| Date | Author | Title | Source | Quotation by Merton |
| 1938/08/11 | James Joyce | Ulysses |
Ltrs: RtoJ p. 144
| I have read Portrait of the Artist which is certainly a remarkable fine book, and the best thing I have read in a long time, only not so fine as Ulysses of course, but that is all written in words of fire. |
| 1939/05/11 | James Joyce | Finnigans Wake |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 4
| I suppose I am not reading Croce on Vico very carefully [Note 4: Vico's La Scienza Nuovo (1725) is a philosophy of history on which James Joyce based his Finnigans Wake (along with Giordano Buno of Nola and Nichlas of Cusa... Merton was reading Croce's La Filosofia di G.B. Vico at this time, also]. I am not getting the steps in the law of the reflux so well down. Yet as to Finnigan's Work [Note 5: A wordplay on Joyce's Finnigans Wake (Merton refers to it in one place as Finnigan's Work and another place as Vinnigan's Walk]: The very first sentence says it's Vico. So Finnigan is the history of the world, seen Vician |
| 1939/08/21 | Valery Larbaud | Amants Heureux Amants |
Ltrs: RtoJ p. 147
| I found this French guy Valery Larbaud to be some good guy too. I just got his novel, Amants Heureux Amants, it's swell. This very excellent guy got a splendid eye for jailbaits I must say, too, in his novel Amants Heureux Amants which I would laughingly translate jailbaits happy jailbaits only I haven't read the part of it that's really called that yet and it is probably about something else. Last night I got some mild amusement from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, that's good. Oh and yesterday I seen again the [avant-garde film] Crazy Ray up at the Museum, and it was better, I thought. |
| 1939/08/24 | Ezra Pound | Culture |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 15
| Ezra Pound's new book Culture is perfectly lousy, his writing disgusting, his opoinions stink, his conceit is unbearable, his pettiness is an affront, his middle class vanity is only equalled by his lack of perceptionsand he parades the acquisitions he has found in museums and libraries with all the cheap pride of a Cincinnaty grocer back from Paris with a lead paperweight representing the Trocadero. |
| 1939/10/31 | Aldous Huxley | Those barren leaves |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 80
| 39. "Siena mi fe, disfecemi Maremma." ["Siena gave me life, Maremma took it away."24 ] Dante. Remember it because Huxley plays on it in Those Barren Leaves. Read that. 1937. |
| 1939/11/08 | T.S. Eliot | Waste Land |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 86
| Reading my diary for 1931, which I ought to destroy, I am surprised at my childish paganism. Announcing what I wanted: to be drunk. To the end of useful notes for novel: in my 16 year old unquietness, what things stirred me, and seemed to be connected with desires. "Autumn Crocus." Omelet and rhine wine at the Trocadero. Edna Best, Madeleine Carroll, etc. Picture of Clara Bow on a beach in Sporting and Dramatic. Cocktail Bar at the Mayfair. Side cars. Grogs in Strasbourg. Maison Olivier, Strasbourg. Anita Page in War Nurse. "Echoes of the Jungle," by Duke Ellington. "Georgia on my Mind," by McKinney's Cotton Pickers. T. S. Eliot's "Waste Land." Oxford. Cambridge. Ezra Pound's "Lustra." |
| 1939/11/19 | James Joyce | Finnigans Wake |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 88-89
| Now look you: there have been three important things that have happened this year 1. The publication of Finnegans Wake. 2. The War in Europe and the Russian German pact. 3. The Picasso exhibition. Compared with these three things everything else has been trivial... [p.89] In the same way Finnegans Wake proves Joyce is the greatest writer of our time, and that the writing of our time is not poor, but very good and rich and exciting and fine. |
| 1939/12/18 | Aldous Huxley | Those barren leaves |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 112
| I have always had a prejudice against buying a book of short stories. I steered clear of Huxley's Those Barren Leaves for years because I thought it was a book of short stories. On the other hand I find peoples' notebooks and diaries intensely interesting, and I am perfectly happy writing in a notebook of my own. And I like reading novels and I was perfectly happy writing one this summer and this fall. |
| 1940/02/13 | Aldous Huxley | After Many a Summer dies the Swan |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 149
| Reading Huxley's new book-After Many a Summer and being very uncomfortable about it-it is so bad. |
| 1940/02/18 | Katherine Anne Porter | Pale Horse, Pale Rider |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 153
| I just picked up Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Ann Porter, and read the first story, while the afternoon sun, spring sun, came through the bare branches and the window into the warm room.... The fact is, K. A. Porter writes well. |
| 1940/04/00 | Aldous Huxley | After Many a Summer dies the Swan |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 165
| All that stuff, since Huxley made such a fool of himself in After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, seems to be so superficial. I don't know why, but there seems to me to be something else you are obliged to do about an ugly hotdog stand besides making obvious remarks about it in a high state of moral indignation. If you don't like it, kick it down |
| 1940/04/00 | D.H. Lawrence | Saint Mawr |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 166
| Another thing about this room [in Miami]: it smells like some place where I have read a lot before, some place where I have had books. At the Savoy Hotel in Bournemouth I read Saint Mawr, by D. H. Lawrence, and got bored to death by Jude the Obscure. It may well be that the place merely reminds me of one of the front rooms in Douglaston, shaded and cool, where I have read God knows what. |
| 1940/04/00 | Thomas Hardy | Jude the Obscure |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 166
| Another thing about this room [in Miami]: it smells like some place where I have read a lot before, some place where I have had books. At the Savoy Hotel in Bournemouth I read Saint Mawr, by D. H. Lawrence, and got bored to death by Jude the Obscure. It may well be that the place merely reminds me of one of the front rooms in Douglaston, shaded and cool, where I have read God knows what. |
| 1940/05/28 | Thomas Mann | The Magic Mountain / translation from German Der Zauberberg |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 224
| I am in no mood to read [Thomas Mann's] The Magic Mountain, which is the kind of book I find tedious anyway. I am only willing to be excited by its metaphysical symbolism and analogies if the elementary level of the book, the surface of meaning, is also interesting. But when the surface is as tedious as this, I don't feel much like going below it. |
| 1941/01/18 | Leon Bloy | Woman Who Was Poor |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 296
| I will go back to reading the The Woman Who Was Poor. And the Woman Who Was Poor is some novel! The second part is a better love story than Anthony and Cleopatra-the second part is magnificent, and ends with some mystical vision! All through the second part, or the last of the second part, there is a series of scenes as simple and clean as pictures by Blake. |
| 1941/02/11 | Richard Hughes | In Hazard |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 308
| That spring in that front room on Perry Street I read some good books. Hopkins' letters; Bridges' Milton's Prosody; R. Hughes' In Hazard, E. M. Forster's Passage to India; Herodotus; Thucydides; Curzon's Monasteries of the Levant; Saint John of the Cross; maybe some Leon Bloy, I forget. Then the big thing that happened that spring was Finnegans Wake came out, and I remember the fine day it was when that happened. |
| 1941/03/04 | Daniel Defoe | Robinson Crusoe |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 317
| Then tonight I read Robinson Crusoe and when he comes on the island I was knocked flat at the wonder of what a marvelous book this is, maybe one of the best books ever written, and not a freak at all. No wonder kids like it! Like religion, it is perfect play. |
| 1941/06/26 | Graham Greene | Brighton Rock |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 378
| Right this minute I am inclined to think G. Greene's book about Mexico is better than Brighton Rock, and also to agree with Gibney that Confidential Agent is (better than Brighton Rock). I was surprised to find out Greene is 11 years older than I am-37, now. I thought he was the same age, or 2 or 3 years older. I hope Auden is at least 11 years older than I am. |
| 1941/07/06 | Jean Cocteau | Grand Ecart |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 378
| Today I reread the scene where Jacques and Germaine quarrel over the stupid lines from Victor Hugo, "Gall, amant de la reine, etc." in Cocteau's Grand Ecart. [Note 10: Le Grand Ecart was the title of a short novel published by Jean Cocteau in 1922. In French, the expression grand Ecart refers to a dance step, that is, "the split." Yet the original meaning of ecart is that of separation or distance between. In this novel of his adolescence, Cocteau has in mind the gap between a woman of the world (with whom he was in love) and an inexperienced young man.] It is one of the funniest scenes I have ever read anywhere. So is the character Stopwell funny-but especially this scene, with Germaine and her mother. |
| 1941/10/03 | Aldous Huxley | Gray Eminence |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 421-22
| It would not be true to say I got mad reading the review of Huxley's new book Gray Eminence in Time... I don't know what to do except pray for Huxley and for the stupid, sly, crafty, pedantic little life-smurching mental dwarf that wrote this review for Time. I am not mad at him, but still can't see straight when I think of the vices of his beastly, smug little review... What about Gray Eminence? The book is probably smarter than the Time review made it seem. |
| 1941/11/01 | Aldous Huxley | Gray Eminence |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 448
| I have got Gray Eminence-which seems good so far. There, the big problem is that a man who convinced himself that his own natural will was God's will. This is always the great danger, but a danger that absolutely has to be faced. |
| 1941/11/27 | James Joyce | Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 455
| I spent maybe the whole afternoon writing a letter to Aldous Huxley and when I was finished I thought "who am I to be telling this guy about mysticism" and now I remember that until I read his Ends and Means just about four years ago, I hadn't known a thing about mysticism, not even the word. The part he played in my conversion, by that book, was quite great. Just how great a part a book can play in a conversion is questionable: several books figured in mine. Gilson's Spirit of Medieval Philosophy was the first and from it more than any other book I learned a healthy respect for Catholicism. Then Ends and Means from which I learned to respect mysticism. Maritain's Art and Scholasticism was another-and Blake's poems; maybe Evelyn Underhill's Mysticism although I read precious little of it. Joyce's Portrait of the Artist got me fascinated in Catholic sermons (!) What horrified him began to appeal to me! It seemed quite sane. Finally, G. F. Lahey's life of G. M. Hopkins. |
| 1947/12/21 | Leon Bloy | Woman Who Was Poor |
Jnl 2 ('41-'52) p. 148
| The Church at Bricquebec was remodeled by an architect, a converted Communist. And Dom Marie Joseph said he would be ready to found a Cistercian monastery in Soviet Russia at the drop of a hat. Likes Leon Bloy but thinks he was mistaken about Melanie in the La Salette affair. Gave The Woman Who Was Poor to novices to read, ones who had been in the war. Likes Bloy above all because he understands suffering. |
| 1948/08/02 | Evelyn Waugh | Decline and Fall |
Ltrs: CforT p. 5
| I have always considered you to be about the best living writer we've got. You do not need to be told that if you read The Seven Storey Mountain. I think I have read Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies over more than any other book except perhaps Ulysses: I mean before coming here. Needless to say I am very thankful for your notice, which the publisher intends to use on the jacket of the book. |
| 1948/08/02 | Evelyn Waugh | Vile Bodies |
Ltrs: CforT p. 5
| I have always considered you to be about the best living writer we've got. You do not need to be told that if you read The Seven Storey Mountain. I think I have read Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies over more than any other book except perhaps Ulysses: I mean before coming here. Needless to say I am very thankful for your notice, which the publisher intends to use on the jacket of the book. |
| 1948/08/02 | James Joyce | Ulysses |
Ltrs: CforT p. 5
| I have always considered you to be about the best living writer we've got. You do not need to be told that if you read The Seven Storey Mountain. I think I have read Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies over more than any other book except perhaps Ulysses: I mean before coming here. Needless to say I am very thankful for your notice, which the publisher intends to use on the jacket of the book. |
| 1949/07/30 | Evelyn Waugh | Brideshead Revisited |
Ltrs: CforT p. 11
