes of us. They were older than we were, rare and singular, returning to university life after something else. There were the first few returning veterans. Some of those were silent. But one was a former navy fighter pilot whose room was across the hall from mine. He told tall stories about smuggling operations using the fighter plane on trips between the Caribbean and the States. He was amiable, skeptical about everything, a legendary and apparently unbeatable poker player, hospitable with his neighbors in the dormitory, generous and open—except that he had a whole other life somewhere in New York, to which he departed on weekends, and of which he said nothing at all. Another became a kind of elder brother figure for a few of us who were already dreaming of being writers. His name was Bunkley. He was the son of an admiral and had been a journalist in Argentina. He had published revelations about the government there that led to his having to skip the country, and he had barely made it. His fragmentary references to that time were redolent of the violence that we were hearing about from the world at large. He was a hard drinker whose liquor cabinet was open to his friends, a brilliant talker, a disillusioned student of history and literature, a young man grown up and desperate. He killed himself a couple of years later, playing Russian roulette at a party, in front of his girlfriend. Those few elders seemed to us fully mature, emblems of worldly wisdom from a generation that was almost our own.
The abnormally small number of civilian students, as we realized even at the time, had given to the campus a feeling of space that it probably had not had for years, and that would soon be completely forgotten. On my allowance an occasional movie was just possible, but even the most frugal trips to New York were out of the question. Once during those years I hitchhiked as far as Newark with another waiter, a boy from Missouri who had never been to New York. We made it to the Newark railroad station and got the train to Grand Central for seventeen cents each, managed to pick up a pair of pretty high-school students, twins, on 42nd Street, and take them for a cup of coffee. Then we had just enough for the train tickets back to Newark.
But on one of my early explorations of the wartime campus I discovered, below the stadium, the riding hall, apparently deserted, and beyond it a stable with about a dozen horses. They included, as I learned, polo ponies, quarter horses, and Morgans, all under the eye of a depressed retired jockey sitting in the tack room by himself, out of his mind with boredom. The horses spent much of the day in stall. I asked him whether they did not need exercise, and he said of course they did. I asked whether I might be allowed to ride them, and he asked whether I could ride. I mustered up images of penny pony rides in Nay Aug Park in Scranton, and of being seated, years before that, high up on top of a white plow horse and led around the barnyard, and I said yes. He may have guessed the extent of my experience, but he saddled up Red, the biggest, oldest, slowest horse in the stable, good-hearted old Red, giving me pointers as he did it, and led Red and me into the empty riding hall with its light like the inside of a paper bag, and he watched me mount, adjusted the stirrups, and left me to it. For a week or two Red and I spent an hour or two almost every afternoon circling the vacant arena, with Red understanding the situation perfectly and willing to humor me, in an absentminded way. Then I was allowed to try other horses—polo ponies, a quarter horse—first inside the halls and eventually outside it, in the corral. Finally I was allowed to ride out off the campus into the patches of overgrown meadow and the woods that ran along the shore of Lake Carnegie almost the whole way to Kingston, at that time. A quarter horse named Bobby, trained as an officer’s mount, was my favorite. He was nearly black, with his roached mane growing back, and the shaved patch on his neck with his serial number disappearing under the last of his winter coat. I am sure that Bobby, li
ke Red and the polo ponies I sometimes rode, grasped at once all they needed to know about my abilities as a rider, and perhaps recognized aspects of my character that I had managed not to acknowledge. Bobby tried a few tricks at the beginning, such as veering suddenly toward low-hanging tree branches to see whether I could keep from getting knocked out of the saddle, but after one or two of those it was fairly clear that he welcomed the outings, the chance to run, even with so poor a rider, and I became very attached to him. The jockey taught me how to groom the horses I rode. I was at home in the stable, which seemed to be an autonomous place, in those years. The jockey never noticed, or else paid no attention, when I borrowed a bridle from the tack room—which of course was locked when he left in the evening—and took it up to my room on the campus, so that I could come back down at night and slip it onto Bobby and ride out bareback, for hours, along the lanes through the woods, and across the open country.
