| Date | Author | Title | Source | Quotation by Merton |
| 1938/08/11 | James Joyce | Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man |
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. |
| 1939/05/02 | Marcus Tullius Cicero | De Oratore |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 3
| Cicero, De Oratore, recommends stamping your foot during your speech. At least at the beginning of the speech and at the end. Caius Gracchus [Note 1: In the first book of Cicero's De Oratore (c. 55 B.C.E.), chapter XXXIV, reference is made to Caius Gracchus, whose speeches were studied as models in the rhetorical schools of the Empire.] had a servant stand behind him with an ivory flute to play the proper note, and regulate the pitch of the orator's voice if he were getting too low or too high or too furious. A girl on a street corner stamping her feet to make the men turn around. |
| 1939/05/12 | Robert Bridges | Milton's prosody |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 5
| Last fall I worked hard and today I am up and working too - getting notes on Bridges' Milton's Prosody and everything is pretty gay. |
| 1939/09/13 | Aurelius Augustinus | Confessions |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 21
| Because ambitious men are absurd, the same suspiciousness towards ambition literature has fallen upon confession literature. (By ambition literature - not Horatio Alger: Stendal.) That is upon all confession literature indiscriminately. Rousseau as well as Saint Augustine. The Confessions of Rousseau belong with ambition literature: these of Saint Augustine do not. The difference is that Saint Augustine confesses God. Rousseau proclaims himself. |
| 1939/09/13 | Blaise Pascal | Provincial Letters, Pensees, Scientific Treatises. / translated by W.F.Trotter, in Great Books of the Western World |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 21
| A model sentence from Pascal. Maybe everyone who wants to write should, before he even starts, consider this sentence as much for its balance and its construction as for what it says: it is the beginning of all writing: "Il ne faut pas avoir l'ême fort elevee pour comprendere qu'il n'y a point ici de satisfaction veritable et solide, que tous nos plaisirs ne sont que vanite, que nos maux sont infinis, et qu'enfin la mort, qui nous menace à chaque instant, doit infailliblement nous mettre, dans peu d'annees, dans l'horrible necessite d'être eternellement ou aneantis ou Malheureux." ["We do not require a very lofty soul to understand that here is no real and lasting satisfaction; that our pleasures are only vanity; that our evils are infinite; and lastly, that death, which threatens us every moment, must infallibly place us within a few years under the dreadful necessity of being for ever either annihilated or unhappy."] Pensees III. 194. [Note 14: Blaise Pascal, The Provincial Letters, Pensees, Scientific Treatises... p.207] |
| 1939/09/13 | Jean Jacques Rousseau | Confessions |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 21
| Because ambitious men are absurd, the same suspiciousness towards ambition literature has fallen upon confession literature. (By ambition literature - not Horatio Alger: Stendal.) That is upon all confession literature indiscriminately. Rousseau as well as Saint Augustine. The Confessions of Rousseau belong with ambition literature: these of Saint Augustine do not. The difference is that Saint Augustine confesses God. Rousseau proclaims himself. |
| 1939/09/14 | A.O. Barnabooth | Journal Intime. |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 22
| Two Quotations: 1 Valery Larbaud - A.O. Barnabooth, Son Journal Intime, p.121 (cf. yesterday remarks on ambition, confessions, Gide etc.) "Currieux: l'aversion que j'eprouve à l'egard de ce que l'on appelle vertu. Il faut que j'examine cela aussi. Je suis bien oblige de constater qu'il y a en moi une emulation au vice. La vertu me semble negative et facile. Le mal me semble positif et difficile..." ["Odd: the aversion I feel toward what is called virtue. I must examine that too. I am quite obliged to note that there is in me an attraction to vice. Virtue seems negative and easy to me. Evil seems positive and difficult to me... etc.] |
| 1939/09/14 | Blaise Pascal | Provincial Letters, Pensees, Scientific Treatises. / translated by W.F.Trotter, in Great Books of the Western World |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 22
| 2. Pascal - Pensees - VI.408. "Le mal est aise, il y en a une infinite; le bien, presque unique. Mais en certain genre de mal est aussi difficile à trouver que ce qu'on appelle bien, et souvent on fais passer pour bien à cette marque de mal particulier..." [Note 15: Great Books of the Western World, 207] 1. These two quotations are obviously not contradictory, but say exactly the same thing. 2. Neither compares absolute good and absolute evil - which cannot be compared because absolute evil does not exist and perfect good is only truly apparent to God. |
| 1939/09/14 | Thomas Aquinas | Summa Theologiae |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 23
| The difference: Pascal considering man in the light of the fall, original sin, redemption, etc. recognizes as "le mal" something easy in the fallen state. It is diverse; it is everywhere. Le bien est unique. cf. Saint Thomas. II-1.2.-Q70-A.4.16 [note 16:] The Summa Theologica, one of the major works of Saint Thomas Aquinas, was read and meditated upon by Merton during this period of his life in New York. He undoubtedly worked easily from the Latin text, as this journal makes clear. |
| 1939/10/01 | Guillaume Apollinaire | Anecdotiques |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 37-38
| This Afternoon, read a few pages of Guillaume Apollinaire's Anecdotiques up in the library... [p.38] Biography is tremendously interesting and fascinating. Therefore, too, Anecdotiques - with its information about Douanier, Rousseau, etc. is also very fascinating. My favorite kind of history: Herodotus; the lives of Saints |
| 1939/10/04 | George Peele | Old Wives Tale |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 40
| I did read Peel's "Old Wives Tale" last night and fount it good. Also more of Apollinaire's Anecdotiques - full of wonderful stories - the man in prison at Ocana - the Albanian, who lived in Brussels, Rio de l'Albanie and ran a magazine called Albania - and so on. |
| 1939/10/04 | Guillaume Apollinaire | Anecdotiques |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 40
| I did read Peel's "Old Wives Tale" last night and found it good. Also more of Apollinaire's Anecdotiques - full of wonderful stories - the man in prison at Ocana - the Albanian, who lived in Brussels, Rio de l'Albanie and ran a magazine called Albania - and so on. |
| 1939/10/09 | Dante Alighieri | Paradiso. English & Italian. The Paradiso of Dante Alighieri |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 45
| Began reading Dante's Paradiso today, out of Douglaston, after Mass. More splendid than anything else before it. He starts by praying to achieve a much higher kind of writing than in the Hell and Purgatory, to fit his much higher subject: and he does. Everything is now made plain: movements are swift and easy (arrows) and the "keel" of the poetry cuts the water in a swift, straight furrow now. Perhaps it is easier to write well of difficulty - the hard climb of the mountain of Purgatory - than of the swift and breathtaking and yet unnoticed movement through nine spheres of heaven... But because heaven is, of itself, a better subject than hell and a higher one, so, with the writing being good enough and hig enough to reach the height of this subject, the Paradiso is the greatest of the three books. |
| 1939/11/20 | James Thurber | Life and Hard Times |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 92
| I have spent weeks telling my class to write out of their own experience: and they write best when they do, too. They write almost good autobiographical short stories sometimes. I showed them some from Thurber's Life and Hard Times and some from Clarence Day: autobiography; now Day's autobiographical sketches have been put together and made into a play on Broadway, Life with Father. |
| 1939/11/20 | William Saroyan | Inhale and Exhale |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 92
| Today I bought Saroyan's Inhale and Exhale and opened it - very exciting and poignant and funny and terrible autobiography. |
| 1939/11/21 | William Saroyan | Inhale and Exhale |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 93
| It is very interesting and exciting to read Saroyan and it is certain enough that he has some good even if nobody knows what. For example I guess his romanticism and Eliot's classicism are about equally important and unimportant. They both certainly wear tags neatly and easily or I wouldn't of mentioned it. |
| 1939/12/14 | Herbert J.C. Grierson | Methaphysical Lyrics & Poems of the 17th C. |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 104
| The books on my bed are Grierson's Metaphysical Poets, Bossuet (whom I haven't read a line of yet), Saroyan, the New Yorker and F. García Lorca. Lorca is fine. A swell poet. For that reason I stop writing this and go back to reading him. Flamenco poetry. Very fine stuff. |
| 1939/12/14 | William Saroyan | Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapese and Other Stories |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 102-03
| Whatever I said about Inhale and Exhale doesn't apply to the Daring Young Man. Very good. Much better than "I. and E." Fewer corny parts. Good prefaces. Good stuff about writing. Still haven't hit an individualstory as good as the one about "Two days wasted in K.C." except Daring Y.M. itself.Very good business about the teletype machine (story-12345678) and the music in it. Saroyan very close to everybody. Closer than any other writer. I remember hearing a girl usher, in the theater where Time of Your Life was playing, saying to someone: "Listen, William Saroyan writes very good." and I never in my life heard an usher say anything like that. |
| 1939/12/14 | William Saroyan | Inhale and Exhale |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 102-03
| Whatever I said about Inhale and Exhale doesn't apply to the Daring Young Man. Very good. Much better than "I. and E." Fewer corny parts. Good prefaces. Good stuff about writing. Still haven't hit an individualstory as good as the one about "Two days wasted in K.C." except Daring Y.M. itself.Very good business about the teletype machine (story-12345678) and the music in it. Saroyan very close to everybody. Closer than any other writer. I remember hearing a girl usher, in the theater where Time of Your Life was playing, saying to someone: "Listen, William Saroyan writes very good." and I never in my life heard an usher say anything like that. |
| 1939/12/17 | William Saroyan | Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapese and Other Stories |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 108
| To tell the class: important what a writer's attitude towards life is. Cf. the Preface to Daring Young Man, which I will probably read to them. If a man writes remembering we must all, at some time or other, die, it is very important. It will greatly affect the way he writes. This is a much better formulation of the problem than T. S. Eliot's way of putting it in terms of original sin. |
| 1940/01/24 | Wystan Hugh Auden | Dance of Death |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 144
| W. H. Auden's trick: ratio-announcers: parody of banal radio announcements-parodying trivialities of commercials and musical comedy songs, etc. Done well enough for once in The Dance of Death and yet not too well either. Since then, done to death. The complete and uninteresting and flat and stupid banality of On the Frontier. Dull as could be. I only dipped into it, however. But it sure looked awful. |
| 1940/01/24 | Wystan Hugh Auden | On the Frontier |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 144
| W. H. Auden's trick: ratio-announcers: parody of banal radio announcements-parodying trivialities of commercials and musical comedy songs, etc. Done well enough for once in The Dance of Death and yet not too well either. Since then, done to death. The complete and uninteresting and flat and stupid banality of On the Frontier. Dull as could be. I only dipped into it, however. But it sure looked awful. |
| 1940/02/13 | Irwin Edman | Candle in the Dark: A Postscript to Despair |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 150
| Reading Maritain's Introduction to Philosophy and finding it very exciting, stimulating, entertaining, clear, forceful. It must make anyone but Aristotelians or Catholics terribly angry, but why not? It is necessary for the truth to be defended without compromise and without a lot of polite philosophical doubletalk. The thing for the other side to do is write something a little more forceful than Edman's Candle in the Dark or a little more coherent and less impotently raging than Communist pamphlets. Maritain can be high-handed because he is completely competent and sure of himself and right. And it is right that people should start philosophy from something as good and clear as this. |
| 1940/03/19 | Graham Greene | Brighton Rock |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 154
| Graham Greene's Brighton Rock is good all the way from the quotation on the flyleaf, from The Witch of Edmonton "This were a fine reign: To do ill and not hear of it again." The book is full of terrific images, witty and complex and metaphysical. He is putting to its very best use a kind of modified surrealism, and the framework of the "thriller" is perfect for what he is trying to do. |
| 1940/10/19 | William Empson | Seven types of ambiguity by William Empson |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 238-39
| Some of the errata listed in the English Edition of Seven Types of Ambiguity are funny. To excuse one sentence in the Gline foreword, he has to say: "For From Mr. Robert Graves' analysis read from Miss Laura Riding's and Mr. Robert Graves' analysis. It is regretted that A Survey of Modernist Poetry is erroneously referred to as by Mr. Robert Graves. It is by Miss Laura Riding and Mr. Robert Graves." Then, after all this: Page 8 line 24 For <i>Miss Gertrude Stern</i> read <i>Miss Gertrude Stein</i>. Page 36 line 11 For <i>paths</i> read <i>pathos</i>. |
| 1940/10/26 | | Sir Gawain and the Green Knight |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 243
| read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight again today and it is one of the best books in the world, the gayest and the most healthy. Men in my class, realizing confusedly in an exam that it had so much more value than Beowulf, and was therefore truer in an ideal sense, groping for an explanation of this experience, could only catch on to the one criterion they knew, and described it as if it were truer in the literal sense, andmore naturalistic and realistic... But even better than Sir Gawain is the Book of Tobias: these two are, at present, my two favorite stories, but the Book of Tobias leaves me, every time, breathless, with all the depth of its symbols and analogies. |
| 1941/02/04 | Dante Alighieri | Inferno. English & Italian. The Inferno of Dante Alighieri |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 304
| But it is still the best epic poem, the best poem, I ever read - I mean the wholeDivine Comedy. |
| 1941/02/11 | Robert Bridges | Milton's prosody |
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. |
