Friday, July 29, 1966
As he sits in the waiting room of the Medical Arts Building in Louisville, he shuffles through the uneven stack of magazines on the side table. The cover of a recent TIME displays a drawing of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara with a map of Vietnam floating ominously behind him, and on the front of Life magazine, a dark-haired young actress is coyly posing outdoors in a wooden bathtub. The odd contrasts of American culture.
This morning, away from the abbey, he was finally able to post a candid, informative letter to Laughlin in which he recounted the recent events and enclosed some new Menendez poems along with a carbon copy of the lengthy Midsummer Diary. None of this, he knows, is likely to be published in his lifetime. But someday, perhaps.
More importantly, he was able to post a letter to Margie—a fairly unambiguous farewell at last. But now he feels torn and distraught. He can think of little else. She is somewhere in the nearby hospital, but unlike before, he didn’t call her in advance. His four-month checkup was originally scheduled for next week, to coincide with her commencement, at which time they planned to meet again in Cherokee Park, but in the letter he mailed this morning, he canceled the rendezvous and said good-bye for good. To avoid any second-guessing, he had rescheduled the doctor’s appointment for today. Though his love would continue, the affair was over.
Now, as he sits there, nearly in tears, the cover of The Saturday Evening Post catches his eye. Dylan. He’s on the cover under the banner “Rebel King of Rock ’n’ Roll.” There he is—in profile, in all his fuzzy-haired glory, head bowed, cigarette in mouth, scarf over his shoulder as he trudges through what looks like a post-apocalyptic New York cityscape. It’s a romantic image, Byronic—the lone poet, turning his collar to the wind and wandering who-knows-where through an indifferent, monochromatic world. The cover also touts an article called “A Major Report on the New Nuns,” which promises to be interesting. But the nuns will have to stand by. The Rebel King awaits.1
•••
On that same morning, July 29, 1966—the morning of Dylan’s motorcycle mishap—by some bizarre coincidence, some inscrutably cosmic happenstance, Thomas Merton and Bob Dylan, eight hundred miles apart, were consulting their doctors about back injuries at precisely the moment when each man was desperately trying to turn his life in a different direction. Even more strangely, Merton was thinking about Dylan that morning and by the end of the day would write a poem he described as “sort of a Bob Dylan thing.”2
It might not have occurred to Merton to write such a poem that day if he hadn’t stumbled across the Post. And though the cover headline read “Rebel King of Rock ’n’ Roll,” the article inside was titled “Bob Dylan: Well, What Have We Here?” written by Jules Siegel, a hip, thirty-year-old journalist who had spent some rare one-on-one time with Dylan on tour the previous year.3 Siegel confirmed what Laughlin had written to Merton: Dylan’s book, to be called Tarantula, was due out later that summer. Under the impression that the book would be a memoir, Merton knew it would be essential reading for his own article.
The Post’s cover photo was by Jerry Schatzberg, who also shot the quintessential Dylan image for the jacket of the recently released Blonde on Blonde. A week earlier, that record—the first double album in rock-music history—had appeared on Billboard’s Top LPs list, eventually climbing to number nine on the US charts. Merton, however, knew nothing about the new album because Siegel never mentioned it, nor would Merton hear about Dylan’s accident until two months later.
As Merton sat in the waiting room, a song flashed through his head, a patter of words with a blues riff behind them. It gave him an idea. He took a pad of paper and a pencil from his pocket and jotted down some Dylanesque lines for another Menendez poem, which at that point he called “A Blues for Margie,” though he later retitled it “Cancer Blues.”
But it was more than a Dylan pastiche. The poem was inspired by a specific song from Highway 61, which was still the only Dylan album Merton knew. Since Father Chrysogonus had toted the abbey’s record player (a sturdy old portable with a fold-down lid) to the hermitage two weeks earlier, Merton had repeatedly listened to the album, anatomizing it with the same focused attention he reserved for writers like Camus and Edwin Muir, about whom he was currently writing major articles in addition to the one he hoped to tackle about Dylan.
