The Merton we knew
Ferry, W.H. & Bamberger, John Eudes & Lax, Robert
When he couldn't publish officially, it made quite a change in my life. He asked me, and I suppose others, in effect to be a bootlegger for him. The nihil obstat rule ran only against magazine...
...He was wrestling with God, and there was always more to God than he could ever master...
...A lot of things were happening that none of us was aware of, and that Merton wasn't aware of...
...Perhaps if he had lived, he would have spent time in other hermitages, but he knew his true home...
...Later Mozart is seen composing the somber opening bars of the Requiem, so absorbed that he cannot hear loud knocking on the door...
...We'd already had our brushes with that world, and we didn't like it, didn't like the standards we'd have to conform to in order to move ahead in that world...
...But, when you knew him well, there always was this awareness that he had been very bad off at one time...
...I was his physician for a long time...
...There wouldn't be any publicity about it...
...I JOHN EUDES BANBERGER Wrestling with God I DOM JOHN EUDES BAMBERGER, O.C.S.O., a physician and abbot of Our Lady of Genesee Abbey, Piffard, New York, was a novice under Thomas Merton...
...he observes Mozart's obscenities and wonders how "the creature" can write "as though taking down dictation" from on high...
...He felt that you did what you must and life would eventually correct itself...
...Tom Merton was grinning from ear to ear...
...I had a red-hot Xerox machine...
...I couldn't imagine what this was all about...
...It seems to me he was supernaturally moved toward all of this because he'd be sitting in his room reading and suddenly he hears a voice inside him saying: "Go to Mass...
...He'd express some complaint about our work, for exam- ple, or the dryness of long periods in the choir...
...Yet, he was very reticent to talk about the deepest things, for example, his experience with prayer...
...And soon after that he hears a voice saying: "Go and become a Catholic," or "Go and talk to Father Ford about becoming a Catholic...
...An accumulation of inertia, waste, wrong, foolishness, rot, junk...
...When he was down it was heavy...
...We got out of the car and walked over to the bluff and there was the great Pacific in front of us...
...He often saw things before they were very clear to anyone else...
...M ERTON was a very different type from the image he projetted in his writings...
...I think it began when he went to Rome...
...There's one very serious proposal that he made which cannot be regarded very seriously today, but he said, "What I want to do is go away with this woman for a month...
...He told me in the car that he wanted to call a woman he had met recently...
...It's always a challenge...
...We went off and sat and talked...
...One finds there are as many different stories as there are people...
...T HE MONASTIC vocation is mysterious...
...By November he was being baptized at Corpus Christi Church...
...And he said, "Bring a lot of change --bring a pocketful of change...
...He felt you should let it all come out, not wrap your cowl around you and submerge...
...In standing before them as a tourist and an aesthete, the religious content of those mosaics began to influence him...
...Tom rushed over and then came back...
...Such interiorization of the score in Amadeus makes the music not background, but in- scape...
...At one moment, for example, the latter picks up one of Mozart's unblotted sheets, the tune flourishes, and Salieri begins to cry...
...Well, it took quite a long while, quite a few hours, quite a few busy signals, and he finally gave up...
...Was it part of the tension that came with his struggles...
...When he became a hermit it was very important to him because he was gifted for prayer and solitude and silence...
...I think that he felt,blocked at one point or another in the choices that were offered him, say, by the university or by the world or anything else...
...an invention to express a powerful theme is one thing, a contrivance to express a banal- ity another...
...She managed her side of this very well...
...The nihil obstat rule ran only against magazine articles, books, and such things...
...his jealousy, by all accounts, was believable and frighteningly demonic...
...Even at his most solitary and contemplative period, his early entry into Gethsemani, he was still conscious of the problems' of the world...
...Somehow, knowing his father was still alive, was spiritually present, began to change him...
...Appropriately, perhaps, Hulce's last movie was Animal House...
...It wouldn't appear normally because usually he gave the impres- sion of being a rather carefree, happy-go-lucky, freewheeling type of person...
...Hang on to the clear light...