| 1941/04/18 | Evelyn Waugh | They were still dancing |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 356
| Leaving Gethsemani was very sad....I went to the Cathedral [of Louisville], then to the Public Library: there I read a chapter-the one on Free Will-in Gilson's Spirit of Medieval Philosophy. In the Public Library I didn't even feel like reading any of Evelyn Waugh's fine travel book They Were Still Dancing which I read between trains there before. |
| 1941/05/09 | P. Mandonnet | Dante le Theologien. Introduction à l'intelligence de la Vie, des Oevres et de l'Art de Dante Alighieri |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 364
| Then I was less happy reading Mandonnet's "Dante le Theologien." It makes you slightly unhappy to read a guy want to write in such a way about Dante and Saint Thomas Aquinas, and making so many smug statements about Saint Thomas being the Truth Itself; and if every line of Dante is not based on Saint Thomas, the only reason is he was not able to get hold of enough of Saint Thomas' books, and had to be content with theories from someone else |
| 1941/06/21 | George Gordon Coulton | From Saint Francis to Dante |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 376
| I just refrained from heaving out the window the only book I've tried to read in weeks except stuff about Dante, Coulton's From Saint Francis to Dante. It contained some fine material, all drowned in Coulton's opinions-argument after argument to vindicate his Victorian optimism, his love of moderate progress, etc. and his belief that asceticism is simply impossible and that saints are really only gentlemen, saints in a nice dull way, not in a mad crazy 13th century way. |
| 1941/06/26 | F.W. Bateson ed. | Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 377
| I am distressed at having to pay so much attention to things like Mudge's Guide to Reference Books but other bibliographies are so dull that it was a kind of a pleasure to read entries in the Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature-new this year, or anyway, last. |
| 1941/06/26 | Isadore Gilbert Mudge | Guide to Reference Books |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 377
| I am distressed at having to pay so much attention to things like Mudge's Guide to Reference Books but other bibliographies are so dull that it was a kind of a pleasure to read entries in the Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature-new this year, or anyway, last. |
| 1941/07/06 | Federico Garcia Lorca | Así que pasen cinco años |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 379
| I also like Lorca's "Así que Pasen Cinco Años." The rugby player, the child and the cat (some scene) the mannequin and the young man: some scenes. That is the first of his plays I have read. |
| 1941/09/01 | Damon Runyon | Damon Runyon Omnibus |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 392
| I read Damon Runyon whom I never, until this, read. He is good because of his style. I laughed more at him today than I did last night. His stories are artificial and stupid and weak. He would be much better without plot: the plot only spoils what he is saying. But in a story like "Blood Pressure," an ending is necessary because a lot of suspense is built up. However the surprise ending is no surprise; it is unimaginative, trite and a let-down. The rest of the story is very funny. There ought to be some way for Damon Runyon to write without those stupid plots to hang such good stuff on! |
| 1941/09/18 | Leon Bloy | Mon Journal |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 409
| Leon Bloy's Vocation (in a letter-Mon Journal, p. 71.) "Pourquoi ne supposeriez-vous pas que ma vocation est peut-être unique? Longtemps avant d'avoir ecrit une seule ligne, j'avais compris que le sacrifice de tout bonheur terrestre m'etait demande et j'avais accompli ce sacrifice. Je recom-mande à votre attention les pages du Desespere, de 179 à 184. Ce sont, je crois, les plus centrales du livre, celles qui expliquent tout"¦." ["Why don't you think that my vocation is at all unique? Long before I wrote even one line, I had realized that I was required to sacrifice all earthly happiness, and I had fulfilled that sacrifice. I bring to your attention the pages of Desèspere, 179-184. These are, I believe, the most important pages of the book, the ones that explain everything"¦."]... ""¦Eh bien, si le don d'ecrire m'a ete accorde, n'est-il pas infiniment plausible de conjecturer quej'ai surtout la mission d'agir sur lea¢mes?" ["And so, if I have a writer's talent, isn't it quite reasonable to suppose that I have a primary mission to work for souls?"] |
| 1941/10/10 | | Mabinogion |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 435
| What is being talked about in the Mabinogion is more like Homer than Keats or Hugo, and therefore it is Romantic in a very different sense from Endymion. It has a sense of desolation, but desolation like that of the Old Testament prophets. It is the Religious desolation of real myth, and experience, and not the sentimental desolation of a fake myth and a vicarious experience-which is all the regular romantics, mostly, achieved. |
| 1941/10/10 | Frank Laurence Lucas | Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 435
| I read in F. L. Lucas' Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal a series of quotations illustrating the term "Romantic." Most of them mean nothing to me: they are slightly or often very ridiculous ("Forlorn-the very word is like a bell""¦. "La Belle Dame sans Merci" ["The Beautiful Woman with no Pity."] / Hath thee in thrall." "Es war ein König in Thule." ["It was a king in Thule."] "Le vent qui vient a travers la montagne/me rendra fou." ["The wind that blows across the mountain makes me crazy."]-This last couldn't be anybody but Old Victor Hugo roaring in his liberal whiskers. I shake with delightful laughter over this sublime line for nearly ten minutes). Then, all of a sudden I come across a couple that not only do not make me laugh, but knock me right off my chair, I find them so impressive and excellent. |
| 1941/10/11 | Frank Laurence Lucas | Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 436-37
| "I like Blake often, but I like Hardy better." This, which is not the best written short sentence in the English language either (the lack of logical correspondence between "often" and "better" is an offensive sloppiness) is one of a million clues to what is wrong with F. L. Lucas' Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal: that, and his naive idea, somewhere, that Blake was a diabolist. Lucas is smart enough to see what is obviously wrong with Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, but not smart enough to see what is obviously right about Coleridge and Blake-to whom he is capable of preferring bleak, pompous, pedestrian dullards like Housman or Hardy who are about as interesting to me as a cold in the head. |
| 1941/10/12 | Ivor Armstrong Richards | Coleridge on Imagination |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 437-38
| Whatever may be wrong with I. A. Richards' notions of Coleridge on Imagination, Lucas is far more wrong about Richards. He evidently doesn't understand the first thing about Richards' theory. When Richards takes a metaphor and breaks it down into all the "connections and cross-connections" of meanings it contains, finding scores of relevant things there that make the metaphor powerful and vital and terrifically significant-Lucas is merely scandalized at this excess of subtlety. He has a sort of Baconian distrust of any theory which says a metaphor can contain so much! In the first place, Richards' method is best when it is applied to the most complex and most highly imaginative poetry-works wonderfully on Shakespeare's sonnets and on metaphysical poetry. Lucas, by preferring Hardy to Blake, and by certain other statements of preference in his book (he definitely can't see as much in the metaphysicals either, as in men like Housman) shows at once that he does not really appreciate poetry of this intensity. Consequently, how can he understand a theory which attempts to show how much is packed into the metaphors of this intense and complex verse. |
| 1941/11/27 | Jacques Maritain | Art and Scholasticism |
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. |
| 1948/09/03 | Robert Graves and Alan Hodges | Reader over Your Shoulder |
Ltrs: CforT p. 6
| It has been quite humiliating for me to find out (from [Robert] Graves and [Alan] Hodge [authors of The Reader over Your Shoulder, which Waugh had sent to Merton]) that my bad habits are the same as those of every other second-rate writer outside the monastery. The same haste, distraction, etc. Really I like The Reader over Your Shoulder very much. In the first place it is amusing. And I like their thesis that we are heading towards a clean, clear kind of prose. Really everything in my natur"”and in my vocation too"”demands something like that if I am to go on writing. The contemplative life demands that everything, all one's habits of thought and modes of action, should be simple and definite and free of waste[d] motion. In every department of our life, that is our biggest struggle. You would be shocked to know how much material and spiritual junk can accumulate in the corner of a monastery and in the minds of the monks. You ought to see the pigsty in which I am writing this letter. |
| 1948/09/06 | Robert Graves and Alan Hodges | Reader over Your Shoulder |
Jnl 2 ('41-'52) p. 229
| One good thing. Evelyn Waugh sent me a fine book to help me to write better, The Reader over Your Shoulder by Robert Graves and Alan Hodges. They seem to think that the time for experimental prose writing is now spent and that we are heading for clear, logical prose that can be rapidly read. I have a definite hunger for clarity and order in my writing"”not necessary for conventions of grammar. Anyway it helps me see my faults and has ascetic implications as well. |
| 1949/02/20 | Antonin Gilbert Sertillanges | Vie Intellectuelle; son exprit, ses conditions ses methodes |
Jnl 2 ('41-'52) p. 283
| More pages in Sertillanges that made me laugh"”the ones about getting up in the middle of the night to scribble down the ideas that come to you. I'd hate to put down any of the notions that occur to me when I wake up in the middle of the night. Sertillanges is definitely not my tempo, and yet he has very good stuff about organizing one's work. Reflecting on my own position"”I have exactly the two hours minimum a day which he calls a minimum. These I have, I mean, for writing. I have other time for reading and prayer. In those two hours I have to take care also of correspondence, duties of charity (reading mss.) or obedience, proofs, contracts, photos for illustrations, talk to the printer on occasion, and order books, and resist the temptation to read catalogs and scraps of magazines"¦ |
| 1949/12/31 | Henri Watson Fowler | Dictionary of Modern English Usage |
Jnl 2 ('41-'52) p. 391
| Evelyn Waugh got Burns, of Hollis and Carter, to send me a copy of Ward Fowler's Modern English Usage as an incentive to clean up my prose style, if I can be said to possess a prose style. I am resolving to use it. That is one of my New Year's resolutions, along with a return to the Stations of the Cross daily and regularly after Chapter - or sometime - at least once a day. |
| 1950/01/28 | Henri Watson Fowler | Dictionary of Modern English Usage |
Ltrs: CforT p. 15
| It is some time since I have given an account of myself. [Tom] Burns sent a copy of Fowler and I am very grateful. I am studying it with much amusement and profit. I remember enjoying it when I dipped into it in past years. In those days I was mostly interested in his wit. That Graves and Hodge book is very helpful. |
| 1950/03/01 | | Song of Roland |
Jnl 2 ('41-'52) p. 413
| So [Book of] Josue is my favorite epic. I like it better than The Iliad, infinitely better than Virgil or the Song of Roland. It is a clean book, full of asceticism. |
| 1950/03/01 | Homer | Iliad / Translated by Robert Fitzgerald |
Jnl 2 ('41-'52) p. 413
| So [Book of] Josue is my favorite epic. I like it better than The Iliad, infinitely better than Virgil or the Song of Roland. It is a clean book, full of asceticism. |
| 1950/10/10 | Pierre Emmanuel | Qui est cet homme? |
Jnl 2 ('41-'52) p. 435
| There are times when ten pages of some book fall under your eye just at the moment when your very life, it seems, depends on your reading those ten pages. You recognize in them immediately the answer to all your most pressing questions. They open a new road. The first ten pages of Pierre Emmanuel's Qui est cet homme? [ou Le Singulier Universel. Paris, 1947] (Chapter I) are that for me. They tell me clearly what I was trying to get obscurely last month out of Ecclesiastes. His is the message of Ecclesiastes. He is the enemy of my angelism. |
| 1950/12/06 | Henry David Thoreau | Walden or Life in the Woods |
Jnl 2 ('41-'52) p. 445
| After those beautiful pages on morning and on being awake, Thoreau writes in his Walden: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." He adds mysteriously, "nor did I wish to practice resignation unless it was quite necessary." I suppose he means he did not intend to be resigned to anythinglike a compromise with life, unless it could not be avoided. |
| 1950/12/08 | Henry David Thoreau | Walden or Life in the Woods |
Jnl 2 ('41-'52) p. 446
| Compare the basic asceticism in Walden with that of St. John of the Crossagreement on the fundamental idea-not, of course, on the means or technique, except to some extent. Ascesis of solitude. Simplification of life. The separation of reality from illusion. "If we respected only what is inevitable, and has a right to be, music and poetry would resound along the streets." |
| 1954/12/20 | Rudyard Kipling | Just-So Stories |
Ltrs: RtoJ p. 218
| However, there is one thing which I treasure and which you also will like. It is an old magazine containing an article on my Father's painting and several reproductions both in color and black and white. It is an old beat-up magazine, and may be in worse shape still by the time it reaches you. But I think you will agree on its worth. Most of the later pictures were done in places I remember very well. The Marseilles one was the view from a room in a little hotel where we stayed on the Vieux Port, and I remember lying around reading Kipling's Just-So stories while Father was painting at the window. |
| 1955/11/26 | Bruno Snell | Discovery of the mind: in Greek philosophy and literature |
Ltrs: Hammer p. 25
| The Snell book is here and I have begun it. I can see its great importance, and therefore i ask you to bear with me if I do not return it in a hurry. My time is rather sparsely protioned out and it takes time through such a book. |
| 1956/02/05 | Bruno Snell | Discovery of the mind: in Greek philosophy and literature |
Ltrs: Hammer p. 29
| I finally have a chance to write you and tell you that I am sending the Snell book back - long after I had promised to do so. It is indeed an important book, and I regret that it is so far from my present context that Iwas unable to do it full justice. It is so difficult to follow all the avenues that open out before one, and I must of necessity leave the vistas of Greek thought somewhat misty, to my regret. I have no other choice, since my limited time for reading and study is now almost all taken up with scripture and mysticism and monastic history and whatnot - things necessary for myself and the novices. So I did not master all of Snell |
