I hadn't before realized the rage and exuberance of this writer, the gambler in the cassock, the voracity for all things human and the will to write his appetites on stone and offer the tablets to a void and hope that the void has eyes that can weep.
--John Leonard, review of My Argument with the Gestapo in The New York Times Book Review, July 10, 1969
My correspondent is happy to believe "mankind will adapt." That we will overcome whatever challenges present. I think maybe so, maybe no. That every empire falls. That our life is given meaning by our knowledge that it will end. Human beings will have their reign and be superseded. Not necessarily by some higher form.
Mozart will be forgotten. That's not despair, that's math.
But maybe it's not much fun either. Sorry.
Foresight is a kind of curse; we can see what's coming at us, what we need to find some way to avoid. What causes us to shut our eyes and brace for impact.
In the summer of 1941, a lot of Americans knew what was coming. Thomas Merton was trying to decide what to do with himself; he felt drawn to the monastic life but felt unworthy of serving God. He had stopped smoking and all but given up drinking, and decided to improve his reading habits, eschewing junk for quality. He thought of offering himself for service in a non-combative role. He was 26 years old and "trying to find something: I don't know what."
He threw himself into writing, producing the odd and fascinating book My Argument with the Gestapo, which we have to call a novel because although it is grounded in recollection and the precise catalogizing of concrete detail ("Here then are a dressmaker's form, a cello, a Dresden fruit dish standing on the table full of small, discarded metal fixtures like picture hangers and old doorknobs"), it describes an impossible journey.
It was the fourth novel Merton had written, and the only one he didn't destroy before entering the Cistercian order. He showed up at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Bardstown, Ky., on Dec. 10, 1941--reportedly in fear of the draft board. (Eventually they would reject him for his fallen arches and weak teeth.) That was days after Pearl Harbor had rendered that novel unpublishable during Merton's lifetime.
It was finally published in 1968, shortly after Merton's bizarre death 27 years to the day after he entered the monastery--electrocuted in Thailand by a Hitachi floor fan in a cottage at a Red Cross retreat center near Bangkok. He was attending a monastic conference there and had just lectured his fellow monks on Marxism and Monastic Perspectives. No one could explain the bloody wound on the back of his head.
They hustled the body out of there and flew it back to the United States on a U.S. military aircraft returning from Vietnam. His biographer Michael Mott dismissed the possibility of suicide because he couldn't imagine a motive. Accidental death seems most likely, though Mott didn't rule out assassination, and others have feasted on the possibility.
Merton seemed to have forgotten about his novel during his time at Gethsemani. It was only in 1967 that he asked his agent to look into getting it published. It can be a confusing read, especially if the reader isn't already aware of the contours of Merton's life.
The novel tells a story of a young man named Thomas Merton who travels to Europe to report on the war. (Though Merton had lived and traveled in Europe as a child and young teenager, he returned to the U.S. in 1933, when he was 18 years old.)
There is a certain artificiality to the work. Merton was no James Joyce, though he obviously wanted to be, and explicitly invokes him in the book: "... Joyce was a blaspheming man. He lost his Catholic faith and was cruel to his mother. His pride was hard as a stone and he smelled hell every day of his life, what all he had to go through, poor blind man! But he was one of the best I can think of, and all I pray is he shall come to the place of saints, for he was an honest writer."
Merton is honest too. What prevented his novel from being published at the time was his disdainful criticism of the British, who were seen as occupants of a brave little island singlehandedly holding off Nazism. When the Japanese made them America's ally, there was no point in trying to put out a young man's worrying of pacifism in the face of Hitler. Bad books are published every day, but Merton's bad book could wait.
Merton's pacifism would not survive the war, but would present itself again in the face of Vietnam. (Catholic censors at one point told him to stop writing about the war.)
Merton was an indecisive man--he knew, understood and forgave this about himself. The ink was barely dry on The Seven Storey Mountain--a 1948 memoir that propelled him to fame as it detailed his journey from a louche young rogue who, his friend Bob Lax said, wallowed in "beer, bewilderment, and sorrow" to a penitent Trappist--before Merton was saying it was the work of "another man."
It's been alleged that The Seven Storey Mountain presented a PG-13 version of a Merton who actually led a rather R-rated existence; it's possible he fathered a child while a college student in England. He alluded to some things left unsaid in his book: "Shall I wake up the dirty ghosts under the trees of the Backs and out beyond the Clare New Building and in some rooms down on Chesterton Road?"
He let them sleep.
Merton was the hermit who, in his 50s, carried on an affair with a nurse half his age. (Merton's diary entry for July 12, 1966: "... there is no question I love her deeply... I keep remembering her body, her nakedness ... and it haunts me ... I could have been enslaved to the need for her body after all. It is a good thing I called it off ..."). She was a fan, she'd read The Seven Storey Mountain.
I'm a fan too, though not so much of the earnest writer of The Seven Storey Mountain who seems to revel in having found all the answers. I like the messy Merton, the one who played Dylan records in his hermitage, who was capable of writing something as derivative of the Beats and Dylan's record album liner notes as Cables to the Ace, his 1967 "nonpoem," which includes not-bad lines like: Make a pretense of fun by bein' serious/Hide the emptiness by bein' mysterious/Joke with ease while feelin' furious/Ain't this Bob Dylan's blues again?
You've got to learn to love the contradiction, to understand the holy have broken hearts. And that it matters all the more because of the shortness of our time. We might adapt. Tom Merton did. But we will not prevail. We can only hope the void has eyes that weep.
www.blooddirtangels.com
Dining Out on 10/21/2018