One afternoon, out beside the lake, near a big stone house that stood by itself under the trees, a horse nickered and Bobby answered. A girl of my own age appeared on horseback. She lived in the stone house with her mother and brother. We became friends, and I rode out there often. The whole family was passionate about music, informed and opinionated. The girl with the horse sang—Bach arias. Her brother, back from traumatic active duty in the army in Europe, was an organist who wanted to be a composer, and with him Bach was an obsession. Bach, Bach, Bach—and I learned other names, of composers I had never heard of, and listened to records out there, on a stone terrace facing the lake.
Other friends from Princeton, all of them fellow waiters, took to coming out to the house by the lake and listening to music, and sitting talking in a kind of half secret retreat that we had found, and the girl, Nancy Merkel, and her mother, Charlotte, remained friends through my years at Princeton and afterward. But I was always there at that house with Bobby. He was the magic that had brought me, and that was something I had come to believe about him, wherever we went together. He made something possible that was ordinarily forbidden and unknown.
I learned more about music by simply listening to an obviously gifted and already learned fellow-student, Charles Rosen, who loved to talk about whatever figure—musical or literary—was his current obsession. He seemed equally brilliant about literature, both French and English, and music, and since his practice room, on the ground floor of the old art museum, was just across the grass from my room in the dormitory, I spent hours at my open window or lying out on the grass listening to him playing Scarlatti and—again—Bach, Bach. Twenty years after we had both left the university, at a big literary party in New York, Charles walked across the room and resumed a conversation exactly where we had left it off, all those years before. His memory for music, for literature, and clearly for whatever interested him, had always been phenomenal.
I signed up to sing in the choir (which earned me a few dollars) and learned a little about singing from Carl Weinrich, and I got to hear him play and rehearse on the chapel organ, Buxtehude, Mozart, and Bach, Bach.
Music, almost from the moment I arrived at Princeton, that summer of 1944, had come to occupy an important place in my life. I had no record player of my own, but there was one, with a shelf or two of classical records, in the upstairs sitting room of the Student Center, and since there were so few civilian students the room was usually empty. I would stop there, if I had time on my way between lectures and the dormitory, and listen to music. Suddenly I was overwhelmed by Beethoven. I played every record of his music in the collection there over and over. In the choir we began rehearsals of the Beethoven Mass in C Major, and in phrase after phrase I felt as though I were being led through some vast portico. I took out of the library books on Beethoven’s life and the development of his music, and he became for me a hero, a reassuring and exemplary spirit, an embodiment of hope.
Two other such figures, during those first semesters at Princeton, were Milton and Shelley. No one had led me to expect the resounding splendor of Milton’s language, its chthonic power. After a while I had most of the first book of Paradise Lost by heart, and I loved Samson Agonistes and some of the sonnets with the same fervent gratitude. Milton’s Satan, via some suggestion found in a note, led me to Blake’s Satan and to my first wandering exploration of Blake, and so to the Romantics, and Shelley, whose passion for freedom from the arrogations of authority—what Keats called his “poems about the deaths of kings”—probably appealed to me as much as his verse. That same ardor, which Shelley, and Blake’s and Milton’s Satan, and (it seemed to me) Milton and Beethoven shared, was a welcome, clarion note for me. They all nurtured an impulse that I had carried with me from childhood, from the days of my father’s capricious strictures and punishments, which were in part intended—although I am sure he was not aware of it—to cripple me with his own besetting fears.
At that same time my reading, through byways that I have forgotten, led me to Spinoza, his Ethics, which seemed to elucidate and confirm things that I had been groping toward, among them a liberation from the religious fundamentalism in which I had been brought up.
