W.S. Merwin, live from Maui
By: Michael Redmond – Lifestyle Editor
"Now all my teachers are dead except silence" (from "The Lice," 1967)
W.S. Merwin is enjoying some unaccounted notoriety as a film star. Or, better put, he is bemused by the same.
The poet, twice the winner of the Pulitzer Prize, appears as a talking head in "The Buddha, A Film by David Grubin," the PBS documentary which received its premiere nationwide earlier this month. He had to be talked into doing it, Mr. Merwin says, because he had no intention of "shooting my mouth off and coming across as a teacher. David is an old friend of mine, and I said to him, ‘I don’t want to come on as a Buddhist this or a Buddhist that.’" But, as Mr. Merwin has found, when one ends up in the same film project as the Dalai Lama and Richard Gere, "star" somehow doesn’t sound too over the top.
William Stanley Merwin, Princeton University Class of 1948, will be returning to his alma mater Wednesday at 4:30 p.m. for a reading he will be sharing with novelist Chang-rae Lee in the Jimmy Stewart Theater at the Lewis Center for the Arts. It’s part of the ongoing celebration of the 70th Anniversary of Creative Writing at Princeton University, a year-long parade of literary notables who have studied or taught there over the years. One of Mr. Merwin’s classmates is Galway Kinnell ’48, poet, also a Pulitzer Prize winner. One has to wonder how many universities can claim two Pulitzer Prize-winning poets from the same class year.
It has been about 10 years, Mr. Merwin estimates, since he last visited Princeton, and he is looking forward to lunching with old friends before leaving for New England. He’s on a swing, as it were, because he doesn’t get to the East Coast all that easily. Since the mid-’70s the poet has resided in Hawaii, on Maui, where he and his wife, Paula, live on a former pineapple farm which they have replanted with native vegetation. No one who knows Mr. Merwin’s poems would be surprised to find him in a garden, his hands in the soil.
The poet, who will be 83 in September, remembers a very different Princeton, one where "the area between Washington Road and Kingston was practically all wild. It was a wonderful place, all wild because the land wasn’t being farmed anymore. It had become overgrown meadows." This is where he liked to go horseback riding, which sounds marvelously posh except that Mr. Merwin – the son of a Presbyterian minister, late of Pennsylvania coal country – was most emphatically not part of the posh set.
"There were cliche Princetonians, you know – Southern boys with lots of money who liked to drink, who hung Confederate flags over their fireplaces, and then there were penniless boys like me and Galway, who were there on full scholarships, waiting tables. Neither Galway nor I ever got promoted, you know," he said with a laugh. "They thought we hadn’t the proper attitude."
The world was then at war, and "most people on campus were in uniform. Our class got smaller and smaller as fellows were called off for the draft. Others were too young or 4F, but the war was hanging over everybody. There were only 147 civilian students. There were no girls around in those days. Oh, there was a lot of drinking." Mr. Merwin remembers the Princeton of those years as "a wild place, really, full of extraordinary people." Two of those most certainly were the teachers with whom the poet worked the most closely – R.P. Blackmur, the self-educated poet and critic who taught creative writing, and the poet John Berryman, whom Mr. Merwin once described as "one of the two or three brightest individuals" he had ever known. "And Charles Rosen (the distinguished pianist and music scholar) was there," he said. "I used to lie in the grass outside his rooms, listening to him play Scarlatti."
Behind Princeton Stadium, Mr. Merwin recalls, was "the old ROTC building. One end of it was a big stable with 14 horses – officers’ horses and polo ponies. No one was riding then. There was an old retired jockey in there looking after the horses, reading the racing paper all day long. He would let me ride. He would let me take whatever horse I wanted, any time I wanted. I’d had a very repressive upbringing. This was like ‘Equus.’ It was great freedom and great fun."
Not fun at all was the day Mr. Merwin was waiting tables and overhearing "a conversation I thought was about science fiction. It was about Hiroshima. I couldn’t believe it. There was this funny mixture of buzzing conversation. Everybody was looking a little stunned. But you could feel that the world had changed. Within the year Oppenheimer and other people from Los Alamos were in Princeton."
Anything resembling even a superficial consideration of W.S. Merwin’s life and work lies well outside the parameters of a newspaper interview. He is, indisputably, one of the greatest living American poets, and is frequently mentioned as a "short lister" for the Nobel Prize. As it is, the poems, prose, translations, essays, memoirs, awards, travels, and bold-face names are daunting even in the short form of semi-official bios, such as one finds at www.poetryfoundation.org, or www.barclayagency.com, or even, heaven help us, Wikipedia.
Still, it just feels right to quote this, short and sweet, from the Barclay site, written by Peter Davison: "W.S. Merwin’s recent poetry is perhaps his most personal, arising from his deeply held beliefs. He is not only profoundly anti-imperialist, pacifist, and environmentalist, but also possessed by an intimate feeling for landscape and language and the ways in which land and language interflow." And this, from poetryfoundation: "Although Merwin’s writing has undergone stylistic changes through the course of his career, a recurring theme is man’s separation from nature. The poet sees the consequences of that alienation as disastrous, both for the human race and for the rest of the world."
It seems only fair to conclude by asking it was that Mr. Merwin should end up in a film about the life of the Buddha. It’s because at midlife the minister’s son from Scranton went to study with a Zen roshi in Honolulu, Robert Aitken, and never left. He has spent the succeeding 35 years in Hawaii meditating, morning and evening, as part of his daily life.
"My father’s faith made me uneasy, but I loved the King James Bible and its language rang in my head – Addison’s hymns, too. The older I got, the harder I tried to go along with Christianity, but I couldn’t. But I couldn’t let it alone, either, because it had awakened within me that dimension of existence – spirituality, a word I dislike – that embraces the unknown and recognizes that our roots are in the unknown," the poet explains.
"I was very impatient and untrusting of doctrine and dogma. I had read Spinoza, and Spinoza led me on to reading mystics, Christian mystics, the Gnostics. I got to reading the Tao and other Eastern scriptures. One day I was reading the Diamond Sutra (a key Mahayana Buddhist text) and I came to the passage where the Buddha asks Subhuti whether the Buddha has any teachings to teach, and Subhuti answers, ‘No, because enlightenment comes not from teachings, but from what’s spontaneous and part of our inner nature,’ and the Buddha responds, ‘Thus there no Buddhas, there are no teachings.’ And it seemed that I’d found what I was looking for."
As is written in the Diamond Sutra: "Thus shall you think of this fleeting world:/ A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream, / A flash of lightning in a summer cloud,/ A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream."