Courage for Truth
V
"I seem to find myself ... part of a family of brothers and sisters all Likeminded though with different views all open and for the most part gentle and living around in remote places and in many ways monks."
MERTON TO LOUIS ZUKOFSKY FEBRUARY 2, 1968
To James Baldwin
Novelist and essayist James Baldwin (1924--1987) was born and raised in Harlem, where he experienced firsthand the harsh realities of racism and discrimination. In his fiction and essays, Baldwin voiced the plight of black people in twentieth-century America. Among his best-known and best-selling books are Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), Notes of a Native Son (1955), Nobody Knows My Name (1961), and The Fire Next Time (1963), the book that moved Merton to write to Baldwin. Merton included this letter among the "Letters in a Time of Crisis," published in Seeds of Destruction in 1964. The Fire Next Time, which he first read in The New Yorker, is "powerful and great," Merton wrote in a letter to Sr. Thérèse Lentfoehr in February 1963 [see The Road to Joy].
[No date, 1963]
You cannot expect to write as you do without getting letters like this. One has to write, and I am sure you have received lots of letters already that say better than I can what this will try to say.
First of all, you are right all down the line. You exaggerate nowhere. You know exactly what you are talking about, and as a matter of fact it is really news to nobody (that is precisely one of your points). I have said the same myself, much more mildly and briefly, and far less well, in print so it is small wonder that I agree with you.
But the point is that this is one of the great realities of our time. For Americans it is perhaps the crucial truth, and all the other critical questions that face us are involved in this one.
It is certainly matter for joy that you have at least said so much, and in the place where you have said it. It will be read and understood. But as I went through column after column [in The New Yorker] I was struck, as I am sure you were, by the ads all along each side of your text. What a commentary! They prove you more right than you could have imagined.They go far beyond anything you have said. What force they lend to all your statements. No one could have dreamed up more damning evidence to illustrate what you say.
Sometimes I am convinced that there cannot be a way out of this. Humanly there is no hope, at least on the white side (that is where I unfortunately am). I don't see any courage or any capacity to grasp even the smallest bit of the enormous truth about ourselves. Note, I speak as a Catholic priest. We still see the whole thing as a sort of abstract exercise in ethics, when we see it at all. We don't see we are killing our own hope and the hope of the world.
You are very careful to make explicit the non-Christian attitude you take, and I respect this because I understand that this is necessary for you and I do not say this as an act of tolerant indulgence. It is in some sense necessary for me, too, because I am only worth so much as a priest, as I am able to see what the non-Christian sees. I am in most things right with you and the only point on which I disagree is that I think your view is fundamentally religious, genuinely religious, and therefore has to be against conventional religiosity. If you do not agree, it does not matter very much.
The other day I was talking to an African priest from Ghana. The impression I always get in talking to Africans is that they have about ten times as much reality as we have. This of course is not an accurate way of speaking: I think what it really expresses, this "sense," is the awareness of complementarity, the awareness of a reality in him which completes some lack in myself, and not of course an intuition of an absolute ontological value of a special essence. And I think as you yourself have suggested, that this is the whole story: there is not one of us, individually, racially, socially, who is fully complete in the sense of having in himself all the excellence of all humanity. And that this excellence, this totality, is built up out of the contributions of the particular parts of it that we all can share with one another. I am therefore not completely human until I have found myself in my African and Asian and Indonesian brother because he has the part of humanity which I lack.
The trouble is that we are supposed to be, and in a way we are, complete in ourselves. And we cherish the illusion that this completeness is not just a potential, but that it is finally realized from the very start, and that the notion of having to find something of ourselves only after a long search and after the gift of ourselves to others, does not apply to us. This illusion, which makes the white man imagine he does not need the Negro, enables him to think he can treat the Negro as an "object" and do what he likes with him. Indeed, in order to prove that his illusion is true, he goes ahead and treats the Negro in the way we know. He has to.
At the heart of the matter then is man's contempt for truth, and the substitution of his "self" for reality. His image is his truth. He believesin his specter and sacrifices human beings to his specter. This is what we are doing, and this is not Christianity or any other genuine religion: it is barbarity.
We cannot afford to have contempt for any truth, but least of all for a truth as urgent in our lives as this one. Hence, I want to give you all the moral support I can, which isn't much. I know you are more than fatigued with well-meaning white people clapping you on the shoulder and saying with utmost earnestness, "We are right with you," when of course we are right with ourselves and not in any of the predicaments you are in at all. What I will say is that I am glad I am not a Negro because I probably would never be able to take it: but that I recognize in conscience that I have a duty to try to make my fellow whites stop doing the things they do and see the problem in a different light. This does not presuppose an immediate program, or a surge of optimism, because I am still convinced that there is almost nothing to be done that will have any deep effect or make any real difference.
I am not in a position to be completely well informed on this issue, anyway. If you think of anything I ought to know about, I would be grateful if you put it in an envelope and send it down. I hope your article will have done some good. The mere fact that truth has been told is already a very great good in itself.
To Cid Corman
Sidney (Cid) Corman (1924-- ) studied at Tufts College, the University of Michigan, the University of North Carolina, and the Sorbonne. In 1951, Corman moved to Japan where he wrote poetry, edited a literary magazine called Origin, ran a press by the same name, and translated the poetry of Matsuo Bash, Shimpei Kusano, Rene Char, and Francis Ponge. During the two years he corresponded with Merton, Corman published seven books of poetry: For You (1966), For Granted (1966), Stead (1966), Words for Each Other (1967), Without End (1968), No Less (1968) and Hearth (1968).
July 8, 1966
Origin (iii, 1) came in the other day and I promised in my note to you that I would write you a line about it. For my own sake as much as for yours I do this, because I can see one of the things you want to do with Origin is to break through the lethargy and laziness of readers and writers who simply plow in a daze through things they don't read and only hate. It is good to pick up Origin and take care: be made to take care by the look of it, by the shape of the poems, by the spareness of what they say. I have not known your poems before, because I am a haphazard reader at best and the right things have not been coming my way. Only the other day I finally read [Louis] Zukofsky for the first time.I am ignorant and isolated. I am the kind of person that badly needs Origin and am not ashamed to admit it.
Your notes on Poetry as Bond say a great deal to me, and the things you quote, the views they represent, views of earth and life, are not as remote from my own as one might think. I don't have views built on top of views, and I am very receptive to the cry of leaves that do not transcend themselves, though I am not closed to transcendence either. But it is a false transcendence if it always has to demand that leaves transcend themselves. The absolute transcendence looks like none at all. Zen.
I think what moved me most in the whole issue was the long Blues anthology. Most grateful for this. I will read it over and over. I wish I were hearing all this ...
September 5, 1966
I have two good letters of yours from July to reply to and now Origin (2) and the books. I was waiting for these and they took a long time. [Clayton] Eshleman's translations of [Cesar] Vallejo come through strong and I am glad that the book of these translations [of Poemas humanos, published as Human Poems] is supposed to be appearing. You say your own poems might be "too quiet" for me. No, I like that kind of reticence, words on top of a lot of silence and as you say not imposing anything, even reticence, on the reader. I find them sharply visual, accurate, concrete, and I like the way they string out into poetic journals ("The Italy Book"). What you have done in Japan comes through best of all to me, for some reason. Thanks very much for the books, I will value them and go back to them often. Did I send you Raids on the Unspeakable? For some reason I got a few author's copies back in July somewhere but the book is not yet out and there do not seem to be more copies around. Probably will be soon, and then I will send one if I have not already. It is a patchy book. I get too vehement but I like a certain volume of a wacky sound.
That is why these days I am reading quite a lot of Rene Char, whom I had not read before. Today, Labor Day, when I get this letter finished, I'll take off into the woods (I live in the woods anyway) with a book of Rene Char selections and maybe some 14th-cent. German mystic stuff. Char has the wacky oblique eloquence all right. I have two books of selections, same publisher, ten years or so apart: first one has picture of him looking like a champion bicycle racer, the other a picture that ought to have a number under it. The people that write about him try to do so in a hesitant imitation of his style, and when they happen to be a bit square the result is very funny. Must drive him out of his head. I would translate some but I understand that there are herds of people doing this now and the rights situation is complicated?? I have also come across a very good Spanish poet, Miguel Hernández, who died in prison and wrote a lot of very good lonely prison stuff.
You are right that I ought to read everything I can lay hands on of Zukofsky, and I am going to try and lay those hands on. I believe you printed one of his books: have you a copy available I could order? Or anything handy of his, in an old issue of Origin that would still be buyable?
Initials [jhs] on the top of the paper you ask about? That is not a secretary, but medieval pious practice to put monogram of name of Christ when you start to write, something like making sign of the Cross when you start doing something. I don't make an issue out of it, it is a habit. Someone helps me with typing when I have stuff to type and can get help, but no secretary. I don't write that many letters any more since I live in the woods with the foxes. No, there are no monks doing illuminated mss. but there are some nuns in England good friends of mine who do some very fancy printing--Stanbrook Abbey. I'll send you a little thing they did for me or I did with them or for them [The Solitary Life: A Letter of Guigo]. They are supposed to be doing a bit of Cassiodorus I translated now, but that has been waiting around for a long time. I'll send you that too if I ever get copies and if you remind me in about three months (probably will not be ready even then).
Origin and your letters mean a lot to me somehow. Your allusion to the vow of poverty and the fact that you are broke without a vow while I am broke with it reminds me that something like Origin and your letters may well be just as monastic and more so than what we are doing around here. I am very aware of the ambiguities of my kind of monasticism and base no claims of any kind whatever upon it: but on the contrary I am very glad when I find anybody doing anything for love of it, and since that is what I myself seek and need, I respond to it with some liveliness. The essence of monasticism as I see it is this doing something or living in a certain way for pure love of it and without further justification. And without necessarily pointing to any special practical result. Or to anything. Or drawing attention etc. Now that I am alone in the woods (for pure love of it and because life in the community also seemed to me too tangled) I want to think more about writing poetry, though perhaps it is better not to think much about it and write without looking too closely at what is happening. Still it is good to have someone like you articulate about these things and willing to share them. I have been out of contact with that, and remain inarticulate on the subject anyway. I don't know how to talk about poetry.
This bit I am sending you is not very good. It does not come off like the piece on the furnaces ["Chant to Be Used in Processions Around a Site with Furnaces"] I did. (Have you seen that? It is in Emblems of a Season of Fury which I can send if you have not seen.) This is a sort of mosaic of Eichmann's own doubletalk about himself ["A Devout Meditation in Memory of Adolf Eichmann"].
I am working on another longer series of short ones ["Edifying Cables," published as Cables to the Ace] which might interest you. Maybeyou will feel it does not communicate: it is imprecise, noisy, crude, full of vulgarity and parody, making faces, criticizing and so on, and not like what you are doing at all, in fact almost the exact opposite. Of Beckett I like very much Waiting for Godot and think it says a lot. The others I can't read for more than a few pages. But I like Ionesco a great deal.
Please tell me if you want Raids, Emblems.
September 6, 1966
I wrote you yesterday and now your letter of the 27th has reached me today. So I see you got Raids after all. Thanks for paying enough attention to it to come through with your observations, which I can understand and accept. It always surprises me when others say I sound violent, because I am really quite an easygoing person. But I know I do use violent language for some reason, and this would especially irritate someone like you, who has manifestly gone to great pains to cool it all off as much as it can be cooled. As I don't know you, I can only suppose you are allergic to my kind of ranting, and I admit that I am too bombastic. I suppose I have grown up too much with rowdy types like Blake, or Leon Bloy, or the Elizabethans. However, you have a serious point in the criticism that my tone may contradict what I am trying to say. I will take that one to heart. It is possible, all right. And I don't claim to be a man of perfect serenity or untroubled assurance, by any means. I am conscious of the fact that in most of my exhorting, the person I am trying to convince is myself. And that does not make for convincing exhortation. Maybe I can just stop most of it. Well, we'll see.
You say I fear relation: well, rather I am in a difficult position about it, because of the frustrations inherent in this kind of life and the added ones that have grown onto it like barnacles. I mean the fact the communication is systematically blocked and so on. It does mean that I don't have a normal easy outgoing way of communicating with others and when I do get a chance to say something I do tend to try to say everything at once, or else don't even try to say anything. Don't know. I have no great problems when I am with some people and know I have time and won't have to shut up in ten minutes.
I won't argue with you over the details--for instance I think Sophocles is magnanimous too, as well as Aeschylus. But so what? Perhaps you don't agree. Ionesco superficial: perhaps, but I can listen to him. And I think he does have some compassion somewhere ... at least I don't think I have to reject him in the name of "health." But no matter. I wish I knew more about you, who you are. The poems as I said are reticent. And that is all right. I don't know who I am talking to.
What you say about each one having his own living-dying to do--"to realize in a context that never permits generality"--this I certainly agree on.
I won't be surprised or dejected if you don't like the Eichmann poem["Epitaph for a Public Servant"]: I realize that it is empty and does not come off at all.
Thanks, Cid, for your criticism. It will help.
March 10, 1967
I have been waiting for the right chance to send you a word or two about the new Origin (4) and now that the frogs are singing here plenty (even in some snow the other day) and I have had crocuses in front of my place for nearly five weeks straight (in spite of zeros) I think it is time to celebrate Shimpei.
Shimpei Kusano has burst on all of us, thanks to you, like one of the very big discoveries and delights. Where have we been all this time not knowing there was such a poet? What clear substance. He does us all good. He saves us all from the swamp (swamp of academic seriousness or fake rhapsody, or my own wordy ironies). I am so happy to be in the same world. Want to read more and more of him. Is there more in a language I know? Can I review him or something?
Thanks too for the Rene Char. I have not seen the original, but your rendering as it stands is an admirable poem. But I wonder about your translation of L'âge cassant as The Brittle Age. Cassant is active. To convey "brittle" it would have to be somehow reflexive. In its active intransitive form, does it have some slang innuendo that for the moment escapes me, such as "crashing bore" or like that? I think that too is there. But I can't judge without seeing the whole thing. Anyway, as I say, your rendering as it stands is fine.
If you haven't any strong objection, I may send along a couple of pages of Char-ish French verse I have written myself recently. Part of a long sequence that I don't pretend is much good. You might find this a little interesting. It is a liberation from the wrong obsessions I have had in my English verse.
Sorry I have not written for some time. Where we ended with our last exchange, there just was not much more to say, we would have just stood in the same places stamping at each other and not moving anywhere. But I have been thinking and absorbing a lot of things, and am I hope moving into something new and a little better. I have wasted a lot of time writing things there was no imaginable need for me to write ever. One thing that is helping enormously is that I am getting at last into William Carlos Williams, to whom I had not previously attended.
If I don't hear from you saying No, I will probably send along a carbon of the French stuff I wrote, and see what you think. In ten days or so. I am concerned for Clayton, who demonstrated in the [St. Patrick's] Cathedral against that Cardinal [Francis Spellman]: what Clayton did was noble and good, I hope he does not have to suffer for it.
April 21, 1968
It is a long time since I have written: can't keep up with correspondence at all. It is just too much, most of the time. Especially as I have had the foolhardiness to start a small magazine of my own [Monks Pond], which however is only to run temporarily. Four issues, no more. I'll send you a copy when I get some more together. I'd be very happy to have something of yours in it, or some translation from Japanese or French.
The [Francis] Ponge issue of Origin was very interesting to me. I read his "Pine Woods" with great curiosity and pleasure. To me the earlier notes had some fine things which more and more tended to get pushed out as he worked it into "poetic" form, and in the poems everything was lost. Very French. A salutary example. The [Lorine] Niedecker poems too, very fine.
I don't remember if I sent my ten, but here. I happen to have some money for the time being.
Your book from England has come in and looks very good. Also other things of yours that have come one way or other, from Elizabeth Press and elsewhere. I have spoken about these things to New Directions, and will do so again, but [James] Laughlin is now very slow to take on anyone new (to him). I really don't understand much about the publishing of poetry in America. There is one small new press that does nice work in California, Unicorn ... with also a new review (Unicorn Journal). It is quite good I think.
And also: thanks for your splendid Bash. A joy.
I do hope you can send something for my magazine, Monks Pond. Short prose fine, translation fine, anything that has not been done in U. S.
To Guy Davenport
With the publication of his first collection of short stories, Tatlin!, in 1974, Guy Davenport (1927-- ) expanded a literary repertoire that already included writing essays and poetry, translating classical texts, editing and illustrating books, and teaching literature at the University of Kentucky at Lexington. Together with poet Jonathan Williams and photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Davenport visited Merton at Gethsemani in January 1967. The letters Merton subsequently wrote to Davenport point to all they had in common and shared during Davenport's visits to the hermitage.
February 20, 1967
Thanks for your letter written in the midst of an existential leap from Franklin to Walton [Davenport's old and new street addresses] and from Blessed Martyrs to Blissful Apparition [feast days on which Davenport wrote to Merton]. And new ribbon for the acknowledgment of Ronald Johnson's clipped yews and gardens of delight [The Book of the GreenMan]. It is a fine book, making me also wonder why I neglected Samuel Palmer, though I wrote on Blake. As to your own book [Flowers and Leaves: Poema vel sonata, carmina autumni primaeque veris transformationum ], it is a very pleasant universe to wander around in, and it makes me glad that people still read the Classics and write accordingly. It is a rich full witty flowering book.
Can you send me Gene Meatyard's address? I mentioned his work to Laughlin at New Directions. Laughlin is always looking for interesting things to put on the covers of his books. I am very anxious to see more of Gene's work--and of course the things he took here.
I hope we can get together again one of these days. Do please keep in touch and let me know what you do. I send various things: for example a thing on the Desert Fathers [The Wisdom of the Desert] which I probably did not give you (I forget).
It was very good to have you all here.
Fiat pax in habitatione tua et benedictio in omnibu viis tuis.
June 11, 1967
The book on Bohr [Niels Bohr: The Man, His Science and the World They Changed] that I have just read is the one by Ruth Moore. Quite good, I thought. Perhaps some time I shall read one of the others. I'd also like to go further into some of Bohr's notions of epistemology in his last years.
I am not hoping to see of any of Gene's pictures until next March. I am resigned. Certainly some of them must be worth seeing at once ...
I was very glad indeed that you brought the Cookham poem ["The Resurrection at Cookham"], and I don't see why poets ought to be concerned about showing people their work (except of course that there are swarms of the wrong ones wanting to share theirs). But I think it is a very fine, well-knit, right-sounding, properly solemn and hopeful poem, good eschatology. If you get an extra copy of Poetry when it comes out, will you please let me have it for a while? Poetry is on a very black blacklist here and the copies that used to come to me stopped with a crash. The Abbot must have opened it at some four-letter word on one of his bad mornings. He seems to be deathly afraid of it. Plain envelope etc ... .
As to the Kentucky Review I firmly believe in supporting one's friendly local magazine, so as I happen to have the enclosed "Rites [for the Extrusion of a Leper]" just ready, I'll send them along. I hope Kentucky can handle them. And that the Catlicks don't get upset etc.
August 27, 1967
Many thanks for the Dichtung all full of Wahrheit, Schönheit, Gemütlichkeit, and other keits. I liked "Cookham" even better in print. Have not got far into Louis Zukofsky yet, as have not had much time in the last couple of days: trying to finish some books out on interlibrary loan before the portcullis comes clashing down.
