Margaret Mead
Shore, Bradd
will get credit for them in the Bible. (' Tll let you in on a secret about my son Solomon: he was dead serious when he proposed cutting the baby in half, that putz. I swear to God. The dumb son of...
...As far as possible he allows Merton to interpret himself...
...Further, the title gives no indication that the book is a biography and indeed the unwary browser in a bookstore might mistake it for a novel or a new edition of Seven Storey Mountain...
...For if Merton was his own best and most frequent critic, he was at the same time his own severest judge...
...David finds God inexplicable in any case, and not terribly bright...
...Mott writes, "Merton was not al- ways fair to his younger self...
...David finds this niggardly of God since it was a mere peccadillo on his slate: "Gory deeds?I've got more than enough for every taste...
...we hardly need to be told, as Heller does tell us, that David has married the original J.A.P...
...The other chapters of the book, rang- ing from interviews with Joseph (Continued on page 565) 19 October 1984:563...
...Robert Imbelli I N the most intriguing chapter of The Now and Future Church, Eugene Kennedy recounts, with the relish and poignancy of a good Irish storyteller, a too-little-known tale of the American church...
...Don't pick your nose in front of me...
...This means of course that there is a generous use of the journals (since it is especially in the journals that Merton analyzes self and motives...
...Heller has done his homework in Samuel and Kings and the story holds close to Scripture in chronology and detail...
...Now all this may sound fairly divert- ing in the telling and it's admittedly churlish for a reviewer to rip off some of a book's better gags and then put it down, but the formula gets more than tedious at book length...
...For many readers Mott's handling of these relationships --confusing and complex though they be, yet important for understanding Merton -- may well be highlights of clarity and clarification in a book that reads well from beginning to end...
...When he was forbidden to write on war and peace, he went underground with mimeographed articles...
...Again, he does not succumb to the temptation of letting biography become autobiography...
...Follow the Ecstasy purports tO be a "dialogue" between Merton and the late John Howard Griffin, the first appointed Merton biographer who was forced be- cause of ill health to give up the project...
...David is waiting for an apology from God for letting the son which Bathsheba bore him as a result of their illicit cou- pling die...
...The New York Review, published at St...
...It is his story about Mer- ton rather than Merton's story about him- self that we read, fleshing in details that were omitted in Seven Storey Mountain and clearing up many of the mysteries that Trappist propriety left obscure or unresolved...
...The title of the biography--intended to stress the importance of place to Metton and its influence on him--seems to me a bit artificial and contrived...
...No review can do justice to Mott's careful and sensitive portrayal of both these incidents...
...One does not~have to agree with everything that Mott has said, but nonetheless from now on any- one who writes about Merton must Commonweal: 562 reckon with this biography, and anyone who ignores it runs the risk of moving Merton scholarship in wrong or unpro- ductive directions...
...Heller does a brisk and diverting job with the slaying of Goliath, but keeps coming back to other key incidents like a pesky, droning fly...
...The book is clearly Mott's, not Merton's: the author remains in control...
...The danger in being a king is that after a while you begin to believe you really are one...
...As one who knew and admired John H. Griffin in life and would not want to dishonor him in death, I regret that the decision was made to publish what I can only judge to be an early rough draft--perhaps from tapes of his reading of the Merton journals...
...More than that, Merton's judgments of himself are not sacrosanct: Mott does not hesitate to question them when it seems necessary...
...Did I kill Uriah to avoid a scandal," he wonders, "or because I al- ready had settled in my soul that I wanted his wife...
...Moreover, by the sixties a new and demanding dimension was added to his monastic life that further complicated his desire for solitude...
...Always make sure that your hair is combed, es- pecially in the back...
...The older Mer- ton and the younger Merton showed a gaiety and high spirits which were largely suppressed during the early years in the monastery, and I have tried to bring back the balance occasionally by includ- ing the laughter of a deeply serious man...
...The subtleties of that human- ness have been captured by Mott in both its strengths and its frailties...
...You must wash your hands with strong soap after defecating and urinating, especially be- fore you start preparing my food...
...Yet it might be con- jectured, with some plausibility, that the American church would have been far better prepared for Vatican II and would have endured the ensuing crisis of growth with far less trauma...
...What we get instead are one-liners ("A harem is a warm climate, not an easy thing to keep in mint condition"), outrageous anachronisms (Bathsheba designed bloomers, the caftan and the mini-skirt...
...Michael Mott has managed to put together a remarkable, coherent, and eminently readable portrait of the differ- ent Mertons that emerge from the pub- lished writings, the journals, the life- events, and the many friendships of Gethsemani's most famous monk...
...For not only is the heart deceitful in all things, it is also desperately wicked...
...Not all Merton's enthusiasms bore fruit in a book or an article...
...In the end it's like inviting the Two-Thousand-Year-Old-Man to prove that he has total recall or like accidentally sitting down beside the Ancient Mariner on a long bus trip...
...The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton (Continued from page 560) publisher the love poetry occasioned by this relationship...
...And even this com- mitment has its ambiguity...
...To his knowledge God has only managed to outsmart him on one occasion and proba- bly resents David's brains and the fact that he refused to play by the book or pay much attention to what God tries to tell him through his muddled prophet Nathan...
...Mott has followed an appropriate her- meneutic...
...129...
