W.S. Merwin Interview (page: 3 / 7) Two Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry	Print Interview

What was the impact of working with John Berryman and R.P. Blackmur at Princeton? They were both poets too.

W.S. Merwin: Oh, they were very important to me, both of them were.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Berryman (was) hands-on about poetry and he was ruthless and merciless and he would destroy everything I wrote week by week. And you know, I learned a lot from him. Blackmur was one of the most brilliant literary intelligences I've ever been close to, and hearing him doing what he did, twice a week he had a sort of volunteer seminar, certain invited people could come and he would just sit at a table and talk about one chapter of Ulysses, for example, for three hours. No notes or anything. He was marvelous as a teacher. I mean, he seemed really not to be paying attention and then you realized he got everything about you. He was thinking about the right thing for you, too. I mean, he saved me from getting thrown out of college a number of times.

I never did all of the right things. I never read the things I was supposed to. I always read lots of other things and some of the teachers got very impatient, especially in graduate school.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. There was a party -- I heard about this afterwards -- when Blackmur was there, and the dean of the graduate school was there, and he was one of the people who wanted to kick me out. And Blackmur said to him in the course of the evening, he said, "Did you ever hear about -- in your knowledge of the English academic system did you ever hear about don..." whatever his name was, don Seymour Smith, or something like that. And the dean said, "No, I never did." Blackmur said, "Well, you might not have because his only claim to historic recognition is that he's the guy that got Shelley thrown out of Oxford." The dean got the point. And they sort of put up with things that I'm sort of amazed by, that I got away with. Nowadays I don't think it would matter so much, but I would read, something would send me off on a tangent, and I would read a whole lot of stuff, but it wasn't what the assignment was about. It was related to the assignment, but it was on a whole different thing. And I did it over and over again. But I was reading endlessly, I couldn't stop reading. But very often I would not bother with the assignment and go on to something else.

It sounds like poets in particular need to find their own voices and their own paths. It seems almost contradictory for a poet to be a conformist who follows all of the rules.

W.S. Merwin: I think that's true. I don't think there is any doubt about that. If they lose that, then they lose the whole thing. But you know, I think that's true of everybody and I think that everybody has their own path. But if they don't pay attention to it, or if they don't look for it, if they don't respect it, if they are not aware of it, they run into trouble. Their life becomes thinner and less satisfactory. Even distractions may be the thing that is helping you, if they are your distractions, if they are what you are really interested in.

Could you tell us about tutoring the son of Robert Graves?

W.S. Merwin: That was the third tutoring job.

Why couldn't Robert Graves tutor his own son?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. W.S. Merwin: He was doing a lot of writing. Robert wrote an enormous -- I mean, Robert was a great model of working. People handle interruptions and distractions differently I've noticed, and Robert was very good at it. He wrote every day, alone for hours and hours in his study. If he had to come out and deal with a meal or with a crying baby or with somebody coming to the door, he would come and do it and then he would go right back into where he was working and keep it going. James Merrill, who is a dear friend of mine, a wonderful poet of the same generation, Jimmy used to say, "Oh yes, the interruptions are all part of the whole process." It's all right, he didn't mind interruptions. I don't like interruptions. Very often, if I get interrupted, very often I'm not even paying any attention to them, because I won't leave what I'm doing. I think the people who deal with them better are wiser than I am, but I can't change that, or if I can, I'm scared of losing something, I guess.

Did you develop a relationship with Robert Graves?

W.S. Merwin: Oh, yeah, sure. It began with a honeymoon and a wonderful friendship across the generations. He was 30-some years older than I was, and he had had that whole life in World War I, and written Good-Bye to All That, and he was quite well known by then. And his poetry, of which there is still some of it that I like very much, and I learned a lot from it and from him. A brilliant, brilliant man.

What did you learn from him?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. W.S. Merwin: I think the most valuable book is The White Goddess. It's very controversial, and Robert cooked the books sometimes. He made up the mythology rather than being absolutely accurate, which is why it's not altogether trustworthy, but it's a very daring book. It's called, "The Grammar of Poetic Myth," The White Goddess is. And he saw the whole world -- the whole value system -- on the basis of a goddess, a goddess figure, not a male god figure, but a female figure, and she's the goddess of lust and fear. I mean she's not altogether gentle and easygoing. I thought when I read the book, before I went to Europe that this was a great metaphor, like something in Joseph Campbell or something like that. But I realized to my amazement and some consternation, after a while with Robert that Robert took it all quite literally, you know. He was turning into kind of a fundamentalist of his own kind, and he eventually got jealous and fought with every younger poet. I mean, this thing would happen, and he would have a sort of honeymoon with another and a great enthusiasm, they would be great buddies, and then something would go wrong and Robert said they are not true sons of the goddess and all of this other stuff and drum them out. It was kind of difficult because when we had our falling out, there I was with the job there. But I spent that year with him and I loved the place on the north shore of Majorca. And I went back on my own for another winter there and wrote the translation of the poem of The Cid for the BBC, to earn some money.

One of the marvelous things that I think I feel so lucky about was that I went to see (T.S.) Eliot occasionally in London when I was there because of my relationship with Pound's son, Omar.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Omar introduced me to Eliot so then Eliot was very kind. He was very kind to Omar, he was very kind to me, and I smoked then, and he used to save me French cigarettes which people gave him and he didn't smoke. And he was homesick and we would talk about the Ohio River and the steamboats.

Were you aware at the time how lucky you were, having these experiences?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. W.S. Merwin: I feel lucky about all of it, but that something I didn't realize was happening at the time. Everything from that deer park and the farms of the Stuyvesants through really the whole thing with that farmhouse on the Dordogne and the year in Portugal and all of that, I was stumbling on places and ways of life and assumptions, a permanence of something that was very ancient, that had been there for a very long time and was just on the verge of disappearing. And if you went back even five years later, it was gone, it would have been gone and it was gone.

I had a letter from Graves's son William, who was the boy I tutored. He hated being tutored. We didn't get along very well at all. The other kids I tutored, I got along fine with. William didn't want to be tutored. He hated me and he had terrible fantasies about what a dreadful person I was. I couldn't understand why it wasn't working with William and finally threw up my hands and let him do what he wanted to do. But we're in correspondence now, and he said, "In spite of all of the problems with Robert, you saw him probably at his best." Ava Gardner came and called on Robert the following year and they started putting him on British television and he started earning a lot more money. He became a celebrity, and he just loved being a celebrity and it became more important than anything else.

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