Strange about Claude Lévi-Strauss: I have just started on him too and the day your letter came I got three of his books. From what little I have read, this is important and lively. I am doing something eventually on cargo cults, but I want all this background. Have poem inspired by Zulu messiahs. Do you know G. Bachelard? I want to get going on him too, but have not tracked anything down yet.
We can talk about all these things I hope when Gene comes over Monday. The note on you in Poetry shows you to be amazingly productive. More I reflect back on the illustrations to Kenner better I like them [Davenport illustrated Hugh Kenner's The Stoic Comedians].
P. S. I nearly forgot: you have the only copy of the prologue to "Leper": could you possibly get me a Xerox of that one page? It may be published in England too [in Peace News].
December 28, 1967
I've been lost and left behind by all the letters. This is to say I like (way back) your Heraclitus. And was happy to hear the K. Review was going to have so many good things in it. I look forward to it ...
And now: everywhere under every tree there is a review, even here, even in the eremo. I have caught it and have decided I would get sick with magazine [Monks Pond] but only for four issues, as if a man can decide beforehand how sick he can afford to get.
This magazine has nothing to do with money in any respect as it can be printed free here and given out as largesse--only mimeograph and offset, but what sane man in my position would not also want Gene's pictures? Somehow it must have in it photographs.
Have you any ideas for people to send in things and do you have anything you would want to go in a magazine so unknown and never to become known as to be almost unpublication? Jonathan Williams has rushed into the fray and sent several good poets in this direction already. Maybe Ron Johnson too.
Translations I could very well use--maybe even a few of the Heraclitus? I mean a couple of dozen of the fragments?
The place is all seething with hopes and fears regarding the new abbot. The election is coming in a couple of weeks. Some thought my campaign platform ["MY CAMPAIGN PLATFORM for non-Abbot and permanent keeper of the present doghouse"] arrogant (enclosed). But as it is a non-platform, there is no hurt if it antagonizes the electorate.
March 11, 1968
Here at last is the magazine. I am getting much more material than I anticipated and I doubt that I will have room for Heraclitus--after all well known. On the other hand probably in the Fall issue I hope to use Gene's picture of you as a Yugoslavian rainmaker with the thyrsus shading your mustache. By then you might perhaps have a pome? Or some tirade.
Thanks for the KR. I like Wendell [Berry] and Ron [Seitz] and theirpoems and your remarks on Gene's pictures. The rest I haven't read yet. It is a good issue: and might I please have two more copies.
Editing a magazine is--as I had forgotten--time--consuming. I am no good at my ordinary correspondence and worse with what goes with this venture. I find I have to put it together myself (with a helper) and this means that it gets into shape by fits and starts. Will do a new batch this week some time.
P.S. Gene was over yesterday, with many good pictures.
To Clayton Eshleman
By the time he first wrote to Thomas Merton, Clayton Eshleman had published Residence on Earth, a translation of Pablo Neruda's poetry, and was working on translations of Cesar Vallejo's poetry. Merton was pleased to hear from someone who shared his interest in the great Latin American poet. Merton himself had translated a few of Vallejo's poems, which appeared in Emblems of a Season of Fury in 1963.
Born in 1935 in Indianapolis and educated at Indiana University, Eshleman began writing in his early twenties and produced the first of many books of poetry, Mexico and North, in 1961. From 1967 to 1973, Eshleman was publisher and editor of Caterpillar Press and translated writings of such literary figures as Aimé Césaire and Antonin Artaud. A collection of Eshleman's poetry, The Name Encanyoned River: Selected Poems, Nineteen Sixty to Nineteen Eighty-Five, was published in 1986, and a collection of other writings, Antiphonal Swing: Selected Prose 1962-1987, was brought out by Caryl Eshleman in 1989.
[June 1963]
[The following letter was translated into Spanish by José Coronel Urtecho and published in La Prensa Literaria in August 1963.]
It takes time to get to a letter like yours, from among the other letters of editors, and of crazies, and of the hurt, and of the rich with propositions, and of the fanatics with accusations.
I have translated only half a dozen poems of [César] Vallejo (I think all were in Poemas humanos) and four will be in my new book [Emblems of a Season of Fury] this fall, so I am not exactly digging in and getting anything done. I am glad to hear you are. I think all the poets in America could translate Vallejo and not begin to get him.
... This is because, as I think, he is the most universal, Catholic in that sense (the only real sense), poet of this time, the most Catholic and universal of all modern poets, the only poet since (Who? Dante?) who is anything like Dante. Maybe Leopardi whom I never read much, of course Quasimodo has some of it too.
So what I mean is that Vallejo is totally human, as opposed to our zombie poets and our little girl poets and our incontinents. I have neverreally thought out all that must begin to be said about Vallejo, but he is tremendous and extraordinary, a huge phenomenon, so much more magnificent (in the classical sense) than Neruda, precisely because he is in every way poorer. No matter what they do with Vallejo, they can never get him into anybody's establishment. (Neruda walked in very easy without giving the slightest trouble.)
Therefore I think that a translation of Vallejo is not only a nice interesting venture but a project of very great and urgent importance for the human race.
However I would like to see your translations of Neruda.
In terms of volume I have not read all or even most of the fine Latin American poetry. There is too much. I don't think any of them that I know come close to the stature of Vallejo, but they are fine in less profound ways. Nobody could be so direct, and go so far into the heart of it, and never stop going. But the Latin Americans are better, as a whole, than the North Americans. Cid Corman I don't know. So many of the others, even when most sincere, give the impression of posing even, especially, in their sincerity. They just don't have anything to say, even when they are indignant one feels that their indignation (in a good cause of course) has not yet got over being just indignation with themselves and with the fact that they are not liked by everybody yet.
Vallejo is a great eschatological poet, with a profound sense of the end (and yet of the new beginnings that he does not talk about). All the others are running around setting off firecrackers and saying it is a national holiday or emergency or something. Or just lolling around in a tub of silly words.
[Hoffman Reynolds] Hays I don't know, N[ew] D[irections] 15 [with the essay, "The Passion of Cesar Vallejo"] I did not see, and I am not up on what is being published. I am not well informed, you understand.
As for me, I am not going to translate any whole book of V. but I may some day do my own anthology of L. American poets I like most, and that would mean a lot of his. But 1 don't think repeated translations of such a man will overlap, especially of the Poemas humanos. I might work more on Los heraldos negros because I like the manifest Inca quality there.
Do send me something of yours: I do not know you, though your name is familiar. I seldom really read magazines even when I get them. I have probably been in something with you and not known about it.
January 22, 1965
It is unfortunate that I am so drowned in letters to answer that I don't get around to the ones I want to answer. I was surprised to hear you were so close, after Japan. Certainly it would make sense to meet and talk. I don't get permission to travel, and I would not be able to come to Bloomington [Indiana]. But if you could drive down here sometime, that would be fine. However, I am under limitations as far as visits go, and would not be free for a few months yet, as I have already filled my quota for the first months of the year. Some time in April might be good. You probably are not so far away that it would mean a great project to get here. So I hope you can get down for the afternoon some time. You are welcome to dinner and supper here, and to stay overnight if you want to. This is not the place where you saw Murder in the Cathedral, that was more probably St. Meinrad's [Archabbey].
Let me know if you will still be around in April, and want to come down. I will then clear it with the Abbot [James Fox].
Glad for Residence on Earth [Eshleman's translation of Neruda's poems]: your translation made me look more closely at the original. The translation is very good. It is real. I mean it is a real experience in its own right and an adequate communication of Neruda except in the few places where he is uncommunicable in English perhaps. I know what you mean about my translations of Vallejo not being "involved" in him. I had not read enough of his poetry or studied enough of his life to really get into it that deeply. The bitterness remained a bit abstract. Not that I could get it all into poems of mine, but it would be good to have experienced it more fully in poems of his. I had not done this. The fact that you have been through so much of it would put you in a position to detect this lack. You took me up on the adjective "great" and of course it is no adjective at all. It has no face left. But what I meant was that Vallejo is one of those people who imposes himself as a world in himself, without being square about it in any way (as I suspect Goethe was for instance). And he does this more truly than anyone in this century, it seems to me. You tell me if I am crazy. Or exaggerating.
I get good letters from Meg [Randall de Mondragon] at El Corno [Emplumado], and wish I could help them with millions. If Ernesto Cardenal comes up here, which I expect, and if he goes that way, should I tell him to come and see you? He is a good poet and he knows how to sit peacefully on islands with San Blas Indians and so forth, with civilized people, is what I mean.
March 11, 1965
About April, by all means bring your wife [Barbara Novak], it is a nice drive and I can talk to her too, why not? Only thing is that she might feel frustrated by signs saying all women will be excommunicated if they are not so already by their very nature. But as long as she does not rush into the monastery everything will be all right. The signs are not as nasty as they look ...
It turns out Cardenal is back in Colombia and didn't come to this country after all, so I can't send him along to Indiana. As for the drawings, they are at the moment in Milwaukee and some may be seen in a newmagazine called Lugano Review; a few were in El Corno a long time ago but rather dim.
Your poem I like in patches, but I find it a bit academic, I mean the gnostic etc. imagery and figures. I think it is not yet as alive as you want it to be: and what is behind the figures, I mean spiritually? I don't think you are really definite about that. Blake was. Your poem gives the impression of something cooking but you do not yet know what. But keep it cooking.
I have translated some Nicanor Parra whom I like very much; he is not a Vallejo, harder headed, more antipoet, very funny.
If I seem rushed, and when it comes to letters I am, it is because I don't put much time in the things that call for a great deal of activity, and as there is an enormous amount of this, a lot gets crowded into a short time and then I dump it all. Probably not the best way to do things, but I can't always try to do everything the best way. But that explains why the letters are slow in getting answered and are often incoherent.
Bring your wife and let her not be frustrated by the signs, by the hideous gatehouse etc. There will perhaps be dogwoods later in April anyway.
P.S. Can you read Japanese? I have a thing here which I can't understand.
May 25, 1965
Well, the only people I know in Peru are the widow [Georgette de] Vallejo and a Benedictine priest who is up in the hills somewhere. I am afraid I cannot be much help except to say that if I were in your shoes I would get up and go, even if I had to swim. If you stay around this country you have to make up your mind to face all the nonsense that is really not so worth facing anyway. On the other hand, there is no good in letting it depress you. One has to be relatively free of all that, even while doing what is demanded in order to be part of the stupid mess--which is unavoidable. After all, the two of you have so much that you ought to consider yourselves well off and not let the squares lead you into self doubt.
[James] Laughlin was here but I did not come to anything conclusive about anything to do with El Corno for instance. He said he remembered having had some correspondence with you. After that I don't remember much because when he was here I got another dose of the flu bug I had before and that wiped out all the rest. He is going ahead with the stuff I am trying to do on Chuang Tzu and that is keeping me happy at the moment, that and the birds. Lots of company out there, rabbits, salamanders, tanagers, fireflies, owls, everything.
Now the question is, having written this, have I lost your address? It is not on the postcard.
November 8, 1965
It was good to get your long letter. Glad you are there [Nicaragua]. Sure, I guess you are right about twelve hours a day in the bus in Central America. I did it in Cuba, but one day is all you need in Cuba. Glad you met [Pablo Antonio] Cuadra and [Jose Coronel] Urtecho. You were probably wrong in thinking Cardenal was not interested. He is rather a shy person and I am quite sure that the fact of your not being a Catholic made absolutely no difference whatever.
Going on through your letter, I really envy you a little. I used to love pushing on through places like that and getting around, like Panama. I used to do that sort of thing in Europe.
About the monastery: does it need explaining or justifying? For my own part I have come to the conclusion that if I can live with it my friends can. It is simply a fact. I know that in many ways it seems to be an offensive fact, but I can't help that, and it may change some day. I did not come here for the costume, and there are various ways in which one can accept it: for my part I like it because it is comfortable: and who cares what anybody wears anyway? I assure you that I am not attached in the least to the institutional exterior of the Church. I have committed myself to this, yes, and people know this. All right. But anyone who knows me knows that I am not going to make funny choices when it comes to deciding between something artificial and external and something real and live. I would not be here if I had not found some kind of life in it, and I repeat, I am in no way selling out to whatever may be fictitious about it. I think that is one thing a person learns in a place like this, just as in a Zen monastery you learn to burn Buddhas. But really I don't want to put up an argument for or against it. I am living with it, and certainly I could wish it were different in many ways. I certainly recognize that as far as the relations with people go, it is a forced and arbitrary setup, and moreover I know that I myself have been to some extent harmed and diminished by this. It can't be helped, there are other things which are important enough to counterbalance this, and all life is much the same in that respect. And I am simply not interested in the kind of life I would have to live if I were outside.
All that is a long way round to say if you can possibly forget I am a priest, forget it. And I assure you that I have no interest whatever in pulling any professional priestly magic on you. I pray for you to have life and happiness as I pray for all my friends, and that is it.
Since August I have been living in the woods all the time, going down to the monastery once a day. It is very good for meditation and for being more alive and for my part I am very happy with it. It is really what I came here for. I get some writing done, read a fair amount, chop wood, think a lot. As far as I am concerned, this is where the root is. I do not prescribe it for anybody else, but for me it is a good answer. Still, at the same time, I would like to get down in those mountains (not Limaso much). [Miguel] Grinberg said he had heard from you and was glad ...
January 28, 1966
Your letter of Dec. 21st didn't get to me until two or three days ago. Sure, you are right that in this position I often say things without knowing all that I ought to know. You list a lot of things I should have read and haven't. However, I wasn't actually saying the South Americans were all better poets. In fact all I did was say what they said, and when I originally said it I jotted it down in a book with an enormous amount of other material in which it was buried. When Harper's [Magazine] for some reason picked it out of a rather long series of selections I sent them, it certainly got to be much too emphatic all of a sudden. I was worried about it ["Few Questions and Fewer Answers: Extracts from a Monastic Notebook"] when I saw it in proof, and would have cut it altogether except that they had cut so much that I was afraid there would be almost nothing left ... In that of course I was wrong.
As you state it, and you state it exactly, what you object to is that I seem to identify more easily with "the South American mind," whatever that may be, than with North American poets. You seem to me to be berating me for being on the wrong side. As a matter of fact I am not on any side: hence it would certainly have been better to have said nothing.
At the same time, I do not say this as anything but a simple fact, not as a statement having some special value or other; though I read [Allen] Ginsberg and recognize he is alive and a good poet he sounds to me like someone on another planet, while [Nicanor] Parra doesn't. This is not to be construed into some other kind of statement "Ginsberg is bad, Ginsberg goes to bed early/late, etc." It is just that I respond to Parra more than I do to Ginsberg. Whether I ought not to is something I consider a bit irrelevant.
As to the statement [about] Harper's being intellectually sloppy, you are perfectly right. All I can say is that I will be more careful next time. Or try to.
If there are people you think I ought to read, and if there is some way you can easily send me something they have written, I wish you would do so. But I don't want to put you to an enormous amount of trouble in Peru, obviously.
One thing you can do, though: I have been wondering if you have ever read Rilke, and if so whether he means anything to you, or to people you know. Does anyone read him in this country besides the squares? I am interested because he is a bit of a problem to me in some ways. I have been reading a lot of him and about him. I should imagine you probably had not read him, or that if you had you didn't particularly like him.
Right now I am pretty well snowed in and chopping a lot of wood.
March 16, 1966
...Liked everything you said about Rilke. The things you did not like about him were the things I thought you probably would not like: the perfume and the older women. But the older women had enough sense to give him castles to write in and I rather like the Princess, not to mention the one he went to Russia with. You are very right about his ideas on death: they are deep and solid intuitions. I think of him as validly religious, and his reaction against a sick Catholicism is perfectly understandable. The translations stink, though the [J. B.] Leishman [-Stephen] Spender job on the [Duino] Elegies is fair. It is at least passable, most of the time. I find myself preferring the Neue Gedichte and not preferring the Orpheus sonnets [Sonnets to Orpheus]. I do like the Elegies very much. Also the Letters to a Young Poet; very good indeed. I am lecturing on them to the monks. "Young Workman's Letter" is fine too ...
I just got Meg Randall's new book of poems and like it.
I did not mean "South American mind" in such a way that I would pretend to give it a clear definition. I don't know that much about it. They are certainly fusty, involved, often superficial, glib, vain, etc. etc. That is a question of character. I was thinking in terms more of culture, the European background, I like Spanish writing and the Spanish language which can be sharp and supple and well tempered like nothing on earth when it is good. Inevitably some of the irony, some of the critical spirit is still lying around at least in the guys who as you say got out. Perhaps if I were closer to the scene I would be less happy about some of the political noises. Maybe they mean absolutely nothing. Maybe they just sound alive. Perhaps my sympathy for them as a bunch is due to the fact that I was born and grew up in France. In fact I was born only a few miles from Spain and am by birth at least a French Catalan. That is enough for the Catalans in Barcelona to call me simply Catalan. That's all right with me, though it is the same sort of joke as Rilke being Russian. Of course, though, Catalan doesn't mean Spanish by any means. Maybe I just miss being with the kind of people I grew up with, though I can't say I was always happy about that, either. Parra seems to me to be a lot lighter on his feet than the gummy and heavy type of thing (at least so it seems to me) we are getting around here. That's why I like Meg's poems, they are less "heavy." Ginsberg is articulate but somehow he seems to me to be emotionally or spiritually or something gooey, viscous. I do not deny that he is a very fine poet.
Spring is coming to the woods, everything is very quiet and is now warm too. It has been very cold this winter. Probably I knocked my back out chopping wood and next week I have to go and get an operation on it.
About the differences between us, you are the one who seems worried by them. Perhaps it would help to distinguish between the differences of the group with which I am associated, and my differences. Theyare not the same. I am not to be identified simply with an outfit, and it bugs me when you do. Then I get defensive about it, and that makes the difference seem greater than it is. But of course we differ and I see nothing whatever wrong with that or surprising about it. I differ with a great number of people, and in fact there are very few that I really agree with in a whole lot of different areas all at once ...
May 8, 1966
Lot of things have happened since I last wrote to you. Mainly I had to go into the hospital for one of those back operations, which came out all right I think, but was a gruesome experience in many ways. Not that I ever got into unbearable pain, but it is simply shattering to have people dig into such a center of life and motion and to be worked on for hours though unconscious, being "lived" through tubes and machines all the while, and becoming a kind of medical abstraction. Not just as Donne did, a map, but God knows what, an experiment. A theorem. A dismembered piece of machinery, like a car in a garage. I came out ok finally and have been going through a long convalescence, not doing much work and writing very few letters.
The Chavin Illumination came. It comes through wonderfully in type, a most beautiful illumination and right at the heart of things. The first time I read it (when you sent it in ms.) I had not met you and Barbara I think. Anyway I read it cursorily and without the attention you would want. This time, for various other personal reasons, I am in a much better position to respond to it because I have run into something like it myself. And I know why such things demand imperatively to be said and are almost the only things worth saying, the only things left that are true.
