The Road to Joy

The Road to Joy




I.
To Mark Van Doren




You are certainly one of the joys of life for all who have ever come within a mile of you.
MERTON TO VAN DOREN JUNE 6, 1959


Mark Van Doren (1894-1972), as Merton wrote in Monks Pond, "needs no introduction. He is one of the major American poets of the century." A professor of English at Columbia College from 1920 to 1959, he was Merton's teacher and figured largely in The Seven Storey Mountain. In 1939 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. They corresponded until Merton's death in 1968. Van Doren exerted great infiuence on Merton's writing and publishing, first in teaching and later in promoting his first published book, Thirty Poems (1944). Van Doren selected the poems, persuaded James Laughlin at New Directions to publish them, and signed the contract for Merton. He later selected and wrote an introduction for Merton's Selected Poems (1959). Merton had known Van Doren's wife, Dorothy (Graffe) Van Doren, and his sons, Charles and John, before he entered Gethsemani. Mark and Dorothy Van Doren, to whom Merton dedicated The Strange Islands, visited Merton at Gethsemani in March 1954 and September 1957. Van Doren also lunched alone with Merton in Louisville in June 1956 and visited him at the Abbey in December 1961. The Van Doren side of their correspondence may be consulted in The Selected Letters of Mark Van Doren, edited by George Hendrick (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987). The first four letters that follow were written to Van Doren from Greenwich Village.


35 Perry Street, New York March 24, 1939
Well here is this Joyceish thing. It is a dialogue between a master & pupil. What is not clear is that the pupil is asking the questions of the master, replying, teaches him myths. In the end the master berates himfor not knowing the difference between art & idolatry--just briefly that is.
I would like to make quite a long thing, starting from this, & going on, maybe as a masque.
March 30, 1939
Surprised Mr ffinDaruian,
and daylighted for your brief letture right in these stole of James' Joys. That glose so fain "Can Grande Latians" grace is! (Gracious!) And so to thank these pencils draw to a close.
Now were to unweight the agurbite of bitterbeer and "Herbies" shall be roarly down in black & wit: but black for line, not (just my gist has) art. And O'Neill as right I did a chief the art-heckle of Rickard Huge ["The Art of Richard Hughes"], and so far wall
Those Mervin
Pastcrit: An M. A. Theseus!
August 18, 1939
Thanks for your letter. No, I hadn't known about the mermaids with fishes heads! People who won't allow Dali to use his good idea deserve to go flat broke, I say [the Dali Exhibit at the 1939 World's Fair].
I went back up to Olean after writing to you & stayed another month & a half. Did I tell you I was writing a novel? Anyway I finished it. 160,000 words. Weighs five & a half pounds. These are about the only things I can say about it that are not completely misleading.
I sent it to Farrar & Rinehart because I heard Farrar was a friendly guy and I saw a picture of him in which he looked as if he had some humor. There again it would be misleading to say the novel is in any ordinary sense funny. And by the way I'm glad you saw that other short novel & told me it was no good because in this (even though it was entirely different to begin with) I tried to keep as far as possible away from the tone of "Marion & Winona", as well as all the private language of [Bob] Lax's & my Jester & so on.
The novel is called The Night Before the Battle but I would not be prepared to defend that title with my life. Its basis is intellectual autobiography. It goes from 1929 to the present year. Of course a lot of it has to do with my going into the church. If I were to be writing the advertising blurb I would say it was about what the generation born during the war has been worrying about & a lot of tra-la-la like that. I just mean that the jacket blurb might safely bait a hook for suckers with this inferior meat, but that is certainly not what I was trying to write or what I wrote. On this foundation is built a novel about a lot of fictional characters & a complex business with no little parody & burlesque in it. I don't know how to start explaining how it goes.
But one character has four love affairs which all burlesque one another, because they all have a similar pattern. A whole lot of things happenin the book & it reads fast I think & everyone who has seen it has liked it fine.
I judge from a note from Farrar that he is himself reading it, but don't know if that means much or even if it is true. To be clear: I sent him a letter giving a vague idea what the book was & got a letter back saying "I look forward to reading it." He has had it about a week. I don't know how it will turn out at all, but I am sure it is a good book, although I will want to rewrite parts of it.
It is not without commercial appeal since it is about English schools & Cambridge & Paris & Cannes & Rome & New York & every place I ever went to, practically, &, as I say, a lot of things happen in it.
By the way, you are in it, I hope you don't mind: that is your Shakespeare class is talked about & I say some things I learned from you, & say I am glad I learned them from you. Is that all right? It all has to do with poetry. By the way, I invented a great fool in the book & made him one of the editors of The New Yorker.
The Dali poem came back from Harpers Bazaar with one of their most flattering rejection slips. This time they were more than sorry, they were "exceedingly sorry" to send back one of my poems. I didn't even try The New Yorker. Now Southern Review has it, along with some others.
[James] Laughlin sent the pastoral back & didn't even say anything about it. I haven't done any more work on it since I have been too busy on the novel.
John Crowe Ransom sent a friendly letter back saying he couldn't use that old Washaw article & this completes this summer's rejections. I think it's about time somebody took something of mine, & I hope it will be the novel! But, as I say, I never sent a novel to a publisher before, & I don't know what to expect. Maybe I was silly to send it to Farrar, because they only seem to publish Anthony Adverse & Mary Roberts Rinehart.
I had a fine summer: now it is hot here, though; but I am finding out a lot of good things. One is that I can read Provencal fairly easily, & I have been finding out Provencal poetry is just as fine as they all say! A lot of it is amazingly fine religious poetry. And where the Latin poetry of the same time is all naive, more or less, this stuff is of much more stature. The sound of the language itself is wonderful,--adjectives & participles ending in -etz & -atz. Take this:
Senher Sant John Baptista Que fust per Dieu marturiatz La tieu testa fou requista El tieu sane fou escaupatz


(Lord St. John the Baptist Who was martyred for God They claimed your head They shed your blood ...)
Some endings for lines! Some beat, too. The way I found out I could read Provencal was from the lines about Arnaut Daniel in the Purgatory of Daniel.
October 24, 1939
... They gave me a teaching job in extension: composition at night for business folk. It is quite dull and harder than I had expected to find it: much harder. But anyway I have got them so that they all like Thurber, except one brute who thinks it's monotonous to laugh so much as Thurber makes you laugh. I keep telling them if they want to write, why don't they first read something besides Time magazine and second do a little writing at least.
I guess they are all very willing, and some of them write a lot of extra things and bring them too. What I mean by that is, they write a lot of essays about real estate, for practice sake: but that's all right. I don't mind that at all.
I was scared I wouldn't have enough to say in my classes, and would find myself stuck after the first fifteen minutes, trying to think up ideas to talk about: but that isn't so, rather, I talk so much that I really never get around to actually discussing their themes in class.
I was in Olean all summer, and wrote a novel: I suppose I told you. Well, Farrar and Rinehart kept the novel a long time, but not so much because they were interested in it as because the reader kept getting colds or something. They gave it back saying they didn't quite follow it, and why did the plot have to be so complicated? On the other hand, they did say it was dull, and I was afraid it might be that to someone besides friends. I sent the pastoral to Southern Review, but I don't know what they have been doing. I think they lost five of my poems, too, in August. On the other hand I am not caring so much about not getting published, because I am less convinced that what I have been writing is any good.
Did you ever get to see all the good pictures in the Old Masters exhibit at the fair? Coming back to New York I found they had done a fine job of messing up Dali's dream of Venus with a lot of rubber turtles the publicity agent thought up out of his hollow head. Also they finally came around to putting mermaid pants on the mermaids, which made them very awkward and silly, swimming about unhappily with their feet tied together in a sack made to look like a fish's tail made out of a sack. The whole amusement area has been pretty sick, I suppose, ever since the first week, but then parts of it were surprisingly good. Nobody believes that any more. [Bob] Lax came to New York for a minute, but he was only here long enough to refuse a job writing a kids' poetry program for the radio. Now he is back in Olean.
I am not paying any attention to my dissertation now. In fact I am more interested in medieval Latin courses and medieval philosophy courses than in English courses, which I have not gone to much yet. I maystart finding out a lot about the language of analogy in Bonaventure and Hugo of St. Victor and write some paper explaining that you can't make a literal statement about anything that is worth while talking about ...


During his visit to Cuba in the spring of 1940, Merton wrote a poem called "Song for Our Lady of Cobre," which he sent Van Doren with the following note.


Santiago, Cuba
Here is a poem I wrote. Cobre is a place in the mountains of Cuba near Santiago & the Virgin of Cobre is miraculous. I am in Santiago now, it is a fine place with a fine harbor a lot of mountains around it but very hot so tomorrow I expect to start back to Havana.
When I get back to America I hope to go into a monastery to be a Franciscan. Back in October & November some angels told me it would be a good thing. My novitiate begins in August. Will you be in Connecticut in May, June or July & if so may I come up and see you? I suppose I will run out of money & come back to America in about 2 weeks.


Olean, New York June 16, 1940
You see I am back here living in [Bob] Lax's hut. I got back from Cuba a month or so ago. It was fine there, it is fine here. I wrote some stuff called a travel book there and I am not bothering to write anything here, as there is no necessity for me to write anything just now. Everybody else here is writing a lot though and I think Lax's big page of masque for his girl was the best thing they ever printed in New Yorker: I never knew they were so smart.
You remember about that Joyce pastoral of mine? Well some little crazy magazine in Woodstock is going to print it, and I am happy that it is going to be printed, even if only by this little magazine I've never even heard of. The way they got hold of it is, I figured Phoenix might be the sort of magazine would think my pastoral was just the thing for their crazy pages, so I sent it to Phoenix, and Phoenix gave it to the fellow next door who has a magazine called Ritual which says it is "devoted to the revelations of idiocy and insanity, both simulated and pathological" which is their way of being funny. But I don't care; as long as they are going to print this pastoral I am glad.
Lax said you were surprised a little that I was leaving the world and that surprised me a bit, too, as I hadn't thought of it in negative terms, but only that I was going to become a Franciscan. If it comes to that, a fellow is supposed to leave the world as soon as he is baptized: that is part of the baptismal vows, but then of course I will take the added vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience giving up all the world has to offer of property, wives and personal independence. But on the other hand a Friar is perhaps in the world more than I have ever been in the sensethat he leads a more active life than I have ever led, what with preaching and teaching and hearing confessions and possibly in my own case writing if I am told to write anything. But of course I will have an opportunity to lead a more contemplative life also than I have ever led, by reason of being part of a religious community and because of those same three vows which take away a false kind of freedom and replace it with a real one.
I will begin my novitiate early in August. I am not only doing this because it is the easiest way of saving my soul, but because that is the kind of life that seems to me to be the best, because a priest's way of life is supposed to be patterned more closely than any other on Christ's own life. To be a priest does not mean that you are necessarily perfect but that you are solemnly bound to a manner of life in which you observe all those things pertaining to perfection.
Meanwhile I sit in the sun and look at the trees and wear a white tennis hat and wait for it to be August. I haven't even been reading anything much except a few snatches of The City of God and the Vulgate and Lorca's poetry. But anyway, that reminds me, I did write a couple of poems this month. I send them, along with a couple of others, and along with my best regards to your whole family.


Olean, N.Y. August 25, 1940
It turns out I had to give up my plans about the monastery: my mind was changed for me, not by me. If I had gone in I would now be busy with the things novices are busy with and not letters. As it is I have been writing a lot of things, another novel, poetry. I don't think, though, I have enough good things to give to Laughlin III. Here is some for you to look at, I mean for your pleasure, not for business thoughts, unless they happen to be the only thoughts possible about such poems.
I am still in [Bob] Lax's house. I was in Virginia for a while and Virginia is very different from this. It is a fierce sort of a place and sometimes I like it a lot. What I am doing now is hunting for a place to work, teaching English. I thought for two seconds of asking you if you thought it would be worth while my trying to get something at St. John's, but I don't ask you that at all, because I think it is perhaps the last place in the world I ought to be at, after Columbia. I don't want to go back to Columbia because I am tired of the place, and I would be scared of St. John's because I'm not smart enough, or don't think I would feel smart enough, if I am, to teach there. Then again I am scared of getting into a round of 'unusual' places and spending my life shuttling between St. John's and Bennington and other places that get written up in Life. My instinct now is to be teaching all the guys at Notre Dame, and taking my chance with the fellows who never heard of a book, because I think I would like to tell them about books and everything else important, than talk aboutDonne to people who had already gathered three opinions about him from the Sunday book reviews.
Anyway, what I am doing is asking the Catholic colleges for jobs and no one else. They seem to know exactly what I mean by a job: a place to eat and sleep and a typewriter to write on and a couple of classes to talk in and whatever money they can spare for the movies, and not much talk of seething ambition. But I don't know where I'll end up, except I am confident one of them at least will take me in.
My old novel is with an agent [Naomi Burton] who likes it. Pretty soon it will have been to every publisher in the world, and then my new one will be finished, and so on until they put an ersatz rifle in my hand and send me to sleep on the ground at Plattsburg some hard winter, waiting for them to order me a tent.
Thank you for naming my name to New Directions. I wish I liked enough poems to send them, but maybe by Christmas I'll have some more. As to the [Joyce] Pastoral that was to have come out in June, I guess the little fellows in Woodstock broke their mimeograph and lost their stencils, because I haven't seen anything of it ...


St. Bonaventure, New York January 28, 1941
... I have just corrected eighty-six English exams in one of which I read: "Chaucer's ABC was a dirty character in one of the Canterbury Tales." There is a lot of snow here, and it is mostly very nice. I am not bothering to go further than Olean between terms because I have a lot of good things to do here. I have been reading St. Anselm's Proslogion, and St. Bonaventure's Itinerarium with this Franciscan philosopher from Germany, and I am finding out all sorts of good things about scholastic philosophy, and, incidentally, learning to be critical of St. Thomas, which is a good thing for a Catholic to be, I find--and a rare one.
The novel course has not yet started but it should be fun.
[Bob] Lax, I suppose you know, has a job on The New Yorker, which could be a very good thing. Anyway that is the sort of job he wants, not because it is on The New Yorker, but because it leaves him free a lot of the time, and that is the most important thing.
He only just got the job, and so I haven't heard from him about it. His relatives told me. Another thing that has been keeping me busy is making speeches on the radio, some against our trying to fight the Germans by butting them with our hard heads (since big thick skulls seem to be all we have to use) and some about "Literature and Life" i.e. anything that comes into my head. They have been mostly about the Middle Ages.
I said I rewrote the novel. Well, more than that I don't know myself, except I got a very friendly letter from the Little Brown people (sounds like a race of rabbits) saying they had heard the book was changed and would be happy to read it over again. That was their idea. I did not writeto taunt them, or anything. Of course the agent was the one who told them I had rewritten the thing.
I was very sad that Joyce died, and I hope he gets to heaven. His death was the same kind of news as that of the fall of Paris, to me.
I have been wondering if there ever was such a thing as a great novel, a Hamlet among novels. Of course there must be: perhaps in Russian or French. The nearest bet in English is Ulysses. Everything else is good healthy amateur amusement, and nothing more.


