Those who came to visit, a not insignificant number of people for a man who considered himself a hermit, soon learned to bring along a case of beer and a bottle of whiskey. Merton went drinking and then swimming with more than one female visitor. At one point he referred to the Goliards, whose ribald medieval poetry was put to music in the ’30s by Carl Orff in his Carmina Burana, as “beat monks.” Merton was on his way to becoming one himself.
In Catholic Counter Culture in America 1933-62 James Terence Fisher refers to both Kerouac and Merton as “the last Catholic romantics.” Merton became a “beat monk” under the influence of the emerging counterculture which took as its paradigm “spade kicks” and the ghetto's debilitating effect on family life and sexual morality. When, toward the end of his life, Merton founded the poetry magazine Monk’s Pond, he was insistent on having Kerouac contribute to it. Unlike Merton, Kerouac seemed more and more drawn to the vocabulary of his childhood Catholicism as he approached the end of his life (they died within a year of each other).
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Toward the end of March 1966, Thomas Merton was brought to St. Joseph Hospital in Louisville for a an operation to unfuse two of his vertebrae. While luxuriating during his recuperation in the ability to lie on his back without pain, Merton looked up six days after the operation, on the last day of March, to notice that a student nurse had come into his room. She was there, she told him, to give him a sponge bath. She was thirty years younger than he, and, in spite of the fact that she had been told to respect his privacy, she announced that she was familiar with his work. A conversation ensued, and continued throughout his stay in the hospital. By the time he left to go back to Gethsemane, the Trappist monastery fifty miles to the southeast, the world’s most famous monk was in love.
If the idea of the ascetic author of The Seven Storey Mountain falling in love with a woman young enough to be his daughter seemed implausible, that was because much of what Merton wanted to tell about his youthful sexual indiscretions had been edited out of the book by the censors at Gethsemane. As Merton made clear in his diaries, he was being haunted by sexual ghosts at the time of his operation. By the time of his operation, Merton was also the author of Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, which was also being serialized in Life magazine. If there were ever an indication of what had happened to American Catholics in the period after the war, the gap between Merton’s two books gives some indication of what it was. Catholics had survived the anti-Catholic campaign of Paul Blanshard and his Ivy League supporters and had taken their place at the center of the national stage, only to be undone by their own success. Merton’s access to the mainstream media would prove, when looked at with the gift of hindsight, to be a two-way street. If it meant that he had a large national audience, it also meant that the media had access to him - something of significant consequence for a man who chose to become a monk, leave the world behind and immure himself in a hermitage in the woods of rural Kentucky.
The steady stream of visitors that Merton entertained there gave some indication that his isolation was less than that of the desert Fathers. In addition to undergoing psychoanalysis at the hands Dr. Gregory Zillborg - something which precipitated a flood of psychoanalytic jargon into his writing - Merton and his hermitage became a stopping-off point for spiritually inquisitive celebrities of all sorts who wanted to spend time with the famous monk and author. In the summer of 1959, Natasha Spender, wife of poet Stephen Spender, “blew in with a girl from the Coast, Margot Dennis.” As had become his custom by then, Merton took his guests and some food and drink to one of the nearby ponds, where Margot, “transformed into a Naiad-like creature, smiling a primitive smile through hanging wet hair,” went swimming, evidently without a bathing suit. In terms of asceticism, Merton was no Simon Stylites; he wasn't even keeping pace with his Trappist brothers, even though the hermitage he inhabited alone was supposedly an indication that he had gone beyond them. Eventually the laxity would catch up with Merton in his infatuation with the student nurse he referred to in his diaries as M.
On May 5, Merton had his friends James McLaughlin and Nicanor Parra drive him to the Louisville airport, where M and I had a little while alone and went off by ourselves and found a quiet comer, sat on the grass out of sight and loved each other to ecstasy. It was beautiful, awesomely so, to love so much and to be loved, and to be able to say it all completely without fear and without observation (not that we sexually consummated it).
The entry gives some indication that sexual consummation was on Merton's mind. On May 7, at a picnic at a nearby lake celebrating the annual running of the Kentucky Derby, Merton’s behavior with M. caused discomfort to everyone in attendance. The relationship reached its consummation on May 19, the feast of the Ascension, when a nurse friend dropped M. off near the monastery and the two of them found a secluded place in the woods around the Vineyard Knobs where they ate ham and herring, drank wine, read love poems and “mostly made love and love and love for five hours.” Merton later wrote in his journal that through the encounter his
sexuality has been made real and decent again after years of rather frantic suppression (for though 1 thought I had it all truly controlled, this was an illusion). I feel less sick, I feel human, I am grateful for her love which is so totally mine. Ail the beauty of it comes from this, that we are not just playing, we belong totally to each other’s love (except for the vow that prevents the last complete surrender).'
By June, Merton’s behavior was so out of control that it had come to the attention of his Trappist superiors. One of the monks had overheard a telephone conversation between Merton and M. and had reported him to Dom James Fox, Merton’s abbot. Fox was understanding but demanded a “complete break.” And Merton, like many religious at the time, was faced with the unenviable prospect of either repudiating his religious vows or cutting himself off from the woman he loved.
During the summer of 1966, at the end of the Second Vatican Council and the beginning of the sexual revolution, the world seemed alive to new sexual possibilities, especially for Catholic nuns and priests, many of whom confidently expected that the Catholic Church’s discipline on celibacy was about to be lifted.
Michael Jones
Libido Dominandi
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