āFact Has Two Facesā: An Interview with W. S. Merwin
Ed Folsom and Cary Nelson / 1981
From Iowa Review (University of Iowa) 13.1 (Winter 1982), 30ā66. This interview took place on October 11, 1981, at Cary Nelsonās home in Champaign, Illinois. Reprinted by permission.
Ed Folsom: You have rarely done interviews. Why?
W. S. Merwin: I gave one in Los Angeles about six years ago, with a couple of students who wanted to do one, but they hadnāt prepared anything. I think thatās one of the reasons for distrusting it. If the interviewers are unprepared or the questions are remote, you have to give a monologue to save the occasion. Then the risk is self-indulgence. The interviews we know well, I suppose, started with those in Paris Review, about twenty-five years ago. Then it became a very popular form, and I think itās been a happy hunting ground for all sorts of self-indulgence, both in the making and in the reading. Itās often a substitute for really thinking about a problem and trying to say something coherent. It can be spontaneous, but sometimes itās just louder, given more seriousness and attention than it probably deserves.
Cary Nelson: I think the last detailed interviews Iāve seen with you are the 1961 interview published in The Sullen Art and the interview with Frank MacShane published in Shenandoah in 1970.
Merwin: Both were a long time agoāten and twenty years, but I assume weāre doing something different.
Folsom: You were telling us recently that you have been reading Leaves of Grass again. Iām curious about what you find there now.
Merwin: Iāve always had mixed feelings about Whitman. They go back to reading him in my teens, having him thrust at me as the Great American Poet. At the time, coming from my own provincial and utterly unliterary background, I was overly impressed with Culture (with a capital C) so the barbaric yawp didnāt particularly appeal to me when I was eighteen, which is an age when it is supposed to, nor did I feel that this was the great book written by an American. Iāve tried over the years to come to terms with Whitman, but I donāt think Iāve ever really succeeded. Iāve had again and again the experience of starting to read him, reading for a page or two, then shutting the book. I find passages of incredible power and beautyā¦. Yet the positivism and the American optimism disturb me. I can respond to the romantic side of Whitman, when he presents himself as the voice of feeling, but even then itās not a poetry that develops in a musical or intellectual sense. It doesnāt move on and take a growing formāit repeats and finds more and more detail. That bothers me, but in particular itās his rhetorical insistence on an optimistic stance, which can be quite wonderful as a statement of momentary emotion, but as a world view and as a program for confronting existence it bothered me when I was eighteen and bothers me now. It makes me extremely uneasy when he talks about the American expansion and the feeling of manifest destiny in a voice of wonder. I keep thinking about the buffalo, about the Indians, and about the species that are being rendered extinct. Whitmanās momentary, rather sentimental view just wipes these things out as though they were of no importance. Thereās a cultural and what you might call a specietal chauvinism involved. The Whitmanite enthusiasm troubles me for the same reasons; it seems to partake of the very things that bother me in Whitman. I donāt know how to say it better than this, which is one reason I didnāt write to you about it. Iām not sure Iām very clear about it.
Folsom: I think youāre very clear about it. We were talking this morning about the problems inherent in putting together a Collected Poems, especially for you, since you have developed individual books so clearly and with such integrity. People who follow your writing closely, I think, conceive of your career in terms of the various books, more so perhaps than in terms of individual poems. The books are each organic wholes, and each is a separate and clear step in your development, with growth and change in evidence. Each marks an important evolutionary shift. Whitman, on the other hand, is a poet who insisted on writing one book over a lifetime, and thatās part of the reason for the uncomfortable positivism that pervades his work, isnāt it? He starts out with this incredible positivism which is rampant in the mid-century, in the 1850s, which grows out of his sense of exhilaration about manifest destiny, about America as a ceaselessly growing field of unified contrarieties. As his career developed, though, the two major historical events of his adult lifeāthe Civil War and the closing of the frontierādestroyed the persona that he had taken on with such burgeoning enthusiasm. Consequently the bookāhis one growing bookābecame a burden to him in a way. He could not contradict the book because he was not writing new ones; he was adding on to and readjusting the old one. Iām wondering if some of that positivism in Whitman is there because he refused ever to set his past aside and begin again?