I won't go into your letter and the "barrier." There is no use defending, protesting, constructing explanations etc. I think you really must have gone through a kind of trauma in Latin America and I am not qualified to talk about it because my own experience of LAmerica thirty years ago was totally positive and totally different. I know what you mean because (this is the problem) I feel in many ways the same kind of trauma about certain aspects of North American culture. The barrier is this difference of experience, history, sensibility, and there is no argument about what has burst into one's karma and is just there. Hence there is no barrier other than that of two entirely different loads of history that we have to carry. The only thing I reproach you for is an apparent inability to see that I am not blindly and willfully choosing to carry my different burden as though in doing so I were challenging you. You must not regard the differences between us as a challenge, and you must not be surprised if for various reasons I cannot suddenly see everything precisely as it looks to you. I do not know you that well. You expect me to understand you and go along with you as if I had known you all my life. But we are strangers. Please do not be mad at me for this fact which cannot be muchchanged at the moment--because I have had all my quota of visitors for this time. I am not justifying this "quota" aspect of my life. It is to me shameful and degrading in many ways, as you know. I do not ask you to approve of it, or even to understand on what terms I just manage to put up with it, not knowing how else to handle the things. You would say "get the hell out of there" and of course from a certain point of view there is no argument: except my karma. And as I keep saying, if I can put up with it my friends ought to.
The translation from Vallejo on the back of your letter was powerful and most moving, a very fine job, though I did not look at the original. It certainly was Vallejo. But I have no intention of fighting windmills at New Directions on this account. Man when it is useless it is useless, and I am not magic. I can't change things by wishing.
Thanks for the books which came in yesterday. Have already begun the Bash which is just what I have been wanting after so much tired stuff, this is the greatest the most alive and you are right perfect monasticism. Thanks for the intuition that it is what I would need. Maybe when I read it carefully I will know a lot more about the question. And there is no question that the great issue is freedom. From Urizens goddam hammers. I go where I am Los (turned loose) so far the one place where I can be the sunlight is up here on this hill where all the angels shine around me in each leaf and no one can prevent them. I have been on the road before and there were fewer and sometimes none. I think I have only one way to travel and it is straight up. Or straight down into the root.
All my love to both of you. I hate priestcraft and do not represent any such thing. Write when you can. Anything I can send? Chuang Tzu? I will send it [The Way of Chuang Tzu] or did I already? I think I probably didn't. And some of the mimeograph stuff we have lying around, I forget what I sent of that. "[The] Zen Koan" maybe did you get?
October 18, 1966
First of all I will certainly write something for the Guggenheim people if you want me to, but I am embarrassed to say that though I have written a lot of those things before, no one I know has ever got anything [Eshleman had asked Merton for a recommendation]. I am sure I don't have the knack. I hope you get to Paris ok, though you may hate it too. Though perhaps less than Lima. It has changed a lot in the last thirty years. I have not been there lately.
... I honestly think both you and Cid have a sort of reflex which leads you to swat other people for no good reason, except that this is something you need to do--I do the same not in letters but in my writing sometimes, and that gives the impression that I am mad too. I know none of us are angry really.
I respect your feeling that monks, Zen or others, give an impressionof hubris by "living detached on a special lane" and then telling everyone else off. Or just claiming to have the answer. I feel that way myself about the monks who really do this and there are plenty. But once again in a despairing plea I hope to get someone at last to see that I am not one of them (but in the past I have been, so I deserve whatever is said about it). This business of chastity is much more complex than that. First of all, it is not a question of negatively scouring out all sexual desire, though many do this or try to. Properly it should be a long hard job of sublimation: and doubtless few of us completely succeed. In any case I have never led or advocated a totally disincarnate life. I was in love before entering the monastery and I have also been in love since (though pretty hampered by the restrictions!) and in the end I have come to a position where I refuse to generalize, and above all I know I don't have the "Big Answers" (who has?). And I do wish everyone would stop inferring that I intend my life to be some sort of reflection on theirs. I don't assume for a moment that the plane on which I live is higher or better than anyone else's, in fact I know it may be a blind alley and a huge mistake, but since I honestly think it is my "fate" (call it that if you like), I have decided, and often, over and over, that it has to be accepted for what it is worth and made the best of. And I suppose I am moderately happy at it and am able to give something to other people from where I am. The point is that this sort of setup does offer a certain kind of freedom of its own, and that if a person wants to choose this and live accordingly, then it would be a bad thing for him to be forced to conform to others who don't want it. People who want and need this kind of solitude (there are always some) should be able to find it and stay in it, though they should do so without looking down on others or being vain of supposed achievements (that vanity immediately empties the whole thing out anyhow). Since this obviously is not your dish, I can see that it would repel you or leave you indifferent: yet the swamp wading you speak of is common to everybody and there is no escape for monks: each one simply has to get through his own swamp as honestly and as completely as he can. The only thing is not to make a virtue out of going under. And I am glad you are getting footway on some rock. Keep it up. I'll send you a book called Raids on the Unspeakable, parts of which I like, parts of which are trivial. Cid didn't like the way I seemed to be telling everybody what to do and saying "hey listen to me." That was a good criticism, but ...
November 10, 1966
I sent you my last letter when I was just entering the hospital for some tests--nothing special. But by the time I got back and got to your letter everything had piled up, and now I am away from it, and swimming to get back to it. And another thing is that all mail coming or going is inspected, especially mine, because I am suspicious character. I suggest then (if it doesn't nauseate you to do it) that if you have something, asthey say, of a "private nature," it would be well to mark the envelope very clearly "conscience matter" and it will not be opened (I hope).
What you say about "dissolution" etc. I deeply and in every way agree with, and I don't claim that I am doing a marvelous job of getting along without. Nor am I in an attitude of self-defense if I say that I have from time to time come close to that in other ways. Sublimation is not a deliberately managed process, and God knows there is no end of dangers and aberrations--maybe most supposed sublimation is just phony--I have seen enough of that. Well, I explore the area that I explore: someone has to, and it is possible that I have gone around in circles, found nothing, and so on. One very good thing did happen: a Sufi master from Algeria [Sidi Abdesalam], a really authentic guy and a completely human being, showed up here with interpreter-disciple and we understood each other fine and understood where we were going: area of crazy liberty of spirit etc. That is my path and my lot and I know there is no going back on it--nor do I want to. Again, I say, this is just for me, not for anyone else. I see the need for you to go the way you are going and feel it is right, if you don't attach too exclusive an importance to it ... I like very much your piece on [Carl Theodor] Dreyer's St. Joan [the film La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc]--not having seen this I don't get whole picture but see there is a lot in what you say. [Rene] Char I was reading this summer, full of great things and especially I wonder as you do at the marvel of the Hypnos notes [Feuillets d'Hypnos]. Now I am in [Antonin] Artaud's great annotations on Balinese theater and theater in general. I might translate some of this material, I don't think it has been done. Finished a long poem sequence ["Edifying Cables"], but I am not happy with it, it is not rich enough, hot enough, cerebral maybe, ironic, testy, blah. I am not anxious to show it to anyone or I would send a copy.
I write when I can, you too. Always most glad to hear.
Have you heard the Jazz of Jimmy Smith? Ambiguous power, but power. Angry power, that's why I say ambiguous. Love is not easily come by.
December 26 or 28 [1966]
I write this fast so I won't forget and leave Lacrymae [Lachrymae Mateo: 3 Poems for Christmas] without any answer. I like the three poems very much and in a way they are going on ahead and past the others as they should. There is much better fusion of things that seem to clash, and this makes for power. Or maybe I realize it more because you have told me what is fusing. I know how much in this kind of poetry you have to know the poet. It is you. Very good you.
Your Guggenheim stuff I filled in and sent in when they asked and I hope you get something but man don't rely on me. I say it again, I don't know how to write out the stuff they want.
Yes of course you are right about them frisking the letters for theUnspeakable. If it were only that. And for my own part my life has been frankly built on the Unspeakable and Unspoken for a long time, and that too everybody knows. Also the word in the title (Unspeakable) is ambiguous even for me: it is just a title, though it does say something. But it is both good and bad Unspeakable. However, what they don't like is the human. But the human doesn't have to be that vulnerable.
The enclosed [a circular letter dated Christmas Morning--1966, published in The Road to Joy] is what I am sending out to a lot of people: another aspect of everything. I don't think it will disconcert you. You know me.
All of a sudden I am reading a lot of [William] Faulkner and finding it very good. Does anybody read him? Or is it just that I live in the South?
St. Joseph's Infirmary, Louisville, Kentucky February 27, 1967
Thanks for your letter & the information about the Ad Hoc Committee ... As a Catholic I want to thank you all for your Christian lesson given in charity to our Church which is sometimes distinguished by moral blindness in crucial issues--and this is one of them. [Francis] Cardinal Spellman's stand on Vietnam has done terrible harm to the cause of man & to the Christian faith & and it is right for you to point this out. It is scandalous that the law & the Church establishment should gang up on you. The only reason why I don't join your sponsors publicly is that I might be more useful to the cause of peace if I avoid an open confrontation "against" people like Spellman, since I am working on issues about which they can't very well complain--aid to civilians in Vietnam, etc.
Of course there will probably come a time when I will have so say No publicly to people like Spellman, but I don't think there is any point to it now ... . What matters is the wholeness of love in all its respects, & this is not just our own managing. It is also a gift.
(Can I have a couple of the pictures taken here? Love to.)
August 17, 1967
Delighted to hear of the new magazine. Will send things and am sending first this. New. Please tell me right away if you don't want it and then I can do something else with it. I am writing this new, pages of. A whole book of it. Lots.
As a matter of fact I did answer your St. Patrick lament with tangible help. Alas, here is what became of it. Your letter got me in the hospital where I lay operated in February. On your letter there was no address but that of the captains who are saving you from the galleys of Spellman and Odessa to fight you in Pepanto etc. Lepanto of course I mean. There is about to be a great naval blunder with Dom John of Austria. To defendthe ables against the capables. Every cardinal you understand is either able or capable or both. Must not tell them any different.
Well now like I explained above I wrote to your captain's palace of defense from the hospital, for this was my only known direction at that time. Well then what. The letter containing no less than five dollars (for me a fortune) was returned to the hospital. Now wait carefully from the hospital I had left. Now attend. The nuns opened the letter. Now remark: the nuns read my saving aspersions on the head of old Spellman but they did not blanch nor quail. The nuns then (observe) contacted me by the planes of secrets away from the hospital. I then advanced by stealth on the hospital for by that time I needed the five dollars bad myself. You can therefore guess the rest. But I have in the meantime shown you the secrets of my sympathy. Old Spellman is all seaweed from head to foot, as everybody knows, for he is really Neptune the god of New York and I intend to write songs to that effect. You have flouted same and are suffering from tridents up the ass which is most unpleasant but this is the age of Auschwitz and the hierarchy ain't fooling. They know what side their brands is buttocked on. That is what you get for being honest. Meanwhile I will scrape if scraps can and fish together emoluments and pfennigs of various denominations to send for the captain's defense against Rapacious old Card. You have done well and my Church is with you in contradistinction to his, for he is a schism or prism. His sights are ascrew, take that in any language you prefer: like A Screw or the Magazine of the Farts. Well, now I must go and bandy witticisms with my superior.
Serious best lucks with the new mag and promise help, if you like this new verse there is plenty more where that come from.
September 3, 1967
Thanks for your letter. I note the change of address. The main thing I want to write about is the question of giving my signature.
Obviously I agree with you on the war, and I agree in particular that Spellman's support of it is scandalous. On the other hand, after thinking about the various angles for several days, I have come to the conclusion that I can't sign. This is not just because I don't want to prejudice the cases of several Catholic C.O.'s who need my support (one is being tried by the army). The difference is more fundamental. I can't personally identify with the way in which you protested. To illustrate what I mean: I don't approve of the use of napalm by Israelis on the Arabs in the recent war [Six-Day War, June 5-10, 1967]. But I would not enter a synagogue with a sign to that effect, especially during a service. The case is not in every respect similar, but it is close enough to show what I mean. Therefore I am sorry, but I can't give you my signature.
Obviously I hope you will be acquitted. I'll be thinking about it and would send money if I could.
To Lawrence Ferlinghetti
The American poet, playwright, editor, and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919- ) was a leader in the beat movement in the fifties. His City Lights Books published works by Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, and Allen Ginsberg, while Ferlinghetti's famous San Francisco bookstore (also named City Lights) featured counterculture writers. A Coney Island of the Mind (1958) is one of Ferlinghetti's most celebrated works. Where Is Vietnam? (1965), Tyrannus Nix (1969), Who Are We Now? (1976), Over All the Obscene Boundaries: European Poems & Transitions (1984), and Seven Days in Nicaragua Libre (1984) reflect Ferlinghetti's political and social concerns. He published Merton's Auschwitz poem, "Chant to Be Used in Processions Around a Site with Furnaces," in the first issue of Journal for the Protection of All Living Beings. Merton's name headed a list of contributors that included Bertrand Russell, Gary Snyder, Albert Camus, and Allen Ginsberg. The letters Merton wrote to Ferlinghetti in the summer and fall of 1961 document some of the difficulties Merton encountered in publishing his first writings on war, "Chant" and Original Child Bomb.
August 2, 1961
Since you ask me to, I have sent the furnace poem ["Chant to Be Used in Processions Around a Site with Furnaces"] to the censors of the Order. However, here is the thing: if they object to it we can't print it at all, whereas if I had printed it over a pseudonym it would at least be printed and they might object afterwards if they knew who wrote it, which would be quite doubtful.
Here we are dealing not with diocesan censors who confine themselves to matters of faith and morals, and are to be taken seriously, but with censors of the Order who bother their heads about everything, because they have been given the task of judging whether or not a piece of work is opportune. That word opportune covers a lot of ground. First of all, it is intended explicitly to discourage new writers from arising in the Order. Secondly, it is concerned with how the work of an established writer may be imagined to affect the reputation of the Order. This extends to some very picayune things. I had a frightful time publishing two articles on Pasternak ["Boris Pasternak and the People with Watch Chains" and "The Pasternak Affair in Perspective"] because of the implication that I must have read a) his novel and b) newspapers and magazines, which all would be a cataclysmic blow to the prestige of the Order. Utterly unthinkable. The atomic bomb piece [Original Child Bomb] was objected to on roughly the same grounds, though was put more coyly: "This has been written about before by others." In a word these cats are obsessed with a certain image they have of themselves and they don't want anyone disturbing it. What they want me to do is to build up the Order to the skies and make it look as if nobody in it even had a body anymore, letalone five senses and an awareness that the rest of the universe continued to exist. This to me seems somehow unconnected with the Christian concept of charity which seems to me to indicate that the Christian is somehow involved with the rest of mankind and that they all have common problems. War for instance, and peace, and concentration camps. I regret that I have not yet advanced to the stage where I can be exclusively concerned with birth control and pornography as the only two moral problems worthy of concern, along with the sixth commandment, generally referred to as "sin" without further qualification.
But I do have a moral problem about that furnace piece. A very sensitive guy who has been living in Europe and knows people who were in the camps, including a Jewish girl who was deliberately run over by a tank outside the Warsaw ghetto and lost her legs, says the piece is too nasty and that people aren't thinking that way over there. In a word the question of violence arises in the poem itself. Certainly it is not pro-Auschwitz, but the fact remains that it states all these things in a sardonic manner which is noncommittal and callous (apparently). Also the aspect of it which bothers me is: to what extent can we point to what is hateful and say it ought to be hated, if by that we necessarily imply that there are, therefore, people to be hated and punished? This piece is by the way not about Eichmann, but about the commandant of Auschwitz, [Rudolf] Hess.
Some day when I have thought about it more I want to talk to you about effective protest as distinct from a simple display of sensitivity and good will. I think we have to examine the question of genuine and deep spiritual non-cooperation, non-participation, and resistance. There is so very little in this country that what little there is has got to be good. If it is not good, if it is just a question of standing up and saying with sincerity, candor and youthful abandon "I am against," it has the following bad effects: a) It perpetuates an illusion of free thought and free discussion, which is actually very useful to those who have long since stifled all genuine freedom in this regard. b) It flatters the squares by giving them something they can contrast themselves with, to their own complacent advantage. I leave you to work out some of the other implications. Have you by any chance read the Old Testament prophets lately? They knew how to hit hard in the right places, and the chief reason was that they were not speaking for themselves.
You ask me about why certain persons [clergymen, priests, nuns, and monks] are absent from peace parades: because they themselves did not organize the peace parade. This is the main reason. They don't join with any other organization in doing things. Why haven't they organized one of their own? Because they are too busy shouting about the need for destroying the enemy. Why are they so busy shouting ...? Etc. All down the line. Ultimately they think in negative terms. They define themselves by standing back from the guy that is something else, and say"at any rate I am not him" and they start from there to arrive at who they are. This I think is why there are so many zombies around. They are just not someone else. Nor are they themselves. This goes for everybody in whatever group, whoever does this ends up a zombie.
I am sorry about the letter you wrote ten years ago [Ferlinghetti had written about the questions of consecrated virginity in Dietrich von Hildebrand's "Marriage" and "got a note from a secretary in return"]. Of course I don't remember whether or not I even got it. Mail is subject to all sorts of ups and downs. Sometimes you get most of it, sometimes you get very little of it, and sometimes someone who has been getting through to you regularly suddenly becomes Nacht und Nebel. A lot of the stuff sent to me is answered by a secretary in the Abbot's office, or handed to some other other department. If you have since found yourself getting a lot of cheese advertising and come-ons for donations to the monks, then your letter got into the office of one of the Fathers who is in charge of a big long mailing list.
Talking about mailing lists: could you send me some of your catalogues? I mean of paperbacks of all kinds that I could get from City Lights Bks?
Look, I don't give you the gotta go to confession right away routine. What is vitally important is that you should be a Christian and as faithful to the truth as you can get. This may mean anything but resembling some of the pious faithful. But I don't have to tell you, because you know, that there is only one thing that is of any importance in your life. Call it fidelity to conscience, or to the inner voice, or to the Holy Spirit: but it involves a lot of struggle and no supineness and you probably won't get much encouragement from anybody. There is a dimension of Catholicism, mostly French and German, which gives a little room for growth like this. But you have to find it as best you can. I can't necessarily tell you where to look, or how much of it you have found already. The start of it all is that none of us really have started to look. But the mercy of God, unknown and caricatured and blasphemed by some of the most reputable squares, is the central reality out of which all the rest comes and into which all the rest returns.
August 12, 1961
Your letter requires a quick answer. Of course print the poem ["Chant to Be Used in Processions Around a Site with Furnaces"] if it is set up. There is no question about that, since I said you could do it if there was no name, or no right name.
But now: about the name. Here is what has happened so far. Of course nothing has come from the censor. But I sent a copy of the poem to Dorothy Day, just for her. And she passed it on to the boys at The Catholic Worker and now they, as far as I know, are printing it or have printed it. Also without benefit of censorship, permission from me, anda few minor details like that. They did write, but it was already an accomplished fact, or so it appeared from the letter.
Since they have to all appearances printed the thing over my name, there is no further reason why you should not do so. The fat is in the fire, so you might as well go ahead and I will take responsibility with my Superiors for whatever follows. It is an accident and that is that. They may not be too happy about it, and it may make them clamp down on anything of this type in the future. But what can anyone do about it now? So go ahead.
I am glad at any rate that the magazine [Journal for the Protection of All Living Beings] is coming right along and look forward to seeing it soon.
What have you decided to do about the Atomic Bomb piece? I have rewritten it, but don't know whether to send a copy to J [Laughlin] out there or not. Nor do I know what has been decided by him and [Robert] Lax and [Emil] Antonucci. Perhaps I had better wait until Lax prints it and then let you print from his copy, if you want it ...