[St. Bonaventure, New York Lent 1941]
Thanks for the letter, I was happy you liked the poem. Some time ago I became a Franciscan Tertiary, which is an order for people in the world (Dante was one), and a good thing because it has a rule of prayer and relative penance etc. that has made many saints. Well anyway I have been writing a great rush of poems ever since, some good some bad, but nothing I am terribly ashamed of and some that I am happy about.
Most of them have gone to this bird Charles Henri Ford who just happened to write and say he had seen a song from the Joyce Pastoral (as much as has so far been printed by the crazy magazine in Woodstock) and liked it and wanted some of my stuff for an anthology of what he called "View" poets for a Press of one James Decker. I don't know what "view" poets are, or who Decker is, or anything about Ford except he is in New Directions anthologies, which I have never read at all anyway. But I sent him a lot of these new poems.
As for most of those you have seen, Southern Review has had them for at least five months. What does one do in a case like that? Do they get sore if you ask for them back, I mean does that finally decide them one way or the other, concerning the poems? Is that all they are waiting for to refuse them?
I have spent most of this evening writing out my reasons to tell the draft board why I don't want to shoot people. It took me some time to make up my mind to object, but about a month or six weeks ago I finally came around to this way of thinking: there is no doubt that I can't see killing people with flame throwers as any form of Christian perfection. If the law just said flatly that everybody had to fight, I would have to go, because that's what Catholics have to do. But if the law asks you to express the reactions of your own conscience to this business, I certainly would be wrong in not saying what I believe, and trying to get out of combatant service. I have made it very clear, then, that I think Christians are supposed to try and imitate Christ, who didn't kill people but healed the sick and told Peter to put down his sword, in Gethsemane. There have been saints who were soldiers and saints who were killed for being pacifists, so there is no absolute position on war one way or the other, except the war has to be "just", as if anybody knew! My aim is to get put inambulance or hospital work if there is a war, and if there isn't I'd just as soon stay a poet, thanks, and not sour my happy disposition in Fort Jiggs.
They sent me my questionnaire, and it got here Feb. 28th and was due there Feb. 28th. I am not supposed to send my objections with the q. but put a mark in the right place and then they will send me a blank to fill in. I have written a whole little pamphlet already, and by the time the blank gets here I will probably have four chapters of a monumental book. The other day, though, I heard [Bob] Gibney had put in a kick and they had exempted him, whether altogether or just from combatant duty I don't know. He said they complimented him on his knowledge of French, Spanish and Italian, also. I can't figure out what part of the blank he slipped that information into. I got it wedged in where it said "What past jobs have you had" and I said "interpreter, French etc, etc". My friend the Franciscan philosopher has read my reasons and found no holes in them except he laughed a lot at the quotations from St. Thomas Aquinas. I suppose he's the wrong one to consult, seeing he's a German and had the G-men trailing him around all summer: for he is a botanist, and spends a lot of time poking around in abandoned parts of the woods and marshes with cameras, compasses, magnifying glasses and all kinds of suspicious objects, like books ...
There is a story floating around Olean that Lax received one thousand manuscripts for The New Yorker, of which he only passed on, to the next man, ten. If that is true, he certainly threw out all the ones the guys on the board would have been interested in, and wanted to print. What would they want with those ten good poems? I haven't been reading The New Yorker, but only because it's Lent. Secretly I am convinced that it is the only good magazine in New York anyway, but still, I've been in the habit of complaining about it for six years.
The novel is going the rounds and I am sure I don't know what's happening to it. I have discovered that the agent [Naomi Burton] doesn't really like the second one, but is sending it around out of respect for the first one, which in turn is completely non-commercial, according to the man at Little Brown: except he's at the Atlantic Monthly. Also the agent says the second ms. isn't changed enough to go back to Atl. Monthly.
I think of going before Easter to a great Trappist monastery in Kentucky and making a retreat. It is apparently a wonderful place; after that I will be in New York, the week after Easter, and will probably call you up ...
St. Bonaventure, New York November 10, 1941
This is the carbon of a book [Journal of My Escape] I am trying to sell--that same agent is working on it. I thought you might enjoy it, and that is why I am sending it to you. You will see right away why I am having trouble selling it: it contains some Joyce talk, here and there andonly has a mock plot. I am afraid the first part is incomplete: it begins at the beginning, and then there are gaps. But from the time Madame Gongora sings the song in Spanish, it goes on straight through, complete. You will be perplexed about the character B. because some stuff on her is lacking, but it doesn't matter. The book is confusing anyway, except as a Journal, which is what it is.
If you like it, perhaps you might have some ideas about what I might be able to do with it. It has been, as far as I know, to Harcourt Brace, where [Robert] Giroux, who is undoubtedly the best friend the book is likely to meet among publishers, regretted that it was not commercial.
I have given up trying to figure out what "commercial" means, and simply write what I write.
Here it snows, and I work, but hope to come to New York for Thanksgiving. I was here all summer except for a month or so, during which time I got up an anthology of poems of religious experience, from metaphysical poets, Hopkins, Blake, etc. etc. and it makes a rather unusual book, because it is more selective than the other anthologies of religious verse I have seen. I don't know very well how to go about getting rid of this either: tentatively I am sending it to the man at Atlantic Monthly books in Boston who seemed slightly interested: that is, at least he didn't give a flat "No" as soon as I mentioned the idea.
I sent [James] Laughlin some poems which I thought good, and he seemed to like them, but then he decided to make his anthology a Russian anthology this year and I was forced out by the Soviets and the Commissars. I believe I am the most unpublished man in seven kingdoms.
Now that The New Yorker finally did buy one of my poems, they have put it away in a drawer without printing it. They took it in May, and it is a summer poem, and now it is winter ...
Are you going to be in New York between November 20 and 23? I hope I can get a chance to see you then. If not, perhaps you might turn over the Journal to Lax at The New Yorker, or at his place on 114th St--he is easily contacted (wow! where did that word come from?) anyway, and he wants to pass the thing on to a friend of ours, with the idea that this man (a very funny actor) might make the book into something for radio without too much changing around.
Anyway, I hope I get a chance to see you.


St. Bonaventure, New York November 14, 1941
Thank you for the letter, & I am very happy you liked the Journal, & want to send it to [William] Sloane. I think it would be better for the book if you showed it to him, don't you? After all, he may not know my agent very well. And he can always talk business with her if it comes to talking business: meanwhile I would be happy if you would pass on the copy you have to him. In the complete copy there are another 35 pagesor so, all of which are very straightforward & perhaps the most "commercial" writing in the book. Perhaps he would want to know this, & that Miss [Naomi] Burton at Curtis Brown (347 Madison) has it. I will write to her at once & tell her I have asked you to show Sloane this carbon.
I will look forward to seeing you Friday or Saturday of next week. I leave here Wednesday, says our schedule; & am eager to talk about the Journal & everything else. I am really very happy you like it, because I like it a lot too & it makes me sad to think the average publisher doesn't.


St. Bonaventure N.Y. November 28, 1941
Thanks very much for sending [William] Sloane's opinion on the Journal. I was rather pleased that he said it was, in its psychology, old fashioned, although that was not meant as any compliment. There were a couple of things that will probably continue to grieve me as long as I try to sell the Ms. The first was that he insisted on taking it as a novel and being surprised that it was 'like poetry.' The second was that nobody seems ready to publish anything that is 'merely good writing.'
So perhaps the only thing is to try New Directions with it. What do you think?
Meanwhile, if you have the carbon (you speak as if you did) of the Journal, will you hand it over to [Bob] Lax? As for News, perhaps I will change my mind and ask you to send it back to me, express collect, if it is not too much trouble. Then I will type out some more of the stuff which is all in longhand in a ledger, and add to this.
Perhaps all I can say is that nothing surprises me less than to have something I have written, which I myself like, rejected. So I enclose a poem, which I hope you will like.
Apart from this, writing is not what I think about most at this moment. There is still this very big open question about what I am to do. When I first started teaching, I tried to convince myself there was no more question: but that didn't work. Then I tried to act as if what question there was was only some kind of a temptation--a temptation to desire something you haven't got merely because you haven't got it and not because you really need it. That has eventually worked itself out to be wrong, too.
Probably everybody who reads the New Testament is curious about stories like that of the rich young man who asked what he should do and, when he was told, turned away sad "for he had great possessions." I clearly remember the polite and academic interest I used to take in such a story. And I can compare it with what the story means to me now: it half kills me to read it. I can't think about it and sit still.
And I am not absolutely sure, either, that Harlem answers the question for me: so much of the work in Harlem seems to me to be, from thepoint of view of whatever it is I want, so much wasted effort: standing around for several hours just so that your presence may keep order among some children playing ping-pong, or maybe arguing about how to mimeograph something or other, with a couple of girls from some college, doing social work. It isn't the spending of time in doing nothing apparently important (because simply watching over a bunch of kids is also immensely good and important) that seems fruitless--none of this, in itself, is fruitless at all. But it all seems ordered in some scheme of references that would be more significant to somebody else than to me: and the same standing around, the same apparently wasted time, could be very fruitful for me in some other context. In other words, I have to seriously consider whether my vocation is not contemplative rather than active. I hope you will say a prayer for me--and let me know if you have any good ideas!


St. Bonaventure December 9, 1941
Many thanks for the letter, which I am in too much of a hurry to answer now. I am sending these [manuscripts] not only for you to look at when you feel like it, but principally for you to hold for me until you next hear from me, when I hope to explain more than I can now. The miscellaneous stuff in the binder represents fragments of a novel, items collected for an anthology, and practically all of my poems, with that pastoral, you remember. [Bob] Lax has another binder full of more miscellaneous stuff you might have fun reading sometime--although I am really not trying to promise you anything. Rather I am asking you to do me the favor of keeping these for me, for a while.


On St. Lucy's Day, December 13, 1941, Merton sent his first circular letter, a poem, "Letter to My Friends / Explaining that I am entering the Trappists in Kentucky." He penned the following note at the bottom of the poem sent to Van Doren.


I have been tentatively accepted & will enter the community within the next few days. I still don't know what, about all those books I sent you, but will let you know soon. Possibly I might ask you to send the handwritten notebooks down sometime--& the poems. As to Journal of My Escape from the Nazis, & all rights connected with it--I make you a present of it. Pray for me.


April 14, 1942
We are allowed to write letters very seldom, but I got special permission to send you some of my poems. I have been writing here. Also, I enclose a page or two of a Journal I have been keeping: it is completely to do with religious experience--& so are the poems, & so is my life, naturally.
And what a life! It is tremendous. Not because of any acts we perform, any penance, any single feature of the liturgy or the chant, not because we sleep on boards & straw mattresses & fast & work & sweat & sing & keep silence. These things are all utterly simple acts that have no importance whatever in themselves. But the whole unity of the life is tremendous. That is because the life is a real unity, because the foundation of its unity is God's unity: the ontological basis of our life is the simplicity & the purity of God. His simplicity is our life. We live His oneness: we live His singleness of concentration on His own immense purity and goodness. No wonder it is wonderful. The life is God: it is Christ, in the sense that Christ is the principle & end of absolutely everything that a Trappist does, right down to breathing. Really, I have only one reason for living at all and that is the love, the glory, the good pleasure of Christ. Therefore, since this is the sort of thing men were created to do (not necessarily all as Trappists, of course) I am very happy. I never was really unhappy in my life except perhaps for a while when I was most mixed up--the year I was registered at Columbia but hardly ever came to school, although I was supposed to be doing everything there was to do on campus besides classes too.
Now I am here, it already seems quite clear how the whole of my life until I came here is at last intelligible. All that chaos, France & England & everywhere else I lived, straightens itself out & points to our cloister & our fields ...
Here the silence does away with almost all the troubles arising from people being bores or cranks or political guys, or joke lovers or whatever you get to drive you crazy where people live together.
It is wonderful to see a postulant arrive--just an average guy in a suit you might see on the subway or in an office or at Columbia, maybe a little preoccupied, or on some kind of a defensive--& watch him turn into a splendid, happy, holy, gentle, self-possessed monk in a very short time. That is, outwardly. Underneath a lot still goes on: but in peace & not in a chaos of dilemmas, as it did in the world. The silence does this.
It is wonderful to live with people who are absolutely concentrated on being good & gentle & becoming saints. The Franciscans I know were all very embarrassed with the notion of sanctity. Only here and at Friendship House in Harlem have I found people who really wanted to be saints, and knew they could be, too, because God will make anyone live for Him who wants to, and when you live for love alone, you become filled with love, & that is to be a saint.
At the same time, I never loved God so much as now, & I never so clearly realized how much I am not a saint. Here in this peace I see so clearly the Iscariot in me, that the knowledge of the kind of baseness I could be capable of--& have been--would be terrible, & drive me to some sin of self-hatred or despair if I were not completely dependent on God as I am here. But He is all peace & all joy, & I have learned a verynecessary truth--that there isn't any evil to which I wouldn't be drawn, if I were without God altogether, but with Him, there is no good which I cannot do, if I let Him do it in me ...
Did my ex-agent [Naomi Burton] get in touch with you? I would be interested to hear if the Journal of My Escape (which I definitely make you a present of lock stock and barrel, since you liked it) aroused any interest at New Directions, or did it ever get there?
Also, if [James] Laughlin is not, like everybody else in the army, he might still want to do something with some poems. The poems are yours too. However, all rights over these I send belong to the monastery, as they were written here. Perhaps [Bob] Lax would like to see them. I haven't a chance to write to him now--we have to get special permission to write to any but our own relatives.
I would be interested & glad to hear from you when you get time. I have forgotten what New York must be like & don't want to remember, but hope everybody I know is all right, & happy. I pray for everybody. We don't pray for ourselves very much. We live for God & for the world--to live for God's glory we have to desire that others shall come to Him & glorify Him more & more as well as ourselves. So I desire that for you, too, & your family & Lax & everybody, & may God bless you & fill you with joy & peace & give you eternal life. How good it is to be a monk, & therefore in a position where I can say such things straight, officially, & without apology or disguising or excuses!


