The Courage for Truth: Letters to Writers

by Thomas Merton, Christine M. Bochen (Editor)

Overview

Letters to James Baldwin, Evelyn Waugh, Henry Miller, and more by the famed monk, "one of the great American letter-writers of the century" (Kirkus Reviews).
From 1948 until his death in 1968, Trappist monk and author of The Seven Storey Mountain Thomas Merton corresponded with writers around the world, sharing with them his concerns about war, violence and repression, racism and injustice, and all forms of human aggression.
Addressed to Evelyn Waugh, Czeslaw Milosz, Boris Pasternak, James Baldwin, Walker Percy, Victoria Ocampo, Henry Miller, Jacques Maritain, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, William Carlos Williams, and others, this collection "reveals aspects of the monk that are seldom seen in literature apart from his letters" (Booklist).
"Witty . . . confessional . . . insightful." —The Boston Globe
"Highly articulate and quietly inspirational." —Publishers Weekly

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781429944083
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	06/04/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	314
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Thomas Merton (1915-68) is the most admired of all American Catholic writers. His journals have recently been published to wide acclaim.

Read an Excerpt

Courage for Truth

Letters to Writers

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By Thomas Merton, Christine M. Bochen

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Copyright © 1993 The Merton Legacy Trust
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-4408-3

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CHAPTER 1

I have always considered you to be about the best living writer we've got.

MERTON TO EVELYN WAUGH AUGUST 2, 1948

To Evelyn Waugh

It was The Seven Storey Mountain that brought Evelyn Waugh (1903 — 1966) and Thomas Merton together, at first in correspondence and later in person when Waugh visited the Abbey of Gethsemani in November 1948. Waugh greatly admired Merton's autobiography after Robert Giroux, Merton's editor at Harcourt Brace and Company, sent a set of galley proofs to London, asking Waugh for an advance comment. It appeared on the dust jacket of the book's first edition: "This book may well prove to be of permanent interest in the history of religious experience." The London publisher, Tom Burns of Hollis and Carter, asked Waugh to edit the book for publication in England. In Waugh's judgment, succinct writing was not one of Merton's virtues, and he cut about twenty percent of the text "in order to adapt it to European tastes." In his foreword, Waugh noted that only "certain passages which seemed to be of purely local interest were cut out." The book was issued in 1949 under the title Elected Silence (taken by Waugh from a poem of Gerard Manley Hopkins).

Merton was delighted to learn of Waugh's good opinion of the Mountain. After addressing some of the points Waugh had raised in a letter to Giroux at Harcourt Brace, Merton turned to his "real reason" for writing to Waugh: "I need criticism the way a man dying of thirst needs water." Merton described the "difficult spot" he was in and the kinds of writing assignments his superiors had "piled up" on him.

Merton approached Waugh as a novice might a master, which is precisely how Merton saw Waugh — as a literary master. By 1948 Evelyn Waugh was firmly established as a leading man of English letters, and he was more than willing to instruct the young monk in matters of literary style. Twenty years later, Merton concluded a reminiscence of Waugh by saying: "I never lost my great admiration of Waugh as a creative writer, though I certainly disagreed with much of his conservatism after the [Vatican] Council. But I think I understand why he felt that way — especially about Latin, etc. He would."

August 2, 1948

You will be surprised to get this but not, I hope, annoyed. Father Abbot gave me permission to write to you when I saw your letter to Harcourt Brace about The Seven Storey Mountain. I was especially grateful to get your reactions to the book in terms of an English audience, and it is about that and all its implications that I feel this letter ought to be written.

About my Cambridge passage, I felt the same way [as you] afterwards, thought of rewriting it. My agent [Naomi Burton], who is English, said it was okay, so I let it stand. Then every time it came up in proof I worried about it, but was too lazy to do anything definite. The book is already printed here. But I'd like to clean up that Cambridge [University] section a bit for the English edition which some people called Hollis and Carter [the publisher in London] are doing next spring. Do you think people would accuse me of duplicity in saying one thing here and another there? Anyway, I'm not as mad at Cambridge as that either. About the succinctness, perhaps the book should have been rewritten. A tremendous amount of dead wood was cut. But there was no time to go over the whole thing again. The poem ["For My Brother: Reported Missing in Action, 1943"] was the idea of the editor [Robert Giroux] at Harcourt Brace (I suppose you mean the one about my brother) and not mine. I tried to get it out but did not succeed. It is too late now, at least for the American edition. I'll probably have to go by what the English editor thinks, on that.

