Summer Doorways: A Memoir
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Book Overview
In 1948, twenty-one, already married and graduated from Princeton, W. S. Merwin made his first trip abroad. "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." Thus begins his most recent memoir, Summer Doorways. Through his days as a student in seminary school and at Princeton, through the years next spent as a tutor for the children of privilege living abroad, Summer Doorways tells the story of the poet's youth in the few years before he won the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1952. And it describes life in Europe that was already passing away at the close of the Second World War. He writes, "I would have the luck to discover, to glimpse, to touch for a moment some ancient, measureless way of living, of being in the world, some fabric long taken for granted, never finished yet complete, at once fixed and evanescent as a work of art, an entire age just before it was gone, like a summer."
Format:Hardcover
Language:English
ISBN:1593760728
ISBN13:9781593760724
Release Date:August 2005
Publisher:Counterpoint LLC
Length:216 Pages
Weight:1.05 lbs.
Dimensions:0.9" x 5.7" x 9.2"
Customer Reviews
3 ratings
Poised at a Moment of Change
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 18 years ago
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.
Elegant
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 19 years ago
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."
What a summer
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 19 years ago
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.
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