| The Month has been paying me for my effusions by sending me books. One of them was The Loved One. I was having a delightful time with it until the authorities discovered that it was a n-v-1 and swept it away. I still have Brideshead Revisited here even though it is a n-v-1. (hush!) I am allowed it because it is a model for style. That was what I said, and it is absolutely true. It is beautifully done. The writing is so fine that I don't want to go on with the book at all, I just take a paragraph here and there and admire it, so that I haven't read Brideshead yet, either, but have just enjoyed these fragments. I hope you are not offended. |
| 1949/07/30 | Evelyn Waugh | Loved One |
Ltrs: CforT p. 11
| The Month has been paying me for my effusions by sending me books. One of them was The Loved One. I was having a delightful time with it until the authorities discovered that it was a n-v-1 and swept it away. I still have Brideshead Revisited here even though it is a n-v-1. (hush!) I am allowed it because it is a model for style. That was what I said, and it is absolutely true. It is beautifully done. The writing is so fine that I don't want to go on with the book at all, I just take a paragraph here and there and admire it, so that I haven't read Brideshead yet, either, but have just enjoyed these fragments. I hope you are not offended. |
| 1949/12/30 | Brice Parain | Mort de Jean Madec |
Jnl 2 ('41-'52) p. 390
| I like the Augustinian themes in [Brice] Parain's Mort de Jean Madec [Paris, 1945] yet I would not know whether it was a good novel. To me it is a good novel. The only other novel I have read in the eight years I have been here is [Graham] Greene's Heart of the Matter and I read only half of that. Then I read bits of The Loved One and a few pages of Brideshead Revisited. Oh, and then Les Illumines about Dom Alexis [Presse] and his secession from the Order's monastery at Boquen. Only read a few pages of that, too. |
| 1949/12/30 | Dom Alexis Presse | Bela Just: Les Illumines |
Jnl 2 ('41-'52) p. 390
| I like the Augustinian themes in [Brice] Parain's Mort de Jean Madec [Paris, 1945] yet I would not know whether it was a good novel. To me it is a good novel. The only other novel I have read in the eight years I have been here is [Graham] Greene's Heart of the Matter and I read only half of that. Then I read bits of The Loved One and a few pages of Brideshead Revisited. Oh, and then Les Illumines about Dom Alexis [Presse] and his secession from the Order's monastery at Boquen. Only read a few pages of that, too. |
| 1949/12/30 | Evelyn Waugh | Brideshead Revisited |
Jnl 2 ('41-'52) p. 390
| I like the Augustinian themes in [Brice] Parain's Mort de Jean Madec [Paris, 1945] yet I would not know whether it was a good novel. To me it is a good novel. The only other novel I have read in the eight years I have been here is [Graham] Greene's Heart of the Matter and I read only half of that. Then I read bits of The Loved One and a few pages of Brideshead Revisited. Oh, and then Les Illumines about Dom Alexis [Presse] and his secession from the Order's monastery at Boquen. Only read a few pages of that, too. |
| 1949/12/30 | Evelyn Waugh | Loved One |
Jnl 2 ('41-'52) p. 390
| I like the Augustinian themes in [Brice] Parain's Mort de Jean Madec [Paris, 1945] yet I would not know whether it was a good novel. To me it is a good novel. The only other novel I have read in the eight years I have been here is [Graham] Greene's Heart of the Matter and I read only half of that. Then I read bits of The Loved One and a few pages of Brideshead Revisited. Oh, and then Les Illumines about Dom Alexis [Presse] and his secession from the Order's monastery at Boquen. Only read a few pages of that, too. |
| 1949/12/30 | Graham Greene | Heart of the Matter |
Jnl 2 ('41-'52) p. 390
| I like the Augustinian themes in [Brice] Parain's Mort de Jean Madec [Paris, 1945] yet I would not know whether it was a good novel. To me it is a good novel. The only other novel I have read in the eight years I have been here is [Graham] Greene's Heart of the Matter and I read only half of that. Then I read bits of The Loved One and a few pages of Brideshead Revisited. Oh, and then Les Illumines about Dom Alexis [Presse] and his secession from the Order's monastery at Boquen. Only read a few pages of that, too. |
| 1950/01/03 | Brice Parain | Mort de Jean Madec |
Jnl 2 ('41-'52) p. 392
| There is a beautiful passage on manual labor in La Mort de Jean Madec. It tells me one reason why I like the book so much. I am secretly reading it as a new and more interesting edition of the Cistercian Spiritual Directory. |
| 1950/01/09 | Brice Parain | Mort de Jean Madec |
Jnl 2 ('41-'52) p. 396-97
| Reading the sixth chapter of La Mort de Jean Madec-where Blaise is summoned before the conseil de discipline [disciplinary committee] for having sabotaged all his school work as an experiment in mysticism-I began to tremble and I had to force myself to go on reading. It really frightened me. And that is significant. It was a relief to see the solution and relief, at last, that he settled down to behave. Also the scare reminded me again of Job and his friends. And now it reminds me that perhaps, after all, I am not Job and that the fear of being Job (which is, of course, the desire to be Job) always gets me in trouble. |
| 1950/01/12 | Brice Parain | Mort de Jean Madec |
Jnl 2 ('41-'52) p. 399
| La Mort de Jean Madec is a magnificent tract against angelism. It is a tract on transcendence and immanence. It says that God is above all and yet in all. I thought the theme of purity of heart was in it. Now I find it is indeed the heart of the book. Madec, le seul homme pur,"¦Madec n'aurait pas eu besoin de la guerre pour être malbeureux. Madec n'avait jamais eu besoin de vouloir qu'il y eût la guerre pour ravoir le silence. (280) C'est en lui seul que tout pouvait renaître. ["Madec, the only pure man,"¦Madec never would have needed a war to make him unhappy. Madec never would have needed a war to make him recover silence. (280) It was in him only that everything could come back to life.] |
| 1950/01/21 | Bernardus of Clairvaux | Sermones de Diversis |
Jnl 2 ('41-'52) p. 401
| St. Bernard's Sermon 110, De Diversis, which I stumbled on just now by accident when I set out to look for the Sermon for the Fourth Sunday of November, is an interesting commentary on La Mort de Jean Madec. He laments the poverty of man. We are so indigent, we even need words. (Consequence: the more words we need, the greater our poverty.) We need them not only to communicate with others, but also with ourselves. For we are not ourselves. We are divided, exiled from ourselves. We have to communicate with the self from which we are separated. |
| 1950/01/21 | Brice Parain | Mort de Jean Madec |
Jnl 2 ('41-'52) p. 401
| St. Bernard's Sermon 110, De Diversis, which I stumbled on just now by accident when I set out to look for the Sermon for the Fourth Sunday of November, is an interesting commentary on La Mort de Jean Madec. He laments the poverty of man. We are so indigent, we even need words. (Consequence: the more words we need, the greater our poverty.) We need them not only to communicate with others, but also with ourselves. For we are not ourselves. We are divided, exiled from ourselves. We have to communicate with the self from which we are separated.b |
| 1950/01/30 | Brice Parain | Mort de Jean Madec |
Jnl 2 ('41-'52) p. 404
| The Greeks say that interior silence is not perfect unless it is centered upon the Name of Jesus. For they do not love silence for its own sake. Silence for its own sake is only death. Love silence for the sake of the Word. There are surprising affinities in the theology of the Oriental Church with the thoughts in Jean Madec. They understand that there is a solitude that is death and a solitude that is life. The solitary who is dead is walled up in his own self. The solitary who lives is eternally delivered from this world and is present to God. |
| 1950/12/15 | Evelyn Waugh | Helena |
Ltrs: CforT p. 18
| This letter has two purposes: to thank you for Helena and to wish you a holy Christmas"”and even a merry one, although the legend is abroad that I have gone Jansenist. Helena came when I was in the hospital. It was handed to me on the afternoon of the day when I had had three inches of bone cut out of my nose and was parked in bed with a nose full of bandages, commanded to sit up for twenty-four hours behaving in all respects like Queen Victoria. It was then that I started in on Old King Cole. I compliment you on your fidelity to the traditional picture of this King. Unfortunately your use of the famous ballad almost made me have a haemmhorage (if that is how you spell it). I am afraid that those on this side of the Atlantic who have never sung it will miss some of the nicest pages in the book. |
| 1951/04/06 | Jean Cayrol | Poèmes de la nuit et du brouillard |
Jnl 2 ('41-'52) p. 454
| camps. When first arrested, they dreamt they had not been arrested but had escaped. Then, resigned to their arrest, they dreamt they were allowed to go home from time to time. This in prison, before the camp itself. In the concentration camp magnificent dreams of landscapes, of baroque architecture. Color in their dreams. (And I thought of Doctor Morris Thompson in Louisville who was telling everybody about his visions of color. Doctor Henry thought he was going crazy!) Blue dreams, green dreams, red dreams of salvation. A sailor who saw a diamond cross rising out of the sea. Dreams which tell us something about our own immediate future! Things the body already knows before the soul has found them out. Jung, I think, holds something to this effect. This worked out in those salvation dreams. I have walked alone on the road to the barns, looking at the high clouds and thinking, "In war and in battle men look up sometimes and see such clouds as these." Cayrol tells of the Appel [roll-call] at Mauthausen, men being beaten up in the presence of a magnificent sunset on the Austrian Alps. The ones who were completely incommunicado were called Nacht und Nebel [Night and Mist], which might conceivably be the name of a perfume. And I thought of St. John of the Cross. His Spiritual Canticle was born of the imprisonment at Toledo! Confirmation of Cayrol's thesis in these two studies. |
| 1953/10/19 | Lucille Hasley | Reproachfully Yours |
Ltrs: SofC p. 67
| When he came back from the General Chapter, our Reverend Father Dom James spoke to me about the affair of that book published in England with an advertisement that shocked the Reverend Mother Abbess of Stapehill [Merton's endorsement of Lucile Hasley's Reproachfully Yours]. I understand her attitude well. I had never known that this indiscretion on my part had gotten to be known as far away as England. This rather un-monastic remark, which I had made in a private letter to the lady who had written the book, had scandalized nobody in the States. But I do think that in England they find it unpardonable. I am very sorry for it. I do not want to defend myself, but to reassure you a little, Most Reverend Father, I will say that this remark was made by me four years ago. I did not understand then all the repercussion of each of my words, but now I am beginning to become, I hope, a little more prudent. |
| 1955/08/06 | Evelyn Waugh | Officers and Gentlemen |
Ltrs: RtoJ p. 220
| Have you read a wonderful book called Pictures from an Institution by Randall Jarrell? It is perfect, in its way"”a beautiful job on the faculty of a "progressiv" women's college. You would love it. I also managed to get [Evelyn] Waugh's latest Officers and Gentlemen which is slow in parts, but in some spots as good as anything he has ever don"”especially a marvelous bleak island off the coast of Scotland, inhabited by a weird laird and a lot of commandos. Maybe you have read it. All this is a kind of a binge I have been having, before diving into the bushes to disappear. But at any cost get hold of the Jarrell book. I wish I could send you the copy I borrowed"”but it is borrowed "¦ |
| 1955/08/06 | Randell Jarrell | Pictures from an Institution |
Ltrs: RtoJ p. 220
| Have you read a wonderful book called Pictures from an Institution by Randall Jarrell? It is perfect, in its way"”a beautiful job on the faculty of a "progressiv" women's college. You would love it. I also managed to get [Evelyn] Waugh's latest Officers and Gentlemen which is slow in parts, but in some spots as good as anything he has ever don"”especially a marvelous bleak island off the coast of Scotland, inhabited by a weird laird and a lot of commandos. Maybe you have read it. All this is a kind of a binge I have been having, before diving into the bushes to disappear. But at any cost get hold of the Jarrell book. I wish I could send you the copy I borrowed"”but it is borrowed "¦ |
| 1956/05/02 | Graham Greene | Quiet American |
Ltrs: WtoF p. 134
| First of all, here are a couple of poems "¦ Matthew Scott is sending the long one to Graham Greene [called "The Sting of Conscience," with the subtitle "Letter to Graham Green"]. I hope Greene will be appropriately edified at the effect of [his novel] The Quiet American on a Trappist monk. Come to think of it, it is not the kind of book that is usually read in the monastery. Somehow I reacted"”responded, what have you"”strongly to the basic moral point. It touched off something very deep in me, that whole business that is boiling around down there. Resistance against the beautiful moral façade which gets built up in front of our very iniquity"”including perhaps my own. Our wonderful capacity to eat our cake and have it, especially when it is cake righteously taken away from someone else who is starving to death. Our ability to ruin others in order to feel clean ourselves... P.S. The thing I can most think of, after The Quiet American, is that the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of truth but not necessarily the Spirit of big catchwords and bright slogans. And that is why we need His protection against the noise all around us everywhere. |