Merwin: Several times Whitman sees something essential about the American situation. F. O. Matthiessen describes it too: in a democracy one of the danger points is rhetoric, public rhetoric. I think now, looking back, that he is also describing his own weakness. Both Whitmanās strength and his weakness is that he is basically a rhetorical poet. And heās rhetorical not only in the obvious sense that all poetry is rhetorical, but in the sense of rhetoric as public speech: you decide on a stance and then you bring in material to flesh out that stance, to give details to your position. This is one of the things that makes me uneasy about Whitman. The stance is basically there; and much of the poetry simply adds detail to it. So many of the moments in Whitman that I really love are exceptions to this. Yet to my mind, these exceptions occur far too infrequently. Most of the time heās making a speech. The whole Leaves of Grass in a sense is a speech. Itās a piece of emotional propaganda about an emotional approach to a historical moment. Itās almost set up in a way which makes it impossible for it to develop, to deepen, or to reflect on itself and come out with sudden new perspectives.
Folsom: What about some of the poems of the āDrum Tapsā period like the āWound Dresserā?
Merwin: Theyāre some of my favorite passages, you know, because his theory wonāt support him there. Heās simply paying attention to what he sees in front of him. I find those poems both sharper and more moving than many other things in Whitman.
Folsom: But they tend to get lost in that vast programmed structure of Leaves of Grass ā¦
Merwin: He allows himself to get lost in it, insisting on inciting the bird of freedom to soar ā¦
Nelson: Even in those poems in which he is depressed by what he sees and admits his difficulty in dealing with itārather than announcing it yet again as an appropriate occasion for his enthusiasmāsome of the same role as the representative speaker for the country, the role of the speaker voicing the collective condition of America, continues to be foregrounded, though perhaps with less mere rhetoric, less oracular theatricality.
Merwin: Iām very anxious not to be unfair to him. Iām not altogether convinced, as you must guess, by the deliberate stance, but thereās obviously a wonderful and generous human being behind it, and a quite incredible and original gift, equally incredible power. But those misgivings have been quite consistent now for all these years, so I guess Iām going to have to live with them.
Folsom: Do you conceive of your own writing, your own career, as the creation of one large book?
Merwin: Well, your whole work is one large book, because there is a more or less audible voice running through everything. At least I would like to think that oneās work becomes a coherent project eventually, that poems are not merely disparate pieces with no place in the whole. But I donāt conceive of deliberately trying to construct a single book the way Whitman was trying to do with Leaves of Grass. I donāt think of that even in terms of the separate books. I never set out to write The Lice, or to write The Carrier of Ladders, but wrote until at a particular point something seemed to be complete. On what terms, or on the basis of what assumptions, I wouldnāt be able to say, any more than I would with a single poem be able to say, āAh, that poem is finished.ā
Folsom: You have said that when you go back to nineteenth-century American writers for a sustaining influence, itās not Whitman you turn to, but Thoreau. I think a lot of people throw Whitman and Thoreau together as part of the American Transcendental and Romantic tradition. What draws you to Thoreau that doesnāt draw you to Whitman?
Merwin: I suppose the way in which he meant āIn wildness is the preservation of the worldā for one thing. Or the recognition that the human cannot exist independently in a natural void; whatever the alienation is that we feel from the natural world, we are not in fact alienated, so we cannot base our self-righteousness on that difference. Weāre part of that whole thing. And the way Thoreau, very differently from Whitman, even in a paragraph takes his own perception and develops it into a deeper and deeper way of seeing somethingāthe actual seeing in Thoreau is one of the things that draws me to him. I think that Thoreau saw in a way that nobody had quite seen before; it was American in that sense. I donāt know if Williams talks about Thoreau, but I would have liked to hear what Williams had to say about Thoreauās capacity to see, even though Williamsās great sympathy is more toward Whitman. Indeed Iāve suspected for a long time that an American poetās sympathy would tend to go either toward Whitman or toward Thoreau, not toward both. Gary Snyder at this point is rather snippy about Thoreau, says heās very uptight, WASP, and so forth. Thatās a way of describing Thoreauās weaknesses all rightāsuch as his lack of any automatic spontaneous sympathy for his fellow human beings. Thoreau is not all-embracing. The kind of hawky thing in Thoreau puts off the enthusiasts of enthusiasm itself, the great Whitmanite hugs of feeling, the lovers, āI love my fellow man.ā Perhaps if you really are there you donāt have to say it so often and so loudly. Dana recently has been reading Henry James and Thoreau and getting very impatient with James and reading a passage of Thoreau and saying, āYou know, for James the natural world is scenery outside the window.ā Thereās never anything alive out there. And for Thoreau, when he sees it, itās alive, completely alive, not a detail in a piece of rhetoric. And he leaves open what its significance is. He realizes that the intensity with which heās able to see it is its significance. This is an immense gesture of wisdom in Thoreau that I miss in Whitman. Whitmanās wonderful expansive enthusiasm isnāt there in Thoreau, though he has things of equal beauty and power. The last page of Walden is certainly one of the most beautiful things ever written, and of a kind of elevation that Whitman himself was trying to reach all the time.