May 12, 1943
Let these poems serve for news of my religious life. My only activity is to remain motionless (as to the will: the body may be breaking rock with a sledge hammer) attentive to God. Any movement that interferes with this motionlessly simple & perfect act instantly causes the torments of purgatory: consequently it is hard for me to write anything, except it be something commanded by the superior (I translate pages & pages of French without a qualm). Excuse the pencil. I am waiting to get shaved (We don't shave ourselves. No mirrors thank God).
What I am writing for is this. Will you please send, express collect, the typescript of The News etc.? The Abbot wants to consider whether it would be of any use here. He is also showing the poems I have here to someone, but I don't know what will come of it. I find it painful to write poems too--but not so painful. Besides: if I had tried not to write these it would have killed me dead. Will you please pass them on to [Bob] Lax? Last I heard of him he was at Olean--that will always reach him.
Please pray for me: my purgatory is very excellent, but also very fierce in its joys & terrors. God does not always let you be motionless--(but it is always my own fault). Pray for yourself too & for peace. And that we may all love God very much. My regards to all your family.
Merton wrote to Van Doren about a projected volume of poetry to be published by New Directions. The volume, Thirty Poems, published in 1944, was Merton's first book and the beginning of a long association with James Laughlin. Van Doren selected the poems and signed the contract on Merton's behalf.


February 22, 1944
Tomorrow it will be Lent & I won't be able to write any letters so I am writing this in haste now. I do not yet know if the poems are approved, but I assume they will be, & am giving this to the Abbot so that if they are approved he can simply drop this in the mail. Consequently, if you receive this, it means that everything you have of mine, plus this one I enclose, is all right, & may be published. Nothing I wrote before coming here needs censorship (except maybe parts of "News" which isn't worth publishing yet--or ever--anyway) ...


April 16, 1944
Day by day in this monastery I realize more & more how far I have failed to show gratitude to all the people who have been kind to me--& realize also how inadequate my thanks really are! Not the least of these good friends is yourself. A series of cryptic messages from [Bob] Lax tells me that [James] Laughlin has taken the poems and is printing them. So I thank you--and the poems thank you. And if my thanks are, as they are, far short of adequate, let me add that Jesus said that anyone who gave a cup of cold water to one of His little ones would not be without his reward. And that you have done this good thing for the poems--which are Christ's poems & not mine, in so far as there is any good in them--you have begun to have your reward. "Love is repaid by love alone" says St. John of the Cross. So what can I give you by way of thanks? I offer you your own charity, which is in you from Christ, through the Holy Spirit--and which is, in so far as it is of & from Him--my charity also, & everybody's charity, & is the same infinite & simple & eternal act of Love, in Whom we are all one, uttering Himself in one of His multitudinous utterances in time. For every good work we do speaks the Name of Christ, in Whom is all Truth, Love & Reality, & Who is the actuality of everything that is ...
I can bless you now as a monk, for I have made profession, & my novitiate is over, I am a Cistercian monk, I have a cowl. This cowl--I wear it, or rather I dwell in it. It is the most beautiful of garments. It is like the cloud that protected the children of Israel in the desert. It is as voluminous as a house. It hides & embraces my mortality like the Immortal Soul of Christ, & is the symbol of His humanity, in which I live, & for which I live: which is also, the "Whole Christ--the Head & the Members"--the Church.
If I could only say how dead I was and how alive I am. Only our Easter liturgy can say it for me. Someday I hope you will come & visit us. Our house is full of love & peace ...


December 26, 1944
Since we cannot write during Advent this is my first chance to thank you for the Thirty Poems. I never saw anything so well done, I think. Also you did a fine job of selecting: I was very glad the Lorca poem got in & "St. Agnes" too & the one about the Greek acropoli, & "Our Lady of Cobre" & "Ariadne at the L[abyrinth]." I was pleased to see "Evening" & "Death" fitting in, although I had not thought of them, as I remember.
Best of all--I looked at one poem (I forget which & had no copy at hand to look) & was surprised at one line being so much better than I remembered having written [it]--because of one word. It turned out there were a few more like this & I attribute the changes to you: they are all big improvements, & thank you very much.
I think Fr. Abbot [Frederic Dunne] is quite pleased with the book. Thank you for giving us the copyright, although there was no need for it, of course. But anyway, in a word, thank you for taking so much trouble: I can only pay you with prayers, but then I don't think I need say "only" to you, since you know what prayers are & what they do.
Bob [Lax] is here & I saw him for a moment yesterday. I think he is very happy & pretty much at peace but it does not sound as if this could be said of most of our friends like [Bob] Gibney etc ... .
I write a lot, all of it business for the monastery, lives of our saints, etc. Would like to write a book all about the Contemplative life, prayer, etc.--& have in mind for an anthology of things from the Liturgy (hymns, sequences etc.) Latin on one page & English on the other, like Helen Waddell only better material. Do you think New Directions might conceivably be interested? ...


On May 22, 1945, a group of friends and former students (including John Berryman and Robert Giroux) gave Van Doren a "surprise dinner" at the Algonquin Hotel in New York. Clifton Fadiman acted as master of ceremonies, dividing the program of tributes between speeches by those present and letters from those who could not attend. Van Doren says in The Autobiography of Mark Van Doren (Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1958): "Thomas Merton sent a letter from Gethsemani so long that [Fadiman] could not read it all." He quotes one of the letter's paragraphs, which follows.


This is not the time for me to be writing a spiritual autobiography; but in 1935 it was an especially good thing that I came in contact with you ... With you it was never a matter of trying to use poetry and all thatis called English literature as a means to make people admire your gifts; on the contrary you always used your gifts to make people admire and understand poetry and good writing and truth.


July 20, 1945
Here are some more [poems]. The others are not yet censored. One censor in Rhode Island is very busy & very slow. These have not even begun the process. We do not need to wait if you think it opportune to approach [James] Laughlin (or anyone else) with the idea of another book. With these, there should be twenty or twenty-five imprinted Gethsemani poems, and besides there remains another (I hope) twenty written before I came here. Since these new ones are longer, they would all make a regular book. Or what do you think? If Laughlin is interested, send me the ms. you have & I will get the whole business together, but don't go to the bother of sending anything down here until there is something definite. Did you ever hear from [Raymond] Larsson? I did not. I was thinking of some of the pre-Gethsemani things like "Oracle", "House of Caiphas"--"Dirge for Town in France," etc. Any chance of interesting Laughlin in Journal of My Escape from Nazis--did he ever see it? I began work on the liturgical book but had to drop it again, being extremely busy. Hope I am not breaking in on your vacation. I mean spoiling it--with this business! Glad at least half the war is over & praying hard the other will be soon. I hope your airman will be sent to Europe & kept there in some nice place like, say, Rome.


August 8, 1945
... If N[aomi] Burton asks again, try her perhaps on the Journal of My Escape from the Nazis. Anyway, thanks for everything, and I am praying hard to get rid of everything phoney and make the new book good. For a title I thought: "The Habit of Wonder." But now I don't know.


September 27, 1945
I thought to have sent all the poems long ago to [James] Laughlin but they are still held up by the censors--for no reason except they have no time. Right now I am very busy rewriting & doing footnotes on the lives of our saints, & feel as if I don't want to write poetry but rather history, on account of reasons like St. Augustine's. Because when you penetrate to the meaning of historical events & movements--like the growth of the Cistercian Order--you come in pretty intimate contact with God in his providential effects. So it is very interesting. I hope I am not too interested in it. Please tell Laughlin the poems are held up, if he asks.
November 7, 1945
... All those fat ms. books, longhand: if they are in your way, you could send them here as I now have a place to put them, and a mousetrap to catch the mice before they eat them.
On All Saints' day we went to fight a forest fire, which some brothers had been fighting since four that morning, so that it was well in hand, and it turned out to be more of a picnic for us. It was very far in our hills farther than I had ever been. We saw a man who ran away from the monastery twenty years ago and became a hermit. I thought he was a Negro, but he used to be some sort of a German. I don't think there was even a path to his house.
Tell Bob [Lax] I liked Bob Lowell's review of Thirty Poems and think he is right about most of his criticisms, but not about the poem called "The Regret". Also thank Bob for his letter and tell him I am bursting with great health, which is true.
I read much Duns Scotus, who when it comes to psychology, at any rate, fills in certain big gaps that leave you unsatisfied with St. Thomas. You would like very much John Ruysbroeck, "the admirable"--and if you see any extra copies floating around a bookstore, tell them to send them here, with a bill, and we will give them its weight in gold, as we have practically nothing.
Laughlin said you were tired or unwell. I hope you are refreshed and very well, and I pray for you to have all sorts of spiritual and temporal benefit.
Oh, please warn Laughlin about our not being able to get letters in Advent (Dec. ist about to Christmas) but if there is something urgent in the way of proof he would undoubtedly write "urgent" all over it, and seek to explain it to Fr. Abbot, and it would be, I think, okay.


September 19, 1946
Maybe by now the ms. of the Journal of Escape from the Nazis has got back to you. It went from [Raymond] Larsson to a publisher in Chicago who liked it a lot and wanted me to rewrite it. But I can't rewrite a thing like that here--where would I get the proper sort of ideas? I might make some small changes of style etc. Now Larsson still thinks it ought to get published as it is and he wants to see it some more, and write an article he says, about it and the poems and everything. For my own part, that is okay with me: but first, has [James] Laughlin ever seen it? I think he should see it before anything else is done, don't you? Therefore will you pass it on to him with my compliments and tell him that it is the nearest thing to the kind of autobiography I first promised to him last spring but that I am unable to do a complete recasting of it, even though that may be needed.
Incidentally, since I have never seen Larsson, how did he strike you, anyway? Or don't you remember? He claims he is the victim of anti-Catholicpersecutions and that somebody is writing him anonymous letters full of threats. Maybe--but I haven't heard of anybody else getting that kind of letter for that kind of reason outside of Alabama for a long time. But he seems like a good fellow by his letter, and he is certainly all in favor of the journal and the poems, and a fervent Catholic all right. I wish Lax or somebody knew him, because it might turn out after all that he really needed some help--which might for instance take the form of his getting out of N.Y. to somewhere like St. Bonaventure or here. I just remembered that when I was wondering what had happened to the ms. I thought of writing him somewhat to this effect: "What has become of you anyway? Are you dead?" It is just as well I didn't, I guess.
Incidentally, remember that this ms. is your property--or does that give you a headache? ...
I am just about finishing a straight autobiography called The Seven Storey Mountain--a title which is literally, physically accurate. I don't t suppose Laughlin would want such a book, although he seems to be asking for it ... It will run some seven hundred pages long ...


November 5, 1947
For a long time I have meant to write and haven't had the chance. I don't even know if I thanked you for your letter of sometime last year with comments on the poems I sent. I meant to do so because criticism is a most rare commodity here--above all good criticism and I want to show my appreciation of it so as to get more if possible. [James] Laughlin is bringing out another book [Figures for an Apocalypse] so I haven't much new and in fact I want to lie fallow for a bit--and try & get into some different rut, as I am thoroughly tired of the old one! The book will show plenty to be tired of, I am afraid.
It is such a long time since I wrote to you that I am in another age of the monastic life and definitely feel it, too. I made my solemn vows last March (and re-make them in my heart every day!) and am going on towards the priesthood which is about two years away. When I say I feel it--I mean this. I can see all the big responsibilities beginning to creep up on me: material offices and cares, jobs in the community etc. Just where I least expected it I can see that I will have to confront the problem of not becoming that middle aged professional man whose shadow I thought I was escaping.
I am tremendously busy with writing. Magazines are beginning to be after me and I have to do a lot of judicious refusing. I can only write for magazines on condition that I keep myself in one field & on one plane--and the nearer it is to mystical theology the better. My superiors have more or less let me go off on my own & make all my own decisions as far as writing is concerned with the one exception--they won't let me give it up.
What grows on me most is the desire for solitude--to vanish completelyand go off into some desert and never be heard of again--& pray, & keep still. Sometimes this desire is a temptation (whenever it takes some concrete form and presents itself with a map of Arizona in its hand) but otherwise it is a grace--and all I know about it is that I must have it undefined for the moment & that God will make the details & circumstances of it take shape in His own good time: and it probably won't be a desert but something better. My vows of course always allow me to look for something higher--if I can persuade Rome that it is higher.
Laughlin was down here and I liked him very much. He is helping us put out a booklet about the monastery which I shall send you. Harcourt Brace is bringing out the autobiography next Spring. It still needs a lot of cutting and incidentally I hope it is all right if you appear in it at any rate I refuse to allow you to refuse to appear in it.
You still have a standing invitation to Gethsemani ...


March 30, 1948
Easter gives me a chance to acknowledge your beautiful letter about Figures for an Apocalypse. Thank you very much for your kindness & deep understanding. In the year that has gone by since that essay ["Poetry and the Contemplative Life"] was written I have found out many things.
The problem is a fearful one in itself, and as it stands on paper--and in the abstract. But on the other hand God is God. I still hold to everything I said in the article about the nature of the problem itself but I am beginning to see everything in a strangely different light.
I can no longer see the ultimate meaning of a man's life in terms of either "being a poet" or "being a contemplative" or even in a certain sense in "being a saint" (although that is the only thing to be). It must be something much more immediate than that. I--and every other person in the world--must say: "I have my own special, peculiar destiny which no one else ever has had or ever will have. There exists for me a particular goal, a fulfillment which must be all my own--nobody else's--& it does not really identify that destiny to put it under some category--"poet," "monk," "hermit." Because my own individual destiny is a meeting, an encounter with God that He has destined for me alone. His glory in me will be to receive from me something He can never receive from anyone else--because it is a gift of His to me which He has never given to anyone else & never will. My whole life is only that--to establish that particular constant with God which is the one He has planned for my eternity!"
Once that contact is established--I feel it in my bones & it sets me on fire--the possibilities are without end. Unlimited fruitfulness, life, productivity, vision, peace. Yet I have no way of saying just what it will be. I don't think it will be merely writing & I don't think it will be anything I have ever yet known as contemplation & in fact I don't think it will be anything that anyone on earth can see or understand--especially myself.
In the light of all that it doesn't make so much sense any more to be planning to either renounce or to adopt whole "blocks" of activity--cutting out "all" writing or "going into solitude for good" (as I would like to)--the thing is to take a new line & let everything be determined by immediate circumstances that manifest God's will & His action here & now. No matter where it may seem to lead, because I don't really know anyway & I don't have to know provided that God is doing the leading ...


