Getting back to the monastery I found – to comfort me – a box of books to review for the Sewanee Review – 5 on or by Camus and the poems and some essays of Edwin Muir. Began Muir’s poems with the hot water bottle cooking my bursitis and find much to say about them. A good discovery.
Tonight – rain and frogs. Can’t sleep. Thinking of M. – and the two worlds, that of our love, which is not permitted to exist and yet is such an imperative reality – and the stupid, trite, artificial world of people who have their ways and standards which outlaw this reality. For very practical purposes of course – I know that if we really let go I would be destroyed and so would she. And yet – would it not be worth it after all? I know she thinks so – tonight I wonder about it again. But I know I have something else to do. The rain and the frogs are saying it clearly enough. As for the “people” – they are none of my business except that I have to keep out of their blundering way if I can!
July 31, 1966
Killed a copperhead on the path yesterday about fifty yards from the hermitage. I was on my way down to have a curious talk with Fr. Eudes. He has apparently been very much in on all my problems. Without my knowing – got a letter from Fr. Salman, and has heard the scandalized reactions of some of the young monks. This is good to know about, though none of it is very clear, nor is what Fr. E. says very clear to me either. Suddenly I find myself looking from the outside into a world of religious correctness which has to some extent become alien. And that is the whole trouble. It is also the source of confusion. “You are no longer correct, as you used to be.” For twenty five years I have been an edification but now … Yet strangely now I feel real, though wrong. The correctness leaves me terribly uneasy! I will not say anything about that, I don’t know what to say. I may be wildly deceived. It is perhaps true that I am doing, as E. said, everything possible to ruin my life. (I can think of plenty of other efficacious possibilities I have neglected!) Yet I feel rather that what I have been through was absolutely necessary. Well, not the Linda Parsons bit. But my love for M. – which I don’t regard as ended and will never so regard. This had to be known and experienced, and I am grateful for it. All their interpretations are partial and biased by fright. I know I have been naive and imprudent. So what. It certainly has done something to get me to decide clearly for solitude, and that is the important thing.
I am really relieved at not having to continue that complex double game of letters, phone calls etc. (No trouble admitting this was all wrong. Not just a matter of external correctness but of inner unity and consistency.)
[T. S.] Eliot’s Sacred Wood remains a book of singular value, one of those books in which every sentence stops you. This for instance on M. Arnold
The temptation, to any man who is interested in ideas and primarily in literature, to put literature into the corner until he cleaned up this whole country first, is almost irresistible.
Small wonder that I have in these weeks walked in the world of folk-song and passion – the only one adequate for my perplexities (well, Gregorian is too, thank God). I realize, reading Muir’s lecture on “The Natural Estate” of poetry [in The Estate of Poetry, 1962], what the real hermit temptation is: it is to go off with the elves. To take the “Road to Fair Elfland” with the Queen of the Elves – which is neither the narrow thorny path of righteousness nor the broad path of wickedness. That has been my persuasion – that there was another purely free and neutral road, love for M. in our own kind of woods and Cherokee Park (note “Clerk Saunders and May Margaret”!!). It is True Thoreau the layman who goes to Elfland for seven years and then returns!
July 31
jhs20
Dear Fr. Eudes:
Our talk yesterday has been fruitful in this: it has suggested some helpful perspectives anyway. We appeared to be arguing about a lot of points that were really beside the point, but this does not matter. The one essential thing to my mind that calls for argument is one on which argument will be entirely futile. I will therefore just state my own idea and pass on. It is the error that you and Rev. Father both share that before I was in some measure whole and consistent and now I am not, and the thing for me to do is to recover my previous wholeness. Anyone that thinks that I was whole and consistent before simply does not know me. My fall into inconsistency was nothing but the revelation of what I am. The fact that in community this could comfortably be hidden is to me the most valid argument why I should never under any circumstances get myself back into the comfort of pseudo-wholeness. I am now in several disedifying pieces. That and not loneliness is the trouble. I am divided by having seen the despairing hope of wholeness with a partner of the other sex – which is of course totally out of the question – and a wholeness alone which I do not have. Now it is entirely possible that as a result of projecting my self-hate on to the community I am refusing the humble and realistic possibilities that could come from taking some active part in the life of the community. I will think about this and give it time, but at present I am so totally loused up on the question that any decision to participate would be phoney. Meanwhile, up here I can live well enough with loneliness and division, and I will do my best not to let my inconsistencies frighten people down there. All I ask is the mercy of God and of the Order, and for my own part I will cultivate the honesty without which this life here would not be bearable at all. And continue to mind my own business. Perhaps it is not necessary for me to act out so visibly and so explicitly my conviction that I am not a monk and that I really never wanted to be one. I mean (don’t be upset) of course that the whole question of “being a monk” is imaginary and irrelevant and to suppose that it requires manifestoes and proofs of some sort is now for me a waste of time. But I will really try to behave in such a way that this pseudo-problem does not disconcert other people. I do honestly and sincerely see that this is something that need no longer bother me at all. I am almost capable of finally becoming a free man.
