The Monk’s Record Player: Thomas Merton, Bob Dylan, and the Perilous Summer of 1966 by Robert Hudson (review)

Robert Hudson, Dylan scholar and member of the International Thomas Merton Society, has written an innovative book on a neglected topic: how the Catholic monk Thomas Merton used musician Bob Dylan’s art to understand various dynamics dear to the monk. These dynamics include his relationship to the world outside the monastery/hermitage, especially his romantic relationship with a student nurse, Margie Smith, as well as his own writing.

Hudson divides the book into three parts, beginning each part with a timetable that lays biographical details for Dylan and Merton side by side and concludes each part with a “Dylan Interlude.” In part one, Hudson treats Merton’s first two decades in the monastery covering April 1941 to August 1965. He sets the tension immediately by presenting a Merton who at once longs for both solitude and contact, not only with God, but also with humanity. In part two, mostly drawing from Merton’s journals, Hudson focuses on the spring and summer of 1966, during which time Merton met and fell in love with Margie Smith and encountered the art of Bob Dylan. Here Hudson demonstrates how Merton dialogued with Dylan’s art to process his romantic relationship. In part three, Hudson covers the remainder of 1966 until Merton’s death on December 10, 1968, this time demonstrating how the monk used Dylan to inform his writing, especially one of Merton’s last book-length poems, Cables to the Ace.

Hudson’s work carries great methodological and biographical value for Merton scholarship and ought to be part of any college, university, or seminary library, especially for graduate students. Methodologically, Hudson’s work demonstrates the importance of utilizing journals, especially in the case of a censored monk (7). Biographically, the book demonstrates how tightly interwoven Merton’s interests were as Hudson takes the reader deep into Merton’s mind. Along the way, Hudson’s insights appear mostly accurate, fresh, and meaningful.

Theologically, however, The Monk’s Record Player is less significant, as Hudson’s work often drifts into caricatures of a liberal ecclesiology. This is problematic because Hudson rarely supports such moves with citations from Merton’s primary sources, or he uses ambiguous citations, leaving the reader mostly with Hudson’s own assumptions.

For instance, in the prologue, Hudson paints a picture of Merton outside the walls of the monastery, walking in the woods, where he encounters deer. Hudson uses the scene to illustrate Merton’s desire to live more radically in a hermitage. He proceeds, however, without citations, to suggest Merton even desired to “[escape] the protective canopy of the Catholic Church” but would have to settle for something less “for now” (11). Such pervasive assumptions linger heavily throughout the book shading Hudson’s entire analysis and the reader’s take on Merton.

By the end of the first third of the book alone, the reader is already left with someone else’s hang-ups from a repeated disparaging use of words and images such as “conservative,” “old-school [Catholicism],” the institutional church, tradition, authority, and hierarchy (36, 41, 48, 49, 51). For example, in Chapter 3, Hudson associates “old-school Catholics” with “a church that before the war had been perceived as stodgy and conservative more often than not” (36). Then, in Chapter four, when Hudson relays Merton’s famous mystical vision at 4th and Walnut in Louisville, wherein Merton comes to a deep recognition of his solidarity with everyone, Hudson fails to consider how old-school, institutional structures like doctrine and the traditional practices of monastic life may have also shaped Merton’s vision. Instead, in Hudson’s hands, the scene becomes the liberal narrative of the individual versus the institutional church and the only thing old-school Catholicism had to do with this scene is that Merton desired to leave it (41–43).

Though the world of Merton scholarship is now more holistic thanks...