The Call to Solitude

On July 7, 1948, fame found Thomas Merton.

When an advance copy of The Seven Storey Mountain arrived at the abbey that day, Abbot Frederic Dunne immediately sought out its author. “I shall never forget,” wrote Merton, “the simplicity and affection with which he put the first copy of the book in my hand.”¹

Even before the book was in general distribution, two book clubs and a Catholic foundation had agreed to carry it, which led the publisher to add twenty thousand copies to the original print run of seven thousand. Although the New York Times declined to list “religious books” on its best-seller list,² indicators agree that Merton’s was among the five best-selling books of that year. It sold six hundred thousand copies in the first twelve months and over a million before going to softcover in 1952. It was the third most popular nonfiction book to top the best-seller lists of 1949, and the only one of those three still in print.

In this age of confessional blogs and crisp three-act memoirs, the success of Merton’s spiritual autobiography is mystifying. It is reflective and chatty by turns, philosophical, self-indulgent, full of arcane references, and sometimes rambling. Although a third of it had been scissored by the punctilious church censors, it still ran to more than four hundred tightly set pages. Since Merton was unknown, without what modern publishers call “a platform,” its success took even its editor, Robert Giroux, by surprise.

But times were different then, especially for the generation of young people returning from the cataclysm of the Second World War and seeking spiritual answers. “Young men and women,” Garry Wills wrote of that time, “were flocking to the seminaries and convents to become priests and nuns. The number of Catholic converts surged.”3 Merton’s book struck them like a lightning bolt. That was the year that Lloyd C. Douglas’s biblical novel The Big Fisherman topped the New York Times best-seller list (the Times didn’t object to religious fiction), and Cecil B. DeMille’s Samson and Delilah was the top-grossing film, which began the craze for biblical epics. The World Council of Churches was founded, and Billy Graham was in the second year of his first evangelistic crusade. The big questions of life and faith were in the air.

The war inspired not only spiritual hunger but philosophical angst as well. Existentialism was in the ascendant. It was the age of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, Camus’s The Plague, Miller’s Death of a Salesman, and Tillich’s The Courage to Be. Willa and Edwin Muir’s translations of Franz Kafka were finding a wide audience; sculptor Alberto Giacometti was then crafting his spindly figures; and painter Jackson Pollock was at the height of his “drip period.”

For Merton and many other intellectuals after the war, the metaphorical desert—the urge to separate oneself from society, from the insanity of the world—seemed an entirely rational place to dwell, a philosophical space chosen as both a rejection of society’s lethal excesses and a way of showing humanity a better path forward. In the twentieth century, the desert was the only place where the religious thinker could find common ground with the existentialist, where the Christian and the atheist alike could contemplate an alternative to global annihilation.

For Merton the intellectual desert was epitomized, as always, by the Desert Fathers, who, he wrote, “were in a certain sense ‘anarchists,’ . . . men who did not believe in letting themselves be passively guided and ruled by a decadent state, and who believed that there was a way of getting along without slavish dependence on accepted, conventional values. The Desert Fathers declined to be ruled by men.”⁴

People of earlier eras, the Georgians and the Victorians, didn’t appreciate the desert in that way. Theirs were ages of optimism and progress and respectability. Hermits were seen as aberrations. Historian Edward Gibbon held a low view of the early desert monks, stating that they “were inspired by the savage enthusiasm which represents man as a criminal, and God as a tyrant.”5 Victorian writer William E. H. Lecky described the average desert ascetic as “a hideous, sordid, and emaciated maniac, without knowledge, without patriotism, without natural affection, passing his life in a long routine of useless and atrocious self-torture, and quailing before the ghastly phantoms of his delirious brain.”⁶ Such dismissive views, Merton felt, “degraded and corrupted the psychological heritage of . . . the Desert Fathers and other contemplatives, and prepared the way for the great regression to the herd mentality that is taking place now.”⁷

But after the devastation of two world wars, many thoughtful people, religious and otherwise, had valid reasons to think that man was indeed a criminal and God a tyrant. No ghastly phantoms of a delirious brain could be any more haunting or terrible than what had transpired in the Nazi labor camps, in the obliterated cities of Japan, and all across Stalin’s and Mao’s communist dystopias. How could the monastic life—the desert life—not seem perfectly rational?