The real reason I write to you is not merely to rehash these little details. I am in a difficult spot here as a writer. Father Abbot [Frederic Dunne, who died Aug. 4, 1948] gives me a typewriter and says "write" and so I cover pages and pages with matter and they go to several different censors and get lost, torn up, burned, and so on. Then they get pieced together and retyped and go to a publisher who changes everything and after about four years a book appears in print. I never get a chance to discuss it with anybody and scarcely ever see any reviews and half the time I haven't the faintest idea whether the thing is good or bad or what it is. Therefore I need criticism the way a man dying of thirst needs water. Those who have any ideas in their head about writing and who can communicate with me by letter or word have so far told me that I need discipline. I know. But I don't get it. A man can do something for himself along those lines by paying attention and using his head, I suppose. But if you can offer me any suggestions, tell me anything I ought to read, or tell me in one or two sentences how I ought to comport myself to acquire discipline, I would be immensely grateful and you would be doing something for my soul. Because this business of writing has become intimately tied up with the whole process of my sanctification. It is an ascetic matter as much as anything else, because of the peculiar circumstances under which I write. At the moment, I may add, I am faced with a program of much writing because we have to raise money to build some new monasteries and there is a flood of vocations. Most of what I have to do concerns the Cistercian life, history, spiritual theology, biographies etc. But (be patient with me!), consider this problem: all this has suddenly piled up on me in the last two years and I find myself more or less morally obliged to continue connections with the most diverse kind of publishers. On one end of the dilemma I am writing poetry and things like that for New Directions and a wacky surrealist magazine called Tiger's Eye that I think I had better get out of.

In the middle is Harcourt Brace. Next year they are bringing out a book I have done about our Order and the life and so on [The Waters of Siloe]. Then Sheed and Ward wants something — an expansion of a pamphlet [Cistercian Contemplatives] I did for the monastery and which might interest you, so I'll send it along. Finally, at the other end is Bruce and Co., popular Catholic publisher in Milwaukee, and, of all things, a magazine called the Messenger of the Sacred Heart, which has just gone through a reform and has elevated itself above the level of True Story and True Romances to become a kind of pious Saturday Evening Post. But I only did one article for them ... no more. Then Commonweal is always on my neck asking for things.

Frankly, I think the devil is trying to ruin me. And I am left more or less on my own in all this. I have got to find some kind of a pace that is steady and disciplined and uniform and pretty near the top of whatever I may be capable of, and stick to that ... then if they all want to buy some of it they can.

You see by this that it is a real problem, and a spiritual one too. Of course the whole thing may change with my being taken out of this job and put on something else after I am ordained, which should come next year. We are short of men all round. But I have been bold enough to impose on your patience and your charity because I have always considered you to be about the best living writer we've got. You do not need to be told that if you read The Seven Storey Mountain. I think I have read Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies over more than any other book except perhaps Ulysses: I mean before coming here. Needless to say I am very thankful for your notice, which the publisher intends to use on the jacket of the book.

I shall certainly pray for you and hope you will pray for me too.

Waugh responded on August 13, expressing his admiration for The Seven Storey Mountain and his hope that it would do much good. He criticized three points of content. He faulted Merton for blaming Cambridge rather than accepting the responsibility himself for having wasted opportunities at the university; he did not like Merton's criticisms of the Franciscans; and he thought that Merton "should have made it clear — tho of course quite dryly and briefly — how far your various 'love' affairs were carnal and how far purely sentimental," as if the censors would have allowed this. Then he offered the advice Merton had sought: "Why not seek to perfect it [literary work] and leave mass-production alone?"

September 3, 1948

I cannot tell you how truly happy I am with your letter and the book you sent. Both of them have been a very great help to me. In case you think I am exaggerating, I can assure you that in a contemplative monastery where people are supposed to see things clearly it sometimes becomes very difficult to see anything straight. It is so terribly easy to get yourself into some kind of a rut in which you distort every issue with your own blind bad habits — for instance, rushing to finish a chapter before the bell rings and you will have to go and do something else.