All the best in Christ,
Fr. E. replied to the above by saying that my general tendency now is to “self-defeating programs as a way of life,” which is a bit sweeping (whereas before apparently I was living fruitfully – not now).
However, there is no harm in taking seriously his advice to be more self-critical and self-disciplined and to “take into account your need to create and exploit the relationship with the young lady and the readiness with which you let it over-ride other needs you have.” In other words why did I fall so hard for M.? He now admits it was not entirely because I was a hermit and lonely. Or does he? It doesn’t matter. I’ll accept the fact it is perhaps a much bigger problem than I realized. And try to work it out.
I like Edwin Muir’s Norton lectures on poetry – very good one on Yeats, and a lot of sense in his lecture on literary critics. Against the professional critic who considers himself a kind of orchid which the tree of poetry exists to sustain. (Northrop Frye has a whole doctrine of the critic as the man who is needed to perfect the poetic experience – he is essential to poetry!) E. Muir – the traditional public is essential. The critics = the critic is essential. Critic is now the poet’s public. Poetry tends to sterility and irrelevance in proportion as the poet addresses himself to the critic rather than to the public.
August 4, 1966
Yesterday a heart-rendingly brilliant and lovely day: all such days are for me now heart-rending because of M. and the days we spent together last May. Such days speak of my love for her and her love for me and of our “vision” of each other – and my intuition of her as a kind of expression of the sweetness of all creation (extraordinary). Awful feeling of loss and deception. Have I really been a complete fool in letting her go? And so on. Almost despair, and blind clinging to God in hope. And at the back of my mind that hot-wind of the radical theologians saying that God is what we don’t need!!
I thought much of her own suffering. It seems to me that a very real and very strange awareness of the quality of her loneliness and anguish is somehow conveyed to me. In our solitude we some
how remain in deep communication. No way of proving it – perhaps only an illusion. But it is terribly real and was most real yesterday afternoon when I was trying to read Muir for my review etc.21
Are people like Camus and Muir the true monks of our day? Is monasticism to be really found in an external commitment to certain formal sacrifice and an institutional and ritual life or in the kind of solitude, integrity, commitment that Camus had – or the fidelity to vision that was Muir’s?
August 5, 1966. Our Lady of the Snows
Yesterday morning after walking out to the Derby Day place again (meditated a bit on P. Erwin’s book and on Edwin Muir) came back and recited the long office of the degraded feast (this morning’s vigils). Yesterday a beautiful rough day. Another session with the Abbot. He lectured me again – not unkindly, but of course with the great moral superiority he now enjoys. And he had engineered various small and humiliating “solutions” to practical problems of monastic importance – too intricate to describe. I am mad at myself for being affected by all of it! For instance the politics about the shortwave radio in the gatehouse. The misunderstandings, the evasions. It is supposed to be for me to use in an emergency. They never answer it. They have now an excuse why they don’t. I am “asking for messages from my friends.” (Once failed to contact gatehouse at all and wrote a note asking if the Hammers called.) I have no confidence in this thing working in a real emergency. Might as well forget about it and trust solely in God.
Then the Abbot started laughing at me. He said “I am thinking of writing a book on how to get hermits into heaven!” And laughed heartily. He enjoys the whole thing very much. And I burned interiorly. And was mad at myself for feeling it! The man has to gloat. I have offended and disturbed him many times and now I should have the decency to let him enjoy his innocent satisfaction. However, on leaving I said: “When the baby is born you can be its godfather!” A slight shadow crossed his face and he laughed with less enthusiasm. Was I really kidding? We are a pair of damned cats.
Reading. Certainly I am in trouble and I know part of the problem comes from not reading enough “holy” material. For a long time – in the thick of the affair – read no Scripture at all and spent time writing long diary entries (the typed Midsummer Diary etc.) or letters to M. Now I am meditating on St. Mark and Ecclesiasticus – and saying the Psalter regularly. But I am withheld from reading the Fathers by a sort of guilt and confusion. Are they really relevant to me now? Is this purely an escape into a beautiful lost world of extinct Christian culture? Will it simply reinforce the deceptions and delusions of my “monastic life”? I don’t say these are answers – but they are real questions.
Always thinking of M. – things deepen, grow on me, possess me more entirely. The image of her the last few times I saw her – the waif-like, questioning, looking, expecting solitude, watching me coming toward her or going away. Sadness, pain, love, and a kind of helplessness which I can do nothing to help because I too am helpless. Except in prayer. M. as a living and suffering question mark. The thought of her turns everything slowly over inside me and I choke with bitter tears.
