| Date | Author | Title | Source | Quotation by Merton |
| 1960/05/18 | Robert Penn Warren | Segregation: the Inner Conflict in the South |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 391
| What had most impressed me was the little book-a pamphlet really-of Robert Penn Warren on Segregation. Powerful and objective, gives a good idea of the problems in its human aspect. A typical American approach, just describing how all these individuals say they feel about the thing. But it adds up to something decent and is not one of these stupid public opinion polls. It is done well and with concern for reality. The reality of the south to which I belong - without ever thinking of it. You can be in a Trappist monastery and never become a Southerner. But I am becoming a Kentuckian and a conscious one. There is no point in trying to evade it. It means of course talking to people and I do that, in Louisville, and Lexington. And I liked the Lexington Presbyterians who came over the other Sunday. |
| 1962/03/24 | John Howard Griffin | Black Like Me |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 213
| Yesterday finished the [John Howard] Griffin book Black Like Me, moved and disturbed. As someone said-what there is in the South is not a Negro problem but a white problem. The trouble is pathological. |
| 1962/03/28 | John Howard Griffin | Black Like Me |
Ltrs: WtoF p. 47-48
| Thanks above all for the [John Howard] Griffin book [Black Like Me]. I found it moving and important, and of course read it right through with unflagging interest. As someone has aptly said: what we have in the southern United States is not so much a Negro problem as a White problem. There is no question that there the real problem lies, and it is more than the race question. The problem of peace is involved too in the belligerency and obtuseness of the same types "¦ |
| 1963/02/19 | James Baldwin | Fire Next Time |
Ltrs: RtoJ p. 244
| One of the things I did read was a manifesto by the Negro writer James Baldwin on the race situation. It is powerful and great. I even gave the publisher a blurb for it, which may get me hanged some day. But it is a tremendous and stirring document. Called The Fire Next Time. |
| 1963/02/23 | James Baldwin | Fire Next Time |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 297
| Have read James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time and now Nobody Knows My Name. He seems to know exactly what he is talking about, and his statements are terribly urgent. One of the things that makes most sense-an application of the ideas behind non-violence, but I think it is absolutely true: that the sit-in movement is not just to get the negroes a few hamburgers, it is for the sake of the white people, and for the country. He is one of the few genuinely concerned Americans, one whose concern I can really believe. The liberation of the Negroes is necessary for the liberation of the whites and for their recovery of a minimum of self-respect, and reality. |
| 1963/02/23 | James Baldwin | Nobody knows my name |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 297
| Have read James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time and now Nobody Knows My Name. He seems to know exactly what he is talking about, and his statements are terribly urgent. One of the things that makes most sense-an application of the ideas behind non-violence, but I think it is absolutely true: that the sit-in movement is not just to get the negroes a few hamburgers, it is for the sake of the white people, and for the country. He is one of the few genuinely concerned Americans, one whose concern I can really believe. The liberation of the Negroes is necessary for the liberation of the whites and for their recovery of a minimum of self-respect, and reality. |
| 1963/04/02 | Hannah Arendt | Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 310
| Adolf Eichmann, in his last words at the foot of the gallows- Declared himself a Gottes[un]gläubiger-(one who did not believe in a personal god). And then addressed those present "After a short while, gentleman, we shall all meet again." "Such is the fate of all men. Long live Germany, long live Argentina, long live Austria; I shall not forget them." H. Arendt comments. "In the face of death he had found the cliche used in funeral oratory, but his memory had played him one last trick, he had forgotten that he was no Christian and that it was his own funeral. It was as though in his last minutes he was summing up the lesson that his long course in human wickedness had taught him-the lesson of the fearsome, word-and thought-defying banality of evil." |
| 1963/05/01 | John Howard Griffin | Black Like Me |
Ltrs: RtoJ p. 244
| Have you read John Howard Griffin's books? You ought to get hold of Black Like Me. It will floor you. He is a fine writer, I haven't read his novels. There was an interesting bit of an autobiography of his in Ramparts a while ago. |