...I remember one day he came up to me in the infirmary -- it was during his period as a hermit when he used to chop wood and he told me he had a numbness in his hand...
...Well," he said, "what's wrong with it...
...And then when he continued his stay in Rome, visiting churches, the basilicas, many of which have Byzantine mosaics...
...I'm sure she did nothing to bring this on, so to speak...
...At times that's hard to handle...
...I N 1934, when Merton and I were at Columbia, it was a place of great intellectual stimulation...
...I said, "Tom, are you out of your mind...
...I think part of his extroverted ways was an expression'of his need to be appreciated, to be loved, as perhaps he never had been...
...THINK THAT all the things happening at the end of the fifties and through the sixties in America certainly got to him because he was in touch with key people in all the movements, corresponding with them in a very lively responsible way...
...There was an open spot where the road ended...
...But there are some common threads...
...He was fifty-three years old the last time I saw him, full of energy and enthusiasm as usual, and his death came as quite a shock...
...I think it was one of the lowest points in his life...
...I thought that he might have a cervical disc impingement, and sent him into the hospital...
...But I believe he was not suited to be a hermit...
...We headed north, up the coast to look for a spot for a possible hermitage for him...
...I think the feeling of God's concern for the world is what drew him to Catholicism...
...So he had to become emotionally free, and probably more than he should have had to be as a young boy...
...I remember meeting him in the woods when his bearing exuded melancholy but that was uncommon...
...Once he was in the monastery, whatever success he had was for the greater glory of God...
...But I never saw him bitter...
...It is a fact that quite early he was all but homeless for all practical pur- poses and that prior to entering the monastery he felt he had lost what was best in his life, his human innocence...
...He was having his usual stomach problems, and on top of that his back was giving him terrible pain...
...I think he also felt that he was being used at times...
...I got hold of her this morning...
...Salieri himself has observed all the proprieties but composes mere drivel...
...And over two or three hours he rushed back and forth to that phone just like any man exasperated because he couldn't get hold of his girl...
...What do you think of that...
...He had two very profound experiences there...
...A great need of clarification, of mindfulness, or rather, of no-mind...
...But he never totally identified with that: he always believed in inno- cence...
...Merton had various health problems toward the end of his life...
...At times one would be aware that he was going through a considerable struggle about some aspect or other of life, because he was inclined not to hide it...
...In truth, Mozart was no saint, but often a crude, boisterous South German who could crack vulgar jokes as easily as crank out splendid tunes...
...Tom Hulce, who plays Mozart in Amadeus, is cast to shock...
...God's mercy towards sinners made a very strong appeal...
...There was a great openness about him and yet a concealed reserve...
...It was at that time when he was under a lot of attack from within the church, outside the church, and even from members of his own order...
...And that was because he was going through it -- not just for himself, but for many people...
...The fact --though considerably exaggerated --involves Mozart's character, who some apparently still conceive of as an eighteenth-century goody-two-shoes who tapped in twofourths time...
...Salieri appears much less a neoclassical Iago than the medioc- rity he confesses to be...
...Well, I was flabbergasted...
...I saw him at his worst physically, and often emotionally...
...He wanted to make it quite clear that this is what happens when a man is alive and struggling and conscious and articulate about it...
...If we went up to the woods, to Olean, to work, it was because we felt we could do something that was going in the opposite direction from the whole commercial world...
...And he wasn't given to hearing voices...
...that was part of his way...
...He was grumbling more than usual...
...When Salieri's demonic power declines, moreover, Schaf- fer's fictions seem more suspect...
...But, at the same time, he was a very independent type...
...We talked about it a lot more and he said,"You've given me something to think about...
...There were periods when Merton felt that the abbot was too narrow...
...But that summer when he went back, he started reading Gilson and Gerard Manley Hopkins, and suddenly a lot of Catholic books were just falling into his hands...
...He had other continuing ailments, stomach problems, digestive problems, and some allergies...
...He was full of a sort of quiet joy...
...And then there was the incident in 1966 that made me see that he was not only a religious, moral figure, but a man, simply unadorned, a man...
