By JUDE DOUGHERTY
Giroux, Robert and Thomas Merton. The Letters of Robert Giroux and Thomas Merton, edited and annotated by Patrick Samway, SJ. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016. x + 397 pp.
This is not a biography, but the correspondence between these two Columbia University classmates reveals much about the career and character of Merton, from the death of his mother when he was seven years old and his early education in Europe, to the spiritual journey which led him to embrace life as a Cistercian monk in the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky.
Merton, upon graduating from Columbia College in 1938, immediately entered the university’s M.A. program and planned to do a doctorate with a projected dissertation on the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. As a graduate student he attended lectures by Daniel Walsh, an adjunct professor, who introduced him to Thomas Aquinas and to the works of Etienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain. It was Gilson’s History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages and Maritain’s Art and Scholasticism from which Merton says, “I at once acquired an immense respect for Catholic philosophy and the Catholic faith.”
In August he began attending Mass, and in November he was baptized and received his First Communion. Merton taught English composition at Columbia for a semester and later taught English at St. Bonaventure University. At age 26 he entered Our Lady of Gethsemani Abbey and took the religious name of Maria Louis.
Some years before entering the monastery, Merton, while browsing in Scribner’s on New York’s Fifth Avenue, encountered his classmate Robert Giroux. Merton had produced several works of fiction and a book of poetry but failed to secure a publisher. By that time Giroux was in the publishing business, editing for Harcourt and Brace. One thing led to another, and Giroux was eventually to publish more than 25 titles by Merton.
Merton’s extensive correspondence is not the subject of this book, but one can nevertheless catch a glimpse of it from Giroux’s account of his own. Jacques Maritain initiates a lifelong correspondence; Evelyn Waugh writes to praise him for The Seven Story Mountain; Clare Boothe Luce writes to advise him about the intricacies of publishing. For his part, Merton admonishes Alexey Surkov, head of the Soviet Writers Guild, for not supporting Boris Pasternak, author of Dr. Zhivago, who was denied publication of the book in Russia.
Waugh is effusive in his praise of Merton, “I regard this as a book which may well prove to be of permanent interest in the history of religious experience. No one can afford to neglect this clear account of religious experience.” Many did not. The initial run of 600,000 hard back copies of the book was followed by subsequent printings and yet The New York Times refused to acknowledge the sales figure and never included it in its bestseller list.
Frequent correspondents included Mark Van Doren and Daniel Walsh, Merton’s two favorite professors at Columbia. Others, just to indicate the spread, included Martin D’Arcy, Aldous Huxley, Gregory Zilboorg, and Baroness Catherine de Hueck Doherty. A collection of his correspondence with Dom Jean Leclercq, OSB, of Clairvaux Abbey, Luxembourg, was eventually published as Survival or Prophecy.
If I may be permitted a person note, perhaps as a result of that correspondence, I became a chauffeur for some of Merton’s distinguished guests arriving at Cincinnati’s International Airport, in addition to those arriving from Louisville. In the company of some of those guests I became acquainted with Merton, and later when I was charged with organizing Bellarmine College’s annual faculty retreats, I held two at Gethsemani with Merton as retreat master and discussion leader.
Merton, as a result of his near global correspondence, was extremely well informed about current events. He followed closely the proceedings of Vatican II, in part by reading the reports of Xavier Rynne, which he had me excerpt from The New Yorker and bring to him because the abbey did not subscribe. At the faculty retreats it became clear that Merton and I were frequently at opposite ends of the intellectual spectrum on theological and social issues. I included one of his presentations in a book that I edited and published with Herder of St. Louis under the title, The Impact of Vatican II, a presumptive title because the council had not come to an end.
On one occasion I drove Mark van Doren, who had been lecturing in Louisville, to Gethsemani. Upon our arrival, Merton, who at that time was master of novices, invited us to attend a lecture he was about to give to his novices. He gave a marvelous presentation of “John of the Cross’s Conception of the Dark Night of the Soul.” Van Doren followed with a lecture of his own on the value of a liberal education.
This took place a week or so after Charles, Mark’s son, sullied the Van Doren name by being exposed as an actor and not the extremely erudite young Columbia University professor he was made out to be on the fraudulent television show, The $64,000 Question. Although I had refrained from raising the issue, the first question Merton put to Van Doren was, “How is Charles?” Van Doren replied simply, “Charles has learned very early in life neither to seek fame nor fortune.”
It should be noted that at about the same time Merton produced The Seven Story Mountain, a Harvard College student, Avery Dulles, published A Testimonial to Grace (Sheed and Ward, 1946). Speaking of his conversion to Catholicism, Dulles wrote, “I found myself avidly reading modern Aristotelians — Catholic authors such as Etienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain — and adhering to the logic of their doctrine with a fervor I could not capture today.” Dulles entered the Church, went on to become a respected systematic theologian, and was made a cardinal by John Paul II in 2001.
On my last visit to Merton, he handed me a letter he had just received from Jacques Maritain, “Can you make any sense of this?” I could not, in part because Maritain’s handwriting in his declining days was nearly unintelligible, and in part because of my inadequate French.
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