Merton’s template for “Cancer Blues” was Dylan’s “From a Buick 6,” in which Dylan extols his hip, scrappy, gun-toting woman as someone who “keeps [him] hid” and can “sew [him] up with a thread” after the singer crashes on the highway. At the end of each of the four verses, Dylan chants almost ecstatically, “Well, if I go down dyin’, you know she bound to put a blanket on my bed”—those last ten syllables being delivered in a machine-gun-like iambic pentameter.4 As swaggering and surreal as Dylan’s song is, sounding for all the world as if it could have been the inspiration for the Mad Max movies, it is essentially a love song, albeit a visceral gut-punch of one, but oddly tender for all that. It is the only unambiguously adoring love song on the album. Its narrator fuses his own battered macho bluster with his awestruck reverence for his muse’s magical healing arts and toughness. She is part shaman, part exorcist, able to “unload” the singer’s head and “keep away the dead.”
Over the past month, Merton could not have helped but hear echoes of Margie throughout “From a Buick 6.” She was the woman who kept Merton and their relationship hid, who had sewn him up, or at least applied fresh bandages to his incision in the hospital; she frequently headed down the highway to see him; and she was the one who had literally put a blanket on his hospital bed.
Dylan uses a string of earthy epithets for his formidably streetwise nymph: “graveyard woman,” “junk-yard angel,” “steam-shovel mama,” “dump-truck baby.” This technique of applying cryptic epithets to one’s lover appealed to Merton; in “Cancer Blues” he rolls out his own list. The poet’s muse is a “magic Indian healer,” a “punishment of dark sickness,” a “sweet relentless punishing / INDIAN,” his “photo-electric / CURE.” So strong is the woman’s healing power that she cleanses the town of its “racetrack vampires and sham aristocrats”—a line that Dylan himself might have envied.
In Merton’s poem, he dramatizes himself as being bogged down amid “tree frogs and rain” in a hot “solitary swamp” (the hermitage) with the “cancer blues” (his depression and longing for Margie), while his healer continually “grows a little wiser” (Margie’s medical training). Throughout the poem, he contrasts her “fiery gentle healing light” with the harsh, unforgiving city in which she lives, the city that he himself has just escaped after the doctor’s appointment that day. Like the narrator in “From a Buick 6,” the poet in “Cancer Blues” barrels down dangerous highways, a rebellious anti-hero on the verge of cracking up. Merton’s narrator connects with the woman through his own “rush signals of emergency love and dread” (his letters and the Midsummer Diary), and his healer woman can only revive him through her “distant radio-electric loving glance” (phone calls). Near the end of the last stanza, he writes:
You never miss you point right down to the
ROOT CURE
All the way down in the sweet summer earth to clean
The hunted heart of the hell-blues because you are grown
Into a healer.5
While infused with an electric-blues attitude, the poem is a touching commemoration of Margie’s impending graduation from nursing school. She had indeed “grown / Into a healer.”
•••
That August, one year after telling the novices that in the solitary life “you no longer care about anything,”6 Merton began to assess the collateral damage of his “affair”—a word that he himself used at this point.7 His chief concern, of course, was Margie, and he grieved for her. But he also took stock of the many people who had facilitated the relationship, sneaking letters out of the abbey, finding payphones, driving him to and from Louisville, arranging meetings, and secretly archiving his poems. In various letters and journal entries, he began to acknowledge them.
He was aware of how close he had come to losing the hermitage. Dom James could easily have evicted him back in June, convinced, as he was, that Merton’s unusually chaotic version of solitude had become almost more than either the monk or the abbot could bear. Merton scrambled to make concessions, which Dom James willingly accepted, while Merton chafed at the dominant position this put the abbot in.