•••

As the first printing of The Seven Storey Mountain was being shipped to bookstores around the country, Merton suffered a significant personal loss. Dom Frederic Dunne, his beloved abbot, died on August 4, 1948. Merton reflected, “The house is sad. . . . His sympathy was deep and real all the time he was alive. I don’t know who was ever kinder to me. . . . I keep contact with God by the touch of a sort of interior hollowness and that counts as my prayer for Reverend Father and for this house.”⁸ The abbot represented the old, traditional Catholic Church, and Merton admired him.

In a sense, Dom Frederic invented Thomas Merton. Not only had he welcomed Merton into the monastery, but he had also bent the rules—Saint Benedict’s, no less—so that Merton could write. Regarding The Seven Storey Mountain, Merton acknowledged that Dom Frederic “was in a certain sense even more responsible for that book than I was, even as he was the cause of all my other writing.”9

Three weeks later, a new abbot, Father James Fox, was installed after an abbatial election. Fox had been a monk at Gethsemani when Merton first arrived in 1941, but he left in 1944 to help found the abbey of Our Lady of the Holy Ghost, near Conyers, Georgia. Within two years, Fox had been named abbot there, but now he was returning to Gethsemani. With a deliberate double meaning, Merton described him as “the Holy Ghost’s candidate . . . quiet and humble,”¹⁰ though it would be only a matter of time before Merton modified his assessment.

The morning after the election, a small exchange took place that would typify their relationship. Merton had just received a royalty check for nine hundred dollars. Since all his earnings were the property of the monastery, he promptly turned the money over to Dom James. In this gesture, Merton took pride in his accomplishment while demonstrating his dutifulness toward his superiors. Dom James simply responded, “Go on writing.”¹¹

Within a few more weeks Merton was able to take further measures of the man. He felt a certain foreboding, for instance, when Dom James returned from a trip to Europe, bearing for the abbey’s scriptorium a book that Merton described as “flossy.”¹² It was a deluxe coffee-table book about the Trappist abbey of Orval in southern Belgium, which Dom James had visited. The abbey’s main product was then, as it remains today, its world-renowned Orval beer, or Bière Trappist—Trappistenbier, as its logo says in French and German, making Orval among the wealthiest and most modern abbeys in the world.

This slick volume served as a stark contrast to Dom Frederic’s love for old books and old things in general. The late abbot had spent many hours in the same scriptorium personally rebinding some of the abbey’s most fragile folios. He had a small hand press and cases of lead type brought in for small printing and repair projects.

As Merton fanned through the photos of Orval, he thought its sacristy looked “like the circular bar on the Promenade Deck of the Conte De Savoia [a cruise ship] which is probably long since at the bottom of the ocean. . . . It is not . . . the conception that is out of place, but the scale on which it is done. The monks have to polish floors all day and all night.” He concluded, oxymoronically, “I wouldn’t be seen dead living in such a place.”13

•••

Where he lived continued to be much on Merton’s mind. Fame had only intensified his desperation to find solitude, for with the publication of his autobiography, he had become a sought-after celebrity, an institutional commodity. While the book was not a revenue producer on the scale of Orval beer, he was still providing a supplement to Gethsemani’s cheese and fruitcake production. And as his writing reached more readers, people at the abbey and far beyond were increasingly invested in his success.

By the following summer, a pattern had developed in his relationship with Dom James, a pattern typified by the visit of Dom Dominique Nogues, the abbot general of the worldwide Cistercian Order. When the abbot general learned that Merton was working on a book about Bernard of Clairvaux, an early Cistercian, he delightedly invited Merton to Rome to do research, and he offered Merton accommodations at his own headquarters, promising “a great deal of time . . . and peace and solitude and what not.” When Merton approached Dom James about the possibility, the abbot flatly refused, offering the weak argument that “there is nothing so distracting as new scenery.”

