Unframed Originals by W. S. Merwin

First published: 1982

Type of work: Autobiography

Time of work: The 1930’s and 1940’s

Locale: New York City, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania

Principal Personages:

• W. S. Merwin, a well-known American poet and translator
• His Father, a Presbyterian minister
• His Mother, a reticent woman of profound feeling
• His Grandfather, a mysterious figure for Merwin

Form and Content

W.S. Merwin’s Unframed Originals is made up of six sections written at intervals over a span of several years. As Merwin points out in a brief prefatory note, “Each was intended to stand by itself, but each was part of the whole enterprise.” Each was “a product of a single impulse,” the attempt to recapture the past. Born in 1927 in New York City, William Stanley Merwin spent his early years in Union City, New Jersey, and Scranton, Pennsylvania, where his father, a Presbyterian minister, held pastorates. As a young adult, Merwin lived in France, Portugal, and London, supporting himself as a tutor and translator. Merwin’s autobiography concerns itself largely with the people and places surrounding his earliest years.

Merwin is known primarily as a lyric poet and translator of poets. His mature poetry includes The Carrier of Ladders (1970), for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. His translations range from the ancient The Poem of the Cid (1959), to the more modern Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1969), by Pablo Neruda. His prose reflects a poet’s distrust of generalizations and analysis. His past, as he recollects it, is not historical but poetic, evoked in a metaphorical but plain style, minutely and sensuously detailed. Neither the individual sections themselves nor the narratives within the individual sections are chronologically ordered. Their order, rather, is one of mood and memory, or, as Merwin puts it, “a presentation of things that originally happened in sequence but now occur in the same moment in my mind, and so have become simultaneous, like flakes of snow that have fallen from different heights into the sea.” While Unframed Originals is clearly autobiographical and Merwin’s memory serves to unite the different sections of the book into a coherent whole, unlike most autobiographies, the primary concern is not Merwin himself, but “reflections of other people,” particularly his immediate family and relatives.

The opening section, “Tomatoes,” serves to introduce several of the book’s central thematic concerns. In it, Merwin, then nine years old, meets his grandfather for the first and last time. They discuss, briefly and inconsequentially, the art of growing tomatoes. Divorced from Merwin’s grandmother long before his birth and banished from the family, his grandfather is absent throughout Merwin’s life. Nevertheless, in his absence, this man exerts a mysterious influence because he can never be fully known.

In the sections which follow—“Mary,” “The Skyline,” “Laurie,” “Hotel,” and “La Pia”—the reader is led, as one reviewer put it, more deeply into Merwin’s “intricate family webs.” Each section centers on a figure peripheral to young Merwin’s life but essential to an understanding of his parents’ inner lives and, consequently, his own. “Hotel,” for example, focuses on the character of Aunt Margie, actually his grandmother’s first cousin. For his mother, she “represented family not only in the sense of blood tie and continuity, but in that of shared assumptions, attitudes, conduct, gesture.” Aunt Margie stayed with the Merwins only briefly, finding the household atmosphere repressive. For his mother, however, she remained, even in her absence, “a private source of strength.” Upon Margie’s death, young Merwin, “for whatever unknown reason,” was made the sole heir to an estate consisting of “one large black and black-green folding steamer trunk” and a small sum of money. Both were significant gifts. The trunk, “this grown-up object appearing out of my mother’s absent family,” came to represent “a past older than either of my parents”—a past that was “in fact mine.” The money was put to use some years later to buy a small farmhouse in France. The price of the house was, coincidentally, “exactly the amount, in francs,” that Margie had left him. His ties to Aunt Margie were tenuous, even accidental, but real—a link, as Merwin writes, to “a life and world before mine.”

Critical Context

Part of the difficulty critics have had in categorizing Merwin’s work lies in Merwin himself. When asked if he thought of himself “as belonging to a specific generation of poets who share similar experiences,” he agreed that he felt a part of his generation but went on to say, “I don’t feel part of any school or approach or movement or anything like that. I never have. In the late fifties, all of American poetry was supposed to be divided into two camps. That never made any sense to me at all.” Neither of the two schools, the “projectivist” and the confessional, adequately describes Merwin’s work. Although Merwin was politically active in the peace and antinuclear movements, unlike that of the projectivists his work reveals that activism only obliquely; although his work is intimate in tone and style, Merwin himself is too reticent for the obsessive self-revelation of the so-called confessional poets.

If Merwin is to be categorized at all, it is perhaps best to place him within a larger American tradition. As the critic Harold Bloom wrote, Merwin belongs within “the revival of the Native Strain or Emersonian vision.” Like his contemporary, John Ashbery, also born in 1927, Merwin explores what the critic Richard Howard called “a quality of life which used to be called visionary, and which must be characterized by its negatives, by what it is not, for what it is cannot be spoken.” While Ashbery and Merwin are strikingly different in style, they share a concern with revealing in the little that can be said all that cannot. Both explore absence and loss.

Merwin is uncompromising in this exploration. One critic, Helen Vendler, finds Merwin’s work so “starved and mute” that she has “a relentless social-worker urge to ask him to eat something, anything, to cure his anemia.” Others, however, find it “apocalyptic and agonized,” an evocation of contemporary despair. Yet for all Merwin’s obsession with absence and loss, he would not wholly abandon himself to a nihilistic despair: “We try to save what is passing, if only by describing it, telling it, knowing all the time that we can’t do any of these things. The urge to tell it, and the knowledge of the impossibility. Isn’t that one reason we write?”

If Unframed Originals is not itself lost in time, it will be remembered for the little it has said. It will be remembered for what it has preserved, in a language both evocative and spare, against loss. Merwin would reveal, as he writes near the end of Unframed Originals, “the stone, the humanly prized thing out of the earth, the crystal, the focus, the symbol, the gauge, the promise, the enduring impersonal source of radiance.”

Bibliography

Bloom, Harold. “The New Transcendentalism: The Visionary Strain in Merwin, Ashbery, and Ammons,” in Chicago Review. XXIV, no. 3 (1972), pp. 25-43.

Cotter, James Finn. “Poets Then and Now,” in America. CXLVIII (January 29, 1983), pp. 75-76.

Folsom, Ed, and Cary Nelson. “W.S. Merwin,” in American Poetry Observed: Poets on Their Work, 1984. Edited by Joe David Bellamy.

Fuller, Edmund. “Autobiographies of a Satirist in Line and a Gifted Poet,” in The Wall Street Journal. CCI (January 3, 1983), p. 22.

Hirsch, Edward. “The Art of Poetry XXXVIII: W.S. Merwin,” in The Paris Review. XXIX (Spring, 1987), pp. 56-81.

Howard, Richard. Alone with America: Essays in the Art of Poetry in the United States Since 1950, 1980 (revised edition).

Irwin, Mark. Review in World Literature Today. II (Spring, 1983), p. 294.

Oates, Joyce Carol. “Family Portrait,” in The New York Times Book Review. LXXXVII (August 1, 1982), pp. 7, 29.

Vendler, Helen. “W.S. Merwin,” in Part of Nature, Part of Us, 1980.