Berkley Center

New Yorker, March 5, 2015

Here ends the book, but not the searching. Thomas Merton ended “The Seven Storey Mountain” with a little Latin to that effect: Sit finis libri, non finis quaerendi. Set tombstone-style in small caps, at once pompous and obscure, it runs against the spirit of the book, which is personal, casual, talky, and self-deprecating—the story of a conversion to Catholicism and a call to a Trappist monastery as the adventures of a young New York dangling man.

Here ends the book, but not the searching. Those words turned out to be as true as any Merton wrote before or after. “The Seven Storey Mountain” sold six hundred thousand copies in 1948 and 1949, and the book’s success forced Merton into the role of a cloistered celebrity, a spokesman for silence. Boxed in by this development and suddenly unstoppered as an author, Merton set himself to overcoming “the limitations that I created for myself with The Seven Storey Mountain” and “the artificial public image which this autobiography created.” There would be no sequel, but over the next twenty years he would scatter accounts of his further adventures across tens of thousands of pages: devotional books, poems, essays, letters, journals, aphorisms, and song lyrics—everything but fiction.

Here ends the book, but not the searching. His search set the terms of the modern religious search for readers of three generations—postwar Catholics, nineteen-sixties pilgrims, progressive contrarians in the age of Reagan and John Paul II—who made his search their own. And yet the exhibit of books and papers that Columbia (his alma mater) has put up to mark his centenary suggests that the search is ended—that Merton, for so long a forerunner or proxy for other seekers, has passed over into history at last.

Two typescripts of “The Seven Storey Mountain”—both marked in pencil by his Columbia friend and eventual editor, Robert Giroux—are mounted in a display case midway through the exhibit. This follows the usual scheme of Merton’s career, in which the autobiography parts the waters, dividing the life into before and after. On one side are Columbia yearbooks; drawings; pages from a journal that Merton kept and a novel that he wrote while living at 35 Perry Street, in 1939; and some letters and poems that he sent to friends after he decided to leave “the world,” in 1941, and enter a Trappist monastery where he would be forbidden to leave the grounds, to speak casually, or to write for writing’s sake. On the other side are examples of the writing that poured out of him after the autobiography (written with permission) made him a lucrative asset for the monastery. Here are his books about monastic life and contemplative prayer, and his published journal, “The Sign of Jonas.” Here’s the chart he drew up of daily life at the Abbey of Gethsemani, the hours blocked out as rigorously as a soldier’s or chief executive’s. Here are his contributions to the Catholic renascence in liturgy and art, lavish letterpress productions on heavy stock. Here’s the jacket blurb he sent in for Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s “Why We Can’t Wait”: “This is a historic little book with which every American, Negro or white, ought to be familiar.” Here’s an issue of Monks Pond, the folded-and-stapled literary magazine that he put together at the monastery in the mid-sixties. Here’s a letter handwritten on the stationery of the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok, a stop on the trip to Asia, through California and Alaska, that he took after the Trappists relaxed their rule against travel. And here’s a yellowed telegram sent to Merton’s old Columbia professor Mark Van Doren: “REGRET TO INFORM YOU OF THE DEATH OF FATHER MERTON IN BANGKOK.”

His death still takes people by surprise. He was a speaker at a conference of monks in Bangkok. After finishing a talk (about monasticism and Marxism), he went to the guesthouse to rest. He took a shower and, afterwards, slipped on the wet bathroom floor; he grabbed a rotary fan for balance and was electrocuted. It was December 10, 1968, twenty-seven years to the day after he joined the Trappists, at age twenty-seven—a numerological wrinkle that has led some people to suggest that his death was part of a pattern, either sinister or providential.

Merton was gone before his time, but his life had a third half in which he accompanied his readers imaginatively—his relative youth, his sudden death in a distant land, and a steady run of posthumous publications made us feel that his pilgrimage was still in progress. The Catonsville draft records and the Watergate tapes; EST training and the New Age; Jerry Falwell and John Cardinal O’Connor; the Star Wars missile shield and the priestly sexual-abuse crisis: about all of these we could ask, “What would Merton have said?” And we could suppose that things would have gone differently if he had still been alive, pumping out missives from the cinderblock hermitage that he built on a scraggly knob near the monastery. We could act as if he were alive, a person whose changes of mind we knew better than we knew our own.

Now the search is ended, and Merton—whose parents died in the nineteen-thirties, whose brother died in the Second World War—is embalmed in paper and ribboned ink.

That’s what I felt at Columbia, anyhow. The exhibit, in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Collection, on a high floor of Butler Library, is built on the foundation of a Merton exhibit held in the same place in 1990. I went to the 1990 exhibit while a graduate student in Columbia’s M.F.A. program. I moved from one glass case to the next, the overheated rooms silent except for the pock-pock of tennis balls on the court near the library. Like so many of Merton’s readers, I had swallowed him whole, and the manuscripts on view stood for stages of his life’s way: super-Trappist; modern poet; Catholic counterpart of Gandhi, King, and D.T. Suzuki, a holy man with a worldly following; hermit in the making; voice of nonviolence; would-be bohemian in overalls and denim work shirt, 35-mm. camera slung over one arm. And like so many of Merton’s readers, I identified my own life stages with Merton’s: as he had taught freshman composition at Columbia, so I was teaching freshman composition at Columbia; as he had written an autobiography, so I would try to live in a way that would call for an autobiography.