August 15, 1961
Your letter came this morning together with one from The Catholic Worker which confirms that they have printed the Auschwitz piece. Since that is the case you might as well go ahead and use it, there are no further reasons for not doing so. Print it over my name. I think it is better for you to use this in the first issue. Lax is not moving so fast with the Bomb piece, so it would be better to wait on that one.
I am sending a second copy of the Bomb piece, this time the full corrected version. I have not sent one to J. I presume he can print from what Lax puts out. They are arranging something between them.
There is peace in ourselves, since we are Sons of God: but the difficulty is in knowing this and facing it. The reason why we do not live in paradise is that it is difficult to be simple. This is our work, though. It is terribly important that we try to understand it, though we cannot really do that. And there are not easy explanations, or cliche answers to questions about it. The answers are all night.
Like being simple enough to love everybody. Nice, on paper. On this I made a sermon ["The Power and Meaning of Love"], and I send it ... What I preach I don't necessarily do, but from that I hope have learned to expect no less from other people. At least that ...
[Cold War Letter 7]
December 12, 1961
J. forwarded your letter to me, and I am sorry to hear that you have been sick. All my friends have been in hospitals, operated on, diagnosed as about to die, God alone knows what. We are cashing in our chips, so it seems, except that for my part I am still standing, though hungry.
About the Journal: don't think I was personally embarrassed by it.But as I rather expected, Fr. Abbot [James Fox] took a good look at it and decided that from now on I am not to contribute any more to it. That is the only thing I regret. I admit that I am not much dazzled by the approach most of the writers take. I mean I can get along from page to page without getting swept off my feet with enthusiasm. Not that I am mad at dirty words, they are perfectly good honest words as far as I am concerned, and they form part of my own interior mumblings a lot of the time, why not? I just wonder if this isn't another kind of jargon which is a bit more respectable than the jargon of the slick magazines, but not very much more. And I wonder just how much is actually said by it.
However, that is not what I mean, because I thought a lot of this stuff was real good, especially the one about David Meltzer's baby getting born. This was fine. And a lot of good in the Robt Duncan, which I liked mostly. I liked very much your beautiful Haiti and best thing in the whole book was Nez Perce. So there. I haven't read the Camus yet but him I like always. Yet I don't think it was what one might have expected, as a lot of the material was not very near the target, and I am inclined to doubt the reality of the moral concern of a lot of these people who are articulate about the question of the war in your Journal. And I think that is one reason why you can't get the other ones to commit themselves. I don't know if there is anything they are apt to mean about a problem as big as this. However, they are all much more human and more real than the zombies who have all kinds of facts about deterrence and finite deterrence and all-out non-survivability and all-in first-strike ballistic preemption plus as distinguished from massive plus-plus retaliation plus.
As regards the Christianity-Buddhism thing ["Wisdom and Emptiness: A Dialogue between Daisetz T. Suzuki and Thomas Merton"]: both Suzuki and I ended up hanging in various trees among the birds' nests. I am not insisting upon anything, least of all affectivity. That remark was a journalistic kind of remark, referring to the way Christianity and Buddhism look to people who are very definite about being one or the other and very sure that the metaphysic of one excludes the metaphysic of the other. This is all probably quite so. But Zen is beyond metaphysics and so, as far as I am concerned, is the kind of Christian experience that seems to me most relevant, and which is found in Eckhart and the Rhenish mystics and all the mystics for that matter. I agree theoretically that there is a complete division between the two approaches: one personalistic, dualistic, etc., the other non-dualistic. Only trouble is that Suzuki's very distinction between God and Godhead is dualistic, and his lineup of Buddha vs. Christ is also dualistic, and when he starts that he forgets his Zen. So he forgets his Zen. He can forget his Zen too if he wants to or has to, no law saying you have to remember your Zen every minute of the day. It seems to me the Cross says just as much about Zen, or just as little, as the serene face of the Buddha. Of course the historic, medieval concern with the expression of feeling and love in the Crucified Christis nowhere near Zen, it is Bakhti or however you spell it, and that is another matter. But essentially the Crucifix is a non-image, a destroyed image, a wiped-out image, a nothing, an annihilation. It just depends what you are looking at and who you are that looks at it. So the Zens burn all the Buddhas, and they come out with the same thing in the end, as far as the destruction of the image is concerned.
What I do think matters is liberty. The complete freedom and unlimited, unrestricted quality of love, not its affectivity. This I think the Zens are after in their own way too, though more intellectual about it. And note that Zen is full of affectivity too, look at the Zen paintings: plenty compassion, humor, comment, all sorts of stuff which in the West we would frown at calling it literature ...
Merton was Ferlinghetti's guest at City Lights Books in May 1968.
June 5, 1968
...Thanks very much for the contribution for Monks Pond. I sent some more [copies of the first issue] yesterday or the day before. Hope they reach you all right. And don't forget--send me something of yours if you can, and urge others to. Only problem is the four-letter words, on account of the monks in the print shop.
... The Sufi man I told you of, Reza Arasteh, has a piece ["The Art of Rebirth"] in MPOND II. It will give you an idea. The longer version of that piece and another article like it might make a pamphlet for you. I told him to send you his book, but I guess it's too long for you and would require too much editing.
The monastery [Christ of the Desert] I went to in New Mexico is a very good spot, in the Chama Canyon. Lots of Indian stuff around. I like Santa Fe, too.
Thanks for putting me up at City Lights. Felt a bit like the old days. I enjoyed looking out in the morning on a street like Havana, full of pretty little Chinese kids going to school. It was good meeting you. Bellarmine College here is probably going to contact you about a reading some time later this year.
Oberoi Grand, Calcutta, India October 18, 1968
I am suggesting to a friend of mine, a Tibetan Lama, that he might send you a manuscript he is preparing [Born in Tibet]. It is of great interest, a contemporary document in the authentic Tibetan tradition--& first rate. The English may need a little improvement but the material is as impressive as the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The author's name is [Chögyam] Trungpa Rimpoche. I am giving him City Lights' address & he will contact you some time.
I am over here on an extended trip & hope to keep extending it ...
P.S. You can always reach me through Gethsemani--mark for forwarding.
To Julien Green
Born in Paris of American parents, Julien Green (1900- ) has lived in France for most of his life. His literary career spans more than sixty years, during which he has published prize-winning novels, plays, and essays. His autobiographical writings include more than a dozen journals.
Julien Green wrote to Thomas Merton in 1962, thanking him for Les chemins de la joie, the French edition of Thoughts in Solitude: "You make the reader feel closer to God and this reader is in constant need of just such a feeling." Merton had asked for Green's last novel, and Green replied that he couldn't imagine a Trappist reading one of his novels, "And yet, why not?" He had liked every word of The Seven Storey Mountain though he felt Merton "could have said more." In September 1966, Green wrote again to Merton after reading Raids on the Unspeakable, which contained an essay on Green's novel Chaque homme dans sa nuit (1961). Admitting that Merton's remarks "throw a light on the strange world" of his characters, Green criticized Merton for misreading the novel's hero, who forgives his murderer and so is "saved."
September 22, 1966
I am grateful for your letter of September 16th in which you speak of my notes on your book. I am glad you feel that I have seen something of the "hidden meaning"--the meaning that is hard to convey in words. It is awesome and you have a peculiar gift for conveying it. You very kindly point out my mistake--a grievous one certainly--of putting one of your best characters in hell when you took such pains to save him! I am confused and sorry: not sorry that he was after all saved, but sorry that I overlooked the indications of it. As a matter of fact, I must admit that the ending of the book had me so shaken that I was reading through rather carelessly, and not taking in all the details. I should of course have gone over that part again later, but I wrongly assumed I had seen everything. In any case, you must admit that he was saved by the skin of his teeth! And the fact of his being so, though it calls for a revision of the notes, does not essentially alter the thesis.
Of course you realize that I think this Augustinian viewpoint of sin is not only impressive, but important to remember at this moment when there is in Christian circles a sort of casual naturalism and naïve optimism accepted rather generally. I don't say that I have as much of a taste for Calvin as you do, but there are moments when I like to have him stand my hair on end for a change! And once again this question of seriousness remains important. And it must of necessity, I think, be also ambiguous.
May I then ask you two things? First, can you tell me which of yournovels I should read in order to get the best view of this aspect of your work? And second, what about your Journal? I have enjoyed that so much in the past and as far as I remember I have not seen any more of it for several years. As far as I can tell, I don't think I followed you much beyond 1950 or 1952. Has there been more?
I shall ask the publisher to send you a book [Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander]--a quasi-Journal--in which I mention your Journal. In it I also speak of my own Protestant likings: especially Karl Barth.
Again, I am sorry for my mistake and will correct it if there is any question of reprinting those notes.
To Henry Miller
Born in New York City, Henry Miller (1891-1980) lived in France during the thirties before taking up residence in California in 1942. Controversy engendered by Miller's explicit treatment of sexual matter in Tropic of Cancer (1934), Black Spring (1936), and Tropic of Capricorn (1939) brought Miller notoriety. Miller's blend of autobiography and fiction is also evident in a later trilogy, The Rosy Crucifixion, which included Sexus (1949), Plexus (1953), and Nexus (1960). Over the course of almost five decades, Miller wrote and published more than fifty books, including The Colossus of Maroussi; or, The Spirit of Greece (1941), The Books in My Life (1952), To Paint Is To Love Again (1960), and On Turning Eighty (1972). Miller published several volumes of letters, including his correspondence with Anaïs Nin, J. R. Child, and W. A. Gordon. Though the worlds in which they lived differed in many ways, Miller and Merton discovered that they had much in common, including a deep respect for each other's work. Their correspondence began when, in April 1962, Henry Miller wrote to tell "Father Louis" that he was "much moved" by the Original Child Bomb and "stimulated" by The Wisdom of the Desert.
July 9, 1962
It was good to hear from you. I have often thought of writing to you, and usually that is the first thing that comes into my mind when I am reading something of yours, like the earlier part of Big Sur [and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch] for example, or parts of the Colossus of Maroussi (which I think is a tremendous and important book). I have always refrained because it is foolish for me to write letters anyway, and then I know you have little time. I am sure you must get much the same kind of mail that I do, including the poets who send you their collected works in weekly installments, and the anonymous painter who, today, sent me a large abstraction. This is all fine, but where does one get the time to collect his thoughts and come up with some kind of an intelligent word, in the presence of so many manifestations? I detest writing letters about which I do not think, at least when thought is called for. It isperhaps fortunate that there are some letters one can write without thinking : business letters. They come out like sweat.
One of the things I have wanted to discuss with you is our common admiration for [Jean] Giono. Something must be done to get a good selection of his stuff published in English--unless perhaps such a thing already exists, without my knowing of it. Recently I managed to get hold of some of his shorter prose pieces about Provence, and they are remarkable. His view of things is the sane one, the one that must be preserved as a basis for some kind of vestigial humanism, if humanism is to remain possible. I have not read his historical novels, and there are lots of his novels about Provence that I have never come across: as I say, I have read mostly essays. I think New Directions ought to do something with him.
I expect to find a lot of the same in the [Joseph] Delteil book which arrived the other day. I have not got very far into it yet, but I think something ought to be done with it in this country, nor is there much difficulty in that. Does Delteil read English? He might like the banned book I have just written (you are not the only one, you see!) about peace [Peace in the Post-Christian Era]. My book is not satisfactory however, because I was fool enough to try to write one that the censors would approve, and this led to compromise and stupidity. And in the end they did not approve anyway. Does he, do you, know of Fr. Herve Chaigne, the Franciscan who is a Gandhian and involved in the non-violent movement in France?
Returning to Giono: I am thinking a lot of Provence because I am doing some work on the early monastic literature surrounding the Provençal monasteries of the 5th century, particularly Lerins. It was a great movement. That and Cassiodorus too, in Italy. One thing I envy you is your freedom to get around to such places.
I have not seen your latest books, but I just asked J. Laughlin to send me a couple. Have you seen New Seeds of Contemplation? He probably sent you that. I am sending along the banned book with a couple of other items that we put out here with a mimeograph machine, run by a monk with an eyeshade who lives in a room full of birds.
This much for now. Do keep in touch with me, especially about Giono, and I will write some more about Delteil later. And keep speaking out. You are in my prayers.
P.S. I would be interested in 2 Brocard Sewell's reviews. Aylesford is an interesting place!
Miller sent Merton's letter to Joseph Delteil with a note asking his wife, Caroline, to read it to her husband.
August 7, 1962
First of all I agree that it will be hard to translate Delteil, or to find a good translator. I am mightily tempted to try it myself, but I just cannotafford the time. I would enjoy the challenge of doing it, and I can think of what a living and riotous book it would make: a life of St. Francis as there never yet was in English. But I have to resist the temptation to go overboard on translations these days, as I have to save energy for some strong statements that may be needed here and there, and I am supposed to be getting busy on another book. As for translations, I am translating bits of César Vallejo, who is to me a most significant and meaningful voice, and moves me most deeply, probably because of his Indian resonances. He is the greatest of all the great South American poets we have had in this century, I think. There is another Central American, who has been out of his head for years but has written some fantastic poems: Alfonso Cortés. I am translating some of his stuff too. Beyond that I cannot go except into the Latin that I have to translate from time to time. More or less have to.
The Delteil book is frankly remarkable. It has an unusual zest and life. He works in big energetic poetic blocs of symbol. Each chapter is a carved-out symbol that runs and lives by itself and keeps affecting all the rest of the book with its own life. It is like the statues of the prophets by Aleijadinho, the Brazilian sculptor in Minas Gerais: only much more living, on the page.
Of course the question comes up, what will the average Catholic think about it? They will think that St. Francis belongs to them, and in thinking that they are perhaps so far wrong that they are out in the middle of outer space. But whenever the book comes out whoever brings it out will have to argue with those people, just as anyone who brings out a movie with some art to it will also have to argue with them.
I will write to Delteil, and I am glad you sent him the messages in the other letter.
Now to other things for a moment: I am in the middle of The Wisdom of the Heart and it is you at your best. There is very fine material everywhere, one insight on top of another. The opening piece starting from Lawrence is full of arresting thought, most important for a writer to read. When you write as you do in the thing on Benno you are at your very best, this is marvelous. As I say I am going along with you all the way with The Wisdom of the Heart. They sent me also the Colossus which I already had but had lent to someone, and lent books never come back. And The Time of the Assassins, which is going to mean much.
The English Carmelites sent me their review about those two late-nineteenth-century people, but I thought all they had to say was very good indeed. How would it be if I sent them a poem? What do you think?
Scotland drove me nuts when I was there in childhood, but I have all kinds of dreams about getting on one of those outlying islands. Maybe this is the worst delusion. I wonder what you will think of it. The people as I remember them were absurd, and especially the place used to be full of Englishmen who wouldn't call a brook anything but a burn, and who stuffed their stupid faces with scones at all hours of the day and nightwhile a character walked up and down playing the bagpipes to them. They deserved it.
I bet you are totally right about Ireland. The combination of faith and poverty has now become one of the things that cries out to heaven for vengeance, loud enough for the vengeance to be quite near.
In the whole question of religion today: all I can say is I wish I could really see what is there to see. Nobody can see the full dimension of the problem, which is more than a problem, it is one of those things you read about in the Apocalypse. There are no problems in the Apocalypse, just monsters. This one is a monster.
The religion of religious people tends at times to poke out a monster head just when you are beginning to calm down and get reassured. The religion of half-religious people doesn't tend: it bristles with heads. The horns, the horns with eyes on the end of them, the teeth, the teeth with eyes in them, the eyes as sharp as horns, the dull eyes, the ears that now listen to all the stars and decode their message into something about business upswing.
This is the greatest orgy of idolatry the world has ever known, and it is not generally thought by believers that idolatry is the greatest and fundamental sin. It is absolutely not thought, it is not credited, it cannot be accepted, and if you go around and speak of idolatry they will fall down and laugh and the heads of the monsters will roll and wag like the biggest carnival you ever saw. But precisely the greatest and most absurd difficulty of our time is keeping disentangled from the idols, because you cannot touch anything that isn't defiled with it: anything you buy, anything you sell, anything you give even. And of course the significance of it is absolutely lost. Anyone who sells out to even a small, inoffensive, bargaincheap idol has alienated himself and put himself into the statue and has to act like it, which is he has to be dead.
The religion of non-religious people tends to be clear of religious idols and is in many ways much less pseudo. But on the other hand, they often have no defense against the totalitarian kind, which end up being bigger and worse.
I frankly don't have an answer. As a priest I ought, of course, to be able to give Christ's answer. But unfortunately ... it is no longer a matter of answers. It is a time perhaps of great spiritual silence.
I must really read Emerson, I never have. Except little bits that I have liked a lot. Thoreau of course I admire tremendously. He is one of the only reasons why I felt justified in becoming an American citizen. He and Emily Dickinson, and some of my friends, and people like yourself. It is to me a great thing that you say I am like the transcendentalists. I will try to be worthy of that. This is not just something we can elect to try as a boyscout project: it is a serious duty for all of us, and woe to us if we do not take it for what it is.
The time is short, and all the idols are moving. They are so full of people that they are becoming at last apparently animated and when theyget fully into action the result will be awful. It will be like the clashing of all the planets. Strange that the individual is the only power that is left. And though his power is zero, zero has great power when one understands it and knows where to place it.
P. S. J. [Laughlin] and everyone call me Tom, and that is the simplest.
August 11, 1962
Reading your magnificent essay on Raimu-whom I have not seen however for twenty years & more. I come upon this sentence--p. 52. "The crimes they (American movie heroes) commit in their sleep outdo the atrocities perpetrated by the most tyrannical despots." That sentence will prove perhaps to be the key to the twentieth century. But does one need a key when all the doors are blown off the hinges?
[Spring 1963]
I was very happy with your two postcards about the [Thomas Merton] Reader & I hope you have continued to like it. I thought you might like to see the poems of Robert Lax (who is now in Greece by the way)--&: I am also enclosing some translations of things I like & a poem of my own. All this is just a way of saying that I continue to think of you & to remain in deep agreement with you. By the way I tried to interest Harcourt Brace in Delteil but I don't know if anything came of it.
May 12, 1963
Thanks for all your cards. I have been thinking of you a lot since I have been reading A[lfred] Perlès's book about you [My Friend, Henry Miller: An Intimate Biography]. It all sounds so familiar: it is the kind of life in many ways that I was always intending to lead and did lead, to some extent. But one thing strikes me: it was possible to do these things, with that much joy and that much freedom, in the twenties and thirties. Since the war, unless I am mistaken, things have changed a lot, and a sick darkness has come over it. The people who remember the other times are still more or less intact. The others, pretty sick. Though I must say that now a whole new generation is coming up that gives me a little hope: the non-violent kids, for instance, in the South.
Yes, I am still at the monastery. There have been all sorts of legends about my being elsewhere, some of them founded on a firm basis of fact: that I did make honest attempts to get permission to live as a hermit in Mexico. But the whole thing was squashed by administrative and political maneuvers which I could not block. However, as to my wanting purely and simply to go back to New York, for example, I have never been touched by this insanity even for a moment. I do have times when I wish I could see some of Europe again, and I may do so, since after all, permissions to travel and pretexts for doing so are not absolutely excludedfrom our life. But normally I am pretty well fixed here, and have no special complaints. I am a monk, and therefore I like the monastic life. If in particular instances it is bound to have a few things lacking, that is only one of the drawbacks of any life. It seems to me that I am here for a reason, just as you are where you are for a reason. And the reason seems to be pretty much the same in both cases. We are here to live, and to "be," and on occasion to help others with the recharging of batteries. I attempt in my own way to keep the monks from getting buried in their own brand of ideological manure, and to maintain at least occasional contacts with the fresh air of reality. On the other hand the manure itself is much less obnoxious and much more productive than what is forked about indiscriminately on the outside. At least it is not lethal.