When the abbot general himself made an attempt, Dom James’s answer was, “If I let [Merton] go to Rome, he will never come back,”¹⁴ and furthermore, he said, once allowed out of Gethsemani, Merton would most certainly become a Carthusian. Dom James was right, and Merton knew it. Merton’s only consolation was to convince himself that Rome might, in fact, be distracting; even Dom Dominique had said the traffic noise could be unnerving.¹⁵ The abbot’s goal was to keep Merton at Gethsemani, in obedience to his vows, and writing.

In 1952, as a concession, Dom James gave Merton permission to have an occasional prayer time in the woods, in an old shed used for tools and firewood. No doubt Dom James thought that since it was already September, a few months of cold afternoons in an unheated shack would most likely dampen—or rather chill—the dreamy monk’s spirits. It’s hard to focus on prayer when one’s teeth are chattering. But Merton adored the place, which he dubbed the hermitage of “St. Anne’s.” After a couple of weeks of prayer in the shed, he wrote:

Out here in the woods I can think of nothing except God and it is not so much that I think of Him either. I am as aware of Him as of the sun and the clouds and the blue sky and the thin cedar trees. . . .

As long as I am out here I cannot think of Camaldoli either; no question of being here and dreaming of somewhere else. Engulfed in the simple and lucid actuality which is the afternoon: I mean God’s afternoon, this sacramental moment of time when the shadows will get longer and longer, and one small bird sings quietly in the cedars, and one car goes by in the remote distance and the oak leaves move in the wind.

High up in the late Summer sky I watch the silent flight of a vulture, and the day goes by in prayer. This solitude confirms my call to solitude. The more I am in it, the more I love it. One day it will possess me entirely and no man will ever see me again.16

Two winters later, he was still relishing the hours spent there. “Here at St. Anne’s,” he wrote, “I am always happy and at peace no matter what happens. For here there is no need for anyone but God.”¹⁷

•••

In the meantime, Merton kept writing. In the years immediately following the publication of The Seven Storey Mountain, he wrote in quick succession The Waters of Siloe (1949), Seeds of Contemplation (1949), The Tears of the Blind Lion (poetry, 1949), The Ascent to Truth (1951), The Sign of Jonas (1953), Bread in the Wilderness (1953), The Last of the Fathers (1954), and No Man Is an Island (1955), his next most popular success. No less a spiritual writer than Cambridge don C. S. Lewis declared No Man Is an Island to be “the best new spiritual reading I’ve met for a long time.”18

It was an impressive run of creativity—and revenue. Not only was the abbey able to expand its operations and even donate money to other monasteries, but the Catholic Church discovered it had a vibrant public personality in its midst—a true intellectual and a compassionate face for a church that before the war had been perceived as stodgy and conservative more often than not.

Merton stood in sharp contrast to radio personality Father Charles E. Coughlin, once a prominent media spokesperson for the Catholic Church and now considered the father of modern political, inflammatory talk radio. Tens of millions of listeners tuned in to his weekly Hour of Power program in the 1930s—until Coughlin’s Nazi-touting, anti-Semitic tirades led to his ouster from the airwaves in 1939, after which he returned to his position as a parish priest and to relative obscurity.

Even before Merton’s left-leaning political writings of the sixties, he routinely faced opposition from old-school Catholics. Many inside the church objected to his seemingly privileged status in the monastery, and some would come to feel that his theological views were heretical.

So intense did the pressure of celebrity become that in 1955, Merton again asked to leave Gethsemani—to leave the country, in fact. He requested permission to go to the monastery at Camaldoli, to Italy itself, to become one of the cave-dwelling monks he saw in the photos at the St. Bonaventure library thirteen years earlier. St. Anne’s had convinced him that God was calling him to complete solitude.

His request was denied.

