Silver Dagger

That Thomas Merton fell in love is not nearly as surprising as it would have been had he not fallen in love.

Here was a man who had lost his mother when he was six and grew up with few nurturing females. In his journals he periodically regretted his youthful dalliances, and now that he was capable of loving more maturely, his vows imposed limitations.

Here was a man who had been feeling lonely for months, who had been reading Rilke’s poetry, meditating on the role of love in the context of solitude, so much so that he had found comfort in the soft eyes of passing deer.

Here was a man who, after living without a woman’s touch for two and a half decades, suddenly found himself personally cared for by an attractive, vivacious woman in her twenties. He leaned on her as he walked. She gave him sponge baths and checked his bandages.

•••

Three days after Margie left for Chicago, Merton returned to Gethsemani. By the time he stepped back through the front gates—over which a sign read Pax Intrantibus, “Peace to those who enter”¹—he was feeling anything but peace. He was aware of being in love and mindful of the risks. On Easter Sunday, April 10, the day after his return, he resumed his journal. “Though I am pretty indifferent to the society of my fellow monks . . . ,” he wrote, “I do feel a deep emotional need for feminine companionship and love, and seeing that I must irrevocably live without [that,] it ended by tearing me up more than the operation itself.” He wondered if he and Margie had perhaps become “too friendly.”2

Although he had given Margie one of his books with a note inside explaining how he could be reached, he assumed their acquaintance was over. Perhaps he might run into her when he returned for checkups—at least, he hoped so—but his main concern was to continue healing and to cope with his tangled feelings. Although he shuffled up the path to the hermitage most days after his return, he slept in the infirmary because he was still experiencing pain, night sweats, and numbness in his leg. But he was improving.

As spring unfolded, he was ready to resume his daily disciplines of prayer, writing, and reading. The redbuds were in bloom along the edges of the woods, and the pink buds of the dogwoods would soon blossom into white. Wildflowers could be seen in every direction, bringing a refreshing sense of renewal.

On Tuesday, April 19, a letter arrived. From Margie. In it, she affirmed her friendship and confessed to feeling lonely, referencing their discussions about love and solitude. She enclosed a cartoon of Snoopy and expressed her regret that they probably wouldn’t see each other again. Like a man grasping a lifeline, he penned a response in which he openly declared his love. It was one of those Rubicon moments from which there was no turning back. He could well lose the hermitage—and his vocation—should his superiors find out about his letter. “I responded positively,” he wrote later in his journal, “because I already loved her.”³

For her part, Margie was terrified. She was engaged, and Merton, more than twice her age, was a renowned writer, esteemed by the church, and someone she personally revered. But here he was, opening the door to a romantic involvement. She consulted a priest, who exhorted her to break off all contact immediately.

Three days later, Merton was at the abbey, helping to host a visiting abbot. After dinner, unsure of how Margie was reacting to his letter, he managed to find a phone with an outside line and surreptitiously dialed her number. Although she didn’t answer, he had crossed another boundary; after the first illicit call, the others were easier. He tried again the next morning; again, she wasn’t in. When he tried that afternoon, she finally answered. In that conversation, they acknowledged their feelings for one another, and, knowing he would be going to Louisville for a checkup in four days, he asked her to meet him outside the doctor’s office.

In the interim, Merton agonized about his motivations, about the inevitability of things ending badly, and about the guilt he felt for stooping to stealth in contacting her. In his journal, he repeatedly couched his feelings in spiritualized terms. Although Rilke had said that loving another human was “the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation,” Merton knew his infatuation was too powerful and too frankly sexual to be easily dressed in pious trappings.

On Tuesday, April 26, he returned to Louisville for a post-op checkup. Beforehand, he met with Dr. James Wygal, the psychiatrist he had been seeing for the past five years. Wygal was the first person in whom Merton confided the details of his feelings for Margie, and, clearly alarmed, Wygal advised him against seeing her that day. But the encounter had already been arranged. As soon as Merton emerged from the surgeon’s office after the checkup, Margie appeared as if out of nowhere. Merton introduced her to Wygal.

The three of them went to lunch at Cunningham’s, an old Louisville institution three miles north of the hospital—and a mere four blocks from the corner of Merton’s life-changing epiphany. Merton and Margie, who were left alone for half an hour while Wygal ran an errand, discussed their relationship, including the level of intimacy people in their unusual situation could expect. Sex, obviously, was out of the question. Of that they were sure.