| 1963/06/24 | P.D. East | Magnolia Jungle; The Life, Times and Education of a Southern Editor |
Ltrs: HGL p. 275
| Thanks for the last two letters and enclosures. About the business in Miss., the murder of Evers and the rest. I have a friend or acquaintance if you prefer down there, a crusading small-town editor P. D. East who wrote a book called The Magnolia Jungle. He has fought the racists all by himself for years, and now finally it looks as though they might have started to get tired of having him around. I don't think his life is absolutely safe down there. He is a good writer and could do a lot of good stuff for Liberation, I believe, though he is more an editorialist and satirist than a newsman or anything like that "¦ Be careful, they are probably working over his mail. The Land of the Free, hah? |
| 1963/07/19 | James Baldwin | Fire Next Time |
Ltrs: WtoF p. 166
| The following are the questions, with Merton's answers: 1. Name the last three books you have read. The Platform Scripture of Hui Neng, translated by Wing Tsit Chen The Proslogion by St. Anselm of Canterbury A Different Drummer by William Melvin Kelley 2. Name the books you are reading now. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture by John Huizinga Ratio Verae Theologiae (The Real Meaning of Theology) by Erasmus The Historian and Character by David Knowles 4. Books that have influenced you. Poetic Works of William Blake Plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas Sermons of Meister Eckhart De Doctrina Christiana, Confessions, and Sermons on Psalms of St. Augustine Rule of St. Benedict The Bhagavad-Gita The Imitation of Christ, etc. 5. Why have these books been an influence on you? These books and others like them have helped me to discover the real meaning of my life, and have made it possible for me to get out of the confusion and meaninglessness of an existence completely immersed in the needs and passivities fostered by a culture in which sales are everything. 6. Name a book everyone should read. Besides the Bible (taken for granted and not included above) and such classics as The Imitation of Christ, I would select a contemporary book which I consider to be of vital importance and which I think everyone should read at this time: The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin. 7. Why this book? This is the most forceful statement about a crisis that is of immediate importance to every American, and indirectly affects the whole world today. It is something that people have to know about. The Negro has been trying to make himself heard: in this book he succeeds. |
| 1963/08/28 | Edmund Wilson | Apologies to the Iroquois with a Study of the Mohawks in High Steel |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 14
| Edmund Wilson's book Apology to the Iroquois is the kind of thing that moves me very deeply, more deeply than anything perhaps except the Old Testament Prophets. And in the same kind of way: sense of an inscrutable and very important mystery, the judgment of the white race and of "Christendom" by its acts and insensitivities. The centuries of blind willful cruelty and greed. The Iroquois have despaired of the whites almost as the Black Muslims have!! |
| 1963/09/05 | James Baldwin | Go Tell It on the Mountain |
Ltrs: HGL p. 147
| You know by now how much I enjoyed your book [Loaves and Fishes]. Am reading James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain which I find very moving. |
| 1963/11/26 | Jean Paul Sartre | Respectful Prostitute |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 39
| Read Sartre's Respectful Prostitute. All I had ever heard about it ran it down, but it is a smasher! Best thing of his I have read, and one of the best on the race question. Certainly it is farcical, arbitrary, in a way "propaganda." And yet it is true. Simple: it has to be simple. And no Southerner has ever stated the Southern case as simply and blandly as his characters, the Senator and Fred. Maybe it is little more than a vaudeville act, but a very good one. The main thing wrong with it is that no signature would have been necessary to save the white man who shot the Negro. |
| 1964/08/02 | William Stringfellow | My People Is the Enemy: An Autobiographical Polemic |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 132
| I finished [William] Stringfellow's book on Harlem [My People Is the Enemy: An Autobiographical Polemic, 1964] and will write to Joe Cunneen about it. It is first rate-full especially of important information. How the rent system works, etc. It becomes clearer and clearer that this is an utterly sick system, but anonymous. If there were one sick King he would be deposed and replaced. Here "they" operate and get rich and it is not always clear who "they" are or how they get rich. |
| 1966/12/04 | Elizabeth Sutherland Martinez (ed.) | Letters from Mississippi |
Ltrs: RtoJ p. 344
