Merwin the mighty

One of the great privileges of my life — aside from being a husband and a father, of course — was meeting W.S. Merwin. He was eager to get home to Hawaii, to his wife, to his gardens, but we talked for about an hour while he was visiting Claremont McKenna College a few years ago. I had my connections to the college, and my identity as a rep for a large newspaper, and that created the kind of opportunity that only seems possible in a dream. But I was also forewarned that he was leery of interviews and suspicious of reporters because they routinely mangled the currency of his craft and took his comments out of context. I was reminded of that warning after reading a comment included in a Huff Post article about a new film of the poet's life. Merwin sounds like a person whose life is characterized mainly by "I don't...":

"He said 'I'm not going to talk about Buddhism and I'm not going to talk about my writing process,' and on top of that, he's just a deeply private person," the filmmaker says in the article. Merwin  "put some creative parameters on what the film is."

Initially, I felt the same parameters. Especially when he eyed the digital recorder in my shirt breast-pocket. He told me not to use it. What could I do?  I tried so hard to keep up with the flow of his thoughts, but I couldn't scribble fast enough.

I knew his work pretty well, especially his Purgatorio translation and early poetry, and the lovely little book about his years in Provence. I asked him question after question. Maybe that made a difference.

I also started expressing my  frustrations over the fate of a manuscript, and he didn't hide his irritation at the whole marketing process, either. It was a revelation. The whole thing bothered him--Him!--too. When he talked about visiting Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeth's, it felt like a flash-bomb had gone off in my face -- Pound, for God's sake, he knew Pound!

He was as generous to me, and as passionate about his work, as the young Princeton student who once talked poetry with John Berryman:

I asked how can you ever be sure that what you write is really any good at all and he said you can't

you can't you can never be sure you die without knowing whether anything you wrote was any good if you have to be sure don't write

And suddenly I heard those words that I'd never expected to hear. He pointed at my recorder and said,  "ok, you can let it run a little."

RELATED: MERWIN AND ME

• Los Angeles Times: A Q & A with M.S. Merwin
• Call of the Siren: On poets and the poetry presses
• Los Angeles Times: Merwin in the South of France

The myth of summer reading

June is here, and so are the summer reading lists… and, always, as I scan these lists, at my back I hear, Time's winged chariot drawing near .... And I'm bored to tears.

Maybe I'm getting old, or too jaded from compiling lists like these for the Times for many a season, but nothing seems to spell tedium or wasted time more than the lists that media outlets want you to use to fill up your vacation time.

To borrow from another myth, I'd rather roll a boulder up a hill and down again, and then up again and … you get the idea.

What these tiring (and tiresome) lists and random sets of suggestions remind me of is something else:  how the old cyclical nature of publishing is completely gone.

Traditionally Spring and Fall have been the big seasons for the book business. That didn't mean that Winter and Summer were dark -- only that the titles with the greatest chance of spectacular success, financially and intellectually, usually didn't appear then.

I know what you're thinking: There are more windows of opportunity now. A writer who didn't appear in the Spring/Fall now has a better chance of finding an audience. You're right. I couldn't agree more, especially since I share that hope.

But what I'm simply responding to here is how dull and dry the summer reading lists look this year! Various newspapers, magazines, and online publications are telling us to indulge this season in wild, juicy, carefree reading like it's an adulterous affair or a drug habit.

The problem is, most of the lists that I've found -- aside from J.P. Morgan's interesting "billionaire's" list leaked recently -- seem far from offering anything wild or, more important, worthwhile. If you're a Stephen King fan, I suppose you have to read "Mr. Mercedes" -- but what I recommend is shunning the summer lists altogether. Do some research on your own. Search the smaller presses for something admirable that would otherwise fall below the radar and plunge into it when you're not plunging off a diving board or a dock.

And that gives me an idea for my next post: a list of small presses worth your time and consideration. Maybe some titles, too? Coming soon!

I'm sorry for the curmudgeonly tone, my friends, but what do you think? Am I overlooking any forthcoming titles that I should treat like the crack of the literary world?  Let me know. Onward!

RELATED:

• The Wall Street Journal on what the billionaires will be reading this summer 

The Writing Life: Something from Mary

Just two brief things to relay, courtesy of novelist Mary Gaitskill, on the writing life. I sat down with her not long ago (she’s a visiting professor this semester at Claremont McKenna College) and I’ve just now returned to my notes to see what she said. No surprise: She definitely didn’t disappoint.

The two comments that I want to share with you, my friends, are things that you probably already understand. Still, to hear them from a contemporary master is powerful. If you’ve been struggling with criticism or self-doubt, her two comments are most definitely for your ears.

The first, on how to handle negative feedback, suggests that everyone needs to be able to wear armor sometimes, but FYI: Make sure that you remember to remove it.

Be prepared for rejection. It took me six years before I finally sold something. You need to have a very thick skin. But not all the time. When you’re out in the world, wear that thick skin. But when you’re back home and you’re writing, you have to take it off.