Wygal returned, and after he and Merton dropped Margie off at the hospital for her shift, Wygal warned Merton that his involvement was extremely dangerous and could have tragic results. That evening, Merton tried to justify his situation, writing that the relationship was “beautiful,” like that between Jacques Maritain and his late wife, Raïssa.

Over the next few days, more letters were exchanged and more phone calls were made while Merton vacillated between justification and pangs of conscience. He knew he could never abandon the hermitage or his vocation, but he was determined to find a way to incorporate a platonic though passionate relationship into his life—though he despised the word platonic in relation to Margie.

On Thursday of the following week, Merton would have a second opportunity to confide in a friend. He was expecting a visit from his longtime publisher, James Laughlin.

•••

In 1936, at the age of twenty-two, and with the help of family money, James Laughlin founded New Directions and soon grew the publishing company into a formidable literary powerhouse. Over the decades it issued pioneering literary works by Ezra Pound, Tennessee Williams, Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Albert Camus, and Pablo Neruda, to name only a few, and by the mid-sixties, few students graduated from college without owning a well-thumbed copy of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Coney Island of the Mind (1958), Dylan Thomas’s Collected Poems (1953), or Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha (1957)—all iconic publications from New Directions.

Laughlin had published Merton’s first book, Thirty Poems, in 1944—well before the publication of The Seven Storey Mountain—and had subsequently issued more than a dozen other Merton titles, including Seeds of Contemplation (1949), Selected Poems (1959), The Wisdom of the Desert (1960), and Original Child Bomb (1962). At the time Merton first met Margie, New Directions was in the process of publishing what would become one of Merton’s most admired books, Raids on the Unspeakable.

Laughlin arrived at Gethsemani on May 5, accompanied by Chilean poet Nicanor Parra, then a visiting professor at Louisiana State University. Only months before, New Directions had issued a bilingual edition of Parra’s Poems and Antipoems, originally published in Spanish in 1954. Parra’s collection was a favorite of Merton’s and had influenced many of the Beat poets, including Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Merton had long admired Parra and written in the “antipoem” form, which is characterized by a deliberate rejection of traditional poetic technique. Merton had even translated some of Parra’s antipoems for this new collection. Although the two had corresponded, Laughlin was eager for them to meet in person.

After their arrival, Laughlin and Parra treated Merton to a scenic drive and a meal. As they meandered north toward Louisville, Merton asked them to stop periodically. He wanted to call someone. Not finding a payphone, he suggested they simply continue driving to see if his friend might be at home. So as not to arrive completely unannounced, Merton finally located a payphone and called Margie to tell her to expect them in twenty minutes.

At Lourdes Hall, introductions were made, and, though understandably puzzled, Laughlin offered to treat everyone to lunch. If there was ever a premise for an intriguing one-act comedy, it must certainly be the day that James Laughlin, Thomas Merton, Nicanor Parra, and Margie Smith had lunch in the Luau Room at the Louisville International Airport.

How different the thoughts of each person must have been. Laughlin, no doubt wishing to play the gracious host, was hoping to cement a closer relationship between Merton and Parra, and Margie might have seemed something of a fifth wheel. Parra, in his poetic way, was delighted with everything—the attractive young woman, the monk who was clearly in love with her, the conversation, and even the airport itself. Parra, a thoroughgoing Communist, was amused by the well-fed bourgeois Americans teeming through the concourse in preparation for the Kentucky Derby, which was to take place in two days. For their part, Margie and Merton, while delighted to be together, were guarded, sticking to safe topics of conversation. Sensing their reserve, Parra eventually nudged Laughlin under the table, indicating they should let Merton and the young woman talk privately. Excusing themselves, Laughlin and Parra said they could all meet up later.

Now on their own, Merton and Margie strolled to a secluded grassy area outside the terminal, where they could talk as they distractedly watched the planes come and go. Later Merton wrote, “It was beautiful, awesomely so, to love so much and to be loved and to be able to say it all completely without fear and without observation.”4 It was their most intimate conversation yet.

On the drive back to Gethsemani that night, Parra, in an impish mood, told Merton he should “follow the ecstasy,” a comment that caught Merton up short. He wrote, “By which he meant evidently right out of the monastery and over the hill. This of course I cannot do.”⁵

The following morning, before leaving, Laughlin told Merton he understood the monk’s attraction to such a lively and intelligent young woman, but he expressed reservations about his own part in the events of the day before. He didn’t want to get Merton in trouble or endanger their relationship.