But the threat of losing the hermitage didn’t entirely go away. At the abbot’s request, Merton had been counseling with Father John Eudes Bamberger, a trusted younger monk with psychiatric training—a substitute for James Wygal, whose relationship with Merton was slowly fraying. Father Eudes too began talking as if Merton’s life outside the walls was a problem, to the point that Merton, in a sort of tactical flanking maneuver, wrote a series of letters to the abbot explaining why the hermitage was essential to his well-being. In one, he wrote somewhat threateningly, “If I could not stay in the hermitage, life would not be worth living and I would certainly create far more problems because I would be a burden to myself and to everyone else.”8 Again the abbot relented. He had a stake in keeping Merton content and productive.
Merton was also at a theological impasse with the abbot. While Merton took responsibility for his actions, he could not bring himself to regard his love for Margie as a moral failing. While ill-advised in light of his vows, the affair, Merton believed, had made him a more complete human being, more aware of his capacity for love and of God’s immense love for him. Having learned this, Merton was eager to face the future as a wiser, more loving individual, while the abbot simply wanted him to admit his failings, ask forgiveness, and get back to being the old Merton.
Merton was also aware that the affair had distanced him from his fellow monks even more severely than his move to the hermitage had; he was now “a priest who has a woman.”9 To make matters worse, the August 5 issue of Life magazine featured excerpts from Merton’s forthcoming Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander as well as photos of Merton onsite at Gethsemani—the first time such photos had appeared in a glossy magazine. It wasn’t good timing. Merton was now becoming a bigger celebrity for being a hermit. Doubly disconcerting was the fact that Merton, whom the church did not even allow to have his photo on his book jackets, had neglected to inform the abbot about the Life photos beforehand. The only good thing about the exposure was that Margie would see it and know that he was all right.
To mitigate some of the damage, Merton devised a plan. On August 12, the day of Margie’s commencement, he came up with the idea of having a sort of graduation ceremony of his own in the near future. He proposed that he be allowed to make an official profession, to undergo a formal rite of “putting away a hermit.” This simple act would communicate to the abbot and the brothers that after his one-year trial at the hermitage he was recommitting himself to the abbey, to solitude, and to stability. The abbot agreed. They scheduled the ceremony for Thursday, September 8.
•••
The “old Merton” was never coming back, and few people were as aware of that fact as Victor and Carolyn Hammer. Victor, a retired artist-in-residence at Transylvania College in Lexington, was a well-known artist, typographer, and printer who had befriended Merton more than a decade earlier. He and his wife, Carolyn, a publisher and fine-press printer in her own right, had been frequent visitors to Gethsemani through the years. In the late 1950s and early ’60s, the Hammers produced exquisite hand-printed editions of three of Merton’s shorter contemplative works, among which was What Ought I to Do?, an early take on The Wisdom of the Desert. Featuring Victor’s own medieval-style designs, these volumes were works of art, rich reinterpretations of fourteenth-century scribal manuscripts.
William Blake’s maxim “Opposition is true Friendship”10 summed up the nature of Merton’s and Victor’s relationship—for theirs was a bond founded in part upon a disagreement about aesthetics. In 1955, Hammer, in his first letter to Merton, outlined a complex theory of art that included the notion that three-dimensional, representational art, which Hammer called “classic art,” was the hallmark of civilization. It was the only kind that accounted for the spiritual realm because it presented reality in a fully delineated, multilayered way. Merton disagreed. For years he gently tried to convince Victor of the equal value of “Byzantine art,” painting that presented flat figures in two dimensions—the third, unseen dimension being an open door to spiritual reality. Among the arts, this included religious icons, abstract expressionism, and primitive art, such as Paleolithic cave painting.11
In the early 1960s, as Merton’s interest in social issues paralleled his growing admiration for modern art, he himself experimented with free-form, Asian-inspired brush drawings. He shared these nonrepresentational shapes and swirls with the Hammers, and the couple saw them reproduced in Merton’s recently published Raids on the Unspeakable.