| The book Letters from Mississippi [edited by Elizabeth Sutherland Martinez] has reached me and I am reading it. Needless to give expression to the deep feelings which it inspires. It is a most important book, and bears witness to a work of courage far greater than can be measured simply by material results. The historic summer project of 1964 will remain an eternal credit to SNCC and to all those who participated in it. Especially those who gave their lives in it. I think it is a very good thing to get this book circulating these days to remind white people that they haven't been polarized out of the freedom movement, since it is a movement for their freedom too. That point, I think, should not get buried. |
| 1966/12/30 | Elizabeth Sutherland Martinez (ed.) | Letters from Mississippi |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 175
| Reading Letters from Mississippi - the SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] book [edited by Elizabeth Sutherland Martinez, 1965] about the 1964 Freedom project. Very good, very moving, it leaves you a little hopeless - sense of a transitional style in the Civil Rights movement - realization that it ccomplished so little - yet was a great thing, especially for the white students and intellectuals who were in it. They profited most (and three were killed, of course). |
| 1967/01/01 | Elizabeth Sutherland Martinez (ed.) | Letters from Mississippi |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 181
| While I was eating breakfast, read in Letters from Mississippi how the SNCC volunteers and the Negroes watched on TV the signing of the Civil Rights bill (July 2, 1964), knowing that as far as the South went it meant nothing. A Negro woman declared she was going to the local pool for a swim. Had to be dissuaded - she might have got herself killed. How hard it is fully to realize the utter enormity of the situation. All these people systematically and totally denied the simple needs and desires of the human heart! No question that this country is under judgment, and the moral blindness of the majority - of those in power - the total moral impotence of the system - are sufficient indications. It gets worse all the time and everyone is helpless. The gestures of a few are perhaps consoling, but achieve nothing important. Perhaps a little here and there. |
| 1967/04/28 | Alex Haley | Autobiography of Malcolm X |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 226
| I am reading the Autobiography of Malcolm X, which is an impressive book. Took it out into the sun in the wood's edge this afternoon after writing one or two necessary letters. |
| 1967/05/03 | Eldridge Cleaver | Soul on Ice |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 226
| Reading [Frantz] Fanon (The Wretched of the Earth [New York, 1963]), Malcolm X and beginning Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver (New York, 1967)], all in view of an essay on war for a symposium edited by someone at Drexel. |
| 1967/08/12 | John Howard Griffin | Black Like Me |
Ltrs: CforT p. 206
| I am looking for a photograph, taken by John Howard Griffin, the one who chemically changed the color of his skin so as to live among black people, and wrote a tremendous book [Black Like Me] about this experience. |
| 1967/08/14 | Laurens Post, van der | Dark Eye in Africa: Politics, Psychology |
Ltrs: RtoJ p. 82
| I read Laurens Van Der Post's book The Dark Eye in A. some years ago and was very impressed by it. He has many other good ones too, some you would like even better as they are less abstract. I have had some correspondence with him in the past "¦ Some time ago I saw he had a book out about Russia. The ones on Africa are the best. By the way I am working along those lines a little myself: interested mostly in the religious-political messianic movements, native Churches and whatnot. Especially in Melanesia though. The Cargo cults etc. If you see anything on that, or especially anything good on the Maori, I hope you will let me know about it. I hope your health is all right now. Take care of yourself. Your spring will be coming soon, with our autumn. I think of you often and Aunt Ka too: my best love to all of you out there. |
| 1968/01/05 | William Clark Styron | Confessions of Nat Turner |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 34
| Nat Turner is nothing but Styron's own complex loneliness as a Southern writer. A well-fashioned book, but little or nothing to do with the real Turner"”I have no sense that this fastidious and analytical mind is that of a prophet. |
| 1968/01/08 | William Clark Styron | Confessions of Nat Turner |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 35
| I finished (Saturday and with additions yesterday) the short piece on Pasternak's Georgian Letters which Helen Wolff asked me to write. Am sending off today final tape of Vow of Conversation for typing. Working on Nat Turner. An ambiguous book, brilliant in parts, uncertain and tedious in others. |
| 1968/01/10 | Dietrich Bonhoeffer | Letters and Papers from Prison |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 37