| 1957/05/01 | Arthur Koestler | Darkness at Noon |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 88
| "Once, when the great ‘we' still existed, we understood them as one had understood them before. We had penetrated into their depths, we walked in the amorphous raw material of history itself"¦At that time we were called the Party of the Plebs. What did the others know of history? Passing ripples, little eddies, and breaking waves. They wondered at the changing forms of the surface and could not explain them. But we had descended into the depths, into the formless, anonymous, which at all times constituted the substance of history and we were the first to discover the laws of motion. We had discovered the laws of her inertia, of the now changing of her molecular structure, and of her sudden eruptions. That was the function of our doctrine. The Jacobins were moralists, we were empirics. "We dug in the primeval mud of history and there we found her laws. We knew more than ever has been known about material. That is why our revolution succeeded. And now you have buried it all again." Rubashov in Koestler's Darkness at Noon |
| 1957/05/29 | Mikhail Zoshchenko | Russia Laughs |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 95
| Good writing and good art are coming to mean much in the salvation of Russia. It is sad that the cultural contacts that were beginning so suddenly ended.... If at least they can read Dostoevsky"¦and fill their lungs with fresh air. I knew the Reds would eventually declare Zoschenko the "scum of Literature." His Russia Laughs was a phenomenally good book. I do not even have to try to find out what may have happened to Kataev. [Note 12: It is unclear if Merton refers to Ivan Kataev (born 1902) or Valentin Kataev (born 1897)"”both literary figures.] He probably went, with the others, in the Great Purge. |
| 1957/10/24 | Arthur Koestler | Thieves in the Night |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 128
| How can we sing the psalms, or understand them, if we are not Jews? Psallite sapienter [Sing praises with a psalm (Psalm 46:7)-in the Spirit, not in the flesh. Yes, but one can get too far away from the suffering and yearning of Israel in the flesh and these are inseparable from the Spirit. I think for example of Koestler and the Zionists. His work Thieves in the Night which is tremendous. And very loyal to the truth. |
| 1957/10/26 | Georges Bernanos | Diary of a Country Priest |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 130
| One reason why it is so hard to read Bernanos' The Diary of a Country Priest is breaking this ghetto wall. Don't mind the Jews in their ghetto-But we in ours-! That is harder to stomach. But Father! Our ghetto is so truly refined, it is a veritable paradise! Fresh air! |
| 1957/10/30 | Arthur Koestler | Thieves in the Night |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 131
| "The ‘People' are regarded through the Socialist Bureaucracy's eyes as a target for propaganda, not as a living reality whose interests, tastes, foibles must be understood and shared if you wish to change the face of the world. The Socialist party bosses or most of them come from the people but were not of the people; they tried to control or manipulate man without identifying themselves with him. Their voice was the voice of the pamphlet or the lecturer at the evening school - not the voice of a new humanity." Koestler. |
| 1957/10/5 | Arthur Koestler | Thieves in the Night |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 128-29
| The ending of Thieves in the Night is something of an anticlimax. A very useful book for monks who can read such books. Insights on community life. Joseph the cellarer. The Psalms-they are something special when read through Zionist glasses. As I say, one has to sing them as a Jew, or not at all. |
| 1957/11/17 | Arthur Koestler | Darkness at Noon |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 141
| (From Darkness at Noon) "The Party denied the free will of the individual - and at the same time exacted his willing self-sacrifice. It denied his capacity to choose between two alternatives and at the same time it demanded that he always choose the right one. It denied him power to distinguish between good and evil-and at the same time it spoke accusingly of guilt and treachery"¦etc. |
| 1958/02/09 | Ciro Alegria | Mundo es ancho y ajeno |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 165
| Reading Ciro Alegria's "El mundo es ancho y ajeno," walking up and down the stonepath in the cold. It is a beautiful book, garrulous but simple, about an Indian village in Peru. Good reading for after dinner. Good to read a novel in which there is still respect for life, unlike the dead stuff that has been coming out of Europe and the U.S. |
| 1958/02/15 | Adolfo Bioy Casares | Plan d'evasión |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 167
| Curious novel of Bioy Casaris, Plan d'evasion, about a governor of Devil's Island experimenting with certain prisoners to put them in a different, schizophrenic sort of a world by various operations and "adaptations." It ends up by being a very good and very original mystery story.... Book starts slow and ends well, with a slow, progressive complication of threads. A kindly Argentinean Kafka, but clear and Latin, without Kafka's brooding and darkness. In the end, I like this curious book which was sent down by New Directions. |
| 1958/02/15 | Adolfo Bioy Casares | Plan d'evasión |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 169
| Back to Bioy Casaris' Plan d'evasion-as a symbol and a symptom. It is about French people. The death rattle of Argentina's dependence on France. The frustration of the American intellectual who can't get along without a Europe that can no longer sustain him. (Yet-he is sustained, without knowing it, by his own latent vitality.) This has been to a great extent my own frustration as a writer-from which I escaped temporarily "upward"-into spirituality-but that was not enough, because it is not a matter of escape, but of incarnation and transformation. |
| 1958/05/18 | Boris Leonidovich Pasternak | docteur Jivago : roman / Boris Leonidovic Pasternak ; trad. du russe |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 203
| Above all, this year has marked my discovery of Pasternak. First, in the copy of Encounter which came by chance with a review of Strange Islands. Then, in last month's Partisan Review clandestinely acquired. I have just finished his marvelous story "The Childhood of Lovers." This is a great writer with a wonderful imagination and all he says is delightful-one of the great writers of our time and no one pays much attention (now no doubt they will, with Dr. Zhivago-coming out in English in the Fall). He is so good I don't see very well how the Reds can avoid killing him. |
| 1958/06/22 | Albert Camus | chute, recit |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 208
| Camus' La chute [The Fall]. I admit is too long. |
| 1958/07/18 | Albert Camus | chute, recit |
Ltrs: Hammer p. 52
| By now everything of the U of K. Library that I had borrowed is on its way back. Unless the unbound an unmarked copy of Camus' La Chute was from you. It was given to me unpacked and I had no idea where it came from and assumed it was from a friend of mine in France. So in any case I have Camus' La Chute and you will not need to send me that. But let me know if it is yours |
| 1958/08/20 | Fyodor Dostoyevsky | Possessed / by Fyodor Dostoyevsky ; transl. from the Russian by Constance Garnett ; with a foreww by Avrahm Yarmolinsky and a transl. of the hitherto-suppressed chapter "At Tihon's" |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 214
| Yesterday good day of recollection in the woods. Read the part of The Possessed about the mad Saint Symeon and something clicked - a strange light on Bernard's "fiducia" ["trust"] and one he might perhaps have repudiated, but the root of my problem remains fear of my own solitude-imagined solitude - the fear of rejection, which I nevertheless anticipate - as if it mattered! I should be more bravely real-it is what I need, and no one would be surprised at it in me - I think even my vocation requires it. |
| 1958/09/04 | Boris Leonidovich Pasternak | docteur Jivago : roman / Boris Leonidovic Pasternak ; trad. du russe |
Ltrs: RtoJ p. 231
| Have you heard of the new book of the Russian poet Pasternak? Dr. Zhivago. It is a tremendous thing and a lot of his poems are published in appendix. The book was not allowed to be published in Russia ("idealist deviation" and doubtless also "rootless cosmopolitanism"), but it actually has a very important basic content of religion and the poems (some of them) are the finest religious poems written anywhere in the 20th century. It is fabulous. I think this is one of the most significant events in literature in the whole 20th century and something we all ought to ponder. I'd like to write an article about him. |
| 1958/09/09 | Boris Leonidovich Pasternak | docteur Jivago : roman / Boris Leonidovic Pasternak ; trad. du russe |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 216
| For the last 5 days or so-reading Dr. Zhivago which finally came. Deeply moved by it. Not being in the habit of demanding absolute structural perfection in a novel, I can call it great. Wrote to Helen Wolff at Pantheon about it and she wired asking permission to use what I said. Later sent a tepid review of the book clipped from the NY Times as a specimen of the kind of reception it is getting. I would like to write something about Pasternak. Wrote a letter to him but don't know if it will get through. Sent him "Prometheus." |
| 1958/10/13 | Boris Pasternak | Doctor Zhivago |
Ltrs: CforT p. 180
| Fr. Lawrence [Ernesto Cardenal] has already told me a little about the history (behind the poem). It is a magnificent poem, and an admirable example of the current political situation with its Indian themes! I really like that prophetic fusion of the past and the present, giving the poem an eternal character, a very religious and solemn aspect! Today, we all have a great deal to do facing the terrible reality of the volcano. The Russian poet Pasternak, whose more or less autobiographical novel Dr. Zhivago I've just finished reading, has done this in a magnificent and providential way. I also received a letter from Pasternak that really moved me. He is very Christian. |
| 1958/10/23 | Boris Pasternak | Doctor Zhivago |
Ltrs: CforT p. 89
| Since my first letter to you I have obtained and read the book [Dr. Zhivago] published by Pantheon, and it has been a great and rewarding experience. First of all it has astounded me with the great number of sentences that I myself might have written, and in fact perhaps have written... The book is a world in itself, a sophiological world, a paradise and a hell, in which the great mystical figures of Yurii and Lara stand out as Adam and Eve and though they walk in darkness walk with their hand in the hand of God. The earth they walk upon is sacred because of them. It is the sacred earth of Russia, with its magnificent destiny which remains hidden for it in the plans of God. To me the most overwhelmingly beautiful and moving passage is the short, tranquil section in the Siberian town where Yurii lying in the other room listens through the open door to the religious conversation of Lara and the other woman. This section is as it were the "ey" of a hurrican"”that calm center of whirlwind, the emptiness in which is truth, spoken in all its fullness, in quiet voice, by lamplight. But it is hard to pick out any one passage. |
| 1959/01/02 | Boris Leonidovich Pasternak | docteur Jivago : roman / Boris Leonidovic Pasternak ; trad. du russe |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 244-45
| In the morning chapter Rev. Father, because of certain events and circumstances, came out strongly against the reading of fiction and playing classical music on records.... For Rev. Fr., incidentally, all novels are "love-stories," and that is that. It can hardly affect anyone much except as a matter of principle-it takes so much time we haven't got, to read a novel. However I did spend some fruitful hours this Summer sitting in the straw and reading Dr. Zhivago. |
| 1959/01/11 | Romano Guardini | Religiöse Gestalten in Dostojewskijs Werk: Studien über den Glauben |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 246
| I really think that in almost everything I read I find new food for the spiritual life, new thoughts, new discoveries (for instance the deep spiritual content of Jan Van Eyck's portrait of the Arnolfinis)-a whole new light on my concept of the hieratic (in the good sense) in art. Or the Gregg book on non-violence-some LaFontaine "fables" (The Rêve d'un habitant du Mogra struck me deeply the last time I was in Louisville and I saw it in Gide's anthology). Three or four pieces on "religion" (decadent) in Edmund Wilson's collection of articles about the '30s (American Earthquake)-some things on Mayan civilization-Kierkegaard's "Works of Lov"-Guardini on Dostoevsky. etc. etc. |
| 1959/01/17 | Romano Guardini | Religiöse Gestalten in Dostojewskijs Werk: Studien über den Glauben |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 248
| Moved by Guardini's wonderful book on Dostoevsky. |
| 1959/05/21 | Czeslaw Milosz | Seizure of Power |
Ltrs: CforT p. 59