As part of their ongoing dialogue, Merton had been trying since the late 1950s to arrange a meeting between the Hammers and artist Ad Reinhardt, the acclaimed abstract painter who had been one of Merton’s friends at Columbia. Like Hammer, Reinhardt too had developed a complex aesthetic philosophy, which was a necessity in Reinhardt’s case because his work was controversial and, in the opinion of many, needed a lot of explaining. He was famous for his “black-on-black” canvasses that looked from a distance as if they were solidly monochromatic but upon closer examination revealed subtle gradations of tone and pattern.
Reinhardt’s New York exhibitions in the early 1960s were widely ridiculed in the popular press, though often praised by critics. (The New Yorker, among others, couldn’t resist lampooning Reinhardt in its cartoons; one pictured an art student with her paints and easel, seated in front of an all-black Reinhardt painting. Her replica is nothing but a smaller painting, all black as well.) Reinhardt once explained that he wanted each of his paintings to be a “free, unmanipulated and unmanipulatable, useless, unmarketable, irreducible, unphotographable, unreproducible, inexplicable icon.”12
Reinhardt’s use of the word icon is significant for its religious connotations. Poet and critic John Yau suggests that Merton admired Reinhardt’s black paintings because they were visual representations of the via negativa,13 a way of coming to terms with God by contemplating what God is not, by meditating on the cloud of unknowing, the dark night of the soul.14 Indeed, Merton once called Reinhardt the “Dean of the Great Quiet.”15 Far from being bleak negations of life, Reinhardt’s paintings are invitations to the viewer to clear the mind of ordinary reality in order to focus on the vast, incomprehensible mystery of the divine. Yau quotes this passage from Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation by way of explanation:
It is in this darkness that we find true liberty. It is in this abandonment that we are made strong. This is the night which empties us and makes us pure. Do not look for rest in any pleasure, because you were not created for pleasure: you were created for spiritual JOY. And if you do not know the difference between pleasure and spiritual joy you have not yet begun to live.16
Though Merton often referenced Reinhardt in his discussions with Victor, Merton failed to bring the two artists together. Had they met, Victor would have reiterated his opinion expressed to Merton in a letter in 1959: “To me abstract art is pure perversion. Reinhardt may be sincere, but as an abstractionist he is a sinner against the Holy Ghost. It is a travesty on creation Carolyn said.”17 Reinhardt, in response to Hammer’s predilection for realism, might well have quoted something he wrote in an art journal: “The one thing to say about art and life is that art is not life and life is not art.”18 In theological terms, the discussion would have been a fascinating confrontation between the apophatic and the cataphatic, the negative and positive spiritual paths.
Traditionalist to the core, Victor was baffled by this increasingly modern Merton. The Hammers preferred instead the hermit monk who quoted the Desert Fathers and engaged in contemplative prayer; what had first attracted the couple to Merton was what they perceived as his unalloyed contemptus mundi—his disdain for the world. Merton did indeed criticize the modern world’s destructive technologies, grotesque commercialism, and corrupting messages, but the Hammers failed to account for Merton’s long-time, enduring engagement with modern art, music, literature, philosophy, and theology. He loved jazz, Beat poetry, and Albert Camus, after all. And now, Bob Dylan’s music. Merton tended to see the spiritual in every honest artist, and it is a testimony to Merton’s brilliance that he could befriend two people as different as Victor Hammer and Ad Reinhardt.
In the summer of 1966, however, Merton wasn’t interested in engaging the Hammers in discussions about art. Instead, he asked them if they might be willing to produce a handmade, limited edition of his Menendez poems, the same ones he had been sending to Laughlin since early May. Merton knew it would have to be done discreetly, perhaps by using a pseudonym or by waiting a few years so as not to exacerbate his current problems, but the idea of an exquisite art-book edition of the poems for Margie captivated him.
