Thomas Merton's Journals

Mary Gordon's Close Read of the Journals

On Thomas Merton

An Excerpt from On Thomas Merton

A Structured Approach

I very much regret that it took me so long to get to Merton’s journals.

There are seven volumes of them, over 2,500 pages—longer than the whole of Proust, whom I also read obsessively for years. I entered into Merton’s mind and heart, his lived life, in a way that was, like my reading of Proust, not like reading a book but having another life. As I would read a certain date that was important in my own life, I noted it: “first anniversary of my father’s death,” “my ninth birthday, I know I was miserable,” “I saw this book by Merton at the world’s fair.” I realized that the membrane between reading and living had grown dangerously thin when I got out of the bathtub one day and, seeing Merton’s alluringly smiling face on the cover of volume 5 on a nearby table, quickly covered myself with a towel.

The journals are Merton’s best writing because in them he found the form that best suited his gifts. In part this is because the journal format is in its essence, like so much about Merton, self-contradictory. A journal is theoretically a private record, but as Jonathan Montaldo, who edited volume 2 of the journals, says, by 1950 Merton had begun “blurring any line that might have previously existed between his journals as spontaneous diaries of remembrance and as conscious, semi-fictional reconstructions of the self, autobiography as a work of art.”1

It is a challenge to write coherently about a form that does not put a premium on coherence, that jumps from one subject to another, contradicts itself, revises itself, corrects itself, and admits its own delusions. As early as 1951 he notes that “this journal is getting to be the production of somebody to whom I have never had the dishonor of an introduction.”2

I approached the journals in two ways: I tried to understand what was constant throughout all the years, and also what showed evidence of development and change.

To the lamp on my desk, I pasted three index cards. They read ardent, heartfelt, headlong. Because whatever he wrote, even if he changed his mind the next day or in the next paragraph, his vibrating presence comes through in every word. Nothing is ever noncommittal or lukewarm. This is what makes Merton, and the journals, so intensely lovable and inspiring to those of us who are stumbling toward, if not Bethlehem, then Calvary.

On my computer I created files in which to place material from the journals in discrete categories: Merton and America, Merton and Europe, Merton and the Church, Merton and the Monastery, Merton and Politics, Merton and Nature, Merton Psychological Reflections, Merton Descriptions, Merton and God. It was a way of starting, but I couldn’t be rigid about my categories, because so many of them bled into one another. Where, I would ask myself, does this passage belong: Politics, the Monastery, or the Church? Or this one: Europe or the Monastery, America or the Church, Description or Psychological Reflection? Many of them that I put initially under one heading, I ended up copying into the largest file: Merton and God.

Whatever he wrote, even if he changed his mind the next day or in the next paragraph, his vibrating presence comes through in every word. Nothing is ever noncommittal or lukewarm.

Descriptive Writing

It was easiest to begin with the file “Merton Descriptions” because his talent for description is his greatest. When his senses are fully engaged, his writing comes most vividly alive. To my mind—and I know there are many who will disagree with me—he is weakest when he is trying to sustain an argument. I detect a much greater sense of spiritual vitality in his journal passages than I do in his books that are self-consciously “spiritual.” In those, I feel the strain, an excessive abstraction that leads to flaccid and disembodied language. But from the very first pages of the journals, everything he describes using sensory language shimmers and resonates.

His writings on nature are well known and widely treasured, and their strength lies in their capturing of disparate elements, netting them in an image that startles and satisfies. This gift does not diminish throughout the decades.

On December 2, 1948, he writes:

A thousand small high clouds went flying majestically like ice-floes, all golden and crimson and saffron, with clean blue and aquamarine behind them, and shades of orange and red and mauve down by the surface of the land where the hills are just visible in a pearl haze and the ground was steel-white with frost—every blade of grass as stiff as wire.3

Ten years later, he presents us with a marvelously ominous description of the night sky.

March 15, 1959
The sky before Prime, in the West, livid, “blasted”—fast-running dark clouds, pale spur of the firetower against the black West.4

The sky is undomesticated here, far from Wordsworthian, a sky looked at with the eye of one up late, or early, but wide, wide awake.

