The future of Thomas Merton:

...In 1988, The Seven Storey Mountain, the book that forty years ago brought instant fame to its monk-author, was published in Chinese...

...Finally, there are hundreds of taped talks...

...Only the first of five projected volumes of letters has so far appeared...

...After her talk, a member of the audience showed her a copy, in Hungarian, of Thoughts in Solitude and confided that he and his wife had taken it with them on their honeymoon...

...Nor does he belong to the U.S...

...It has sold over a million copies in English and has been translated into Japanese, as well as into eleven European languages...

...There is a need for discussions between the various disciplines...

...This essay is not an attempt to make the "true face" of Thomas Merton emerge...

...There are other people with whom we can identify in a shared humanness...

...Only time will give a definitive answer...

...It is perhaps no accident that in the last year of his life, Merton was much occupied with reflection on transcultura-tion, whereby a person transcended a particular culture by being at home in all cultures...

...it will also contain a chronology of all of Merton's letters and an extensive index...

...Rather, I want to look at some of the pieces of that mosaic and ask: Are the pieces worth saving...

...Of course, sheer quantity establishes no claim to lasting survival and not everything Merton wrote deserves to survive, as he himself recognized...

...Some of Merton's other books have also been translated into Vietnamese, Korean, and Tamil...

...He tells about himself and you see not only yourself, but every person...

...Radhakrishnan...

...These can be published in 1993...

...His clay feet are visible for us to see...

...Called The Hidden Ground of Love, it includes more than 700 letters on religious experience and social concerns...

...For the categories "Bad" and "Awful," he has one each...

...He lists none of his works as a "Best...

...A number of such tapes, recently published, show little sign of editing and project a mediocrity onto Thomas Merton that is both misleading to readers and unfair to him...

...o In September 1988, Sister Mary Luke Tobin, a friend of Merton, went to Hungary to speak about him...

...My suggestion was that maybe they should...

...Thematic studies have been done, especially in dissertations, but these will best be done when all the Merton material is finally published...

...A critical study, or even a critical edition, of The Seven Storey Mountain is very much needed...

...The third volume (on monastic renewal and spiritual direction) is near completion in typescript, and the fourth (dealing with Merton's contacts with poets and other writers) is in preparation...

...To give one example of the latter: "Philosophy of Solitude" in Disputed Questions is a superb study of a fundamental need that women and men of every age and place have experienced...

...He asked Merton to send him some books...

...As early as 1949, he recorded in his journal: "Every book I write is a mirror of my own character and conscience.'' I believe that it is this autobiographical strain that draws and will continue to draw people to his writings...

...These would have only restricted appeal and probably will not be published...

...A similar selection of important essays could be made, again with proper critical notes and introduction...

...These are pieces of a mosaic-and there are many more-which, despite the laudable efforts of several biographers, has yet to be put together into an image that brings out the colors and richness of the original, while evoking the wholeness of the man who was Thomas Merton...

...This is the book that "launched" Merton's career as a writer...

...Only then can we address an important question: is Merton to be classified as a "religious" writer, with the inevitable restrictions that such a classification would impose in terms of potential readers, or is he a figure in American literature and one to be reckoned with, at that...

...But the fact that we find our stories in his does not, of itself, offer sufficient reason why his writing ought to survive...

...Some Merton scholars are in the field of literature, but not enough...

...In this article I want, first, to take an evaluative look at Merton's literary output as well as the explosion of books, articles, and dissertations he has inspired...

...Of value might be an updated revision of The Thomas Merton Reader or a new reader that would offer a representative selection of Merton writing, including some of the posthumously published works...

...Merton's writings, which deeply touched the lives of multitudes of people in his lifetime, seem, twenty years after his death, to exercise an ever expanding influence on a whole new generation...

...Eliot's rather pragmatic definition of a "classic" as "a work that stays in print,'' The Mountain has met the test for forty years, and all the signs point to continued popularity...