It has been quite humiliating for me to find out (from [Robert] Graves and [Alan] Hodge [authors of The Reader over Your Shoulder, which Waugh had sent to Merton]) that my bad habits are the same as those of every other second-rate writer outside the monastery. The same haste, distraction, etc. You very charitably put it down to a supernatural attitude on my part. Yes and no. It is true that when I drop the work and go to do something else I try not to think any more about it, and to be busy with the things that are really supposed to preoccupy a contemplative. When I succeed it means that I only think about the book in hand for two hours a day, and that means a lot of loose thinking that goes through the machine and comes out on paper in something of a mess. And consequently I have to admit that much of the Mountain is pure first-draft writing with nothing added except a few commas. That accounts for the heaviness of the long section preceding my Baptism — in which I think the cuts should come more than anywhere else. On the whole I think my haste is just as immoral as anybody else's and comes from the same selfish desire to get quick results with a small amount of effort. In the end, the whole question is largely an ascetic one! And incidentally I would never reproach anyone like yourself with vanity for wanting to write really well! I wish I had some of your integrity.

Really I like The Reader over Your Shoulder very much. In the first place it is amusing. And I like their thesis that we are heading towards a clean, clear kind of prose. Really everything in my nature — and in my vocation too — demands something like that if I am to go on writing. The contemplative life demands that everything, all one's habits of thought and modes of action, should be simple and definite and free of waste[d] motion. In every department of our life, that is our biggest struggle. You would be shocked to know how much material and spiritual junk can accumulate in the corner of a monastery and in the minds of the monks. You ought to see the pigsty in which I am writing this letter. There are two big crates of some unidentified printed work the monastery wants to sell. About a thousand odd copies of ancient magazines that ought to have been sent to the Little Sisters of the Poor, a dozen atrocious-looking armchairs and piano stools that are used in the sanctuary for Pontifical Masses and stored on the back of my neck the rest of the time. Finally I am myself embedded in a small skyscraper of mixed books and magazines in which all kinds of surreal stuff is sitting on top of theology. All this is dominated by a big movie-star statue of Our Lady life-size, on a pedestal, taking up most of the room; it was spirited out of the lay-brother's choir when they varnished the floor of the Church last spring, and never found its way back.

Before I get into any more digressions I want to thank you for your offer to edit the English edition of the Mountain. The letter just came from Hollis and Carter and I gladly accept your offer. I was thinking that, for my own part, I could go over the book and make the corrections that occur to me and then send it along to you, to work with. As for the Cambridge business I will rewrite the whole thing if you wish. I would gladly see the whole tone of that passage changed. I am glad the book will be shorter.

I am sorry to think that I gave the impression I was looking down my nose at the Franciscans, and I hope their feelings won't be hurt. They are very nice to me. However, about the love affairs I am afraid nothing more than what is there will get past a religious censor and there is nothing that can be done about it. I had to practically move a mountain to get across that passage where Peggy Wells came back and spent the night in the same room as [Robert] Gibney and myself — and only did so by juggling it around and trying to disguise the fact that it was only a one-room apartment.

I am sending you a book of poems [Figures for an Apocalypse] I wrote although I am ashamed of it. If you have any good ideas about them, let me know. I have practically stopped writing verse for the moment. I also sent you a pamphlet about the monastery [Cistercian Contemplatives] and extracts from a magazine article in the official publication of the Order. You will find a lot of misprints made by the Belgian typesetters. Perhaps the subject matter is too technical to be really interesting but I thought you might get something out of it.

Since I last wrote to you, our Abbot died and we have a new one [Dom James Fox] who just flew away to go to the General Chapter in France. He is a very holy man and he will be glad if I extricate myself from the network of trivialities into which the magazines are trying to get me. The Vicar General of the Order [Dom Gabriel Sortais] came from France and I talked with him a lot, being his interpreter in the regular visitation of the house, and he had a lot of ideas that harmonized with yours, so definitely I shall try to keep out of useless small projects that do nothing but cause a distraction and dilute the quality of what I turn out. The big trouble is that in those two hours a day when I get at a typewriter I am always having to do odd jobs and errands, and I am getting a lot of letters from strangers too. These I hope to take care of with a printed slip telling them politely to lay off the poor monk, let the guy pray.