It is a pity I have not read your novels. I think I would enjoy them now, whereas before I entered I was too ambivalent and too doubtful of myself. Now I know exactly where I stand, and I really think I would get a lot out of the Tropics [Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn]. So I will get at them one of these days. (Don't send. There is a barrier of censorship.)
I have been thinking of many things which some day I will probably want to discuss with you. Since I do not have the leisure right now, the time has not yet come.
I like the modern Greek poets very much, at least the ones I have seen in the New Directions anthology of modern Greek stuff. I regret that I never got to Greece, and envy Lax who is batting around in the islands there now. I can understand that his poems did not click: I suppose you have to know what is in all the blank spaces.
Don't forget that if you happen this way, you are invited to stay a day or two at the monastery.
June 22, 1964
I cannot let your hummingbird [Stand Still like the Hummingbird] get away without a resounding shout of approval. Perhaps J. Laughlin already told you how much I liked it from the first. I have been getting into it again and like it more and more. Naturally. There is no need even to say it. All that you say seems to me as obvious as if I had said it myself and you have said it better than I ever could. It needs to be said over and over again.
I resound to everything you say, Europe, Zen, Thoreau, and your real basic Christian spirit which I wish a few Christians shared!
There is no question that we have to be to a great extent voices crying in the desert. My best books are the ones nobody reads. (Nobody is buying the Reader and few are buying the poems.)
Keep giving us so many good things. Don't forget this place if you are around this part of the country, though why you should be anywhere in this area God alone can tell.
I met [D. T.] Suzuki the Zen man recently, and we agreed warmly about everything. He is another one. God bless [Kenneth] Patchen too. And thanks to you I am going to dig up everything I can find of J. S. Powys.
P.S. Enclosed, a response to a high school girls' magazine. I think, from the answer I got, that it really meant something to one of them.
Merton sent Miller a photo of himself and Miguel Grinberg. Miller thought Grinberg looked "a bit like an ex-pug, vagabond, poet combined" and was amazed by Merton's resemblance to himself and to Jean Genet: "You too have a look of an ex-convict, of one who has been through hell and I think bear the traces of it" (July 4, 1964).
August 16, 1964
I am glad you liked the photos [of Merton and Miguel Grinberg]. By now you must have seen Grinberg himself in person. He is a promising young guy and the thing I like best about him is that he is free of the bitterness and frustration and self-pity that is eating up so many of the good young poets. He has really decided that things are good and that he is going to try to make them better. His is the kind that will not blow the world up. Maybe some of his elders will get to it before he has a chance. But if his gang make it, perhaps there is hope.
Yes, I have often thought of the resemblance between our faces. I had not associated Genet with it, not knowing what he looks like. I suppose the person I most resemble, usually, is Picasso. That's what everybody says. Still I think it is a distinction to look like Picasso, Henry Miller, and Genet all at once. Pretty comprehensive. It seems to imply some kind of responsibility.
As to the ex-con slant: I am very glad you mention it. It seems to me that the only justification for a man's existence in this present world is for him to either be a convict, or a victim of plague, or a leper, or at least to look like one of these things. In a world of furnaces and DP's it would be hideously immoral for someone, especially a priest, to be well, totally sane, perfectly content with everything, knowing which end is always up and keeping it that way too, knowing who thinks right all the time and staying with him only and beating the others over the head etc. etc. Yes, I have got some good hellburns all over me. We all exist. Thank God.
The boys at ND have not sent me your new book [Miller on Writing] yet. I will get after them. They sent a couple of good books of poetry recently. I am doing a book of selections from Gandhi [Gandhi on Non-Violence ] which I think you will like. Long introduction.
I know how it is about finding time to write, and about being deluged with letters. People going down for the third time think a letter will keep them afloat. But often what they are going down in is itself an illusion,and the letter itself will be to them an illusion. Sometimes I answer sometimes I can't and I mean not to worry about it. There is a destiny involved there too. But there is no question that we spent our lives battling with mountains of crap, and this is no mean exercise. I do not know if it helps one to improve his faculties. Perhaps that does not matter either. We are all in the plague. Have you read Camus's book on that? I just finished it and it is very true and sobering. The plague is unquestionable, irrefutable. It need not silence a stoical joy. What is real is the emptiness which is always on the side of Being, not of non-being. I will get Powys's autobiography and perhaps a novel or two from one of the college libraries around here.
Very best wishes always. By all means call me by my name which is
TOM
To Walker Percy
Walker Percy (1916-1990) studied medicine at Columbia University and interned at Bellevue Hospital in New York before giving up the practice of medicine to write full-time. Percy's first novel, The Moviegoer (1961), earned him the National Book Award. In subsequent novels, such as Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time near the End of the World (1971), Lancelot (1977), The Second Coming (1980), and The Thanatos Syndrome (1987), Percy continued to explore, through his characters, the moral dilemmas facing individuals in the modern world. Merton liked The Moviegoer, and wrote to tell Percy so. That led to an initial exchange in 1964. In July 1967 Walker Percy, Will Campbell, and James Holloway visited Merton. Campbell and Holloway were collaborating on the publication of Kattalagete; Percy was a member of the advisory board. The visit briefly revived the correspondence between Merton and Percy.
[January 1964]
There is no easy way to thank you for your book. Not only are the good words about books all used up and ruined, but the honesty of The Moviegoer makes one more sensitive than usual about the usual nonsense. With reticence and malaise, then, I think your book is right on the target.
For a while I was going around saying it was too bad guys like Hemingway were dead, as if I really thought it.
You are right all the time, not just sometimes. You are right all the time. You know just when to change and look at something else. Never too much of anyone. Just enough of Sharon. The reason the book is true is that you always stop at the point where more talk would have been false, untrue, confusing, irrelevant. It is not that what you say is true. It is neither true nor false, it points in the right direction, where there issomething that has not been said and you know enough not to try to say it.
Hence you are one of the most hopeful existentialists I know of. I suppose it was inevitable that an American existentialist should have a merry kind of nausea after all, and no one reproaches you for this or anything else. It is truer than the viscous kind.
I think you started with the idea that Bolling would be a dope but he refused to be, and that is one of the best things about the book. Nice creative ambiguities in which the author and the character dialogue silently and wrestle for a kind of autonomy.
As for Southern aunts, if they are like that you can keep them. (But I praise the Southern aunt's last speech too. Insufferable, the last gasp.)
All this says nothing about how I was stirred up by the book. It should be read by the monks for a first lesson in humility. But I guess they would be bowled over by Sharon, so I better not hand it around to the novices.
I am glad Fr. Charles [Jack English, a Trappist monk from Holy Spirit Monastery in Conyers, Georgia] came by here and got sick and told you to send the book.
Now send me all your other books or things you write, please. Do you want anything of mine? I do artworks very abstract, maybe you would like one. Let me know if you like abstract brush and ink calligraphies.
Did this book get published in France yet? If not tell me and I will get the guys at Le Seuil busy on it at once.
I will send you my new book of poems [Emblems of a Season of Fury].
March 31, 1964
From Le Seuil comes this letter saying they had seen the book in 1961, Knopf must have sent it, and they liked it but. However, they say that you have a strong personality (I wonder if that is news to you) and that they want to see your next book. I am sorry they said you were a strong personality, as that might make you clam up for more years than you otherwise might. But in French it obviously means something better than it does with us. By the way I like the French place names around there, especially Chef Menteur. The dog.
P.S. I am glad about the calligraphy getting so near to Kafka.
Bold, oversized, cut-out letters spelled out "THE MONKS. MODERN MOVING ... WITH OLD-FASHIONED CARE" alongside the typed text of the following note.
July 20, 1967
It is good news to hear you can perhaps use Bantu philosophy in your new book, which sounds like a very good idea by the way. I hopeyou will keep at it, because that is something I will enjoy reading. The book I referred to is in French (from Dutch) by Pere Placide Tempels, CSSR, La philosophie bantoue, Presence Africaine (publisher). It is a rather old book and you may have to hunt through libraries for it. Also there is another, less good, but more varied (with Voodoo etc.) by Jahainz Jahn, called Muntu. Grove Press did that one, so it is more available.
I agree with you about the ecumenical sparks that did not spark. All movements fill me either with suspicion or lassitude. But I enjoy talking to people (except about movements). I think the best thing is to belong to a universal anti-movement underground.
The failure to deal with the Negroes properly and justly and humanly seems to be by now conclusive, irreversible, and your novel is acting itself out. Just keep a diary, maybe ...
August 24, 1967
You are much in my thoughts as I continue my explorations of Bantu ideas. I have on interlibrary loan an essential book: Bantu Prophets in South Africa by Bengt Sundkler, Oxford Press, 1961. The thing is not to distill "Bantu philosophy" out into pure speculative projects as we Westerners like to do. This particular book deals with the syncretism of Zulu religion and a kind of Evangelical Christianity in South Africa: prophetic cults (hundreds of them), nativistic and healing sects. Pursuit of health is a central theme. Joining you in your forecast I would say that in our coming Bantu society (is that accurate though, because our Negroes came from Dahomey, maybe that's a different bunch?) there will be considerable interest in medical diagnosis, psychosomatic illness, questions of potency, interesting treatments, resistance against nefarious influence of dead ancestors ("Uncle Toms" perhaps). Possible efficacy of intense vomiting cures to get rid of internal snakes and animals. Treatment by pummeling with holy sticks (the Zulu Zionists carry white sticks with which to resist evil influences. The white sticks may be blotched with red if the believer has slipped into unchastity or beer drinking. When this is detected, the sinner is immersed in the river or beaten or both). Testimonials of Father delivered from liquor habit and secret societies etc. At the same time, in S. Africa, there is a taboo on European medicine in some sects--together with a taboo on native magic also. What's left? Repeated baptisms and vomitings. You could probably distinguish a high Church sort of set with very decorous unctions of the infirm, and a low Church set with more rollings, beatings, vomiting etc. There might be heated controversies and even religious and ideological conflict over crucial points concerning the dead: where they are, what they are doing, how they should be treated, fed, appeased, raised, not raised, kept quiet, etc. What about nefarious influence of Catholic and Lutheran ancestors? There is by the way an African Castor Oil Dead Church in which new life is acquired by laxatives. Interesting possibility of description of a mass revivalmeeting of a Church of this type. Sundkler remarks: "The prophet with his cross and his enema syringe around his neck is a common sight on the Rand and in the Reserve."
There could of course be visits from fashionable Bantu prophets sent from Africa, one called T. S. Eliot who comes preaching toilet Zen.
If you get to a university library you might look into the files of some of the better anthropology magazines. Man, the journal of the Royal Anthropological Society, has interesting things in it sometimes on African religion and philosophy. One must incidentally remember that none of this is static. Always in motion. And an individual who at one time is filled with intense prophetic spirit may a year or two later be quite peaceful and declare himself "no longer troubled with religion."
I am sending one of the latest mimeographs ["The Long Hot Summer of Sixty-Seven"], a mere blowing off of steam. What I am more interested in: the poetry I am writing [Merton was working on The Geography of Lograire], which is not typed so far, including a Zulu piece which I may send one of these days.
To Jonathan Williams
Born in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1929, Jonathan Williams was educated at Princeton and studied painting at the Phillips Memorial Gallery and photography at Black Mountain College. Williams has distinguished himself as a poet and essayist and, since 1951, as publisher of The Jargon Society Books. Among Williams's best-known books of poetry are Blues & Roots Rue & Bluets: A Garland for the Southern Appalachians (2nd rev., 1985), An Ear in Bartram's Tree: Selected Poems, 1957-1967, Elite-Elate Poems 1971-1975, and Eight Days in Eire: or, Nothing So Urgent as Maana (1990). He has also written introductions and texts for collections of photography. Jonathan Williams wrote that James Laughlin suggested he visit Merton while he was at the University of Kentucky "colporteuring" his "latest Orphic Snake-Oil Show for the proposed benefit of various snake-eyed undergraduates." Williams went to Gethsemani with Guy Davenport and Ralph Eugene Meatyard, a trio that Merton described as the "three kings from Lexington."
November 11, 1966
Good to get your letter. Bring the snake oil over this way. Afternoons are the best time, that is you can come and have dinner at the guesthouse (11:30) and I can be with you after that. Lexington is about an hour and a half from here. Bring Guy Davenport and if you like beer bring beer (I don't have any to offer you). If it is nice we can sit around in the woods somewhere ... I will be very glad to have the [Ronald] Johnson book [A Line of Poetry, A Row of Trees] and maybe I could order a copy ofthe [Louis] Zukofsky you did and get someone to pay for it here. Got to support good cause ...
I don't see much of what goes on I don't know what happens I don't hear what they say I don't get into any of their fights but I wish I saw more good poetry. Never never see Jargon. I see you speak of Stevie Smith: do you know her? I like her stuff immensely. You know maybe some time I could do a small volume of translations of some French or Spanish poet or Spanish American for your press. Let's think of that ... I look forward to seeing you one of those afternoons: or in the evening if you can't make it afternoon though I am supposed to get to bed around seven or eight as the local sports club is up early in the basketball court. Like two a.m.
November 29, 1966
Guy Davenport's long poem [Flowers & Leaves] is really beautiful, and holds up perfectly all the time, advancing in the stately way a long poem should and always very alive. I am enjoying it very much and the book is beautifully done. Thank you very much indeed for it.
Have just written a little piece on Zukofsky ["Paradise Bugged," which was also published under the title "Zukofsky: The Paradise Ear"] for a Catlick literary mag [Critic]. Won't do the Catlicks any harm to hear of some good poetry.
Are you in snow now? We are. Hills very gaunt and fine.
May 4, 1967
I am terribly sorry for the delay in writing. Doctors again, operation again, nonsense again, tests, inspections, inquisitions, visits of publishers, scrutinies of lawyers, quarrels of abbots, plagues of insects, bloody rain, dragons in the woods behind the house, well diggers pounding the earth, varmints scampering, St. Elmo's fire in abundance, northern lights in the bedroom, incidence of leprosy in the mind only but leprosy. Poems of leprosy have followed the St. Elmo's fire and the unquietness of the age. For all these reasons I have not thanked you for Ronald Johnson's book ...
I now thank you for it, it is a beautiful book, good to have, good to converse with, good for meditation, good to sing, a fine book.
Now for Dahlberg, of course I will write for Dahlberg [Festschrift] and in fact here it is ["Ceremony for Edward Dahlberg"]. It is a second draft. I can't sit here drafting more drafts, I guess you can read this one all right.
I am glad to know where you are, where you have settled, come down and alighted. Keep in touch, tell me things that happen. I envy your collection of ancient postcards. You will see, I will roust out of some hole some even more fantastic ancient postcards of monasteries. You willsee. I will send you almost invisible prints of the monks of Italian chiostri fermenting the juice of the juniper.
May 19, 1967
... I haven't been anchoritic enough these last weeks, and it culminated in a big flap in Louisville when an old friend of mine [Dan Walsh] was ordained priest at 60 in a sudden charismatic seizure of bishops. I went in and got stoned on champagne, which must have surprised the cult public. I am now hoping to get back into a little quiet, and meditation, and poetry. But meanwhile I have been held up in writing the current curriculum [vitae]. I am bad at writing these things, "born on a chimney top in Strasbourg in 1999" etc.) but you can select what you want from this one, there is plenty of choice.
Got a very good letter from Ron Johnson but so far no [The Book of ] Green Man. I will agitate for it in the office where the mail gets lost. But I never had it and this is what I want most to have since seeing part of it. I will write him when I have the book in hand and have read some more.
I hope you are having more luck with the Festschrift contributions. I suppose it is understandable though that people rebel at making statements that might sound like blurbs. There are too many statements about everything, and I am lucky to be out of the blizzard thereof, so I can talk without embarrassment about liking, say, Dahlberg.
I just finished a piece ["The Shoshoneans"] on Ed Dorn's Indian book [The Shoshoneans: The People of the Basin Plateau], thought you might like it ...
Curriculum vitae Merton
May 1967
Born 1915 in Southern France a few miles from Catalonia so that I imagine myself by birth Catalan and am accepted as such in Barcelona where I have never been. Exiled therefore from Catalonia I came to New York, then went to Bermuda, then back to France, then to school at Montauban, then to school at Oakham in England, to Clare College Cambridge where my scholarship was taken away after a year of riotous living, to Columbia University New York where I earned two degrees of dullness and wrote a Master's thesis on Blake. Taught English among Franciscan football players at St. Bonaventure University, and then became a Trappist monk at Gethsemani Ky. in 1941. First published book of poems 1944. Autobiography 1948 created a general hallucination followed by too many pious books. Back to poetry in the fifties and sixties. Gradual backing away from the monastic institution until I now live alone in the woods not claiming to be anything, except of course a Catalan. But a Catalan in exile who would not return to Barcelona under any circumstances, never having been there. Recently published Raids on the Unspeakable,Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, Mystics and Zen Masters, have translated work of poets like Vallejo, Alberti, Hernández, Nicanor Parra etc. Proud of facial resemblance to Picasso and/or Jean Genet or alternately Henry Miller (though not so much Miller).
June 9, 1967
You know, Ron Johnson's book (I mean now the Green Man) never arrived. I tried to inquire about it, but got nowhere. I wonder what has happened to it. Also a poem he said he was sending did not get here either. The mail here of course is very strange, and everything goes through the hands of people who if well meaning are often inefficient or mixed up, or just don't pass everything on. I have got at some of these people and am sure they would have passed the things on if they were around here now. Hence one thinks of the General Postal Service which is hardly better in many respects than the monastic ...
Guy Davenport speaks of a new magazine in Lexington: Kentucky Review. He and Gene [Meatyard] were over again a few weeks ago and we had a time with much photography around an old house and a dead pine tree.
I have finished a long poem series ["Edifying Cables"] and sent it off to J. [Laughlin]. Am enjoying June, fighting allergy, working, reflecting on how much Kafka's Castle has to say about the Church. Life is normal.
October 31, 1967
I'm off to a start. Here is a concrete poem I am working on. Right away I am up against the new world of questions: I mean obviously there is a certain amount of palaver with the editors before such a thing moves on into print. Like in this one, I need my two O's, I need to dig up the sort of typeface the two O's aren't yet in, and all like that. Maybe I need a book of typefaces at my side every moment, who knows? But surely every concrete poet doesn't have this. Well, anyway.
Then where can I get a copy of that magnificent book of concrete poems you had there? I'd gladly review it even on my hands and knees ...
Merton sent Williams a copy of the following concrete poem, signed and dated:
(Concrete racegram of Pluto king of hell as he meets white foe in Gaol while one or both is/are set free into the fair.)
ALL WELL END
December 13, 1967
Many, many thanks for the Concrete Poets [an anthology]. Magnificent. Great to have and soak in. I see what you mean about my square efforts. True does not connect at all. I look at these Brazilians. Wow.
Guess what. I am suddenly going into editing, temporarily. I want to put out four offset collections of poetry-prose from all good people. Just four collections. One brief magazine [Monks Pond] flash in the air and out, but four good collections. We have here our own offset press and I'd be crazy not to do this, we might as well put out something besides cheese ads for heavens sakes. Thus I want material for four good collections and how thick they'll be no one can say: no money involved one way or other give away the collections.