...And I said, "I'm sure there would...
...I don't think that Tom ever outgrew Gethsemani...
...His mother died when he was six, and his father was an artist who would suddenly decide to go off to North Africa and leave his son behind...
...One in his hotel room one night when his father, who had died not so very long before, was suddenly in the room with him...
...A great deal has been said about Merton and the problem of authority, his struggles with superiors in the order, Dom James Fox in particular, his abbot for some twenty years...
...The only thing he said was, "Thanks for the conversation...
...I'm not being moral about it, I think it's just a big mistake...
...Not simply to be quiet, somewhat productive, to pray, to read, to cultivate leisure.There is a need of effort, deepening char~ge and trans- formation...
...He furnished me with lists, and I had a good many lists of my own...
...He fixes on the somber, dedicated An- tonio Salieri, court composer for the Hapsburgs, as a medioc- rity who'becomes so consumed by jealousy that he contrives to destroy what he calls "the creature...
...Why did he have those things...
...The music is far more than a mere score, even more than a figurative"extra character...
...we listen to Salieri as he recalls the rivalry thirty years later in a lunatic asylum after a suicide attempt...
...There is So much talk about Tom's wanting to get away from Gethsemani, that he was plai n sick of it...
...and that if later he was drawn to the monastery, it was because he could see a kind of freedom there --paradoxical --but a kind of freedom in which he could grow and become fully the thing that he must have felt he was potentially...
...He was never able to face that fact, and I believe that instead of facing it he took it out on the community...
...But on the other hand, death came at a good time for him...
...From the first, director Milos Forman, aided by conductor Neville Mar- riner, coordinates his images with Mozart's lesser known serenades, then piano concertos, and finally the operas that so revolutionized wooden heroic traditions ("Who would you rather hear," Mozart asks Emperor Joseph II, "your hairdres- ser or Hercules...
...To create Amadeus, Peter Schaffer, who wrote both play and film, has freely mixed fact and fiction, perhaps too much so...
...But I left the next day...
...Just for a month...
...I for one realize that now I need more...
...I was quite rocked by the news of his death, but I didn't feel a maudlin thing about it at all...
...Well," he said, "that isn't what I wanted to hear...
...That's where he was complex...
...Oh, that look on his face...
...To this revision, Schaffer has added a tale of murder and spiritual corruption...
...And somehow he was able, because of the experience of God, to believe that God had recreated his innocence...
...He was fifty years old, and he was vulnerable...
...And they always felt a very personal bond with him for that reason...
...We walked another twenty yards and looked down from the bluff to see condominiums, a golf course, and restaurants being constructed fight down below US...
...He would indicate this by some sudden word, some touching sign of sympathy that was spontaneous and simple...
...That Mozart of popular iconography was a fiction, an invention of his widow to upgrade his reputation, and of nineteenth-century music critics to discipline the even wilder bohemians of their time...
...He realized that contemplation and action go together, and he could see a way of combining the two...
...When you're an abbot you can't just think of only the person you're dealing with, but of the way a decision will influence or be perceived by others...
...You'll find there was nothing directly stated about that in any of his writings or tapes...
...The line was busy...
...when his attention is finally jarred, the musical prayer dies mid- chord, like a recording unplugged...
...I think that was part of his mystique at Gethsemani...
...Although we hear much of this music set against exquisite Prague backgrounds, or watch its perform- ance in the very Tyl theater where Mozart first conducted Don Giovanni, we experience it most powerfully when it is set in the minds of Mozart and his rival Saiieri...
...At some point on that trip I said that I had been interested in Neo-Thomism and the things that Richard McKeon and Mortimer Adler were doing out in Chicago, and Thomistic thought in general...
...In the film, the rivalry seems a one-sided battle...
...But as he settled in, all these things came back, and he realized that he could deal with them from within the monastery...
...He knew, I think, he couldn't say, "Don't get into action, just live a contemplative life in a limited sense...
...he had an idea that if he could live away from Gethsemani for a time he'd like a place high above the Pacific Ocean...
