By J.S. Porter
porterjs@rogers.com
(for Susan McCaslin and Lynn R. Szabo who inspire me with their poetic thought)
ABSTRACT
This article lays out some of the grounds for considering Thomas Merton as a candidate for the Library of America based on his literary production. (His entering the Library on the basis of his religious thought is another matter, and not in the purview of my literary advocacy.) In terms of literature, he enters for his political savvy, his acute observation of nature, his prayer-poems, his love diary, and his compelling voice that converts strangers into friends with its searing honesty and courageous self-appraisal.
… I have become an explorer for you, a searcher in realms which you are not able to visit … I have been summoned to explore a desert area of man’s heart in which explanations no longer suffice, and in which one learns that only experience counts.
—Thomas Merton (1915-1968) in an August 21, 1967 letter to Dom Francis Decroix in response to a request from Paul VI for a “message of contemplatives to the world”
WHO ARE YOU, THOMAS MERTON?
The simple answer is that he was a monk : “Following Christ under a rule and an abbot, we Trappists [Cistercians under the Rule of Benedict] lead lives of prayer, work, and sacred reading, steeped in the heart and mystery of the Church” (https://monks.org/visit-us/).The definition on the Gethsemani website leaves little room for quarrel, except perhaps on the point about reading. Yes, Merton lived a life of prayer and work and sacred reading, but his reading was much more wide-ranging than would comfortably fit under the modifier sacred. To be a monk and a literary writer is to read broadly. Merton’s vast reading, secular and sacred, would be comparable to a Joseph Campbell or even a Carl Jung –a point I made in this article:
https://www.scribd.com/document/381368004/JungMerton-pdf
Merton read in Latin, French, Spanish and English, with three books on-the-go at a time.
Canadian bookseller and blogger,Robert Gray notes in one of his blogs how common it was for Merton in his journals to say, “I am reading… Those three words recur as a kind of litany throughout the writings of Thomas Merton.”
I am reading, Merton wrote again and again, followed by all those names: James Baldwin, Matsuo Bashō, Boris Pasternak, Federico Garcia Lorca, Czesław Miłosz, Margaret Randall, Graham Greene, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Meister Eckhart, Gabriella Mistral…”. https://www.shelf-awareness.com/issue.html?issue=2438#m27323
You could add hundreds of other names including his friends Robert Lax and Ernesto Cardenal whom he read deeply and well, along with dozens of Latin American writers, D.H.Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, William Blake, Anaïis Nin, and Henry Miller with whom he had an epistolary relationship. Merton always seemed most himself, most relaxed, in the company of poets whether in person or by letter. Have you ever read a more accurate depiction of the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca than the following, which betrays the critical acumen of a practising poet?
Reading Lorca again—what a marvelous poet, so alive, so much strength and vividness and sound. I can think of no modern poet that gives me more genuine poetic satisfaction. Wholeness. Primitive and modern. Beauty. Toughness. Music. Substance. Variety. Originality. Character. Color. An Andalusian weather (Turning Toward the World, 52).
Merton was more than a reader, of course. He was many things. These are some other names several critics and biographers have called him: a rebel with heretic blood (Michael Higgins).the unquiet monk (also Higgins)—I would have preferred the noisy monk—Silent Lamp (John Wu, used as the title of William Shannon’s biographical study), Wild Bird (Ron Dart), a trickster (Marshall Soules) and a friend’s coinage, Zorba monk. (Dan Pilling). My own moniker for Merton would be outlier, someone on the outside of mainstream thought, within the monastery and without, on how to conduct a life or build a career. These are some of the names he called himself:
a marginal man
a guilty bystander
the incarnation of everybody
a farmer from Nelson County
a poet (and translator of poetry, primarily from the Spanish, in addition to his translations, with the help of John Wu, from the Chinese, culminating in The Way of Chuang Tzu)
an explorer, a searcher
a critic (social, religious and literary critic)
a monk (“The monk is essentially someone who takes up a critical attitude towards the world and its structures…the monk is somebody who says, in one way or another, that the claims of the world are fraudulent”(“Marxism and Monastic Perspectives, “(The Asian Journal, 329)
a stranger
an intellectual
Thomas Merton was indeed a very literary monk. His first published book before entering the monastery was poetry, Thirty Poems in 1944, his master’s thesis was on Blake,“Nature and Art in William Blake” in 1939. The last book he was working on before his death in Bangkok was a long epic poem, The Geography of Lograire, and in his last journal The Asian Journal (posthumous, 1968) he was working on a poem, “Kandy Express”. With eleven volumes of poetry under his belt, he was clearly a serious writer and reader of poetry.
He wanted to be “a writer, a poet, a critic, a professor” (The Seven Storey Mountain, 231) and to a large extent he fulfilled his youthful ambition given that he enacted the four professions, including “professor” in his role as Master of Scholastics and Master of Novices. My favourite sentence in his autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain, still his most famous book, is a scrap of amusing banter between a postulant and a priest concerning Merton: “Father, here is a man who was converted to the faith by reading James Joyce” (386).
To take one of his names on my list above, and put flesh on it, Merton was an intellectual in alignment with Edward W. Said’s Representations of the Intellectual (1996). He questioned patriotic nationalism, corporate thinking, and a sense of class, racial or gender privilege (xiii); he raised embarrassing questions, confronted orthodoxy and dogma, and wasn’t co-opted by governments or corporations (11); he belonged on the same side as the weak and unrepresented (22); and would have concurred, I think, that the intellectual in exile is “necessarily ironic, skeptical, even playful—but not cynical (62). He would be in harmony with the thought that “Exile means that you are always going to be marginal, and that what you do as an intellectual has to be made up because you cannot follow a prescribed path” (82).