| 1956/08/14 | Georges Bernanos | Last Essays of Georges Bernanos |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 65
| On top of this, [Georges] Bernanos' Last Essays of which at least the last is fine (I have not touched any of the others)-again, the importance, the necessity of France. The fool might laugh at his intensity, but he is terribly right. |
| 1956/08/14 | Julien Hartridge Green | Journals |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 64
| Julien Green's Journal has finally come to absorb me altogether in the sleepy time after dinner when I have to read something light to keep awake. The first two volumes were innocent and could be read like a magazine in a dentist's office with a certain detachment or, better perhaps, superficially They do not invite the reader to commit himself. One is simply interested by the reappearance of Gide and by his bright sayings and by Green's struggle to write another novel. (I have never had any desire to read any of his novels.) After the war years have begun it is another matter. Green, in America, had an imperious need for France, for Paris. Here there is no neutrality. I find I am in the same position-to some extent. Green challenges me to remember whether or not I am, as he is, French. Well, I am. |
| 1956/08/14 | Julien Hartridge Green | Journals |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 65
| To be completely dependent on a country, on a city"¦for a moment I was annoyed at Green and started finding fault with him as a bourgeois. But that is not enough. He may be a man of his (my) clan, but there is more to it than that. France is what it is and it is important to see this. Not to be able to see it is to have lived only a half-human life. Green's 4th. volume is very fine. It is a record of a civilized mind-perhaps one of the last. I am already, with my generation, far less civilized than he, far less able to see. Also, no one should underestimate the powerful, though unassuming, intuitions about religious things, in which connection I appreciate above all his exactness and refusal to pretend. |
| 1957/08/08 | Julien Hartridge Green | Journals |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 108
| Finally got the rest of Green's Journals. Their climate is wonderful. I am really at home in it-he is an honest mind-and dishonest too, like all of us, but simple about it. And he loves France. I am more fascinated by his days than anything I can think of. His moments of despair are important to me, because, above all, he clings in desperation to the reality of the religious life. It is most "edifying" to look at religion through his eyes-which are honest ones. For edification does not mean delusion. He sees religious as they are-with their limitations. And I have those limitations too. To what extent have they crippled me? I ask that as if there were an answer. But I will probably never know. |
| 1957/09/10 | Ludwig Bemelmans | Donkey inside |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 116
| No easy generalizations about Job and Zen. Job is a big koan. So is everything else. Best book yet about Ecuador-Bemelman's-The Donkey Inside-which I got in the Louisville library. |
| 1957/10/26 | James Joyce | Letters of James Joyce |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 129
| "Ten years of my life have been consumed in correspondence and litigation about my book Dubliners. It was rejected by 40 publishers; three times set up and once burnt. It cost me about 3,000 francs in postage, fees, train and boat fare for I was in correspondence with 110 newspapers, 7 solicitors, 3 societies, 40 publishers and several men of letters about it. All refused me except for Ezra Pound." Letter of James Joyce to John Quinn. 10 July 1912. [The whole first edition of Dubliners was burnt.] |
| 1957/11/11 | James Joyce | Letters of James Joyce |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 135
| Joyce's Letters (sent them back to Louisville today)-a very fine book. Especially enjoyed his letters to his family-Lucia, Giorgio. A great and good person, hounded by a lot of narrow minded idiots. That generation and that world have almost vanished now. The picture of Joyce and family, as if they were all going to step out together in a fantastic dance. Joyce's passion for singing and singers. I want to read Finnegans Wake the way I want to hear good music. Patience, man. Mortify yourself in something. The quiet in the cannery this afternoon was, for once, as good as music and more healing to my soul. Joyce's Letters were better than all the mail I didn't get at All Saints. |
| 1957/11/17 | Arthur Koestler | Invisable Writing |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 140
| "Their mentality (of party intellectuals in 1930s) was a caricature of the revolutionary spirit"¦the seeds of corruption had already been present in the work of Marx in the vitriolic tone of his polemics, the abuse heaped on his opponents, the denunciation of rivals and dissenters as traitors"¦" 29 "The liberals in Germany and elsewhere have clearly understood that there are situations in which caution amounts to suicid"¦" 38 |
| 1957/11/17 | Bertolt Brecht | Measures Taken / Translated from German Die Massnahme |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 140
| Quote from Bert Brecht Punitive Measure: "He who fights for communism must be able to fight and to renounce fighting, to say the truth and not to say the truth, to be helpful and not helpful, to keep a promise and to break a promise, to go into danger and to avoid danger, to be known and be unknown-He who fights for Communism has of all the virtues only one: that he fights for Communism." (In the play villain falls into 4 traps-"pity, loyalty, dignity, righteous indignation") p. 41ff. Quote from a Communist in Bruckberger: "We manufacture gods and transform men to believe in Order. We will create a universe in our image without weaknesses"¦in which man will attain his cosmic grandeur"¦We are not fighting for a regime, or for power or for riches, we are the instruments of fate." |
| 1957/12/17 | Albert Einstein | Ideas and Opinions |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 146-47
| Here, however, is a paragraph which I can and ought to make my own: "My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities. I am truly a ‘lone traveller' and have never belonged to my country, my house, my friends, or even my immediate family with my whole heart; in the face of these ties I have never lost a sense of distance and need for solitude - feelings which increase with the years. One becomes sharply aware, but without regret, of the limits of mutual understanding and consonance with other people. No doubt such a person loses some of his innocence and unconcern; on the other hand he is largely independent of the opinions, habits, and judgments of his fellows and avoids the temptations to build his inner equilibrium on such insecure foundations." (Ideas and Opinions, p. 9) |
| 1957/12/24 | Georges Bernanos | Dialogue des carmelites |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 148
| Bob also sent Bernanos' Dialogue des carmelites one of the first things I read after coming over to the novitiate. |
| 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. |
| 1958/05/29 | Boris Pasternak | Safe Conduct: An Autobiography and other Writings |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 204
| Finished Pasternak's Safe Conduct and felt as if I must at once begin to read it again. A magnificent book, one of the great ones. The fabulous descriptions of the flower store in Leningrad-the incidents in Marburg and Vienna-trains-the Urals-his devotion to Scriabin and Maiakovsky - Maiakovsky's suicide, his piteous lamentation over him and the cryptic conclusion. I have thought several times of writing to Pasternak. How absurd-as if I could contemplate the writing of such a letter. But perhaps I could send him "Prometheus"-And need to send the "Tower of Babel." |
| 1958/08/22 | Boris Pasternak | Safe Conduct: An Autobiography and other Writings |
Ltrs: CforT p. 87
| I have not yet had the pleasure of reading your recent autobiography although I am familiar with the earlier one, Safe Conduct, by which I was profoundly impressed. It may surprise you when I say, in all sincerity, that I feel much more kinship with you, in your writing, than I do with most of the great modern writers in the West. That is to say that I feel that I can share your experience more deeply and with a greater intimacy and sureness, than that of writers like [James] Joyce whom I nevertheless so well like and understand. But when you write of your youth in the Urals, in Marburg, in Moscow, I feel as if it were my own experience, as if I were you. With other writers I can share ideas, but you seem to communicate something deeper. It is as if we met on a deeper level of life on which individuals are not separate beings. In the language familiar to me as a Catholic monk, it is as if we were known to one another in God. |
| 1958/09/04 | Louis Bouyer | Newman: His Life and Spirituality |
Ltrs: RtoJ p. 231
| In the refectory they are reading Newman's life by Louis Bouyer, a splendid book "¦ I think it is the wisest and most outspoken book about the problems of converts that I have ever seen"”it has made me really understand and sympathize with Newman for the first tim"”and now I am sold on him, I think he was really a saint "¦ |
| 1958/10/12 | Mark Van Doren | Autobiography of Mark Van Doren |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 223
| Then on Friday Mark Van Doren's autobiography came and I have begun it, getting with him as far now as the army in World War I and the Negroes. The world of Illinois and of his childhood is very much the same as the world all around us and yet I suddenly find it hard to believe in such peace and such security. That only means that I have finally realized such peace and security have never been normal for mankind as a whole. They have existed, but as an anomaly. But they should be normal. |
| 1958/11/10 | Czeslaw Milosz | Captive Mind |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 230
| Reading Czeslaw Milosz The Captive Mind-a really interesting book. When you read something worthwhile in these days, you know it right away-and this is worthwhile-every line of it. The challenge it presents-very clear and sober. Who is there in the West that can write a book that will really be appreciated by someone who has lain on the cobblestones of the street with the machine gun bullets whizzing by him and re-arranging a pattern of upturned paving stones? |
| 1958/12/15 | Boris Pasternak | I Remember: Sketch for an Autobiography |
Ltrs: CforT p. 93
| Kurt W. [Wolff] has sent me the Essai autobiographique [written as the introduction to A Sketch for an Autobiography and published separately in 1958] and I am reading it with great pleasure. In my turn I am sending you a book of mine, also autobiographical in character, called The Sign of Jonas. It may take a little time to get there. New Directions may also send you a small volume of my poems, of which I am by no means proud. |
| 1958/12/30 | Sophocles | Oedipus at Colonus |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 244
| Significant that on the 28th. in the morning I read Oedipus at Colonus and was deeply moved by it. |
| 1959/02/24 | Czeslaw Milosz | Captive Mind |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 264
| Fine letter from Czeslaw Milosz in Paris. I had written about The Captive Mind. He replied at length about Alpha, Beta, etc. gave information about books, said he had translated some poems of mine into Polish. Sense of dealing, for once, with a real person, with one who has awakened out of sleep. There is no question that the world of the West and I in it, is involved in the deepest and most restless, and most stupid sleep. And how are we going to wake up? (The efforts which Western politicians imagine to be an awakening are only ways of tossing around in order to settle into an even deeper slumber.) |
| 1959/02/28 | Paul Claudel | Jeanne d'Arc au bûcher |
Ltrs: CforT p. 56-57
| There is something much too mental and abstract, something too parochial about a great deal of Catholic thought and Catholic spirituality today, and this applies to the contemplatives in large measure. So much of it is all in the head. And in politics it is even worse: all the formulas, the gestures, the animosities, and the narrowness. I can easily understand your attitude though I do not know the situation. I can understand your looking for something in Simone Weil and am glad you translated her. Personally I found a great deal that rang a bell for me in Dr. Zhivago and I very much like [Nikolai] Berdyaev. There are people in the Orthodox Theological Institute (Institut Saint Serge) in Paris who are doing some tremendous thinking in spiritual things ([Paul] Evdokimov for instance) "¦Among the Catholics [Louis] Bouyer is writing some good things, also of course [Henri] De Lubac, [Jean] Danielou etc. And then there is [Romano] Guardini, who is splendid. I have never been able to read a line of [Paul] Claudel's big fat poems, but I like Jeanne d'Arc au bûcher and some of his prose, particularly about Japan. Japan is another obsession of mine. Not Rashomon"”yet! Only Zen. |
| 1959/04/14 | Boris Pasternak | I Remember: Sketch for an Autobiography |
Ltrs: CforT p. 96
| Thank you also for I Remember. You have presented it very attractively, and I am delighted to find in it the notes on translating Shakespeare which are a very important addition. I have not been able to read them yet, I am saving them for a moment in which I can give them thought. With Pasternak one does not just read things in a rush. He puts himself so generously into everything, even and especially his letters"”to strangers. I have not heard any more from him, but the quotes from his letters to Miriam Rogers etc. are most illuminating. I also received some news about him indirectly from a person to whom he writes in England [John Harris]"”but this was before February 11th. |
| 1959/05/21 | Lional Mordecai Trilling | Broken Mirror: A Collection of Writings from Contemporary Poland / edited by Pawel Mayewski |
Ltrs: CforT p. 58
| Reading The Broken Mirror, I was moved by the sense of real kinship with most of the writers. Underneath the institutional shells which distinguish us, we have the same ardent desire for truth, for peace, for sanity in life, for reality, for sincerity. But the trouble is that our very efforts to attain these things tend to harden and make more rigid the institutional shell. And a turtle without a shell is not likely to lead a happy life, especially in a world like ours. But perhaps the trouble is that we imagine ourselves turtles. I speak here of the Polish writers in The Broken Mirror. I could not seem to spot any of them as Alpha, though I was looking for him. (You did not send me his book, or at any rate I did not get it.) I thought [Kazimierz] Brandys's story "The Defense of Granada" was a very good piece and of course I felt very much involved in it, it grips one's sympathies. Parts of [Wiktor] Woroszylski's "Notes for a Biography" are also very convincing and sympathetic. I liked perhaps best the notes of Jan Strzelecki. The story by Tadeusz Rozewicz seemed to me to be quite bad, like a contribution to a college-humor magazine in this country: one that we would never have published in the Columbia Jester. |
| 1959/06/07 | Julien Hartridge Green | Journals |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 286