When the Hammers came to see Merton on August 13, the three of them, caught in a rainstorm, ducked into a barn and sat on hay bales for a chat. The Hammers kindly declined Merton’s proposal. The reasons were Victor’s poor health (he was eighty-three) and their other commitments. But the subject matter itself may have been the greater problem. The Hammers, in whom Merton had confided details of his affair, were sympathetic, but they were disconcerted by his situation as well, and during their talk that day they expressed their relief that the relationship had ended. For them, the romance was another indication of Merton’s devolution, paralleling his shift away from contemplative writing and his seemingly ardent embrace of modernism. Carolyn Hammer referred to it as Merton’s transition “from cowl to blue jeans.”19
•••
Around the time of the Hammers’ visit, the bursitis in Merton’s elbow flared up, becoming so intense that he requested to see the doctor in Louisville. The appointment was scheduled for August 19. As before, he took advantage of this sojourn outside the abbey to post another confidential letter to Laughlin, updating him on the situation with Margie and his resolution to rededicate himself to the hermit life. Wistfully, Merton made this request: “In case of some important event like my death or my sudden transportation to the moon . . . I wish you would tip her off. No one here would.” Toward the end of the letter, he adds, “Did the Bob Dylan book come out yet? I am perhaps going to write a piece on him for Jubilee.”20
Though resolved that their affair was finished, Merton found it impossible not to place a long-distance call to Margie in Cincinnati. They hadn’t spoken directly since their picnic in Cherokee Park a month earlier, so the emotions were intense. He wrote in his journal that the talk “was wonderful and in a way shattering,” and before the end of the conversation he felt as if his heart had been “churned to pieces.”21 He learned that she had written him letters that apparently had been intercepted at the abbey. She also explained that she would be returning to Louisville for some exams in late October, hinting that they might find a way to see each other then. This posed a dilemma for Merton since he had already resolved to resist such temptations.
•••
As Merton struggled to remind himself that the affair was over, he continued to write. He busied himself with the articles on Camus and Muir, he translated the poems of French surrealist René Char and the Spanish poems of Miguel Hernandez, and he contemplated a new direction in his own poetry—a non-Menendez, non-Margie direction. All the while, he listened to his single Dylan album, something he reserved for the evenings before going to bed, a routine that only increased his appetite for Dylan’s music.
As far as the article Merton hoped to write, he knew he was handicapped by not having Dylan’s book and access to more music. Realizing that two months had passed since he had requested the records from Ed Rice, he sent him a whimsical reminder on August 29:
Do not hesitate at once to procure these gems instantly and at no matter what personal sacrifice. . . . This is a one shot expedition into the land of Nod for your old chum. I will be allowed a record player for this once only time in a lifetime to which I will be glued for half a day or so and then pfft. Further I wish to accomplish this spring rite before too long when I am to make profession as a hermit. Hurry then to your nearest drugstore with all possible patience and longanimity and if you can’t get this just send me a bucket of LSD. . . .
Or if you prefer those Dylan records. I am going to be the teen culture king of Trappist Nebraska.22
That last phrase deliberately echoes The Post’s “Rebel King of Rock ’n’ Roll.”
•••
The first week of September was given over to a spiritual retreat in preparation for his official installation as a hermit. Merton rose early each morning to roam the hills around the abbey, saying prayers and praying the Rosary. Each afternoon he repeated these walks after Mass.
Then, on September 8, after Merton read aloud a short vow at the abbey, Abbot Dom James officially confirmed him as a hermit of the Roman Catholic Church. The ceremony was low-key. Although he didn’t climb into a cave and pull the rope up after him, as he had joked with the novices a year ago, it was a milestone, a way of declaring that his solitary life was permanent and irrevocable. He had chosen solitude.
That same day, as fate would have it, a package arrived at the abbey. From its shape alone, Merton knew exactly who it was from, and he couldn’t have been more delighted.