...That same year the curator of the special collections at the library of Syracuse University wrote to Merton informing him that they were "endeavoring to acquire and preserve the cor respondence and files of well-known creative writers such as you.'' Merton's response-a gift of notebooks and other mate rials-now constitutes a relatively substantial Merton file in the university's special collections...

...Many were intended for a limited audience within the monastery and need judicious editing...

...Though Merton was not a creative thinker, he was a creative synthesizer: he knew how to raise to a new level of understanding people's perception of God, prayer, and human life...

...In the course of our conversation, he said: "We people in literature do not take Thomas Merton seriously...

...and essays...

...He could reach into the human heart and surface for his readers questions that, till they read him, lay hidden and unasked, struggling for expression...

...No wonder that, as his books mirrored his "own character and conscience," his readers found themselves mirrored as well...

...It is a young monk reflecting on a young man's life and in some ways setting a future agenda: metaphors he was to live out and develop further, as well as others that later he would reject...

...Still, as literary immortality goes, twenty years is a short time...

...Amiya Chakravarty, a Hindu scholar and friend who visited at Gethsemani and later accompanied Merton on part of his Asian journey, told Merton that his writings were known and liked by the renowned Hindu scholar, Dr...

...In 1967, Merton did a self-evaluation of thirty-one of his books...

...I stress the importance of the autobiographical thrust of Merton's writings because so many readers around the world are able to identify their story with his-a human person struggling to find meaning and to confront the absurdity that life so often appears to be...

...This may seem like a harsh evaluation, but I am convinced that Merton deserves better treatment than he has so far received...

...Besides Merton's own literary output, there are the works which his writings have inspired: books, articles and dissertations (111 of them...

...Merton's classification of his own books may appropriately be applied to these...

...In considering the Merton literary output, one is amazed by the sheer quantity of it...

...This would reveal a rather uneven picture and not an especially happy one: very few works that could be called "Better" and perhaps a reasonable number of "Good...

...There are more than sixty other journals and reading notebooks, which contain valuable material and, with careful editing ought to be published in conjunction with the restricted journals...

...but all too many would qualify only as "Fair," "Poor," "Bad," or even "Awful...

...I also have the feeling that many of my colleagues would agree that Merton scholarship is still in its infancy or at best in adolescence...

...If one accepts T.S...

...At least a dozen are available in most Western European languages...

...My tentative list would begin with The Seven Storey Mountain, a smash hit in 1948, which sold 600,000 copies in its first year and continues year after year to attract readers...

...In short, Merton is a person who, through his writings, enters into conversation with you...

...There are four journals, 1956-68, that by Merton's will were restricted from publication for twenty-five years after his death...

...The Merton poetry exists in somewhat unmanageable form: a huge volume of over a thousand pages, with no introduction or notes...

...He writes autobiography and we find biography-our own...

...These are but a brief sampling of possible directions in which Merton scholarship and publishing might move...

...Second, assuming that consideration of this whole Merton corpus builds a strong case that his works deserve to survive, I will suggest what I think are the directions in which future Merton studies ought to move...

...They were available to Merton's authorized biographer, Michael Mott, who gives generous excerpts from them...

...He digs so deeply into raw humanity that his words will reach women and men for ages to come...

...Will the Merton charism continue to move women and men in the third millennium...

...He became a citizen of the United States on June 22, 1951...

...Using six categories (ranging from "Best" to "Awful"), he lists fourteen as "Better,"six as "Good," six as "Fair," three as "Poor...

...The first task is the publication of what is as yet unpublished: journals, letters, and taped talks...

...What ought to be the future direction of Merton studies...

...should be in print by the spring of 1989...

...In 1964, Ripu Daman Lama, an Indian student in Poland, wrote to Merton that he was studying mining engineering in the university at Cracow and had become involved with a group of Catholic intellectuals...

...Some time ago I was talking with a friend who is a teacher of literature and a highly respected scholar in the field of nineteeth-century Romantic poetry...

...Suzuki, the noted Zen scholar, who called Merton one of the best interpreters of Zen to the Western world...

...Capovilla added that, "as I go down to the pope's apartment, I see your books there 'L'une apres I'autre.' " In that same year Merton became an outspoken critic of nuclear war and joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation...