| Now about your own books. I suppose it is not strange that your younger earthy and cosmic self should be so sharply divided from the later political self. Sur les bords de l'Issa is admirably alive, rich in all kinds of archetypal material, with a deep vegetative substratum that gives it a great fertility of meanings. Your lyrical poem falls into the same category "¦ this element in your being is very essential to you "¦ you will not produce your greatest work without it. Its absence from The Seizure of Power is one of the things that makes the latter simply a routine job. Of course it is hard to see how ancient pagan naturalistic remnants from archaic Lithuanian peasant culture could be fitted into the tragic story of Warsaw. The fact is that The Seizure of Power, though very impressive in patches, did not seem to [hold] together well. You do not seem sure of yourself in it and your statement that you do not like the novel as a literary form by no means surprises me. Yet I think perhaps one day you may go over the same material and write a great novel. I think The Seizure of Power suffers from a lack of perspective, and from a natural inability to assimilate all the awful elements that had to go into it. One day when you have come to see it all in a unified way, it may turn out quite differently. |
| 1959/05/21 | Czeslaw Milosz | Sur les bords de l'Issa |
Ltrs: CforT p. 59
| Now about your own books. I suppose it is not strange that your younger earthy and cosmic self should be so sharply divided from the later political self. Sur les bords de l'Issa is admirably alive, rich in all kinds of archetypal material, with a deep vegetative substratum that gives it a great fertility of meanings. Your lyrical poem falls into the same category "¦ this element in your being is very essential to you "¦ you will not produce your greatest work without it. Its absence from The Seizure of Power is one of the things that makes the latter simply a routine job. Of course it is hard to see how ancient pagan naturalistic remnants from archaic Lithuanian peasant culture could be fitted into the tragic story of Warsaw. The fact is that The Seizure of Power, though very impressive in patches, did not seem to [hold] together well. You do not seem sure of yourself in it and your statement that you do not like the novel as a literary form by no means surprises me. Yet I think perhaps one day you may go over the same material and write a great novel. I think The Seizure of Power suffers from a lack of perspective, and from a natural inability to assimilate all the awful elements that had to go into it. One day when you have come to see it all in a unified way, it may turn out quite differently. |
| 1960/05/06 | Albert Camus | chute, recit |
Ltrs: CforT p. 66
| At the same time I enjoy and respect Camus, and think I understand him. What you said about La Chute struck me very forcibly when I read it: it is a fine piece of Manichaean theology and very applicable to this Trappist kind of life. In fact I was able to use it to good effect, perhaps cruelly, in the spiritual direction of a narcissistic novice. But the thing of Camus that really "sends" me is the marvelous short story about the missionary who ends up as a prisoner in the city of salt. There, in a few words, you have a superb ricanement, in theology! And a very salutary piece for Trappists to read, because for generations we have been doing just that kind of thing. I was deeply saddened by his death. In politics I think I am very much inclined to his way of looking at things, and there is in him an honesty and a compassion which belies the toughness of his writing. |
| 1960/05/06 | Jean Paul Sartre | nausee : roman |
Ltrs: CforT p. 67
| I do not have much interest in Sartre, he puts me to sleep, as if he were deliberately dull: assommant is a much better word. He shaves me, as the French say. He beats me over the head with his dullness, though Huis Clos strikes me as a good and somewhat puritanical play. The other thing of his I have tried to read, La Nausee, is drab and stupid. |
| 1960/05/30 | Richard Hughes | High Wind in Jamaica |
Ltrs: RtoJ p. 236
| I have lately read some Joseph Conrad and he is always a Master. Did you ever read anything of Richard Hughes, High Wind in Jamaica? I used to use him [as an English teacher]. I am interested in the new stuff out of Germany. A finely wrought short story by a lad called Wolfsiegfried Schnurr (what a name!) was in Encounter lately, called "The Maneuver." Dostoevsky is always tops. Another of the new Germans is Ernst Muenger, and I am liking what little bits of his I see. I want to see more. For short stories, Bernard Malamud has done some fine things "¦ |
| 1960/07/30 | Giuseppe Lampedusa | The Leopard |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 24
| Finished [Giuseppe di Lampedusa's] The Leopard yesterday. A finely constructed novel which suddenly disintegrates, and yet the last two chapters, icebergs broken off a huge moraine, float independently away and are interesting. It is a humorous and moving book. Thoughtful and archetypal, about the disintegration of an old Europe. But dignified and sane. |
| 1960/08/17 | Fyodor Dostoyevsky | Brothers Karamazov |
Ltrs: HGL p. 138
| Yes, I too love Dostoevsky, very much. Staretz Zosima can always make me weep and a lot of the beat people in the books also. I love the little Jew in The House of the Dead (the one with the prayers, the weeping, the joy) "¦ |
| 1960/08/17 | Fyodor Dostoyevsky | House of the Dead |
Ltrs: HGL p. 138
| Yes, I too love Dostoevsky, very much. Staretz Zosima can always make me weep and a lot of the beat people in the books also. I love the little Jew in The House of the Dead (the one with the prayers, the weeping, the joy) "¦ |
| 1960/12/26 | Giuseppe Lampedusa | The Leopard |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 79
| I read a thing of Kierkegaard with a lovely paragraph on solitude - a bit of Henry Miller on Big Sur (in another place), much Suzuki, Vinoba Bhave. It is an oriental wood. I taught Nels Richardson a little yoga there, walked and planned with Dom Gregorio anxiously there. There walked one winter afternoon after discovering some lyrics in the I Ching. Read The Leopard and Ungaretti there. Above all prayed and meditated there and will again. |
| 1961/10/20 | Jean Giono | Regain |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 171
| After dinner-in the cold woodshed-have discovered a marvelous book by [Jean] Giono - of ancient vintage: Regain [Paris, 1930 and 1950] - in a bunch of books sent over from the library of the university. This is perfect writing. |
| 1962/02/13 | Andre Schwartz-Bart | Last of the Just |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 202
| Finished the Last of the Just [Andre Schwartz-Bart, New York, 1960], which is a tremendously moving thing, and says a great deal. Compassion in the midst of the inexorable absurdity and violence and madness of Nazism. Pity is the center. Pity as an absolute, more central than truth ("There is no place for truth here," says the Just man on the way to Auschwitz). And that Christians have come in the end to hate Christ. And that the Jews are Christ. |
| 1962/07/13 | Jules Romains | Men of Good Will |
Ltrs: HGL p. 212
| "¦ By the way, talking of books: Jules Romains. I don't care what he thinks about the Church. It is just that years ago when I read the first volumes of the Men of Good Will, I came to the conclusion that he was almost as pedestrian as Zola, which is saying a lot. I just think him a complete bore. Maybe he has got better lately, I don't know. If you really think I ought to be converted on this point, I am not averse to trying my best. |
| 1962/09/15 | James Farl Powers | Morte d'Urban |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 247
| Finished [J. F.] Powers' new novel [Morte d' Urban, New York, 1962] yesterday - will perhaps review it for Worship. It is very competent and deserves an article. Complete change in the hero who suddenly becomes human, instead of an obsessed clerical zombie, around the middle of the book. |
| 1962/09/20 | James Farl Powers | Morte d'Urban |
Ltrs: RtoJ p. 242
| I finished the new Powers novel [Morte d'Urban] which got to me from the publisher, before publication. It is a masterly job, ruthless in the first half, gentler and more merciful in the second. The priest is an "operator," a narcissist of the first water, and there is no let up in his appalling mediocrity until suddenly in the second half he becomes human and, though he remains an operator, he gains a real dignity and comes out with a certain nobility. Something happened to Powers himself in creating his character, a sort of breakthrough of some sort, apparently "¦ |
| 1962/10/22 | James Farl Powers | Morte d'Urban |
Ltrs: WtoF p. 67
| I do want to thank you for sending me your very incisive conference on Religion and the Mass Media. I have read and reread it, and agree all down the line. It is very clear, and is right on the target. I think you will probably be interested in the review I wrote of the new J. F. Powers book ["Morte d'Urban: Two Celebrations," published in Worship, November 1962], which treats some of the same ideas indirectly. |
| 1962/12/28 | Fyodor Dostoyevsky | Brothers Karamazov |
Ltrs: HGL p. 102
| My work with your Russian Mystics proceeds slowly as there are many other duties to be performed. I am now in the last part, where the pages are smaller and the writing is more concentrated: hence it is harder to make corrections. I am happy that the whole typescript will be gone over carefully. I am afraid that in many cases where I was trying to make the text more easily readable, I may have altered the sense. This will have to be carefully checked. Then of course someone well versed in Oriental theology will also have to correct more carefully the passages which I have left to a great extent untouched, on prayer, etc. The first half of the ms. is already in the hands of the Benedictine monks at Collegeville, who are typing it. I will send the rest along in a few weeks. Meanwhile I am giving my novices a few classes on Russian mysticism, using notes drawn from your ms. as well as from Fedotov and other sources. I think St. Seraphim is still my greatest favorite, but now I am glad to make the acquaintance of the great Startzi of Optina. I am much impressed with them, as of course I expected to be after reading The Brothers Karamazov. You should do an anthology of the writings of Optina. |
| 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. |
| 1963/07/19 | 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. |
| 1963/07/19 | William Melvin Kelley | Different Drummer |
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. |
| 1963/07/30 | Georges Bernanos | Journal d'un cure de campagne |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 350
| "Je crois de plus que ce que nous appelons tristesse, angoisse, desespoir, comme pour nous persuader qu'il s'agit de certains mouvements de l'ame, est cette ame même, que depuis la chute, la condition de l'homme est telle qu'il ne saurait plus rien percevoir en lui et hors de lui que sous la forme de l'angoisse." ["I believe more and more that what we call sadness, anguish, despair, as if to persuade ourselves that it is a question of certain impulses of the soul, is really the soul itself, and that since the fall the condition of man is such that he is not capable of perceiving anything in himself and outside of himself except in the form of anguish."] Bernanos |
| 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. |
| 1963/09/20 | Morris West | Shoes of the Fisherman |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 17
| Wasted my time reading Morris West's Shoes of the Fisherman. Superficial and naive. A Ukranian Pope falls in love with Teilhard de Chardin! They talk earnestly. Teilhard de Chardin says: "You know, Holy Father, I think we are no longer reaching people!!" etc. Actually, this book is a nonentity. A pious, baseless hope for a renewal that would be comprehensible to Time magazine, and which indeed has already been dreamed of by it. Is this the best the Church can hope for? This folksy myth with its soap opera characters and its changes that change nothing. Here is the kind of prophecy that glorifies the status quo, and works only for a little glory in the Vatican. |
| 1963/09/23 | Jean Paul Sartre | Age of Reason |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 19
| In contrast I skimmed through Sartre's Age of Reason which at first (the other day) I had decided not to read at all beyond the first few chapters. But it is an important and well-written novel, and the theme is inescapable: the question of giving one's life a meaning by accepting the meaning of definitive commitments and not always evading them. It is a subtle and true study of the moral inanity of bourgeois life. But this is no guarantee that "socialist" life is any less inane. Quite the contrary! It is not social programs that give life the meaning it demands. The ending of the book is very effective. |
| 1963/10/03 | Morris West | Shoes of the Fisherman |
Ltrs: RtoJ p. 246-47
| I read the Shoes of the Fisherman in the hospital & thought it rather naive & after all timid & passive. Pope Paul is really much more energetic than the tense Pope of that novel! The recent pronouncements have been fine. Did I tell you he wrote me a personal letter & sent me an autographed picture? I expect great things from Pope Paul & this session of the Council "¦ |
| 1963/10/09 | Jose Maria Gironella | One Million Dead |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 24
| Began [Jose María] Gironella's One Million Dead. |
| 1963/10/22 | Zoe Oldenbourg | Destiny of Fire |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 25
| The book Destiny of Fire, a novel, is far more powerful and "bouleversant" ["upsetting"] than the history. A fantastic religious Eros is at work there: this is her genius. It is her own self that is in the book, the beauty and fascination of her own religious aspirations. Really, there is all this passion-and nothing much after all of God: this sounds like an invidious judgment. Yet what you have is the beauty of religious passion in people hunted to death for heresy. And I have the feeling that God is very remote from that whole war, from either side of it. What mattered were the different kinds of passion. God was gone from it. Or no? |