Again he accepted it as God’s will, and in that same year, perhaps to occupy Merton’s mind in some more productive way, Dom James appointed him master of novices, the teacher for the new monks.

•••

The following summer of 1956, Merton was working on an article called “Neurosis in the Monastic Life.” Having long been interested in psychiatry, he was fascinated by what motivates men to seek the same spiritual disciplines that he had sought, and his piece was a perceptive overview of the sometimes misguided reasons men are attracted to monasticism. Merton drew heavily upon the work of psychiatrists who were, at that time, cutting-edge writers in the field of psychoanalysis, people like Karen Horney and Erich Fromm, both of whom were working to move psychology beyond the more astringent dogmatism of the old-school Freudians. Fromm, with whom Merton corresponded, was a friend and intellectual sparring partner.

Merton sent a copy of his draft to Giroux, who suggested that one of Harcourt’s current authors, renowned psychiatrist Dr. Gregory Zilboorg, might also be interested in the piece. A year earlier, Giroux had helped to publish Zilboorg’s book The Psychology of the Criminal Act and Punishment, which received mixed reviews. One reviewer said it “contributes more misunderstanding than improvement to the relations of law and psychiatry.”19 If Giroux could have foreseen that he too was about to cause “more misunderstanding than improvement,” he would have thought twice about forwarding the article.

Zilboorg was a Catholic convert and already interested in Merton. The idea of having the monk travel to New York for a private psychiatric consultation was bandied about, but Dom James predictably nixed the idea. As an alternative, Zilboorg arranged for Merton to attend a psychology conference at St. John’s University, a Catholic school in Collegeville, Minnesota, at which the doctor was to be a featured speaker. It would be Merton’s most extended trip outside the monastery to date, and he was excited by the prospect of consulting with a famous psychoanalyst about his writing and, if the opportunity should arise, about his “troubles,” as Merton called his longings to leave the monastery and find greater solitude.²⁰

Gregory Zilboorg was born of Jewish parents in Kiev, studied medicine in Saint Petersburg, and, to escape the fallout of the Russian Revolution, came to the United States in 1919 at the age of twenty-eight. Within two decades, he became a high-priced psychotherapist for the stars—or at least for many prominent Broadway notables and New York’s left-leaning elite. His patients included playwrights Lillian Hellman, who spent seven years in therapy with Zilboorg, and Moss Hart, who is thought to have based his 1941 musical Lady in the Dark on his sessions with the eminent shrink.21

Zilboorg’s most noted patient was George Gershwin. Once, when that famous American composer was asked how much Zilboorg charged, he quipped, “He finds out how much you make and then charges you more than you can afford!”²² Less amusing is the evidence that Zilboorg misdiagnosed Gershwin’s various symptoms—olfactory hallucinations, headaches, and dizziness—as psychosomatic. They weren’t. Gershwin died of a brain tumor within a year and a half after consulting Zilboorg.²³

Recent research suggests that Zilboorg may have misrepresented his professional credentials from the beginning, lacking the necessary coursework for his medical degree in Saint Petersburg and his psychiatric certificate in Switzerland. He may have been neither a medical doctor nor a certified psychiatrist, and at least two of his female patients later claimed that he had had sexual relationships with them.²⁴

In 1956 these details were unknown to the Catholic authorities who shipped Merton off to Minnesota in hopes that the psychiatrist would be able to fix the wayward monk, to set him straight regarding his hermit problem. The authorities wanted to know: Was Merton’s obsession with solitude healthy? Was it even normal? Dom James had long had suspicions regarding Merton’s mental state; earlier Dom James had written to a bishop that Merton was “temperamentally unstable, too artistically volatile to be entrusted with determining his own spiritual destiny.”²⁵

Unbeknown to Merton, Zilboorg had already done a psychoanalytic workup based on Merton’s writings alone. As unusual as it seems, it has precedent. In 1916 Freud had psychoanalyzed Leonardo da Vinci based on his artwork,²⁶ and Zilboorg considered himself an expert on Freud. Only five years earlier he had published a short book called Sigmund Freud: His Exploration of the Mind of Man. And now Zilboorg was ready to explore the mind of a monk.