His ability to yoke two unlikes—the hallmark of successful metaphor or simile—are evident in two passages from 1964:

April 24, 1964
Large dogwood blossoms in the wood, too large, past their prime, like artificial flowers made out of linen.5

April 28, 1964
There was a tanager singing like a drop of blood in the tall thin pines.6

Often, he makes the natural more apprehensible by comparing it to something inorganic or man-made: “the moon . . . dimly red, like a globe of almost transparent amber”; “waves of hills flying away from the river, skirted with curly woods or half-shaved like the backs of poodles”;7 “a puddle in the pig lot shines like precious silver”; “pillared red cliffs, ponderous as the great Babylonian movie palaces of the 1920s.”8

His writings on nature are well known and widely treasured, and their strength lies in their capturing of disparate elements, netting them in an image that startles and satisfies.

I notice the number of times violent images connect with beauty: “the tanager . . . like a drop of blood”; “the sun . . . under a shaggy horn of blood”;9 “the pines were black . . . a more interesting and tougher murkiness”;10 “smoke rising up from the valley, against the light, slowly taking animal form . . . menacing and peaceful”;11 “they lighted the orchard heaters to fight against smoke, and the farm looked like a valley in hell”;12 “Claws of mountain and valley. Swing and reach of long, gaunt, black, white forks.”13

So much for Milosz’s criticism that Merton was an overly optimistic romantic when it came to nature.

On Travel

In the last year of his life, when he was allowed to travel more than he had for many years, he took great pleasure in the new landscapes that presented themselves to him. From a plane he wrote,

May 6, 1968
Whorled dark profile of a river in snow. A cliff in the fog. And now a dark road straight through a long fresh snow field. Snaggy reaches of snow pattern. Claws of mountain and valley. Light shadow or breaking cloud on snow.14

Merton’s ambivalence about whether or not Gethsemani is the place he wants to end his life finds its expression in his response to the trees of the West Coast and the trees of Kentucky.

May 30, 1968
I arrived back here in Kentucky in all this rain. The small hardwoods are full of green leaves, but are they real trees?

The worshipful cold spring light on the sandbanks of the Eel River, the immense silent redwoods. Who can see such trees and bear to be away from them? I must go back. It is not right that I should die under lesser trees.15

One of the sadnesses surrounding Merton’s death is that this man who was so nourished by the created world died under no trees at all, but in a bathroom.

I wondered what he would have made of it if the accident had been just an accident, not a fatality. He might have been funny about the absurdity of the situation: he was often very funny. He might have given us a fine description of a bathroom in Bangkok: his gift for description wasn’t limited to the natural world. He could conjure a place, a room, a public or private space with a few details—using not only his eyes and ears but his nose, skin, and fingertips. In 1940 he described a Miami hotel:

Venetian blinds, stone floors, coconut palms making a green shade . . . The smell is a sort of musty smell of the inside of a wooden and stucco building cooler inside than out . . . a smell that has something of the beach about it too, a wet and salty bathing-suit smell . . . of dry palm leaves, suntan oil, rum, cigarettes. It has something of the mustiness of that immense and shabby place in Bermuda, the hotel Hamilton . . . also like the Savoy Hotel in Bournemouth, which stood at the top of a cliff overlooking a white beach on the English Channel. It had fancy iron balconies, and even when the dining room was full you could feel the blight of winter coming back upon it, and knew very well how it would look all empty, with all the chairs stacked.16

His description of a restaurant in Lexington—caustic, ferociously observant—accomplishes what the best of his journals do: the creation of a whole world, an atmosphere, a set of characters, in a few words.

April 6, 1968
Lum’s in Lexington. Red gloves, Japanese lights. Beer list. Bottles slipped over counter. Red waistcoats of Kentucky boy waiters. Girl at cashier desk the kind of thin, waiflike blonde I get attracted to. Long talk with her getting directions on how to get to Bluegrass Parkway. While we were eating a long, long freight train went by, cars on high embankment silhouetted against a sort of ragged vapor sunset. A livid light between clouds. And over there a TV with . . . the jovial man in South Africa who just had the first successful heart transplant. . . . He had an African Negro’s heart in him, beating along. They asked him if he felt any different towards his wife and I really fell off my chair laughing. No one else could figure out what was funny.

