“What good news that is,” the author would reply. “How fortunate it is that there is some correspondence between what I am impelled or inspired to write and what the general public likes to read!”
As the time drew near for me to give serious thought to my adult career (always provided I didn’t become a Trappist monk), I decided that winning the esteem of the world by filling pages with words would suit me very well. At this time, the best known and most admired authors in America were William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. I read their work and found it not too difficult to fill up pages of my own that seemed very similar to theirs. I sent a collection of these pages to the Writers’ Institute at St. Louis University, and they replied by awarding me a full scholarship.
Like most people then and today, I lacked any clear idea about what writers are and what writers do.
Nowadays it seems to be fairly well understood that writers know something about writing that English teachers don’t. In 1953, however, this apparently wasn’t even guessed at, for there wasn’t a single writer on the faculty of the Writers’ Institute. As a result, when we aspiring writers handed in stories, they didn’t come back with comments like “Nicely written, but no one on earth will publish it.” They came back with the same comments we’d had from our high school English teachers, comments like “Very good” and “Interesting idea.” In our classes, to the best of my recollection, no one ever talked about what was involved in getting published. It seemed to be taken for granted that if we were “good enough,” publication would surely follow and was not something that could otherwise be usefully thought about.
To be fair to the faculty, I gave the program only two years. To be fair to me, in two years I didn’t acquire a single new skill or a single new understanding that would be relevant to a writing career. I don’t mean to suggest that I was outraged by this failure. I was, after all, only marking time until I could take up my true vocation, which was to the religious life. It seemed to me now, though, that I’d waited long enough, that I’d given the idea long enough to go away if it was going to go away, and it hadn’t. I still wanted to become a Trappist monk.…
Yes, that’s a valid point. I’m expressing this as I perceive it now. Naturally, when I was twenty years old, I spoke in terms of “having a vocation,” but this didn’t presuppose that I’d received a personal summons from God. If you felt an attraction to the religious life, this was assumed to be a reasonable indication that you had a vocation.
On the subject of attraction and assumptions … it’s often assumed that my attraction to the Trappist life must have been inspired by Thomas Merton. After the appearance of The Seven Storey Mountain, he’d become the world’s most renowned Trappist as well as one of the world’s most renowned religious writers, but I wasn’t going into the Trappists to pursue the intellectual life or to become a writer. Merton was far less what I had in mind as a model than that roughneck cowboy of The Man Who Hated God. Although I made my application for admission to Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky, where Merton lived, I had no reason to suppose that I’d ever meet him or exchange a syllable of conversation with him. In fact, I wasn’t particularly asking to be admitted at Gethsemani and said in my letter that I’d gladly go wherever I was told to go. At that time the Trappists had several U.S. foundations.
As it happened, however, Merton was at that time the novice master at Gethsemani, which meant that it was he who received my letter and he who decided there was no reason why I should go anywhere else.…
It seemed to me now, though, that I’d waited long enough. I still wanted to become a Trappist monk.
I’m smiling because when I say “as it happened,” I really mean “as Providence would have it.” If I’d written to a different monastery, if someone other than Merton had been the novice master, or if he’d sent me to a different monastery, my whole subsequent life might well have been quite astonishingly different.
Yes … my family. I remember my mother making the expected speech about “throwing my life away,” and what terrible thing had I ever done that I needed to go and do penance at a monastery? I don’t recall my father’s reaction; I can’t think he would have been much surprised. After all, I’d always been a queer boy, in every sense.…
That’s an acute observation. I don’t remember their reactions very well because they were no longer deeply involved in my life or I in theirs. I’d given up on them, you see. They were clearly hopeless, still tearing and rending each other like a couple of savages, and my being perfect had been completely wasted on them. But now I had another use for perfection. Now I could be perfect for someone who appreciated perfection, who knew the value of perfection—indeed for someone who had said in so many words, “Be perfect, as your heavenly father is perfect.”
That too is an interesting observation. I do sound as if I despise this boy, who was having so much difficulty becoming a real boy. Let me think about that.…
I don’t think I despise him, in fact I’m quite sure I don’t. It’s simply that I’m allowed to laugh at him. I’m allowed to laugh at him and at his very painful adolescence, because, after all, he was me. I wouldn’t take it kindly if you were to laugh at him, however. You don’t know him well enough for that.
Now where was I? I guess I was on my way to the monastery. I got there somehow, but, for all I remember, it might have been by bicycle.
FIVE
People of modern sensibility can admire someone who enters a religious order to do good works of some kind, to teach or tend the sick or feed the poor. Even sanctity can be swallowed if it’s a good, healthy, active kind of sanctity, like Mother Teresa’s. What people don’t like to see nowadays are saints skulking in their cells staring glassy-eyed at a crucifix. This sort of sanctity strikes them as morbid and sickly, and naturally this was exactly the sort of sanctity I had in mind for myself.
