’s Books Essay, Research Paper
Helen Vendler
"Desolation Shading Into Terror"
Review of The Miner’s Pale Children: A Book of Prose
and The Carrier of Ladders: A Book of Poems
These books invoke by their subtitles the false distinction between prose and poetry:
the real distinction is between prose and verse, since both are books of poems, with
distinct resemblances and a few differences. There are more allegories, parables, and
fables in the 80-odd pieces that make up the book of prose, but that only makes for more
narrative and less reflection. The prose pieces come on with their dramatic title to
preclude our criticism: if we ask why they are no more robust, they answer by a single
eloquent finger pointing to sunless caverns where they were born: peaked and huge-eyed,
like wizened English workhouse children, they stand in speechless reproach in the
schoolyard, rebuking by their mere subterranean etiolation the boisterous ruddiness of the
terrestrial.
The trouble with the analogy is that nobody tells us why the father of these pieces
hasn’t let them play in the sunshine more. There is maybe even a complacency in their
fragility, as if to say that they are more sensitive than those huge galumphing types with
their tans. I don’t know for sure whether one has the right to reproach a poet for his
subject, but Merwin has been maintaining his starved and mute stance so long that one has
a relentless social-worker urge to ask him to eat something, anything, to cure his anemia.
And then, relenting in face of a single poem, singly perceived, and not part of the
litany of hunger, one grants Merwin his talent for the desolate and the dismembered. He is
one of the voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells, and if the toneless
cry of the Waste Land is one of your affinities, you will find it in Merwin. He often
seems a lesser Eliot, taking one of Eliot’s tonalities to its logical conclusion, a hollow
man finding his hollow divinities:
in the abandoned foundation a dead branch points upwards eaten out from
inside as it appears to me
I know a new legend
this is the saint of the place his present form another blessing in absence.
The prose pieces are mostly too long to quote, but one of the shortest, ">From
a Mammon Card," can give some idea of the intricacies of the others: "Those who
work, as they say, for a living, are not to calculate how much they make an hour and then
consider what they claim to own, remembering that there was a time when they made less per
hour, and then consider that what they claim to own is perhaps all that remains of what
they sold that many hours of their life for, and then try to imagine the hours coming
again."
There are tenuous allegories of wish and incomprehension: a "June couple"
imaging the "little place beside the water" that they would like to own, each
confecting a private vision (his has tan imitation-brick shingles, with a screen porch,
while hers is "a low stone building, one big dormer in its thatch roof"), and
while each says raptly in separate chorus "Mine," the separation yawns invisibly
between them, and the piece ends.
There are parental neglects and reparations. (A mother, frightened of her grown-up
daughter, continues "to look after her, but from a distance," so much so that by
the time she gets up courage to look inside the bedroom, she finds "that the girl had
left without a word two days before.") Other stories, more dream-like, with the
attendant disadvantages, revolve around incomprehensible journeys, uninhabited ports,
fragmented bodies, chilling rites of passage, inexplicable ordeals, and surreal tasks
(like "unchopping a tree" — a minute set of directions on how to put a
chopped-up tree back together again).
There are also painstaking and self-flagellating dissections of memory, grief, fear,
and personality: "You are the second person … You make a pathetic effort to
disguise yourself in all the affectations of the third person, but you know it is no use
… No, you insist, it is all a mistake, I am the first person. But you know how
unsatisfactory that is. And how seldom it is true." The first person would be
"the orphan’s mother who never lived but is longed for," and it seems to be an
orphan who has written both this spectral book and its companion volume in verse.
Merwin’s abstraction cloaks the human cause of these poems, but desolation and
abandonment shading into terror are more common than any other feeling. On the other hand,
one feels that these poems were written not so much from sentiments requiring expression
as from obsessive counters demanding manipulation. These counters are a set of words,
found here and in Merwin’s earlier volumes, that act for him as a set of talismans:
endlessly he pushes them around into different spatial arrangements, festoons them with
different decorations, but they are almost always there, central, demanding, repetitive,
exacting.
The Merwin dictionary has nouns of ill-omen (pain, grief, fear, pallor, extinction),
obsessive objects (gloves, hands, clocks, watches, bandages, shrouds, and eyes), exhausted
adjectives (hollow, empty, faint, deaf, blind, blank, frozen, lost, broken, hungry, dead),
and constellations of negation (speechless, colorless, nameless, windless, unlighted,
unseen, unmoved, unborn). Is it ill-will in a reader to want to force-feed these pale
children till they, when cut, will bleed? Even Merwin would seem to want a change: he
prays,
Send me out into another life
Lord because this one is growing faint
I do not think it goes all the way.