And her face turned up to me to be kissed, with total surrender after we had put down the picnic things in Cherokee Park. I hear nothing from her – nothing can get through, even conscience letters. Awful loneliness, getting deeper and more inarticulate all the time. (At this time she had written two letters that did not get through – one a note from the Merton room at Bellarmine, where she had gone in desperation.)22
This morning I have finally really begun to dig the God is dead set. Wm. Hamilton’s essay “Thursday’s Child” [in Radical Theology and the Death of God, ed. Thomas J. J. Altizer and William Hamilton, 1966] is so correct, so honest a statement of the complete futility of all our gestures and charades! I know exactly what he means and at this point I find myself with him – though I reserve the right to my own empty and disconcerting experience of faith. But as to the complete alienation and disedifying scandalousness of it, I am with him. This is the real “place” – I mean it is the ark in the present deluge. I cannot be “in the world” (just as well) but I have a new sense of the meaning of my solitude. This is fraught with consequences and I see they must sink in.
The first of these is peace. I have got to stop being troubled by my alienation. God will take care of it. (I can say this shamelessly, thus separating myself also from Hamilton and co.)
The above – a surprising context for the meditation topic suggested by Dom James “What does it mean to be a Hermit?” Yes indeed! What does it mean!!
Innocent joy of having a shortwave radio set which I shall never even bother to turn on for any reason. Only in a Trappist monastery would I achieve the inexorably consistent absurdity towards which I now willingly drift and in which I really foresee a kind of happiness for a few years before they plant me.
August 6, 1966. Transfiguration
Last night I dreamt I called M. and was going to meet her – indeed I was seeing her again often. Going to meet her! I awake when I was having trouble finding the way. Perhaps my next date with her is in heaven. I wake thinking of this possibility. I have often wished I would die in these last days – I constantly pray for us to be together finally in God. And am impatient for the time when we will be!
How beautiful were the few times we had together. I do not regret at all my love for her and am convinced it was a true gift from God and has been an inestimable help to me. I know it was getting to a point where it could have gone very wrong and become destructive. But it did not, and I know it remains in both our lives as something healthy and beautiful, a real grace, that will hold us together forever. I am so thankful for this!
Meanwhile, I have to accept the punishment the Abbot is giving me. Nothing great in itself, really, only his scorn and his narrow-mindedness bearing down more directly, cutting off liberties and what were really privileges – so I cannot truly complain. I must see Dan Walsh less frequently (soon not at all). I must stop seeing Wygal at least in Louisville – in all this I know he is fearing plots and smuggled letters etc. Well, he has the right and I must accept – without resentment. What I resent is the suspected personal animosity but Dom J., though I know he doesn’t like me really and is jealous of me, does keep his animosity somewhat controlled and is not as unfair as he could be if he wanted. That he is certainly arbitrary and demanding in many tiresome frustrating little ways – (refusal to let me go to St. Joe’s again – I may need a bursitis operation – will have to change doctors and start over again in Lexington where we don’t pay the hospital etc. Then in Lexington I must not go to the Hammers’ house but can eat with them in a restaurant etc. All silly but not totally negative).
I think what really irritates me is the central ambiguity in all Dom J. does especially in my regard. His real motive in letting me be a hermit is to have more complete control of my relations with the outside, to cut contacts and correspondence etc.; when he says I am not living as a hermit he means I am frustrating this aspect of his plan.
One of the things that most angered him was my going to Loretto on the 13th and “giving conferences.” This is what he hates – my communicating with other people successfully and receiving their gratitude and appreciation. He sincerely thinks his reason for hating it is that it is against the hermit ideal. “If you were in community it would be different.” It would not!! He felt the same way when I was in community.
August 7, 1966. “Day of Rec[ollection]”
One thing I realized this morning and I have realized it before: the real difficulty with Dom James is his mentality, his character, his prejudices, his background. He is the very incarnation of New England middle-class, efficiency-loving, thrifty, crafty, operating, sanctimonious religiosity. He is at once calculating and sentimental, comfort loving and disciplined, a mystically inclined businessman, secretive, suspicious, solitary, yet in many ways self-sacrificing and dedicated to making his institution run in an orderly manner. And he is good at this. He has put ever
ything he has into it.
But he finds me irritating and embarrassing because I will never play any of his little games, and am anti-institutional from the start, and I do not like being used for his ends (he discovered that long ago and on the whole he has not tried to exploit me much). (He has in fact often left me a great deal of leeway and I should have paid him off with greater consideration. The trouble is I am not profitable – except in royalties – he gets no payoff from me either as hermit or as a cenobite and he is fed up. Have been too conscientious about it, not from perfect motives but just to assert my independence.)
The independence of the Steppenwolf says H[ermann] Hesse, is really only a pseudo-independence. The autonomy of the intellectual who repudiates bourgeois comforts without entirely giving them up himself – and Hesse in the end justifies the bourgeoisie. That is about what I am doing in the monastery. Is it worth all the trouble I put into it?
Yet at the same time here, with Dom J. – the failure of communication and total lack of real contact is getting more and more embarrassing – now I really feel like a Negro in the presence of a Southern white man. The desperation of knowing that you are talking to a wall of blank refusal to see you in any other than his own purely arbitrary terms. I have felt this before but never as strongly. The temptation is to take up an attitude of insolent and uncomprehending servility. And I suppose that is the worst thing possible in the circumstances.
Learning To Love Page 15