...In that context, however, he must com- pete against Mozart's music --present as mere tape-recording in the theater...
...Right after my graduatio~l from college we both went up to Olean...
...he has a callow, almost vacuous face and a nervous high-pitched giggle...
...Merton said that if there was one thing that he wasn't much interested in, in the whole world of philosophy and religion, it was that tradition...
...Salieri, of course, might have been jealous of Mozart, but there is no evidence that he plotted against him...
...There were our mutual social concerns, there was this spe- cial relationship that we had once he was censored...
...Ah," he said, "let's go back...
...The monastic life appeals to people who have had some awakening that makes them feel that living in a way that doesn't go to the heart of life is a waste of time...
...He smiled a great deal, laughed a great deal...
...As an abbot, I speak to many people who see me when they think they have a vocation...
...I think that was moving him all the time, and any decisions he made really were leading toward that, and he hoped that they would lead him toward that...
...We went on and on and finally I drove him across twenty miles of the worst road in northern California to get out to the coast...
...And from that point of view I felt that his death expressed a good deal of continuity with his monastic life, in the sense that he had resolved some of the tensions about his vocation...
...he was certainly interested in the problems of the whole world...
...A return to genuine practice, right effort...
...I could do this...
...When I was traveling, I'd meet theological students and people like that who had just encountered his books for the first time, and they'd always say, "He was talking as though he was talking from inside of me...
...He was challenging also because of his background and tempera- ment...
...he read and studied in his trade, particularly in Bach, no favorite at a time when Baroque seriousness and structure had gone out of style...
...Tom called me, and very rarely did he do that...
...Need to push on to the great doubt...
...except toward 1966 and 1967, during his hermit period...
...W HEN I saw Tom in 1968 just as he was about to leave for Asia, it was obvious he had reconciled things and was generally in much better spirits...
...Screen I I MOZART & MURDER 'AMADEUS' & 'A SOLDIER'S STORY' M I USIC, APPROPRIATELY, dominates the film Amadeus, redeems its weaknesses, and raises it at last to some i fragic heights...
...And there were plenty of people who were examples to us, to keep us at that: people like Meyer Shapiro who was teaching art history, and Mark Van Doren who would keep us remembering the world...
...Classes were held by some of the greatest teachers of our time...
...when we first see him, he's pinioning a buxom lass beneath a banquet table...
...I have a past to break with...
...In the movie, however, it seems warmed over...
...Merton often felt that his views were clear and obvious, and he was prepared to fight for them...
...He just couldn't resist it...
...He said, "You think there'd be any publicity...
...He was very responsive to human suffering...
...He was allowed to send around mimeographed copies...
...Thank you...
...I never knew how it all came out, or how he settled with himself...
...He warned me against allowing his essays to be printed without permis- sion, but he didn't warn me very hard...
...In the play --which I did not see --Salieri apparently dominated...
...The contemplative life encounters each of us at the point where we are most fully ourselves, but also uncertain of who we really are...
...And that it was...
...I think that was why it stayed alive for Merton...
...You'd just disappear from the monastery, and this woman would just disappear from wherever she comes from, and the world would pay no attention to this...
...He had faced the deep conflicts he had been struggling with for an extended period, and he had worked them through...
...Six months before he left for Asia he wrote in a journal he was keeping: "In our monasticism we have been content to find our way to a kind of peace, a simple, undisturbed, thoughtful life...
...Almost anything that he took a liking to he became enthusiastic about...
...Although F. Murray Abraham fills the old man's voice with passion, it gradually seems like mere ranting in this context, and far more convincing only when we see him, in his earlier days, plotting Mozart's downfall...
...He said to me what he said to others: "I'm always going to be a monk of Gethsemani...
...He had tremendous energy and dynamism...
...He was a very outgoing person with an obvious ease in relationships, very approachable, with a great sense of humor...
...I said,"What do your superiors have to say about this...
...I would take these mimeographed copies and distribute them...
...He had a strong social conscience when I first knew him at Columbia...
...I think he was looking for a direction in life...
...This was in June Of '38...
...he couldn't say no...