Can you please send me something of yours, poem, prose, published before or not no matter though preferably new, but good, saying what you most want to say. And can you ask Ron [Johnson] to send something, and maybe Dahlberg and so on. Only problem here is I forgot it has to be something the monks won't be shocked at. If you can think of someoneelse right around I wouldn't know, or something out of the past Mina Loy, or like that, get it sent. Translations too. Anything.
[Robert] Lax back in U.S. at Olean NY.
Jonathan Williams dispatched copies of Merton's letter of December 13 to colleagues, adding a note of his own encouraging contributions to Merton's new magazine.
April 12, 1968
I think I will use picture of you as harvest spirit with beer and thyrsus (Gene Meatyard) in next issue. Lots of good things coming in, very happy to have [Russell] Edson and Emmett Williams in next issue. And many others. Send more of your own and urge others to send stuff too. Happy Easter.
To William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) lived all his life in Rutherford, New Jersey, combining a pediatric practice with work as a writer. Williams wrote novels, essays, and plays but is best known for his poetry, especially Paterson 1948-1956, a poem originally published in five volumes and regarded as a distinctively American work. Merton began his brief exchange with Dr. Williams with a note expressing pleasure in his essay on Daniel Boone, published in In the American Grain in 1925. In reply, Williams suggested that Merton read Allen Ginsberg's poetry, especially Kaddish and Other Poems 1958-1960, published by City Lights in 1961.
April 6, 1961
J. Laughlin--your publisher and mine--tells me you have been quite sick, a fact which I am sorry to hear. I hope you will be getting better soon & will be writing some more. From the thirties on I have been reading your poetry with great pleasure, and recently I opened up [In the] American Grain & came upon your fine essay on Daniel Boone. It moved me very much. I have a little house in the woods near the Abbey & all my neighbors are Boones & I guess I myself have become a Boone in my own way. What you said about D. Boone is profoundly meaningful, in a time when I get so sick of our infidelity to the original American grace that I no longer know what to do. Anyway Daniel Boone had it & I think you have kept it.
God bless you, & get well soon. May all things prosper with you.
July 11, 1961
It has taken me a long time to get to be able to follow your advice and read Kaddish [and Other Poems], because nobody sent me one. Butfinally Laughlin is out in SF and the City Lights Books sent me a copy. I agree with you about it. I think it is great and living poetry and certainly religious in its concern. In fact, who are more concerned with ultimates than the beats? Why do you think that just because I am a monk I should be likely to shrink from beats? Who am I to shrink from anyone, I am a monk, therefore by definition, as I understand it, the chief friend of beats and one who has no business reproving them. And why should I? Thank you for telling me about Kaddish. And I also liked very much the poem on Van Gogh's ear ["Death to Van Gogh's Ear!"]. I think this is one of the few people around who is saying anything. The others are in a bad way. I hope I can some time send you a long poem I think you may like. It ["Hagia Sophia"] is being printed by a friend of mine down the road here in Lexington.
God bless you. I liked two poems of yours that were in Harper's. I wish you all good things.
To Louis Zukofsky
Louis Zukofsky's poetry, like "all really valid poetry," is "a kind of recovery of paradise," Merton wrote in a review of All: The Collected Short Poems, 1956- 1964. Zukofsky's poems "spring from a ground of immense silence and love" (see "Louis Zukofsky--The Paradise Ear" in The Literary Essays of Thomas Merton). Touched by Merton's understanding of his work, Zukofsky wrote to thank Merton for the review and Merton responded with praise for Zukofsky's "A's." In the correspondence that ensued, it is obvious that the two took delight in each other as well as each other's work, offering helpful criticism of works in progress and words of advice on treatments for bursitis and other ills.
Louis Zukofsky (1904-1978) was born in New York City, earned an M.A. at Columbia University, and taught English at several colleges and universities, including the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, from which he retired in 1966. He began to publish poetry and literary criticism in the thirties and gained the admiration of poets like Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams long before his work became more widely read in the sixties. Zukofsky's best-known work is "A," a long poem which he began in the twenties and completed in the seventies. A volume of all the "A's," containing previously published collections, appeared in 1978. Zukofsky's many other published writings include All: The Collected Short Poems, 1923-1964 and Bottom: On Shakespeare, a two-volume work of criticism that includes a musical setting for Shakespeare's Pericles by Zukofsky's wife, Celia.
March 11, 1967
Many thanks for your letter of nine days ago. The operation seems to have helped and has perhaps got rid of everything in that elbow (elbow included maybe). I agree with you about not wanting operations. Theanesthetic is a terrible thing. Not bad this time though. I fought it off with everything--though can't take aspirin. Cortisone shots are very helpful. I made good use of hot-water bottles too. I need the arm to be all right so I can do a little work, keep my place swept, get in a little wood and so on. I live in a house in the woods near the monastery.
And now to your books [Bottom: On Shakespeare; All: The Collected Short Poems, 1923-1958; "A" 1-12; "A" 9; and A Test of Poetry]. What a happening. Really. Especially to have the superb volumes of Bottom: On Shakespeare--it's like getting The Anatomy of Melancholy from [Robert] Burton himself: a book into which everything has gone. It will be something to think about for years. I look at it with wonder as I move around my front room. Never having read the early "A's" it is they that I have begun on, and they are full of everything that is best. To begin with, this is the right way to read "A's" I think, not bit by bit here and there in magazines. One really gets into them.
"A" 7 is a most marvelous Easter fugue. You are in fact sacred music but as it should be, not just Church music. With the kind of secularity that is in Bach. And the compassion. The great Lenten compassion and sense of rising from the dead that must happen, that happens, that art is all about. The victory over death. This is the real witness to the world and you are the one who is saying it most clearly: which is probably one reason why as yet too few have heard it. I really get my breath knocked out of me completely by some of those "A's." The way in "A" the perspectives fuse in and out of each other and the dead and the alive interchange and come into focus, and the echoes of the psalms in scorn of idols, the dead wood, the dead and living horses, oh my. Such praise.
I am glad to hear the second volume is coming. And look forward to Prepositions. A Test I am very glad to have too, and it will help much. Maybe with this stimulus I will at last begin to write some decent poetry myself. It is about time. There is not much that I am glad to have done and published. A few, not more.
I will send some books today, ones that for some reason I myself like. One is simply a matter of some versions based on Chuang Tzu [The Way of Chuang Tzu], nothing "original" but in a way the book of mine I like best. It is more the "finding" type of thing you mention. If you pass them on to someone else, that's fine too. The great struggle is against the invasion of paper first of all: though [there are] other more spiritual invasions and worse, now. The visions and noises. All the electric stuff. It is so good to be in contact with you: I wish I could be there sometime to hear you play music. When I get some questions about things in "A," I'll perhaps bother you for identifications.
April 15, 1967
Thanks for your wonderful appreciative letter of couple weeks back. And maybe you find Conjectures [of a Guilty Bystander] too quarrelsome:most do. No matter, there are other things in it. But meanwhile I have fallen head first into a long poem of my own, swimming in its craziness, and trying other work and just walking in the sun. The operation did not really work I am afraid and so the arm is still a bit bad and the back is bad and all this making my typing a venture. But I am so convinced that none of these things matter. There is always the deep inner richness of a silence that comes up and meets and merges with the sunlight from the outside and all is one sun so who cares about whether work is done? Then the work does itself in its own freedom and if it is bad no matter. I think it will possibly be good.
The long Marxist section of "A" brought back the thirties as nothing else (though also a friend sent me a picture of Groucho Marx in the paper, another more influential Marxism of the thirties!) (Thought Groucho had gone to the Valhallas of laughter). "A" 10 is right up my alley as you will see from parts of Conjectures (though I do not write explicitly about the war). It is in a way Blake-like. So many good rich things. Especially the last long one. And now I read Bottom, too, when I am not writing my own: and the principle you lay down there is the one: that language comes up out of love in S. [Shakespeare] and in any valid poet. This is the truth we live for and by and there is no other (the Bible is full of the same). Also however, I read a Sufi, Ibn al Arabi, just getting into him, who says some remarkable things about the imagination: Abraham dreamed he must sacrifice Isaac but did not interpret his dream, so God had to interpret it for him showing him that he had a wrong notion of sacrifice: a literal notion. And it is true, we none of us interpret our dream: but you do in "A." It is a long, careful, valid, patient, humble, penetrating interpretation of your dream. It helps me to interpret my own. Praise God for giving us you.
This is just a note to give a sign of life, because next week comes the publisher [Naomi Burton Stone, Merton's editor and former literary agent] and I will be all tied up and won't be able to write ...
All my very best to all of you, I wish I could be there or you here (maybe someday?).
May 5, 1967
Most grateful for yours of April 20th and for the parens in the Smithgirl poem ["A Round and a Hope for Smithgirls"]. You are certainly quite right in most cases, and I do not even question you: you have spotted useless words. Writing as I have alone in the woods for such a long time without anyone to make remarks, I have let too many useless sprouts grow out in all directions. The one I do doubt is "to surface"--somehow I wonder if that movement and coming into sight should not remain. I will think of it. And I have left "Look" perhaps because I have a weaknessfor saying "Look" (and perhaps that is the very reason why I should get rid of it). In any case, many thanks, you have helped the poem and the poet.
I just got from New Directions the selection of Charles Olson, whom I have hitherto not carefully read, and I see that I must. Especially his prose remarks on how you see things. This I think must contain a lot of important directions and suggestions. I have to read him slowly and carefully because his background is not quite mine and I have not situated him yet. What do you think about him? To what extent does your way of looking agree with his, would you say? I'd be interested to know. For my own part I have naturally grown up all full of myth and symbol and sound and explanation and elaboration, too much elaboration, but never allegory (except in worst moments of writing when I was not even present). In the long run I think one can have both the direct and continuous relation with the visible and also see it as symbol but not as containing a symbol that is something else and of something else. Hence what I really would like to do with Olson is reconcile his direct way with also a traditional symbol way that is properly understood, and after all there is Melville?! I must go into all this.
Back to Smithgirls: absolutely nothing from the papers which I do not read either, and I am not saluting them in some public event. A friend of mine [Amiya Chakravarty] who has been teaching Hindu philosophy there for a year (a disciple of Gandhi) has been reading them stuff of mine and they have got interested in it, finally sending some lovely reactions and happy remarks so that in return I wrote the poem, celebrating nothing more than that they were young and new and alive and new friends.
Letters have got far beyond me the last few weeks because I have had visiting publishers and am trying to catch up with the mail now ...
Elbow is all right, back is all right (more or less), have allergies but who hasn't? All is well, and the May weather is perfect.
June 23, 1967
I don't know if I answered your last letter yet: your suggestion for the end of Smithgirls is fine and has been put into act. It is very hot here now and I have been busy finishing a small chore, a commentary on Camus's The Plague ["The Plague of Albert Camus: A Commentary and Introduction"]. Camus is a man for whom I have a lot of sympathy and he is one of the few people who can still preach and get away with it. Because he does it with much modesty ...
What I have just read and highly recommend: Ronald Johnson's lovely poem The Book of the Green Man ... It is really substantial and full of color, draftsmanship of a high order, sound, and memories most rich of things that have been forgotten to our cost, myths, and well-chosenpeople and places. It is one of the very finest things I have seen anywhere and I know you will like it if you have not liked it already.
Please excuse the very badly typed lepers and their lamentable rites.
July 18, 1967
The main purpose of my last letter was to thank you for It Was and so I didn't mention it! That, and the failure to answer fairly promptly yours of July 5th is some sign of the disarray I am and have been in for several weeks. Changes in my house, taking it all apart and putting it all back together, new shelves, new sink, running water that I can't dare drink, and then on top of that all the chickens (metaphorical ones) coming home to roost at once, reviews I have promised, people I have promised to see, all this has happened at once. And you are right, the mail is mad anyway and one has to wonder and worry about things like books: but I have It Was and in the uproar have read part of it, which is very much you and I am delighted to have it and see it in the context of everything else. I have not finished "Ferdinand" yet but it is what I like best--I have run ahead of the story a little to read the poem about the Cape Cod girls that have no combs and I like that very much. (The shanty. Now I will have to catch up with myself and find where it fits in.)
I am a fool to get involved in reviewing (in order to get still more books than I need) and as I have to do reviews for the magazine of the Order (no choice there!) I get hung up on books in German, which I read slowly and laboriously. More fun with Spanish and even lately Catalan (article on Catalan hermit movement and things like that!). But still, it is a deluge and who needs another deluge? We have deluges enough. The war in the Near East got me very upset and it was good it was soon "over," though is it over?
Take care of yourself and have a good summer, fair weather, peace, time to do the things you like. Blessings always, and my very best of everything.
August 30, 1967
Shouts from Kentucky. Reading "A" 18 ... I can if I wish hold one "A" 18 in each hand and sing them. I have been ill. In bed with bad 'flu. "A" 18 the thing with also a little sunshine that has at last pulled me out. It has been good to be ill alone in the woods, one likes the woods better for it and is more suspicious of infirmaries. Back to"A" 18, everything so close, so clear, so new. Everything there even Rock well all shut up on yours and mine names day Aug. 25 St. Louis. That was when I got the flu. That p. 292 the whole thing flies beautifully and I too and trying like that especially like the top of the page. The big Buddhist fish is new to me and a portent: for the fish is Christ and if he shows his snozzle sure and the bloody Catlicks will bomb him. And the kids on the fence and the Gemini walker at the end of his cord. All the hot and cold, the fireand water. All Vietnam themes finely done and poor Roger La Porte etc. London's burning for sure, isn't it? Where did you get the Melanesian stuff? I am working that too: only a further development, the cargo cults. Yours sounds like [Bronislaw] Malinowski? I am getting into Claude Levi-Strauss. Marvelous (Brazil mostly). "Let the mad dogs transports enjoy all success/ We are alone where they cannot exist alone / and alone our desire won't shadow their living." Just what I was coming out of it all with today, after being sick, after being oppressed by the spites etc. of so many competing operators (each day comes the mail and I am snowed with their goddam competitions). Even in the woods you cannot have quiet unless you determine not to have a shadow anymore and not to cast any. How? So many lovely things in "A" 18, I could see Chagall coming long before he appeared, announced pages ahead by Chagall fiddles, etc.
And also Prepositions. It finally reached me and I went to the Chaplin bit like iron filings to the magnet, remembering everything perfectly. But I have read it all, I do not get carried away by it like by the "A's."
I hope you are well and that you stay away from all flus and all competitions.
Some typography.
My old friend Victor Hammer died, too: great typographer and hand printer here in Lexington. It has been a hard summer.
December 28, 1967
Thanks for the letter and for the little bit of "A" 21 on the card--very moving. And now what do you think? I have become one of the million editors in the world and have decided upon starting a small magazine [Monks Pond] but it is only to run four issues and then goodbye. It will be a very simple offset thing, I hope and think, and can be done here without cost. No money involved anywhere. Poems, creative things, Asian texts, blues, koans, ghost dances, all to be crammed into four issues. Already have poets coming in with good stuff. And of course IF ... well, editors assume all poets have thousands of poems tucked away somewhere. But if you do have some little piece of something, this will be an unusual magazine in many ways if only first of all because it is a monastic literary magazine--not many of those around! It would of course be marvelous to have something of yours in it, even something that has appeared elsewhere (preferably abroad!).
Failing that, if you have ideas about young poets with good things to dispose of, turn them this way. Or any other suggestions, poetry prose, ideas, people to waylay etc. I will try to see that everyone gets it who wants it (free).
Now I'm snowed in the hermitage and it is very quiet, with probably a lot more snow coming in the night. Otherwise the monastery down there is a bit unquiet, with a new abbot soon to be elected, and peoplefearing to get the wrong kind, someone afraid of anything good. I hope not. I'm out of it. I watch too much weather maybe.
New Year blessings to you and Celia and all of you. Joy and peace.
I think you might enjoy the little old piece on the Cell [see Contemplation in a World of Action] and as for the poem which does not really work, if you see the wrongs I'd be glad to hear them.
February 2, 1968
I know what you mean about the bronchial bug. I've had a wicked January, three or four days very sick indeed and the rest dragging around and coughing like a man who smokes three packs a day without having to go to the bother of smoking any.
Anyway I hope you are feeling better. It has been a bad 'flu and many of my friends have been hit hard by it.
The magazine has got off I think to a good start. First issue in the "press" and lots of material for the next two on hand. Thanks to the Dictionary has so much beautiful stuff in it. I will gladly accept your offer of the preface and ask also for more: could I add "Young David"? This in the second issue: and then especially the lovely bit "There was a horse its face bausond ..." pp. 129-131? For another issue? And call it "David's Horse"? This little book is only 250 copies and who has seen it? The David and Michal section is also most sharp and lovely. Could I use all these, Louis? I would be most grateful and the people would see these things. And other poets being near them would be improved and helped.
Thanks for your remarks on my Cain poem which does indeed need more work. Part of a big long mixed-up thing [The Geography of Lograire] that will come together in time I hope. I need to soak in "A" again and deepen my understanding of how to get at such a venture.
I wonder why I started a magazine: but it has turned out to be a good idea and also I seem to find myself by it part of a family of brothers and sisters all likeminded though with different views all open and for the most part gentle and living around in remote places and in many ways monks.
Yes, I too am for statement: I wish though that my own made more sense. This one is not as clear as it could be (it presupposes that one has seen the things I refer to) but I think it is one I will not take back.
I
I have always considered you to be about the best living writer we've got.
MERTON TO EVELYN WAUGH AUGUST 2, 1948
To Evelyn Waugh
It was The Seven Storey Mountain that brought Evelyn Waugh (1903--1966) and Thomas Merton together, at first in correspondence and later in person when Waugh visited the Abbey of Gethsemani in November 1948. Waugh greatly admired Merton's autobiography after Robert Giroux, Merton's editor at Harcourt Brace and Company, sent a set of galley proofs to London, asking Waugh for an advance comment. It appeared on the dust jacket of the book's first edition: "This book may well prove to be of permanent interest in the history of religious experience." The London publisher, Tom Burns of Hollis and Carter, asked Waugh to edit the book for publication in England. In Waugh's judgment, succinct writing was not one of Merton's virtues, and he cut about twenty percent of the text "in order to adapt it to European tastes." In his foreword, Waugh noted that only "certain passages which seemed to be of purely local interest were cut out." The book was issued in 1949 under the title Elected Silence (taken by Waugh from a poem of Gerard Manley Hopkins).
Merton was delighted to learn of Waugh's good opinion of the Mountain. After addressing some of the points Waugh had raised in a letter to Giroux at Harcourt Brace, Merton turned to his "real reason" for writing to Waugh: "I need criticism the way a man dying of thirst needs water." Merton described the "difficult spot" he was in and the kinds of writing assignments his superiors had "piled up" on him.
Merton approached Waugh as a novice might a master, which is precisely how Merton saw Waugh--as a literary master. By 1948 Evelyn Waugh was firmly established as a leading man of English letters, and he was more than willing to instruct the young monk in matters of literary style. Twenty years later, Merton concluded a reminiscence of Waugh by saying: "I never lost my great admiration of Waugh as a creative writer, though I certainly disagreed with much of his conservatism after the [Vatican] Council. But I think I understand why he felt that way--especially about Latin, etc. He would."