Why take time to listen to Thomas Merton? Because as a monk, poet and intellectual, he is a marginal man who did make himself up as he went along and didn’t follow a prescribed path.
As Lynn R. Szabo fittingly notes in her Introduction to Merton’s selected poems, he refused “to dichotomize the secular and the sacred” (In the Dark Before Dawn, xxvii). and by the end of his life he had learned to synthesize ”the apparent dichotomies of his monasticism and his poetry, silence and language, anonymity and renown, asceticism and art, mysticism and secularism, contemplation and action” (xxxiii). According to Susan Sontag, “The religious imagination survives for most people today as not just the primary but virtually the only credible instance of an imagination working in a total way” (“The Pornographic Imagination,” in Styles of Radical Will, p. 69). Merton worked “in a total way” in which the religious and literary cast of his mind were inseparable. If I have separated them in this article, it’s only for the sake of convenience and concentrated focus.
Merton possesses a poetic and religious mind—a unifying and synthesizing mind—and to have an inclusive mind, at once religious and poetic, is to respond to the world poetically in praise and gratitude. Poetry deals with concretes, with the things of the world, which is quite different from the irreligious mind, which “is simply the unreal mind, the zombie, abstracted mind, that does not see the things that grow in the earth and feel glad about them, but only knows prices and figures and statistics. In a world of numbers, you can be irreligious, unless the numbers themselves are incarnate in astronomy and music. But for that, they must have something to do with seasons and with harvests…”(Turning Toward the World, 346).
Authentic religion for Merton must incarnate itself in the ordinary day-to-day activities of human beings, or not at all. As he eloquently writes to Rosita and Ludovico Silva on April 10, 1965, presaging his “Day of a Stranger:” “That is where the silence of the woods comes in…and one works there, cutting wood, clearing ground, cutting grass, cooking soup, drinking fruit juice, sweating, washing, making fire, smelling smoke, sweeping, etc. This is religion. The further one gets away from this, the more one sinks in the mud of words and gestures” (The Courage for Truth, 225). One’s words must be as alive as the domestic chores one undertakes, as the silence that surrounds them.
Novelist Mary Gordon (2018) in her little book On Thomas Merton sees deeply into Merton as someone who “didn’t know who he was, moment to moment, until he wrote”(82). He wrote in order to know himself, and be himself. According to Gordon, “What makes Merton so approachable and so lovable are his inconsistencies, his rare ability to name and to own them, to move from one phase of life, one image of himself, to another” (127). As a monk and writer, he took a vow of conversation with the world and kept it up until death. These conversations need to be suitably housed, curated, and shared with the world. It may be true that “It is not much fun to live the spiritual life with the spiritual equipment of an artist”(The Sign of Jonas, 241), but out of that tension between writer and monk comes the extraordinary quality of thought and expression displayed in his best work such as Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander.
You’re no doubt familiar with those gorgeous black- covered volumes with a red-white-and-blue strip running across front and back covers, with authoritative texts, quality paper and minimal editorial intervention. From a seed in Edmund Wilson’s mind and modeled on The Bibliothèque de la Pléiade founded by Jacques Schiffrin in 1931, the Library of America (1979) blossomed into publishing classic American literature from Emerson to Philip Roth.
What is Merton’s ticket of entry into such an austere and historic enterprise? In a word, his journals. In his journals, says Merton scholar Ross Labrie, “Merton [comes] closest in a verbal medium to the spontaneous self-expression that he achieved in his calligraphies” (The Art of Thomas Merton, 53). Just as he moved quickly in life, in his walk and typing, so Merton moves quickly in his calligraphies and journals.
In the back cover blurb of Turning Toward the World, the Catholic News Service succinctly makes the case for Merton’s contribution to American literature: “When all the journals are published, it is likely that they will take a place with the famous journals of Henry David Thoreau, G.M. Hopkins, Edmund Wilson, and perhaps be seen as an American version of St. Augustine’s Confessions. It’s primarily on the pages of his journals, and journal-like works such as Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, that Merton is able to put his loves on the page. As Merton makes clear in his journals, “…to write is to love.” As early as December 20, 1939 Merton is able to say to himself, and hence to us as eavesdroppers on his private confessions, “I only know I am writing well about the things I love: ideas, places, certain people: all very definite, individual, identifiable objects of love…” (Run to the Mountain, 118).
CATHOLIC IN HIS RANGE AND TASTE
Of the writers whom I’ve internalized in some way, none has more intimately engaged me than Thomas Merton. When reading him, I convince myself that he is writing a personal letter to me. Much of his best writing is letter-like — personal, intimate — and seems addressed to a single reader: you, me. You don’t read Merton, you meet him. You meet him on the page and your encounter doesn’t differ much from the in-the-flesh encounter of Merton by author and photographer John Howard Griffin in Follow the Ecstasy: Thomas Merton, The Hermitage Years (1983): “In that day’s photographing and talking I became aware of a quality that was to characterize all my subsequent meetings—an unblemished happiness with the moment, a concentration on the moment, as though there were no yesterday or tomorrow. It was like the experience of music, each moment felicitous, enough in itself’”(6).
There is a naturalness to Merton’s voice, a lack of strain, an easy breathing. I have written previously on his seductive voice and tone in The Merton Seasonal: https://merton.org/ITMS/Seasonal/17/17-2Porter.pdf What Merton once said about the poet Zukofsky pertains to himself: “He never reaches to make anything ‘musical’ or ‘poetic’; he just touches the words right and they give the right ringing and tone”(Learning to Love, 206).
