Men of Letters

...I'm not a great fan of such books, more than once finding the scholarly annotations more interesting than the primary texts...

...Unfortunately, the earlier volume of correspondence, A Catch of Anti-Letters, edited by Merton, is much too slight...

...Lax was an independent writer and poet who settled in the islands of Greece, where he lived until he returned to his family home in Olean, New York, to die last year, surviving Merton by more than thirty years...

...Even in his early twenties, Merton has mastered his infectiously enthusiastic style: I went up to the Music Library having a hangover, and took Ionisation and put it on the thing with the earphones, and Chroust Chroust, it poured into my head so that it sounded like it was my brains falling about, the lobes moving from place to place and changing positions and when the fellow comes in that drops all the trays I thought I was dead and ran away screeching...

...Since the photo is described as though it were seen firsthand, it should have been reprinted...

...More than once, the editor remarks that poems Lax incorporated into his letters are omitted—which is unfortunate, for Lax's pioneering experiments with poetic minimalism (mistakenly called "concrete poems" here) made him a "language poet" long before that term was coined...

...Another factor making this Merton-Lax correspondence unique is that the two college friends rarely saw each other as adults, living as they did in impecunious isolation on different sides of the world...

...Little is more painful than reading an abundance of communications between people who were patently circumspect Richard Kostelanetz recently completed a collection of his literary essays, Person of Letters in the Contemporary World...

...The lack of an index seriously weakens the book...

...Remember that such prose came from him unrevised, because his monastery commitments gave him only a few hours each week to write...

...One reason is that neither seems to have felt the need to hold back from the other...

...So they remembered each other, and regarded each other, as brilliant young men well beyond that fact...

...In his early fifties, for instance, Mer-ton writes to Lax about their classmate, the painter Ad Reinhardt: "Just heard today by clipping from Schwester Therese about Reinhardt...

...Now there has appeared When Prophecy Still Had A Voice, a collection of letters between the two...

...Important figures aren't identified, while others have their names misspelled (beginning with sometime Washington literary magazine editor Bill Clare), making me wonder if it, and thus much else, was mistakenly transcribed...

...then all through the whole dark night it is Reinhardt, Reinhardt...

...Fascinating as these letters are, the book in which they appear is lamentably under-edited...

...A second reason is that both are master stylists: Merton inclining to garrulous elegance, Lax to conciseness...

...Somewhere between these collections there is a book with the sustained quality that marks a classic—for Thomas Merton and Robert Lax were among the most intelligent, interesting, and engaging men of their time...

...Merton became a Trappist monk in 1941—the most famous monk in America, a poet and essayist, and the author of the bestselling conversion-tale The Seven Storey Mountain...

...BY RICHARD KOSTELANETZ Thomas Merton and Robert Lax first met as undergraduates at Columbia in the mid-1930s, and they remained close friends throughout their lives...

...Just said he died in a black picture he daid...

...The sorrows have said that he has gone into the black picture for he is dead...

...then I sit (as seldom enough we do) in a church & look at the black & grey squares of the tiles, till the spirit is somewhat mended...

...Better notes would have identified, for example, "Ionisation" as Edgar Varese's entirely percussive piece (and thus an odd cure for a college hangover...

...Twenty years ago, Rein-hardt's widow showed me some letters Merton had written her husband and repeated Reinhardt's line about the monk: "Taking the vow of silence, he wrote garrulous letters to his friends...

...But these letters from Merton and Lax are different—indeed, often brilliant...

...Last Wednesday he die with the sorrows in the studio...

...A headnote on page 407 says that Lax enclosed a snapshot he'd taken of Merton during their last visit...

...Reinhardt done in...

...with each other, as, say, Thornton Wilder and Gertrude Stein were...

...And is "Chroust" Christ or the Russian word for a crackling noise...

...Stylistically pushed, Lax responds only a week later: "I sit near the sea & almost fall into it from sorrow...

...He die...

...My first thought was that When Prophecy Still Had A Voice could become a classic book for serious young people, much as Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain or Vincent Van Gogh's letters are favorites for certain readers...

...Reinhardt he daid...

...But then the editing deficiencies began to bother me...

...Though one was born Protestant and the other Jewish, both converted to Catholicism...

...Elsewhere, he reflects the influence of James Joyce and Marshall McLuhan: "The Matterhorn is the Message and the modiste is the massage and Marshall MacLompoc is Mother Macree...

...The title of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake often appears with the addition of the apostrophe that isn't in the original...