Thomas Merton never wrote the article about Bob Dylan. At the end of January 1967, he wrote to Ed Rice, “Haven’t done anything on Dylan, . . . and I guess it is useless waiting for his book. Besides I’ll soon have to return the Abbot’s record player.”1 In February he wrote to Baez and Sandperl, “Still haven’t written anything on Dylan, and perhaps won’t after all. I lack perspective.”2 In that last comment he seemed to acknowledge Baez’s more personal connection with Dylan, while still pondering the issue of violence in Dylan’s lyrics. Ultimately, he knew his article would be outdated the instant the book was published.
Little did Merton know that pirated copies of the book’s rough galleys were available—if only Laughlin had known where to look, that is, in the hippie head shops and underground record stores springing up on both coasts. The official edition, published by Macmillan, wouldn’t appear for another five years—three years after Merton’s death.
What would Merton have made of Tarantula? Since he was expecting a memoir, he would have been disappointed—baffled, even—by its anarchic verbal deconstructions, and, like many critics, he might well have found it self-indulgent and silly. One writer described the book as “a foray into career suicide,”3 though it had its admirers, one of whom called it “a high-art symphony of allegoric metaphor.”4
But if Merton could have read Tarantula in the spirit in which Dylan had written it, the book would have reminded him of the French surrealist poets like André Breton, whom Dylan admired, and René Char, whom Merton had been recently reading and translating. Merton was unusually responsive to the surrealists, for, in his words, they fomented a much-needed revolt against the contemporary world’s “tidal wave of trademarks, political party buttons, advertising and propaganda slogans, and all the rest . . . an age of mass psychosis. . . . That is why some of the best poets of our time are running wild among the tombs in the moonlit cemeteries of surrealism.”5
Merton might have been one of the few critics to approach Tarantula on its own terms, as an experimental foray into verbal dissociation along with a sort of strident playfulness. Tarantula might have led Merton to reevaluate his own Cables to the Ace, a book that also explored some of the same surrealist terrain.
Although the article was never written, we can catch a glimpse of what it might have contained by considering the adjectives Merton had already used in his letters and journals to describe Dylan and his songs—“pointed and articulate,”6 “prophetic . . . baroque,”7 “exciting . . . very real, very good,”8 “unruly . . . authentic,”9 “blatant,”10 “inspired, shamanic, and everything”11—all of which suggest that Merton’s approach would have been adulatory and complex.
The core of the article would no doubt have been Dylan’s “prophetic” voice—a word Merton applied to his favorite poets. For Merton, prophetic implied both a high level of truth-telling and the state of being ahead of one’s time. The idea of poetry as a prophetic vocation recurred in several of Merton’s essays written during the time of his Dylan infatuation. In an article about the early-twentieth-century Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío, Merton stated, “All true poetic genius tends to generate prophetic insight. The poet cannot help but listen to awakening voices that are not yet audible to the rest of men.”12 In another essay of that time, comparing Milton and Camus, Merton wrote, “Poets and poetic thinkers—men who construct myths in which they embody their own struggle to cope with the fundamental questions of life—are generally ‘prophetic’ in the sense that they anticipate in their solitude the struggles and the general consciousness of later generations.”13
At that time, Merton talked openly with his friends about Dylan’s prophetic art. Professor Ron Seitz remembers Merton playing Dylan’s “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” for him in the hermitage, and Merton even had him sing along on the “Everybody must get stoned” refrain. As Merton explained, “This is the new American poetry! No kidding! It’s that important!” 14 But the incident may also be an example of Merton’s humor, for Seitz had told him about marching in a demonstration at which he’d had actual stones thrown at him—he’d been stoned!
Despite abandoning the article about Dylan, Merton had not abandoned his desire to hear his poems turned into Dylan-like songs. While he waited for Baez to respond to his poems, another musician was hard at work.
•••
In late May 1967, Victor Hammer, who was then quite ill, and his wife, Carolyn, visited an old friend, performer and folk-song collector John Jacob Niles, who lived not far from Lexington. When the conversation turned to Niles’s poetry, Carolyn told him bluntly, “Johnnie, you’re wasting your time on a lot of nonsense. . . . Have you ever read Tom Merton’s poetry?”15 She then handed him copies of Merton’s Selected Poems and Emblems of a Season of Fury.