There are poems when a new life may seem to be beginning, and some of these are very
beautiful, especially "Snowfall," where after a vision of death in the night a
vision of communion intervenes in the day:
… this morning
I see that the silent kin I loved as a child
have arrived all together in the night
from the old country
they remembered
and everything remembers
I eat from the hands
of what for years have been junipers
the taste has not changed
I am beginning
again.
In his elusive pallors, Merwin sometimes comes near a flawless balance of cadence and
meaning. Some of his poems of deprivation and winter share a place in "the
pre-history of the mind" with the February poems of Wallace Stevens, but they lack
Stevens’s obdurate persistence in the natural — his squirrels, his forsythia, his scrawny
bird cry. On the other hand, Merwin has not subscribed to the falser poetic consolations
of Eliot: he inhabits a dimmer world than either Eliot or Stevens, but there is a faint
cast of sentimentality over his poems that rather persuades the reader that he could, by
taking thought, add a cubit to his stature and raise sturdier offspring.
from New York Times (Oct. 18, 1970). Copyright ? 1998 The New York Times
Company. Online Source
Joyce Carol Oates
"Family Portrait"
Review of Unframed Originals: Recollections
The supreme achievement of memory,” Vladimir Nabokov says in his masterly
autobiography, ”Speak, Memory,” ”is the use it makes of innate harmonies when gathering
to its fold the suspended and wandering tonalities of the past.” One ‘’sees” through
memory as through a tremulous prism: The past is recaptured by way of disparate images,
fragmented sensory vignettes, snatches of conversation. Chronological fidelity is desired
less than impressionistic immediacy. For of what value is the past if, being recounted, it
lies dead and mute on the page?
W.S. Merwin’s third book of prose might have as its subtitle ”What to Make of a
Diminished Thing,” for this collection of six related essays on the poet’s family refuses
to present its modest subject in anything but understated and relentlessly
un-self-conscious prose. Merwin, the author of nine books of poetry and 12 books of
translation, creates by way of the uncompromising plainness of his language a haunting and
frequently disturbing portrait of Americans who seem, in this convincing account at least,
to have had no language – no interest in literature, very few books in their houses, a
minimum even of curiosity about one another’s sometimes tragic lives. When, as an adult,
Merwin returns to visit a cousin of his father’s, to ask questions he hadn’t known – or
hadn’t dared – to ask as a boy, the reply is typical: ”She said, well she supposed she
did know some things, probably as much as anybody. But why? What did I want in things like
that? None of the rest of them thought anything of all that. They never paid no mind.”
(This is the very person who tells him, somewhat hazily, that a relative of hers married a
daughter of Jay Gould but that she never troubled to visit them. ”None of those Goulds
ever amounted to much,” she says.)
In ”Unframed Originals” the poet-narrator, sometimes called Billy, inhabits his
childhood life as we have all inhabited ours – from the inside, invisibly, seeing and
listening keenly but rarely experiencing himself. The son of a Presbyterian minister in
Union City, N.J., the grandson and nephew of exceptionally dour and closemouthed
Methodists who lived in small settlements along the Allegheny River in Pennsylvania,
Merwin endured what seems to have been a particularly joyless – and remorselessly bookless
-childhood. ”At home our lives were surrounded by injunctions. On visits there were more
of them”: Hence the refrain Don’t touch runs through the earliest recollections with a
dull, comic insistence. Why is Mr. Merwin so ”harsh” and ”peculiar” in his behavior
toward his son, people inquire, and the answer is typically ambiguous, the sort of thing
one recalls as an adult with a stabbing sensation in the region of the heart: ”He always
answered that he treated us, and me, that way, only because of love, and that he was
afraid I might get hurt.” Having been encouraged to believe himself superior by his own
mother and confirmed in this ‘’superiority” by the parishioners of his various churches,
Merwin’s father seems to have inhabited a private world so insular and so crudely in
sympathy with others as to verge upon pathology. One of the memorable scenes in ”Unframed
Originals” is a comically despairing account of an attempt on Mr. Merwin’s part to be
more of a ”pal” with his son:
”I would stand in front of his (study) desk, uncomfortable, hot, wondering what I had
done wrong now, and he would tell me to shut the door behind me. Then he would fish in the
lower recesses of his desk for a moment, shut a drawer and sigh, and tell me we just were
not spending enough time together, he and I, and that he was sorry it was happening but he
could not help it right now because he was so busy and had so much on his mind. But these
were precious years that would not come again. He would tell me how hard things had been
for him as a boy, and how fortunate we were, we children, and how much easier life was for
us, with our yard to play in. And he said how important it was for me to study hard and do
well at school. … Then he would start telling me about insurance, how I would come to
realize its importance when I was older. … And he might give me something, such as a
card printed with the Ten Commandments, … and pat me and say he would try to find more
time to be together, and we would be pals, and I would nod, and go, feeling grief
inextricably tangled with my own unexpected and unconvincing goodness, and shutting the
door behind me.” One begins to see revealing affinities between Merwin’s life and certain
of the haunting, parablelike prose poems of ”The Miner’s Pale Children.”