| Saw Shakertown-the big old dormitories stood among the weeds in desolation. Yet there was still something young about the old buildings, as if their pioneer hopefulness were still in them, as if they could not despair though the Shakers (having refused to have children) were all gone. A strangely touching monument to our ingrained puritanism which is not just silly. It is pathetic and beautiful in its wrongness - J. Green is so sensitive to this in his Journal which deals increasingly with Calvinists and Port Royal. |
| 1959/06/28 | Gerard Manley Hopkins | note-books and papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins / Gerard Manley Hopkins ; ed. with notes and a pref. by Humphry House |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 297
| Baffled by the intensity of observation in the G. M. Hopkins notebooks (Thought I would talk to the novices about inscape and poetry to give them a change). |
| 1959/07/16 | D.H. Lawrence | Mornings in Mexico |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 306
| Now too is the time to go into a different regime. I don't need all the library books I have been getting (though Lawrence's Mornings in Mexico had two wonderful chapters on Indian towns). More prayer, more sacrifice, more silence- more work. There are still lots of things to think about in the next three months. I have little doubt the indult will be granted. |
| 1959/08/15 | James Thurber | Years with Ross |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 316-17
| Terrell Dickey lent me Thurber's book The Years with Ross. Interesting, and yet I don't laugh. In a way it is a sad book-saying so definitely that the era and the city I once believed in are both already finished, and belong only to the past. Every name hits me hard-names I had forgotten-Dorothy Parker, Rea Lavin, Scudder Middleton (who was at all those parties Reg would take me to), Reginald Marsh himself, John O'Hara, Scott Fitzgerald. People not of my generation but the ones my generation believed in. And the brave days of Columbia in the Thirties, which Ad Reinhardt still believes in, I learned at his last visit. |
| 1959/08/18 | James Thurber | Years with Ross |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 318
| The book about the New Yorker-Thurber's-oppresses me. Civilization oppresses me, or rather all that is new in it does-the most comforting thing in the book is the sketch on the cover-a boat in one of the Manhattan docks. The only good thing about New York is that you can sail from there to France. |
| 1959/08/22 | James Thurber | Years with Ross |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 320
| I continued to be interested and depressed by The Years with Ross. It is really a very remarkable book in its way-a historical document. And a very human one. That is the only way one could write the life of an abbot. "The Years With James." It is remarkable the mixture of objective criticism, legitimate impatience, admiration, resentment, and love with which Thurber looks at Ross. Very edifying in its subtle way, and yet also there is something weird about it. Maybe neurotic. Which I guess Ross was and Thurber probably is. |
| 1959/08/24 | James Thurber | Years with Ross |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 321
| Yesterday finished The Years with Ross, and am tempted to write Thurber a note about it. This seems to be a good thing to do. J. Laughlin wants me to write a note to Mina Joy in Aspen, to cheer her up. (He sent me her poems from N. Carolina.) And I will. |
| 1959/12/06 | Niall Brennan | Making of a Moron |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 353
| Read a bit of Voillaume on the poverty of the Little Brothers. Finished Neal Breman's excellent book The Making of a Moon. |
| 1960/01/17 | Aeschylus | Prometheus Bound |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 370
| After dinner-read the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus. Shattered by it. I do not know when I have read anything so stupendous and so completely contemporary. I felt like throwing away everything and reading nothing but Aeschylus for six months. Like discovering a mountain full of diamond mines. It is like Zen-like Dostoevsky-like existentialism-like Francis-like the New Testament. It is inconceivably rich. I consider this a great grace on the feast of St. Anthony! A great religious experience. Prometheus, archetypal representation of the suffering Christ. But we must go deep into this. Prometheus startles us by being more fully Christ than the Lord of our own cliches-I mean, he is free from all the falsifications and limitations of our hackneyed vision which has slowly emptied itself of reality. |
| 1960/03/03 | Bruno Snell | Discovery of the mind: in Greek philosophy and literature |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 377
| Walked in the snow after dinner and read a little about St. Bede. There are so many things to read! Snell on the Discovery of the Mind (in Ancient Greece) is enthralling but yet unsatisfactory. Too simplified. We have oversimplified Classical Greece. Only Cornford satisfies me as having approached its true complexity. |
| 1960/03/16 | Giles Lytton Strachey | Eminent Victorians |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 379
| Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians. The life of Manning is a masterpiece. That of Arnold, disappointing. That of Gordon perplexing and disturbing. I believe that his portrait of the religious megalomania of Gordon is distorted and overdone. But I am sure it is essentially true. I feel very sorry for the poor man-and also do not quite understand him. For there are wide gaps in Strachey. Strachey, Tom Bennett, myself at 18-and so many other Englishmen laughing at false mystics and holding them off by supercilious objectivity. All Englishmen who are not Thomas [sic] Cromwells or worse, tend to be General Gordons. (Hence Trevor-Roper's fear of monks and his admiration T. Cromwell-of all people to have for a hero!) |
| 1960/05/06 | Jean Paul Sartre | Huis Clos |
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. |
| 1960/06/01 | Georges Bernanos | Dialogue des carmelites |
Ltrs: WtoF p. 268
| Did I thank you yet for Bernanos' Dialogues des Carmelites? It is a splendid thing, and it is good to have it here in French. I had read it a long time ago in English. |
| 1960/06/30 | Bertolt Brecht | Trial of Heron Lucullus |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 17
| I am in St. Anthony's Hospital for X-rays. A quiet hot day, reading Chinese philosophy and a little book on the Etruscans-and Bert[olt] Brecht's "Trial of Heron Lucullus" [radio play, New York, 1943]. |
| 1960/07/10 | Bertolt Brecht | Private Life of the Master Race |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 19
| Read Brecht "Private Life of the Master Rac" under the pine trees the other day. Because it is good, one can see how it would be not thoroughly acceptable to the Party-the good things precisely would make it unacceptable! Which? Well, one obviously thinks of the same things which he condemned in Nazism flourishing in Communism. It is a good medium. |
| 1960/07/10 | D.H. Lawrence | Sketches of Etruscan Places and other Italian Essays |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 19
| I have been able to take a little time for reading in the woods, but have been trying to do too much especially with Richards' Mencius (getting excited about the ideograms and literal translations in the Appendix). [D. H.] Lawrence's Etruscan Places [London, 1932] is a book with which I am in harmony-I remember the day I discovered the Etruscans in the Villa Giulia. Of course L. has his axe to grind. |
| 1960/09/09 | E. M. Forster | Abinger Harvest |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 44
| Brought back from the library, for light reading, O[liver] St. John Gogarty's Week End in the Middle of the Week and could not stand it. Empty, absurd, it antagonized me. That peculiar type of emptiness (which requires a peculiar type of snotty audience) I tend to label (perhaps unjustly) as fascist. So I turned to a paperback of E. M. Forster's, Abinger Harvest [New York, 1953] and this, on the contrary, I find charming and alive. And I agree, and I delight in listening, and in agreeing. It is a voice that comforts me, it is a voice of a world to which I still belong and am proud to belong-of humanism and, culturally, of Catholicity. (Yet Gogarty is the Irishman of the two and Forster the English protestant.) I have to be humble to take serious thought in having to say Forster is my kind of person (I hope). |
| 1960/09/09 | Oliver St. John Gogarty | Week End in the Middle of the Week: and other Essays on the Bias |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 44
| Brought back from the library, for light reading, O[liver] St. John Gogarty's Week End in the Middle of the Week and could not stand it. Empty, absurd, it antagonized me. That peculiar type of emptiness (which requires a peculiar type of snotty audience) I tend to label (perhaps unjustly) as fascist. So I turned to a paperback of E. M. Forster's, Abinger Harvest [New York, 1953] and this, on the contrary, I find charming and alive. And I agree, and I delight in listening, and in agreeing. It is a voice that comforts me, it is a voice of a world to which I still belong and am proud to belong-of humanism and, culturally, of Catholicity. (Yet Gogarty is the Irishman of the two and Forster the English protestant.) I have to be humble to take serious thought in having to say Forster is my kind of person (I hope). |
| 1960/09/10 | E. M. Forster | Abinger Harvest |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 44
| "For what, in that world of gigantic horror, was tolerable except the slighter gestures of dissent?" So says E. M. Forster, discussing his satisfaction on reading the early Eliot during World War I. We tend to think massive protest is all that is valid today. But the massive is also manipulated and doctored. It is false. The genuine dissent remains individual. At least that is my option. In my view it is saner and nobler to take the kind of view E. M. Forster takes, not line up with the manipulated group. But to the group this looks like defeat. It looks like futility. What is likely to be wrong is the failure of action. This kind of dissent may never be anything but words, attitudes, ideas. On the other side what seems to be "action" on the mass scale may be nothing more than a parade-or an organized disaster. A big, blown up expression of a puny idea which, by its very emptiness, leads to a cataclysm of destructiveness. This is the gigantic horror, against which even the slightest idea is of great value. |
| 1960/09/25 | E. M. Forster | Abinger Harvest |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 52
| Reading Lorca again-what a marvelous poet, so alive, so much strength and vividness and sound. I can think of no modern poet that gives me more genuine poetic satisfaction. Wholeness. Primitive and modern. Beauty. Toughness. Music. Substance. Variety. Originality. Character. Color. Andalusian weather. Finished Abinger Harvest, embarrassed a little by the pageant but loved all the rest of it. Finished Isaias |
| 1960/09/25 | E. M. Forster | Abinger Harvest |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 52
| Finished Abinger Harvest, embarrassed a little by the pageant but loved all the rest of it. Finished Isaias. Not finished-Daniel the Stylite. But turned him in anyway. Pussy's life of Dom Martène.17 I'll keep at it. And I want to read this about Toumliline, too. |
| 1960/12/26 | Henry Miller | Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch |
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. |
| 1961/01/18 | Samuel Nathaniel Behrman | Portrait of Max: an Intimat Memoire of Sir Max Beerbohm |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 86
| Moved by S. N. Behrman's beautiful book on Max Beerbohm [Portrait of Max, New York, 1960]. That is important for me-the lost side of my life. Note Brecht loved Kipling and Beerbohm hated him. I think this is very significant. Brecht-something of the self I wanted briefly to become when I immigrated (I ceased to want to be Beerbohm). |
| 1961/01/21 | Samuel Nathaniel Behrman | Portrait of Max: an Intimat Memoire of Sir Max Beerbohm |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 89
| That Behrman book on Beerbohm is not always admirable. Sometimes his admiration makes him sound like something Beerbohm himself would have parodied. He foolishly says too much. |
| 1961/01/22 | Samuel Nathaniel Behrman | Portrait of Max: an Intimat Memoire of Sir Max Beerbohm |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 90
| I know what really annoys me about the Behrman book-he is finally, completely, dedicated to the illusion that Max was to be treated as some kind of ultimate reality, as an ens per se [being existing by itself]. The total acceptance of shadow for substance, the conservation of accident for its own sake. One can and should enjoy Beerbohm's humor, his comments on his time and on his contemporaries, but to solidify him into something eternal, just in what was precisely transient about him, this is sentimental and idolatrous and therefore it is very boring. |
| 1961/04/06 | William Carlos Williams | In the American grain |
Ltrs: CforT p. 289
| J. Laughlin"”your publisher and min"”tells me you have been quite sick, a fact which I am sorry to hear. I hope you will be getting better soon & will be writing some more. From the thirties on I have been reading your poetry with great pleasure, and recently I opened up [In the] American Grain & came upon your fine essay on Daniel Boone. It moved me very much. I have a little house in the woods near the Abbey & all my neighbors are Boones & I guess I myself have become a Boone in my own way. What you said about D. Boone is profoundly meaningful, in a time when I get so sick of our infidelity to the original American grace that I no longer know what to do. Anyway Daniel Boone had it & I think you have kept it. |
| 1961/06/15 | Romain Rolland | Inde: journal 1915-1943 |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 127
| Began the other day reading Romain Rolland's Inde. Wide awake and all there when I read this (I cannot say as much for Nels Ferre, whom nevertheless I like). Much more myself, much more awake, reading this than when reading some of the long chapters, in proof, of my own New Man, which is a failure. The thing that keeps me awake in Rolland is truth. I don't mean dogmatic truth, but the truth of life. He is a lover of India but not a zealot or an enthusiast and he sees the weaknesses, the vanities, the blindnesses. He does not just take Gandhi blindly. He sees the element of despotism in Gandhi. He likes Tagore and now so do I. I really want to read Tagore. Victoria Ocampo sent me a picture of him. I sent her Mencius. |
| 1961/06/21 | Romain Rolland | Inde: journal 1915-1943 |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 130
| Romain Rolland's Inde is detailed and interesting - besides being very important - in the objectivity with which he treats Tagore. The conflict in Tagore between the poet and the prophet. He is too seldom able to rise to the "prophetic" (or shall we simply say political) level. Analysis of his struggles over Fascism-how easily he was duped and used and how much trouble his friends had to go to [to] wake him up. We are travelling toward an age in which consciences are no longer troubled over such things! Que penser d'une epoque où les fêtes du centenaire de St-François d'Assise sont patronees par un Mussolini! Et l'Eglise Romaine, bien loin de protester, y trouve son profit! [What can be thought of an age when festivals celebrating the anniversary of St. Francis of Assisi are presided over by a Mussolini! And the Roman Church, instead of mounting a protest, profits from the occasion!] Inde, p 167 Same page. That the basic conflict is between Conscience = Christ in us, and the state. |