August 2, 1948
You will be surprised to get this but not, I hope, annoyed. Father Abbot gave me permission to write to you when I saw your letter to Harcourt Brace about The Seven Storey Mountain. I was especially grateful to get your reactions to the book in terms of an English audience, and it is about that and all its implications that I feel this letter ought to be written.
About my Cambridge passage, I felt the same way [as you] afterwards, thought of rewriting it. My agent [Naomi Burton], who is English, said it was okay, so I let it stand. Then every time it came up in proof I worried about it, but was too lazy to do anything definite. The book is already printed here. But I'd like to clean up that Cambridge [University] section a bit for the English edition which some people called Hollis and Carter [the publisher in London] are doing next spring. Do you think people would accuse me of duplicity in saying one thing here and another there? Anyway, I'm not as mad at Cambridge as that either. About the succinctness, perhaps the book should have been rewritten. A tremendous amount of dead wood was cut. But there was no time to go over the whole thing again. The poem ["For My Brother: Reported Missing in Action, 1943"] was the idea of the editor [Robert Giroux] at Harcourt Brace (I suppose you mean the one about my brother) and not mine. I tried to get it out but did not succeed. It is too late now, at least for the American edition. I'll probably have to go by what the English editor thinks, on that.
The real reason I write to you is not merely to rehash these little details. I am in a difficult spot here as a writer. Father Abbot [Frederic Dunne, who died Aug. 4, 1948] gives me a typewriter and says "write" and so I cover pages and pages with matter and they go to several different censors and get lost, torn up, burned, and so on. Then they get pieced together and retyped and go to a publisher who changes everything and after about four years a book appears in print. I never get a chance to discuss it with anybody and scarcely ever see any reviews and half the time I haven't the faintest idea whether the thing is good or bad or what it is. Therefore I need criticism the way a man dying of thirst needs water. Those who have any ideas in their head about writing and who can communicate with me by letter or word have so far told me that I need discipline. I know. But I don't get it. A man can do something for himself along those lines by paying attention and using his head, I suppose. But if you can offer me any suggestions, tell me anything I ought to read, or tell me in one or two sentences how I ought to comport myself to acquire discipline, I would be immensely grateful and you would be doing something for my soul. Because this business of writing has become intimately tied up with the whole process of my sanctification. It is an ascetic matter as much as anything else, because of the peculiar circumstances under which I write. At the moment, I may add, I am faced with a program of much writing because we have to raise money to build some new monasteriesand there is a flood of vocations. Most of what I have to do concerns the Cistercian life, history, spiritual theology, biographies etc. But (be patient with me!), consider this problem: all this has suddenly piled up on me in the last two years and I find myself more or less morally obliged to continue connections with the most diverse kind of publishers. On one end of the dilemma I am writing poetry and things like that for New Directions and a wacky surrealist magazine called Tiger's Eye that I think I had better get out of.
In the middle is Harcourt Brace. Next year they are bringing out a book I have done about our Order and the life and so on [The Waters of Siloe]. Then Sheed and Ward wants something--an expansion of a pamphlet [Cistercian Contemplatives] I did for the monastery and which might interest you, so I'll send it along. Finally, at the other end is Bruce and Co., popular Catholic publisher in Milwaukee, and, of all things, a magazine called the Messenger of the Sacred Heart, which has just gone through a reform and has elevated itself above the level of True Story and True Romances to become a kind of pious Saturday Evening Post. But I only did one article for them ... no more. Then Commonweal is always on my neck asking for things.
Frankly, I think the devil is trying to ruin me. And I am left more or less on my own in all this. I have got to find some kind of a pace that is steady and disciplined and uniform and pretty near the top of whatever I may be capable of, and stick to that ... then if they all want to buy some of it they can.
You see by this that it is a real problem, and a spiritual one too. Of course the whole thing may change with my being taken out of this job and put on something else after I am ordained, which should come next year. We are short of men all round. But I have been bold enough to impose on your patience and your charity because I have always considered you to be about the best living writer we've got. You do not need to be told that if you read The Seven Storey Mountain. I think I have read Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies over more than any other book except perhaps Ulysses: I mean before coming here. Needless to say I am very thankful for your notice, which the publisher intends to use on the jacket of the book.
I shall certainly pray for you and hope you will pray for me too.
Waugh responded on August 13, expressing his admiration for The Seven Storey Mountain and his hope that it would do much good. He criticized three points of content. He faulted Merton for blaming Cambridge rather than accepting the responsibility himself for having wasted opportunities at the university; he did not like Merton's criticisms of the Franciscans; and he thought that Merton "should have made it clear--tho of course quite dryly and briefly--how far your various 'love' affairs were carnal and how far purely sentimental," as if the censors wouldhave allowed this. Then he offered the advice Merton had sought: "Why not seek to perfect it [literary work] and leave mass-production alone?"
September 3, 1948
I cannot tell you how truly happy I am with your letter and the book you sent. Both of them have been a very great help to me. In case you think I am exaggerating, I can assure you that in a contemplative monastery where people are supposed to see things clearly it sometimes becomes very difficult to see anything straight. It is so terribly easy to get yourself into some kind of a rut in which you distort every issue with your own blind bad habits--for instance, rushing to finish a chapter before the bell rings and you will have to go and do something else.
It has been quite humiliating for me to find out (from [Robert] Graves and [Alan] Hodge [authors of The Reader over Your Shoulder, which Waugh had sent to Merton]) that my bad habits are the same as those of every other second-rate writer outside the monastery. The same haste, distraction, etc. You very charitably put it down to a supernatural attitude on my part. Yes and no. It is true that when I drop the work and go to do something else I try not to think any more about it, and to be busy with the things that are really supposed to preoccupy a contemplative. When I succeed it means that I only think about the book in hand for two hours a day, and that means a lot of loose thinking that goes through the machine and comes out on paper in something of a mess. And consequently I have to admit that much of the Mountain is pure first-draft writing with nothing added except a few commas. That accounts for the heaviness of the long section preceding my Baptism--in which I think the cuts should come more than anywhere else. On the whole I think my haste is just as immoral as anybody else's and comes from the same selfish desire to get quick results with a small amount of effort. In the end, the whole question is largely an ascetic one! And incidentally I would never reproach anyone like yourself with vanity for wanting to write really well! I wish I had some of your integrity.
Really I like The Reader over Your Shoulder very much. In the first place it is amusing. And I like their thesis that we are heading towards a clean, clear kind of prose. Really everything in my nature--and in my vocation too--demands something like that if I am to go on writing. The contemplative life demands that everything, all one's habits of thought and modes of action, should be simple and definite and free of waste[d] motion. In every department of our life, that is our biggest struggle. You would be shocked to know how much material and spiritual junk can accumulate in the corner of a monastery and in the minds of the monks. You ought to see the pigsty in which I am writing this letter. There are two big crates of some unidentified printed work the monastery wants to sell. About a thousand odd copies of ancient magazines that ought to have been sent to the Little Sisters of the Poor, a dozen atrocious-lookingarmchairs and piano stools that are used in the sanctuary for Pontifical Masses and stored on the back of my neck the rest of the time. Finally I am myself embedded in a small skyscraper of mixed books and magazines in which all kinds of surreal stuff is sitting on top of theology. All this is dominated by a big movie-star statue of Our Lady life-size, on a pedestal, taking up most of the room; it was spirited out of the lay-brother's choir when they varnished the floor of the Church last spring, and never found its way back.
Before I get into any more digressions I want to thank you for your offer to edit the English edition of the Mountain. The letter just came from Hollis and Carter and I gladly accept your offer. I was thinking that, for my own part, I could go over the book and make the corrections that occur to me and then send it along to you, to work with. As for the Cambridge business I will rewrite the whole thing if you wish. I would gladly see the whole tone of that passage changed. I am glad the book will be shorter.
I am sorry to think that I gave the impression I was looking down my nose at the Franciscans, and I hope their feelings won't be hurt. They are very nice to me. However, about the love affairs I am afraid nothing more than what is there will get past a religious censor and there is nothing that can be done about it. I had to practically move a mountain to get across that passage where Peggy Wells came back and spent the night in the same room as [Robert] Gibney and myself--and only did so by juggling it around and trying to disguise the fact that it was only a one-room apartment.
I am sending you a book of poems [Figures for an Apocalypse] I wrote although I am ashamed of it. If you have any good ideas about them, let me know. I have practically stopped writing verse for the moment. I also sent you a pamphlet about the monastery [Cistercian Contemplatives ] and extracts from a magazine article in the official publication of the Order. You will find a lot of misprints made by the Belgian typesetters. Perhaps the subject matter is too technical to be really interesting but I thought you might get something out of it.
Since I last wrote to you, our Abbot died and we have a new one [Dom James Fox] who just flew away to go to the General Chapter in France. He is a very holy man and he will be glad if I extricate myself from the network of trivialities into which the magazines are trying to get me. The Vicar General of the Order [Dom Gabriel Sortais] came from France and I talked with him a lot, being his interpreter in the regular visitation of the house, and he had a lot of ideas that harmonized with yours, so definitely I shall try to keep out of useless small projects that do nothing but cause a distraction and dilute the quality of what I turn out. The big trouble is that in those two hours a day when I get at a typewriter I am always having to do odd jobs and errands, and I am getting a lot of letters from strangers too. These I hope to take care ofwith a printed slip telling them politely to lay off the poor monk, let the guy pray.
Hollis and Carter may want the next book I am doing for Harcourt Brace which is about the Order and our life [The Waters of Siloe]. Will it be all right if we shoot the proofs along to you when they come out, next spring or early summer? God forbid that I should impose on your kindness, so if you cannot read it please say so. But since you might be interested I thought I would mention it, anyway. Meanwhile I am waiting to get busy on the manuscript again.
I don't agree with Mgr. [Ronald] Knox that God isn't interested in good prose. True, it doesn't mean anything to Him per se, and St. Paul seems to be on Mgr. Knox's side of the argument. But I don't think that Our Lord is very pleased with preachers and writers who do their best to get the Church all mixed up. Then there is that line about the judgment meted out for every idle word. It makes me very happy to think that you are going to judge the idle words in The Seven Storey Mountain before God does.
Meanwhile I pray for you, and please do you also pray for me. Don't be afraid to have a great devotion to Our Lady and say the rosary a lot. Do you have any time for mental prayer? You have the gifts that grace works on and if you are not something of a contemplative already, you should be. Tell me to mind my own business--but in a way, it is my business. Anyway, God bless you, and thank you very much.
P.S. A Carthusian I write to at Parkminster [Dom Humphrey Pawsey] tells me they want to print something here to arouse at least a remote interest in a possible foundation in the U.S. If you have any connections here that would be interested in such a thing you might let me discreetly know--but discreetly. And I would pass the information on to the Carthusians.
September 22, 1948
I am very glad you went ahead with the editing of The Seven Storey Molehill. Since you have probably cut more than I would have, it will save me the useless labor to wait for the proofs & then catch the one or two lines you may have missed. I don't expect to have to add anything --I mean restore anything--unless you have cut out the fact that I was baptized & became a monk. All the rest is accidental.
Your last paragraphs interested me much. Like all people with intellectual gifts, you would like to argue yourself into a quandary that doesn't exist. Don't you see that in all your anxiety to explain how your contrition is imperfect you are expressing an instant sorrow that it is not so--and that is true contrition. After all if you are sorry because your sorrow is not sorrowful because of God, then you are sorrowful because of God, not because of yourself. Two negatives make an affirmative. All you need is to stop speculating about it, and somewhere around the secondstep of your analysis, make a definite act of will, and that is that. Then you will be practicing a whole lot of supernatural virtues. Above all, trust (hope). The virtue of hope is the one talented people most need. They tend to trust in themselves--and when their own resources fail then they will prefer despair to reliance on anyone else, even on God. It gives them a kind of feeling of distinction.
Really I think it might do you a lot of good & give you a certain happiness to say the Rosary every day. If you don't like it, so much the better, because then you would deliver yourself from the servitude of doing things for your own satisfaction: and that slavery to our own desires is a terrific burden. I mean if you could do it as a more or less blind act of love and homage to Our Lady, not bothering to try to find out where the attraction of the thing could possibly be hidden, and other people seem to like it. The real motive for this devotion at the moment is that the Church is very explicit: a tremendous amount depends on the Rosary & and everything depends on Our Lady. Still, if there is some reasonable difficulty I don't know about, don't feel that you have to try this just because someone suggests it! ...
But things are so serious now--and values are so completely cockeyed--that it seems to me a matter of the highest moment to get even one individual to make one more act of his free will, directing it to God in love & faith.
Everything--the whole history of our world--is hanging on such acts. Have you read St. John of the Cross? You ought to do so--he is terrific; and also he is very clear in spite of what people say about his difficulty. I envy you your leisure. I would be sitting on top of the Cotswolds all day long, in a trance. If you don't say many rosaries, at least please sometime say one for me. I am haunted by two ideas: solitude and poverty. I pray for you a lot, especially at Communion--& for your family. Someone told me you are doing a feature for Life on the Church in America. We think we are so much better than we are. We have a big showy front. Behind it--there is a lot of good will that loses itself in useless activity & human ambitions & display.
P.S. Once again--I am tremendously grateful for your kindness in editing the book for me. God bless you for it.
February 19, 1949
As far as I can judge, you must be back in America at the moment, finishing your articles for Life. So I am writing to you in New York, first of all to thank you for the preface to Elected Silence, a copy of which was sent to me, and which was very kind indeed, and second to assure you that the edition of E. S. by you is much less cut than I expected. I have not gone through it all, since Hollis and Carter said they would not have time to incorporate any corrections I might make in their edition anyway, but from what I have seen, the book is improved considerably.
I hope we are going to see those articles--and I hope you have not said anything too flattering about American Catholics. There is a fair amount of ferment, I suppose, in the Church, but I wonder how deep it goes in this country. We still need an interior life--and a few sacrifices. On the other hand I am constantly impressed by the amount of good theological writing that is coming out of France, especially from the Editions du Cerf.
New Directions is putting out a book I wrote [Seeds of Contemplation ] and which purports to be spiritual. There is a deluxe edition of the thing, on special paper and in a box. When I was signing the colophon sheets, I reflected on the nature of the work itself and began to feel very foolish. As I progressed I was tempted to write flippant and even obscene remarks over the signature, so perhaps the whole scheme did not come from the Holy Ghost. But in any case I'll send you a copy of this book in its dressed-up edition. It is beautifully printed.
Speaking of New Directions, I told [James] Laughlin you said you had met him, and he became very agitated and made me promise to inform you that the man from New Directions whom you met was not Laughlin but one of his henchmen, a Tony Bower with whom he does not wish to be confused because he is "a character." Anyway, it was not you who told me you had met Laughlin, but I insisted that it was Laughlin you had met when you said you had had lunch with someone from New Directions. There, I hope that is settled.
Don't forget, please, that we extorted a promise that you would come back here some time.
God bless you. Say some rosaries too, if Our Lady inspires you; it is very healthy.
May 12, 1949
Thank you very much for your last letter, written before you left New York. Since then a volume of Seeds of Contemplation has started on its way to Gloucestershire, where I hope it will find you well and happy and will not do anything to spoil your joy. I imagine you are quite relieved to be at home and in relative peace after your American campaign. Sister Thérèse [Lentfoehr] in Milwaukee and others here and there have written in to say that they succeeded in cornering you at odd moments on your lecture tour. Which brings to mind your kind offer to look at the original ms. of E. Silence and perhaps incorporate unprinted passages in a second edition. I don't know if it would be worth the bother. Sister Thérèse, who is extremely kind-hearted, has a misguided notion that I am the cousin of Santa Claus and overestimates every word that I write by about seven hundred percent. Perhaps it would be just as well to let it drop, although if you really want to undertake this penance, you may certainly have all the necessary permission.
I have taken the liberty of dedicating our book Waters of Siloe toyou. I do hope you will not object to having your name appear in the front matter of the history of a religious Order-and a history which is not any too well written, either. But I wished to show you some exterior token of our gratitude and sincere friendship. Besides, I felt, quite selfishly, that the book would benefit by the presence of your name in it, and that this fact might even hoodwink some of the readers into thinking that the book had some merit.
I close assuring you that your account of the Chicago prayer wheel, or the rosary with lights, has been haunting me for months. No wonder Communism is so popular.
If you happen to be anywhere near here in two weeks, on Ascension day [May 26, 1949], or the two following, please consider yourself invited to my ordination and first low / then high mass. In any case I know you will ask Our Lady to make me a simple and holy priest.
July 30, 1949
Thank you for your letter of May 27th. I haven't seen any sign of the Ronald Knox book [Enthusiasm] which you mentioned yet. Perhaps it got sidetracked somewhere in the Prior's shambles.
The Month has been paying me for my effusions by sending me books. One of them was The Loved One. I was having a delightful time with it until the authorities discovered that it was a n-v-1 and swept it away. I still have Brideshead Revisited here even though it is a n-v-1. (hush!) I am allowed it because it is a model for style. That was what I said, and it is absolutely true. It is beautifully done. The writing is so fine that I don't want to go on with the book at all, I just take a paragraph here and there and admire it, so that I haven't read Brideshead yet, either, but have just enjoyed these fragments. I hope you are not offended.
Waters of Siloe, which is, on the other hand, a model of downright terrible writing, partly through my fault and partly through the fault of those whose hands it passed on the way to the press, is now in print but not yet bound. Harcourt Brace will send you a copy as soon as possible, I hope. The date of publication is set for September 15th and there is already an enormous sale.
We had our centenary celebration. It only lasted one day. I learned later that one of the monks had thought up a horrible scheme for a threeday celebration, the second day of which would feature a field Mass to be attended by twenty thousand school children. The archbishop nearly fainted when he heard of it. Fortunately it never went through. I was in charge of press relations that day and sat in a press box, no less watching the field Mass as if it were a polo game. A week later someone called up on the telephone and by some mistake got me--I was the one he wanted anyway. His first question was "Do you have the rule of silence?" I said, "Who are you, anyway?" It turned out to be one of the reporters whohad been here for the centenary. He was just trying to show off the fact that he now knew the difference between the rule of silence, which exists, and the vow of silence, which does not.
Since then it has been furiously hot here. Postulants keep arriving in great numbers, and while we all sweat in the refectory a colored novice reads to us glowing accounts of how cold is the life of the missionaries among the Eskimos. It is a book which I find very thrilling although it contains horrible passages about people eating live fish and holding their mouths with their hands to keep the fish from jumping out while being chewed.
One of the postulants we have now wears a sport shirt that is covered with pictures of fox-hunting scenes dreamed up by some genius in the Seventh Avenue ghetto of New York. Men on fat horses come whooping through the pack of hounds in every direction and I forget all about the psalms in my fascination at this curious piece of tapestry which is parked right in front of me.
If you want an idea for a novel I think I could start you on one, and find out the rest of the story. At four o'clock one morning a Negro in a dinner jacket showed up at the gate of a prim Trappist monastery in France and said he had come all the way from Haiti to join. He was not wearing a dinner jacket because of dissipation, but because he believed one ought to dress as a waiter. He signed up in the book as the official guide to the cathedral in Port-au-Prince and became a monk but I have forgotten the funny details of his short stay in the monastery. He left the Trappists and went to the Dominicans in Angers and they did not let him become a novice but put him to work in the garden. There he found out that there was a very pretty maid who worked in one of the houses overlooking the garden and he fell madly in love with her, so that whenever she appeared at the windows he began throwing kisses to her. The story immediately got around Angers that the Dominicans were throwing kisses at all the maids in all the houses around their Friary and so the man was fired. I can find out about him and about the only American postulant who entered the same monastery. He became wildly incensed at the tyranny of Trappist life and after a week in the monastery attacked the novice master with a pitchfork. He had previously rushed into the dormitory when nobody else was there and had scrawled "A Mort le Pere Maitre" all over the cells with chalk.
