The Letters of Thomas Merton and Victor and Carolyn Hammer: Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam ed. by F. Douglas Scutchfield, and Paul Evans Holbrook Jr. (review)

Books about Thomas Merton proliferated around 2015, the centenary of his birth. This volume may be the most significant. It records an extended, important friendship; illuminates Merton’s European origins (a facet underplayed in American Merton scholarship); his interest in aesthetics; and his voracious intellect. The editors “have reproduced the entire corpus of work that we have found, fragments, postcards, and quick notes on dates to meet . . .” (p. xvi). Notes about arranging for meetings indicate the devotion of Victor and Carolyn Hammer to Merton. They provided meals; traveled from their home in Lexington, Kentucky, to the Abbey of Gethsemani; offered Merton humane emotional and intellectual sustenance; and connected him to wider intellectual and artistic communities. Substantive aspects of this correspondence include “art and spirituality . . . collaborative publications, Merton’s reading lists, and mutual friends” (p. 271).

The letters begin after the couple met Merton in September 1955 through mutual friends Jacques Maritain and James Laughlin, and end with Merton’s death in 1968. As Merton was born in France in 1915 and educated in England, his sensibility was not circumscribed by cultural myths of the United States to which he emigrated in 1934, three years after the death of his artist father. Baptized in 1938 while a student at Columbia University, he entered the Abbey of Gethsemani in 1941 and became a U.S. citizen in 1951.

Victor Hammer was born in Vienna in 1882 and educated there. By 1937, he was teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts. After Germany annexed Austria in 1938, Hammer was “retired.” In 1939 he began teaching at Wells College in New York and was later artist in residence at Transylvania College (now University) in Lexington. After his first wife died, he married Carolyn Reading, a University of Kentucky librarian and small-press enthusiast.

Victor Hammer was a father figure and an intellectual partner for Merton. Both men were European immigrants, deeply spiritual Catholics, and serious explorers of art and faith (as master of scholastics, Merton gave conferences on the topic “Notes on Sacred Art” in October and November 1954). Their friendship was rooted in this mutual interest, in Merton’s need for books, and in projects involving editions of Merton’s works. The Hammers’ press published Merton’s long poem, Hagia Sophia (which inspired Hammer’s painting), and works on the early Fathers. The weightiest letters discuss art and spirituality topics such as Conrad Fiedler’s theories (pp. 19–29), Hagia Sophia (pp. 64–69), and Hammer’s painting of the woman caught in adultery (pp. 173–81). Thus the book will surely interest art historians.

Merton’s letters to Carolyn request books on an astonishing variety of subjects. Without her help he could not fully have explored interests in Russia, Latin American literature, Celtic Christianity, Islam, Zen Buddhism, American literature, and contemporary social and political thought—subjects to which he made significant, sometimes seminal, contributions. His book requests are as staggering as his cavalier attitude toward borrowing practices and publishing legalities. Carolyn played a crucial role in Merton’s work, a debt heretofore unheralded.

Both Kentucky scholars, the editors have produced an important volume illustrating Catholic intellectual life in the mid-twentieth century. Their extensive notes are valuable especially in identifying people mentioned and in synchronizing letters with Merton’s journals. The University Press of Kentucky has produced an attractive volume. Eight pages of photographs and an index enhance the text. The editors hoped the reader would “share in the friendship of these polymaths” and “extract nourishment for themselves” (p. 271). This reviewer did.