Thomas Merton was, in the words of his friend and fellow-Kentuckian Guy Davenport, a truly ecumenical spirit:
When he wrote about the Shakers, he was a Shaker. He read with perfect empathy: he was Rilke for hours, Camus, Faulkner. .. . I wonder whether there has ever been as protean an imagination as Thomas Merton’s. He could, of an afternoon, dance to Bob Dylan on a Louisville jukebox, argue an hour later with James Laughlin about surrealism in Latin American poetry, say his office in an automobile headed back to Gethsemani, and spend the evening writing to a mullah in Pakistan about techniques of meditation. (Guy Davenport as quoted in Ralph Eugene Meatyard’s, Father Louie: Photographs of Thomas Merton, 34).
A few years ago (December 28, 2018), The New Yorker ran a feature article “Thomas Merton, The Monk Who Became a Prophet” by Alan Jacobs, capturing the contradictions that make “[Merton’s] work all the more instructive:” For Jacob, “Merton was the person in motion who seeks stillness; the monk who wants to belong to the world; the famous person who wants to be unknown.” I might add: the man who took a vow of silence and never shut up; and the man who never stopped growing or sharing the bumps and detours and wrong-turns in his growth. His reach was vast: “… talking on wisdom, talking boldly, …a broadening of horizons in every direction [my emphasis]– political leftism, peace (Gandhi), study of the Orient, creative work, writing, publishing (Oct. 14, 1960, Turning Toward the World , 59). The growth from the triumphalist and judgemental Merton of The Seven Storey Mountain (1948) to the broad-minded, inclusive Merton of The Asian Journal (1968) is staggering.
In the last year of his life, Merton compiled a four-season anthology of poets and other writers, friends and correspondents, including Zukofsky, Ernesto Cardenal, Ad Reinhardt and Paul Klee, Jack Kerouac, Wendell Berry, Hayden Carruth and Czeslaw Milosz. The journal was entitled Monks Pond, without the apostrophe after monk, presumably in honour of James Joyce who omitted the apostrophe in Finnegans Wake. To the poet Zukofsky, he writes: “No money involved anywhere.” Instead: “Poems, creative things, Asian texts, blues, koans, ghost dances, all to be crammed into four issues”(The Courage for Truth, 297).
An aspect of that broadening in every direction was an epistolary life that included correspondence with Nobel laureates (Boris Pasternak and Czeslaw Milosz), psychologist Erich Fromm, students, the Zen authority Suzuki, Rabbi Heschel, and a host of others – 3,500 letters to over a thousand correspondents (Preface vi, Thomas Merton, The Hidden Ground of Love: Letters on Religious Experience and Social Concern). He seems to write letters as effortlessly as a hen lays eggs. By turns, Merton can sound confessional, angry, consoling, questioning, empathetic, rebellious, critical; he adopts voice and mask at will. Like any good chameleon, he adapts his presentation of self to suit the social environment. To students, he is chatty and funny; to fellow-writers, measured and thoughtful; to clergy, the ones he admired at least, respectful. His letters to Henry Miller are particularly charming; his letters to Boris Pasternak particularly revelatory regarding the power of the feminine in his dream life; and his letters to Rosemary Ruether full of sparks and pugilism. And then there is the Catch of Anti-Letters, a performance of masks, voices and improvisations with best friend Robert Lax — spoof, parody, wisecracks, play, stream-of-consciousness, a Joycean mishmash.
Another aspect of his broadening out was mulling over an invitation to Marshall McLuhan to visit him at Gethsemani. (Merton was also considering sending an invitation to Bob Dylan, whose music he was inspired by in the summer of 1966.) The McLuhan and Dylan visits never materialized, although Merton had a thrilling encounter with Dylan’s friend Joan Baez. Nevertheless, Merton’s reading of McLuhan continued. In “Day of a Stranger,” Merton even channels a few McLuhanesque observations: “The hermit life is cool. It is a life of low definition… The monastic life as a whole is a hot medium. Hot with words like ‘must,’ ‘ought’ and ‘should’”(37).
Reading Understanding Media makes Merton think that he has missed the significance of recent cultural shifts and trends: “Certainly McLuhan brings home to me the fact that I do not really know what is going on. Doubtless Conjectures…may appeal to a lot of people who, like myself, are essentially book types. But does it have any real understanding of new developments. Possibly very little”(Learning to Love, 133). One can only imagine the sparks that a meeting between a conservative Catholic (McLuhan) and a liberal Catholic (Merton) would have engendered. The meeting would have gone well or not so well depending on which Merton showed up. As he confessed to Sister J.M., June 17, 1968, there were “two Mertons: one ascetic, conservative, traditional, monastic. The other radical, independent, and somewhat akin to beats and hippies and to poets in general” (Echoing Silence, 195-196). I suspect that the conservative, traditional, monastic Merton would have been more readily embraced by McLuhan than the Beat Merton.
THE LITERARY CANON OF THOMAS MERTON
Every reader of Thomas Merton reads him differently and takes away different things. Some read him for spiritual enlightenment, others for political vision; some for poetic understanding, others for that currently dreaded word in the United States, “wokeness.” I read him for his political savvy. I read him for patches of playfulness:
I think poetry must
I think poetry must
Stay open all night
In beautiful cellars (In the Dark Before Dawn, Epigraph)
I read him for bursts of beauty, where his best poetry often resides in his prose.
An indigo bunting flies down and grasps the long , swinging stem of a tiger lily and reaches out, from them to eat the dry seed on top of a stalk of grass. A Chinese painting! (Turning Toward the World, 228).
I read him for his voice—questioning, struggling, broadening, deepening.