The latest rumor about me is that I am in the Vatican studying ancient manuscripts about the Cistercian Order. If you see me around London, let me know. Since Father Abbot lets me wander around in the woods by myself I am no longer so terribly bothered with the problem of solitude. Kentucky is mildly crazy but I suppose one can be a contemplative here as well as anywhere else in the world, and the easy informality of monastic life in America is probably a great improvement over the tension which I suspect exists almost everywhere in Europe. A Chinese monk was hereand he gave a graphic imitation of the French monks fighting in choir over details of the chant, in his Chinese monastery. Really I think you could write a wonderful novel about Trappists and it would give you an excuse to come and stay here for six months, in hiding. We would all be glad to have you. The Abbot General gave me a good story which I am going to use myself; it is the real account of what happened to one of our Brothers who was put in a concentration camp by the Nazis and afterwards did some jobs for the Free French secret service and had some thrilling escapes from the Gestapo and whatnot. It sounds good.
There goes the bell. God bless you. I remember you at Mass and recommend you especially to Our Lady. Like everyone else in the world you are almost too shy about your religious possibilities.
On August 29, 1949, Waugh wrote to thank Merton for dedicating The Waters of Siloe to him and offered some "technical criticisms." The arrangement of sections seemed "a little loose." Several parts seemed unnecessary altogether. And Merton was given to "pattern bombing instead of precision bombing. You scatter a lot of missiles all round the target instead of concentrating on a single direct hit." In conclusion, he wrote: "I wish I saw the faults of The Seven Storey Mountain disappearing and I don't."
September 17, 1949
Thank you very much for your two letters and your very valuable advice on the two books, Waters of Siloe and Seeds of Contemplation. I heard indirectly from Hollis and Carter that you might let yourself be persuaded to edit Waters for the English public as you did the Mountain. I would have never dared to ask for such a favor but if there is any possibility of you doing it, I would be delighted at my good fortune.
Your comments on the structure of Waters are true. The book is now being read in the refectory and I am aware that the pattern bombing, as you call it, is even worse than in the Mountain. It would be a great deal tidier and better to get direct hits, as you say. Still, I know that in my spiritual reading, I am generally glad to find the same thing said over again three or four times and in three or four different ways. I think this is a characteristic of many people who try to say something about the spiritual life--not a virtue perhaps, but a characteristic fault. I am glad to have at least a fault in common with St. John of the Cross, but I agree that it would be better to get rid of it and acquire the virtue of precision instead. You know that slang is almost part of my nature. I shall, however, set myself to avoid it in at least one book, and see how it turns out. Recently, I went through a manuscript that I turned out when I thought I was being "disciplined," and the effect was horrible. It read like a literal translation from the German. My tendency is to tie myself up in knots when I get too self-conscious about what I am putting down on paper.
You console me greatly by objecting to the Prologue, which I hadthrown out and which the editor demanded back. The Note is my fault, and is a hypersensitive gesture of protection against critics who have been peppering me for my notions about the contemplative life.
Having found that even in a contemplative order men resent being hustled into contemplation (especially by one who is their junior in religion!!), I am pulling in my horns and will send you the article that results. One of the censors said it consoled him.
By the way, do not think that the faults of Waters are due to neglect of your advice about Mountain. The book was finished long before Mountain came out and I did not have a chance to do more than wipe out a few solecisms and make other corrections of that sort in proof. I should have caught more of the clichés. The trouble with writing here is that one has few contacts with healthy modern prose, and the things you hear in the refectory do not form your style! Then I have tended to rush too much. I have burned deep in my mind a statement from Graves and Hodge that faults of style are ultimately faults of character and have moral implications. Whatever happens, the next book will come out slowly and with thought and attention. I mean the next but one. The next [What Are These Wounds?] is an atrocious life of a medieval stigmatic [St. Lutgarde, a thirteenth-century Trappistine]--the one which I thought was disciplined, when I was writing it. Short of rewriting I cannot seem to do anything about it. I ought to have the strength of character to refuse to let it be published at all.
In any case, I am glad to get such valuable and stimulating direction, and from one so marvelously qualified to give it. I have no difficulty in accepting you as the delegate of the Holy Ghost in this matter. By the way, I have been twisting and turning and trying to get Ward Fowler [Modern English Usage] from some source. Would you be annoyed if I finally turned and begged it from you? We have no copy in the house, and we do not have any decent (i.e. Oxford) dictionary here either. And I cap my insolence with the assurance that we would be delighted to get anything by Monsignor Knox.
In any case, God bless you. I keep you in my Mass every day and ask Our Lady to be with you and help you. Please pray for me too.
October 15, 1949
You will be amused to hear that your article on the "American Epoch in the Catholic Church" is now being read in our refectory, to the accompaniment of some obstreperous coughing by the fathers who have surnames like Flanagan. I like it very much indeed and I think you have handled the situation very well: but fortunately I had already read the article for myself. The treatment to which it is being subjected by this week's reader is atrocious. He announced, for instance, in the introductory note, that you were the author of a best-seller called Bridgehead Revised. Really! If they let him get so far as the voting stage (he is a novice), Iassure you he gets black from me-unless he wants to change to the lay brothers. The article is well liked by everyone, even by many of the Irish. I imagine your fan mail from the latter is, however, rather hot. I remember a letter I got from a man in Peekskill, New York, for just one innocent little hint that perhaps the Irish sometimes got drunk (which you deleted from the English edition). The man said that he was positively going to send the Ancient Order of Hibernians on my trail, declared that my book has "dragged many fine men into the mire," and closed with the woeful words: "Hoping to carry this matter further." I do not know where he carried it, but no repercussions have so far reached the abbey.
I meant to say in my other letter that I appreciated your remarks about the Carthusians. The truth is, I am firmly settled here. Since God has chosen the cenobitic life for me, it is evidently what I most need and then, too, there is really an extraordinary flexibility in our life as it is being led here at the moment. Everyone is ready to accept new suggestions and ideas and we are broadening out in many ways. Did I tell you that Father Abbot now allows me to run off to the woods by myself now? It is a great help. And rather unusual, I think. Then, with the growing numbers, we have been allowed to spread out more within the enclosure itself. We used to be all cooped up in that little garden you saw. Now we can rove around the orchards during the time of spiritual reading, if we want to. So I am quite ready to believe your friend who says that the Cistercians can actually lead a more contemplative life than the Carthusians. We are certainly not hidebound and we are not overburdened with vocal prayers. And that is a burden which is heavier when the prayers are recited in private, I think.
P.S. Of course I keep you in my Mass.
January 28, 1950
It is some time since I have given an account of myself. [Tom] Burns sent a copy of Fowler and I am very grateful. I am studying it with much amusement and profit. I remember enjoying it when I dipped into it in past years. In those days I was mostly interested in his wit. That Graves and Hodge book is very helpful.
And now comes a matter that belongs to St. Benedict's fifth degree of humility. In spite of the earnest efforts of my Abbot, my agent and myself, Bruce and company is bringing forth an atrocious biography of a Cistercian stigmatic that I wrote five years ago under obedience. We did what we could to stop it but it was too late. The thing was sent to them some years ago and the contract was signed too long ago for my own good. I hope a copy of it never falls into your hands. In spite of your great forbearance, you would never forgive me. Please pray that it may not do any harm.
Did I tell you that I am now busy teaching? Perhaps not. It takes up most of my time, but it will serve to accumulate material for biographiesand doctrinal studies of St. Bernard and of St. Aelred of Rievaulx. You will be pleased at the thought that I am now working slowly and thoughtfully. I like it above all because it helps me to be a monk instead of a journalist. What I am teaching is Mystical Theology. This year I am on the Cistercians. Next year we hope to have a course in Mystical Theology from Origen to St. John of the Cross. A most wonderful amount of production is being done in France, on the Fathers. Did you see that article in The Month on the "Return to Contemplation"?
I have long hesitated to send you a copy of the Tears of the Blind Lions since you do not like modern poetry, but a copy is on the way as a token of my gratitude for your great kindness in going over Waters of Siloe. I am eager to see what the book will be like and know it will be easier reading after your editing. I think, incidentally, that teaching will help me to get direct hits instead of spraying the whole neighborhood of my target, especially when I am trying to talk about doctrine.
In any case, please believe me to be most grateful as always, for your kindness. I remember you often at Mass, asking Our Lord to bless you and your family and your work and all that you do, that you may give Him glory and help to extend His Kingdom on earth. It is a very sobering thing to go each day to the altar to offer this tremendous Sacrifice, and one of the principal affects it has had on me has been to leave me convinced that once one has pronounced the words of the Canon there is practically nothing left worth saying--except to wait until next morning's Mass. Do not think, however, that I despise the Post-communions-or that I walk into class and stare at the young monks in silence and then walk out again in disgust.
August 12, 1950
Hollis and Carter have just sent me Waters of Siloe, with your kind foreword and your expert editing. It was a much more difficult piece of work for you to reshape than Elected Silence but I am deeply indebted to you for doing such a good job. I have no regrets at the cutting of the Prologue and am glad it went. The opening story never sat very comfortably on my conscience. The defense of my ideas about the contemplative life was quite useless, and I have done it properly, in any case, in an article for Cross and Crown. That was where the defense belonged.
Thank you especially for your foreword. I do not know whether the amount of books against which you warn the reader will ever be produced. I am working slowly at them and I am also teaching now. The teaching serves to accumulate material for books but does not allow me as much time for writing as I need. Your remark about life in the Scriptorium being harder is, as a matter of fact, no fancy, as I am beginning to discover after seven years of it. (My first year in the monastery was the only one when I went out every day.) However, I do get out into the fields occasionally. For the first time in eight years I have been able to do somethingthat might reasonably be called "bathing," when I managed to fell a tree in such a way that it dropped across a stream. That made it necessary to get in the water to trim it and cut it up. Very pleasant. I shall try to get out again before they finish cutting down all the trees along that creek.
Helena looks fine, in The Month. I especially admire your dialogue --the most difficult thing in a historical novel, isn't it? But above all I was delighted by the witch's little song.
It has occurred to me several times that in one of my other letters I may have said something that offended you. I do hope this is not so, but if it is, I know you will forgive me. Perhaps you have had wind of that hideous book I did, on a medieval stigmatic. I can understand your being vexed at the appearance of such a thing (the publisher gave it an abominable presentation too), when you had come out on a limb to assure people that I deserved some respect. We tried to keep the thing from being printed but the idea occurred to us too late.
I think it is being printed in Ireland. I hope that you will not be splashed by the mud that may be thrown at it. But really I don't think it will reach the kind of people who really care about the difference between a good book and a bad one.
Soon I hope to be able to send you a new, short book that is coming out, called Bread in the Wilderness. It is about the Psalms, and I hope you will like it. It is a little technical but I hope it is not dry.
I frequently remember you at Mass, and pray Our Lord to repay you for all your kindness. It is not to me that you have been kind but to Him especially. And if my books have reached people in England and have done them any good, most of the credit goes to you. May Our Lady ever be with you and help you to do much for the glory of her Son.
P.S. Looking back at one of your letters, I found you said you were sending a volume of sermons by Mgr. Knox--I have no knowledge of their ever having arrived. About the [Pere A. ] Gardeil book [La structure de l'âme et l'expérience mystique] which you were trying to get for us: since it is so unobtainable we finally got it on microfilm. That was our only hope. But thanks very much for your efforts.
September 11, 1950
The Stromboli notepaper literally overwhelmed me. I am answering you at once to send my congratulations on the advent of Septimus and to assure you that the entire choir-novitiate here is praying for him with enthusiasm. So too am I.
Then, I enclose a monument of American Catholic endeavor. A copy of this leaflet was addressed to every priest in the community here, but was, of course, stopped by the censor. I managed to get one for your archives. It is really something, isn't it?
I am just off to the hospital, but am not especially ill. The doctors seem to think their time has come to compass me with devices. Theybelieve that they can produce ulcers by this method: ulcers being what they intend to find. If they succeed, I shall sink back in mournful resignation at the thought that I have reached a rather unmonastic middle age.
In our Orientation course for the novices I have been working on the Desert Fathers and think they would be a wonderful subject for a book. Have you ever thought of trying it? You know the country, of course. But if you do not do it, I hope that some day I will get a chance to try. But you could do a wonderful job on them.
I must now close and tidy up, before they carry me off.
P.S. Thank you very much for the review--the first & only one I had seen. I am presuming you do not want it back as it might make this letter too heavy.
December 15, 1950
This letter has two purposes: to thank you for Helena and to wish you a holy Christmas--and even a merry one, although the legend is abroad that I have gone Jansenist.
Helena came when I was in the hospital. It was handed to me on the afternoon of the day when I had had three inches of bone cut out of my nose and was parked in bed with a nose full of bandages, commanded to sit up for twenty-four hours behaving in all respects like Queen Victoria. It was then that I started in on Old King Cole. I compliment you on your fidelity to the traditional picture of this King. Unfortunately your use of the famous ballad almost made me have a haemmhorage (if that is how you spell it). I am afraid that those on this side of the Atlantic who have never sung it will miss some of the nicest pages in the book.
I mentioned a legend about myself. There is another, or one that is more colorful. A certain Robert Louis, who tossed an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, I believe, entered a monastery somewhere. One day, a visitor to a slightly deaf nun in a convent hereabouts remarked: "Robert Louis has entered a monastery. He's the one who threw the atomic bomb and killed sixty thousand people." The nun let out a faint scream and rushed into the convent, returning presently with the whole community ... "Father Louis ... who is in the Trappist monastery ... threw an atomic bomb ... etc. etc." Nice reputation I have.
I beg God to bless you and all your family a primo usque ad Septimum. May you enjoy all the graces of Christmas. It is my intention to remember you all in my Christmas Masses. Pray for me too, please.
February 25, 1952
Many thanks for your very kind letter and for [Ronald Knox's] Enthusiasm . I entirely agree with your comment on the patchy character of the Ascent [to Truth]. It is getting to be increasingly difficult to get a book together at all, and I know very well that the chapter on "TheProblem of Unbelief' was addressed to a different "reader" than the others, while two other early chapters were originally intended for a completely different book!! I tried to drop the "Problem" chapter but the publisher wanted to keep it as bait for this apologetically minded nation. I suppose it is the one chapter that has more or less registered--at least with the clergy.
When I say that it is hard to put a book together I do not mean that I have gone to seed (although maybe as a writer I have--and perhaps it is a good thing). But I have so many other things to do now that I cannot write anything except fragmentary sentences. I am Director of the scholastics. This is very fine. I talk to them about their problems. With some of them I have an agreement that I occasionally write out cryptic ascetic sentences in the Desert Fathers tradition and slip the paper to them when they least expect it. Then they go away and think about these statements of mine. They could make a book. But I don't know if it would be a stuffy book or not. There again, you have a scattered audience.
Enthusiasm is fine. I value it highly above all as a reference book, but it is also very good reading. I promise myself to make it an arsenal if I return to writing about quietists. The Procurator General of the Carthusians [Dom Jean-Baptiste Porion] says I am too sharp on quietists and that there really are no quietists anyway. But it is to me a guarantee that the Jesuits will not be too angry with anything I say about contemplation if I drub the quietists for a few pages in every book. Besides, I have the same baleful interest in quietism that a doctor might have in chiropractors or an MFH in people who shoot foxes.
Your article on the Holy Land was read in the refectory and I thought it was the best piece of reporting you have done. I especially enjoyed the description of the Holy Sepulchre at night. Did you get any closer to the Abyssinians on the roof? Did you see the Greek monastery on the "Mountain of the Temptation"--is it still there? Did you run into anything connected with this Charbel Makhlouf in Syria? I have a piece of wood from Charles de Foucauld's hermitage in Nazareth and I am getting ready to plant it secretly in the forest here, in the hope that a small hermitage will spring up after the rains in April.
Actually, what I am going to do, beginning next week, is to go out to the forest with a crew of novices every day, planting some twelve thousand pine seedlings where we have been cutting a lot of timber. That, I think, is going to be very pleasant.
About apophatic--although it is not in the OED it does crop up in English, though in translations of French books like Mgr. Journet's Dark Knowledge of God. That word has, however, caused more trouble than almost anything else in the Ascent.
God bless you always and all your family. I keep you occasionally in my Mass.
To Paul A. Doyle
Paul A. Doyle wrote Merton requesting "information, reminiscenses, impressions, etc." related to Evelyn Waugh's visit to the Abbey of Gethsemani in 1948. Doyle was one of a group of college teachers working on the Evelyn Waugh Newsletter.
June 5, 1968
As regards the dates of Waugh's visit here (one only, in my time at least), I cannot check. I have a vague recollection that one of the days was a Sunday. Maybe that might help. I remember him telling a lot of funny stories about Arnold Lunn--he was out on the town with Lunn and played a lot of tricks on him, taking him to his (own) Club and saying in a loud voice in the lobby: "Everyone knows that the Lunns are Jews." Most of the stories are probably well-known. Told me one too of when he was in the army, in the officers' mess, drunk, spilled his drink on a commanding officer's lap, the latter told him he ought to stop drinking, to which Waugh replied: "I'm not going to renounce the habit of a lifetime to suit your personal convenience." I guess this is well-known too. He told me that he thought I would like Cambridge better if I were there now. Seemed to have a great respect for the Catholics at Cambridge (I have since got mail from them, maybe he got me on the list). He talked about liking J. F. Powers' stories--that was the first I heard of Powers. Later read him and met him. Waugh, in speaking of poetry and Tennyson, mentioned a friend of mine at Cambridge, Julian Tennyson, the greatgrandson of the poet. Julian was then reading poetry in English pubs. Waugh seemed to think this a good idea. We talked a bit about the Tennysons. Also about Gloucestershire, the Cotswolds, I think Prinknash Abbey also. One thing that had especially amused him in The Seven Storey Mountain was the bit about the monks out in the woods chopping trees and saying "All for Jesus" at each blow of the ax. He gave an energetic imitation of what he thought this was like.
He wrote a short foreword to the English edition of Waters of Siloe, which he also edited. He took out quite a lot, including the prologue to the American edition, which he said was "bad art." He sent me several books, including Ward Fowler's Modern English Usage to improve my own style, The Loved One which I thought was great, Brideshead Revisited, Helena, and later one of the war trilogy. Also at least Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter, perhaps also others. He also sent Knox's Enthusiasm, which he thought very good. He told me a story of Knox saying: "It seems I am the only person in the world who has not yet read The Seven Storey Mountain."
As to letters, I have none here, but those I received I think I passed on to Sister Thérèse for her collection of my mss. She is at 3516 WestCenter Street, Milwaukee, and could probably inform you or send copies of what she has. I have no objection to your using them.
I think that's everything. I never lost my great admiration of Waugh as a creative writer, though I certainly disagreed with much of his conservatism after the Council. But I think I understand why he felt that way--especially about Latin, etc. He would.
Copyright © 1993 by The Merton Legacy Trust