Niles read the books and was fascinated. He set to work composing tunes for some of the poems, and over the next few years he would transform twenty-two of them into songs. They were first performed in public in 1971, and ten years later the set was published as The Niles-Merton Songs, Opus 171/172. The front cover displayed color reproductions of two portraits—one of Niles, one of Merton—both painted by Victor Hammer. That edition was a posthumous tribute to all three men, for by then all three of them were gone.
•••
As a teenager, John Jacob Niles fell in love with Appalachia, its people and its music. In 1907, at the age of fifteen, he collected his first folk song, and over the next five decades he transcribed countless traditional songs, more than a hundred of which ended up in his seminal 1961 collection, The Ballad Book of John Jacob Niles.
But it was as a composer and performer that he earned his reputation. He is now mostly remembered for such original compositions as “Go ’Way from My Window” and the popular Christmas song “I Wonder as I Wander.” So authentic-sounding were some of Niles’s compositions that they would be collected in the field by other folklorists who mistook them for traditional songs. The confusion was unavoidable, of course, because Niles, like Woody Guthrie and, later, Bob Dylan, was a musical magpie, adapting bits of traditional songs to create new ones.
Niles’s performances were unlike any other—regarded as bizarre by many. Accompanying himself on his handmade, oversized Appalachian dulcimer, he would dramatize the ballads as he sang them, often in a high falsetto. Greenwich Village folkie Dave Van Ronk remembered him this way: “There are a few things that make me glad I’m old, and one of them is that I saw John Jacob Niles perform ‘Hangman, Slack Your Rope,’ running around the stage with his dulcimer and playing all the roles. It was gorgeously awful.”16
Niles’s influence on younger singers was enormous. At age sixty-seven, he performed at the first Newport Folk Festival in 1959, the year that an eighteen-year-old Joan Baez got her big break there, and a short time later, Baez’s manager arranged for her to sing two songs at one of Niles’s own concerts. Blues-rock legend Janis Joplin started her musical career as a teenager playing autoharp and singing Niles’s songs. Early on, Bob Dylan was mesmerized by Niles’s musical persona, and if anyone was fascinated by musical personas, it was Dylan. He wrote:
Niles was nontraditional, but he sang traditional songs. A Mephistophelean character out of Carolina, he hammered away at some harplike instrument and sang in a bone chilling soprano voice. Niles was eerie and illogical, terrifically intense and gave you goosebumps. Definitely a switched-on character, almost like a sorcerer. Niles was otherworldly and his voice raged with strange incantations.17
In Henry Miller’s 1953 autobiographical novel, Plexus, a novel Merton likely read, Miller provides his own rhapsodic tribute to the folksinger. In one scene, the book’s narrator and his wife listen repeatedly to one of Niles’s records:
Our favorite was “I Wonder as I Wander,” sung in a clear, high-pitched voice with a quaver and a modality all his own. The metallic clang of his dulcimer never failed to produce ecstasy. . . . A sweep of the hand and the dulcimer gave forth magical sounds which caused the stars to gleam more brightly, which peopled the hills and meadows with silvery figures and made the brooks to babble like infants.18
Merton was already familiar with Niles’s work, especially “I Wonder as I Wander,” the fifth track on side one of Baez’s Noël album. So the prospect of Niles’s adapting his poems was more than promising—it was something he had been longing for.
•••
To have a world-renowned composer transform one’s words into songs is an honor that few poets experience, and Merton couldn’t have been more exhilarated. But that exhilaration didn’t last long, for it was soon lost among other significant events.
On June 20, Merton was once again at the doctor’s in Louisville. Knowing that Margie was in town that day, he opted to call her rather than seeing her in person; the situation had changed. “No longer in love, and not even particularly in tune with each other,”19 still, they spoke, and she urged him, for his own sake, to leave the monastery and “be [him]self,”20 just as Abdeslam and Sandperl had recommended earlier. Similar exhortations also arrived in letters from Catholic feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether, a friend and correspondent, one of the most anti-monastic thinkers Merton knew.