Merton speaks brother to brother, brother to sister. He doesn’t speak as an authority; he speaks as a beginner. He doesn’t lecture from the pulpit; he speaks from the table at which the two of you are seated, He shows you his cuts and bruises in words as simple as bread, as full-bodied as wine. And when he finishes talking, you ask yourself, Is he talking about himself or is he talking about me? (Superabundantly Alive, 45)
Merton speaks soul to soul, as in the opening sentence of “Poetry and Contemplation: A Reappraisal” (1958) in (The Literary Essays of Thomas Merton, 139): “In an age of science and technology, in which man finds himself bewildered and disoriented by the fabulous versatility of the machines he has created, we live precipitated outside ourselves at every moment, interiorly empty, spiritually lost, seeking at all costs to forget our own emptiness and ready to alienate ourselves completely in the name of any “cause” that comes along.” MAGA anyone? The words were written in 1958. They might have been written in 2025, so accurate is the pulse-reading of our time. As he says in his Preface to the Japanese edition of The Seven Storey Mountain (1981) “I seek to speak to you, in some way, as your own self” (Introductions East & West: The Foreign Prefaces of Thomas Merton, 47).
Below are the writings I keep returning to and would like to see in a one-volume compilation of Merton’s poetic and political thought for The Library of America:
The Seven Storey Mountain
Conjectures of a Guilty-Bystander (Merton’s private secretary in his hermitage years, Brother Patrick Hart, believed this work to be the best one-volume introduction to Merton’s life and thought)
“Love and Need: Is Love a Package or a Message” (essay) from the posthumous Love and Living
“War and the Crisis of Language” (essay) in Passion for Peace: The Social Essays
“Hagia Sophia”
“Message to Poets”
“Louis Zukofsky – the Paradise Ear” (essay) from The Literary Essays
“The Pasternak Affair” from Disputed Questions
“Day of a Stranger”(This is where the poet and the monk are fully integrated. Be sure to read the book edition with the long introduction by Robert E. Daggy linking Merton to his inspirational Latin American friends.)
“Midsummer Diary for M.”
Poems from In the Dark Before Dawn: New and Selected Poems of Thomas Merton, edited by Lynn R. Szabo
“Signatures: Notes on the Author’s Drawings” from Raids on the Unspeakable
Several of his translations, notably those of Cortés and Chuang Tzu
His essay “Cargo Cults of the South Pacific” from Love and Living
“Rain and the Rhinoceros” from Raids on the Unspeakable
“A Signed Confession Against the State” (one of Merton’s funniest works, a celebration of nature and the art of doing nothing)
Selections from Cold War Letters and The Courage for Truth: Letters to Writers along with several letters to young people
Swiftian satires – his Original Child Bomb, and one of his satires on Adolf Eichmann
Selections from The Asian Journal, including his Bangkok talk on “Marxism and Monastic Perspectives”
Selected photographs and calligraphies (ink drawings)
If I could only keep one Merton book in my library, it would be The Asian Journal for the power of its thought and emotion. If I were permitted to have one more, it would be Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander for its hop-scotching magic moving among disparate elements and seeing the interconnections and the interdependencies among them. And yet, I’d also agree with Michael Higgins (Heretic Blood, 126) that there is a lyricism in the early work, particularly in The Seven Storey Mountain and Sign of Jonas, that is very hard to let go of.
In a recent “By the Book” column (April 15, 2022) by the Vietnamese-American poet and novelist Ocean Vuong https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/15/books/review/ocean-vuong-reading, Vuong speaks warmly about Thomas Merton, telling us that he has The Sign of Jonas on his night stand, that he frequently returns to Seeds of Contemplation, and, if he had an imaginary dinner party, he’d like to invite the transgressive poet Arthur Rimbaud, the world’s first novelist Murasaki Shikibu, and Thomas Merton. He chooses Merton because he was “a Trappist monk who challenged ideas of orthodoxy in order to privilege a wider curiosity of inter-philosophies….”
If the Library of America decides on a two-volume compilation, with the second volume emphasizing the religious and the spiritual, then I would expect pride of place to be occupied by New Seeds of Contemplation, a generous sampling from The Sign of Jonas, Opening the Bible, selections from Bread in the Wilderness on the Psalms, a generous portion from Zen and the Birds of Appetite, passages from The Desert Fathers and Thoughts in Solitude, and at least some selected pages from Ishi Means Man .in company with prayers and letters. The Seven Storey Mountain could wedge itself into either the poetic (Volume One) or the spiritual (Volume Two) and not be out of place in either location.
A MIDSUMMER DIARY FOR M., June 1966
In my earlier list of Merton’s self-characterizations, I omitted an important name: lover. Merton is a lover of many things and in the spring and summer of 1966 he becomes a lover of one particular woman whom Merton readers and writers know as M. The joy you hear in his voice on the pages of his journal is ecstatic, “She came out looking lovely and joyous in a light dress, long hair flying in the wind, face literally shining with love… We talked and loved and scarcely ate anything but drank Chianti and read poems and loved and loved.” (Learning to Love, 78). How different is the beginning compared to the end. “Where will I be when the dark falls and the dragons come and there is no more beer?” (340).
In his engaging article “Thomas Merton’s Blues” in New Explorations (2020), Marshall Soules finds the right words for the diary and the rise and fall of Merton’s love: “To my ear, “A Midsummer Diary for M.” contains some of Merton’s most poignant blues. All in a breath, he suffers depths and loves to the height” (212). Merton was a great lover of Black music, having experienced it firsthand in his Columbia University days in New York City where with his friend Robert Lax he would frequent the jazz bars, listening to Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong. As Soules notes, Merton was also familiar with the Delta blues of Jimmy Smith and Muddy Waters, and perhaps only such music does justice to love’s great entanglement of joy and sadness.