| 1961/07/08 | Romain Rolland | Inde: journal 1915-1943 |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 140
| An understanding of why I am so taken with Romain Rolland, why he speaks to me with such warmth of conviction: a chance phrase. "Tout m'est ferme en France; et je n'ai pas où aller [All is closed to me in France, and I have nowhere to go]" (Inde, p. 282). That is the condition for penetrating everywhere-but to a few. |
| 1961/07/11 | Allen Ginsberg | Kaddish and other poems 1958-1960 |
Ltrs: CforT p. 289-90
| It has taken me a long time to get to be able to follow your advice and read Kaddish [and Other Poems], because nobody sent me one. But finally Laughlin is out in SF and the City Lights Books sent me a copy. I agree with you about it. I think it is great and living poetry and certainly religious in its concern. In fact, who are more concerned with ultimates than the beats? Why do you think that just because I am a monk I should be likely to shrink from beats? Who am I to shrink from anyone, I am a monk, therefore by definition, as I understand it, the chief friend of beats and one who has no business reproving them. And why should I? Thank you for telling me about Kaddish. And I also liked very much the poem on Van Gogh's ear ["Death to Van Gogh's Ear!"]. I think this is one of the few people around who is saying anything. The others are in a bad way. I hope I can some time send you a long poem I think you may like. It ["Hagia Sophia"] is being printed by a friend of mine down the road here in Lexington. |
| 1961/07/26 | Pieter Meer de Walcheren, van der | Rencontres: Leon Bloy, Raïssa Maritain, Christine et Pieterke |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 145
| Moved deeply and to tears by Pierre van der Meer de Walcheren's book Rencontres, which he kindly sent, saying rightly in the dedication that we are "clos" - and it is certainly true, for I am somehow of the family of Bloy. The section on Bloy is fine and even more moving is the one on Raissa Maritain. |
| 1961/07/27 | Pieter Meer de Walcheren, van der | Rencontres: Leon Bloy, Raïssa Maritain, Christine et Pieterke |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 145
| Lovely poem on Chagall by Raissa Maritain in P. Van der Meer's Rencontres. Like to translate it in Jubilee with a note on her and perhaps some Chagall picture. |
| 1961/07/28 | Sophocles | Antigone |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 146
| Looked over notes on Sophocles' Antigone. Must read it again and again. How great are the Greeks, how much we owe them, how foolish to set them aside in silly contrasts with the Bible. Sophocles throws light on his contemporaries Isaiah and Jeremiah. Especially the problem of true obedience - to God, and false obedience - to tyrants who confound the upper and the nether world, try to hold them apart by force of will, and declare heaven to be hell, and hell heaven. They demand obedience as justification of their pride and violence and by their logic disobedience is the greatest sin. |
| 1961/08/22 | Henry Miller | Colossus of Maroussi |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 154
| In the Nation-a good article on Nicaragua: a poisonous critique of Miller's Tropic of Cancer by [Kenneth] Rexroth (which may have some truth in it-well written, but very nasty) and a poem I liked, about George Fox. I certainly don't accept Miller as a prophet, though he has good things to say in The Colossus of Maroussi [Norfolk, 1941]. |
| 1962/03/24 | John Howard Griffin | Black Like Me |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 213
| Yesterday finished the [John Howard] Griffin book Black Like Me, moved and disturbed. As someone said-what there is in the South is not a Negro problem but a white problem. The trouble is pathological. |
| 1962/05/10 | Mircea Eliade | Images and symbols : studies in religious symbolism / Mircea Eliade ; transl. by Philip Mairet |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 218
| Fascinating books by Mircea Eliade. Finished (two days ago) Image and Symbol and began today the new one, Forge and Crucible, about alchemists. Opening up the meaning of myth in primitive technology which is always mystical. Why engineers are happy without religion? |
| 1962/06/07 | James Legge | Chinese classics |
Ltrs: HGL p. 622
| Paul Sih has obtained for me a wonderful reprint of the Legge translation of the Chinese Classics, and has also sent the Wang Yang Ming. I am awed and delighted with the great volumes of the Classics. I do not intend to read them lightly however, they are waiting until other things can be cleared away. But I must admit I have done absolutely no work at all on Chinese, because I find that I simply waste too much time fumbling around in the dictionary and so little is done that it does not make sense to continue until sometime in the future when I can get some instruction. So it will all have to wait a bit. |
| 1962/07/09 | Alan Harrington | Life in the Crystal Palace |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 230
| Businesses are sects. They are little religions-at least in America. One believes in the product, and preaches it. Your belief is an essential constituent in its goodness. "The new evangelism, whether expressed in soft or hard selling, is a quasireligious approach to business wrapped in a hoax-a hoax voluntarily entered into by producers and consumers together. Its credo is that of belief-to-order. It is the truth-to-order as delivered by advertising and public relations men, believed by them and voluntarily believed in by the public." -Alan Harrington, Life in the Crystal Palace [New York, 1959], p 194 |
| 1962/07/09 | Henry Miller | Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch |
Ltrs: CforT p. 274
| It was good to hear from you. I have often thought of writing to you, and usually that is the first thing that comes into my mind when I am reading something of yours, like the earlier part of Big Sur [and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch] for example, or parts of the Colossus of Maroussi (which I think is a tremendous and important book) |
| 1962/07/09 | Henry Miller | Colossus of Maroussi |
Ltrs: CforT p. 274
| It was good to hear from you. I have often thought of writing to you, and usually that is the first thing that comes into my mind when I am reading something of yours, like the earlier part of Big Sur [and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch] for example, or parts of the Colossus of Maroussi (which I think is a tremendous and important book) |
| 1962/07/14 | Rose Macaulay | Personal Pleasures |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 231
| Reading Rose MacCauley's Personal Pleasures-published 1935. Therefore her swim in the Cam [river in Cambridge] might well have been the same year as mine, though probably earlier. An entrancing book, and baffling, for that world has ceased to exist so completely: yet thirty years ago it was the only world I dreamed of as possible. The world of civilization and books and ease, and humor and perhaps a lot of nonsense and falsity that did not have to be taken too seriously. Since that day, absurdity has won. Her lovely piece on the "Bird in the Box," and on "Book Auctions" too. But the bird has become a symbol of that whole world, and I suppose without fully realizing it, she knew this! |
| 1962/07/14 | Sophocles | Antigone |
Ltrs: HGL p. 353-54
| I wonder if the best thing in the world to read in a period of night is Ruysbroeck? Personally I rather doubt it. I think that he will only make you feel worse. Have you ever tried reading Sophocles or Aeschylus at such a time? In the first place they have the immense advantage of being people you at no time have to agree with. The whole notion of one's "spiritual stat" is not called into question, and therefore they can get in under your guard, so to speak, and I find that the Antigone or Oedipus at Colonus is most helpful in a shattering sort of way. We simply have to get away from this business of weighing spiritual values in the balance against one another especially in the night when in any case it is almost impossible anyway. In the night it is intolerable to raise the question of right and wrong because we are in a sense simply wrong and in another sense out of the whole area of argument altogether. That is precisely the atmosphere of Greek religious tragedy. It is much healthier than our obsession with the fear that if we are not somehow optimistic we are lost. In the night optimism and pessimism are both meaningless. |
| 1962/07/14 | Sophocles | Oedipus at Colonus |
Ltrs: HGL p. 353-54
| I wonder if the best thing in the world to read in a period of night is Ruysbroeck? Personally I rather doubt it. I think that he will only make you feel worse. Have you ever tried reading Sophocles or Aeschylus at such a time? In the first place they have the immense advantage of being people you at no time have to agree with. The whole notion of one's "spiritual stat" is not called into question, and therefore they can get in under your guard, so to speak, and I find that the Antigone or Oedipus at Colonus is most helpful in a shattering sort of way. We simply have to get away from this business of weighing spiritual values in the balance against one another especially in the night when in any case it is almost impossible anyway. In the night it is intolerable to raise the question of right and wrong because we are in a sense simply wrong and in another sense out of the whole area of argument altogether. That is precisely the atmosphere of Greek religious tragedy. It is much healthier than our obsession with the fear that if we are not somehow optimistic we are lost. In the night optimism and pessimism are both meaningless. |
| 1962/08/07 | Henry Miller | Colossus of Maroussi |
Ltrs: CforT p. 276
| Now to other things for a moment: I am in the middle of The Wisdom of the Heart and it is you at your best. There is very fine material everywhere, one insight on top of another. The opening piece starting from Lawrence is full of arresting thought, most important for a writer to read. When you write as you do in the thing on Benno you are at your very best, this is marvelous. As I say I am going along with you all the way with The Wisdom of the Heart. They sent me also the Colossus which I already had but had lent to someone, and lent books never come back. And The Time of the Assassins, which is going to mean much. |
| 1962/08/07 | Henry Miller | Time of the Assassins: a Study of Rimbaud |
Ltrs: CforT p. 276
| Now to other things for a moment: I am in the middle of The Wisdom of the Heart and it is you at your best. There is very fine material everywhere, one insight on top of another. The opening piece starting from Lawrence is full of arresting thought, most important for a writer to read. When you write as you do in the thing on Benno you are at your very best, this is marvelous. As I say I am going along with you all the way with The Wisdom of the Heart. They sent me also the Colossus which I already had but had lent to someone, and lent books never come back. And The Time of the Assassins, which is going to mean much. |
| 1962/08/07 | Henry Miller | Wisdom of the Heart |
Ltrs: CforT p. 276
| Now to other things for a moment: I am in the middle of The Wisdom of the Heart and it is you at your best. There is very fine material everywhere, one insight on top of another. The opening piece starting from Lawrence is full of arresting thought, most important for a writer to read. When you write as you do in the thing on Benno you are at your very best, this is marvelous. As I say I am going along with you all the way with The Wisdom of the Heart. They sent me also the Colossus which I already had but had lent to someone, and lent books never come back. And The Time of the Assassins, which is going to mean much. |
| 1962/08/11 | Henry Miller | Wisdom of the Heart |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 237
| Henry Miller's tremendous essay on Raimu deeply significant, touches the real nerve of our time, the American nihilist, the movie dreamer, who commits crime in his sleep, a bomb wrapped in ideals, as against Raimu the human European, caught in the mess of real politics. |
| 1962/08/17 | Henry Miller | Wisdom of the Heart |
Ltrs: CforT p. 134
| I have been in contact with Henry Miller. He has written some extraordinary essays recently, especially a book called The Wisdom of The Heart from which Pablo Antonio could also extract some really great material. |
| 1962/08/21 | Henry Miller | Wisdom of the Heart |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 237-38
| Hot. Yesterday, the dip in the path to the woods beyond the sheep barn was like an oven. The breeze like the breath of a furnace. Cooler in the woods where I read [Jakob] Boehme's Confessions and a bit of Miller's Wisdom of the Heart (a fine book). The Confessions are the only book of Boehme so far I have been able to understand. |
| 1962/11/22 | J.D. Salinger | Franny and Zooey |
Ltrs: RtoJ p. 324
| What have I read of his? I started Franny and Zooey. That is to say, I started Franny, and after that I started Zooey. I thought it was well written. I thought the people were alive, and I could see where one would get deeply absorbed in their concerns, but let me put it this way: I am profoundly engrossed in the 12th century school of Chartres, and in Zen (which I understand comes later in Zooey?) and in Sufism, and in some novices I am supposed to be teaching about the monastic life, and in the peace movement, and in poetry of a sort. My reaction to Franny and Zooey was simply that it was keeping me from something else in which I was really interested. I have absolutely nothing against Franny or Zooey. I am glad they had people who wrote such nice letters to them. But this is what I walked away from twenty years ago and it is just very remote, it doesn't come through any more. I am sorry, this may be a confession that I have drifted away from the human race, though I don't think even Salinger would interpret it that way. |
| 1962/12/18 | Raïssa Maritain | Journal de Raïssa |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 278
| Jacques Maritain has sent Raissa's journal, a most moving and lucid and soulcleansing book. It is wonderful to read and to share so perfectly such things, on which one's own whole life is centered. Especially the trials and their meaning. |
| 1962/12/18 | Raïssa Maritain | Journal de Raïssa |
Ltrs: CforT p. 33
| I am overwhelmed by Raissa's Journal. How to put it? You must know better than I do. This document is like the sunrise, a wonder that is ordinary but if you are more attentive you find it an astounding event. I read it in solitude in the woods. Each sentence opens our heart to God. It's a book full of windows. What moves me most is that in each line I see and I hear this "child" of Proverbs 8:27"”31 "ludens in orbe terrarum" [playing on the surface of the earth], ludens too in Raïssa. I dreamed a few times of this child (who the first time presented herself as a girl of the race of St. Anne) and she was sad and quiet because everyone was making fun of her strange name which was "Proverb." Also, another time on a Louisville street I saw suddenly that everyone was Proverb, without knowing it. Raissa's words are filled with the presence and the light of this wisdom-child. She is "Proverb." Especially she reminds me of that mystic that I love above all others, Julian of Norwich. (Raïssa even speaks of the maternal knees of God.) She has the same tone, the same candor. I will treasure this book. To receive it is an event of significance and a very great grace. It is not only Raïssa that moves me in this book but your love for her and her love for you and your love for all your friends. This is what the Church is all about. |