Laughlin’s qualms did nothing to prevent Merton from immediately suggesting yet another deception for which he needed Laughlin’s help. Merton wanted to mail him his growing catalog of love poems for Margie—with the intention of having Laughlin publish them posthumously. Since his mail was often screened, Merton wanted to avoid arousing suspicion. His solution was to refer to the poems, which eventually numbered eighteen, as translations of obscure Latin American poets, for Merton was, in fact, translating a number of them at the time.⁶ The code name Merton devised for use in their correspondence was “the Menendez file.”

•••

Even as Merton and Margie spoke at the airport, they knew they would be seeing each other two days later, on Derby Day. The abbot had given Merton permission to invite some friends to Gethsemani on Saturday to enjoy a picnic and to listen to the race on the radio. As a personal favor, Merton asked these friends, philosophy professor Jack Ford and his family, to bring along another guest, one who was unknown to the Fords. It was Margie.

The night before the Derby, Merton wrote a Menendez poem about their airport tryst, titled “Louisville Airport, May 5, 1966,” intending to read it to Margie the next day, though he worried he wouldn’t be able to contain his emotion. The deer he had watched from his porch two months earlier returned again in his imagination. He wrote:

[God’s] alone and terribly obscure and rare

Love walks gently as a deer

To where we sit on the green grass7

Rilke’s themes of solitude and desire are again echoed in God’s “alone and . . . rare / Love.” When Merton looked into this woman’s eyes, he couldn’t help but echo Shakespeare;⁸ he writes of his and Margie’s

. . . solemn love

Now for the first time forever

Made by God in these

Four wet eyes and cool lips

And worshipping hands⁹

•••

During the Derby Day picnic at the abbey, Merton and Margie, to the Fords’ surprise, disappeared over the hill and were gone for a couple of hours. The two walked to the creek at the foot of Vineyard Knob and had a long talk. They discussed their options, which they narrowed to three. First, Margie suggested she could live in Louisville after her graduation from nursing school and visit him regularly. This would mean more illicit meetings and whispered phone calls, possibly for years. Second, Merton could leave the monastery, which was his only path to “marrying”—Merton himself put the word in quotation marks because he knew the church would never recognize such a marriage, and he could be excommunicated.¹⁰ Finally, a distant hope: perhaps, in light of Vatican II, the church might eventually allow its priests to marry. But this possibility was as remote then as now, more than fifty years later.

A few days later, Margie wrote to him, suggesting that their only option was simply “to be ourselves.” The problem, Merton observed, was, “This is not allowed.”11

•••

On Saturday, May 14, a week after the Derby, Merton was back in Louisville to get a shot for his bursitis. He met Margie at Cunningham’s and read another poem he had written for her, “Aubade on a Cloudy Morning,” in which he grieves he cannot sleep next to her and watch her as she wakes each day. They talked about their situation, about the possibility of Merton’s leaving the order so they might simply live together without marrying, which was implied in the poem. They knew this was unrealistic.

At one point, the conversation turned to Joan Baez, whom the media had dubbed “the Queen of Folk” and a Time magazine cover story had called a “Sybil with a Guitar.”¹² Margie adored her music, and Merton had recently been listening to Baez’s first album on the recommendation of Gethsemani’s choirmaster, Father Chrysogonus. Baez’s version of the folk song “Silver Dagger” seemed so poignant to Merton and Margie that they made a resolution. They vowed to listen to the song every morning at 1:30—just as Merton was rising from his bed to start his day and as Margie was settling into hers after her late shift fifty miles away. One biographer refers to it as their “binding song.”¹³

The idea is a variant of the old lovers’ vow involving the moon. Henry Fielding described it in Tom Jones when the title character tells a friend, “Two Lovers . . . agreed to entertain themselves when they were at a great Distance from each other, by repairing, at a certain fixed Hour, to look at the Moon; thus pleasing themselves with the Thought that they were both employed in contemplating the same Object at the same Time.”¹⁴

The “Object” in this case—Baez’s plaintive ballad——had a cathartic quality for Merton and Margie.

Don’t sing love songs, you’ll wake my mother,

She’s sleeping here right by my side

And in her right hand a silver dagger,

She says that I can’t be your bride.

All men are false, says my mother,

They’ll tell you wicked, lovin’ lies.