On March 23, 1966, while in hospital for spinal surgery, Merton meets a student nurse who has a fiancé in Vietnam. She has grey eyes and long black hair and bears a strong resemblance to the Proverb of his dreams. He is almost thirty years her elder. He is vulnerable and dependent when M. walks into his room to bathe his wounds. He’s reading Albert Camus. One conversation leads to another, one visit or phone call or letter leads to another, and by midsummer, Merton celebrates his nurse as if he has known her a long time: “M. is terribly inflammable, and beautiful, and is no nun, and so tragically full of passion and so wide open,” he writes in his Midsummer Diary, the 23,000-word diary he writes in a week (Learning to Love, 45). He is smitten by her as she is smitten by him.
In one short, transformative summer Merton comes to an understanding that love “is a certain special way of being alive;” it’s “an intensification of life, a completeness, a fullness, a wholeness of life” (Love and Living, 27). He feels that his life is changing and his approach to it must change: “I am going to write maybe a new book now, in a new way, in a new language too. What have I to do with all that has died, all that belonged to a false life? What I remember most is me and M. hugging each other close for hours in long kisses and saying, ‘Thank God this at least is real!’” (Learning to Love, 84).
He does write in a new way, clearly seen in the essay “Love and Need: Is Love a Package or a Message?” published posthumously in a grab-bag of essays, Love and Living, in 1979. He writes the article in September of 1966. He met M. in May of 1966. In a few months, M. clearly impacts his outlook and worldview to engender sentences like these:
We do not become fully human until we give ourselves to each other in love.
We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone—we find it with another… (Love and Living, 27).
In his midsummer diary, which is one of literature’s great documents about finding love and losing it, Merton quotes Camus’ beautiful conviction: “When you have once seen the glow of happiness on the face of a beloved person, you know that a man can have no other vocation than to awaken that light on the faces surrounding him…” (Learning to Love, 150).
Throughout his life, revelations, like dreams, visit Merton in abundance: in the churches in Rome to which his father takes him as a boy, in an old Cuban church where he is on holiday before entering the monastery, on Fourth and Walnut in Louisville where everyone he sees radiates love, and before the Buddha statues in Polonnaruwa on his final journey. He is prone to life-altering experiences and, afterwards, to high-blown rhetoric about the experiences. On the church in Havana: “that Heaven was right in front of me, struck me like a thunderbolt and went through me like a flash of lightning” (The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton, 151). In Polonnaruwa: “I have now seen and have pierced through the surface and have got beyond the shadow and the disguise”(The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton, 236). Of all the epiphanies and revelations, nothing hits him harder than the finding and losing of love for one particular human being when he becomes once again “untouchable” (his word).
We know so little about her, this nurse-dynamo, this mystery woman, who topples and reconstructs a monk. Merton burned her letters. We have his journal entries and diary but not her responses. We have one-way communication, him without her. We have fifty pages of a summer diary, perhaps the most courageously honest and self-critical, the most existentially hopeful and despairing of his career. Did he ever put more of his topsy-turvy emotions into a single piece of writing—all his confusion, ambivalence and contradictions?
Occasionally, M. makes an appearance in the diary in lines Merton quotes from her: “The happiest I have ever been is when I took care of you in the hospital … Being without you isn’t the hardest thing—it’s not being able to give you anything except thoughts and prayers … You keep me, you guard me, you protect me in all my ways …” (Learning to Love, 145). She tells him that she is so totally his that he’d never be able to get rid of her if he tried. In a sense, they don’t let go of each other. Merton continues to write to her until his death in Bangkok.
Merton gives love and receives it in transformative ways. Throughout the love affair with M., he phones her., writes letters to her, writes poems to her, dreams about her. They share their enthusiasm for Joan Baez’s “Silver Dagger,” a song about thwarted love, by playing it exactly at 1:30 a.m., when M. finishes her shift and Merton rises an hour earlier than usual in the hermitage.
In A Midsummer Diary For M, Merton tries to explain, rationalize and justify his ambivalent behaviour. He wants M and doesn’t want her, he trusts her and doesn’t trust her, he’s going to leave the monastery and he’s not going to leave the monastery. He acts like Hamlet and stutters like a character in Beckett. He must go on with his vocation, he can’t go on, he will go on,.. he won’t, he will, it’s impossible … He wants to gamble on love but he can’t throw the dice. He speaks of “the tyranny of diagnosis”(338). He recognizes that “Lucidity does not prevent anguish”(325).
By the end of the summer, Merton arrives at the view that he has a gift and an obligation to offer his gift to the public. His gift is his living out “an inner dimension of experience” that is desired by many but is closed to them. It is not closed to him. “I know I have to read, and understand, and think, and grasp, and experience,” he writes. “I have a rich life, but built on the central cost of cruel deprivation … But I know that I am not in a position to choose another kind of richness: that of love and living with M.” (330-331). He thinks that he will find his way, in his usual fashion, “without a map” (338). What is important to him is that, perhaps for the first time in his life, he has been fully accepted, understood and loved by another human being.
In perhaps his most searing lines in the 18 poems Merton writes to and about M, these unforgettably stand out: “If only you and I/Were possible.” The diary in Learning to Love begins on page 304 and ends of page 348. I’ve read nothing like it in literature in its articulated anguish, an anguish for which you would need to combine the letters of Kierkegaard and Kafka on their respective lost loves to find its likeness. The anguish is made all the more poignant by its brevity. But the anguish doesn’t end there in the diary. He continues to reach out to M. in Cables to the Ace (1968) “…we’ll meet in some Kingdom they forgot and there the found will play the songs of the sent…We will then gladly consent to the kindness of rays and recover the warm knowledge of each other we once had under those young trees in another May…” (In the Dark Before Dawn, 155).