| 1962/12/27 | Raïssa Maritain | Journal de Raïssa |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 281
| Jacques Maritain sent Raissa's Journal, a most remarkable book full of clarity and simplicity. She had an unusual life of prayer, a very intelligent life of contemplation, very pure, great virginity of spirit and of intelligence. Surely she was a saint and I am most happy for this privileged look into material which may never be given to the general public (and I have urged Jacques not to publish it). I am sure this book has come to me providentially. It helps set so many things in order. |
| 1963/02/23 | James Baldwin | Fire Next Time |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 297
| Have read James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time and now Nobody Knows My Name. He seems to know exactly what he is talking about, and his statements are terribly urgent. One of the things that makes most sense-an application of the ideas behind non-violence, but I think it is absolutely true: that the sit-in movement is not just to get the negroes a few hamburgers, it is for the sake of the white people, and for the country. He is one of the few genuinely concerned Americans, one whose concern I can really believe. The liberation of the Negroes is necessary for the liberation of the whites and for their recovery of a minimum of self-respect, and reality. |
| 1963/02/23 | James Baldwin | Nobody knows my name |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 297
| Have read James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time and now Nobody Knows My Name. He seems to know exactly what he is talking about, and his statements are terribly urgent. One of the things that makes most sense-an application of the ideas behind non-violence, but I think it is absolutely true: that the sit-in movement is not just to get the negroes a few hamburgers, it is for the sake of the white people, and for the country. He is one of the few genuinely concerned Americans, one whose concern I can really believe. The liberation of the Negroes is necessary for the liberation of the whites and for their recovery of a minimum of self-respect, and reality. |
| 1963/03/27 | François de Salignac de La Mothe Fenelon | Lettres Spirituelles |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 306
| "Ecoutez Dieu et point vous-même: làest la vraie liberte, paix et joie du Saint Esprit." ["Listen to God and not yourself: in that lies true freedom, peace and the joy of the Holy Spirit."] Fenelon The ms. of Fenelon's letters has arrived-of course only a selection. Well translated, very appealing. "Les pecheurs veulent toujours ce qui leur manque, et les ames pleines de l'amour de Dieu ne veulent rien que ce qu'elles ont." ["Sinners always want what they don't have, and souls full of the love of God don't want anything except what they already have."] (Fenelon) |
| 1963/03/28 | Raïssa Maritain | Notes sur le Pater |
Ltrs: CforT p. 37
| Did I ever tell you how much I liked Raïssa's Notes sur le Pater? It is a really precious book, a perfect commentary, and so unassuming. I have quoted from the last pages in a book of mine which is to appear next year, on prayer "¦ |
| 1963/05/01 | John Howard Griffin | Black Like Me |
Ltrs: RtoJ p. 244
| Have you read John Howard Griffin's books? You ought to get hold of Black Like Me. It will floor you. He is a fine writer, I haven't read his novels. There was an interesting bit of an autobiography of his in Ramparts a while ago. |
| 1963/05/08 | Ambrosius | Hexaemeron |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 316-17
| The other day, on the advice of Notker Balbulus, "If you love God's creatures, read Ambrose's Hexaemeron," I began the Hexaemeron of Ambrose. A book of great charm because it is a poem of love, primitive, childlike and erotic joy in creation, and yet with great intelligence and strength. We can well read such books if we do not take them as science, and the scientific view of the evidence will not make sense until it, also, becomes play. Elements of play in space-flight. But the great death play of nuclear war: the awful, stupified, obsessed seriousness of technology, especially war technology. |
| 1963/05/08 | François de Salignac de La Mothe Fenelon | Lettres Spirituelles |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 317
| Finished the preface to Fenelon's letters the other day. |
| 1963/05/12 | Alfred Perles | My Friend, Henri Miller: An Intimate Biography |
Ltrs: CforT p. 278
| Thanks for all your cards. I have been thinking of you a lot since I have been reading A[lfred] Perlès's book about you [My Friend, Henry Miller: An Intimate Biography]. It all sounds so familiar: it is the kind of life in many ways that I was always intending to lead and did lead, to some extent. But one thing strikes me: it was possible to do these things, with that much joy and that much freedom, in the twenties and thirties. Since the war, unless I am mistaken, things have changed a lot, and a sick darkness has come over it. The people who remember the other times are still more or less intact. The others, pretty sick. Though I must say that now a whole new generation is coming up that gives me a little hope: the non-violent kids, for instance, in the South. |
| 1963/06/24 | Dorothy Day | Loaves and Fishes: The Inspiring Storey of the Catholic Worker Movement |
Ltrs: HGL p. 276
| I read the proofs of Dorothy's book [Loaves and Fishes] and gave it a good boost for Harper's "¦ |
| 1963/07/16 | Paul Standard e.a. | Chapters of Writing and Printing |
Ltrs: Hammer p. 171
| By the way I forgot to say how much I liked the little books, Carolyn's history of the press, and Victor's gression [note 147 Chapters on Writing and Printing (Lexington, KY.: Anvil Press, 1963) included four essays from Paul Standard, Victor Hammer, R. Hunter and Carolyn R. Hammer]. I thought Carolyn's was particularly good reading, a very good little book. The dialogue on the Roman letter is very well done too. I appreciated the remark about men not proceeding gently, and "even the gentle teachings of Christ have not met with success." That is unfortunately quite true. |
| 1963/07/19 | Aurelius Augustinus | Confessions |
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. |
| 1963/09/05 | Dorothy Day | Loaves and Fishes: The Inspiring Storey of the Catholic Worker Movement |
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. |
| 1963/09/15 | Iris Origo | Leopardi: A Study in Solitude |
Ltrs: Hammer p. 173
| I am enjoying the Leopardi [note 153: Iris Origo, Leopardi: A Study of Solitude (London: Oxford University Press 1935)] book in the hospital and will look forward to doing the translations. |
| 1963/09/20 | Jean Paul Sartre | Literature & existentialism / Jean Paul Sartre ; transl. from the French by Bernard Frechtman |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 17
| Sartre's Literature and Existentialism on the other hand is powerful and convincing, though his historical synopsis is contrived and pontifical as are his pseudo-marxist conclusions. |
| 1963/09/20 | Yevgeny Yevtushenko | Precocious Autobiography |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 18
| Finally-[Yevgeny] Yevtushenko's autobiography [A Precocious Autobiography, 1963]. Unquestionably good, lively, powerful. Here is real newness of life. Wonderfully encouraging in its sincerity. A powerfully moving description of the publication of "Babi Yar" in the Literary Gazette with the typesetter offering him vodka. |
| 1963/10/07 | Ida Friederike Görres | Broken Lights: Diaries and Letters of Ida Görres 1951-1959 |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 22
| Yesterday began Ida Göerres' diaries which are very lovely. She is one of the most alert and honest Catholic minds, not at all conformist, and very true. I am glad of course that she likes The Sign of Jonas. |
| 1963/10/23 | Raïssa Maritain | Notes sur le Pater |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 26
| The other day I finished a short preface to Julie Kernan's translation of Raïssa [Maritain]'s Notes sur le Pater [Notes on the Lord's Prayer, 1964]. |
| 1963/10/29 | Raïssa Maritain | Notes sur le Pater |
Ltrs: RtoJ p. 132
| Jacques [Maritain] cabled me today that he was happy with a preface I had written for Raissa's Notes sur le Pater. I have wanted to stop all prefaces, but this one last one for him was, I thought, necessary. He is such a great person and responds with such wonderful warmth to the least glimmer of truth, or friendship, or humanity. I think I owed it to him and Raissa. (When I say "last" preface it is perhaps exaggerated because I can see I am committed to a couple more, but I am going to have to say "no" a lot more often.) "¦ |
| 1963/11/11 | Quintus Horace | Odes |
Ltrs: CforT p. 81
| I am glad you have been working on [Robinson] Jeffers. I can see what would attract you in him, though I have not read him much. There is too much of him, and he is too grandiloquent for me in some ways. I have never been attracted to him much. But this is my fault and not his. Mark Van Doren likes him and I like Van Doren (one of the rare poets here I can read). Nor have I ever got into Lucretius. Personally I like Horace and Virgil, and I think Virgil is an unquestionably great one. I have always loved the Georgics, and Horace's Odes. |
| 1963/11/11 | Virgil | Georgics |
Ltrs: CforT p. 81
| I am glad you have been working on [Robinson] Jeffers. I can see what would attract you in him, though I have not read him much. There is too much of him, and he is too grandiloquent for me in some ways. I have never been attracted to him much. But this is my fault and not his. Mark Van Doren likes him and I like Van Doren (one of the rare poets here I can read). Nor have I ever got into Lucretius. Personally I like Horace and Virgil, and I think Virgil is an unquestionably great one. I have always loved the Georgics, and Horace's Odes. |
| 1963/11/26 | Jean Paul Sartre | Respectful Prostitute |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 39
| Read Sartre's Respectful Prostitute. All I had ever heard about it ran it down, but it is a smasher! Best thing of his I have read, and one of the best on the race question. Certainly it is farcical, arbitrary, in a way "propaganda." And yet it is true. Simple: it has to be simple. And no Southerner has ever stated the Southern case as simply and blandly as his characters, the Senator and Fred. Maybe it is little more than a vaudeville act, but a very good one. The main thing wrong with it is that no signature would have been necessary to save the white man who shot the Negro. |
| 1963/12/13 | Rolf Hochhuth | Deputy / Translation from the German Der Stellvertreter |
Ltrs: HGL p. 651
| As to Hochhuth: yes, I have read the play [The Deputy] and have dashed off some notes on it which George Lawler says he wants to include with some other notebook excerpts in Continuum. I am sending you a Xeroxed copy of the notes "¦ As to the play, I think it is awful: at least to read. Hochhuth strikes me as somewhat sick, not that I blame him for that. However, the question he raises is an important one, and though he has been grossly unjust to Pius XII (after all, there is no hint whatever of the real greatness of the man in the play), yet I think that the Vatican is at fault, and the hierarchy too, for favoring that kind of abominable and moss-grown concept of authority and of obedience. Here Hochhuth has something to be said for him. When such a temptation is presented to him, how can one blame him for taking it? There has been so much sickening nonsense about Pius XII, and such obviously interested efforts to promote him as a saint, that no one can blame this man for saying he does not agree. |
| 1964/01/25 | Caesarius of Arles | Epistolae |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 67
| Still on Anselm's Letters-and now too Caesarius of Aries. |
| 1964/02/07 | Jean Paul Sartre | Baudelaire |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 71
| I emerge at the end of Sartre's involved meditation on Baudelaire [Eng. trans., 1950], like coming out of darkness underground into daylight with the last sentence: "La choix libre que l'homme fait de soi-même s'identifie absolument avec ce qu'on appelle sa destine" ["The free choice that man makes of himself is absolutely identified with what one calls his destiny"] (p. 224). This is really just what, to the superficial observer, Sartre's liberty seems not to mean. For those who think this liberty is arbitrary and subject to no restraint or limit, his portrait of Baudelaire is the most clinical and exact condemnation of a liberty misused, inauthentic, steeped in "bad faith." In fact, for Sartre, Baudelaire is guilty of the primal sin of forcing together en-soi and poursoi, willing the impossibility of their union. It is "original sin" in a very real sense for, in Sartre's philosophy, if en-soi and pour-soi could be identified their union would be God. To seek to identify them in oneself is to seek to be God-i.e., static (for Sartre) excuse, pure nature, subject as object for eternity. The sterility of Baudelaire's life ("going into the future backwards") is never for a moment justified by the beauty of his poetry. |
| 1964/02/08 | Georges Bernanos | Chemin de la croix-des-Ames |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 73
| I have here his Chemin de la croix des ames-written about France in World War II. It is often tedious. Perhaps something to refer to. So much vehemence, so much overflowing anger, over the daily misdeeds of a futile, deluded old man like Petain. And yet he is right-and really on the side of the angels in denouncing the impotence of the old guard who did not believe in man, after what man had sacrificed under him at Verdun (p. 139). His "goût du malheur" ["unfortunate tast"]-a fine analysis! After years of being passed over, he takes his bitterness for strength. Bernanos is accused of being merely anti-democratic. But is this true? This is not just lamentation, or archaism. |
| 1964/03/03 | François de Salignac de La Mothe Fenelon | Fenelon: Letters of Love and Counsel / Merton wrote introduction |
Ltrs: CforT p. 104
| Your letter reached me back in January and since then I have heard you are with us again. It is good to have you back, and I hope that everything is settling down well and that you are profitably busy with good books to publish. I look forward to seeing Fenelon come along later in the spring. One feels close to such a man. I am having something of the same kind of trouble since it is now absolutely impossible for me to open my mouth in public about the bomb or to write a word about it, against it. I suppose if I were writing for it "¦ I won't say that. But anyway, I am in trouble there, and it is galling, humbling, sickening and I suppose in the long run it is salutary. I often see how meaningless one's life can be, and one's work. The meaning is deep in the meaninglessness itself. But the meaning does not turn out to be very comforting either. |
| 1964/03/03 | Rolf Hochhuth | Deputy / Translation from the German Der Stellvertreter |