The narrative strategy of ”Unframed Originals” is one beloved of poets: Each essay is
a brooding, speculative, interior piece arising from and circling about an image (a picket
fence in Grandfather Merwin’s tomato garden, for instance; the New York skyline as it was
seen from Mr. Merwin’s yellow-brick church in New Jersey). As a much-honored man of
letters, W.S. Merwin is cautious about presenting himself, even inadvertently, as
‘’superior” to his subject, hence the monochromatic tone, the pages of straight family
history – catalogues of names, dates, places, summary careers and fates. These
”originals” are deliberately ”unframed”: Merwin’s book is no autobiography along the
lines of ”The Education of Henry Adams” with its covert claim for singularity, nor is it
a memoir in the service of an ongoing polemic, as in Lillian Hellman’s autobiographical
writing. Indeed, the manner is improvisational, the tone self-effacing. In a typical aside
the author says of a longdead relative: ”I cannot be sure now how much of her I remember
and how much I have dreamed.”
Nevertheless, there are memorably eccentric characters here. Though rarely presented
directly and allowed their own voices, certain of Merwin’s relatives declare themselves as
marvelously idiosyncratic. There is cousin Mary (”Some meaning of the word ‘naphtha’ was
inexplicably hers, and echoed the smell of her damp apron that reached below her knees,
and of the duster on her head, and of her hands, long shapeless and rough, running from
gray to orange. … Whatever she touched was the wrong size”). There is Alma, who
fantasizes a ghost child and insists upon living alone in her old age (”(Her hair) never
got washed. It was all nested up on top of her head, with pencils stuck through the nest
to hold it together. It got matted. Alma complained that it hurt. Her niece offered to
wash it. She found that the hair was caked solid, glued with what turned out to be an egg
and a melted crayon”). There is Mr. Merwin himself, who never spoke of his father (that
is, Billy’s grandfather) and allowed the grandson to meet him only once, on the day the
old man was being committed to an institution for the elderly and infirm.
Only as the narrator matures and detaches himself from childhood scenes does the book
lose its quirky, obsessive quality and become, by its end, a nostalgic reverie of a more
conventional sort. But Merwin’s prose is never less than graceful and his effort – to
understand, to record, perhaps even to celebrate inarticulate lives – is ambitious and
laudable.
from New York Times (Aug. 1, 1982). Copyright ? 1999 The New York Times
Company. Online Source
David Bromwich
"Remembered Gestures"
Review of Opening the Hand
During the late ’60s and early ’70s, W. S. Merwin was the leading practitioner of the
”instant elegiac” mode that dominated American poetry. Since then the mode has been
largely assimilated and therefore forgotten, and Mr. Merwin’s own ellipses and fade-outs
have become less singular. ”Opening the Hand” still has echoes of the portentousness
with which Mr. Merwin once addressed ”last questions” to everything that met his eye;
when he writes, ”of tomorrow I have nothing to say / what I say is not tomorrow,” he is
poised delicately on the brink of self-parody.
Of course, to be parodied at all one must have come upon a personal style
distinguishable from other styles. This Mr. Merwin has done steadily for three decades;
and yet a certain mystery remains. Less than any other poet of comparable stature does he
occupy his own work as a personal presence. He writes of regret (before action) and
mourning (before loss), with a disdain for narrative argument that can seem a noble
reticence in the face of actuality. But it would be hard to say what his attitude amounts
to, without falling back on useless adjectives like ”restraint” and ”reserve.”
In many of these poems Mr. Merwin employs a long line, with a visible break to
represent a caesura.
Now it happens in these
years at unguarded intervals With a frequency never to be
numbered A motif surfacing in some
scarcely known music of
my own Each time the beginning
and then broken off
One may recall the experiments with Anglo-Saxon accentual verse in Mr. Merwin’s third
book, ”Green with Beasts” (1956); but in these new poems, for the most part alliteration
is kept to the level of a gentle hint; and often the break seems to be only a chiming
pause, as natural and adaptable as rhyme:
I keep waiting to give you what
is already yours it is the morning of the mornings
together breath of summer of my found