The very next evening, they’ll court another,

Leave you alone to pine and sigh.

My daddy is a handsome devil

He’s got a chain five miles long,

And on every link a heart does dangle

Of another maid he’s loved and wronged.

Go court another tender maiden,

And hope that she will be your wife,

For I’ve been warned, and I’ve decided

To sleep alone all of my life.15

What the lover does after this rejection is not explained. Perhaps he will murder the mother. Perhaps he will elope with the girl. But none of this is hinted at in the version Baez gives us. Hers is not about the lover; it’s about the girl and her rejection of the man before he betrays her.

One can picture Thomas Merton, in May 1966, sitting alone in the abbey’s dimly lit library in the early hours, seated by one of the record players with headphones on.¹⁶ He has risen a half hour before the other monks so he can keep his 1:30 listening date with Margie. He hunches slightly over the phonograph. Gently, he brings the phonograph needle down on the edge of the record, called simply Joan Baez.¹⁷ She had recorded it, her debut, in 1960, and the first track is “Silver Dagger.”

In the song, Baez projects a heartbreaking innocence as well as an astonishing power. A rapid acoustic-guitar accompaniment creates a tension, impelling the narrative forward in a headlong way, as if anticipating a train wreck. Baez, as always, sings with flawless conviction. Four decades later, Bob Dylan could still remember the impression Baez’s recording of this song made on him: “She made your teeth drop.” She had the ability, Dylan wrote, “to make you believe what you are hearing. . . . I believed that Joan’s mother would kill somebody that she loved. I believed that. I believed that she’d come from that kind of family. Folk music, if nothing else, makes a believer out of you.”18

The song itself is only two and a half minutes long, but in its four verses, a whole world of inexpressible emotion opened for Merton, just as it had for Dylan. A month later, Merton summed up his own feelings in his Midsummer Diary, the private journal he kept for Margie. He wrote, “All the love and death in me are at the moment wound up in Joan Baez’s song ‘Silver Dagger.’ I can’t get it out of my head, day or night. I am obsessed with it. My whole being is saturated with it. The song is myself—and yourself for me, in a way.”¹⁹

For Merton and Margie, the song was talismanic, mysteriously evoking their situation. They would have equated the mother with the church itself, or perhaps with Dom James, who would certainly disapprove of their relationship. The dagger represented not the redemptive cross of Christ, but the powerful symbol of the Church of Rome’s ultimate authority over its clerics in such matters.

The girl’s warning to the lover not to sing love songs must have been especially significant for Merton. He had already conspired with Laughlin to hide his own “love songs”—his poems for Margie—from the abbot and anyone else who might be intercepting his mail. Metaphorically, if Dom James were to wake up to the sound of love songs being sung outside the abbey window, he would most certainly take up the cross, the church’s authority, to end the relationship. He would have reminded Merton, as he eventually did, that Merton had already “decided to sleep alone” when he took his simple vows twenty-five years earlier.

In the short term, Merton and Margie found some small comfort in the fact that the song ends, as one writer said, “inconclusively.” But few listeners would mistake that for a happy ending. The ominous, modal melody and Baez’s heartrending delivery leave little doubt that things will end badly—and soon. Whatever happens, the listener knows the lovers will part—just as Merton and Margie must have known they would eventually have to. For them, like the lovers in the song, their situation was impossible.

Perhaps even more apposite is the song’s finely pitched sexual tension, which comes as much from the edgy guitar pattern as the singer’s luxuriant voice. Baez herself has referred to “Silver Dagger” as “by far the most erotic song in all of my repertoire.”20 More than a month later, one of Merton’s fellow monks, who may have overheard him listening repeatedly to “Silver Dagger,” chided Merton, saying, “The songs of Joan Baez had ‘sensuality in them.’” But Merton was in no mood to be lectured. In the Midsummer Diary, he vented his fury: “My eye. I told him that he was hearing the deep archetypal symbols and resonances that come from the love and death planted deep in our hearts: things the monks would rather not hear. . . . There is no sensuality in them.”²¹

After a few moments’ reflection, Merton sensed he had overstated things and, in a seemingly defeated tone, added, “There are no archetypes in them either. Maybe there is a kind of death in them, and maybe even a life comes out of them.” Then he reminded himself why he and Margie were listening to “Silver Dagger” in the first place: “No one can ever prevent us from thinking of each other and from loving each other.”²²

•••

For those few weeks, Merton’s world contracted. Due to the physical and emotional “tearing up,” his focus narrowed to the thin geographical corridor between Gethsemani and Louisville. Where his journal used to overflow with a wide array of topics—presidents, poets, Nature, the peace movement—the writing now became a catalog of his conflicted feelings about Margie. His once voluminous correspondence slowed to a trickle, and when he did write, it was usually to say, cursorily, he’d had an operation, had returned to the abbey, and was recovering.