April 8, 1949
I write to you although it is Lent because my correspondence is now completely out of hand and I have to write when I can. The object of this letter is something that ought to be taken care of soon.
It is to invite you, officially, to come down here if you possibly can on the 16th of May when I hope to be ordained to the priesthood. The date is not absolutely certain, and I know it is not a good one for university people. Anyway, Bob Giroux said something about having spoken to you about it already. Do keep it in mind, and I will let everyone know definitely when the date is really settled. I am asking Bob Giroux and of course Bob Lax and [Ed] Rice and all of them who can come, and Jay Laughlin also. Jay has been down here a couple of times now.
Tomorrow is Palm Sunday. I am a deacon now and that gives me some special things to sing in the Easter Liturgy--a closer participation, materially and spiritually, in everything that is going on. It really does have a considerable effect on a person to take part in these things. I know the priesthood is going to be something tremendous. A kind of death, to begin with. But that is good. The whole business about Orders has been striking me as something much more important than religious vows. The question of sacramental character comes in, for one thing. Then you become public property. At the same time you are mystically more isolated in God. The combination is quite baffling.
Anyway, the priesthood will end up by giving me a completely social function. Perhaps that was what I was always trying to escape. Actually, having run into it at this end of the circle, it is making me what I was always meant to be and I am about to exist.
As soon as I put on the vestments of a subdeacon and stood in the sanctuary I was bowled over by the awareness that this was what I was always supposed to wear, and everything else, so far, had been something of a disguise.


Abbot James Fox had written at the bottom of Merton's letter: "May 26 is the definite day of fr. Louis ordination," and Van Doren recorded that he was unable to attend because he had to be present at Donald Keene's doctoral examination at Columbia.
[December 20, 1949]
I liked very much the poem on your card. Do you know we do not have any of your books here? And did Jay [Laughlin] send you my Tears of the Blind Lions? ...


April 7, 1953
It was wonderful to get the letter and the book [Spring Birth and Other Poems], which both arrived long enough before Lent for me to have answered them long ago, if I had not been busy. I know you understand what "busy" means, because I think I am closer to people working in the woods than I would be writing them letters. But now that Easter has come I can at least tell you how happy the letter made me. It made the writing of [The Sign of ] Jonas seem completely justified. I had a little trouble with the book within the Order, and it does not appear that I will be writing another one like it quite soon. But that does not matter very much and I do not regard it as strange that Trappists should be surprised that a Trappist should publish a journal! Spring Birth is wonderful. I still think I like the sonnets best of all--I saw them before in the pamphlet. But this time I discovered all the Old Testament pieces, and after reading about your visit to Uncle Mark I was sorry you didn't stay with him for a couple of weeks. Since I have been down here, I have developed almost a veneration for people like that: they live all around us. I ran into one when we were fighting a forest fire last October. They call him Gringsby Collins, and he lives out in the woods with a couple of acres of corn, with his two kids and his old mother. The fire was all around his place, and I never saw anybody less excited. The monks were running around wildly, and here he was standing there in the trees like St. Benedict and he isn't even a Catholic. For my own part I nearly got burned up in a thicket of young oaks--ten year old saplings with the dead leaves all over them: no place to fight a fire. It seems that I save up all the forest fires to tell you about in the rare letters I write. Remember the hermit [Herman Hanekamp]? He and I are great friends now, and when I was over at his place a month ago he was showing me the letters from his niece Thekla back in the old country (Oldenburg). And a picture of his terrible father now long dead. Maybe that is the reason why he is a hermit: that his father lived, I mean, not that he is dead. Spring Birth will be useful for my scholastics: I will give them the book for the Old Testament poems in it especially. They read the Bible backwards and forwards and can't get to know too much about the people in it. In a place like this you can eventually get so that you live with Abraham at one elbow and Elias at the other: you go around with them all day, and the old brothers look just like them. I had a Frater David, a big kid from Missouri, who was just like David. But the place busted him and he went home and he is doing all right. So anyway I was very very happy withthe book and the letter. Write again when you can and don't forget that you are always invited to stop by here when you are in this part of the country.


August 11, 1953
In case I do not get a chance to write again before next March, I am doing so now in order to tell you that by all means you must come and visit Gethsemani, Lent or no Lent. I have the permission. Besides I think the country around here says a lot about Lincoln. It is angular and honest and poor. For my own part I love it more and more. I am glad too that you have a sabbatical and I hope you will be enriched by your solitude. Its poverty is a great enrichment. I was glad to have news of the boys. I have sons in the army too--some of the scholastics who left here for one reason or another have been drafted, and they write to me. And I think of them and pray for them. Johnny too.
I have also adopted a terribly tough kid who is in the penitentiary waiting to be executed for murder. In Missouri. But he writes wonderful letters. Meditates on fire. Prays when he hears the rain running down the walls. Writes poems. Desperately writes hundreds and hundreds of short poems, as if to stave off death. He is not a Catholic. I am flattered that I am one of the only two priests he will have anything to do with. He says all the other "squares" are crooks.
Our cow barn burned down in little over twenty minutes or half an hour--like a pile of brush. We could do nothing to put it out. Everybody thought it was a really beautiful fire, and it was. I am sending a poem about it ["An Elegy for the Monastery Barn"].
One of the amusing things I have found out how to do is to use Paul Hindemith's record of the Four Temperaments in spiritual direction. I play it to them and get them to figure out what temperament they are. Do you know it? I think it is wonderful. Although I am not at all phlegmatic I find that the part I respond to most, myself, is the fast part of the phlegmatic movement which practically makes me fly out the window.
Hindemith was down here in Lent, so I don't see why you should be abashed at coming then.


In the spring of 1954 Van Doren and his wife, Dorothy, traveled from Hodgenville, Kentucky, where they visited Lincoln's birthplace, to Gethsemani where Merton had permission to see them. They met and talked on March 5, 1954. Van Doren recalls that he remarked that Merton had not changed much and that Merton replied: "Why should I? Here our duty is to be more ourselves, not less."


June 3, 1954
... I was sitting out there in the hermitage, or to be exact in front of the hermitage, when I heard a shot and simultaneously a bullet whistling past like in the movies. I always thought that twang in the movieswas meant to indicate the bullets ricocheting off rocks, but I guess this one just made that noise going past my ear, unless it had bounced off a tree. A few days later one of the brothers was proclaimed for "shooting off a high powered rifle in the bottoms, and one bullet landed fifty feet from where a couple of novices were working" ...
Again, I am so glad you and Dorothy were able to come, and I insist that you make every effort to come again, when you can. When you had left I remembered that I had omitted to ask you to tell [Joseph Wood] Krutch "hello" from me, but I am sure you did. Meanwhile I am sending a draft of the "[Tower of] Babel" poem, which has somewhat changed since this stage, but this will give you an idea of it. I keep being interested in your Scripture talks, and hope you will let me have them if they get published.
God bless you both, and the boys. Everything is wonderful here, because we have had a lot of rain. And the other night a couple of the young monks got lost in the woods and I had to go out to look for them in the evening, and visited all my friends, [Herman] Hanekamp the hermit (who was reading a German book called the pilgrimage) and Grigsby (not Collins) Cauldwil, who had just come back from town and hadn't seen anybody (though as a matter of fact they got lost around his farm, where the forest fire had been).


October 16, 1954
At last it is raining and I not only have the time to write a letter but am more or less in a mood for one. So after a long delay I thank you for Selected Poems which was a very pleasant surprise. I was really happy to have it. Fr. Matthew [McGunigle] and I had been cooking up a plot to ask you for some books of verse of yours, and then this came. Now he has it, but before he took it I had time to dig into Winter Diary, which I had never read, and to re-read so many other favorites. I still like your sonnets best. And I want to use one of the later short pieces ("If they could speak") in a book I have been writing this fall, which is all about man being in the image and likeness of God. It is largely about Adam, and the poem would come in where I talk about him naming the animals. The book is called (so far) "Existential Communion" [eventually published as The New Man]. It is about the business of "coming to oneself" and "awakening" out of the inexistential torpor that most people live in, and finding one's real identity--in God. Which is possible because we are His image and likeness, and by our charity we are identified with Him. Thus our knowledge of Him is no longer merely as though it were the knowledge of an "object"! (Who could bear such a thing: and yet religious people do it: just as if the world contained here a chair, there a house, there a hill, and then again God. As though the identity of all were not hidden in Him Who has no name.)
I talk about rain, at the top of this page, as if it were somethingunfamiliar. It has been, here. We have hardly had four good showers all summer, and everything is half dead. (Except we irrigated our tobacco, with the lake you saw, and got a tremendous crop of two kinds of burley.)
September was busy, with writing the book and cutting tobacco and canning things. But now, as I say, it has rained, and we are back in cold fall weather (which was a long time coming). I like the woods best when there are a lot of black clouds streaming along the hills.
Are you still on your sabbatical? Or did it end in September? I had a monosyllabic card from [Bob] Lax in France, and he sent a lot of people a mimeographed letter which was very funny and was signed "Noah Webster" ...


December 30, 1955
Your wonderful letter from Beaune [Côte d'Or, France] was a happy surprise. Thank you for thinking of me at the Grande Chartreuse. Even to be thought of there is something. Thanks for telling me about Bob [Lax], and above all thanks for the poem, which is so true to him. I even put it up in the novitiate so that all could ponder on a poem about a spiritual subject. You don't know, do you, that I am now master of the novices--a much more responsible and occupying job than the other one. I have practically a small kingdom of my own, a wing of the monastery in which Canon Law says I am the boss. The young ones entering live there and depend on the broken reed they have received as their support. The best of it is that the place is quiet, and we have our own garden and chapel, and the job is not too plaguing. In fact I find that if I overcome a little of my selfishness, it is quite pleasant.
Imagine if you can what led up to it. Again the old wrestling, more awful than before, about solitude. This last year I really plunged into the fight for true. I found a couple of people who told me "Yes, you should leave, you should go off and live alone--or enter another order etc. etc." Armed with this I even got as far as Rome (I mean with pestering letters) and finally the highest Superiors under the Pope calmed me down and told me to stay here. It sounds silly but I had to go through it. Having done so I feel pretty well cleaned out. I mean washed of everything. There is very little I seem to want at all--or so it seems, until I turn around and realize that I still cling to this bodily life, for instance. It would be too impossible of me if I suddenly turned out to be detached from that. Actually, I think the only valid step that has come out of the whole thing is that I am detached from detachment. And from ideals, I no longer want to know, or to think, what I am or what I've got or where I'm going ...


In December 1955, after having visited Merton at Gethsemani the previous year, Van Doren wrote a poem called "Once in Kentucky (To Thomas Merton)," which he sent him in January 1956. He included the poem in The Autobiography of MarkVan Doren (1958), pp. 331-32. He wrote below the poem when he sent it to Merton: "This is your poem if you want it ... I am terribly interested in what you tell me about your wrestling over solitude again. I don't pretend to understand it all, but with your sufferings I have, believe me, the fullest and tenderest sympathy. And I can doubt that you are washed literally of everything. You couldn't be, and I dare to say shouldn't be. For instance of your created person. Which is why I send the poem--to show that someone saw that person."


February 11, 1956
We want to love in the minds of other people and we are surprised when we find ourselves there, as if it were after all not possible. And it is not the "we" that we think of as ourselves, because the person each man thinks he is does not exist. What an existential problem your poem suggests! You have met in Kentucky a person that I have been acquainted with for some time, but whom I have not yet learned to understand. In the poem (about the men you met in their cages) are mixed the sorrow of the cage and the joy of liberty, and I am glad you think my joy is thin enough to survive, for I hope it will. And yours too. And it is true that the fat joys that sit in the world's door try to be implacable. But you know they are dead. And I would be glad if there were none on my doorstep. Let us be happy then in the ver sacrum, the Lent which is the doorway to the victory of Easter ...
For the rest I lecture the novices on Cassian and on the customs of twelfth century monks and on the behavior of twentieth century novices and secretly I pry into the psychoanalysts. These are the occupations which God has given to Masters of Novices in Cistercian monasteries. I have no other, except the felling of trees, and the praying of prayers. In the distance, on top of the hill, I can see the fire tower when I look out the windows of the novitiate. In the evening it is surrounded with seraphim.
... Come to Kentucky some more.


In the summer of 1956, Van Doren visited Louisville, where he lectured at the University of Louisville on June 25. Merton obtained permission to meet and talk with his former teacher in Louisville.
The Courier-Journal reported that Van Doren had lunch with "Trappist monk Thomas Merton" at the Arts Club in the old Henry Clay Hotel, at which newswriter William Habich and Julius John Oppenheimer, dean of the University's College of Arts and Sciences, were also present.


July 3, 1956
... The Louisville session was wonderful. I can't get over it. I know you are more used to being treated as a celebrity than I am, in fact I am never treated as one face to face in real-life-flesh-and-blood adulation. This once was I thought very funny, right down to the good old type withhis comments on the demise of De la Mare. It was all wonderful. And I did think the Dean was a good egg, and will go and see him some time. When I say funny, I mean "humorous" in the Johnsonian sense (and I suppose that too has to do with my own rather unorthodox interest in analysis, which I hope did not sadden you). All people are funny because they are at the same time real and false, and that is what is so good about it. Original sin is serious enough for it to be blasphemy to find a joke in it, and yet since from the first a Redeemer was promised, and since He is sent, and is in the midst of us, the mixture of reality and serious falsity that is everywhere becomes very funny if we see that in the midst of everything is the Christ, the Real One, Who does not mind our caricatures as much as we would if we were in His exact position. He sees it all in another way, through the lens of a mercy which does the same thing to everything as does Zen to whatever it looks at. (Zen can only do things to what it looks at for, of course, it redeems nothing.)
I am still so dazed that I have not remembered half the things I forgot to say, or I would say some of them here. But of course they were never meant to be said, I suppose. They have been uttered in the Word and we can understand them all in His silence. Once a Zen master reproved a disciple saying: "You are all right, except that you talk about Zen." Yet of course they would immediately agree that an agreement not to talk about it would not be Zen either.