Hollis and Carter may want the next book I am doing for Harcourt Brace which is about the Order and our life [The Waters of Siloe]. Will it be all right if we shoot the proofs along to you when they come out, next spring or early summer? God forbid that I should impose on your kindness, so if you cannot read it please say so. But since you might be interested I thought I would mention it, anyway. Meanwhile I am waiting to get busy on the manuscript again.

I don't agree with Mgr. [Ronald] Knox that God isn't interested in good prose. True, it doesn't mean anything to Him per se, and St. Paul seems to be on Mgr. Knox's side of the argument. But I don't think that Our Lord is very pleased with preachers and writers who do their best to get the Church all mixed up. Then there is that line about the judgment meted out for every idle word. It makes me very happy to think that you are going to judge the idle words in The Seven Storey Mountain before God does.

Meanwhile I pray for you, and please do you also pray for me. Don't be afraid to have a great devotion to Our Lady and say the rosary a lot. Do you have any time for mental prayer? You have the gifts that grace works on and if you are not something of a contemplative already, you should be. Tell me to mind my own business — but in a way, it is my business. Anyway, God bless you, and thank you very much.

P.S. A Carthusian I write to at Parkminster [Dom Humphrey Pawsey] tells me they want to print something here to arouse at least a remote interest in a possible foundation in the U.S. If you have any connections here that would be interested in such a thing you might let me discreetly know — but discreetly. And I would pass the information on to the Carthusians.

September 22, 1948

I am very glad you went ahead with the editing of The Seven Storey Molehill. Since you have probably cut more than I would have, it will save me the useless labor to wait for the proofs & then catch the one or two lines you may have missed. I don't expect to have to add anything — I mean restore anything — unless you have cut out the fact that I was baptized & became a monk. All the rest is accidental.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Courage for Truth by Thomas Merton, Christine M. Bochen. Copyright © 1993 The Merton Legacy Trust. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Title Page,
Preface,
Introduction,
I,
To Evelyn Waugh,
To Paul A. Doyle,
II,
To Jacques Maritain,
To Czeslaw Milosz,
To Boris Pasternak,
To Aleksei Surkov,
To Helen Wolff,,
III,
To Ernesto Cardenal,
IV,
To Alceu Amoroso Lima,
To Esther de Cáceres,
To Napolean Chow,
To José Coronel Urtecho,
To Alfonso Cortés,
To Pablo Antonio Cuadra,
To Miguel Grinberg,
To Hernan Lavin Cerda,
To Angel Martínez,
To Victoria Ocampo,
To Nicanor Parra,
To Margaret Randall,
To Ludovico Silva,
To Rafael Squirru,
To Alejandro Vignati,
To Cintio Vitier,
To Stefan Baciu,
V,
To James Baldwin,
To Cid Corman,
To Guy Davenport,
To Clayton Eshleman,
To Lawrence Ferlinghetti,
To Julien Green,
To Henry Miller,
To Walker Percy,
To Jonathan Williams,
To William Carlos Williams,
To Louis Zukofsky,
The Thomas Merton Letters Series,
Acknowledgments,
Index,
Notes,
Copyright Page,

Editorial Reviews

This is new Merton material! For the latest (fourth) collection of Merton letters, Bochen has selected excellent representatives of Merton's correspondence with writers. This volume is a necessary addition to the library of Merton scholars and students because it reveals aspects of the monk that are seldom seen in literature apart from his letters. For 25 years since the untimely death of Thomas Merton, a constant stream of literature has emanated from his dedicated readers, whose lives are conditioned by his teaching and his rapport. In this volume, Merton's correspondence is revealed as he interacts with major and minor literary contemporaries. Evelyn Waugh, Jacques Maritain, Boris Pasternak, Czeslaw Milosz, Ernesto Cardenal, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Walker Percy, and William Carlos Williams are some of the luminaries who fed and were fed by the paradoxical monk. Bochen has described the relationships with interspersed information and commentary, which reflect the quality of her scholarship. For novice writers, this could be the kind of vade mecum that would inspire and improve the style and content of their interaction with readers. Highly recommended.

Gary Young