Zilboorg’s diagnosis was dire. Merton, he concluded, was on the verge of mental collapse. At their first meeting, he informed Merton that the proposed article on monastic neuroses was “utterly inadequate, hastily written, will do harm, . . . should be left on the shelf.” When they met the following day, Merton, who was shaken but still eager to sit at the great man’s feet, decided he would confide the details of his “troubles.” Zilboorg’s response was swift and unremitting. After admitting that he had engineered their confrontation in order to confirm his diagnosis in person, Zilboorg said, among other things, that Merton was “a gadfly to [his] superiors,” was “stubborn,” and on his way to becoming a “semi-psychotic quack.”

Zilboorg continued, “You like to be famous, you want to be a big shot, you keep pushing your way out—to publicity—Megalomania and narcissism are your big trends.” As if that weren’t enough, he added, “Your hermit trend is pathological. . . . You are a promoter. If you were not in a monastery you are the type that would clean up on Wall Street one day and lose it all on the horses the next. . . . Your writing is becoming verbological.”27 If “allowed a little liberty,” Zilboorg said, Merton “would probably run away with a woman.”²⁸

Merton was stunned. Struggling to gain perspective, he wrote, “While he said all this, I thought ‘How much he looks like Stalin.’”²⁹ Instead of viewing it as an open-and-shut case of psychiatric projection, Merton, as was his habit, tried to glean whatever grains of truth he could from the encounter. He was already aware of his own neuroses and had long known of his narcissism, and yet, he wondered, how does such knowledge change anything? These traits didn’t interfere with his day-to-day functioning. As a successful writer, a beloved teacher, an acknowledged intellectual, and a valued friend to some of the most renowned thinkers in the world, Merton seemed to be faring quite well. Still, Merton grieved over what Dom James would think if he were to learn of Zilboorg’s diagnosis.

The harshest blow was the accusation of being “verbological”—wordy for the sake of being wordy, of using language artificially to impress. Merton already secretly feared that this might be true, especially in his devotional writings, which in turn forced him to reflect on the extent to which he believed what he wrote about faith, the monastic life, contemplation, and prayer. It was not a comfortable self-evaluation, and he sensed that his own confused response was yet another symptom of neurosis.

Merton was relieved when Zilboorg recommended that they not discuss their conversation with anyone, that it remain a matter of doctor-patient confidentiality. Despite their agreement, Zilboorg took it upon himself to share his insights with Giroux, the purpose being to undermine Merton in the publisher’s eyes. As if that weren’t enough, when Dom James arrived at St. John’s near the end of the conference, Zilboorg arranged a meeting with him to go over his diagnosis. And Merton was invited.

The ambush—the betrayal of confidences—reduced Merton to heaving sobs. While Zilboorg calmly declaimed, “You want a hermitage in Times Square with a large sign over it saying ‘Hermit,’” all Merton could do was groan, “Stalin! Stalin!”30 Zilboorg—as if with a large sign of his own—confirmed Dom James’s own assessment of Merton’s psychological state.

In letters to friends, Merton put a positive spin on the events, declaring that Zilboorg’s bracing assessment was exactly what his soul needed to set it on the right path—and to a great extent he believed that. Whatever Merton thought about the attack, which had been conspiratorially staged by a questionable doctor and the abbot, “Neurosis in the Monastic Life” did indeed remain “on the shelf.”³¹

In that essay, Merton insisted that anyone exhibiting signs of neurosis should “not be treated with indifference, patronage or contempt. We have duty of charity towards others who suffer things that we ourselves may well come to suffer someday.” Such people should be approached with “kindness and understanding and infinite patience.”³² A final irony is that when Zilboorg died three years later, his obituary in the American Journal of Psychiatry described the possibly counterfeit doctor as being “brilliant, warm, understanding, . . . kindly” and exhibiting “a ready humor”³³—to which Merton might well have replied, “. . . like Stalin.”