...Joseph's Seminary, Dunwoodie, shone fora thousand bright days in the first decade of the twentieth century, seeking to reconcile "ancient faith and modern knowledge," only to fall feel sure, not Seeds of Contemplation (p.238), but New Seeds...
...As he has Bathsheba tell David when he boasts about his psalms: "Some are masterpieces but, like everything you write, they're flawed by excessive length...
...Readers will especially want to see how Mott handles two crucial and complicated situations in Merton's life: his brief love affair with a young woman in 1966 and his long-time relationship as a monk to his abbot, Dom James Fox...
...Always use deodorants...
...If this is a false judgment and this text was actu- ally intended as finished copy, one can only conclude that Merton fared better in a book by Michael Mott who never knew him than he would have fared at the hands of a very dear friend...
...I have suicide, regicide, patricide, homicide, fratricide, infan-ticide, adultery, incest, hanging, and more decapitations than just Saul's...
...Of course, one can only speculate...
...To the impress- ive list of Merton names and nicknames, (p.7) I would like to add the delightful Chinese name given him by Dr...
...Mott manages this well...
...He sought solitude relentlessly, yet he needed to be with people...
...After listening to the honeymoon prescriptions laid on him by David's first wife, King Saul's daughter princess Michal ("I will want you to bathe every night and to brush your teeth after every meal...
...The voyeuristic roof-top bathing seduction scene is re-created with variations at least four times, and the sole suspense provided is whether Bathsheba, the only woman David feels sure can stir him from impotence, will agree to lie with him one last time if he will agree to name Solomon king...
...He began to reach far beyond the monastic walls, writing articles and letters on ra- cial justice, Vietnam, and nuclear war (his statements on the last find significant parallels in the 1983 American bishops' Pastoral, The Challenge of Peace...
...But the seriousness largely ends there, with no real attempt to get inside the heads of any characters other than David, or to get down the ethos of the period as Thomas Mann managed so splendidly in Joseph in Egypt, or to dazzle with arcane imagination as Mailer did less successfully in'Ancient Evenings...
...Kennedy is moved to exclaim rhetori- cally: "What might have happened had the light struck at Dunwoodie not been so abruptly snuffed out...
...Minor points: The most admired of Merton's books on contemplation is, I Catholic psyche then I THE NOW AND FUTURE CIOlgl THE PSYCHOLOGY OF BEING AN AMERICAN CATHOLIC Eugene Kennedy Doubleday, $13.95, 198 pp...
...H e bitterly resents the fact that not a single book in the Bible is named for him whereas Samuel "that crude, blundering jackass" has two...
...He protests far too often that the lines about his love for Jonathan surpassing that of man for woman will be misconstrued ("I am David the king, not Oscar Wilde") and boasts about his sexual prowess ("Oh, boy, did I cleave to her...
...God, for his part has never forgiven David for sending Bathsheba's husband off to the front to be killed...
...Trying to be fairer, at times I have been critical of The Seven Storey Mountain...
...Even mine...
...The dumb son of a bitch was trying to be fair, not shrewd...
...It is also, so the preface says, "the her- mit's life-story and Griffin's lucid syn- thesis of solitude...
...God knows...
...tomorrow victim to the anti-modernist paranoia propagated by the religiously sensitive but intellectually shallow Pope Pius X. The suppression of the Review and the extinguishing at Dunwoodie of the novel experiment in seminary education which it spearheaded serve Kennedy as potent symbol for the anti-intellectualism and clerical authoritarianism which formed the shadow side of the prodigiously im- migrant church in America...
...Irenaeus's name does mean "peaceful," but in Greek not Latin (p...
...Yet his in-volvement in the social issues of his day never shook his conviction that he was irrevocably a monk...
...The fact that so many did is amazing when one realizes his rigorous commitment to prayer and solitude...
...John Wu: Mei Teng which meansSilent Lamp...
...Perhaps Heller i~ aware that he runs on a bit...
...The Seven Storey Mountain-Merton's bestseller autobiography which covers more than half his life--probably poses as serious a challenge as any to a Merton biographer...
...Far too early on in God Knows the temptation to start skimming all the biblical prose for the jokes and naughty bits becomes overpowering...
...There are times when his self-criticism needs softening...
...Catch-22 is a hard act to follow and even it may have been too protracted...
...Yet Mott is careful not to let his text become entangled in a catena of quo- tations...
...Surely no small feat...
...This is perhaps espe- cially true in the book that brought him instant fame: The Seven Storey Moun- tain...
...He was very human, unaffectedly and endear- ingly so...
...One could probably think of an eighth or ninth mountain...
...That's gross...
...This man of many talents and lofty ambitions was not a contradiction, but surely a paradox--and more than that, a mystery, not only to others but often to himself, as he strove to integrate his enormous spiritual, intellectual, artistic, and emotional capabilities into a unified life...
...It is no easy thing to retell a best-seller...
...David has a weakness for tacos...
...Both are put in a context that make his presentation balanced and insightful...
...To enliven the mandatory plod- ding through dead patches of scriptural narrative we are given David's com-ments and complaints about everything from plagiarism (it wasn't just Solomon who stole from him, but Shakespeare and Milton, among others) to Michelangelo's outrageous portrayal of him as uncir-cumcised...
...BOW TO SATE TIIg CATH0UC CIUBCB Andrew M. Greeley and Mary Greeley Durldn Vikings, $16.95, 256 pp...
...Merton was one of those persons whom people instinctively like...
Vol. 111 • October 1984 • No. 18
