I was never a big Merton fan, but I never knew any of this.
Saturday, April 06, 2019
A dubious figure …
… Shallow Calls to Shallow by Garry Willis | Harper's Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
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The first psychoanalyst seems to have had Merton figured out. Yet St. Charles Borromeo is said to have had "Humilitas" embroidered or painted on his mule's saddle cloth. The proof of the cleric is in the performance; and St. Charles seems to have done a good deal better than Merton, or Tolstoy's Father Sergius.
ReplyDeleteGuy Davenport, who was a friend of Merton's, mentions the nurse, though not the extent of their relations, in the essay "Tom and Gene", collected in The Hunter Gracchus. He is far more sympathetic to Merton than Wills is; but I shouldn't have cared to appoint Davenport as a supervisor of monasteries.
Waugh thought that the assignment to write as a duty did not promise well for Merton's development as a writer. I haven't read Merton's later stuff, and so can't say, but it does sound like a monastic version of New Grub Street.
Years ago, I noticed a slighting reference to The Seven Storey Mountain in something of Lionel Trilling's. Only much later, it occurred to me that Merton might have taken a class or two of Trilling's, and that the two might not have cared for each other.