Thomas Merton/Words and Silence/The Art of Thomas Merton/The Solitary Explorer/Merton, A Biography
Baker, James T.
A kinsman to so many THOMAS MERTON, A PICTORIAL BIOGRAPHY James Forest Paulist Press, $5.95, 102 pp. WORDS AND SILENCE ON THE POETRY OF THOMAS MERTON Therese Lentfoehr New Directions, $4.95,...
...Some courage...
...Some courage...
...It is worth noting that Merton books are coming from all over now, this one from Texas, from the press of a Protestant university...
...He searches for the same elusive God, who alone can fill man's spiritual vacuum, that so many people today pursue...
...Though it provides fewer intimate glimpses of Merton's inner vision and its motivation than one might expect from a soul sister, it does give the kind of interpretive detail students of poetry need in order to approach a new poet...
...Some nerve...
...As Therese says: "Merton's uniqueness as a religious poet lies in his focusing on the 'inner experience,' as he called it, the God-encounter in the depths of one's being and his striving to articulate it in his poetry...
...4) and poetry, which he always considered his first but most frustrating love, his gloriously "useless" work...
...This they must do, of course, because this is what Merton offers every reader: a guided tour down his own wooded pathway from where it all began to wherever it all might be going...
...Scholars in the field of American religion have begun to notice a significant "Merton phase" in the religious pilgrimage of many young people...
...Jim Forest, once with the Catholic Worker, now with the Fellowship of Reconciliation in Europe, has assembled a grand array of photographs to illuminate the Meiton journey in his Thomas Merton, A Pictorial Biography...
...Merton continues to attract such broad and enthusiastic interest-and to inspire such devotion-because his versatility makes him a kinsman to so many kinds of people...
...The first point is doubtless true...
...They all follow Merton's journey (personal, artistic, spiritual) from his early years in France and Britain through his American career at Gethsemani down to his odd death in Bangkok...
...The university press, especially in the South, is not the way to immortality...
...What is most pleasantly surprising is how many of them, the five listed above included, write good-to-excellent books about this most creative of religious men...
...Merton seems to demand and get the very best from those who write about him...
...A saint...
...Each new Merton book is different, as the ones above prove, written by a different kind of person on a different Merton subject from a different perspective for a different audience...
...but in subsequent books Merton went on further journeys: to social criticism, to Eastern religions, to be himself after all the years of assumed identity...
...Annual conferences are held all over North America to pursue Merton themes...
...All of his work is autobiographical, as is no other American religious writer's, all of it a public examination of his every weakness, his every strength, lamenting, celebrating, yet without maudlin sentimentality or false bravado...
...Elena's thesis, carefully and thoroughly developed in a book that might serve as a guide to any reader's spiritual quest, is that all of Merton's thought is self-study, all of his art self-portraiture, a welcome addition to the arid grazing grounds of modern theology...
...2) diary, in which more than any other form he was able to bare his soul to the world...
...Here, as in the other books, Merton is seen searching for his" own soul's identity, this time through his verse...
...He symbolizes and epitomizes modern man, head in the clouds, feet in quicksand, fighting every battle up hill but with a look of confidence on his face, making all his "cheeses for Jesus...
...In these ten years thirty Merton books have appeared...
...Forest's research and writing are solid, and his book fills a longstanding need for a "simple" yet complete Merton biography...
...What all of the new Merton books say is that Merton had both the ego and the perception to recognize in his own experience the key to theological communication with a secular world...
...That he could and would cast himself in the role of modern religious man, that he would and could make theological mountains out of personal molehills, meant that he would work always in semi-darkness, as do all people who work on frontiers, and that he would continue to attract and capture the imaginations of men and women seeking their own dusky destinies...
...He is artist, poet, philosopher, theologian: a man with a hundred passions, a man with a canine appetite for leporine fantasies, a brother to all who search for truth...
...Each writer probably feels, as I once did, that Merton belongs to him or her and yet must be shared with the world...
...Of the five new Merton books, two are biographies (one pictorial, one interpretive), two are concerned with his literature, and one deals with his spiritual pilgrimage...
...Monica Furlong's Merton, A Biography deserves the attention it is receiving from reviewers and buyers...
