Epistolary Eavesdropping

...In fact, they frequently disagreed...

...On the other hand, since he is talking about labels that force those who bear them into certain kinds of behavior, perhaps he does mean etiquettes...

...Once the ice had been broken, both writers rapidly opened up to one another...

...We at least get along, I say to the trees, and though I am perfectly aware that the spider eats the fly, and that the singing of the birds may perhaps have something to do with hatred or pain of which I know nothing, still...

...Spoken in the voice of a Metternich-like reactionary, the poem posits that in the Garden of Eden before the Fall, shrikes Did not impale caterpillars on spikes of the blackthorn...

...When the poet observed the Berkeley riots, his apocalyptic imagination ran wild with images of the fall of a culture...

...The book was poorly received in France, where many academics of the time were enamored of Marxism...

...Probably he means "epithets...

...A poet at heart, he too had largely taken to writing prose, channeling his powerful sense of metaphor into images that express the interior life...

...Especially at the beginning of the exchange, his letters return repeatedly to these subjects, as if he were trying to clarify his thoughts before a sympathetic audience...

...Much in us has to be killed, even much that is best in us...

...Early in the exchange, he proclaimed, "All loyalties have to pass through fire...

...Obviously, the poet was still considering the argument...

...Sometimes his idioms are startling, though they can be rather telling too...

...He writes that most theologians "swim in the vague...

...For his part, the monk never doubted that "Life is on our side...

...Those evenings in Switzerland or Italy when Byron and Shelley argued about the nature of poetry...

...Most of all, he worried that in abandoning his native land, he had cut himself off from his true vocation and would henceforth be forced to switch from verse to prose, because the former doesn't translate well...

...what it amounts to is that I am in complete and deep complicity with nature or imagine I am: that nature and I are very good friends, and console one another for the stupidity and infamy of the human race and its civilization...

...Merton was gifted with a poetic style that nonetheless manages to sound like ordinary speech, giving readers the illusion that an intimate companion is conversing with them, not lecturing...

...Back in 1958, however, most religious thinking was dominated by a cloying pietism that either ignored the world's problems or else confined itself to fulminating against godlessness, with the unspoken assumption that believers could somehow ignore the culture they inhabited...

...Art for art's sake dominated the thinking of writers who agreed with the early Auden that "Poetry makes nothing happen...

...Merton replied that there was "plenty of resentment in me: but it is not resentment against nature, only against people, institutions and myself...

...Obviously, scholars will be a long time assessing the considerable influence each writer had on the other, along with the impact both have had on contemporary poetry...

...He turned Milosz on to the hopeful spiritualist, Swedenborg, to temper his millennialist despair...

...Their dialogue came at a transitional time in the life of each...

...But the trouble is that our very efforts to attain these things tend to harden and make more rigid the institutional shell...

...Coming from Eastern Europe, where literature was a major engine of protest against the Communists, Milosz knew better...

...However, other than that moment, what we know of Nature Does not speak in its favor...

...Much has to be lost...

...Merton, for his part, took Milosz' objections to heart, and tried to probe more deeply into his own assumptions...

...And a turtle without a shell is not likely to lead a happy life, especially in a world like ours...

...But perhaps the trouble is that we imagine ourselves turtles...

...Though he had found life in the Communist state untenable, he disliked many aspects of French culture...

...For instance, Milosz' continental Catholic education prepared him to comprehend that his friend's vocation created a space in which he could live as contemplative philosopher-theologian, free from trivial distractions—and that, at times, the monastery's routine and proscriptions could also seem like a ball and chain...

...I do not have the impression of being especially happy, and I am in definite reaction against my surroundings: for a 'happy monk' I must admit that I certainly protest a great deal against the monastic Order, and the Order itself thinks I protest a great deal too much...

...Striving Towards Being: The Letters of Thomas Merton and Czeslaw Milosz (Parrar Straus Giroux, 178 pp., $21.00) allows us to listen, as the book's editor, Robert Faggen, puts it, to "a mutually edifying dialogue, a concerto grosso, between two powerful voices seeking to maintain faith in some of the most turbulent years of the late 20th century...

...Everybody envies me for being so happy," he complained...

...Alas, they were merely conferring about the tribulations of arthritis...

...For certain concepts he lapsed into French...

...Instead, there must be a "third way," though its nature is difficult to determine...