The next letter was written at St. John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, where Merton was attending a series of lectures on psychiatry for priests given by psychoanalyst Dr. Gregory Zilboorg--his first extensive trip outside Gethsemani since entering in 1941.


St. John's Abbey Collegeville, Minn. July 30, 1956
I was deeply moved by your last letter. Certainly there is little one can do about being a celebrity except bear with it, and I was not really disturbed by the business at the club, except that it could have been much more pleasant if we could have gone on talking alone as we did up in the room. It was well worth it, if it was the price of seeing you again and, as you say, talking about the things we did not really say but conveyed. So the club can be forgotten, it was nothing. The substance remains.
Here incidentally everything has been fine. First of all it is so good to be received in all simplicity by a community of other monks, as a monk, no questions asked, no incitements to act famous. Then there has been the short summer school.
I think I told you I would be here for some lectures on psychiatry for priests. You have no idea how good and how right the approach hasso far been. Far from trying to teach us jargon, they have not hesitated to purge those of us who brought a little with us. They have been sternly opposed to tendencies to diagnose and pry, to "peep and analyze" on the grave of a human value. They have made us want not to have technical means of manipulating people. On the contrary they have kept up a magnificent emphasis on human values, on getting in real contact with a person who is in trouble and needs your help, and on really giving him the help he needs instead of something he does not need from you. Zilboorg, the dominant spirit, who has a tremendous mission in this regard, made a statement which has set the tone for the whole business: that the priest cannot be the accomplice of formalists and legalists who use their techniques to destroy human values in the sick individual, or the criminal, or the man in trouble--or the person they do not like. We are being taught that we cannot and must not attempt the kind of thing I think you most object to when psychoanalysis corrupts literary judgment. So you see I am gaining much ...


April 9, 1957
As I prepare to tell you that I have dedicated my last book of poems [The Strange Islands] to you and Dorothy, I reflect that since things move so slowly down here, you have probably already received the book from New Directions before I have had any to send you. My copies arrived last evening, however, and I am inscribing one and sending it off right now. As I say, I am sure New Directions must have sent you one, or some. I hope you will like it, anyway. I know you have seen most of the poems before, and liked them, and I thought you would not mind the dedication. It is twenty years since I have dedicated a book to you, so I thought it was about time to do it again.
It is probably also the anniversary, or nearly the anniversary, of that wonderful day when you and Dorothy stopped by at the monastery, after being at Hodgenville. It is just the same kind of day, bright and dazzling with all sorts of promises. We have had a lot of rain, and I have planted hundreds of pine seedlings and yellow poplars and it looks as if they are going to do well if we can keep the hermit's goats away from them. So, on a sunny spring day with a new book of poems dedicated to you, I have every reason to think especially of you and Dorothy and to pray for you especially and do whatever else a monk can do to bring good to his friends.
The way things are with me at the moment is: no writing at all. The weather-vane is pointing that way, this time. It is just as well, for I am busy with the novices and have written so much that it is time to slow down and rest. So I am reading a lot instead, all sorts of things, whatever I can lay hands on, especially some interesting Greek Fathers, though not as much in the original as I would desire. Maybe after I am no longer novice master, I will write again.
I had another occasion to think of you, when news of Charlie's exploitson TV filtered through. I was given to understand that he had become the king of Persia as a result of being very smart, but that it was the tax people who actually wore the crown. It must have been harrowing, and if, after it all, he feels like entering a Trappist monastery, well, the novitiate is wide open.
We are just finishing Genesis, after all these months. I'd love to see a Russian Ballet of the Joseph story, which has in it unending depths of wonder and of goodness: for it is at once the Gospel and the Last Judgment. One of the things that has not yet worked out is the ultimate destiny of the Jews: but it is all there in Joseph, for Joseph is the Christ of the Last Day. Isn't it tremendous? Not only for the Jews, but for all of us, brethren of various shapes and sizes.


The Van Dorens visited Merton at Gethsemani again on September 28, 1957. In his letter to Merton planning the trip, Van Doren cautioned: "Don't go to Nicaragua before the 28th."


September 17, 1957
By all means come in the afternoon of the 28th. I will be expecting you about two. That will give us a couple of hours and more to talk--do you want to stay overnight? Or for supper? You are very welcome if you do. Why not stay for Vespers & supper & then go to Louisville for the night? We will see anyway ...


November 20, 1958
Well, they are hammering again, and I am sitting down to another letter. This time it is Father Joseph with the hammer. A few days [ago] I got a note from Fr. Benedict asserting that he intended to "scrap the walls" by which, as I discovered, he meant to scrape them. Which he did. Fall is a season of special monastic madness. But also the monastery being old is constantly getting fixed and re-modelled as they say. They pull out whole floors and put in new ones (as is being done now with the novices' dormitory). It goes without saying that they scrap the walls.
What I really want to do in this letter is thank you for the book on Liberal Education. I am sorry I never read it before, it is a wonderful book. It is not at all like the books professors write about colleges today, but much more like the books of the people you quote, people who have actually had a liberal education. And the best argument of your book for liberal education is the way it is written: finely. I am constantly being brought up short by the fact that every sentence has something important to say. There is never any waste of time or paper on what claims to be inevitable nonsense. So true is it that people who write books in which large patches of nonsense "have to" appear to get them from one "point" to another, do not have anything to say in the first place. All that I have ever said about the seriousness with which you take truth, I repeat inconnection with the Liberal Education. I am going to make sure that a lot of the monks and novices read this. There is so much in it, and it is about all of life and not just a department of life. This too is another argument for the book's excellence, and the author's.
All this being so, then there is nothing for it: we must have the book on Don Quixote. I am sorry to be so grasping, but we are in a predicament here getting ready to supply for the education which many of the young people never got in their high schools and colleges, and they will surely need this. Will you let me bother you for it? In return I will begin pulling wires to have them send you a Trappist cheese of some sort which, by the time it reaches you, may be strong enough to walk by itself.
(Father Joseph just broke a window.)
I think the new Pope [John XXIII] is a wonder, a fine simple old man, who would not let anybody kiss his foot, and whose first thought was to go back to his native village and have a fine fiesta with his brothers and cousins. (Though it turns out he probably can't go.) Whose first public statement, or one of the first, was that the Pope doesn't have to know everything and be able to do everything, and that all he has to be is the Pope. I have written at once to say that he is my favorite Pope.
We have an old farmhand working here, who has been here for over fifty years, and his father was here before him. He often walks up to the monks and tells them what he has heard over the radio (frowned on but tolerated). He came up to me the other day full of wonderment and said "Father, the Pope has just chosen Spellman a cardinal." He was disappointed that I didn't seem amazed, and when I made him signs that I thought Spellman was already a cardinal, he went off and checked, and the next person he told, he gave them a paper with the names written down so he wouldn't get them wrong. He meant Cushing, of course.
He's the same one who, if a bear gets loose somewhere in Wyoming, gives out the news in such a way that everyone believes the bear to be in New Haven [Kentucky]. On one such occasion I got the cellarer to issue me a big hunting knife, before going out into the forest.
Once again, many thanks for the Liberal Education which I like the way I like Thoreau--it is that kind of a book.


December 18, 1958
Quixote is here, where he belongs, among so many others like himself, and most welcome. I quite agree with you that "he had his own reasons" for behaving as he did, and I think that sums him up. His only fault, if it be a fault, was that he played too seriously. And that was the fault of the Renaissance all over, I think, though they would all with one voice deny it. The Middle Ages just played without reflection. Don Quixote and his age perhaps reflected too much. And we--what on earth does our age do? I do not have words to describe it: certainly the very thought of "play" is something we have forgotten, but that we are eternallyself-conscious about trying to do it, or watch it done professionally by somebody else.
Thank you in any case for giving me the pleasure of reading such a book and of having it here for the novices. We are all grateful.
Sometime a fruitcake soaked in Bourbon should reach you from here, with our love, for Christmas. Which I wish you and Dorothy and all very Merry.


In 1959 Van Doren received the Alexander Hamilton Medal given by Columbia University for meritorious accomplishment. Merton was asked to write a letter of tribute and wrote several drafts for a humorous "message," the first of which is given here. Subsequent drafts were titled "Message to Marx Van Doorway for the Alphabet Medal" and "A Message to be Inscribed on Mark Van Doren's Alphabet Medal." The final version, called more sedately "Message to be Inscribed on Mark Van Doren's Hamilton Medal," is included in The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton (New Directions, 1977, pp. 800--1).


Oh Mark:
Whooping up the side of the house in a fast storm come messengers with ice on their whiskers and great lolling heads of snow. Me they find in lenten emaciation meditating various meats. They wipe their eyes, and have me in focus. One makes a hole in his stuffed blizzard and out of this, in words reminiscent of language, he speaks: Marx Van Doorway has fallen upon the Hamilton muddle. What, I cry, is this some country treat? No they reply in fat gusts, he's a metropolitan winner. Winner of what I lean, as a matter of question, winner of a race? Has he outfooted champions and presidents and won himself a cup? No, but rather for personal eminence he is decked with muddles, in the middle of a city banquet. Grand, I cry, and is everybody at the banquet rich? He is filled with muddles on all sides by millionaire poets, for singular worth, particularly worth of letters. You mean I say that people are writing him letters? Not only people, but even you. Fine, I say, I too will praise my friend Max Van Dusen. I will praise him for the twenty-four letters of his alphabet. Of all the writers I ever heard about, he uses the best alphabet.


June 6, 1959
I have not yet written you the "Dear Mark" letter I should have written for the "feast" of your retirement. For you a feast, and for Columbia an occasion of mourning. Of course, all the public celebration of the Hamilton Medal put me a bit out of my stride and I could not begin to say anything I really wanted to say. So I was merely facetious and cryptic, knowing you would know all that was behind it. As Tate remarked in the collection of letters written to you, it was you who honored the medal by receiving it.
As for you and Columbia: I tried to say a little of what I meant before. But since then I have gone on piling up a debt to you and there is no way of paying it. That is the best thing of all, because if it were a "debt" in the sense of something that could be paid, where would be the joy? Love's debts have this in them that they are too great to be paid, and that therefore one loves to remain in debt. I hope that I will owe you more and more that I can never repay, and I fully expect to. You are certainly one of the joys of life for all who have ever come within a mile of you. And everybody knows it and says it. So you have become a kind of sacrament, which is what every man should be. You are certainly one of the most Christian people I have ever seen, for this is what it is to be a Christian: simply to be Christ and not to realize it. In this there is nothing but reasons for humility, because everybody is Christ. But not everybody is able to work out, in his life, the meaning of who he is. Most people manage to obscure it and even deface it, sad to say. If this bewilders you, that is fine. It should. Anybody who understands such things has not understood. Let us just settle for the fact that you are a most Christian person, and perhaps all the more so for not having acquired some institutionally Christian "form" (which would only limit you to the Christianity of a certain age, time or place.)
Of course these things might shock some people, but I am not saying them to the people who would be shocked, only to those who will understand (without understanding).
And now I maneuver myself into greater debt.
J. Laughlin was here for two days and we had a fine time riding to Lexington and back, as it happened I have a novice in the hospital there and we both have a friend there, a printer, an old Austrian [Victor Hammer]. That is not what I wanted to tell you. J. is bringing out a volume of my selected poems, and at first they wanted me to write a preface. But the other day we agreed it would be much better to have someone else: who else but you? You are the one who started the whole thing going. They will be, I hope, the best of the poems, and an essay, for a ND paperback. I would be so happy if you could find time to do it, and could think up something to say about the poems (which you already have so well and so generously!) I gave J [Bob] Lax's poems too and he seems very interested in them. I think he will want to publish them, or some of them. Lax was here too, but he told you. It has been gay all summer.


July 24, 1959
... Mark, thank you for taking on the preface. It will give some point to the book, I hope. Not that I think the poems are all bad. But the fact that you like them will enable people to see them rightly, and find whatever good is there. I forget whether or not I had included "The Barn" on the original list, perhaps I was shy about it. As a matter of fact it is for me subjectively an important poem, because when I was a kidon a farm in Maryland (yes, even that, for a while) a barn burned down in the middle of the night and it is one of the earliest things I can remember. So burning barns are for me great mysteries that are important. They turn out to be the whole world, and it is the Last Judgment. New Directions say they have sent you the bits and pieces of poems in any case. I am very glad ...
America means to me Mark, Dot, the boys, Lax, and all the fellows, and Krutch and Thurber and then back further Thoreau and--It is not a very long list. So it seems that only a very small sector of the country really means a lot to me. But I think it is a very important one, and essential enough so that I have no apologies to make to any of those committees, do I? They, the committees, are about the last thing in the world I ask for America and for their sakes I would gladly part company with the whole business: them, and Time and Coca Cola (this is heresy, don't tell Lax, but I have suddenly gone manichaean on Coca Cola. Not that I drink any, but I have just come to detest the very idea of the stuff because of some ads that I saw going in to Louisville. I mean the uggsome pictures of healthy, optimistic, empty-headed, crew-cutted, sweatered, American youth swilling that damn stuff in order to bear witness to our incomparable national IDEAL.) (There, now I've said it.) There are some other things too, but I forget them, happily ...


In 1959 Merton learned of the television scandal which involved Van Doren's son Charles, to whose appearance on a TV quiz show he referred in his letter to Van Doren of April 9, 1957. Charles Van Doren's appearances on the show made him a popular celebrity and won him $129,000. But in October 1959 a nation-wide scandal broke when it was learned that participants had been given in advance answers to questions. The public which had adulated Charles Van Doren turned on him and he bore the brunt of the antipathy and embarrassment that followed. Merton's letter to Charles Van Doren is included in the final section of this book.