| 1963/10/26 | Julien Green | Each in His Darkness |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 27
| "One thing still holds, and only this one thing is really serious, that Jesus is the victor. A seriousness that would look back past this, like Lot's wife, is not Christian seriousness. It may be burning behind-and truly it is burning-but we have to look not at it but at the other fact, that we are visited and summoned to take seriously the victory of God's glory in this man Jesus and to be joyful in Him." Karl Barth This is appropriate to what I was thinking about the grim and fearful seriousness with which Julien Green takes evil [in Each in His Darkness, 1961]. The fear that one's obsession with evil may be a sign of not being "of the elect." And Graham Greene too: in him evil is more serious than good. |
| 1963/11/09 | Julien Green | Each in His Darkness |
Ltrs: RtoJ p. 247
| There is a new magazine starting up at the University of Iowa [Charlatan ], run by Episcopalians. I don't know how good it is going to be, but I sent them the notes on Julien Green ["To Each His Darkness"] which I enclose. They are perhaps too subtle. The notes, I mean, not the Episcopalians. I liked very much the librarian from Pusey House, Oxford [A. M. Allchin], who was here this summer, and who just sent me a new book of Traherne, whom I love "¦ I got Fr. [Raymond] Roseliep's latest, but haven't had a chance to read it thoughtfully. Ned O'Gorman sent some of his new poems in ms and a few are really terrific. I liked your latest in Commonweal ["Each Spring the Arbutus"] "¦ |
| 1963/11/11 | Jose Maria Gironella | One Million Dead |
Ltrs: CforT p. 82
| I agree with you on your dislike of fiction and can't read most novels even when I try, but now I am well into an enormous one, [Jose Maria] Gironella's great, laconic (yet enormous) novel of the Spanish Civil War, One Million Dead. I think it is something everyone should read, though it starts slow and has thousands of characters. |
| 1963/12/03 | Jose Maria Gironella | One Million Dead |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 42-43
| Am well on the way to finishing Gironella's great book (One Million Dead). Great in size, and a very competent work. A picture of the Spanish war that is complete and objective, not pretentious, compassionate, detached, often very humorous, but real. It is really quite an extraordinary book, rich in material, full of small touches, details, telling lines, full of people-characters all lightly drawn, the central one Ignacio in Spain, an impartial Spain-he has been on both sides, passed from one to the other through a kind of dynamiter's tunnel in Madrid-an aorta. |
| 1964/01/00 | Walker Percy | Moviegoer |
Ltrs: CforT p. 281
| There is no easy way to thank you for your book. Not only are the good words about books all used up and ruined, but the honesty of The Moviegoer makes one more sensitive than usual about the usual nonsense. With reticence and malaise, then, I think your book is right on the target. |
| 1964/01/18 | Maurice Merleau-Ponty | Signes |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 64
| "Le romancier tient à son lecteur, et tout homme à tout homme, un language d'inities: inities au monde, à l'univers des possibles que detient un corps humain" "The novelist converses with his reader in a language of initiates and every man to every man, people initiated into the universe of possibilities contained in the human body"] (Merleau-Ponty, Signes, p. 95). This describes exactly the awareness that is alive in Walker Percy's book-of the scene with the crippled child. "Ce que nous voulons dire n'est pas devant nous, hors de toute parole, comme une pure signification. Ce n'est que l'excès de ce que nous vivons sur ce qui a ete dejà dit" ["What we want to say is not right in front of us, outside of every word, as a pure signification. It is only the excess of what we live over what has already been said"] (Signes, p. 104). |
| 1964/01/18 | Walker Percy | Moviegoer |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 64
| The great impact of Walker Percy's Moviegoer is that the whole book says in reality what the hero is not and expresses his awareness of what he is not. His sense of alienation, his comparative refusal to be alienated as everyone else is (not successful), his comparative acceptance of the ambiguity and failure. Book full of emblems and patterns of life. (The misty place where they fish, or rather his brother fishes, like a vague movie too.) |
| 1964/02/11 | Walker Percy | Moviegoer |
Ltrs: RtoJ p. 47
| Have you read a book by a man called Walker Percy, called The Movie Goer? I don't read enough novels to judge, but I think this is a good one. You think at first he is making this Movie Goer a supreme dope of some sort for going to so many movies, but in the end it turns out that he is the only smart one, in a wild existentialist kind of way, and the best thing about the book is that in the end nobody says who is supposed to be right anyway. I think it is very important at this juncture that novels should not insist that somebody is right. Because when somebody is right, then someone else is wrong, and this gets us forgetting that we are all wrong, or, in some sense, right. The thing is to see that unless we know we are wrong we cannot be right, because the only thing we can successfully be right about is the fact that we are all wrong. The one incontrovertible fact of human life. When one starts from that one, however, the rest begins to make sense. Hence there is no justification for consoling religions. I mean the kind that think they can console by saying everything is all right. But I am not propounding the idea that everything is all wrong, as a source of religious consolation. It is just a fact, not consoling. Anyway, in The Movie Goer, besides a lot of intriguing New Orleans names, there is a Mardi Gras to which nobody goes. The author of the book has written well about Kierkegaard somewhere too. |
| 1964/03/24 | Piotr Rawicz | Blood from the Sky |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 92
| The frightful novel of Piotr Rawicz. Blood from the Sky is a true descent into hell, so much so that it seems to be a voice of Christ-that is, of the not damned-often innocent-even from hell. The innocence of the work, in all its honor, comes from its realization that all is sin and horror in the absence of mercy. The relentless, seething, objective, existentialist revelation of the betrayal of the Jews by the leaders of the people, by all the wise, all the just, all the capable, all the intelligent, all the holy-picture of the total degradation of everyone and everything, and totally fruitless. Conclusion-the stripping off of the desire for survival and "love of lif" and showing it as horror, nausea, hatred, deathdealing selfishness, headed inexorably toward its own extinction. |
| 1964/04/17 | Piotr Rawicz | Blood from the Sky |
Ltrs: CforT p. 105
| That [Piotr] Rawicz [Blood from the Sky]. It is magnificently horrible, and I am terribly impressed by it. There is a sort of limitlessness and lawlessness, a total madness about it which makes it a strangely sober statement in the end, so that one takes everything very seriously. It is neither honest nor possible to complain of a single line. He has the right to say anything he likes and be heard, because even the most extravagant thing he can say is far short of the truth, and what he is talking about has awful religious implications. So thanks for both these books "¦ |
| 1964/04/17 | Wlodzimierz Odojewski | Dying Day |
Ltrs: CforT p. 105
| Now as to the books you have sent. [Wlodzimierz] Odojewski's Dying Day is a fascinating and sometimes beautiful book in its strange way. What is most of all surprising is that such a "subjectiv" book comes from behind the Iron Curtain, though I suppose that this should surprise us least of all. The stifling atmosphere of socialist realism would make such a book imperative. And of course it is a very real picture of the hot, breathless, obsessive, imprisoned life of the spirit in the socialist world: again not too essentially different from the frustrations in our own square society, though we are better able to breathe. On the whole I think this is a very telling piece of work and rather brilliantly done, especially the dream parts. If you are in contact with him or if anyone is, please tell him how much I have liked his book and how much I compliment him on it. |
| 1964/07/21 | Graham Greene | Burnt-Out Case |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 130
| Graham Greene's A Burnt-Out Case-takes this up a bit savagely and very well. The complete burning out of Christianity in the official, clerical sense, is the subject of the book. Not a great book, but still timely, urgent, convincing. Greene knows what he is saying. Burning out of the appetites of the bourgeois world, sexual, cultural, religious: the appetite for life: Pfft! |
| 1964/07/23 | Graham Greene | Burnt-Out Case |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 130
| The Burnt-Out Case is not much of a book, really. It is competent, but is itself a bit burned out and silly. Yet one reads it with interest. It is the same problem as in Honest to God but turned around. The priests who insist that Querry is not an atheist but is really in the Dark Night. All of a sudden one realizes that this approach has perhaps become usual. Indeed, it is Greene's own mainspring. I mean that of most of his novels. Here it is very tired but still works. |
| 1964/08/09 | Albert Camus | peste |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 134
| Where can I ever read all the novels one is supposed to read? I am, however, finishing La Peste (Camus). It is a precise, well-built, inexorable piece of reflection. Picture of our society as it really is when undefended by distraction. I can accept Camus' ideas of nobility- and certainly agree with him about the Jesuit sermon. Yet the nobility of the Doctor is still not enough-though it may be enough for the doctor, and it may be all that most men can do. There is a nobility in the simplification of reasons in the renunciation of religious explanations. But to live without ideology is not to live without faith. The doctor would not be possible without the Gospel or without some cryptic compassion that is more than simply humanistic. Has Camus got far beyond Kant? |
| 1964/08/09 | Albert Camus | peste |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 134
| La Peste-understandable in the light of Bonhoeffer's admirable prison letters. In connection with Camus and people like him-see this line of Bonhoeffer: "I often ask myself why a Christian instinct frequently draws one more to the religionless than to the religious, by which I mean not with any intention of evangelizing them but rather, I might almost say, in ‘brotherhood.'" (p. 165) |
| 1964/08/09 | Herman Melville | Moby Dick; of the Whale |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 133
| The other day in Louisville picked up [W. H.] Auden's "Enchafed Flood" at the library. It is good background for Brendan. I must finally reread Melville-but when does one get time for such things? It all depends upon how badly I want to read Melville, and how guilty I will feel about doing so. Actually, there is no need of guilt. Moby Dick has a lot to do with the spiritual life, perhaps a great deal more than some of the professedly "spiritual" books in the novitiate library. |
| 1964/12/05 | William Golding | Lord of the Fliles |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 175
| I had a somewhat fearsome night after reading The Lord of the Flies. This a hangover from my cenobitic after-dinner flight into light reading (which is all right, I do not despise it). So many good books around and in the woodshed after dinner. |
| 1965/01/22 | Vintila Horia | septième lettre. Le roman de Platon |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 194
| Vintila Horia sent me his novel about Plato and I find it extraordinarily beautiful, a sustained tone of wisdom, with all kinds of modern undertones. Very "actual." He says (Plato): "I saw the world rushing into stupidity with such natural self-assurance that it caused me to suffer keenly, as if I had been personally responsible for it, while the people around me saw the future as a new pleasure to be expected from a certain joy: as if by being born into the world they acquired a right to this." (p. 101) |
| 1965/05/10 | Herbert Read | Green Child |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 246
| Already a most beautiful week of May has gone by. For part of it I was ill again, with the same bug that had me in the infirmary at the beginning of Holy Week. It was a good thing, for this time Father Eudes gave me an antibiotic which seems to have cleared it up properly. Last time it really stayed with me (my stomach remained quite upset even though I was "well"). So for a couple of days I lay around in the warm green shade of the end room, with no desire for any food, and read Martin Ling's book which he sent me (Ancient Beliefs and Modern Superstitions), a good chunk of De Lubac's Exegèse medievale (Vol. 1) and the early part of Herbert Read's Green Child. The most exciting for me was De Lubac. |
| 1966/05/20 | Walker Percy | Last Gentleman |
Ltrs: Hammer p. 228
| If you have in the library Walker Percy's new novel The Last Gentleman - look at pages 26-28, a very funny comment on museums. Victor might enjoy it though it might be hard o get into the crazy style without an introduction. |