Folsom: Yes, Whitman does tend to dwell a bit too long on ācameraderie,ā as if itās something heās trying to invoke rather than to describe. I think in that sense thereās a real loneliness at the heart of Whitman.
Merwin: There is at the heart of both of those writers, but itās quite obvious in Thoreau, he makes no bones about it. Thereās that wonderful passage where he says, I donāt pay enough attention to my fellow human beings, I donāt feel strongly enough about them, I donāt take enough interest in them, and Iām going to do something about that: these people down here working on the bridge, Iām going to walk closer to them and see if I canāt think of them as though they were groundhogs.
Folsom: Do you read Thoreau often?
Merwin: Well, I keep him in the john. Heās been there for years. So I go back and read things over again. I think Walden is an incredible book. I feel grateful to Thoreau in a way. Heās been a companion. Yet I see Thoreauās limitations, too, including whatever it is that makes him write by tacking one sentence onto another sentence out of notebooks, and putting them together. Itās a strange way of writing, though heās not the first person in history to write that way, after all.
Folsom: Your myriad translations suggest all kinds of affinities for you from outside America, but are there other American writers besides Thoreau that you find yourself returning to, that you would call sustaining influences?
Merwin: Thoreau is really the main one that I go back to. Thereās nobody really before Thoreau. There was a time when I used to read Mark Twain for fun, but apart from Huckleberry Finn, which I love, I find that he doesnāt last very well. I donāt even find him very funny anymore. And then I read an early book, his book about Hawaii. Itās amazing how much racism and John Wayne-ism there was in that generation.
Nelson: Has Thoreau been behind some of the prose that youāve written recently? Youāre writing about your family and your past, which are very different topics from his, but thereās a certain humility about phenomenal existence that I see both in Thoreau and in these pieces from your new prose book, Unframed Originals.
Merwin: I hadnāt thought of that, Cary; thatās interesting. Maybe so, who knows?
Folsom: Certainly that position you put yourself in when you buy the old abandoned house in France at the end of that one autobiographical essay, called āHotelāāthe position of moving into that house only so far, not wanting to clear the floor and put panes in the windows and paint the walls, but rather only lie there on a simple cotāis a very Thoreau-like position. Itās like his bean-field: half-cultivated and half-wild.
Merwin: Yes. I guess thatās part of what I was talking about a minute ago. Thatās a wonderful way of putting it, tooāhis humility before the phenomenal world. If you donāt accept the genuine chairness of the chair, if itās all just background, as it is for a great many people in the contemporary worldāfirst the separation from the natural world, then from the phenomenal worldāthings tend to be seen only in terms of their uses, or in terms of what abstraction they can serve. If the reality of the unreal objects cannot be accepted as an infinite thing in them, you canāt see anything. You only see counters in a game that is of very doubtful value.
Nelson: I feel in your recent pieces a real wariness about rhetorical over-statement, a wish to write in a very delicate and lucid way and not to fall into what might be a Whitmanesque mode of thinking about your own past, but to speak in simple and direct terms about it if possible.
Merwin: Well, of course I donāt have to tell you that youāre always writing in a rhetoric of one kind or another, but I am working to avoid as much as possible a kind of rhetoric which is an emotional screen that keeps you from seeing what youāre trying to look at. Thatās something I did want to do. And I also realized, part way through, since one of the main themes of the book is what I was not able to know, what I couldnāt ever find out, the people I couldnāt meet, that reticence was one of the main things I was writing about. Indeed it was a very reticent family. But I felt if I could take any detail, any moment, anything I could clearly see, and pay enough attention to it, it would act like a kind of hologram. Iād be able to see the whole story in that single detailājust the way, if you could really pay attention to a dream, the dream would probably tell you everything you needed to know for that time and place. But obviously any exaggerated rhetoric you were using at that point, in the...