World events that would have formerly compelled his attention now remained largely unmentioned. On March 23, for instance, the day he was driven to the hospital in the pouring rain, Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey made a landmark visit to Pope Paul VI in Rome, initiating a rapprochement of the Anglican and Roman Catholic Churches after four hundred years of estrangement.

Before the operation, Merton noted that an antiwar demonstration was to take place in New York on March 26. Twenty thousand people gathered. After his return to Gethsemani, he mentioned neither the protest—the largest to date—nor the follow-up march in Washington, D.C., on May 15. Nor did he mention that on April 12, the US expanded its strategic bombing of North Vietnam in an operation ominously called “Rolling Thunder.”

On March 16, a week before the surgery, Merton expressed outrage about the January crash of a US military B-52 off the coast of Spain. During a routine refueling, the plane broke apart with a nuclear payload—the infamous “Palomares incident.” Three of the four bombs were recovered near a small fishing village, and though none exploded, five hundred acres of Spanish coastline became uninhabitable due to plutonium contamination. The fourth bomb was fished out of the Mediterranean on Good Friday, April 7. After returning from the hospital, Merton didn’t mention the incident again.

Also on that Good Friday, Time magazine issued what was probably the most controversial edition in its history—the famous “Is God Dead?” issue.23 It sparked years, if not decades, of debate and misunderstanding. The article outlined the complex issues philosophers and theologians were discussing at the time—the fact that traditional conceptions of God were becoming functionally irrelevant and that theologians were positing the need for a “God above the God of theism.”²⁴ Merton had been writing intensely about the death-of-God movement for many years already, but the publication of that issue of Time, which suddenly brought the discussion into the public square, passed unacknowledged by Merton until months later.

More personally for Merton, on that Easter Sunday, Catholic writer Evelyn Waugh died. Noted for his lyrical novel Brideshead Revisited, among many others, Waugh had edited the British edition of The Seven Storey Mountain, which was retitled Elected Silence. He also edited Merton’s subsequent book, The Waters of Siloe, a history of the Cistercian order.

Waugh had been a personal writing coach for Merton and, as such, something of a poke in the eye to those Catholic censors who had once recommended that Merton take a correspondence course in grammar. Merton did them one better by apprenticing, by mail, with one of the greatest English stylists of the twentieth century. Waugh first exposed Merton to such classics on writing as Graves and Hodge’s Reader Over Your Shoulder and Fowler’s Modern English Usage. Waugh, whom Merton respectfully addressed as “Mr. Waugh,” had visited Merton at Gethsemani in 1948. But the level of Merton’s distraction was such that he never mentioned Waugh’s death in his journals or letters until much later. While it was not uncommon for him to get the news of the world weeks late, in this case, Merton simply had other things on his mind.

His life had gone underground. Secrets needed to be guarded. Merton regularly made illicit phone calls, arranged private trysts, and smuggled love poems out of the abbey under a code name. In his journals, he refers to Margie only as “M.”

Though problematic, this new life had its advantages. The surgery offered Merton a much-needed respite from the daily grind of church politics, monastic rules, writing deadlines, and world affairs. The romance offered him a chance to reclaim a part of his life that had been overshadowed by his fame, his vows, the church’s high expectations, and his own enormously high ideals. He was entering a new kind of aloneness, existential and visceral. Not unlike the young Sebastian in Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, Merton found himself in a situation that was now “Thomas contra mundum”—“Thomas against the world.”

His recovery at the abbey gave him a different sort of desert experience—one in which he was suddenly forced to focus wholly, if stealthily, on his own emotional needs, which now had enormous relevance to his spiritual development. His vision that “there are no strangers” became personal in a different way. He found a new kind of solidarity with the world. Now, being in love, he was dealing with ethical and romantic issues he’d not dealt with this intensely since before entering the monastery, and though not without its agonies and anxieties, this new life—this vita nuova—energized him. It made him feel alive as never before.

And all it took was the tender gaze of one caring human being.