| Bonhoeffer says, "It is only when one sees the anger and wrath of God hanging like grim realities over the heads of one's enemies that one can know something of what it means to love and forgive them." This is the key to the dishonesty of Styron's treatment of Nat Turner. Styron "enjoys" wrath as an indulgence which is not seen as having anything serious to do with religion whatever. Religion suddenly appears on the last page as a suggested preposterous reconciliation (in purely sentimental terms). To treat a prophet of wrath while having no idea of the meaning of wrath, and reduce that wrath to the same level as masturbation fantasies! The whole thing is an affront to the Negro"”though it is well-meant, even "sympathetic." It reduced me finally to desperation! How can white people do anything but cheat and delude the Negro, when that is only part of their own crass self-delusion and bad faith! |
| 1968/01/10 | William Clark Styron | Confessions of Nat Turner |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 37
| Yesterday I would have gone to town but it snowed, the roads were bad. I came back up and finished Nat Turner and wrote my articl"”after lunch with Fr. Charles, ill and alone (the two abbots out to the Little Sisters of the Poor and to a hospital where two of our professed ar"”to get them to renounce their votes). |
| 1968/01/10 | William Clark Styron | Confessions of Nat Turner |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 37
| Bonhoeffer says, "It is only when one sees the anger and wrath of God hanging like grim realities over the heads of one's enemies that one can know something of what it means to love and forgive them." This is the key to the dishonesty of Styron's treatment of Nat Turner. Styron "enjoys" wrath as an indulgence which is not seen as having anything serious to do with religion whatever. Religion suddenly appears on the last page as a suggested preposterous reconciliation (in purely sentimental terms). To treat a prophet of wrath while having no idea of the meaning of wrath, and reduce that wrath to the same level as masturbation fantasies! The whole thing is an affront to the Negro"”though it is well-meant, even "sympathetic." It reduced me finally to desperation! How can white people do anything but cheat and delude the Negro, when that is only part of their own crass self-delusion and bad faith! |
| 1968/01/16 | William Clark Styron | Confessions of Nat Turner |
Ltrs: WtoF p. 242
| Also one thing I have done in the meantime is a review of Styron's Nat Turner, which strikes me as an affront. The review says why: I don't have a copy to spare at the moment but it is supposed to come in Katalagete, so you will see it. Anyway, that's in line with your fine piece on the Afro-American past. Of course I agree with you entirely about that and about the Indians. More and more my work seems to be tending in that same sort of direction, though the new Abbot wants me to concentrate on mystical theology, etc. (He isn't at all aware of what these things mean.) I'll dig around and see if I have some of the other Indian pieces. Eventually they should add up to a book. And also I am very involved in the Cargo Cults and their apocalyptic meaning. It certainly seems to me that white America is right up a blind alley, and under judgment. It is not a situation in which I for one can be comfortable. I don't take happily to wrath. |
| 1968/02/12 | Ronald Segal | Race War |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 55
| I finished [Ronald] Segal's badly written but perceptive survey The Race War [New York: Viking, 1967]. It really clarifies the situation"”shows how serious and how irrational it is. These are elementary truths"”and people like Johnson evidently can't see them. To think that a society as complex and sophisticated as the U.S. seems to be, should bog down, finally, is something as trivial, as stupid, and as self-defeating. One conclusion: the real importance of resistance within the U.S. Not only for ourselves but for everyone els"”for the human race. Yet the hangups are now so inexorabl"¦ |
| 1968/06/29 | Frantz Fanon | Black skin, white masks / Frantz Fanon ; transl. by Charles Lam Markmann |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 134
| I am reading [Frantz] Fanon's Black Skins, White Masks"”a really extraordinary book. From every point of view"”as a piece of existentialist philosophizing, an analysis of the race question, as a work of literature (got it from Jim Lowell at the Asphodel Bookshop in exchange for Monks Ponds). |
| 1968/07/03 | Frantz Fanon | Black skin, white masks / Frantz Fanon ; transl. by Charles Lam Markmann |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 136
| Yesterday I finished Fanon's intelligent, well-written, eminently true book Black Skins, White Masks. Written earlier than the Wretched, it is more incisive, dispassionate, less angry. He still thought he could communicate with white men. |