...Milosz at once recognized the monk as a kindred spirit...

...In the same way, Merton's experience with Roman Catholic hierarchy, and with a rule of life that included censorship, gave him some insight into the plight of Eastern European writers who found the role of a dissident focused one's work and made its message more urgent, even as it made existence precarious...

...He had already translated one of the latter's poems for the journal Kiiltura and, as a practicing Catholic, had been moved by Merton's spiritual writings—particularly their insistence that religion address the major issues of existence, including justice...

...In general, though, Milosz tended to be the more pessimistic, Merton the more hopeful...

...But of course, it must be understood that in an institution like ours even the slightest hint of protest is already too much...

...Readers who know Milosz' verse will recognize in this exchange traces of a famous passage in "Three Talks on Civilization," which he wrote three years later, after he had moved to Berkeley...

...or nights at Dove Cottage in England's Lake District, where William and Dorothy Wordsworth, together with such friends as Charles Lamb and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, talked the hours away—what wouldn't we give to be a fly on the wall on such occasions...

...When the poet ranted against Mass in the vernacular in 1968, and mourned what he saw as the dumbing down of Catholicism, Merton gently retorted, "you are part of my 'Church' of friends...

...But Victory is certain...

...However, as Faggen explains, thoughtful American readers proved a more receptive audience...

...We can appreciate the fact that in these letters, each man crawled out of his shell and exposed aspects of his thinking and personality seldom fully on display in the public works...

...and on another occasion, protests that "etiquettes are being glued to [himself and his fellow Poles in exile]: 'communist," anti-communist, "catholic,' etc...

...Merton had just read an English translation of Milosz' The Captive Mind, a study of the dehumanizing psychology of Communism...

...Before Milosz moved to the United States, his command of English was less than perfect...

...I am on the side of poetry which is nourished not by itself," he told Merton in his awkward English...

...Though the circumstances of their lives were quite different, Merton and Milosz had an intuitive sympathy with one another...

...Ours is no worse...

...Milosz was used to combating a similar kind of quietism in the literary communities of the West...

...Merton was intrigued by Milosz' claim that those who oppose despotic systems need not feel they are logically impelled to embrace Western-style capitalism...

...As a stranger in an alien land and language, Milosz was feeling unsure of himself and looking for a guru, though this did not prevent him from challenging his correspondent at every turn...

...It was his last letter to the poet, except for a postcard from India written a few weeks before his death in Bangkok...

...For most of us, though, it is enough just to be able to listen in on their heartfelt, luminous colloquy...

...Merton, for his part, had long since moved beyond his initial euphoria over the religious life expressed in his first book,The Seven Storey· Mountain...

...He was deeply affected by the dark, bitter epics of Robinson Jeffers...

...In 1960, Milosz reproached: "Every time you speak of Nature, it appears to you as soothing, rich in symbols, as a veil or a curtain...

...You do not pay too much attention to torture and suffering in Nature...

...In his later works the "happy monk" has been banished in favor of a more vulnerable and frankly troubled person facing many of the same anxieties that confront those who live in the world...

...Here he is discussing with Milosz the problems of the individual in society: "Underneath the institutional shells which distinguish us, we have the same ardent desire for truth, for peace, for sanity in life, for reality, for sincerity...

...Over 30 years after Vatican II, and with a plethora of volumes by several generations who cut their teeth on Merton's Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, this no longer seems unusual...

...The late Joseph Mitchell used to describe an afternoon long ago in Greenwich Village when he pretended to be transfixed by the trusses and tubes of ointment in a pharmacy window for the better part of half an hour so he could overhear those great ladies of Modernism, Marianne Moore and Djuna Barnes, converse...

...What shines through Milosz' struggles with a foreign tongue is honesty of spirit and a mind that never stops searching for ways to make sense of a problem...

...He was beginning to fear, though, that his readers outside the monastery formed an inaccurate picture of him...

...spiders have always eaten flies and I can shut it out of my consciousness without guilt...

...He accused the monk of being too accepting, ready to believe with Candide that, apart from human cruelty, everything was for "the best in this best of all possible worlds...

...In 1958 a Cistercian monk at Gethsemane Abbey in Kentucky—known to his own order as Father Louis, but to readers by his secular name— wrote a fan letter to a young Polish writer living in exile outside Paris...

...Not That both men were always in harmony...