Ltrs: WtoF p. 142-43
| A letter from the new Abbot General [Dom Ignace Gillet] came in concerning the articles on peace in Seeds of Destruction. [These articles were part of a manuscript Merton wrote in 1962 called Peace in a Post-Christian Era.] I was sure, since these had been cleared before by the previous Abbot General, with difficulties, but yet cleared and published, that I had the right to go ahead with them. However, the new Abbot General dug out all the correspondence, had a meeting with the definitors, and said that these articles are not to be "republished" in book form and implicitly in any other form... Naomi, frankly I must say that this whole thing leaves me a bit dizzy. And sick. I can't say exactly that it constitutes a temptation against my "vocation," but it certainly raises some pretty profound questions indeed. I know, one must just take it on the chin and shut up, etc., etc. But with all the attention that has been drawn to the obedience of an Eichmann and now even the question of Pius XII [the reference is to Hochhuth's play The Deputy], the props given by the conventional arguments don't offer much support. One is faced with the very harrowing idea that in obeying one is really doing wrong and offending God. I know of course that my conscience tells me that this is by no means certain and that the only thing is to trust Him and hope for the best. But it certainly wrings all the last drops of alacrity out of one's obedience and one's zest for the religious life. |
| 1964/03/14 | Albert Camus | Discours de Suède |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 90
| I read Camus' Discours de Suede in the University of Louisville library. Fed up with Louisville. Wish I did not have to go there. |
| 1964/04/01 | Konstantin Paustovsky | Story of a Life |
Ltrs: RtoJ p. 248
| Time for a class, so I must stop. Later I will write more. There have been a lot of interesting books around, especially one huge big life by [Konstantin] Paustovsky [The Story of a Life], a friend of Pasternak (who was completely loyal to Pasternak in all the trouble, one of the only ones) and it has magnificent things in it. |
| 1964/04/04 | Konstantin Paustovsky | Story of a Life |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 94
| I have been reading [Konstantin] Paustovsky with pleasure [The Story of a Life, 1963]. It is a great book with wonderful warmth and reality. But Kafka is now read, I hear, in Russia and the official people don't know what to make of him now that they understand it is bad form to call him decadent. Formally and aggressively accused China of selling out the revolution (which must, when all the chips are down, be a violent one). The Russians drift home toward the west. Paustovsky is thoroughly European (he loved Latin and you would be hard put to it to find anyone in America so willing to admit it!). Yet Russian too. |
| 1964/04/13 | Henri Perrin | Priest and Worker: The Autobiography of Henri Perrin |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 95
| This would be the fiftieth birthday of the Worker Priest Henri Perrin if he were alive. The publishers have sent me proofs of his autobiography (actually a collection of fragments of letters) [Priest and Worker: Autobiography of Fr. Henri Perrin, 1964]. The fact is that he was driven to despair by the stolid conservatism of the Church-her refusal to become detached from sterile commitment to a society that is finished. As a matter of fact the whole question is perhaps less complicated than it may seem. So much of the class consciousness-(left wing or right wing)-in France is just bourgeois anyway. The guilt at not being a worker is a bourgeois guilt. |
| 1964/04/13 | Paul Nizan | Aden Arabie |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 96
| Note exactly the same torment of conscience in Sartre's preface to Aden Arabie. A long querulous self-examination and confession, based on the fact that Aden Arabie (by Paul Nizan) is itself another version of the same confession. |
| 1964/05/16 | Ida Friederike Görres | Broken Lights: Diaries and Letters of Ida Görres 1951-1959 |
Honorable p. 141
| Thanks for your kind letter. I did enjoy Ida Goerres' diaries very much indeed and got a good letter from her. t is good to hear from you also. |
| 1964/06/22 | Henry Miller | Stand Still like the Hummingbird |
Ltrs: CforT p. 279
| I cannot let your hummingbird [Stand Still like the Hummingbird] get away without a resounding shout of approval. Perhaps J. Laughlin already told you how much I liked it from the first. I have been getting into it again and like it more and more. Naturally. There is no need even to say it. All that you say seems to me as obvious as if I had said it myself and you have said it better than I ever could. It needs to be said over and over again. I resound to everything you say, Europe, Zen, Thoreau, and your real basic Christian spirit which I wish a few Christians shared! |
| 1964/07/01 | Rolf Hochhuth | Deputy / Translation from the German Der Stellvertreter |
Ltrs: HGL p. 218
| One book you must read if you have not already is The Pilgrim by Serafian, about Pope Paul and the Council. Thesis that Pope Paul's curial instincts took over and he sacrificed Bea and the Johannine drive to the conservative pressures against them, then went on pilgrimage as a surrogate for the non-achievements of the second session. In a way it is a curious parallel to The Deputy, though not of course as rough. What impresses me is that wherever we turn we come back to this baroque image of the Papacy, more than an image, an idol, of which curial power is an essential element. The conservatives see it better than the liberals. The thing is now so constructed that perhaps the Papacy has come to depend to a great extent on machinery like that of the H. Office, and the Office crowd is serenely convinced that it has to arrogate to itself all the powers of the Pope even against the Pope himself, becoming in the end the real seat of infallibility. This means of course that infallibility becomes organized and to some extent anonymous (no longer a charism but an institution) and of course that means one thing: totalism and the monolith. |
| 1964/07/02 | Rolf Hochhuth | Deputy / Translation from the German Der Stellvertreter |
Ltrs: HGL p. 652
| I am very much tempted to write a parallel between The Deputy and the new Serafian book, The Pilgrim. Starting with the titles, there is soon seen to be a deeper analogy. Only in one chapter does the Serafian come out as a real hatchet job on Paul VI, the rest balances it off and makes nicer noises and gestures, and it is not as blatantly prejudiced as the Hochhuth. Yet at the same time it reinforces the justice in Hochhuth's accusation, and does so by dimming the focus that is too crudely and too insistently fixed on Pius. Actually, the great question is the Papacy itself in its post-Tridentine and post-medieval, indeed post-Constantinian shape. The thing that really hits me hardest of all is that at this very moment the same issue of the Jews is right in front of our noses, just as much as it ever was before any German under Hitler, perhaps more so. And of course the Jewish schema [Note: Preparatory document: part of what became Vatican II's Declaration on Relationships with Non-Christian Religions], or part of that schema, is central in The Pilgrim. Once again, when John brought up the obligation to make some kind of amends, the same old machinery that Hochhuth tries to show at work in the one man and mind of Pius is in full operation in the whole "Papacy," i.e. Curia and all. |
| 1964/07/12 | Rafael Squirru | Challenge of the New Man: A Cultural Approach to the Latin American Scene |
Ltrs: CforT p. 232
| Many thanks for your little book on the "New Man." I have read it carefully and with pleasure and want to congratulate you on it. I especially liked the essays on the poet and on the role of the intellectual. It seems to me that this little book represents a vitally important trend of thought, and you know of course how much I agree with it. The thinking of the public, especially in the "‘great powers," seems to me to be hallucinated by the unreal concept of what one might call an Atlantic gigantism (except that it would have to include Russia and even China). The belief that the only kind of thinking that is real and meaningful is that which is associated with European and North American thought patterns, extending this also to Chinese Marxism. But this cerebration leaves out most of the human race, most of its needs, most of its aspirations. It has proved itself completely incapable of really solving the problems of man and is now increasingly incapable even of defining them. |
| 1964/08/09 | Wystab Hugh Auden | Enchafèd Flood: or the Romantic Iconography of the Sea |
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. |
| 1964/11/04 | Eugène Ionesco | Bold Soprano |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 163
| Yesterday I was reading [Eugene] lonesco's Bald Soprano and laughing myself silly behind the forage boxes packed in the woodshed. |
| 1964/11/11 | Eugène Ionesco | Poesie / ed. Renan |
Ltrs: Hammer p. 201
| Many thanks for all the Ionesco. I am sending back Renan today. There are very interesting things in it but I do not want to keep it too long. |
| 1964/12/02 | Eugène Ionesco | Notes et contre-notes |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 173
| Hurray for Ionesco! He has some very good ideas, and here is one of them (against those obsessed with ideologies and with theories of history.) "Nous sommes pris tons dans une sorte de complexe historique et nous appartenons à un certain moment de l'histoire-qui cependent est loin de nous absorber entièrement et qui au contraire n ‘exprime et ne contient que le part la moins essentielle de nous mêmes." ["We are all of us caught in a kind of historical complex and belong to one special moment in history-which is, however, far from absorbing us entirely but rather expresses and contains only the least essential part of us."] (Notes et contre-notes [1962], p. 16) |
| 1964/12/05 | Eugène Ionesco | Future Is in Eggs |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 175
| So many good books around and in the woodshed after dinner. Pasternak once. Lately Ellul, and Felix Green's Curtain of Ignorance (good information on the bad reporting about China), Stevie Smith, Françoise Henri on Irish art, Auden "The Enchafed Flood," and last summer Kenneth Jackson's Early Celtic Nature Poetry. Also Nora Chadwick, etc., etc. (I got a charming letter from the Carmelites of Waterbeach, her friends). And of course recently Ionesco-Rhinoceros, The Future Is in Eggs, etc. I am still busy with his Notes et contre-notes. |
| 1964/12/05 | Eugène Ionescu | Rhinoceros |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 175
| So many good books around and in the woodshed after dinner. Pasternak once. Lately Ellul, and Felix Green's Curtain of Ignorance (good information on the bad reporting about China), Stevie Smith, Françoise Henri on Irish art, Auden "The Enchafed Flood," and last summer Kenneth Jackson's Early Celtic Nature Poetry. Also Nora Chadwick, etc., etc. (I got a charming letter from the Carmelites of Waterbeach, her friends). And of course recently Ionesco-Rhinoceros, The Future Is in Eggs, etc. I am still busy with his Notes et contre-notes. |
| 1964/12/05 | Wu Wei Wei | All else is bondage : "non-volitional living" / by Wei Wu Wei. pseud. of Terrence Gray |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 174
| Meanwhile a little book [All Else Is Bondage: Non-Volitional Living, 1964] by Terence Gray (Wei Wu Wei) is in the hermitage and I find it clear and right on target. Using a jumble of western terms, but o.k. One must improvise! |
| 1964/12/05 | Wystab Hugh Auden | Enchafèd Flood: or the Romantic Iconography of the Sea |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 175
| So many good books around and in the woodshed after dinner. Pasternak once. Lately Ellul, and Felix Green's Curtain of Ignorance (good information on the bad reporting about China), Stevie Smith, Françoise Henri on Irish art, Auden "The Enchafed Flood," and last summer Kenneth Jackson's Early Celtic Nature Poetry. Also Nora Chadwick, etc., etc. (I got a charming letter from the Carmelites of Waterbeach, her friends). And of course recently Ionesco-Rhinoceros, The Future Is in Eggs, etc. I am still busy with his Notes et contre-notes. |
| 1964/12/06 | Eugène Ionesco | Notes et contre-notes |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 176
| Thank God I have been purged of Sartre by Ionesco. I don't think Ionesco is a great artist but he is healthy and alive and free. Sartre is not free, for all his academic mumblings about freedom and "engagement." Nor is his refusal of the Nobel Prize to me a convincing proof of anything except perhaps that he is clever enough to know how much he needs to fight his own bad faith. And so now, sure enough, he is in Life with a sly little smile-and essentially he is a clever, mild little bourgeois. An honest modest man. But he has to be a dragon and that is his trouble. Hence-"misguided direction," arrogance, pontifical ceremonies, declarations, etc. But who is without guilt? Ionesco carries it off better than Sartre. He is more truly a child, and independent. |
| 1964/12/20 | Eugène Ionesco | Pieton de l'air |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 181
| Am working on Philoxenus and Ephrem. Yesterday I finished Ionesco's Le Pieton de l'air which is extraordinarily beautiful, though uneven. The basic idea is wonderful, and it is his best, deepest idea. Especially moved by Marthe. |
| 1964/12/27 | Camille Drevet | Par les routes humaines |
Ltrs: WtoF p. 98
| I must thank you for your new book, Par les routes humaines, which reached me some time ago. I have not yet finished reading it, but it is really a most absorbing and fascinating book, full of all kinds of good things. You have had a rich and fruitful experience and have indeed traveled the ways of men and found Christ in them. I compliment you on the book, which is very fine and I am delighted to have it. I will continue to enjoy it and profit by it at leisure. |
| 1965/02/29 | Eudo C. Mason | Rilke, Europe and the English-Speaking World |
Ltrs: Hammer p. 225
| Today I am returning Peters, Rilke, Masks and the Man. As I mentioned in my card I would like if possible toe keep Mason Rilke... and the English Speaking world. |
| 1965/02/29 | H.F. Peters | Rainer Maria Rilke, Masks and the Man |
Ltrs: Hammer p. 225
| Today I am returning Peters, Rilke, Masks and the Man. As I mentioned in my card I would like if possible toe keep Mason Rilke... and the English Speaking world. |
| 1965/03/03 | Lional Mordecai Trilling | Broken Mirror: A Collection of Writings from Contemporary Poland / edited by Pawel Mayewski |
Honorable p. 144
| Your book THE BROKEN MIRROR is one that I have read with interest, and in various ways I have tried to keep up with current Polish literature in translation. I am especially impressed by the contemporary Polish poets, and have had occation to say something about them in connection with a new anthology which is being published by Doubleday. |
| 1965/03/10 | Johann Peter Hebel | Treasure Chest |
Ltrs: Hammer p. 212
| Talking about diversion, I never said how much I liked Hebel's stories. They have a completely wonderful tone and atmosphere , and one never gets tired of them. Thank you for the book. |
| 1965/04/23 | Flannnery O'Connor | Everything That Rises Must Converge |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 233