St. Anthony Hospital Louisville, Kentucky October 17, 1959
Do not be surprised at the letterhead. I am just in here for a minor operation.
But while here I have seen the papers and all the nasty fuss about Charlie. I am so sorry to hear that everything has turned out so disagreeably & I want to express my sympathy for him & for all of you. I hope it will not be too unpleasant & that you will not have to bear too much unnecessary publicity & trouble, but that soon everything will be cleaned up satisfactorily.
This whole affair, in its foolishness & sordid cheapness, is something I cannot help regarding as symptomatic. I for one do not believe that all is right with America. On the contrary I think this is a sick and deludednation (along with all the others, of course). And this proves it in some sense. Why? Charlie, precisely because he is in most ways just what so many Americans want themselves to be--clear-headed, frank, & ingenuous--has to pay for it by becoming a victim of advertisers, manipulated & sold by them. To me, this is just another indication that few people with any influence care, any more, about anything except how the best things look & how they sell. And the pity is that everything is reduced to that level, including all the things that can neither be seen or sold.
That Charlie should, in all innocence, be the victim of sick manipulation is a sad & terrible thing. At least he has his innocence. But that does not spare him from the insane gestures and exhibitions of the inquisitors who are bent on staging their own kind of show: the great, stupid bluff of governmental zeal & integrity!
So I want you all to know that I am very angry & very sick & very fed up with what has happened to you all, and that I have considerable difficulty in keeping the anger within ordinate bounds.
But you can have the consolation of knowing that if such things happen to you, it is because you form part of the honest & civilized remnant for whom such attentions are reserved ...


October 31, 1959
My last letter to you from the hospital was a little inadequate, especially as I was peeved about the whole affair that poor Charlie is going through. Now that I have slightly more perspective on it, and it is growing more unpleasant I really want to write to you about it in a more detached way (I hope) and say some of the things I think ought to be said about it. And of course the first thing I want to say above all is that I do hope you are not all of you too distressed and shattered by it. Please do not be, because there is really no reason for that. Actually in many ways this can be seen as a very good thing, though I know I sound like Eliphas the Themanite when I dare to say it. But before I launch into some Job's-comforting of my own, I offer, as the only apology for words, my love for all of you which, if possible, has become very much greater as a result of all this. And I am sure that with all your friends it is and will be the same.


First of all let me say this: my respect for Charlie is immeasurably greater than it was when he was winning all the money and getting all the favorable publicity. Then, one could not help feeling a little uncomfortable about it, because it was basically false like everything else on that level of being--like everything else that people seem to cling to most blindly for support in this poor benighted country we live in. Now, brutally but perhaps mercifully, suffering and humiliation have entered into the picture to add a note of reality for which one has reason to be thankful. Forgive me, even all of you have reason to be thankful for it, and I think very much so. It certainly gives Charlie a "tragic" stature which is much more human than the nice optimistic role of a year ago. And, too, this isnot a role. Isn't that after all a blessing? I mean, even when everything was going so well, Charlie was still, without doubt, seduced into impersonating himself, in order to please and comfort this foolish, and pitifully foolish nation, with a daydream of itself.
So America grabbed Charlie and set him up in the middle of its dream, so that he could be the dream image for a while. And the people who were making money out of it could see that it had evident possibilities. And after all, America continually and stupidly pays people like that millions of dollars all the time precisely in order to suffer this kind of deception. America wants to be kidded and the only crime is letting the people know, realize, the falsity. We are such babies that we want our unrealities to be real and the only thing we resent is the reminder that they are not.
What one of us has not been coaxed into doing things of which he is terribly ashamed? Certainly there are things in my past that I do not want to have known all over the country, and you know, they still might be. When one person out of all the rest is picked out to have his shame known by everybody, then perhaps it may be because he is very much more of a person than the rest, and is capable of growing because of it. But the rest of us have to grow by it too. I do not know what the reactions have been, but if people have just deserted him (which is possible) then I don't think much of this country. But if they have stood by him, even in his shame, then I think perhaps there is some hope for us. Perhaps we are able to realize that we are all equally guilty. Lao Tse has said wisely that the man who praises virtue by that very fact leads someone into vice, and it is the narcissism of the whole blind lot of us that has got Charlie into trouble because he is such an image of frankness, honesty etc. We had better be very careful how we praise honesty in this day, and when there are such instruments as TV around.
The thing that is so appalling in this whole affair is the frightful eruption of guilt that it represents. The boundless, bottomless guilt that this country cannot help feeling and cannot bear. Does it really make such a difference that this brainwashing process has arisen spontaneously among us, while in totalitarian states it is cynically planned? Are we still so blind that we cannot see that we do the same thing to our own people as they do in Russia and China, but not yet on so great a scale? And still, as it were, with our right hand not knowing what the left is doing? It is the same all over the world, and yet we have this abominable illusion that we are shining, candid people and they are all the rest of them dark and base. Good God, we are all base and black, who the blazes do we think we are? That is the first step in being human, to recognize that. We can't. Instead, we push people out on to stages, and before cameras, to impersonate the white image of ourselves, and when we find a speck on him we kill him. It is dreadful, and because of this we are a very sick country.
The reason why I feel this so strongly is that it is to a great extentmy own problem, and in a way it is also yours. We are all of us comforting images. That which is nice in us, and is admired, is perhaps now what we have to be most afraid of. I know that I for one have become part of a very big false front of which I am ashamed and by which I am often very much upset. But one of the fortunate advantages of monastic community life is that, in it, no one is very prodigal with compliments and admiration. That has been a corrective, but not much of one, when the whole thing gets shot through with falsity. I don't know if you ever see anything of our particular brand of phoniness, but it is certainly quite humiliating.
Not to prolong this beyond measure: forgive one last platitude. Certainly there is nothing in this that cannot be used as a great good, and it can perhaps turn out to be the one thing that has saved Charlie from becoming just another one of those people whose faces are everywhere. Just another big smile. If it gets him back into the woods, and out of the limelight, and gets him back to what he really knows as himself instead of what other people want him to be, then what could be better? It can be a liberation, and I hope that is what it is. That is my prayer for him, and for all of you, and for all of us. And I do not mean to say that I think he has been much hurt by success, or anything like that. I know he must have been strong enough to take it well, but this requires even greater strength. And no one can be a success without suffering from it in some way. This is the only way of suffering from success that really amounts to anything. The other ways are poison. One is infected without knowing it. This way you know what is hitting you.
But I do hope you realize that all your friends are very much with you, and that we all love all of you more and more. Such is the point of this whole sermon, which I trust your love to forgive and understand.


November 12, 1959
Charlie sent me his "confession" signed, "with love from Babylon" which immediately reassured me. I am now more or less straight about what happened and wrote to him as soon as I got the statement. I don't take back anything I may have said that applied to the case, and regret only having bothered you with letters that were more or less off the target. It would have been more sensible to write just one that was directly to the point. But of course you understand. I am no longer mad, but still smouldering no doubt. With resentment against the whole country, in so far as they have tried to make Charlie a scapegoat for a national sin. How stupid it all is. Just suppose he had taken an enormous sum of money to have his picture printed in a magazine over a statement that he thought that product was utterly superb--whatever it was. Nobody would have accused him of lying. It is perfectly respectable to tell that kind of a lie. Of course I understand that they got mad when thepoint of the other business was its supposed genuineness. Still, the difference is very artificial. Omnis homo mendax. It is about time this was admitted.
Enough of that whole business.
I have read your preface [Selected Poems] and it made me feel warm all over on a cold day. There is no way of saying how happy I am to have such good things said by someone who knows what he is talking about. It will add immensely to the book and be one of the best things in it. Of course I do not mind letting you use the letters. Why not? In fact I had forgotten all about them and was interested in them myself. I think it was a very good way of starting. But I am really happy to think, finally, that some of my poems really make sense, and that as a whole it is poetry. That is comforting, because for a while I was disgusted with the whole lot of it, since the middle book (Figures for an Apocalypse) was so bad in many ways. The last book didn't seem to get anywhere but I am still glad about it, and have learned that if critics (with a capital K) don't like it, it still makes no difference. Really no difference at all. It is a relief to wake up and see clearly that these people seldom know what they are talking about ...
[P.S.] I take seriously the last lines of your preface, and will write verse when and if I can.


September 17, 1960
Thank you for your card about the little book on Solitude. I knew you would like it and understand it. Now I am sending you a bigger book of so-called Disputed Questions in which the same material on solitude is in fact done at slightly greater length. The censors brought it about that I became even more explicit than I had been before. The beauties of censorship. This is often not realized outside the Church. Censors have, as one of their unintentional effects, the power to make one more ardent, more explicit, more indignant, more succinct and in the end they force one to come right out and say many things that would otherwise have remained hidden. I don't know what "good it will do" but I did not write this in order to do good, but simply in order to speak the truth and the truth can take care of itself and do its own good.
You might also like the essay on the power of love and for the rest of the book I don't know. It has a mixture of strange things in it.
Charlie [Van Doren] wrote me last year that in my Pasternak article my attitude toward politics was undeveloped and naive and this is true. I didn't develop anything since then, at least in the article. But someday I will, and I hope I can do it outside of a concentration camp.
Bob [Lax] is coming down in October or at least he says he is and I think he will. I am looking forward to it anyway. This has been a busy year. I hope this winter I can sit more in the woods or wander aroundin them. We are not cutting trees much anymore, everything is cheese. We are cursed with business even here. Sell cheese, buy wood. What kind of a life is that? However, there it is.


February 16, 1961
It is a very long time since I have written. The pretext is this mimeographed thing, a deadpan thing, a simple chaining together of clichés that are frightening ["Original Child Bomb"]. I think the same words were used by the human race when the things happened, and I have just picked up what was said by the human race. Its pitiful and sudden attempts to exorcise the horror with cheap symbols. Bob Lax probably wants to print this in Pax and it is the first thing almost that he had had in a long time especially about pax. But I like [Ad] Reinhardt's dogmatic definitions about abstract art ...
Here it rains. In the pine woods I have a little house. It is on the point of being approved or reproved and I don't know which. I have a house hanging by a thread. The most beautiful little house in the world, mostly for conversations with protestant ministers who come here to find a little peace and quiet and some agreement. We actually get along very well.
I hope it is coming around time for you to be out this way so that you can stop by and see the house and sit on its porch. I don't live there, though my heart probably does. I don't even have a typewriter there. There is no electric light and of course no telephone even to the monastery, and there is no road only a path through the woods. If the thread holds and becomes a cable, then I hope some day we can comment on the pine trees and chickadees and the pileated woodpeckers and above all the quails which I keep tripping over all the time as they seem to recognize me as one of the few in Kentucky with whom they are safe. (They live in the area where the house is.)
Ed Rice was down here and nearly slid off all the roads in America driving back to New York. I am working on an art book, or am supposed to be.
Lax sends wonderful incoherent prophecies and scribbles, very wise.
Later will come to you more Desert Fathers, the same ones as before but more and in a different book. I don't know how much later, but it will be a pretty book.
As the dour meditation indicates, I want very much to say a loud "No" to missiles and polaris submarines and everything which sneaks up on a city to destroy it, no matter whose city, no matter what the supposed wickedness of it. Who is to judge cities if not even Christ came to judge the world? For the just there is probably no pardon. If you know what I mean by "just"--of course, unjust. That is one of the principal lessons of the Gospels: that the just are unjust and that those who are "justified"are so only by mercy received and given, for it is this that brings them "in line", for the line is mercy, not justice.
I hear that the business about Charlie [Van Doren] still smoulders a little and remains nasty. Can't they finish with their righteousness?


Columbia University awarded Merton the University Medal for Excellence in 1961. Because of the rules of the Cistercian Order which would not allow him to be present, the Trustees of Columbia agreed to make an exception to their "hitherto inflexible rule" and gave him the medal in absentia. He asked that Van Doren accept at the Commencement Exercises on June 6, which Van Doren did. The citation, signed by President Grayson Kirk, read: "Gifted master of language, in poem and prose, light-hearted as you are grave, you have reached out with winged words to the world you left. In the phrase of one who was your beloved teacher in days on Morningside, you are much less lost to the world than many who insist they are still in it. To his hand, for early conveyance to you, I entrust the University Medal for Excellence as a testimonial of your Alma Mater's admiration and enduring respect."


May 13, 1961
All I can say is that as June 6th approaches I am happy that no one but you will be going there to get the medal for me. No one but you should. Of course if I went back to Columbia today the buildings would collapse, probably. I have to sit here with my shoes off among the ants and rave at the world from a distance. But I do love Columbia and don't rave at it at all, on the contrary. I am not aware of any reason why I should have received a medal. But that is where you come in. To you it seems logical that I should be getting a medal, then to me it seems logical that you should receive it for me.
It has finally stopped raining and snowing (?) around here. The quails live all around my house, and whistle in the grass. I read Chinese philosophers and discover that this is what I am, in fact, myself. Though doubtless some other things too.
For three months I have been pounding away at a mad course in mystical theology and have enjoyed the sweating, but it is finally ending and I enjoy that more. It is always racking to talk about what should not be said. I ended up last time Beguines, beguines and beguines. They were wonderful, like the quails around my house. Everybody has forgotten them, but they were very wise and Eckhart learned all the best things he knew from them.
[Ed] Rice is worried about [Bob] Lax, says he went off in confusion to Greece. Where else should one go in confusion?
The poem ["The Moslems' Angel of Death"] I send does not come from knowing Algeria so much, but I suppose it applies.
And you: do they still heap medals upon you? Or is this your year to collect medals for other people who deserve them less than you do?
June 21, 1961
Here is the June solstice and I thank you for the medal in its box with its message of light and its questionable claim that I have somehow served somebody besides myself. Thank you above all for your kindness in getting it for me, and for enjoying it on my behalf (which I would not have done for myself if I had been there). I wrote Grayson Kirk a letter. The fact that his secretary wrote the kind little statement diminishes nothing of my gratitude to the President and to his university. Next year is my twenty-fifth anniversary. I mean that of my class. I don't know what is left of 1937, probably quite a bit. Really I am more '38 than '37 ([Bob] Lax and so on). I actually got my degree in February. But I was always supposed to be '37, since I edited the yearbook and other things were done which are understood to make one a member of that class forever and ever.
Anyway, thinking over the unbelievable fact that it is twenty-five years since these things happened, I am once again aware of the fact that I liked being at Columbia and that it meant a great deal to me. The place, the people, the classes, the library, the books, the things done, the noise made, the time wasted well and the time wasted badly. I would not want to appear on the campus next year with a false nose and a funny hat (if that is what one does on these saturnalia) but I would not want the year to go by without my having thought of this: and if they think of me too, so much the better. I am glad you said they felt as if I were there.
Here it is a cool summer, and the birds sing well, and the trees throw a very good shade. The flowers come up and there were millions of strawberries. I read and enjoy Chinese classics and the Lord knows what else. They (meaning Harcourt Brace) are working on a Merton Reader, and I am keeping my fingers in the selection process to make sure it does not become either too dull or too frivolous. I am not writing much at the moment and not intending to write much except for doing chores like an Encyclopedia article (New Catholic Encyclopedia, which will probably be stuffy).
Guess what I have on the table in a little phial of water: a gardenia. We grew it in the garden, the plants were sent to us from our monastery in South Carolina. They have to be taken in for the winter. There have been a lot of small blooms this summer. This is the second I have surreptitiously picked (I am novice master and I can do what I like with the novices' garden, but I wouldn't want to be seen picking gardenias) and have this placed before the little Mexican image of Our Lady of Solitude. The scent is very pure: when I was in the world I did not think this. I can now see why.
Thank you for your good letter, then. And for the medal. And if you are a ghost of mine you are obligated to haunt my house, at least for a brief interval.
Van Doren came again to Louisville in December 1961 to speak in a joint project of Louisville colleges called the "Book of the Semester" program. He actually spoke at the University of Louisville and Ursuline College, though Bellarmine College was his official host. On December 3, Van Doren paid his third visit to Merton at Gethsemani. He wrote later: "I shall never forget that day, at the retreat, in your class, and on the Abbey walks ... It was wonderful to have lunch with the Abbot [James Fox], whom I'm afraid I didn't thank eloquently enough ... I'll be thinking of you in your little house--but not so little either. I was impressed."


