Richard Moore
The Folding Cliffs: A Narrative by W. S. Merwin
W. S. Merwin is a poet fond of new forms. With
one small exception, the seven parts of this 325-page densely
printed "narrative" are each divided into 40 sections. The
exception is the central fourth part which has 41—perhaps on
the same principle that guides oriental rug weavers to include a
fault in their fabrics, since only God is perfect. The apparent
reason for this 40-symmetry in the poem's fabric appears in
Merwin's note on the Hawaiian god, Kane, "God of origins, the east,
life, humankind....The number forty was his, representing the forty
forms of life." Of course, this doesn't mean that all the parts are
exactly the same length. The shorter parts just have shorter
sections. A little more managing was required for another curious
feature: each of the parts ends with the same word with which the
next begins. To complete that pattern, the first and last words of
the whole poem also ought to be the same; but they aren't: another
precaution, perhaps, that Merwin has taken against God's
jealousy.
The poem's narrative concerns people afflicted
with leprosy in the Hawaiian Islands when the islands were falling
under American domination at the end of the nineteenth century.
Almost all the afflicted were native inhabitants, who lacked
immunity to that and other diseases introduced from Europe; and the
policy of consigning them to ill-managed camps of the dying,
separated from their families, increased their sufferings
immeasurably. The core of the narrative concerns Pi'ilani (who is
in good health), her husband, Ko'olau, and their son (both of whom
have the disease). Along with many others on Kauai, they flee to a
remote part of the island to avoid apprehension by the authorities.
The real action starts when Ko'olau, a character drawn in heroic
dimensions as a wise master of all the skills known to the natives,
kills an ambitious official sworn to apprehend him "dead or alive."
A small force of American soldiers is forthwith dispatched to clear
out the area. This is done, more-or-less completely in a matter of
days, but Ko'olau kills another soldier or two; he and his family
elude capture in the mountainous terrain; and in the course of a
year or two in isolation, his son, then he himself succumb to the
disease. Pi'ilani, having buried him, returns to her previous home
and family.
These happenings, along with several other
subsidiary case histories, make for an interesting, if not deeply
meaningful, story. Unfortunately it doesn't begin until halfway
through the poem, which gets off to a very slow start and peters
out in another forty pages of tedious inconsequentials at the end.
Comparisons with one or two other great narrative poems in our
poetic tradition are instructive. The first line of The
Iliad is all Homer needs to define that poem's subject and
imply his audience's relationship to it. Virgil in The
Aeneid is almost as succinct, and Milton in Paradise
Lost manages to run through a synopsis of his entire story in
the opening five-line prepositional phrase. In the first lines of
Merwin's poem, we are presented with an unidentified
woman—"she"—trudging through the woods at night, and we
do not fully understand what she is doing there and what has led
her to be there until almost 200 pages later.
These omissions, together with another formal
peculiarity, make it extremely difficult for any but the most
dedicated reader to gain access to the poem. It is not clear what
Merwin gains by omitting almost all marks of punctuation. (Capital
letters sometimes signify the beginnings of sentences, and dashes
indicate changes of speaker in dialogue.) Other poets—Gerard
Manley Hopkins with his special accent marks and Emily Dickinson
with her ubiquitous dashes spring to mind—have sometimes
overpunctuated in the poet's perennial effort to make the
words "leap off the page" and become an aural experience for the
reader. Does Merwin have the opposite aim? Or as in Molly Bloom's
soliloquy in James Joyce's Ulysses, does the lack of
punctuation signify language on the borderline between sleep and
waking? Or is it simply that Merwin as "a major contemporary poet"
needs such an oddity to establish his individuality?
Actually the reader quickly gets used to the
new typographical situation and supplies the missing pauses,
tone-changes and grammatical relationships for himself; and it was
probably a useful formal obstacle for Merwin to organize his
phrases in a way that enables the reader to do this. Sometimes
there are minor slip-ups in the process, as in "They were allowed
to stay for the time being at least / perhaps they would..." on
page 80. One reader, seeing that participle coming, supposed a
comma after "time" and got into trouble. Or consider the lines on
page 143:
and lived with it
and died of it no from the start it was the
people
of the islands the blood of the islands that were being
got rid of it was our families that were being
broken up
Here the analogy with "with it" and "died of
it" directs the reader---especially the musical reader---to imagine
the parallel phrase "rid of it," and again he is in trouble because
a full stop is required after "rid of."
