Thomas Merton and the Counterculture: A Golden String by Ron Dart (review)

herself in Homeric terms. In Officers and Gentlemen (1955), Guy loses his faith in Ivor Claire, the modern warrior-aesthete, during the disastrous invasion of Crete. In Unconditional Surrender (1961, published in America as The End of the Battle), the great ‘‘artist-criminal’’ Ludovic nihilistically devotes himself to hatred of others and himself in his literary compositions, such as The Death Wish (145). The success of DeCoste’s last and longest chapter depends on three debatable points. First is the use of the original, single-volume editions of the trilogy. In the 1965 revision, Waugh excised many of the passages cited from volume one. Second is our willingness to admit Ivor as an aesthetic symbol, although this is true of him only as a person; he is a sober and adult Sebastian, not an artist by vocation like Charles. Third is the notion, on which DeCoste insists at the end of the chapter, that the artistry of the trilogy—Waugh’s own ‘‘preoccupation with style’’ as a writer— should count as evidence of the struggle between faith and art. These latter two points require a broader definition of art than seems warranted, but they are similar to the arguments from Constantine’s make-up and Pinfold’s textual allusiveness. But in those cases, the argument was supported by significant artist-characters and passages editorializing on issues of aesthetics and stylistics. In any case, even if we do not find faith and art in the war trilogy, we must grant the presence of DeCoste’s theme at a more general level, for Guy’s central problem is the search for a new private vocation after the wreck of his marriage. DeCoste suggests Waugh’s point is that private vocations are not just for saints and artists (158). The Vocation of Evelyn Waugh is notable for keen insights and sturdy argumentation . DeCoste knows the man and his works very well. He has a gift for finding happy parallels—‘‘the fundamentally Arnoldian faith of Waugh’s Hollywood reduces persons to works and artworks to kitsch’’ (48). Some sentences are burdensome to read (162), but at times he finds just the right template for clear and memorable analysis. Occasionally he turns a fine phrase; The Loved One’s Mr. Slump is called ‘‘one third of the Guru Brahmin’s profane trinity’’ (49). Gilbert Pinfold’s ‘‘diminished charity can do no more than turn odium to tedium’’ (112). Not always quite so memorable, the book is almost always clear, interesting, and reasonable. I look forward to rereading Waugh’s novels to test the thesis. Seth Holler Universitas Pelita Harapan Thomas Merton and the Counterculture: A Golden String. By Ron Dart, ed. Abbotsford, BC: St. Macrina Press, 2016. ISBN: 978-1523927883. Pp. xx + 123. $20.00 (pbk). In a February 13, 1972 piece for the New York Times Book Review entitled ‘‘The Beat Movement, Concluded,’’ novelist and critic Wilfrid Sheed wrote, ‘‘Much of the Beat lifestyle, or at least notes toward it, existed among a small group at Book Reviews 343 Columbia University as early as 1939.’’ The ‘‘small group’’ to which he refers was that of Thomas Merton and his friends, whose bohemian lifestyle during their summer stays at the family cottage of Robert Lax in the hills above Olean, NY foreshadowed much of the anti-establishment ethos that would mark the rebellion of the slightly later Columbia students Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac and their fellow Beats. Sheed continues: ‘‘The years of Beat gestation fortunately cover the whole undergraduate career of Thomas Merton . . . Merton and his group proceeded to stage a complete dry-run of the Beat movement.’’ While the lives of Merton, Lax, and their companions would eventually move in very different directions from those of the most prominent Beats, the essays collected in this volume, edited by Canadian scholar Ron Dart, explore some of the continued areas of similarity and convergence between the mature Merton, Trappist monk and celebrated author, and particular figures associated in varying degrees with the Beat movement. The title of course recalls Theodore Roszak’s celebrated study of 1960s radicalism , The Making of a Counter Culture, published in 1969, the year after Merton’s...