When I was in Lum’s, I was dutifully thinking, “Here is the world.” Red gloves, beer, freight trains. The man and child. The girls at the next table, defensive, vague, aloof. One felt the place was full of more or less miserable people. Yet think of it: all the best beers in the world were at their disposal and the place was a good idea. And the freight train was going by, going by, silhouetted against an ambiguous sunset.17

Merton’s compassion and tenderness toward the poor and the marginalized shows itself in tender but piercing snapshots, revealing that his political convictions had their roots in a deep and wide human sympathy. He describes the journey of a black junkman:

November 6, 1950
The willows were like silver this morning. . . . A junk wagon came along. . . . The wagon seemed to be all bells, like a Chinese temple. . . . The mule was flashing with brass disks. . . . The wagon . . . had something of the lines of a Chinese junk [seaship]. . . . On top of it all sat the driver with his dog. Both were immobile. They sailed forward amid their bells. The dog pointed his nose straight forward like an arrow. The negro captain sat immersed in a gray coat. He did not look right or left, and I would have approached, with great respect, what seemed to be a solid mysticism. But I stood a hundred yards off, enchanted by the light on the mule’s harness, enchanted by the temple bells.18

His rendering of the suffering of a child caught in a fire is worthy of James Agee:

March 19, 1959
After the fire . . . a little boy with a pathetic face and holes in his pants, whom I had seen some weeks before with an ugly scar on the side of his head. The big scab was gone and you could see the place of the scar. His face made you wonder if he ever had anything happen to him in life worth smiling about.19

Merton’s compassion and tenderness toward the poor and the marginalized shows itself in tender but piercing snapshots. . .

It’s not surprising that Merton wrote on December 18, 1939, “I have always been fond of guide books. As a child I read guide books to the point where it became a vice. I guess I was always looking for some perfect city.”20

Perhaps New York was the closest he came to that “perfect city”; his palpable delight in his return after more than twenty years away bursts out in every word:

July 10, 1964
Riding down in the taxi to the Guggenheim Museum around one o’clock, through the park, under tunnels of light and foliage. . . . The people walking on Fifth Avenue were beautiful, and there were those towers! The street was broad and clean. A stately and grown-up city! A true city, life-size. A city with substance and scale, large and right. Well lighted by sun and sky, anything but soulless, and it is feminine. It is she, this city. I am faithful to her! I have not ceased to love her.21

Notes

1. Merton, Entering the Silence, 394, fn 50.
2. Merton, Entering the Silence, 458.
3. Merton, Entering the Silence, 248.
4. Merton, Search for Solitude, 268.
5. Merton, Dancing in the Water, 99.
6. Merton, Dancing in the Water, 100.
7. Merton, Search for Solitude, 6.
8. Thomas Merton, The Other Side of the Mountain: The End of the Journey, Volume Seven 1967–1968, The Journals of Thomas Merton, ed. Patrick Hart (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1999), 106.
9. Merton, Other Side, 70.
10. Merton, Other Side, 33.
11. Merton, Turning Toward the World, 74.
12. Merton, Entering the Silence, 195.
13. Merton, Other Side, 94.
14. Merton, Other Side, 94.
15. Merton, Other Side, 112.
16. Thomas Merton, Run to the Mountain: The Story of a Vocation, Vol­ume One 1939–1941, The Journals of Thomas Merton, ed. Patrick Hart (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996). 162.
17. Merton, Other Side, 78.
18. Merton, Entering the Silence, 438.
19. Merton, Search for Solitude, 270.
20. Merton, Run to the Mountain, 113.
21. Merton, Dancing in the Water, 125.

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Mary GordonMary Gordon is a novelist, essayist, memoirist, literary critic, and the McIntosh Professor of English at Barnard College. She is the author of many books, including Final PaymentsCircling My MotherReading JesusThe Shadow Man, and The Company of Women. Learn more.

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