Thomas Merton: The Prolific Monk

Thomas Merton: TheProlificMonk JamesForest. Thomas Merton: 4 PictorialBiography. New York: PaulistPress. 1980.102pp. Monica Furlong. Aferton: A Biography. SanFrancisco: Harper & Row, 1980.332 + xx pp. RossLabrie. The Art of Thomas Merton. FortWorth: Texas Christian University, 1979. 188 + xiiipp. Si\terTherese Lentfoehr. Words and Silence: OnthePoet1·1· of Thomas Merton. New York: New DirectiL~ns,1979.166+viii pp. GeorgeWoodcock. Thomas Merton, Monk and Poet: 4 CiiticalStudy. Vancouver, B.C.: Douglas & ~Iclntyre, 1978.200 pp. Michael W Higgins Whenthe far-from-anonymous Trappist monk Thomas Merton died of accidentalelectrocution in Bangkok in December 1968,he succeeded with this singleact in opening the floodgates of critical and biographical commentary whichhitherto he had largely kept closed. Although there had been a modest numberof master's and doctoral theses on various aspects of his work since the 1950s,his death provided the occasion for a flood of scholarly studies and fraternal tributes. Like Louis XV, Merton could have appropriately remarkedon that fateful day in December: ''Apres moi le deluge." A number of the studies that have appeared since his death should not havebeen published. Barely critical, many of them were written more as actsofhomage than as scholarly inquiries, and Merton's reputation suffered asa consequence. Few took seriously his admonition, initially addressed to scholarsbusily at work making sense of the fluid genius of James Joyce: They !scholars I are encouraged, by the rules of their game, to espouse one contrad1ction againstthe other, to choose between polarized energies, to decree that the "real Joyce" mw,t hesituated on one pole or the other, not in the tension between them. In order to "prove" thi,, it is apparently enough to accumulate every scrap of material in Joyce-and m the industry-which says anything whatever about one's chosen aspect of his work. The job to hedone is not one of qualitative judgment, but of quantitative accumulation. You pile up a mountain of evidence and set your chosen theme on top of it in splendid isolation. You \elt:"cta small part of Joyce, remove it from its context, sterilize it, sedulously cleanse 1t fromevery trace of living and dynamic relationship with other organic parts of the whole. Then, having declared this to be the "real Joyce" or the "main theme" or the "central Canadian Review of American Studies, Vol. B, No. 1, Spring 1982, I27-34 128 Michael W Higgins mystery" of his work, you proceed to bring all the rest of the work back into an artificial relationship with it, thereby re-defining Joyce in your own terms. Thus in an act of pnesth and scholarly transubstantiation you have extracted a living organ from the whole bodv and given it "a permanent life of its own." If in order to do so you have to stand Joyce on hishead. so much the better. Evidently the academic eye finds him more intriguing in that position.1 It is a fine irony that the monk-poet who penned these lines would himself fall prey to repeated acts of "priestly and scholarly transubstantiation" in order that the "academic eye" should find him more intriguing. More than ten years after his death the time is propitious for a comprehensive, critical assessment of a figure whom even the rather unsympathetic Richard Koste· lanetz acknowledged as a truly "extraordinary man." In this review I wishto look at two biographies, an introductory study and two critical works. In the mid-sixties Merton set up a trust to handle all the legal and financial matters attendant on his literary and publishing activities. After his death the Trust, in consultation with the Abbey authorities, appointed Merton's close friend, the Southern novelist and journalist John Howard Griffin,to be his official biographer. Griffin labored for years examining in great detail Merton's numerous private notebooks and journals and the countless letters that constituted his truly phenomenal correspondence. But he also labored under the weight of his own many and painful physical disabilities; andin the Fall of 1980he died with the biography unfinished. Griffin's publishers, Houghton Mifflin, have assigned an American professor of English, Michael Moffit, to complete the work. Until recently the only biography of Merton available was the renegade Man in the Sycamore...