Merton and Waugh

Thomas Merton

Merton and Waugh, by Mary Frances Cody (Paraclete Press, 2015), recounts a relatively brief period from August 2, 1948, to February 25, 1952, during which the American author and monk Thomas Merton engaged in correspondence with the British novelist Evelyn Waugh. This slim volume, subtitled A Monk, a Crusty Old Man, and The Seven Storey Mountain, was a gift from my partner/husband Sam on the occasion of the fifteenth anniversary of our relationship, which coincidentally was our wedding day. I finished reading the book exactly three months later, not that it took that long to read the 155 pages but because I read it in digestible bits, allowing ample time to ponder this remarkable period of correspondence between these two interesting men whose lives were perhaps even more intriguing than their writing.

The correspondence between Merton and Waugh began when Waugh was asked by Merton’s American publisher to edit the

Evelyn Waugh

monk’s The Seven Storey Mountain manuscript for a British edition. Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) was approaching middle age in 1948 and had recently become known in the United States following the publication some two years earlier of Brideshead Revisited, his novel of elicit love and divine grace. The manuscript of The Seven Storey Mountain, written by a Trappist monk living in obscurity in a rural Kentucky monastery, arrived unsolicited, sent by Merton’s editor Robert Giroux at Harcourt Brace, the New York publishing company.

Thomas Merton (1915-1968) was not a novice writer at the time, although he was still somewhat new to monastic life, having been accepted at the Abbey of Gethsemani near Bardstown, Kentucky, as a novice monk in the spring of 1942. Early on it was recognized that Merton’s strength lay in his abilities as a writer, and he was set to work producing texts of various sorts as a means of bringing income to the monastery. The Seven Storey Mountain, written when Merton was in his early thirties, is autobiographical and unarguably his best-known book. The title refers to the mountain of Purgatory in Dante’s Divine Comedy.

Evelyn Waugh was not the only person Giroux approached to edit the work. Three others received unsolicited manuscripts: Graham Greene, Clare Booth Luce, and Bishop Fulton J. Sheen. But it was Waugh, who wasn’t expected to respond, who got the nod. Waugh’s endorsement was selected for the cover of the first edition: “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 a complex religious process.” And so it has proven.

Cody has done a masterful job of parsing the two writers’ thoughts and feelings over the course of their exchanges. I suspect most readers will believe, as I do, that in peering into the letters these men exchanged they have been grant privileged access to a moment in time when the lives of these two writers intersected.

The Nation's Soul

Religious ceremonies—weddings, funerals, worship services—are forms of theater, whether they are bare-stage productions or lavish with pageantry. This has been understood since ancient days, though the connection perhaps is not as often explored today as in former times. However, there is scholarship in this field, as witnessed by the Journal of Religion and Theatre, published by the Religion and Theatre Focus Group of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education.

In religious ceremonies, as in theatrical performances, what touches us as witnesses may not be the central action but something incidental to it: a gesture, a word, a verse of song, a melody. They are theater of the soul. This fact was brought home to me on the Saturday preceding the Monday Martin Luther King Day, when I was attending a memorial service for my brother, who had died in December after a battle with pancreatic cancer.

He was a Navy veteran and so military honors were a concluding part of the service. I was sitting near my sister-in-law as the young seaman of the honor guard presented her with the flag, folded in the traditional triangle, “on behalf of the President of the United States….” What moved me at that utterance was not only the honor shown to my brother and the finality of this closing action but also that this honor was rendered on behalf of a President that I like and admire and who is, significantly, nonwhite. Here’s why:

The flag ceremony reminded me of a similar honor accorded to my father, an Army veteran who saw wartime service in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, when he died in 1997. But it recalled an even earlier time, when Dad had been a young serviceman.

For a short time my father had been assigned to work with a black Army officer. They traveled together in the United States at a time before desegregation was widespread, and so part my father’s duties was to go into hotels and restaurants ahead of the military detail and ask whether they would serve this officer. My father, who told me of this episode in his life only in later years, never did so without tears welling in his eyes at the injustice done to this officer—a man who served his country with honor and distinction and yet could not walk into just any establishment and be served a meal or given a room and a bed.

The religious theatricality of celebrations of Martin Luther King Day sometimes obscures the small and large realities that ride just behind the stirring language of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Full civil rights may not yet have been achieved for all individuals. But our country has made progress on this front. When my brother’s widow was presented the flag on behalf of this President, my soul was stirred because so much more lay behind those words for our family.