The second point suggests that there’s actually a positive side to negative feedback. Who knew?

If you want to be a writer, you’re going to have to tolerate hearing all kinds of things said about you and your work. But that’s if you’re lucky. In most cases, what you may encounter is a towering wall of silence. Indifference is much harder.

Indifference -- which is why I'm very glad to have a blog ... and you, my friends.

Keep working. You're almost there.

AND DON'T FORGET...

• Alistair McLeod's attitude to writing (at Call of the Siren)
•  Patricia Highsmith on writing (at Jilanne Hoffmann)
• Ghosts of the Kanza and more (at The Task At Hand -- you want to see a true modern-day practitioner of myth? Go here!)

What is it about the letter M? Three writers' passings

The literary world has taken a very big hit over the past few weeks. It lost three Ms -- Peter Mathiessen, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and now Alistair MacLeod. It isn't that the writing world expected more from them. Mathiessen and Marquez were both sick and well past their writing primes. MacLeod,who hailed from Canada, brewed up only a single novel and a small collection of short fiction over his 77 years on the planet.

But the reason why they'll be missed is for what they taught, by example, about the writing life.

Plenty has been said in recent weeks about the first two Ms. MacLeod's passing is far more recent, and his name is lesser known.

But when I read Margalit Fox's very nice overview of MacLeod in the New York Times, I felt such admiration for him that I wanted to pass it along in case you haven't had the pleasure to read him.

While there's far too much of T.C. Boyle or Joyce Carol Oates around (my humble opinion, you don't have to agree with me), there would never be enough of MacLeod. Hurrying into print was never his modus operandi.

"For a long time, I was described as one of North America's most promising writers," he says in quote from Fox's article. "Pretty soon, I was going to be one of North America's most promising geriatric writers...."

Some writers don't publish much because they don't have much to say; others think they have more to say than they do.

And then there's a third kind of writer, the one who understands that narrative truths need to simmer for a long time, like a good pot of stew.

That was MacLeod. To use another metaphor, MacLeod preferred to dig down, setting layer upon layer of family history and fishermen lore like a master mason in the single novel mentioned earlier, "No Great Mischief."

What he taught -- and still teaches --  can be reduced to two words. Be patient.

If any writer is suffering anxiety over finishing a manuscript, over getting things right, try to relax. Breathe. There are plenty of publishers but there's only one of you. Take the time needed to make your story properly sing. That's a lesson that MacLeod teaches us even now.

Return of a Roth ... necessary reading ... rest, Peter

Of the Roth triumvirate (Philip, Joseph, and Henry), Henry usually gets overshadowed by the other two. After all, how can a maker of bildungsroman tales compete with portraits of a failing empire or the romantic uses of a piece of liver?

Well, the work of Henry Roth -- lyric chronicler of childhood in Call It Sleep -- will have yet another chance to snag more readers nearly twenty years after his death in 1995.

The top editor at W.W. Norton tells me that a single-volume version of Roth's epic, Mercy of a Rude Stream -- published as four books, A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park, A Diving Rock on the Hudson, From Bondage, and Requiem for Harlem -- is coming soon under one cover.

I can't say if this will be an edited, reimagined work in the same way that Peter Mathiessen retold his Watson trilogy as one book, Shadow Country, or Nicholas Delbanco revised and amplified his New England trilogy into Sherbrookes .... but let's just say that any opportunity to read Roth with fresh eyes and see his name (hopefully) prominently displayed in your local bookstore is welcome news.

 AND CONSIDER:

Lijia Zhang offers some terrific commentary and posts from her blog perch in China on her eponymous blog, which sports the nice subtitle: "Socialism is still great." If you're contemplating writing a book of history and you want an unusual angle, you might check out Nicholas Griffin's Ping Pong Diplomacy: The Secret History BEhind the Game that Changed the World, which Lijia has recently reviewed.

How about political and cultural life in France? My friend and scrivener par excellence Kai Maristed sends dispatches from Paris in her Pointe DeVue: Paris that are worth a follow, an RSS feed, google alert...you get the idea. Though her most recent items offer the perfect overview of political scandals and the municipal elections that rebuffed a lazy, presumptuous Socialist Party in that country, my eye was drawn to "The President, the First Lady, and the #2 Mistress with the Mona Lisa Smile." How could it not? I'm sure yours will be too. (Just terrific, Kai!)

 AND, FINALLY:

Rest in peace, Peter Mathiessen. There's so much and so little to say. Leave that to the newspapers. Thank you, simply, for your own work and for championing the work of others. I hope this day finds you, like the title of your last novel...

... "In Paradise."

Related:

On Writing Strong Female Characters (at Corsets, Cutlasses & Candlesticks)

On the great, bad poetry of William McGonagall (at A University Blog)

Maester Class: HBO's Game of Thrones is Back (at Grantland)