This time, however, rather than citing his vows as a defense, he wrote in his journal that perhaps it was time “to be a little more free of the system here, and able to circulate a little and find some other people who are awake and doing something.”21 This thought was a seed that would blossom the following year.
The first week of July 1967, a kitchen sink and cabinet were delivered to the hermitage, and running water was piped in, six months after the well had been drilled. Though no toilet was installed yet, forcing Merton to continue using the snake-infested outhouse, he no longer needed to tote jugs of water from the abbey each day. And a set of bookcases arrived, so he could finally organize his stacks of borrowed books.
All this brought him a step closer to greater independence from the abbey. With an unlimited supply of water, he would no longer have to keep buckets of rainwater to wash his dishes, and he could drink coffee and tea anytime he wanted. Tea was in fact his main source of nourishment while he fasted, which he did that first week of July after hearing that Victor Hammer was in the hospital as the result of a heart attack. Another step toward independence occurred when the abbot gave him permission to have a small altar built for the hermitage; that way, Merton could say Mass there instead of walking to the abbey each day.
While his independence from the abbey increased, Merton’s solitude was still plagued by too many visitors—people with agendas unrelated to his vocation. The constant traffic left him little time to write. That summer he managed to complete the essays for Faith and Violence, and for Seabury Press he wrote a commentary and an introduction for their new edition of Camus’s The Plague. But he felt he should be doing more.
On July 11, the news arrived that Victor Hammer had died the previous day. Merton was distraught. Not only had he lost a friend, but he felt that he had failed in some small way to guide Hammer, a lapsed Catholic, back to the faith. Of all Merton’s visitors, the Hammers were among his favorites. They had created deluxe editions of his books and encouraged his writing. Victor’s presence was always “reassuring, stabilizing,”22 and he was someone Merton could confide in. “We belonged together,”23 Merton wrote.
A week after Victor’s death, Dom James appeared at the door of the hermitage. After a few minutes of conversation, Merton gingerly broached a subject they had discussed briefly in previous conversations: the abbot’s retirement. Merton had encouraged such a move for the abbot’s sake—and for his own; there was, after all, no requirement to stay on indefinitely.
In early September, to Merton’s surprise, the abbot announced his resignation. Not only was he retiring, but he was planning to become a hermit. Another monk had found him a cabin about thirty minutes away by car, on a ridge with a stunning view. The structure was so cozy and secluded that Merton was envious. But more surprising was Dom James’s suggestion that Merton join him by relocating to another cabin on a nearby hill. Merton wrote, “I can think of nothing worse! . . . just being in the same acreage. It would drive me crazy.”24
By the end of 1967, Merton was discovering what many people in their fifties and sixties discover: that their friends and peers are dying at an alarming rate. In August, Merton was devastated to learn of Ad Reinhardt’s death. Not only had he failed to introduce Reinhardt to Victor Hammer, but now both of them were gone within months of each other.
Two other friends from his Columbia days also died around this time. First was John Slate, the attorney who had been setting up the trust that would care for Merton’s literary archives. Slate was also a humor writer who published in a number of major magazines.
A few months later, Merton received news of the death of Sy Freedgood, a writer and editor for Fortune magazine. In The Seven Storey Mountain, Merton had described Freedgood as someone who was “full of a fierce and complex intellectuality.”25 Tragically, Freedgood was burned to death in a house fire. Merton had even had a premonition of that death the previous year when he heard that Freedgood had been in a serious car accident.
It was a sad toll. These deaths hit close to home, and Merton wondered what his own future held. He was at the age when most people realize that their days are passing more quickly and that every life has an expiration date.
•••
In October, Merton’s friend Doris Dana drove him to Lexington, where they picked up Carolyn Hammer and proceeded to the home of John Jacob Niles and his wife, Rena. Boot Hill Farm, where they lived, was just north of Berea, Kentucky, and east of Highway 75. Now Niles had completed three of Merton’s songs and was eager to premiere them.
