Volume 53, Number 3 · February 23, 2006
The Making of a Poet
By Christopher Benfey
Summer Doorways: A Memoir
by W.S. Merwin
Shoemaker and Hoard, 216 pp., $24.00
Present Company
by W.S. Merwin
Copper Canyon, 134 pp., $22.00
During the summer of 1948, when he was twenty-one, the poet W.S. Merwin made his first trip to Europe. Merwin had graduated from Princeton and was newly married, but the voyage was hardly a honeymoon. His unraveling first marriage was part of the old life Merwin was leaving behind: his cramped childhood in a Presbyterian minister's household in Pennsylvania; his stint in a boarding school for the children of Protestant ministers; his proposal on a whim to the secretary of the physics department at Princeton. An invitation to serve as tutor to the nephew of a rich and shadowy American provided the means of escape, 'the arrival of the beginning of freedom.' Merwin's book opens with a beautiful and enigmatic sentence: 'A summer descends on us from earlier years, heir to ancestors it never knew.' The summer of 1948 is the major 'doorway' of Merwin's title, the threshold he had to cross to discover—as all the classic writers of autobiography discover—the new life waiting for him on the other side.
Review, 2588 words
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