Summer Doorways: A Memoir [Paperback]

W. S. Merwin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 28, 2006

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.”

Editorial Reviews

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.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

Merwin is as refined and entrancing a prose stylist as he is a poet. Earlier works chronicle his experiences in France and Hawaii. In Summer Doorways, he circles further back in time to tell amusing and piquant stories of his years at Princeton during World War II, and of summers in the country that stoked his sense of wonder and mystery. Chance acquaintances led to Merwin's becoming a tutor to privileged boys in beautiful settings, including Genoa and Portugal. His splendidly detailed and sensuous descriptions (what a memory he has), especially of postwar Europe, are redolent in mood and precious historically. And he takes great pleasure in turning intriguing, exquisitely crafted portraits and anecdotes into lustrous recollections that capture lost time and trace the making of a poet. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Counterpoint (July 28, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 159376118X
• ISBN-13: 978-1593761189
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #239,912 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

W.S. Merwin is the 17th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry of the United States. He is the author of over fifty books of poetry, prose, and translations. He has earned every major literary prize, most recently the National Book Award for 'Migration: New and Selected Poems' and the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for 'The Shadow of Sirius.' He lives in Hawaii where he raises endangered palm trees.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Elegant, March 13, 2006

By 

Richard Wells (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Summer Doorways: A Memoir (Hardcover)

W.S.Merwin has written an elegant memoir of the passing of an age of manners and aristocracy that makes the near past seem far distant. Mr. Merwin states his intention early in the book, and delivers with consumate skill, and unfailing grace. There's nothing shocking here except that such a genteel time existed in the rubble of post-WW II Europe. The milieu and the prose are almost other-worldly, and I think the best way to define it is as a "civilized read."

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars What a summer, February 23, 2006

By 

Dale Bentson "bentmax" (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Summer Doorways: A Memoir (Hardcover)

Merwin relates, with charming lexis, his background and the circumstances leading up to the summer of his 21st birthday, in 1948, when he was contracted to tutor the nephews of the well heeled and well connected Stuyvesant family. The languid prose floats us across the Atlantic with him and his students. Taking up residence in the a Stuyvesant villa on the Riviera, Merwin meets an amazing group of the literati of Europe and America hobnobbing and living off each other in post War II ravaged Europe.

By summer's end he moves on to his next tutoring stint in a very backward Portugal where he meets kings and queens in exile, peasants, ex-patriots and pretenders to thrones. It is a summer worthy of a Fitzgerald novel, a summer of unexpected adventure and reward, a summer that could not possibly be duplicated. It is a memoir written against the backdrop of the final days of the old European aristocracy. A new order had come to power and the lights were rapidly dimming on the Old Guard.

Merwin imbues his tale, not with nostalgia, but with a sense of tenderness and wonder. His beguiling prose sits on the page as if it were kissed by a butterfly.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Poised at a Moment of Change, November 19, 2006

By 

Renee Thorpe (Karangasem, Bali) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Summer Doorways: A Memoir (Hardcover)

Will be appreciated by most readers possessing a sensitivity to the often-agonizingly-beautiful moments in the passage of time.

This book addresses a time that is lost to us... when post-war Europe was a third world realm. But it coincides with activities of the author (Pulitzer winning poet) who was becoming an adult.

Yeah, it is something of a prose Bolero (the sweet, evenly paced orchestral piece that drives some people crazy), but I loved it. Merwin has an unbelieveably detailed memory, keen appreciation of culture, and delightfully soft touch with syntax.

Really wonderful gift for your favorite nostalgic.