POLITICS
When Merton takes his place on the shelf in the Library of America– I think it’s just a matter of time (and timing)–alongside the fiery James Baldwin, the contemplative Wendell Berry, the rebellious Jack Kerouac, and the wide-ranging Edmund Wilson — he will enter partly on the strength of his political writings. Is there a more cogent political analysis in American literature, for example, than his understanding of how “utopia” quickly transforms into dystopia.
He quotes the Russian philosopher Berdyaev: “…in the old days we used to read of utopias and lament the fact that they could not be actualized. Now we have awakened to the far greater problems: how to prevent utopias from being actualized” (Conjectures, 86).
He then elaborates:
The terrible thing about our time is precisely the ease with which theories can be put into practice. The more perfect, the more idealistic the theories, the more dreadful is their realization…. liberty is bound up with imperfection, and that limitations, imperfections, errors are not only unavoidable but also salutary. The best is not the ideal. Where what is theoretically best is imposed on everyone as the norm, then there is no longer any room even to be good. The best, imposed as a norm, becomes evil. (Conjectures, 96).
Merton in a few sentences deflates the right-wing utopia of “the pure race” (fascism) and the left-wing utopia of “the classless society” (communism). In both ends of the idealistic spectrum, utopia morphs into dystopia. The drive to impose perfection results in death and destruction. People not considered “pure” are murdered, and people who stand in the way of “the classless society” are also murdered.
Thomas Merton decisively announces his turn to politics in a letter to Dorothy Day on August 23, 1961: “…I don’t feel that I can in conscience… go on writing just about things like meditation… I think I have to face the big issues, the life-and-death issues…” (Hidden Ground of Love, 140). The big issues then, and now, were war and peace, the cry for justice, the cry for the protection of the natural environment, and resistance to the technologizing of culture and the human mind.
As Merton scholar William Shannon notes, during the summer of 1961 Merton writes three important political tracts: his “Auschwitz poem” published as “Chant to Be Used in Processions Around a Site with Furnaces” in which he enters the mind of a Nazi officer for subversive purposes; his “Original Child Bomb: Points for meditation to be scratched on the walls of a cave” written in the persona of a journalist understatingly recording the facts leading to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the beginning of the nuclear age; and his essay-letter to Pablo Antonio Cuadra, “A Letter to Pablo Antonio Cuadra Concerning Giants,” on the dual madness of the United States and the Soviet Union in risking nuclear annihilation. These tracts show an incisive mind grounded in the world, seeing it from the margins with great clarity.
One of Merton’s achievements is to understand the personality-type and the speech-patterns of the representative personality of the age—the engineer, the problem solver, the efficiency expert who speaks in a combination of technical jargon and bureaucratic cliché. Merton comes to an understanding of the age’s representative human being through his studies of Adolf Eichmann about whom he writes explicitly on three occasions: first in his “Devout Meditation in Memory of Adolf Eichmann” (1964) in Raids on the Unspeakable, then in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (286-290) in 1965; and finally in his “Epitaph for a Public Servant” (1967) originally written for Ramparts and posthumously included in the Collected Poems. He also wrote implicitly about the Eichmann personality or, more accurately, performed the Eichmann-like mind, in “Chants to be Used in Processions Around a Site with Furnaces” (1963). He fulfills his promise to Dorothy Day.
As one of the essential voices of the sixties—with Norman Mailer and James Baldwin—Merton constructs numerous small political masterworks, including these essays, “Rain and the Rhinoceros,” “A Signed Confession Against the State,” “The Root of War is Fear,” War and the Crisis of Language” and these poems, “Chant to Be Used in Processions Around a Site with Furnaces,” “Epitaph for a Public Servant,” and “The Original Child Bomb.” Masterpieces don’t need to be long. A small Vermeer belongs in the same gallery as a large Rembrandt; Chekhov’s short stories belong on the same shelf as a Tolstoy novel. Merton will enter the Library of America on the strength of his engagement with Eichmann, much fuller than the respective treatments of Leonard Cohen (“All There Is To Know About Adolf Eichmann” –he had ten fingers and ten toes) and Denise Levertov (“During the Eichmann Trial –“he, you, I, which shall I say?”), and perhaps only equalled by Hannah Arendt’s deep probe in The New Yorker.
POLITICS AND NATURE
In one of his masked performances, “A Signed Confession Against the State,” from The Behavior of Titans and reprinted in A Thomas Merton Reader 1974, Merton spoofingly imagines himself akin to Kafka’s K, someone who feels guilty just for being alive. Nature keeps breaking into the narrator’s monologue: “I confess that I am sitting under a pine tree doing absolutely nothing…I confess that I have been listening to a mockingbird..I hear him singing in those cedars, and I am very sorry…I confess furthermore that there is a tanager around here somewhere…” The speaker goes on: “There are ants on the paper as I write. They are determined to take over all the writing, but meanwhile the sun shines and I am here under the pine trees…
“The sun? Yes, it is shining. I see it shine. I am in full agreement with the sunshine. I confess that I have been in sympathy all along with the sun shining, and have not paused for two seconds to consider that it shines on account of the state. I am shattered by the realization that I have never attributed the sunshine to its true cause, namely the state” (A Thomas Merton Reader, 118).
