Summer Doorways: A Memoir - Softcover

Merwin, W. S.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 159376118X ISBN 13: 9781593761189

Publisher: Catapult, 2006

Synopsis

America today is a mobile society. Many of us travel abroad, and few of us live in the towns or cities where we were born. It wasn't always so. Travel from America to Europe became a commonplace, an ordinary commodity, some time ago, but when I first went such departure was still surrounded with an atmosphere of adventure and improvisation, and my youth and inexperience and my all but complete lack of money heightened that vertiginous sensation,” writes W. S. Merwin. Twenty-one, married and graduated from Princeton, the poet embarked on his first visit to Europe in 1948 when life and traditions on the continent were still adjusting to the postwar landscape. Summer Doorways captures Merwin at a similarly pivotal time before he won the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1952 for his first book, A Mask for Janus the moment was, as the author writes, an entire age just before it was gone, like a summer.”

About this title

About the Author

W. S. Merwin is the author of more than forty books of poetry, prose, and translation, including The Carrier of Ladders, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize in poetry. He has been honored with the Bollingen Award, the first Tanning Award, the Ruth Lilly Prize, and many others. He has lived for many years in Hawaii.

From Publishers Weekly

In 34 brief, dreamy chapters, esteemed American poet and translator Merwin meanders back to the late 1940s and early 1950s summers of his youth and inexperience. At age 16, he was blessedly released from the watchful protection of his stern Presbyterian father in Scranton, Pa., to attend Princeton, when the university was bereft of young men serving in WWII. Through a Princeton acquaintance, Alain Prévost (son of French writer Jean Prévost), the impressionable young Merwin secured the position of tutor to Prévost's friend Alan Stuyvesant's nephew, Peter, and spent an idyllic summer at the eminent family's bucolic home, Deer Park, in Hackettstown, N.J. Over two summers with Alan's aristocratic family, first at Deer Park, then in St. Jean Cap-Ferrat, France, near Nice, the fledgling writer glimpsed for the first time "some ancient, measureless way of living." Upon graduating, he returned to Europe with his wife and two 12-year-olds he would tutor for the summer in the south of France. Merwin (The Ends of the Earth) is best at succinct, decisive cameos: characters enter his enchanted sphere, then vanish, such as the visiting young Samuel Beckett, memorable for the exquisite fineness of his cucumber slicing. Purposefully incomplete, occasionally frustrating, Merwin's book traces lost worlds. (Sept.)
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Edition details

• Publisher: Catapult
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 159376118X
• ISBN 13: 9781593761189
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224