| 1966/05/21 | Walker Percy | Last Gentleman |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 67
| In the evening to get away from it, began reading Walker Percy's new novel [The Last Gentleman] and then finally called her from the Cellarer's office after 8 when everyone was in bed. |
| 1966/06/16 | Albert Camus | etranger : roman |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 85
| "Il n'etait pas mon père, il etait avec les autres [He was not my father, he was with theothers]," says Meursault in Camus' L'Etranger [The Stranger], speaking of the prison chaplain. |
| 1966/06/17 | Albert Camus | Myth of Sisyphus |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 86
| Went down to concelebrate early, then came back and spent the whole morning on a slow reading of The Myth of Sisyphus (Camus) which I shied away from before. Now it is just right, just what I need, suits me perfectly for I see my vocation to be an absurd man if ever there was one! Or at least to try to think in some such honest terms. |
| 1966/06/19 | Albert Camus | Myth of Sisyphus |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 86
| The great and deliberate flaw in Camus - a flaw on which he insists - is the "ethic of quantity." Certainly this is decisive for our time - perhaps the only way of not being quixotic (the repetition of the absurd in complete lucidity - Don Juan - is non-quixotic). This I cannot accept. I'd rather fight windmills. But am I fighting them? Or does it come back to the same thing - and to the fact that "knowing oneself to be mortal" is in fact a disguised return to quality! That is the ambiguity in Camus and La Peste [The Plague] proves it. (Sisyphus is by no means final!) The desert landscape in Camus - the hidden Islamism. Finished Sisyphus in a rush, finally bored by it. |
| 1966/06/19 | Albert Camus | peste |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 86
| The great and deliberate flaw in Camus - a flaw on which he insists - is the "ethic of quantity." Certainly this is decisive for our time - perhaps the only way of not being quixotic (the repetition of the absurd in complete lucidity - Don Juan - is non-quixotic). This I cannot accept. I'd rather fight windmills. But am I fighting them? Or does it come back to the same thing - and to the fact that "knowing oneself to be mortal" is in fact a disguised return to quality! That is the ambiguity in Camus and La Peste [The Plague] proves it. (Sisyphus is by no means final!) |
| 1966/07/15 | Fyodor Dostoyevsky | Idiot |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 95-96
| Blazing hot yesterday afternoon - I found a good breeze at one of my favorite spots, the N.E. corner of St. Edmund's field where the road (track) plunges into the woods. Read on Buddhist meditation [The Heart of Buddhist Meditation (London, 1962)] ([Bikkhu] Nyanaponika Thera - excellent) - on "bare attention"! Then Alan Watts on LSD (poor). Later came back and read some, The Idiot. |
| 1966/07/20 | Fyodor Dostoyevsky | Idiot |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 98
| Reading Dostoievsky's The Idiot, a marvelous and fascinating book. What a world! And how he structures it, with what ease - from the very first chapter. Also [G. J.] Warnock on English Philosophy Since 1900 [London, 1963], a new area for me - I always assumed these people were complete squares. Need to know Wittgenstein. The book is well written. Finally also Nyanaponika Thera's excellent treatise on Buddhist meditation - the basic elements - so easily despised, but very practical indeed. There is a healthy empiricism in Buddhist ascesis! |
| 1966/07/25 | Albert Camus | homme revolte |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 101
| Am going back to Camus' L'Homme revolte - and as with Sisyphus I now find I am ready for it. |
| 1966/08/07 | Herman Hesse | Steppenwolf |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 111
| The independence of the Steppenwolf says H[ermann] Hesse, is really only a pseudoindependence. 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? |
| 1966/08/09 | Albert Camus | homme revolte |
Ltrs: RtoJ p. 341
| I am not clear in what "live and act like atheists" presents a difficulty. How does an atheist act? Well, the way you put it, it is quite true that atheists don't necessarily have peculiar ways of acting in so far as they are just people like everyone else. Perhaps I should have qualified and spoken of those who devote themselves to carrying out a policy of military atheism"”and I suppose this is just religion in reverse. But again, as I don't have the text and forget exactly what I said, I can't clarify. All I can say is that I probably had in mind the kind of atheism which draws practical nihilistic conclusions from a somewhat high-powered animosity against the god-image (see Camus' The Rebel which explains this very well). This kind of atheism is aggressive, nihilistic, committed to deliberate terror etc. More common in Europe than here. When I think of all my nice warm atheist friends with whom I get along very well, I can see your point. |
| 1966/08/27 | Cesare Pavese | Harvesters / Translation from the Italian Paesi Tuoi |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 118
| The spell of Cesare Pavese, a novelist. Italian hill towns in the north or rather villages in the foothills of the Alps. Passion. Intensity. The Harvesters is a racking, smashing book. Curious, undecided, circular movement of The Moon and the Bonfires. |
| 1966/08/27 | Cesare Pavese | Moon and the Bonfires / Translation from the Italian La Luna e i Falô |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 118
| The spell of Cesare Pavese, a novelist. Italian hill towns in the north or rather villages in the foothills of the Alps. Passion. Intensity. The Harvesters is a racking, smashing book. Curious, undecided, circular movement of The Moon and the Bonfires. |
| 1966/08/29 | Albert Camus | Carnets janvier 1942 - mars 1951 / Albert Camus |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 119
| Camus in Notebooks, planning a novel: " "¦ that void, that little hollow in her since they discovered each other, that call of lovers toward each other, shouting each others' names." Exactly: that discovery of each other. Like May 5 at the airport. The discovery that in each other we find the meaning of life and the universe - that we are capable together of being a microcosm, a whole world, a summary of it all. And then to have the history of this world cut short - we spin in space like empty capsules. And yet no. There is a certain fullness in my life now, even without her. Something that was never there before. |
| 1966/09/17 | Albert Camus | Fall and Exile and the kingdom / Albert Camus ; transl. from the French Chute by Justin O'Brien |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 134-35
| Reread Camus' "Renegad" and today the "Growing Stone." I wish to compare them. Nostalgia for primitive community. Camus is really a traditionalist and romantic conservative, balked by fact that he can't accept Christian transcendence - or even, really, primitive immanence either. So he has neither Man nor Macumba - but wants to celebrate the Sisyphus with primitives none the less. Knows it is hopeless, of course. The ending of "Growing Ston" gives it all away. |
| 1966/09/22 | Albert Camus | Malentendu |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 140
| My reading and study of Camus continues very fruitful. Have now read enough of him and on him so that everything begins to click with everything else. He is an easy man to study because everything he says is said in images and all belong to a living pattern of suggestions and allusions and "myths," easy to spell out. This probably makes him a little corny (his figures tend to be artificial and almost allegorical at times). Today - great impact of Le Malentendu [The Misunderstanding]. Not the odious Chas. [Charles] Addams figures of Martha and the Mother, but the wisdom of love in Maria and the stupidity of Jan's absurd project which leads to his destruction. The question of language and communication treated as though in a morality play. But effectively (perhaps not as drama I don't know, but at least as a "morality," a "parable"). |
| 1966/09/22 | Julien Green | Chaque homme dans sa Nuit |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 141-42
| A letter came today from Julien Green - about my notes on Chaque homme dans sa Nuit. "Your remarks about my novels do throw a light on the strange world my characters live in. No one, to my knowledge, has ever said what you say about the meaning of my books (shall we say the ‘hidden meaning'? I don't like to sound mysterious but, after all, you do hint at something of the kind)." But then he complains that I have damned the hero of Chaque homme, "the only one of my novels in which I clearly indicate that the hero is saved" and indicates how. W. forgives his murder, and the "puritan husband" (Green protests against my calling him "horrid") sees him "as if observing us from a region of light."1 I must have read the ending carelessly - it was so exciting I rushed through it. |
| 1966/10/14 | Albert Camus | etranger : roman |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 149-50
| The letter preface to an American school edition, L'Etranger (preface of Camus himself) has things to say on truth and silence which have deep monastic implications. I must refuse all declarations and affirmations of what I do not fully and actually know, experience, believe myself. Not making statements that are expected of me, simply because they are expected, whether by the monastery (or monastic life) or by the peace movement, or by various literary orthodoxies and anti-orthodoxies or routine rebellions. If I renounce all that, there will be precious little left to say. But above all (as Maritain and I agreed) to steer clear of the futilities of "Post-Conciliar" theological wrangling and image making. |
| 1966/10/31 | Albert Camus | Etat de siège |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 154
| Am reading Camus's L'Etat de siège [State of Siege]. The whole Plague theme is one of the best and most powerful things in his work. The heart of it. Perhaps there is much wrong with this play, but to me it reads well anyway and I like it. A medieval morality play, hence inevitably naive, rambunctious, untidy, and probably not as controlled as he hoped. I suppose one must overlook faults in it - musical comedy atmosphere of the "leading juveniles" - . Was he having trouble with the color, verve, vitality of it? (Better when his plays are somber - Le Malentendu.) I don't know. He liked it and I like it. My heart is with Camus. Thought is going to publish "Three Saviors." |
| 1966/11/01 | Albert Camus | Etat de siège |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 155
| Finished reading Camus's L'Etat de siège. It is really lamentable. A disaster. It began OK, and the idea is good enough, but it is mechanical, arbitrary, full of trite moralizing - none of which is redeemed by the fact that "his heart is in the right plac" etc. It is just downright bad - the moralizing and melodrama of 18th century bourgeois theater, or 20th century agit prop [pro-Communist propaganda]. All the good ideas go astray. A very sad job. |
| 1966/11/02 | Antonin Artaud | Oeuvres complètes |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 156
| I went down in the dark and snow to say my three masses early (others are not saying the 3 Masses anymore - a few of the older priests are). Came back had breakfast, read some Antonin Artaud on the plague theme (Camus tried to use this but failed imaginatively and otherwise. Artaud's thesis is a bit far fetched anyway. Plague - Theater). |
| 1966/11/14 | Nathalie Sarraute | Portrait d'un inconnu : roman / Nathalie Sarraute ; pref. de J.-P. Sartre |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 161
| Delight. Nathalie Sarraute. Finally reading Portrait d'un inconnu [Portrait of a Man Unknown] which has been lying around for four or five years. Very good. I can't read novels - only anti-novels. This is expect[ed]. |
| 1966/12/02 | William Faukner | Go Down Moses |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 165
| Early morning - reading Faulkner's The Bear. Glad the time has come for me to read this. Shattering, cleansing, a mind-changing and transforming myth that makes you stop to think about re-evaluating everything. All great writing like this makes you break through the futility and routine of ordinary life and see the greatness of existence, its seriousness, and the awfulness of wasting it. And how easy it is to waste and trivialize it. Seriousness of my own solitary vocation. Eschatological witness of Ike McCaslin. To know what it means that Boon kills the head Bear. |
| 1966/12/03 | Nathalie Sarraute | Portrait d'un inconnu : roman / Nathalie Sarraute ; pref. de J.-P. Sartre |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 166
| What a contrast between Faulkner and Sarraute. The clever aridity of the Frenchwoman and the passionate myths of the Southerner - the "driving complexities of the heart" - the love of truth, the need to be free - the need to understand why we are not. Biblical Faulkner. I could write a book on The Bear as a basis for contemplative life. The true kind. Theoria. Freedom. One truth. |
| 1966/12/06 | William Faukner | Go Down Moses |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 166
| What a contrast between Faulkner and Sarraute. The clever aridity of the Frenchwoman and the passionate myths of the Southerner - the "driving complexities of the heart" - the love of truth, the need to be free - the need to understand why we are not. Biblical Faulkner. I could write a book on The Bear as a basis for contemplative life. The true kind. Theoria. Freedom. One truth. |