The speaker confesses to being a traitor, someone “who simply takes no interest. That’s me. Here I sit in the grass, I watch the clouds go by, and like it.”
This short satire drips with irony and tongue-in-cheek discourse brilliantly undercutting human pretension to control everything, including the sun, just as in another earlier piece, “Rain and the Rhinoceros,” Merton sardonically prophesizes that, “The time will come when they will sell you even your rain” (Raids on the Unspeakable, 9).
In “Signed Confession” Merton’s fictional voice is close to his “real” voice in that Merton frequently champions “the useless” and “the worthless” in many of his writings, mostly notably in “The Useless” in The Way of Chuang Tzu (1965) where he extols the virtues of the so-called “useless”. After all, we are talking about a man with an estimated net worth of 55 dollars as judged by the Bangkok police. His books (not even mentioned in the report), his icon, his rosary (broken), glasses, Cistercian leather-bound breviaries were considered worthless. Only his watch and his camera merited a value estimation of 55 dollars in total. His material legacy—a man without a car, a house, a phone, a television—was 55 dollars (John Howard Griffin, The Hermitage Journals, 9).
In the world’s eyes, Merton was a complete failure, the opposite of that much-coveted word “success,” a word for which he had contempt. In response to an inquiry by a man writing a book about success, Merton unleashed his fury: “If I had a message for my contemporaries, I said, it was surely this: Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success.” Merton elaborated: “I swore I had spent my life strenuously avoiding success. If it so happened that I had once written a best seller, this was a pure accident, due to inattention and naiveté, and I would take very good care never to do the same again” (Love and Living, 11).
PRAYER-POEMS
There are at least two additional components the editor of Merton’s contribution to the Library of America needs to consider: his prayers, including the one below, and his unclassifiable utterances on the border of poetry and prayer.
It is enough to be, in an ordinary human mode, with one’s hunger and sleep, one’s cold and warmth, rising and going to bed. Putting on blankets and taking them off, making coffee and then drinking it. Defrosting the refrigerator, reading, meditating, working, praying. I live as my ancestors have lived on this earth until eventually, I die. Amen. (Dancing in the Water of Life, 257).
This prayer might be First Nations, it might be Buddhist, it might be Judeo-Christian; it’s personal (containing as it does references to Merton’s daily life in the hermitage) and it’s universal; it’s also a unique aspect of Merton’s voice where he addresses the Earth, the Universe, the transcendent. Being. The holy Wind that blows through all things.
And then there are the unclassifiable utterances that Merton breathes into his journals, prayer-poems. As one reads, ideally accompanied by Louis Armstrong singing in the background “What a Wonderful World,” praise and appreciation of nature shine forth abundantly.
A sweet summer afternoon. Cool breezes and a clear sky. This day will not come again. The young bulls lie under a tree in the corner of their field. Quiet afternoon. Blue hills. Day lilies nod in the wind. This day will not come again (Conjectures, 45).
Again, in Conjectures, after a paragraph on Thoreau’s “incomparable gift” with its “fruits” and “blessings,” Merton launches into his own Thoreau-like utterance:
“Dark dawn. Streaks of pale red, under a few high clouds. A pattern of clothes lines, clothes pin, shadowy saplings. Abstraction. There is no way to capture it. Let it be (249).
With his customary self-awareness, Merton writes these lines and others like them knowing that not everyone sees nature as wholly good, not even a poet-friend like Czeslaw Milosz “who challenges me on my love of nature, my optimistic attitude toward it, my not reflecting how cruel nature is, and so on”(Conjectures, 139).
NATURE WRITING
Sensitivity to nature is one of the constants in Merton’s life. Seeing nature, within and without, and celebrating it, is one of his principal strengths as a writer.
[W]e have a deep and legitimate need to know in our entire being what the day is like, to see it and feel it, to know the sky is grey, paler in the south, with patches of blue in the southwest, with snow on the ground, the thermometer at 18, and cold wind making your ears ache. I have a real need to know these things because I myself am part of the weather and part of the climate and part of the place, and a day in which I have not shared truly in all this is no day at all (Turning Toward the World, 299-300).
On November 28, 1967, he writes: “Then came back and began a new Penguin containing Basho’s travel notes. Completely shattered by them…” (The Other Side of the Mountain, 18). On December 19, 1967, a year before his death: “Reading Basho again. Deeply moved by the purity and beauty of his travel notes and Haiku” (27).
In Merton’s last poem “Kandy Express” published in The Asian Journal, he strings together travel notes, reading notes and haikus. He has a haiku mind – jumps and linkages everywhere. When he reads Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, he writes: “It is like Zen—like Dostoevsky—like existentialism—like Francis—like the New Testament” (A Search for Solitude, 370). That’s Merton: connections galore, and a never-failing awareness of his surroundings:
A white crane standing in sunny water
briefly shakes herself.
Another flies low over green paddy and alights. (The Asian Journal, 223)
There is always more than one thing going on at any one time in Merton. The Asian Journal is full of unexpected delights where Merton often sounds like Thoreau or Basho. His turning toward the world in the sixties was not just a political decision; it was also a decision to maintain his lifelong love of nature.
A very small, gold-winged moth came and settled on the back of my hand, and sat there, so light that I could not feel it. I wondered at the beauty and delicacy of this being—so perfectly made, with mottled golden wings. So perfect. I wonder if there is even a name for it. I never saw such a thing before. It would not go away, until, needing my hand, I blew it lightly into the woods. (Turning Toward the World, 328)
Merton is always aware of the weather, how the day is, where the birds and butterflies are. He knows he is a part of the all, as each is interpenetrated by all.