After Pi'ilani's mystifying 40-page walk which
begins to poem, the reader is presented with another rather dull 40
pages of island history. Here the point of view shifts so suddenly
and bewilderingly back and forth from that of the original
inhabitants to the official accounts, that the reader begins to
feel that he is reading library notes transcribed, with little or
nothing added, into the loose five- and six-beat lines of the
poem.
In the third part, "BORN," the characters of
the story are introduced in an extremely leisurely fashion and the
leprosy problem comes into focus at last. Finally around the middle
of the fourth part (the absolute middle of the book) a major
character with the disease flees into the woods, and for 120 pages
the reader is treated to a rollicking tale of the good guys and the
bad guys. This is the essential, most compelling part of the poem,
and a much better poem could have been made by radically trimming
what comes before and after.
A defender of Merwin's work might say that the
background material, the slow, mysterious beginning, and the
account at the end of how the story came to be recorded give the
whole a deeper significance, a more resonant, more artistic
complexity. To this argument one must reply that if such deeper
values and complexities cannot be found in the story to begin with,
then it is merely pretentious to try to paste them on as
afterthoughts.
It is surprising how suitable this poem is for
reading on airplane flights. There are no deeply interesting
characters, no complex motives, no wrenching moral problems, no
upsetting juxtapositions of humor and horror. Much of the
conversation is banal---on such subjects as who is going to have
what for dinner. Either that, or somebody is walking through the
woods. Such walks are difficult to describe meaningfully or even
clearly, and in the many such instances, Merwin does not usually
succeed in doing either. He does best when Pi'ilani and Ko'olau are
in hiding and are finding ingenious paths to elude detection. There
the cliffs, streams, nooks, and grottos that they sneak through
have a human, narrative meaning.
And mainly in that connection, there are some
fine passages in the poem. First of all, there are the one or two
occasions when Merwin has found a good metaphor, and what may be
called his prolix style suddenly comes to life---as in the
description on page 122 of how Pi'ilani and Ko'olau are first drawn
to each other:
she looked at other boys
all of them watching for any hint of welcome
and she thought that they were all missing something that she
had always known in Ko'olau it was already so
when they both found themselves lifted up as when a wave
arches itself under a canoe and the whispering hull
pauses like a caught breath and then is flung forward racing
down the blue slope that keeps curling out from in front of
it
they felt themselves hurtling in a single rush with no
thought
of anything else no sense of before or after
yet it seemed to them that they were not moving at all
and everyone around them could see what was happening
Almost always unfortunately, those enlivening
comparisons, which Aristotle says are the sure signs of genius, are
either absent entirely or cliches dressed up for the occasion, as
in "slow as a snail" in the following on page 252:
they started down
a foot at a time feeling the rock in the dark
slowly as snails over lichen and came at last to the foot
of the cliff face
Perhaps the finest single passage in the poem
is section 40 of the part [6] entitled "THE CLIFFS." Pi'ilani and
Ko'olau are alone together in the precipitous landscape after their
son has died, and the progress of the disease in Ko'olau is
described in horrifying, but matter-of-fact detail. The section
ends:
she saw that his hands were curling tighter the fingers
shriveling until it was awkward for him to eat
and he picked up more things with the heels of his hands
but he seemed almost well that summer although he was weaker
than she had ever believed he could be and in
the evenings they would sit in the dark as the coals
closed themselves in the ashes and they would say nothing
for a long time and then find that they had been thinking
of the same thing and they would talk of what they remembered
without sadness or it seemed to be without sadness
and then would be silent again and she would start to chant
under her breath patting a shell or her knee bringing the
chant
out of the darkness around them and offering it
to the darkness ahead of them and she thought of his face
as it was crumbling into itself that summer and autumn
and winter and when they slept to the sound of the rain
some nights she dreamed of white sand and voices along the
shore
What, then, are we to make of all this? Some
listeners were not happy recently with a performance by the
renowned Barry Tuckwell of one of the Mozart horn concertos. They
said that Tuckwell was highly skilled and played with complete
technical mastery. He was a favorite at recording studios because
he always got it right the first time and costly retakes were
unnecessary. But he just played the notes. There was no personal
nuance, no peculiarity. He didn't make the music his own, added
nothing of his own. In consequence, his performance, in its very
correctness and perfection, was boring.
Is Merwin the Barry Tuckwell of contemporary
American poetry? Alas, it seems so.