| 1966/12/06 | William Faukner | Go Down Moses |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 166
| Great appetite for Faulkner now. The Bear can be read as a perfect tract on the monastic vocation, i.e. especially poverty. Though it is not "monastic." Merely Christian!! Merely. The Bear is a key to everything in America too. I am talking about it in the Sunday conference. How important to see our monastic vocation in this light. As against all the secular city naivete that is floating around. A genuine and serious eschatology! There comes a point where compromise is simply impossible. Either the curse exists or it doesn't. To embrace the "system" and plunge into it is to say there is no curse and never was and man can by his own ingenuity fix everything just by acting as if there were nothing wrong; and the indifference to humanity which is built into the society he lives in, is accepted as "love." Things just become what you call them. Murder goes on? You have to learn not to see it, I guess!! Solidarity? with what? Murder! Just call it love, that makes everything OK in the secular city and next week there will be a better word for it, "lov" not being quite acceptable. |
| 1966/12/14 | William Faukner | Go Down Moses |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 168
| I am still reading Faulkner. Nothing impresses me as much as The Bear. I suppose I need to get Light in August. Perhaps write on The Bear and Requiem for a Nun - "Faulkner's Saints." My "Day of a Stranger" is accepted by The Hudson Review - for next summer.6 That news came in on the 25th anniversary of my entrance into the community. Re-read the ms. and it is OK. It comes close to being real. Still questions about "Edifying Cables." The typed ms finally got back from Eileen Curns but I have more to do. Maybe the writing is worth while - or let me say - maybe it goes in the right direction. |
| 1966/12/22 | William Faulkner | Wild Palms |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 173-74
| Rinzai and another tremendous bout with Faulkner [The Wild Palms] - this time the convict and the woman and the river. Another fantastic myth, the void, the great power of evil, the alone man, the woman, their relationship, the ark - paradise - hell of snakes where the child is born - the primitive lake-dwelling huts of the cajun - the insensate return. As if the Flood with all its evil lifted humanity to a supreme level of stark, lonely meaning - nameless. The convict, the woman, the child is only a bundle, yet alive, and the boat. Marvelous passages on the River as the Void, from which comes inexhaustible, malignant power. And the frail but indestructible identity of man. And the silent presence of woman. A rending and shattering legend about everything. |
| 1966/12/29 | William Faulkner | Sartoris / William Faulkner ; forew. by Robert Cantwell ; after. by Lawrance Thompson |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 175
| It is good to have accepted a man like Faulkner completely - then you can read and enjoy even an inferior book like Sartoris and watch him working and tolerate the trash that is there - not trash, but juvenile creation. Good really - though a little embarrassing (comic Negroes etc.). Now we are more "serious" than that but do we know anything? |
| 1967/01/24 | William Faulkner | Wild Palms |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 187
| Sunday was Septuagesima. I am giving talks on Faulkner still ("Old Man") and rereading the whole of Wild Palms. Also writing my piece for a Panichas book (Mansions of the Spirit) of which I have a Xerox here. Some fine things in it. This morning I finished the [Georges] Florovsky essay. Which explains perhaps why I never could get into Tolstoy. But it also makes me see that the negative and inconclusive radicalism of Tolstoy could be a danger for me too. Except that I am very different from him. |
| 1967/01/30 | Jean Cocteau | Enfants Terribles |
Ltrs: CforT p. 51
| Ed Rice asked me to write an article on Fr. Pascal Bourgoint for Jubilee. I said I might be able to do this later. Can you tell me where I can get the necessary information on his early life and conversion besides of course Les enfants terribles? I can write to Africa for his last years. If you get a chance to set down a few words on him, I would appreciate it. But no hurry, you have your own work to do and that is much more important. Perhaps there may be an article on him in France somewhere, too? If so, please be sure that I get a copy, and I will be most grateful. |
| 1967/02/19 | William Faukner | Go Down Moses |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 200
| Back to Camus (I have a booklet to write on The Plague. Lee Belford at NYU asked for this). Am glad to get to him again out of the kind of romantic murkiness of Faulkner. "The Fire and the Hearth" is not so wonderful. |
| 1967/02/22 | William Faulkner | Sound and the Fury |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 201
| Box of Faulkner books came yesterday from Random House. I began The Sound and the Fury, which I had never read. What a book! One of the greatest ever written by anybody. There is the real Faulkner. The Benjy section is fascinating - and beautiful, incest and all. A marvelous piece of work, innocent and strange and immediate and with so many implications for the world of "moral" people. |
| 1967/03/31 | William Faulkner | Sound and the Fury |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 209
| Easter Monday morning Pee Wee McGruder came up to finish work on the well digging. They put in the casing after welding it there on the new grass. And then in the afternoon I went for another walk but not far away, only on the dirt road around behind St. Joseph's hill because I had to give a conference. And I gave it on community life, which was perhaps silly. (Palm Sunday I talked on the Easter service from Sound and Fury - Dilsey's illumination. Better.) |
| 1967/04/01 | Albert Camus | peste |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 211
| Doing some notes on Camus' Plague - (background) for the booklet I am to write this summer. |
| 1967/04/19 | Pierre Dommergues | Saul Bellow |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 221
| [Pierre] Dommergues' book [Saul Bellow (Paris, 1967)] came yesterday from Paris. Very interesting. I like the mosaic technique. Lots of information. I still have not read Bellow. |
| 1967/05/06 | Albert Camus | peste |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 228
| Very curious. This morning I begin my work on Camus' Plague and last evening coming up from the monastery I found a dead mouse on my doorstep. I tried to figure out what had killed it, but there was no indication, it was just dead. |
| 1967/06/01 | Albert Camus | peste |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 242
| I sit here with a wind breaker on. It is dark. As far as I am concerned it was a good day - quiet. Began writing the booklet on Camus's Plague for Seabury Press. The Plague itself is impressive on second reading. A clearcut job. Reading [Ernst] Benz on Evolution and Hope [Garden City, NY, 1966]. The absurd hope of some nineteenth-century optimists. The future has to be better, man has to become a superman. Article of faith! Every bit as naive as the most naive myths about Adam and Eve. |
| 1967/06/09 | Franz Kafka | Castle |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 246
| I am reading Kafka's Castle again - this time it hits me harder than before, for some reason. It so exactly describes life in the Catholic Church! The firm and stable unreality of relations between subject and superior - the creation of a small pseudo-supernatural mystery world of curial bureaus from which emanate incomprehensible instructions, warnings, rewards. Perhaps one thing that makes me most laugh: The new archbishop tells Dan Walsh that the Apostolic Delegate (of all people!) thinks very highly of me, wants to come here on retreat etc. (I know he won't!) Then a few days later - the letter of the Delegate to Dom James, sent me from J. in France, with raised eyebrows over my being an advisor of the NAPR (priest-marriage outfit). Meanwhile the Delegate is one of 27 new cardinals. |
| 1967/06/11 | Franz Kafka | Castle |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 248-49
| The Castle. A fantastically suggestive book for anyone living precisely the kind of "Castl" life I live. An ironic tract in Ecclesiology. My order and my Abbot believe firmly in maintaining a kind of Village-Castle relationship in their monks. Thus creating and maintaining something like the intensely neurotic anguish and alienation which Kafka describes so subtly. Too subtly. But the subtlety is part of it. The needless yet necessary subtlety. All this digging into motives of motives "¦ Also The Castle is not a sick book, it is a healthy book about a sick situation, because it admits the sickness. Too much modern optimism seems to consist merely in looking at a bad situation through the small end of the telescope, and saying it isn't really there. On the other hand it is imperative to overcome Castle sickness - involvement in Byzantine and futile hierarchical relationships - hoping in the inscrutable machine - here where I am. But it is so firmly built in to the system I belong to, and I am so deeply obsessed with it, that I wonder if I really can be free. It would be an awful thing to be caught in this forever, without issue. |
| 1967/06/12 | Franz Kafka | Castle |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 249-50
| Finished The Castle except for the fragments at the end. This is I think the third time I have read it. Surprising how much I had forgotten. It is as though the first time, because this time I have been really open to it. The extraordinary scene in the upper floor of the Inn, the corridor of the officials, where they wake up in the morning, the files are distributed etc. Fascinating: a very great piece of writing. Kafka is one of the few writers still capable of making me want to write a story because he is one of the few whose approach I find credible for myself - a dream-like, free association dealing with subliminal events, letting them organize themselves, and not bothering to find an "end." True, it is sometimes a bit boring. (Need to study the fragments he deleted, and see why perhaps.) After reading Kafka all life becomes much more curious because one sees it in that strange perspective, hears people talking and sees them acting as automata, and it is very revealing. Because to a great extent that is what they - we - are. |
| 1967/06/19 | Albert Camus | Myth of Sisyphus |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 317
| I finished Sisyphus in a hurry, bored with its systematic aridity. It is inconclusive even in the thought of Camus himself, an essay, a note, a way station, and all that he proclaims in the middle of it about the "ethic of quantity" (finding meaning in the repetition of meaningless acts) is highly ambiguous because what he finds is precisely a hidden quality. Well, that's that. I turn to something else. |
| 1967/06/26 | Albert Camus | etranger : roman |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 255
| Importance of really studying Kafka's Trial is dawning on me. First of all for work - comparison with Camus' Stranger and for the ideas on language, war etc. Also for my own evaluation of my own position. My own neurotic attitude toward society and my own guilt. A deep [indecipherable] in existential psychoanalysis! And on the idea of "original sin," solitude, identity etc. How K. goes to work and constructs the identity they seemingly "want" him to have (do they "want" anything?). In other words, by resisting one can effectively affirm whatever it is one is accused of and, in a manner, submit to the accusation. (Fr. Kavanaugh's book). The utter uselessness of that kind of righteousness. Du Bay also. It is clear that no one affirms the clerical state in all its absurdity more firmly than Du Bay with his idiot idea of a priests' union. |
| 1967/06/26 | Franz Kafka | trial / by Franz Kafka |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 255
| Importance of really studying Kafka's Trial is dawning on me. First of all for work - comparison with Camus' Stranger and for the ideas on language, war etc. Also for my own evaluation of my own position. My own neurotic attitude toward society and my own guilt. A deep [indecipherable] in existential psychoanalysis! And on the idea of "original sin," solitude, identity etc. How K. goes to work and constructs the identity they seemingly "want" him to have (do they "want" anything?). In other words, by resisting one can effectively affirm whatever it is one is accused of and, in a manner, submit to the accusation. (Fr. Kavanaugh's book). The utter uselessness of that kind of righteousness. Du Bay also. It is clear that no one affirms the clerical state in all its absurdity more firmly than Du Bay with his idiot idea of a priests' union. |
| 1967/07/05 | Albert Camus | Actuelles I: Chroniques 1944-1948 |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 259
| Also I am back reading Camus - Actuelles I and Kafka's Trial - and will keep working toward the Camus book I want to finish, if possible, this year. |
| 1967/07/13 | Albert Camus | peste |
Ltrs: HGL p. 95
| I wrote a pamphlet on Camus's Plague for Seabury Press and thought I'd dedicate it to you, so here is a copy of it. I know you like the Plague. So do I "¦ |
| 1967/08/11 | Albert Camus | peste |
Ltrs: CforT p. 107