The first modern poet I came to was Federico Garcia Lorca, whose poetry was an obsession of my Spanish teacher. And then William Arrowsmith, from the height of his few years of seniority and his irascible assurance, interrupted the Shelley that I was reading as I walked across the campus, by reading aloud Wallace Stevens’s lines beginning
Bethou me, said sparrow, to the crackled blade,
And you, and you, be thou me as you blow . . .
and with that I was caught by something new, by modern poetry in English, by Stevens, and then by Eliot, and by Pound with his heartening insistence on the possibility of a provincial American being a poet.
For some reason, though I have no mathematical aptitude, a number of my student friends were mathematicians. Norman Hamilton, for example, who was physically shapeless as jelly and uncoordinated, but in his third semester as an undergraduate, was earning money by teaching math courses at the graduate school. He would talk about mathematics and I would talk about horses, and we must have understood something that way. I took him to the corral, and he gazed in amazement at these large incomprehensible creatures that I so admired. He was skeptical about everything, gentle, wholly impractical, and a wonder, like Rosen. It was strange to see Norman balancing a tray, an equation in wavering motion.
Another waiter friend, who was privately determined by then, as I was, to be a poet, was Galway Kinnell, and he was as footloose in his outlook. Both of us continued to wait on table all through our undergraduate years, but the head waiters clearly were never impressed by our attitudes or reliability, for we shared the distinction of being the only two waiters who had been on the job for so long without ever being promoted. Galway had a mentor, Charles Bell, a generation older than we were, who lived off campus and taught, without tenure, at the university, and talked of German literature and the arts of central Europe. Charles was deep in Goethe’s Elective Affinities, and he became an intellectual father to Galway, and has remained so.
The two who came to occupy an analogous place in my life there were Richard Blackmur and John Berryman. Neither was there when I first arrived, but a few students who were hoping to be writers frequented a small bookstore that had opened in a house along Nassau Street, the Parnassus Bookshop, run by Keene and Anne Fleck, and it was Anne who told me about Blackmur, and about the proposed Creative Writing Program that was just getting started under his direction. Anne looked like a gypsy, and she had a remarkable sympathetic gift for sizing up character and originality. Again and again she pointed me toward people of interest who came and went in the two rooms of their bookshop. She suggested that I write to Blackmur and ask to be admitted to the writing course.
I met Blackmur and Berryman, who was to be his assistant, one rainy afternoon when those who had been accepted for the new program gathered to sign up for it. Blackmur was sitting calmly at a desk, his cigarette held, as usual, between his thi
rd and fourth fingers, his low, resonant, even voice sounding as though it was answering all questions with oracular authority in a few words. The rest of us, including John Berryman, were standing around in raincoats, John in a pork-pie hat. He stood in one spot, hollow-cheeked, seeming to revolve slowly as though he were suspended, his real attention apparently somewhere above our heads. He was responding to prospective students one by one, in his nasal, sidelong, snapping tone, high-strung, with high-flown odds and ends of an English accent. The room smelled of wet rain-clothes and umbrellas. Berryman’s contribution to the program, I came to realize, would be influenced by memories of his time in England, at Cambridge.
In the year or two that followed I would take my sheaf of belabored verses once a week up the narrow old stairs of the Pyne Building to John’s small office, where he would unhesitatingly, mercilessly, reduce them to nothing, in the course of which I learned some extremely valuable things from him. I listened without resentment. For him poetry, as I heard him tell a group assembled one evening in the Parnassus Bookshop to listen to him read poems of Yeats and Hardy, was a matter of life and death. He cared about it more than he did about anyone’s ego, including his own, which made his caustic manner pardonable, and some of the things he imparted to me lit up like discoveries of my own, and never left me. His awareness of the importance of the order of words and syntax, and of what he called movement in poetry and its relation to the life, the charge of the language of verse, was intense, unremitting, and fierce. It was part of the way he read poetry, and it was a revelation to me. His own reading of English poetry, and his memory of poems, were exhaustive, and much of the poetry he had read seemed to be before him whenever he spoke. He left me week after week with a cluster of new names in my head to be tracked down in the library and pored over, trying to find the fire in them.