September 20, 1961
It was good to get your letter and I am very happy that you can come. Sunday is not the best of days, but since this is exceptional we can certainly make the most of it. There will at least be a bit of time in the afternoon for you to see the hermitage: probably a little chilly, enough for a nice wood fire. So let us by all means plan on December 3rd. Probably the best thing would be for someone of the Bellarmine people to drive you out Saturday evening. Sunday morning there is Mass about 10. You would get a little time to think and breathe. We can get you back to Louisville whenever you need to get your plane, but I hope you don't have to leave us before 3 in the afternoon.
[Bob] Lax sends me all kinds of cryptic cards from some non-existent place in Pennsylvania saying "Isaacs for Prothonotary" and other such incitements to civic zeal.
J. [Laughlin] has published a poet called Denise Levertov I think you would like. Have you seen her book? It starts with a wonderful version of a Toltec poem about what an artist ought to do ...


November 22, 1961
Thank you for the latest letter: I was deeply touched that the Thurbers wanted a copy of the poem about Jim ["Elegy for James Thurber"] and of course I would want them to have it with all my heart, if they like it. Everything today is at the same time sad and full of irony: one can be humorous because behind it all is the mercy of God, and the ponderous cruelties and stupidities of men are not the last word about anything.
About December 3rd, the first Sunday of Advent, and your Advent: I shall make sure that someone in Louisville drives you out Sunday morning, the earlier the better, but of course you have to sleep: don't think I am urging Cistercian hours on you, much as I would like to. But at least I hope we can have most or all of the afternoon. Then I can promise, I think, the wood fire, unless we have one of those summer days that sometimes come in December and of which there is, at the moment, no threat ...
January 15, 1962
I hear indirectly that this awful business about Charlie [Van Doren] is starting up again. I hope that it is not true, or that I have not understood it. Once again this frenzy of justice which fixes itself relentlessly on one who does not have the conventional defenses of the big lawbreakers. It cannot hurt Charlie, because he has outlived whatever was wrong in it for him, and has got far beyond that. And yet I hope he will be spared very much, and that he will be able to rise above whatever he is not spared. You too. I wish this did not have to be, but in any case I will remember it in prayer often, and will get the novices to do this also. And meanwhile, this remains a grim sorrow, along with all the other grim ones.


January 18, 1962
J. [Laughlin] was here and left yesterday. I asked him if there was anything new about Charlie [Van Doren] and it seemed that I had been misled by a rumor. Thank heaven that there was nothing to it. I am sorry I wrote so excited a letter. I had better be careful about that in the future.
We have pretty well planned the peace book [Peace in the Post-Christian Era], with a lot of good things in it, and I think it will be a persuasive book. Certainly I like it myself and think it says many things that need to be said. Thanks to the folly of people, a situation has arisen in which they had to be said, so therefore there is some good in all the nonsense. I still keep hoping that the air will be to some extent cleared, and that we will be able to go ahead with at least a little of the light of reason, and find our way patiently into some new dimension where war will be a thing of the past. It seems unlikely, though ...


On February 4, 1962, Van Doren sent Merton a poem entitled "Prophet." In his note Van Doren said: "It has taken me years to finish. I send it to you because I know now whom it fits. You."


March 29, 1962
If I have not written sooner about the Prophet poem it is probably because I am too busy with the prophet business, & when one gets that way he is probably more of a fool than a prophet. Sometimes I think the grave I am digging is for everybody's soul. A great grave of absurdity for everything. Surely I am not entitled to take my disillusionment that seriously!
And I do not intend to with such nice weather, so many birds, such a smell of new grass growing, such a coming of different freights!
The Bishops do not like my war songs about peace, which is natural no doubt. They are in the bishop business, & that has more to do with being a manager than I am able to understand. They would be more at home around the Pentagon than I, and no doubt I would be & am moreat home in the pine trees. They can let me talk out loud to myself, & if they don't like what I say they can be just a little more patient & shall soon find out who was right ...


Merton sent Van Doren a copy of his poem "Grace's House," inspired by Grace Sisson's drawing of a house with no access. Later she provided "The Road to Joy," as Merton dubbed her second drawing.


[Cold War Letter 99]
August 9, 1962
Here, a poem. That is all. I have no other pretext for writing, but glad to have this one. It is a poem about a drawing of a house by a fiveyear-old child. What a drawing, what a house, what suns and birds. It is true that we do not know where we are.
That there are circles within circles, and that if we choose we can let loose in the circle of paradise the very wrath of God: this is said by Boehme in his confessions. We are trying to bear him out, but children can, if they still will, give us the lie and show us our folly. But we are now more and more persistent in refusing to see any such thing. All we will see is the image, the image, the absurd image, the mask over our own emptiness. And we will beat on the box to make the voice come out. And it will speak numbers to us, oracular numbers, delphic billions this way and that way.
I have read a little of Thoreau and know enough to lament that such good sense died so long ago. But it could still be ours if only we wanted it. We do not, we want the image, the consuming image, the dead one into which we pour soft drinks. The smiles of the image. All the girls are laughing because the image has a soft drink. He will, with the power of the drink, explode a moon.
The book on peace [Peace in the Post-Christian Era], did I say it? was finished and told to stop. Stop they said this book about peace. It must not. It is opposite to the image. It says the soft drink is an untruth, and that exploding moons is not the hopeful kind of sign we have pretended. Or claimed. But let the moons explode and the books be silent. Let the captains whirl in the sky, let the monkeys in the heavens move levers with hands and feet, and with their big toe explode cities, for a soft drink.
I know this is the wrong kind of image. I have rebelled against an image. This is not safe, is it? Well, alas, so I must reconcile myself to the unsafe, because the safe I can no longer stomach.
Let them beat on the box while the voice comes out in a stream of lighted numbers. I have resigned from all numbers.


August 18, 1963
Thanks for the letter and above all for the book [Van Doren's Collected and New Poems, 1924--1963]. THE book in every way: yours, ours,the year's, the world's and the time's. As it should be, a world in itself, and a century in itself, an era, an Eden, full of Bible, full of world, full of America, full of farms and people and animals. In every way the best book ever ...
This fall I have Emblems in a Season of Fury coming out, of which you have seen most, I think, in bits and flakes. You will see it, but it is only small, and mad. Better I think than some of the others though.
Yes, I hear always from [Bob] Lax, marooned on purpose on the very best of islands. Why isn't every sane man doing the same? You and I, I suppose, have our islands in the woods. That is good enough. They don't have to be Greek. If Lax stays there, though, he will be wise.
Sly villains report there will not be a war right away and that it is time for the Russkys to befriend us and find out how to fight the crooked Chinee. This report is as worthy as the slyness of the reporters, and I remain, sly as sly can be, under the same rug as before. And when I look out I see portents, monsters, wens, two-headed infants, birds without wings, buildings all drunk from top to toe, urn, alarms, cinders and a general confused cloud of deceptions. Let us continue more sly than before and than the villains.
It is said that one of the monks must now go blind as a result of having looked too intently at the eclipse. Was the eclipse full in your place? Here it was only a bite out of the sun's side, like flaming zinc let into the bigger fireball. Yes, I was looking also at the eclipse but have not yet inquired if I must be blind, and don't much care. We will all eventually be eclipsed anyway ...
Glad you was to Harvard, it does good for Harvard to get educated.


February 11, 1964
I have not been able to keep track of who owes who letters (as if there were scoresheets in these matters) but I think I owe you more than one. It is not a matter of debt but of having a moment to find joy in writing you. I have here a letter you wrote me in September and which found me in the hospital in Louisville, tied up and trussed with weights hanging from my head, all very silly and not comfortable, because the picture of my seventh vertebra seems to look something like the cover of Emblems. It is not a disk, just the vertebra injured. Bah. So I go out and fall in the snow. It is all right. I have got traction of my own in a little room up under the roof and they won't get me back in the hospital if I can help it. Actually it is not painful much now, but my typing is worse than it ever was ...
Well, now, there is snow outside the window and it is Shrove Tuesday and for my Mardi Gras I have entertained the thought of caffe espresso with lemon rind and some rum in it. Not very satisfying an indulgence, in this abstract state. It would go nicely with the snow, I tell my angel,but my angel says nothing. The espresso remains a mere thought, but better than some other thoughts I could think, I imagine.
Have you read a book by a man called Walker Percy, called The Movie Goer? I don't read enough novels to judge, but I think this is a good one. You think at first he is making this Movie Goer a supreme dope of some sort for going to so many movies, but in the end it turns out that he is the only smart one, in a wild existentialist kind of way, and the best thing about the book is that in the end nobody says who is supposed to be right anyway. I think it is very important at this juncture that novels should not insist that somebody is right. Because when somebody is right, then someone else is wrong, and this gets us forgetting that we are all wrong, or, in some sense, right. The thing is to see that unless we know we are wrong we cannot be right, because the only thing we can successfully be right about is the fact that we are all wrong. The one incontrovertible fact of human life. When one starts from that one, however, the rest begins to make sense. Hence there is no justification for consoling religions. I mean the kind that think they can console by saying everything is all right. But I am not propounding the idea that everything is all wrong, as a source of religious consolation. It is just a fact, not consoling. Anyway, in The Movie Goer, besides a lot of intriguing New Orleans names, there is a Mardi Gras to which nobody goes. The author of the book has written well about Kierkegaard somewhere too.
Yes, you are right (change context from last paragraph) about going on saying that the Negroes are trying to tell us something and about the way so many people want to know how to agree. But the whole thing is like a dream, and when we all think we are finding out what to say or do next, everything gets away again and we are in a different building, a different town. In the enormous absence of certainty they turn away and put the works of Shakespeare through a computer.
Here is a message for some poets ["Message to Poets"]. It was read at a meeting of a whole lot of young poets from all over the place in all parts of Latin America. They came out of where they were and got to Mexico City and said there was a new solidarity of poets. This is good, not Communist or anything, just a lot of poets who want to say there is a new solidarity of poets, with no strings attached. I wrote a message saying there was a new solidarity of poets. I represented the poets that are in this part of Kentucky, Nelson County I believe. I don't know what other poets are in these woods but I have a new solidarity with quails against hunters. The quails live all around the hermitage, and I rush out in hunting season and tell the men get off this land it is posted. Between myself and hunters there is no solidarity whatever. They resent my attitude because it disturbs their preconceptions: they feel that they can hunt on Trappist land because Trappists can't tell them to get off. But I do. They look at me with wrath and shattered idealism. And some, if Catholic, assert that they have been given permission by the parish priestof some nearby town. Others make like they would enjoy nothing more than shooting a Papish priest.
[Bob] Lax has asked me to edit his big long book of poems and this I will do, when I get to it. Have you seen all his poems (one word a line, half a word a line) and have you any special favorites? I like them all very much but when it comes to editing them as a book I suddenly find it very hard.
Ted Andrews [Shaker expert Edward Deming Andrews] has written several times, usually mentioning you. He is doing a new book [Religion in Wood], as you know, and it sounds splendid. He asked me to write a preface and this will be a delight if I can measure up to it.
Deceived by my left hand I spell worse and worse and type incomprehensibly, so I had better stop ...


August 4, 1964
Thanks for the word in the silence. I am sorry only of the occasion for it. I had as a matter of fact heard very indirectly of Ted Andrews' death, from a Benedictine down this way who is interested in Shakers because his monastery is in an old Shaker Village. Also, on the day you wrote the letter I was sending the Preface to Faith [Andrews], so everything is all right. At least I hope it is all right.
I enjoyed writing the preface and brought a lot of Blake into it. Let's hope that it serves its purpose. Ted Andrews is a loss: he had such a wonderful sense of all those things. I think his book will be great, though I have not actually seen the pictures, only the text. The list of pictures alone is exciting.
Here is heat. Much heat. The kind that makes everybody mad, and the kind that probably accounts for some of the craziness and violence of the South. In this land one sees things through a nasty mean haze in which the houses and trees are crooked and the people swim at you like spectres. And this is only Kentucky. What must it be in Mississippi? ...
One of the novices came proudly in with a big yellow apple off a tree when I said all winter that the orchard was never going to bear fruit again. This at least bears fruit. I am glad to be wrong ...