| Then yesterday Flannery O'Connor's new book [Everything That Rises Must Converge, 1965] arrived and I am already well into it, grueling and powerful! A relentlessly perfect writer, full of tragedy and irony. But what a writer! And she knows every aspect of the American meanness, and violence, and frustration. And the Southern struggle of will against inertia. |
| 1965/04/25 | Flannnery O'Connor | Everything That Rises Must Converge |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 233
| I wonder if the singular power of Flannery O'Connor's work, the horror and fascination of it, is not basically religious in a completely tacit way. There is no positive and overt expression of Catholicism (with optimism, hope, etc.) but perhaps a negative, direct, brutal confrontation with God in the terrible, the cruel. (The bull in "Greenleaf" [short story] as the lover and destroyer.) This is an affirmation of what popular Christianity always struggles to avoid: the dark face of God. But now, and above all in the South, it is the dark and terrible face of God that looks at America (the crazy religious characters are to be taken seriously precisely because their religion is inadequate). |
| 1965/04/27 | Jacques Maritain | Carnet de notes / Jacques Maritain |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 235
| I received a copy of Jacques Maritain's Notebooks, from Paris, and have already read the interesting (and sometimes funny) chapter on La Salette and his attempts to get his manuscript on it approved in Rome in 1918. Some very fine pages on the nature of prophetic language, the language of heavenly revelations. What comes out most of all of course is the simplicity and probity of Jacques himself and his evident loyalty to the Church. It is very edifying. I love the pictures of Raïssa and Vera [Oumansoff ]. Though I never actually met them, I know they are two people who loved me-and whom I have loved-through our writings and the warmth and closeness that has somehow bound me to Jacques and to them. It is really a kind of family affection, which also reaches out to good Dom Pierre (Van der Meer) who wrote (through Dame Christine [Van der Meer]) about the article concerning [Georgio] La Pira's visit to America-and his (somewhat over enthusiastic account of Gethsemani). |
| 1965/04/30 | Flannnery O'Connor | Everything That Rises Must Converge |
Ltrs: HGL p. 221
| Having just finished Flannery O'Connor's new book [Everything That Rises Must Converge], I can easily believe that this country has got seven devils in it and a few more perhaps besides, and that the American illusion of innocence and universal messianism is now about to unleash THE worst war that ever happened, maybe the final one. It seems to me that only some kind of direct intervention of Providence can prevent it. But since God is on the side of the poor, it is quite possible that rather than let us wreck so many innocent people, he might intervene and let us blow up some of our own stuff and have an accident that would set us back hard enough to shut us up for a while. |
| 1965/06/06 | Samuel Nathaniel Behrman | Biography of Joseph Duveen, Baron Duveen, 1869-1939 |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 253
| On Friday I went to Lexington for some examinations at the clinic (Dr. Fortune) and was supposed to return that afternoon but stayed overnight in the hospital for more tests yesterday morning. What with enemas, proctoscopes, barium enemas, etc. I had a miserable time. When I began these examinations ten or fifteen years ago they were unpleasant but bearable. Since then, my insides have become so sensitive that they are a real torment. However, there is no cancer, there are no ulcers, just a great deal of inflammation and sensitivity, etc. The results of all the tests are not yet in. However, on Friday I had lunch with the Hammers, and borrowed from them the Tao of Painting [by Mai Mai Sze, 1963] to take to the hospital. I had some very enjoyable moments reading it. A very exciting first chapter. Also read [Samuel Nathaniel] Behrman's life of "Duveen" which is very funny [A Biography of Joseph Duveen, Baron Duveen, 1869-1939, 1952]. |
| 1965/06/12 | Eugène Ionescu | Avenir est dans les oeufs |
Ltrs: CforT p. 213
| We are in a time of the worst barbarity, much worse than in the time of the fall of the Roman empire. It is sufficient to look at what is happening in Vietnam and everywhere, most of all here. Sermons are worth nothing in this situation. It is necessary to state, without judgment, the truth of things. And that apocalyptic truth cannot be expressed in apocalyptic symbols, but only in "cliches." I wonder if you know about the "antitheater" of Ionesco (especially L'avenir est dans les Å“ufs). |
| 1965/08/06 | Euripides | Iphigenia in Tauris |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 277
| Returned to hermitage today after a week in St. Anthony's hospital. In a way it was trying, at least a test of patience. Had to rest, take medicine and sit in a room with machinery going outside-and with an air conditioner on day and night. At least the even noise of the air conditioner neutralized the heavy traffic on Barret Avenue and I was astounded to find myself sleeping nine hours a night!! Evidently it was something I needed, that and the diet, because my stomach calmed down. And I suppose I enjoyed it in a way-saying the new Mass (we don't have English at Gethsemani yet except for the Brothers), reading a lot. (Finished the Tom Wolfe Kandy Kolored, etc. book, a Herman Wouk novel, some Bultmann on New Testament, a book on Buddhism, Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, a couple of pages of Aeschylus, and Euripides' Iphigenia in Tauris.) Got some work done-finished the galleys of Seasons of Celebration and made a few additions. |
| 1965/08/06 | Tom Wolfe | Kandy Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 276-77
| Returned to hermitage today after a week in St. Anthony's hospital. In a way it was trying, at least a test of patience. Had to rest, take medicine and sit in a room with machinery going outside-and with an air conditioner on day and night. At least the even noise of the air conditioner neutralized the heavy traffic on Barret Avenue and I was astounded to find myself sleeping nine hours a night!! Evidently it was something I needed, that and the diet, because my stomach calmed down. And I suppose I enjoyed it in a way-saying the new Mass (we don't have English at Gethsemani yet except for the Brothers), reading a lot. (Finished the Tom Wolfe Kandy Kolored, etc. book, a Herman Wouk novel, some Bultmann on New Testament, a book on Buddhism, Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, a couple of pages of Aeschylus, and Euripides' Iphigenia in Tauris.) Got some work done-finished the galleys of Seasons of Celebration and made a few additions. |
| 1965/0806 | Friedrich Nietzsche | Birth of Tragidy from the Spirit of Music |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 277
| Returned to hermitage today after a week in St. Anthony's hospital. In a way it was trying, at least a test of patience. Had to rest, take medicine and sit in a room with machinery going outside-and with an air conditioner on day and night. At least the even noise of the air conditioner neutralized the heavy traffic on Barret Avenue and I was astounded to find myself sleeping nine hours a night!! Evidently it was something I needed, that and the diet, because my stomach calmed down. And I suppose I enjoyed it in a way-saying the new Mass (we don't have English at Gethsemani yet except for the Brothers), reading a lot. (Finished the Tom Wolfe Kandy Kolored, etc. book, a Herman Wouk novel, some Bultmann on New Testament, a book on Buddhism, Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, a couple of pages of Aeschylus, and Euripides' Iphigenia in Tauris.) Got some work done-finished the galleys of Seasons of Celebration and made a few additions. |
| 1965/09/05 | Jacques Maritain | Carnet de notes / Jacques Maritain |
Ltrs: CforT p. 45
| It has been a terribly long time since I have written to you or heard from you, and I am not sure whether or not I ever thanked you for the Carnets. Perhaps I did not. But I am very delighted with them, and they form an admirable companion to Raïssa's Journal. Thank you very much. |
| 1965/09/25 | Jacques Maritain | Carnet de notes / Jacques Maritain |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 299
| Last evening began again reading parts of Maritain's Carnets de notes-good things on the layman and a plea to be left unorganized! |
| 1965/09/26 | Jacques Maritain | Carnet de notes / Jacques Maritain |
Ltrs: CforT p. 46
| I have been reading your Carnets [de notes] "¦ Everything you say is quite true & even prophetic. Our mania for organization will be judged & all will be burned except love and friendship. The small groups united by genuine love will remain everywhere & the rest will go, even in monasticism. I want to quote you in the book I am writing now. |
| 1966/01/02 | Eudo C. Mason | Rilke, Europe and the English-Speaking World |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 3
| Reading E. A. Burtt's book, sent by him from Cornell - and galleys of a good book on the Church trans[lated] from Dutch [The Grave of God: Has the Church a Future? New York, 1967]. The author is an Augustinian, R. Adolfs. Still have Endo Mason's excellent book on [Rainer Maria] Rilke and England. |
| 1966/01/18 | Ernesto Cardenal | Vida en El Amor |
Ltrs: CforT p. 155
| Who is publishing your Vida en el amor? It is really excellent"”in some ways equal to Teilhard de Chardin even better, since he was only half a poet "¦ |
| 1966/02/13 | Rainer Maria Rilke | Duino Elegies / translated into English by James Blair Leishman and Stephen Spender |
Ltrs: Hammer p. 226
| As to Rilke - I know what you mean. He is a fine poet but I have grave reservations about him too. As prophet there is really something missing. One may however like the Duino Elegies in spite of these reservations. My reservations have been more seriously on the Orpheus Sonnets, and ther 'Theogeny.' |
| 1966/02/13 | Rainer Maria Rilke | Sonnets to Orpheus / translated by J.B.L. Leishman |
Ltrs: Hammer p. 226
| As to Rilke - I know what you mean. He is a fine poet but I have grave reservations about him too. As prophet there is really something missing. One may however like the Duino Elegies in spite of these reservations. My reservations have been more seriously on the Orpheus Sonnets, and ther 'Theogeny.' |
| 1966/02/13 | Victor Hammer | Fragments for C.R.H. |
Ltrs: Hammer p. 226
| Not only do I like 'Pebbles' [note 198: "Pebbles was the working title that Victor used for a book that was subsequently published as Some Fragments for C.R.H. (Lexington, Ky.: Stamperia del Santuccio, 1967.)] very much but in many ways I think it is going to be your most attractive and articluate book and it must by all means be printed! Certainly continue with it. I am eager to be the next. I like the format as well as the idea. |
| 1966/03/16 | Rainer Maria Rilke | Duino Elegies / translated into English by James Blair Leishman and Stephen Spender |
Ltrs: CforT p. 260
| "¦Liked everything you said about Rilke. The things you did not like about him were the things I thought you probably would not like: the perfume and the older women. But the older women had enough sense to give him castles to write in and I rather like the Princess, not to mention the one he went to Russia with. You are very right about his ideas on death: they are deep and solid intuitions. I think of him as validly religious, and his reaction against a sick Catholicism is perfectly understandable. The translations stink, though the [J. B.] Leishman [-Stephen] Spender job on the [Duino] Elegies is fair. It is at least passable, most of the time. I find myself preferring the Neue Gedichte and not preferring the Orpheus sonnets [Sonnets to Orpheus]. I do like the Elegies very much. Also the Letters to a Young Poet; very good indeed. I am lecturing on them to the monks. "Young Workman's Letter" is fine too "¦ |
| 1966/03/16 | Rainer Maria Rilke | Letters to a Young Poet |
Ltrs: CforT p. 260
| "¦Liked everything you said about Rilke. The things you did not like about him were the things I thought you probably would not like: the perfume and the older women. But the older women had enough sense to give him castles to write in and I rather like the Princess, not to mention the one he went to Russia with. You are very right about his ideas on death: they are deep and solid intuitions. I think of him as validly religious, and his reaction against a sick Catholicism is perfectly understandable. The translations stink, though the [J. B.] Leishman [-Stephen] Spender job on the [Duino] Elegies is fair. It is at least passable, most of the time. I find myself preferring the Neue Gedichte and not preferring the Orpheus sonnets [Sonnets to Orpheus]. I do like the Elegies very much. Also the Letters to a Young Poet; very good indeed. I am lecturing on them to the monks. "Young Workman's Letter" is fine too "¦ |
| 1966/04/22 | Edwin Muir | Autobiography |
Ltrs: Hammer p. 234
| Many thanks for the Pavese books. I am well into one of them and he is a marvelous writer. I returned Suzuki on Mysticism Christian and Buddhist. I am not et finished with Briffault, The Mothers which is marked for August 31. Could I perhaps have it a little longer? I notice that Muir's Autobiography seems to be marked for that date too, and I am still working on it. |
| 1966/05/08 | Matsuo Basho | Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches / translated by Nobuyuki Yuasa |
Ltrs: CforT p. 262
| Thanks for the books which came in yesterday. Have already begun the Bash which is just what I have been wanting after so much tired stuff, this is the greatest the most alive and you are right perfect monasticism. Thanks for the intuition that it is what I would need. Maybe when I read it carefully I will know a lot more about the question. And there is no question that the great issue is freedom. From Urizens goddam hammers. I go where I am Los (turned loose) so far the one place where I can be the sunlight is up here on this hill where all the angels shine around me in each leaf and no one can prevent them. I have been on the road before and there were fewer and sometimes none. I think I have only one way to travel and it is straight up. Or straight down into the root. |
| 1966/07/27 | Jean Paul Sartre | Mots |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 102
| Am reading Sartre's Les Mots, a curious, brilliant book, one of his best. An antiautobiography - the variety of self-iconoclasm. But there is a certain pathos in it... Sartre in Les Mots turns out suddenly to be Merton of the movies. But that passage is too long and overdone. Just because he is making fun of himself he thinks he is permitted to drop all limits to carry on interminably. |
| 1966/07/30 | Edwin Muir | Autobiography |
Ltrs: Hammer p. 233
| Can you help me with some more books? I have to review Edwin Muir's collected poems for Sewanee Review and I will need some background material: chiefly Muir's own Autobiography. Do you have this? Also an important review of this book, Collected Poems in its earlier edtiont by Kathleen Raine in the New Statesman, april 23, 1960. If by any chance there has been anything about the book lately in magazines like the Kenyon Review and others of the same type, I would appreciate having access to them. Maybe you could obtain for me a Xerox of the Raine article, and the monastery of course would pay for it. |
| 1966/07/31 | T.S. Eliot | