Silent Prophet

By Mayo Mohs

MERTON: A BIOGRAPHY by Monica Furlong

Harper & Row; 342 pages; $12.95

Just 32 years ago, The Seven Storey Mountain appeared in American bookshops. Within weeks the autobiography became the most unlikely bestseller in American history--600,000 copies in the original clothbound edition. The author, Thomas Merton, was a young Roman Catholic convert who had scuttled a promising literary career to seek the austere and silent cloister of a Trappist monastery. But the career pursued him. At the time of his death in 1968 at the age of 53, the monk who dwelt in a hermitage at Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky had become the most celebrated religious recluse in the Western world.

Now British Biographer Monica Furlong, 50, offers the first full-length assessment of the hermit celebrity, a provocative and thoughtful examination of a life that she judges to be "victorious."

It might have been a disaster. Merton was so restless in infancy, his mother recorded, that only by singing to him could she quiet him sufficiently to dress the boy. His artist father, a New Zealander, cultivated his son's passion for the creative; the talented but apparently frustrated American mother gave him a compulsion to be perfect. That Thomas would long feel unloved may well have come from his desperate efforts to please this fastidious woman. When she lay dying of cancer, she refused to let her children see her; she sent the six-year-old Thomas a farewell letter from the hospital.

The childhood restlessness plagued Merton through school in France and in Britain, where he entered Cambridge. His first year there was his last. He spent too many nights in beds other than his own, and fathered an illegitimate child. His furious guardian, a family friend, dealt with the indiscretion. But when Merton left for a visit to the U.S. the next summer, the guardian wrote to suggest that Thomas stay there. (The young woman and her son died in a London air raid early in World War II.) The Seven Storey Mountain was so circumspect about Merton's youthful sins that his later conversion seemed oddly lopsided. Furlong's exploration of the Cambridge episode reveals the secret, morally reckless side that the monk would later say "demands a whole life of penance." What distinguishes Merton, however, is more than the detailed portrait of his scandal-marred youth. The monk lived more than two decades after his early epic, and he died quite a different man from the one he first described. Furlong provides what Thomas Merton himself only partly disclosed in later works: a chart of the pilgrim's progress toward maturity. His dark night of the soul was a long, arid season. Fame was no solace.

Told by a monk in Rome that there existed a cultist trend called "Mertonism," he disowned followers with a fierce warning: "Anyone who imitates me does so at his own risk. I can promise him some fine moments of naked despair."

Merton emerged from his crises disillusioned but stronger. His devotion to God, the Virgin Mary, the fruits of contemplation remained intact. His questioning of institutions increased. Though he kept his own will in check, he doubted a system that "constantly organized and marshaled [the young ones] this way and that." In his 1951 spiritual treatise, The Ascent to Truth, Merton had ingenuously defended the churchmen who silenced Galileo, and he had counseled other pioneers to be patient with ecclesiastical censors. Now he sharply questioned such blind obedience.

At Gethsemani, Merton was given permission to build a modest, cinder-block hermitage in which to write and pray, and to receive a mounting stream of visitors. His message journeyed far beyond the confines of the retreat into a world with which he was finally at ease. The perduring cause was peace -- a cause he had first championed in his days at Columbia in the 1930s: peace among races, peace in Viet Nam, peace between the superpowers who were to decide the fate of billions of souls. The irksome discipline of the monastery, Furlong concludes, had given him the freedom to be a prophet.

That freedom could be savored for only a moment. After a journey to meet with Asian mystics in India and Ceylon, death came in Bangkok, where Merton, padding about in his room, was electrocuted by a faulty fan. The words-- and they were a torrent within that vow of silence -- are undying.

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