| I wonder if you would enjoy the little commentary on Camus's Plague that I wrote, in view of a pamphlet [Albert Camus's The Plague]? I am in any case sending a copy along, and may perhaps add one or two other out-of-the-way items. Since you are so kind and seem to like these things, you encourage me to share them, knowing of course that you will put them aside for the appropriate tim"”or for no time at all if they do not suit you. |
| 1967/08/22 | William Faulkner | As I lay dying |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 281
| Reading on "Bantu Prophets," i.e. the Nativistic Church split-offs in S. Africa. But above all Faulkner's As I Lay Dying - certainly his finest work, far and away - a great work of art, on the highest level, perfectly put together, and with immensely important implications. To my mind one of the great works of all literature, comparable to the best in any field. Today I read the central part, the crossing of the river, and the chapter on Addie, which gives the key to everything, and was simply floored by it. I don't remember when I have read anything with such admiration - it is so full of insight, irony and a whole view of language and reality that is so exact and pertinent to our time that it is breathtaking. And the roots of myth, the solemnity of it. Then the following chapter, the contrast, the little wordy minister hurrying to her death "¦ The most completely damning pages on Southern Christianity in all Faulkner, not excepting Hightower and the other Church people in Light in August. This is so sharp, so exact, so final! This is a book I must study to write about. I have never seen anything written on it that came anywhere near being an adequate appreciation. |
| 1967/08/22 | William Faulkner | Light in August |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 281
| Reading on "Bantu Prophets," i.e. the Nativistic Church split-offs in S. Africa. But above all Faulkner's As I Lay Dying - certainly his finest work, far and away - a great work of art, on the highest level, perfectly put together, and with immensely important implications. To my mind one of the great works of all literature, comparable to the best in any field. Today I read the central part, the crossing of the river, and the chapter on Addie, which gives the key to everything, and was simply floored by it. I don't remember when I have read anything with such admiration - it is so full of insight, irony and a whole view of language and reality that is so exact and pertinent to our time that it is breathtaking. And the roots of myth, the solemnity of it. Then the following chapter, the contrast, the little wordy minister hurrying to her death "¦ The most completely damning pages on Southern Christianity in all Faulkner, not excepting Hightower and the other Church people in Light in August. This is so sharp, so exact, so final! This is a book I must study to write about. I have never seen anything written on it that came anywhere near being an adequate appreciation. |
| 1967/09/26 | James Joyce | Finnigans Wake |
Ltrs: HGL p. 235
| The books arrived yesterday. It is sheer joy to get back into Finnegans Wake again after all these years. The lightness and freedom of it is a huge relief after all the piles of heavy junk one gets buried under. All the messages, all the media, all the mustaches"”for the medium as we know is the mustache. I have gone right into The Anathemata [of David Jones] and it is a fine poem: curious from the Catholic viewpoint right at this time! I hope at least one or two Catholics read it one of these days and keep their sense of continuity with the past. He says everything. And has the sap and solidity of Romanesque sculpture, too "¦ |
| 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 | 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). |
| 1968/01/16 | 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. |
| 1968/02/29 | Carlos Fuentes | Change of Skin |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 60
| Tried some books. Carlos Fuentes' Change of Skin, new, from Farrar, Straus & Giroux "”starts out lovely, fuzzy, but doesn't hold me. I guess it is a good job but it doesn't hold me. What do I care about those people? Very good, though, the new Robert Duncan, Bending the Bow, from New Directions, with a fine terse, complex introduction, putting it all in a setting"”and also a great poem on Christ in the Garden"”like Rilke. Also, the new Gary Snyder"”strong, clear, definite poetry, a man of solid experience. No faking. David Ignatow"”a good poet but describing a person that stands between himself and lif"”and on which sometimes are projected rimal murders. He screams. The screams are unreal (Rescue the Dead). I notice in the poems of Vassar girls a hell of a lot of death wish. |
| 1968/03/30 | B.F. Skinner | Walden Two |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 74
| I have given up on Hugo Rahner's Theology of Prodamation and on Skinner's Walden Two"”I see the "importanc" of the latter but it bores me. I forget the dozen other books I have given up on lately. But last evening I was reading The Essential Lenny Bruce and almost blew my mind. Completely gone in laughter, the kind that doubles you up and almost makes you roll on the floor. Surely that is some indication of the healthiness, and sanity of this satire which so many people regarded as "obscene." In reality, it is much more pure than the sinister doubletalk of the "moral" murderers and cops. Lenny Bruce was one of the few who were really clean. |
| 1968/05/18 | Rene Daumal | Mount Analogue |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 106-07
| This morning I began looking at the copy of [Rene] Daumal's Mount Analogue, which Ferlinghetti just published and which he gave me in San Francisco... From Mount Analogue: "How it was proved that a hitherto unknown continent really existed with mountains much higher than the Himalaya"¦how it happened that no one detected it befor"¦how we reached it, what creatures we met ther"”how another expedition pursuing quite different goals barely missed destruction." |
| 1968/05/20 | Rene Daumal | Mount Analogue |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 107
| Evening. Sun setting over Memphis Airport. I have come in a slow prop plane over flooded Arkansas country from Dallas. Between Albuquerque and Dallas, I finished Mount Analogue, a very fine book. It ends at a strange moment, a sign for the eschatological conscienc"”or it does not end, for the climb has only begun. |
| 1968/05/24 | Peter Nabokov | Two Leggings: The Making of a Crow Warrior |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 121
| Sunday"”Peter Nabokov (whose book Two Leggings I reviewed) showed up with a Puerto Rican priest and a Christian Brother (Bro. Godfrey"”quite a personality), all of whom were involved in the Poor People's March. |
| 1968/07/21 | James Joyce | Dubliners |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 144
| I went to concelebration but fell asleep. Fr. Anastasius preached against false prophets-known by pride and rebellion. False prophets rock the boat. I thought that's what the true ones did. In the evening I gave a talk on Joyce. I hope to discuss some of the stories in Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist, and read parts of Ulysses. |
| 1968/07/21 | James Joyce | Ulysses |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 144
| I went to concelebration but fell asleep. Fr. Anastasius preached against false prophets-known by pride and rebellion. False prophets rock the boat. I thought that's what the true ones did. In the evening I gave a talk on Joyce. I hope to discuss some of the stories in Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist, and read parts of Ulysses. |
| 1968/07/29 | James Joyce | Dubliners |
Ltrs: HGL p. 648
| Am giving talks on Joyce to the brethren now. I regret anything I may have said that suggested Beckett's stories were halfway as good as Dubliners. I was out of my mind. But Ulysses remains one of my top favorites of all time. Such a great job! Am reviewing some current Joyce lore for Sewanee Review and find it atrocious. Half-literate, idiotic garbage. At least some of it. How does such stuff get by? |
| 1968/07/29 | James Joyce | Ulysses |
Ltrs: HGL p. 648
| Am giving talks on Joyce to the brethren now. I regret anything I may have said that suggested Beckett's stories were halfway as good as Dubliners. I was out of my mind. But Ulysses remains one of my top favorites of all time. Such a great job! Am reviewing some current Joyce lore for Sewanee Review and find it atrocious. Half-literate, idiotic garbage. At least some of it. How does such stuff get by? |
| 1968/08/18 | Cesare Pavese | Among Women Only / translation of Tra donne sole |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 155
| Eating supper I finished Cesare Pavese's The House on the Hill. Marvelous writing! A beautiful book! Then I went out and read a French translation of AI Ghazali's Error and Deliverance which is also a magnificent book, one of the greatest! I am beginning, in spite of myself, Pavese's Among Women Only. Fantastic stuff! What a writer! |
| 1968/08/18 | Cesare Pavese | House on the Hill / translation of La Casa in Collina |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 155
| Eating supper I finished Cesare Pavese's The House on the Hill. Marvelous writing! A beautiful book! Then I went out and read a French translation of AI Ghazali's Error and Deliverance which is also a magnificent book, one of the greatest! I am beginning, in spite of myself, Pavese's Among Women Only. Fantastic stuff! What a writer! |
| 1968/10/02 | Hermann Hesse | Journey to the East / translation of Die Morgenlandfahrt by Hilda Rosner |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 196-97
| "My own journey and life-goal which had colored my dreams since late boyhood was to see the beautiful Princess Fatima and if possible to win her love." (H. Hesse, Journey to the East)." I met and loved Ninnon, known as ‘the foreigner"'"”she was jealous of Fatima"”"the princess of my dreams and yet she was probably Fatima herself without knowing it." [Note 14: This is taken from Hermann Hesse's The Journey to the East, translated from the German by Hilda Rosner (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1961), 24.] |
| 1968/10/03 | Hermann Hesse | Journey to the East / translation of Die Morgenlandfahrt by Hilda Rosner |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 198
| Then there was Portland (where we were not supposed to be) and the plane filled up and I finished Hermann Hesse and Paul Bowles [ Note 15: Paul Frederick Bowles (1910-) is an American writer, poet, novelist, translator, and composer living in Tangier, Morocco. It is not certain which book of Bowles's Merton was reading at the time, since it was not returned to Gethsemani with the rest of Merton's personal effects at the time of his death.] and looked out at the scarred red flanks of Lassen Peak and as we landed in SF a carton of Pepsi cans broke open and the cans rolled around all over the floor in the back galley and even a little bit forward, under the feet of some sailors. |
| 1968/10/15 | Hermann Hesse | Siddhartha |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 209
| Long, long noon. Endless noon. Like Alaska in midsummer. In San Francisco it has long been dark. It is nearly 10 at night there. Here, endless sun. I have done everything. Sleep. Prayers. And I finished Hesse's Siddhartha. [Note 5: Siddhartha Gautama (Sanskrit) is the personal given name of the Buddha. Hermann Hesse's novel Siddhartha, however, relates the life of one of the Buddha's earliest disciples.] |
| 1968/11/21 | Tsewang Yishey Pemba | Idols on the Path |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 290
| I finished Murti at Mini. Also all I intend to read of Conze's Buddhist Thought in India, and Dr. [T: Y] Pemba's novel Idols by the Path. It is interesting, full of violence, but probably gives a fair idea of Tibet before and after the Chinese takeover. And of Tibetans in this part of India. |
| 1968/11/29 | Elias Canetti | Auto-da-Fe |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 309
| Then I went into the Taprobane Hotel and got a bottle of Ceylonese beer which turned out to be fairly good, better than Indian. I bought Elias Canetti's Auto-da-Fe at the Taprobane bookstand, anticipating future hours in airports. |
| 1968/12/06 | Herman Hesse | Steppenwolf |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 325
| "Most men will not swim before they are able to." [Note 84: Novalis, as quoted with approval by Hesse's Steppenwolf.] For Nagarjuna, all things are self-contradictory. The root of the Steppenwolf sickness is Steppenwolfs conviction that he is uniquely self-contradictory, and that his selfcontradiction is resolved into a duality of wolf and man, self-love and self-hate. But this duality arises from ignorance of the fact that all "things" are self-contradictory in their very claim to privacy. The Steppenwolf, however, creates a double illusion by the price he places on private individuality as capable of special and unique relationships. |
| 1968/12/06 | Nathanael West | Miss Lonelyhearts |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 326
| "They had run out of seashells and were using faded photographs, soiled fans, timetables, playing cards, broken toys, imitation jewelry, junk that memory had made precious, far more precious than anything the sea might yield." [Note 85: Nathanael West. Miss Lonelyhearths (New York: New Directions. 1969),26.] |
| 1968/12/07 | Herman Hesse | Steppenwolf |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 327
| "The human merry-go-round sees many changes: the illusion that cost India the efforts of thousands of years to unmask is the same illusion that the West has labored just as hard to maintain and strengthen." [Note 86: Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf (New York: Bantam, 1969), 69 |