...WORDS AND SILENCE ON THE POETRY OF THOMAS MERTON Therese Lentfoehr New Directions, $4.95, 144 pp...
...THE SOLITARY EXPLORER THOMAS MERTON'S TRANSFORMING JOURNEY Elena Malits Harper and Row, $12.95, 340 pp...
...It provides a good, clear analysis and evaluation of the four "types" of Merton writing through which he sought to find his own destiny: (1) narrative, with which he was for the most part unsuccessful, with the notable exception of The Seven Storey Mountain...
...Which makes him a fascinating subject for each new reader, and probably for each new generation of readers, far into the future...
...Though it is not a biography or strictly a study of Merton's writings, Elena Malits's Solitary Explorer is one of the best studies of Merton's journey...
...Merton will not fade...
...James T. Baker A DECADE AGO, when I took the first tentative, frightened step toward an evaluation of the life and work of Thomas Merton, a distinguished reviewer (who will remain unidentified) gave my book and me rather sympathetic short shrift...
...MERTON, A BIOGRAPHY Monica Furlong Harper and Row, $12.95, 340 pp...
...THE ART OF THOMAS MERTON Ross Labrie Texas Christian University, $8 (paper), 173 pp...
...Certainly a prime candidate...
...Don't be surprised if this turns out to be the Merton book most read by future generations...
...but each one exhibits a deep affection for the man, and that affection gives each one a fine nobility...
...Furlong honestly and carefully treats the two heretofore inadequately covered crises of Merton's life: the unwanted pregnancy of a Cambridge "shop girl" in the 1930s and the amateur journey into neurosis in the 1950s...
...Some man.s...
...end-if indeed it ever does...
...It does provide a passionate, sometimes simplistic account of Merton's journey to the mysterious realm of religion and on to "the desert" of monastic contemplation...
...Forest's account is fully as fluent and entertaining as Ed Rice's (A Man in the Sycamore Tree) without Rice's lapses into fantasy and sensation...
...Her Words and Silence is a good, basic introduction to the Merton poetry, its variety, its struggle toward maturity...
...Writers of every type-students of poetry, of American Catholic religion, of social criticism, of the spiritual life-swarm over Merlon's literary carcass, reconstructing the organs, sifting the cells, drawing brave conclusions and devising daring hypotheses about the nature of religious-creative man...
...Articles on his thought number probably a thousand...
...No one has the slightest idea where it will all...
...Some nerve...
...These newest of Merton books are probably the best each writer will produce...
...So apparently with all his life and work...
...At least a hundred theses and dissertations have been or are being written on his life and work...
...In light of this achievement even her occasional lapses into pop psychoanalysis and her "novelist's tendency" to use question marks instead of declarative periods are forgivable...
...But how mistaken my man was about Thomas Merton's future...
...In fact, the Merton story is so well and completely told here that one has to wonder if there is any need for Michael Mott's yet-to-be-written "official" biography, thetextus receptus of the Merton Legacy Trust...
...Some man...
...Her style is generally of such high quality that readers will read closely even the passages where the story is quite familiar...
...The text follows Merton's own versions of the story (as told in The Seven Storey Mountain) to its end and then adds a helpful if unsurprising update to cover the years from World War II to 1968...
...Sister Therese Lenfoehr, a poet herself, was perhaps Merton's most consistent poetic "pen pal" over the years...
...She digs deeper into Merton's multilayered life and interprets the bewildering mountains of facts more thoroughly and accurately than any previous biographer...
...3) essay, where he was doubtless at his best...
...She reminds us that The Seven Storey Mountain, which is often taken as the definitive story of Merton's life, is less than half his story, and a censored half at that...
...I had worked long hard and well, he allowed, but it was a shame really: the book was published by a university press, a southern university press at that, and it was about a man who would so quickly fade from public view that his name would hardly be recognized in ten years' time...
...Labrie gives one of the most accurate assessments yet of the effect the censors had on Merton's writings, of the creative tension they contributed to his sensitive psyche...
...The Solitary Explorer will not be permanently crippled by an early New York Times review featuring three factual errors in the first paragraph...
...Ross Labrie's The Art of Thomas Merton is not about Merton's considerable visual art-his calligraphy, his photography-but about the art of his pen...
Vol. 108 • April 1981 • No. 7