...A valuable Merton project would be to make a discriminating selection from among the eight poetry collections Such a selection of the best poetry, with an introduction and critical notes, would open up Merton's least-known writings...

...THE FUTURE OF THOMAS NERTON SORTING OUT THE LEGACY In 1961 Monsignor Capovilla, private secretary to Pope John XXIII, wrote to Thomas Merton that the pope had been "impressed" by a November 11 letter in which Merton had linked the American war effort with the national industrial economy-a relationship that Pope John himself later picked up in Pacem in terris...

...In some sense practically everything he wrote is in one way or another autobiographical...

...Merton himself realized this aspect of his writing...

...But there are other books that, while addressing the concrete circumstances of his own time with clarity and authenticity, have a quality of insight into the human condition that transcends his own generation...

...Like ourselves he had attachments of which he had to rid himself and illusions he had to unmask...

...Merton knew loneliness and alienation...

...It is unfortunate that Merton has been seen as the almost exclusive "possession" of people in the field of religion and spirituality...

...Still, we can sometimes contribute to the shaping of the answer...

...I would also include New Seeds of Contemplation (a far better book than its predecessor, Seeds of Contemplation) and the Merton journals: The Sign of Jonas (a favorite of so many Merton readers), Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (not actually a single journal, but made up of items from journals covering the period 1956-65), and the recently issued The Vow of Conversation (a journal of 1964-65...

...There will be no great surprises or new revelations when the remaining journals are published...

...Merton's works, if they survive, will do so because of their autobiographical character...

...Even as I set myself these goals, I realize that the first is more the beginning of a long project than an article, and that the second will put me on a limb that, it may well be, other Merton scholars will want to saw off...

...Volume five of the letters will include correspondence that did not fit the other volumes...

...Much of what he writes later flows out of the metaphors, symbols, and reflections found in that book...

...My list would include a fairly large sampling,of Merton's letters (in which his humanity shines in both its greatness and its weakness...

...What makes the difference with Thomas Merton are the special gifts he had: a deep wisdom and a marvelous facility with words...

...In 1964, Thomas Merton had a meeting at Columbia Uni versity with D.T...

...The religious traditions of a whole humanity filtered through his fertile mind and enriched his own faith with an ever expanding catholicity...

...His last two volumes of poetry, Cables to the Ace and The Geography of Lograire, could receive the same treatment, but as individual works complete in themselves...

...Is his writing of enduring significance or is it destined for a library graveyard a few decades down the road...

...I link these disparate events and facts because they are all points of entry into one of the remarkable religious phenomena of the twentieth century: the man who was monk and hermit at the Abbey of Gethsemani, Thomas Merton...

...I would venture to say that "devotional" and "inspirational" works (like The Living Bread, which Merton classifies as "Poor") are destined for literary demise...

...That a monk, whose daily life was fairly rigorously regulated by a monastic routine that gave him only limited time for writing, should produce more than forty books and some sixty or more journals and reading notebooks, a thousand pages of poetry and upwards of 4,000 letters, boggles the mind...

...A fair amount of it is mediocre or just plain bad, but one will also find fine poetry there...

...But Merton does not belong to the Roman Catholic church...

...An important priority for Merton scholars is to establish more contact between specialists in religious studies, theology, or spirituality and specialists in literature...

...He tells the monk of Gethsemani that Merton's name was frequently on the lips of the students, with whom Lama discussed such topics as philoso phy and the growing atheism of the day...

...The second volume (called The Road to Joy, letters to family, friends, young people, etc...

...healthy selections from his poetry...

...Thomas Merton was received into the Roman Catholic church on November 16, 1938...

...We can also consider evidence that will impinge on our judgment...

...This would be of special value to the growing number of teachers who offer courses on Merton, or to people who would like to indulge themselves in a "home" study...

...Besides these three areas, there is a good bit of unpublished material dealing with the monastic life (for example, notes Merton used with the young monks he taught...

...The lives and destinies of humanity touched his person and made him, as far as this is possible, a world citizen...