December 19, 1964
Yes, you bet we got winter. Your card woke me out of hibernation. Not really. But I have not been writing purposeful letters or any but daft business ones for a long time. Last night I was sleeping in the hermitage (where I sleep now, by the way). It was Zero and I had everything in the place piled on top of me, and felt like a bear. Thought of all the beasts and varmints hibernating in the woods all around. It is a pity to wake up every morning. But when I did, this morning and came down after my meditation, with everything cracking under foot and moonlight bright all over the place, a deer started up down in the hollow and bounded off. Icaught sight of it momentarily in the moonlight, between cedars. There are quite a few around as the state has been stocking the woods. I am happy to have them, and to have them near. If I ever get any assurance that hunters will respect the signs I have put up all over the place, I will get a salt block for the deer and have it just across the fence for them.
Which reminds me that the Narrative Poems came, and I like best The Mayfield Deer always. Your two books together with the bright covers are very comforting, a presence and a reassurance. Someone at least has done something worth while: you. Thanks for this one too, and for the other. I am sending you my new one [Seeds of Destruction], it has peace talk in it and anger about race. The peace talk was nearly not published but eventually got done up better and was allowed. So there it is. And to plague you more in a season when you are deluged, here is an article ["Rain and the Rhinoceros"] I was asked for, and wrote in the hermitage. As one can easily tell.
It was a pity Ted Andrews died. I have been writing to Faith, and she has the preface. But seemingly no publisher has the sense to definitely take their book. How silly can they get? I suggested Doubleday, but naturally that is a big barracks of computers and the computers read the Shaker book, having been previously programmed only for baseball. Though I have a friend [Naomi Burton] at Doubleday and may go there from Farrar Straus, even though it is now also Giroux on the FS [Farrar Straus Giroux]. I don't know. I don't know. I am getting like [Bob] Lax now that I too have found my island. Meanwhile we send each other code messages, whom to elect, whom to defend, whom to trounce. He is for defending Lizzie Borden. I forget who I trounced in my last letter, but I have a program for rushing to the support of Baumgarten. In French.
Oh yes, and as you will see if you are patient with the article past page six, I have been reading Ionesco, and him I like. His latest play or one of his latest is beautiful in a way, like your imaginary worlds of angel transients, in fact a very lovely and haunting play about a man who suddenly discovers that he walks on air because that is man's nature anyway, and because he is happy. I don't suppose it was yet in NY or perhaps will be, since there too they are all programmed exclusively for baseball. And as a play it may even be a bad play, I don't know, but the ideas and imagination there are fine. To the novices I have been talking about poetry, no less, that old Donne again. On St. Lucy's day I read them the "Nocturnal," and it is a beautiful poem, but did his girl really die or was that just an idea he had? You would know. It makes no difference, because the real idea of the poem is about being the epitaph of everything that is nothing ...
Once there was an invisible snake and it struck at an entire country and the country turned all in a wink to dust as if there had never been a country there at all, though the machines went on whirring for some time after. And the hairy ones danced and tromped in the machinery.And history, if any, later declared: this was a really unusual snake. Who shall say, though, whether history is ever right, or ever even on the target?
Once there was a Scotchman met an Irishman met a Jew met a Scotchman and they said hello Pat and they said who the hell are you calling Pat? And they had a fight and in the end it turned out they was only one person fighting himself, wasn't that a funny thing to have happened. What is history going to have said about that?


September 29, 1965
How are you? I hope in good health now, though last I heard you were in a hospital. Reason for my long silence is that I now have all the time in the hermitage & see practically no one--everything is so totally peaceful that I have little or nothing to say, except when I drop a log on my foot or something serious like that ...
Anyway, the main thing is how are you?
Here the sun is silent, there is mist in the valley, & a train whistles out there somewhere just like when the world first began.


February 24, 1966
... There is no need to tell you where I am. You have seen the hermitage and I am living in it--have been really for over a year, but only in the last six months have I been free of any job or obligation in the monastery, so I am here all the time. I just go down to the monastery once a day for Mass and a cooked meal. It is a serious, by no means idyllic sort of life--quite a lot of cold here in January and February, and one takes stock of, gets to grips with, a lot of things. What infinite nonsense is in the world and it turns out I am not exempt from much of it: I have to sweat it out of myself here. In a way the best thing about the life is chopping wood. And then burning it in a good lively fire, and making tea, and reading St. Thomas or the Desert Fathers or the Bible or more recently the tales about a mad Persian called Nasrudin, who seems to have been the subject of all the good jokes that ever got into anything later, from Don Quixote to the Marx Bros.
You have probably heard some of them, but here is one:
Nasrudin is about to fall in a pond, and a friend grabs him in time so that he does not fall in. Then his friend keeps reminding him, day after day, of the fact that he kept him from falling into the pond. Nasrudin finally loses patience, drags the friend down to the pond and then jumps in. "Now," he says, "will you finally leave me alone?"
Another: Nasrudin walks into a shop. The shopkeeper comes out and says: "Can I help you?" N. says "Have you ever seen me before?" "No," says the shopkeeper. "Then," says Nasrudin, "how can you help me: how do you know it's ME?"
One more. Nasrudin walks into a store and says: "Have you gotleather? Have you thread? Have you some dye?" "Yes," says the shopkeeper, to all these questions. "Then," says Nasrudin, "why don't you make yourself a pair of shoes?"
These stories are so archetypal that you must have heard them in some form, but apparently Nasrudin is the original. The stories all have implications for Sufism and the mystical life. I want to get hold of some source material and do something with it (not a third book for another year however).
I have been having much company of great constellations around here on the clear nights, and right out in front of the house, when I get up at two-thirty, is scorpio raising his head out of Tennessee and it is quite impressive to see him climb up and unroll his body behind him. I am supposed to be able to see canopus, denied to the North, these nights, but there is always a bit too much haze in the early evening and by the time the haze is gone either canopus has set or I have.
All the publicity is a bit embarrassing. Ed Rice is doing a story in Jubilee ["Thomas Merton Today"] and then, I hope, it's all over. I have no ambition whatever to be known any more of in this society.
But I certainly do not regard news from you as an intrusion. Quite the contrary, I need more.


July 25, 1966
It is so long since I wrote to you and so much water has gone under the bridge that the bridge itself has vanished and all the water has turned to rain. But I wanted to send you this scurrilous poem ["Western Fellow Students Salute with Calypso Anthems the Movie Career of Robert Lax"] which I am sending to Lax who is, really and truly, in a movie. Ed Rice came back from Greece and said Lax was honestly acting in a movie and "making a lot of money." The last part is what I doubt. Lax himself mentioned it in a letter but I thought he was kidding. Anyway, I thought it merited this song.
As for me as per the end of my third stanza I am more in the old folks' home than in the movies. I must have told you of my mad operation, not so mad really to others but mad enough to the one who had to have it. Since then I have dug in more and more in the woods and am doing less and less. The woods certainly agree with me as nothing else does and I am no longer able to imagine another form of life. So now I think I am stabilized in Kentucky, finally. (As if there were any doubt.) But as I say I feel like old folks, what with creaking back, red hot bursitis, unpredictable knees, rubber ankles, but to all of this I thumb the nose. It means I can't cut much wood, so I will train rabbits to come and breathe on me or something. Incidentally there is a most beautiful fox that plays in the field around sunset when his colors are most attractive and his movements most worthy of praise. Such a dancing and leaping fox, and such a spirit of play. Lither than any cat. Actually there is a family ofthem (foxes) living barely a couple of hundred feet from the hermitage, but they stay out of my way, knowing man.
How are you and Dorothy? What is new? As if there were anything new under the sun: but it would be good to hear from you.


August 21, 1966
... Do you know Edwin Muir? You must have read some of his poems. I am sure you would like him very much--you have much in common. I am doing some reviews on him. But what I really wanted to say is that if you never read his Autobiography I think you would be delighted with it. I don't presume to recommend books usually to others, but I really think this would please you. But you probably know it well. Who knows perhaps you even recommended it to me twenty years ago. That is possible too, except I think the first edition was more recent.
Otherwise I am in the woods, and content with them. My troubles begin as soon as I am out of them and end when I am back in them.


March 12, 1968
Many thanks for the card of old big boots down in Mexico. I thought seriously of Tlaloc last night when the rain was pounding down on the roof of my place. Good rain. I have transplanted some beech and pine saplings and the rain will help them along.
Lately I have almost given up even trying to keep up with mail, so it is ages since I have written to you at all. I am content to let the mail situation be more or less hopeless and write when I get a chance or an urge.
What makes it more insane is that in my old age I decided to start a magazine (herewith) [Monks Pond]. I excuse and justify myself on the ground that I intend to quit after four issues. But it is also fun, in so far as one discovers good poets hiding around in the bushes. The ones in this magazine all seem to be living in the woods or trying to. So now that you have seen it, you know I am inviting, urging you to send something if you have something--prose or verse or just a shout of some sort. But I know you are pestered by everyone under the sun so ... if you have something. I'd not want the pond to be without you.
Bob [Lax] is back and I hope he will get down here when spring is further along. And it's a long time since you have been seen down here yourself. By the way Bob and I are thinking of publishing our "letters". Neither of my two publishers has the courage to take them and I think they are both hoping the book [A Catch of Anti-Letters] will go, if at all, to a very small hidden publisher with no money and on the verge of despair. This does not suit Bob at all. He thinks the public needs our letters and he knows he needs the money. He may have written to you about it. I do have a small hidden (though not despairing yet) publisher that is interested. Finally, I think that old novel, from back when, youremember, the Journal of My Escape from the Nazis, is going to be published. I have gone through it again and find it holds up pretty well and suits our current frenzies without need of the slightest adaptation. In fact perhaps better now than ever.
All goes well here. I am busy, writing a lot, long poem or series of poems [The Geography of Lograire], articles: and on nice spring afternoons I run off into the woods and sit in the sun by an, of course, pond. An pond. Hm.


April 12, 1968 They can call this Friday Good: bright sun, blue hills, many birds, and the local mockingbird who as a celibate all winter chased every other damn bird out of the rose hedge has now got himself a wife and settled down and everything on wings is nesting in the same hedge with them. The Peaceable Kingdom: it is at least here.
I like the poem ["Merton's Wood"] and obviously want to use it like in the third issue [of Monks Pond]. May I? The only problem is one of local politics or whatever you'd call it. My name in the title would be pride like this notepaper etc. Pride pride pride all is pride. If the monks thought I was trying to own these woods (mockingbird in winter hedge) it would be bad. I thought I'd change the title (for purposes of this mag at any rate) to the official (proud of course) title of the hermitage: "Carmel Hermitage, Gethsemani" or even the full (prouder prouder) title "St. Mary of Carmel Hermitage." Get the subtle pride in "of" for instance. Pride is "of." Pride is in hyphens, asterisks, commas. Enough of that though, I would be happy to have you in the magazine before it stops. It must stop, because I am losing poems, not answering letters, putting everything backwards, sorting out the magazine all wrong, stapling it to my own thumb, etc.
[Bob] Lax is now in a camp of colleges called "Beagle" in S. Dakota. But later in the summer we are promising ourselves to gather here with cocolas.
Doubleday is being square and hedging about Journal of My Escape but if they finally reject it J. Laughlin says he wants it. My editor at D. likes it very much but I guess the business boys don't. As to the Letters (Lax and mine) we are still hunting around, but I think we will end by editing it with Santa Caluses I mean Clauses. (A Santa Callous:
O Santa Caloso Making famoso The leapyear letter of Lax.)
I am working at guess who: Joyce and Blake again. Back in full circle to thirty years ago. Joyce all brand new! ...
July 23, 1968
M. Pond (iii) is now in the press, which is to say it is being typed on stencils by a Jesuit scholastic [Philip Stark] who has volunteered to come here for the summer and do it. Your poem about the hermitage is in it, for we don't have antipoems only: we even print real poems. I really want it, it says just the right thing about the place--but not in such a way that anyone in the guesthouse would immediately know where it is. So I am grateful for it. And we have a pile of usuals, and an even greater pile of the unusuals, including a mad section of concrete funny sheets (I suppose you'd call it). This is being done first and I will send it separate, the rest will take a little time, our Jesuit being very careful. But after this there is only one more issue. And then ...
And then, man, I fly to Asia. Really, that is the plan. All sorts of places I am supposed to go to if I don't faint from delight at the mere thought. Since I hop from Singapore to Darjeeling, and have a meeting there with various swamis gurus etc, I hope to sneak into Nepal. Then maybe a bit more of the top of India. Then Thailand (if not Burma, hard to get into, but may manage), then Indonesia (a monastery of ours there) then Japan, then home. Maybe. If they can get me home, I should say. This doesn't begin until October but at the moment I am itching with vaccinations and expectations and being photographed for the passprops and phonographed for the pesthouse and airlifted to the quarantine and divided up into computers. If I survive I may manage to get to a country where they don't even have roads. And where if you ride it's on an ox or not at all. Or a yak. Or an elephamp. All this because of a meeting of dull Abbots in Thailand, but who would not go to a meeting of Abbots for all those other secondary gains?
[Bob] Lax was here in June and brought me innumerable cans of tuna fish and several pints of whiskey, the latter being more practical than the former. We had great conversaziones and took a lot of pictures (mine not yet printed, will send some if any good).
Right now, as I say, I am taken up with getting shots and visas, and cleaning up my premises and finishing up all the absurd jobs I took on when I was a low creature of earth and not a prospective world traveler. I assure you I hope to make the best of it while it lasts! (Think of all the cablegrams saying "RETURN AT ONCE" being shot to Bali, Tibet, Kamchatka, Ceylon, the Maldives, the Endives, the Southern Chives, the Lesser Maundies, the Nether Freeways, the Outer Salvages.)


Darjeeling, India November [1968]
I have been confronting this huge presence [Kanchenjunga] for about 10 days. Out of one month or more in India, most of it has been in the Himalayas. Calcutta, Delhi--& I'm off to Madras & Ceylon, then Indonesia& strange dances. This has been a marvelous trip--Lamas & all sorts ... How are you? Monastery forwards mail to me. I will be gone another four months or so.


In a note on a Christmas card sent to Gethsemani (which Merton, of course, never saw), Van Doren said: "I rejoiced in your card from Darjeeling--unbelievable, of course--and in all the news you managed to pack in. Please now continue to have a wonderful journey through unimaginable places ..." On December 11, Abbot Flavian Burns sent a telegram to Van Doren: "We regret to inform you of the death of Father Thomas Merton in Bangkok." Van Doren responded: "Terrible as it is, thank you for sending me tonight the news of Thomas Merton's death. He was one of the great persons of our time or of any time. I shall mourn for him as long as I live."
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