W.S. Merwin Interview (page: 2 / 7) Two Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry	Print Interview

What books did you like to read growing up?

W.S. Merwin: Oh, some of them were pretty obvious.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I must have read Robinson Crusoe four or five times and Swiss Family Robinson and Treasure Island, all of Stevenson. A book called Ship's Monkey about a ship off to Borneo, and books about American Indians. I really taught myself to read because there was a book about Indians with pictures, a lot of pictures of Indians, and it was a children's book, but it had a text at the bottom of each page and I couldn't read the text. So I asked word by word what the words were until I could read the book about the Indians because I wanted to live in a place like the place they lived in, in the woods. So that taught -- it was two things, I mean learning to read, because of a fascination with people who didn't read and write, that's sort of interesting. And realizing that early that I really wanted to live not in a city, but in the forest.

[ Key to Success ] Passion

What was your father's reaction to your original hymns?

W.S. Merwin: Sort of a little pat on the head. He wasn't opposed to them, but he wasn't very interested. "Isn't that nice." I did illustrations for them, too.

When did you start thinking about writing professionally?

W.S. Merwin: Seriously? By the time I was in college I knew that's what I wanted to do. I thought that I had to do something else to make a living, and I don't know what that will be, but I didn't give it a thought. And I'm very glad I didn't, because I don't know if this was true for the people who were going to be corporate executives and hedge fund operators and things like that. I think it's true for them, too, to some degree. The longer you can keep the options open, the longer you can keep the choices open, the better. And all of a sudden when I was in graduate school, this guy needed a tutor for his nephew, and the nephew was Peter Stuyvesant and this was the Stuyvesant family. So I had one year up in this extraordinary place one summer, which was an old deer park surrounded by 17 farms which were all part of the original estate, and that went back to the 17th century and earlier, late 16th century when the Dutch were there, before the English came.

Outside New York?

W.S. Merwin: Yeah, in New Jersey, way over on the Delaware River, and then over to France. That's what took me to Europe. And then from there, I had two other tutoring jobs. I couldn't have done that if I had been following a career and got locked into it, wanting to do the academic track and everything. Nothing against teachers or teaching, it just wasn't what I wanted to do at that point in my life. I think some of these smart kids make crucial decisions too early and get locked into something that will be apparently very successful, but may not be what they really want to be doing. And that is dangerous, because that's where a lot of breakdowns and mid-life crisis and things like that come from. I have psychiatrist friends who have told me that this is the main body of their clientele, the people that come in. They have done all of the right things and why is their life so screwed up?

You decided to study romance languages at Princeton. What led you to that?

W.S. Merwin: Well, I went to a very strict and severe Methodist prep school where I got a scholarship to wait on tables and so forth to pay my way through. And I really hated the place because it was so kind of puritanical and severe.

All boys?

W.S. Merwin: No, but it was worse than that. It was boys and girls, but they were kept separate and they weren't allowed to speak to each other. So there they were getting nubile and very pretty and all of that and you got ten demerits for ever speaking to one and 20 demerits for doing it again and you got 30 and you were out for good. I had to be a good boy at home and now I'm supposed to be a good boy here and I really don't like being a good boy. But there was one professor there whom I really loved and he wasn't like that at all. He was the language professor, and he taught Spanish and French and German and he was a funny, funny, sweet, humane, highly cultivated man.

What was his name?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. W.S. Merwin: His name was Lawrence Sampson. He died soon afterwards of heart failure, but he started me paying a lot of attention to languages, in particular Spanish, and then I went on to do the same thing when I got to college. Had a very interesting Spanish teacher in college who was so homesick for Spain and he was Spanish himself. I mean, not Mexican, but Spanish. He wanted some help translating Lorca -- so the first modern poet I read was a Spanish poet, it was Lorca. Romancero gitano was the first book, and we translated that together. It was my first attempt at translation, too. And then I went on and met Ezra Pound in the crazy ward at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington.

You met him in the crazy ward?

W.S. Merwin: Yeah, he was in the crazy ward. He was legally insane. I didn't know anything about his politics, fortunately. I had to learn about it later.

He made broadcasts for the Axis during the war.

W.S. Merwin: Yes, for the Fascists in Italy, and his anti-Semitism, dreadful things. It would have been very troubling. It's always been very troubling once I did find out about it. But I loved some of his poems that I'd read, and his ear.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Every poet who has come after owes him something, that is part of the enigma about Pound, whatever they think about his character. We owe him something from the way he heard English. And so I went to see him, and he said that I had to go on translating. He took me seriously as a poet and he said, "You should write every day..." should do all these things, and gave me a lot of advice. He loved giving advice.

Did you see signs of madness?

W.S. Merwin: No, he wasn't mad. He was no more mad than he had ever been. He was nuts, but not mad. He had gone on the air for Mussolini and he had said really quite stupid, but very, very ill-judged things, bad things, pro-Mussolini, in the middle of the war. And the prosecution wanted to shoot him for a traitor right there in Italy. And there was a movement to prevent that. His defense lawyer was a Quaker and the safest thing to do was to say that he was insane. He was eccentric enough.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Somebody asked T.S. Eliot -- he and Ezra, they had known each other forever. I don't know, Pound was so opinionated that you wondered how anybody could stand being around him very much, but he was brilliant, he was absolutely brilliant. Somebody asked Eliot -- he had a lot to do with the final text of The Waste Land, you know, Pound did. He was very, very, very skillful and smart. And asked Eliot if Ezra was really crazy and he said, "Well, you know Ezra."

W.S. Merwin Interview, Page: 1   2   3   4   5   6   7