The late-afternoon gathering began with imbibing Niles’s homemade cider and listening to him sing some of his favorite songs on his dulcimer. Delighted, Merton found that their eccentric host fully lived up to expectations: “Niles is a character and I like him . . . ,” Merton wrote. “He has a good weather-beaten, self-willed face, is a bit of a madman. . . . And he can carve messages on doors, besides play the lute and sing a toothy song in a metallic voice.”26
At dinner, Merton mentioned that Joan Baez had visited him, and Niles abruptly declared that she was “a whore.”27 Merton leaped to her defense even as Niles complained about the many performers who sang his songs without crediting him. Baez had recorded two of his original songs: “Go ’Way from My Window” (Joan Baez/5) and “I Wonder as I Wander” (Noël). On the records, she credits the first as having been “arranged,” not composed, by Niles, and lists the other as simply “traditional.” She also recorded his version of the traditional “Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair” (Joan Baez in Concert), though she credited him for the arrangement. In her autobiography, Baez, with no love lost, referred to Niles as “the well-known traditionalist and old crank.”28
As dinner ended, two women arrived, musical associates of Niles. One was a singer, an operatic soprano named Jacqueline Roberts, and the other was her piano accompanist, Janelle Pope. They were there to sing Niles’s settings of Merton’s poems “Messenger,” “Carol,” and “Responsory (1948).” At this point Merton realized that Niles’s settings weren’t going to be in the folk idiom, nor sung by Niles. In fact, they were about as far from being Dylanesque—or even hummable—as they could be. Niles had transformed the poems into what are called “art songs,” with complex, nuanced, somewhat meandering melodies meant to be sung by trained voices.
Unlike the more “singable” poems Merton had sent to Baez, the poems Niles selected were free-verse, lacking the meter and rhyme of simple musical settings. Whether taken aback or not, Merton wrote that “it was really a moving experience . . . and I burst into tears at Jackie’s singing.”29
A few days later, Merton wrote to a friend a somewhat less glowing report. “I think he did a fine job, and is in any case a great person.”30 One wonders whether “a fine job” wasn’t a bit of faint praise suggestive of Merton’s own disappointment.
The following June, Merton traveled again to Lexington to hear more of Niles’s settings, but at that time he wrote simply that it was an exceptionally tiring trip.31 Whatever Merton thought of the Niles/Merton Songs, he certainly didn’t regard them as “toothy,” nor were they “inspired, shamanic, and everything,” as Merton had said of Dylan’s songs. They were, sadly, closer to what Merton had described to Margie the previous summer—new hymns that “nobody is ever going to sing.”32
•••
That fall, Seabury Press published their edition of Camus’s The Plague, for which Merton had written the introduction and commentary. As part of their marketing push, the publicist sent Merton a questionnaire, asking him to list his favorite things, a list that would then be printed in Publishers Weekly as a way to pique interest in the book. In the issue dated November 6, 1967, that list appeared under the heading “A Hermit’s Preferences”: it was a neat summary of the last year and a half of Merton’s life: “Zen. Indians. Wood. Birds. Beer. Anglican friends. Calligraphic abstract art. Ad Reinhardt. Subversive tape recordings for nuns. Tea. Bob Dylan. Nicaraguan folk art. Quakerism. Shakerism. Novels of Walker Percy. Myth in William Faulkner.”33
•••
In mid-November, Merton phoned Margie. She was moving to Miami to take a job, she said, and hinted that he might join her there, that he should “reach out for happiness.” The phrase struck him, and it was the only part of their conversation that he quoted directly in his journal. But he knew that he “could not live happily with a woman,” for the two of them would ultimately make each other miserable. Still, like so many of his other friends, she was encouraging him to venture beyond the monastery. It was their final conversation, and Merton described it as “a sad sort of call and in the end she was crying.”34
But it was not their final communication. A month later, two days before Christmas, a card arrived from Margie, unleashing a flood of memories. Merton had been thinking about her recently—so intensely that he could “almost [see] her it was so vivid”—and he wrote in his journal that he felt “less real, somehow, without our constant communication, our sense of being in communion.” Although he still recognized that marriage would have been impossible (he was too old anyway, he said), he admitted that he often felt tired of his solitude, or, as he phrased it, “the drab, futile silences of this artificial life.”
Although the depression would pass within a few days’ time, and he would energetically throw himself back into his routine of prayer and reading and writing, still, on the day that he received Margie’s Christmas card—for that brief moment, at least—he reflected, “This afternoon I wondered if I’d really missed the point of life after all.”35