In my school career, all my efforts had gone into demonstrating that I was a genius. If I was a genius, then it didn’t matter if I was queer. Or, perhaps more accurately, if I was a genius then being queer was okay, because all geniuses are queer, aren’t they? But I wasn’t entering the monastery to continue this career. I didn’t need or want to demonstrate my brilliance. I wanted to be shed of all that. I didn’t want to shine, I wanted to become nothing, to be enfolded in the Lord, and disappear.
No, no, here I’m speaking the literal truth. Hold on, I’ll be back in a minute.…
This is a poem I wrote a few months before I left for the monastery. It’s called “The Old Acolyte’s Easter.”
They found me hidden in a dark corner.
The candles had dissolved to pools, and they,
Finding themselves in darkness, looked for me,
I being the candle-lighter. And so they found
My bones hidden in this dark corner, and they
Rejoiced with me that I had been discovered—
And not only I, but my bones. They gathered me up
Easily, for, hiding there, I had become a web,
Clinging to the walls as I petrified, and when
They touched me I gave no resistance but loosened
Even this mild grip and fell into their hands.
This is what I had in mind for myself, self-effacement to such a degree that I could die and not be missed.
Apparently you find this puzzling. I’m not sure why.…
Ah, yes, I see, that’s a good point. When I thought of myself as a writer, the objective was entirely different. As a writer, I wanted to stand in the spotlight of public attention and adulation, there’s no doubt of that. These were the two forks in the road ahead of me, and each had its attractions. I could go either way, toward what I imagined would be fame and glamour and fortune or toward complete poverty and anonymity. It had to be one extreme or the other. The middle of the road has never had any attraction for me.
In my fantasy of monastic life, I would on arrival, as the newest newcomer, be given the humblest chores to do, and I would do them—t
o perfection, of course. Naturally my fantasies didn’t run to cleaning latrines or washing dishes. I thought in terms of scrubbing floors. There I’d be, lost in meditation, scrubbing away for hours on end but oblivious of the passage of time. In ten or twenty years I could work my way up to being the candle-lighter of my poem.
I didn’t want to shine, I wanted to become nothing, to be enfolded in the Lord, and disappear.
Of course the actuality was nothing at all like this. The novices were rather like a special class at a school, and I was received by them like a new classmate. I was immediately assigned a guardian angel (literally so-called), a novice my own age, whose job was to see that I had everything I needed and got everywhere I needed to be. I remember this handsome and good-natured young man very vividly. I’m sure he must have been the prom king at his high school and the valedictorian and probably the captain of the football team.
Something I couldn’t possibly have anticipated happened: I was accepted by this group. I was welcomed and made to feel … worthy. I was completely bowled over by it. Nothing like this had ever happened to me. I wasn’t on trial. I didn’t have to prove myself. Thinking about this now, I realize that for the first time since early childhood, I didn’t have to prove that I was a real boy or a real man. There was utterly no machismo here. Gethsemani wasn’t about manhood, it was about sainthood.
Decades later I realized that the silence saved me. I assume you know that, among the Trappists, you speak only to your spiritual director or confessor. There’s a rudimentary sign language—deliberately rudimentary—but this is for necessary communications, not for idle chitchat, at least in theory.
I say that silence saved me, because, growing up, from age ten to age twenty, language had been my weapon, virtually my only weapon. I wasn’t strong or fast or big, wasn’t physically aggressive, so I fought with my tongue. Made enemies with my tongue. This was all right too, because being shunned for viciousness is much easier to take than being shunned for queerness. But I walked into Gethsemani without a weapon of any kind, having denied myself speech. And, having denied myself speech, I was unable to make enemies—and, for the first time in a long, long time, didn’t make enemies.
People without much imagination will say things like, “Oh, it must have been terrible for someone as verbal as you not to be able to talk!” Believe me, it was heavenly not to be able to talk—to have no one expect you to talk. To be honest, I didn’t even much want to learn the sign language. I was perfectly content not to know what people around me were saying with their hands. It was none of my affair. If someone came up and told me the abbot wanted to see me, that was fine, I could make that out, what more did I need?
Merton lent me a copy of Max Picard’s The World of Silence, a wonderful book, a whole book on silence, and nothing I could say in praise of silence could begin to equal it. Father Louis—that was Merton’s name in religion—was a marvelous person, full of humor and charm, not in the least austere or self-important or solemn. What my guardian angel was to me, Father Louis was to the novices as a group, and he brought us along rather like a good-natured football coach. Not all the novices were youngsters. Two were ordained priests from other orders, one in his thirties, the other in his forties. He treated the rest of us—the ten or twelve youngsters—the same way he treated them, as if we were grown-ups worthy of his respect. Obviously he knew things about the contemplative life that we didn’t know, couldn’t even begin to guess, but he was just there to enlighten us and that was that.
I was far from being the only one who had arrived with romantic fantasies. One day Father Louis said—we had classes with him every day—“Look, you’ve got to understand that what we have here is a very ordinary life.” Well, I think that drew a lot of smiles. Not many of us little saints were ready to believe that. He told us there were a lot of zombies walking around behind those beatific smiles we saw in the halls, and this certainly gave us something to think about, but no one imagined that something like that could ever happen to us.