A BRIEF CONCLUSION
In his diary on love, his forays into politics, his celebration of nature, his surrender to prayer, Merton had an energy that produced vast quantities of work. What he once said about the bard can be applied to himself: “Shakespeare is always doing marvelous things that are the products not of any recognizable personality, but of sheer imaginative overflow, a brilliant excess” (Run to the Mountain, 250). Merton was a man in overflow, of brilliant excess.
Mary Gordon in her little book on Merton is intrigued by Merton’s “hyphens” in their “whirling, sensual overfullness.” When I read Gordon on Merton, I have the feeling that she is drawn to his personal, intimate voice for the same reason I am. He tells us what it’s like to be a human being alive now, superabundantly alert, aware and alive.
This is simply the voice of a self-questioning human person who, like all his brothers, struggles to cope with turbulent, mysterious, demanding, exciting, frustrating, confused existence in which almost nothing is really predictable, in which most definitions, explanations, and justifications become incredible even before they are uttered, in which people suffer together and are sometimes utterly beautiful… (Contemplation in a World of Action,160).
Merton seldom forgets the utterly beautiful within turbulent, mysterious and demanding existence.
There is something in Merton’s voice that seems to sound from within your own voice. The honesty. The humility. When the poet C.K, Williams read Whitman for the first time, he became aware of Whitman’s voice colonizing, amplifying and enhancing the music of his own inner voice. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/books/review/Vendler-t.html
When I read Thomas Merton for the first time some 40 years ago, I read him for his voice. I still read him now for a voice that enhances the music of my own voice.
The pious, judgemental young man who wrote The Seven Storey Mountain in 1948 became the open-hearted, open-minded , mature man of The Asian Journal in 1968— self-correcting, expanding, growing. I can’t think of another American writer who grew so much in so short a time. I can’t think of a more worthy writer to add his name officially to American letters in the permanence of The Library of America alongside the fiery James Baldwin, with whom he had a brief correspondence, and his friend Wendell Berry who also combines poetry, politics and prayer, than Thomas Merton.
REFERENCES
Books by Thomas Merton
A Thomas Merton Reader, revised edition (1974). Edited by Thomas P. McDonnell. Doubleday.
Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (1968). Doubleday.
Contemplation in a World of Action (1998). University of Notre Dame Press.
Dancing in the Water of Life (1998). The Journals of Thomas Merton: Seeking Peace in the Hermitage, 1963-1965. Volume Five. Ed. Robert E. Daggy. HarperSanFrancisco.
Day of a Stranger (1981). Introduction by Robert E. Daggy. Gibbs M. Smith.
Echoing Silence: Thomas Merton on the Vocation of Writing (2007). Edited with an Introduction by Robert Inchausti. New Seeds.
In the Dark Before Dawn: New Selected Poems of Thomas Merton (2005). Ed. Lynn R. Szabo. New Directions.
Introductions East & West: The Foreign Prefaces of Thomas Merton (1981). Ed. Robert E. Daggy. Mosaic Press.
Learning to Love (1997): Exploring Solitude and Freedom: The Journals of Thomas Merton: 1966-1967. Vol. 6. Ed. Christine M. Bochen. HarperSanFrancisco.
Love and Living (1979). Eds. Naomi Burton Stone and Brother Patrick Hart. Harcourt Brace and Company.
Raids on the Unspeakable (l964). New Directions.
Run to the Mountain (l995): The Story of a Vocation: The Journals of Thomas Merton. Volume One. Ed. Patrick Hart, O.C.S.0. HarperSanFrancisco.
The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton (1973). Eds. Naomi Burton, Patrick Hart & James Laughlin from his original notebooks. New Directions.
The Courage for Truth: Letters to Writers(1993). Ed. Christine M. Bochen. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
The Hidden Ground of Love (1985): The Letters of Thomas Merton on Religious Experience and Social Concerns. Ed. William H. Shannon. Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
The Literary Essays of Thomas Merton (1981). Ed. Brother Patrick Hart. New Directions.
The Other Side of the Mountain (1999): The End of the Journey: the Journals of Thomas Merton. Volume Seven, 1967-1968. Ed. Patrick Hart. HarperSanFrancisco.
The Seven Storey Mountain (1976). Harcourt, Brace & Co.
The Sign of Jonas (1981). Harcourt Brace & Co.
Turning Toward the World (1996): The Journals of Thomas Merton.Volume Four, 1960-1963. Ed. Victor A. Kramer. HarperSanFrancisco.
Other Works
Higgins, Michael W. (1998). Heretic Blood: The Spiritual Geography of Thomas Merton. Stoddart.
Gordon, Mary (2018). On Thomas Merton. Shambala.
Griffin, John Howard (1983). Follow the Ecstasy: Thomas Merton The Hermitage Years 1965-1968. JHG Editions/Latitudes Press.
———–, The Hermitage Journals (1981): A Diary Kept While Working on the Biography of Thomas Merton. Ed. Conger Beasley, Jr., Doubleday.
Labrie, Ross (1979). The Art of Thomas Merton. Texas Christian University Press.
McCaslin, Susan & Porter, J.S. (2018). Superabundantly Alive: Thomas Merton’s Dance with the Feminine. Wood Lake.
Meatyard, Ralph Eugene (1991). Father Louie: Photographs of Thomas Merton. With an Essay by Guy Davenport. Ed. Barry Magid. Tinken Publishers.
Said, Edward W. (1996). Representations of the Intellectual. Random House.
Sontag, Susan (2002). Styles of Radical Will. Picador.
Soules, Marshall (2022). “Thomas Merton’s Blues” New Explorations: Studies in Culture and Communication. Vol. 2 No. 2.