I wound up writing something else. Out of that exhibit came the impulse to write about Merton and the American Catholic writers who were his contemporaries—Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and Dorothy Day—in such a way that their stories could be seen as aspects of one story. Twelve years later, the book was done, with Merton’s typescripts and offprints interpreted as footsteps in the pilgrimage of a writer who sought to take the elaborately figured pattern of Catholic mysticism and make it the pattern of his own inward trek at an abbey in Kentucky.

Twelve years after that, Merton is no longer a man in stages, at least not to my eye. The letters, books, and drawings, for so long seen as expressing spasms of his restlessness, now seem reposefully all of a piece. Here is Merton as a notable author of the typewriter era—an era whose black-and-white austerity makes it seem more distinct from ours than it did in anno dot matrix 1990. His working life (long seen as frantic and interruptive) now seems impressively efficient: a very long series of what he called thoughts in solitude, each conceived, clarified, worked up, and rolled through the pecked-at manual typewriter and then posted (by U.S. Mail, that is) to his publishers and correspondents—a Kerouac-style scroll of self-expression, subdivided into several thousand parts. The writing itself, uniformly high in quality, seems one great burst of energy—the lifeward push of a man who loved cities and people but who loved solitude and God more, and who found a tolerable midpoint when he was alone and writing to somebody.

“To clear up any misconceptions as to whether I might be what is vulgarly known as a slacker . . .” That (he explained) was why he was writing; and in a letter of a thousand words, urgent and yet deeply considered and carefully typed, he set out the reasons that he was not a slacker at all. The letter, from December 1941, was addressed to the draft board: Pearl Harbor had just been bombed, and Merton, who was working as an adjunct professor of English, wrote to ask for noncombatant status on the grounds that, as a Catholic, he was pledged to nonviolence, and that he was pledged to enter a monastery besides. But that early letter gives voice to the impulse that runs all through his writing, whether typed or handwritten in his small, fine, fluid script. I am not a slacker. He is known as a spiritual master, and rightly so: nobody’s search was more ardent. He’s known as a point man for American Catholic writing, and so he was: his fame, his energy, and the range of his interests meant that, in the postwar years, all Catholic roads ran through him. He’s known as an expositor of contemplative prayer, and it may be that he was the last American writer to describe prayer with the pure and uncut confidence that the object of prayer really exists and is not a product of the cultural imagination.

Merton was all of those things; and all of those things had their roots in his tremendous dissatisfaction with the world as he found it. What’s really striking about him, a century on, is just how deep his dissatisfaction ran and how high his expectations were for himself and for his life. Here was a young man, outwardly thriving, who tossed outer measures aside—characterizing Columbia as “a big, sooty factory,” disdaining his work as a freelance book reviewer for the Times and the Herald Tribune (he was twenty-four) as a trivial pursuit. Here was a person who resolved not to miss the meaning of his life in the living of it. Here was a dangling man who was determined not to go slack.

It’s a little-known fact that J. D. Salinger took a writing course in the Extension Division at Columbia in 1939, when Merton was teaching writing in the Extension Division at Columbia. It’s better known that the year after Robert Giroux published “The Seven Storey Mountain,” at Harcourt Brace, he sought to publish “The Catcher in the Rye”—but he got pushback from the higher-ups who ran the textbook side of the firm. Those correspondences are significant. Like Salinger’s own dangling men—Holden Caulfield, Buddy and Seymour Glass—Merton set himself against phonies as a way of setting against phoniness in himself. Like them, he sought a life, a way of life, that was authentic and not phony.

Where Salinger retreated to New Hampshire to elect literary silence, Merton’s retreat to Kentucky turned out to be the opposite of silence. “It is possible to doubt whether I have become a monk (a doubt that I have to live with), but it is not possible to doubt that I am a writer, that I was born one and will most probably die as one,” he wrote in 1961, introducing an anthology of his work. “Disconcerting, disedifying as this is, this seems to be my lot and my vocation.”

“Well, what is it that I have been trying to say?” he asked in the same piece. After dismissing the obvious answer—that he was trying to make a case for the contemplative life—he answered the question with another question. “When a man enters a monastery he has to stand before the community and formally respond to a ritual question: Quid petis? ‘What do you ask?’ His answer is not that he seeks a happy life, or escape from anxiety, or freedom from sin, or the summit of contemplation. The answer is that he seeks mercy. ‘The mercy of God and the Order.’ ” That, Merton declared, is what he had sought, and he offered his writing as evidence “that I have found what I sought and continue to find it.”

“What am I looking for? What am I trying to say?” Those are questions every serious writer asks. To see specimens of Merton’s writing propped up under glass is to know that he asked those questions as authentically as any writer has. To see them again in the same place twenty-five years later—to catch your reflection in the glass: brow scored with lines, hair at the temples tonsured by time—is to see Merton’s work turn from an ideal to a measure before your eyes. It’s to recognize that his authenticity now belongs to him and to yesterday and is no credit to those of us who admire him today. Pope Francis, who has made mercy a key theme of his pontificate, is a member of the generation after Merton’s. The Dalai Lama—a radiant young man when Merton met him in Dharamsala—is now the elder of elders. The novice monks who trained under Merton in the sixties are octogenarians. Myself, I am nearing fifty—the age Merton was when he began what scholars treat as his “late” or “last” stage—and can I say what I am trying to say or what am I looking for?  Not as well or as urgently as Merton did, that’s for sure. Here ends the book, but not the searching. Now his search is over, a challenge and a reproach to ours.

This article was first published by the New Yorker.