Of course, it was all new and exciting to us, but what Father Louis wanted us to see was that it wasn’t always going to be new and exciting. It is, after all, a life of absolute regularity and unalterable, deadening routine, day after day, year after year, decade after decade—life utterly (and by design) without novelty. No vacations, no visits home, no days off, no cocktail hours, no parties, no scratch football games, no chess tournaments. In spite of that, a delightful merriment and glee flourished there that I’ve never encountered elsewhere. Holiness and reverence didn’t preclude gaiety and humor.
Lightheartedness. That’s what I found there: something almost unknown in today’s world, crushed under leaden burdens of crime, crisis, hatred, and anguish. You should see the letters I receive every week from despairing teenagers. Who can live with a light heart while participating in a global slaughter that makes the Nazi holocaust look like a limbering-up exercise? We look back in horror at the millions of Germans who knew more or less exactly what was happening in the death camps and wonder what kind of monsters those people were. In fifty years our grandchildren (if any survive) will look back at the billions of us who knowingly and wantonly laid the entire world to waste and wonder what kind of monsters we were.…
One day while I was out weeding a tomato patch, an old horse-drawn manure cart went lumbering by. The younger of the two novice-priests was standing on top of the load and throwing out magnificent two-handed kisses to the world, just the way the pope does in St. Peter’s Square. He was clowning, of course, but for whom? Not for us—I doubt if he knew anyone was watching and he certainly didn’t care. He was clowning for God, displaying his thanks and his joy at being alive.
Was I happy there? Let’s hold off on that one for a while. All questions of that sort will be answered in their place.
I should point out that I wasn’t yet in the novitiate. I was a postulant—someone on probation, someone asking for admittance rather than someone admitted. That I was an outsider was plain from the fact that I still wore the clothes I’d arrived in.
Lightheartedness. That’s what I found there: something almost unknown in today’s world, crushed under leaden burdens of crime, crisis, and hatred.
As my spiritual director, Father Louis needed to know everything about me, and it wasn’t long before he unearthed my literary ambitions. He wanted to see some of my work, and I wrote out from memory a few of my poems—including, I’m sure, the one I read you a few minutes ago. He looked at them and said, “Well, that’s one thing settled: You’re a poet.”
From his point of view, this wasn’t something in my favor or something he saw as promising for my vocation. Just the opposite, in fact. As he had experienced it, the Trappist life was not congenial to the life of the mind. (I don’t remember his words; this is what I understood from his words.) From ancient tradition, the Trappists are an order of peasants and laborers just as the Benedictines are an order of scholars and intellectuals. He told me very openly that he’d suffered in this environment—and wasn’t at all convinced that I should go through the same experience.
I’ll tell you something that may never have appeared in Merton’s published journals. There came a time when, after months of anguish, he told his confessor that he was struggling with a temptation to write his autobiography. If it isn’t already clear from what I’ve said, the writing of autobiographies is decidedly not on among the Trappists. But in this case, much to Father Louis’s surprise, his confessor ordered him to write it. Thus, suddenly, it was no longer a temptation to be resisted but rather an obligation to be fulfilled, and time previously spent in more ordinary work was now to be devoted to writing. This was how The Seven Storey Mountain came about.…
Why did he tell me this? I don’t know, I never wondered. I suppose it’s because he was one writer talking to another. It’s certainly something I would’ve done in his place.
SIX
Readers of Ishmael often assume that I must be a great lover of nature. Nothin
g could be further from the truth. I’m a great lover of the world, which is something quite different. Nature is a figment of the Romantic imagination, and a very insidious figment at that. There simply is no such thing as nature—in the sense of a realm of being from which humans can distinguish themselves. It just doesn’t exist.
The nonhuman world? There’s no such thing as a nonhuman world—not here and now at any rate. The world that we have is the world that has humans in it, just as the world that we have is the world that has air and water and insects and birds and reptiles in it. Every aspect of the world was changed by our appearance in it three million years ago, just as every aspect of the world was changed by the appearance of plant life three billion years ago. We’ve breathed in and out here for three million years, we’ve taken the substance of the world and made it into human flesh for three million years, and willy-nilly the world has taken that flesh back for three million years and redistributed it through the entire web of life on this planet.
Where would you draw a line between the human and nonhuman worlds? To which world does the wheat in our fields belong? If it belongs to the human world, what about the thousands of species that thrive in and around the wheat—and the tens of thousands of other species that thrive in and around them? It doesn’t even make sense to say that this house belongs to the human world. Carpenter ants and termites are making a meal of it as we speak, I can assure you of that, and it would be a miracle if there weren’t some moths in there snacking on our sweaters. The walls are inhabited by hundreds of different insects (most of which, thankfully, we never see), and funguses, molds, and bacteria flourish by the thousands on every surface.