...In my years at Gethsemani his health problems were pretty much in the background...
...He said, "I don't think I'd consult them very much...
...we had about two hours together...
...Absolute historical accuracy isn't required, of course, but Schaffer has to stretch in too many directions to f...
...I think that for Thomas Merton the experience of being forgiven by God was one of his deepest experiences...
...He was a man who had a deep need to know that he was appreciated and loved, stronger than average...
...Music is the story in Amadeus, or at least the best part of it...
...We wanted to be making some sense within the social pattern...
...As he had a passion for spiritual beauty later on, he had a passionate nature for all kinds of things, and he'd indulged it too much...
...He believed in them, and he did have a lot of courage...
...He had to be...
...He didn't worry too much about what might happen if he said what he felt and thought, what impression ivmight give...
...And so what he was after was to become himself...
...He couldn't believe what he was seeing...
...I think this is a mistake...
...ROBERT LAX Freedom to become Merton II I I I ROBERTLAX, a poet now living in Greece, maintained a long and consistent friendship and a lively correspondence with Thomas Merton...
...I don't know how to describe what voice he heard, but it was certainly a strong impulse to do this...
...It didn't respond well to conser- vative treatment and required surgery, which was painful...
...He also needed silence and solitude, but when he was in a crowd he was very quickly the center, even if people didn't know who he was...
...We went about twelve miles away, and we stopped at a gas station which had one of those phone kiosks outside...
...We really had to take our lives and our work seriously...
...And I think that what Merton was hoping to become was completely a human being, or completely Thomas Merton...
...I felt that he'd gone on to another stage, and I really felt that if it happened, it must have been the time for it...
...I felt that if he had died suddenly it was fortunate it was not six months earlier, or a year earlier...
...I saw Tom many times after that, but the matter was never mentioned again...
...I think if a tree is looking for a direction in life, it's just hoping to become a tree...
...It's impor- tant to put that in the context of a monastic vocation...
...I think all of us who knew him well felt we had lost a brother...
...I'm absolutely sure...
...And I said, "On this I'm going to fall you because if there were a way of handling it, I wouldn't help you...
...And this is certainly good, but is it good enough...
...Some of that exchange of letters has been collected in A Catch of Anti-Letters (Andrews McMeel...
...I'm sure the monks pretty much did...
...I'm just terribly taken by her...
...He asked me to come as soon as I could to the monastery --he had some- thing to talk to me about...
...Mozart was wild, to be sure, but not great despite his nature...
...If you were going through a hard period, he would pick it up very quickly and respond to it with a profound intensity...
...I often saw him distressed, but when you would pin him down on things, he was a man of very deep faith, and he was tough...
...He needed that...
...Usually he came through as being full of energy and enthusiasm...
...I knew Merton probably as well as anyone...
...One reason he felt there was tension between himself and the community after he moved to the hermitage, I think, was simply the fact that there was markedly reduced contact, and little opportunity for those small, daily signs of friendliness and acceptance that are so important...
...I think that he was fulfilling his vocation in that way, and he was glad to see it happen...
...Do you suppose there's any way of handling it...
...THINK THAT late in his life Merton was quite weary of community life...
...And I said, "There wouldn't be any publicity...
...If you did that with whatever seemed real when it came up, then you'd eventually be more true and complete as a person...
...Salieri rails at God's injustice...
...I think it was a gradual thing, but I think he had an encounter with GOd and sensed that GOd knew him at his worst and his best, and that God loved him, that he was a sinner whom God had found and forgiven and made a son...
...This isn't the place...
...I think probably most of his friends felt that way...
...And I think he really turned himself inside out in his books because he felt that was his vocation, too...
...His books give the impression of a person who was on top of things, and who had a very involved but balanced vision...
...That's kind of mysterious...
...He was so much inside himself that he was inside of everyone...
...All I know is that this woman, whoever she was, was a remarkably sensitive, terribly nice person...
...Need for the spirit...
...Actually, there were periods when I think Merton would have been extremely difficult for anyone to deal with...
Vol. 111 • October 1984 • No. 18
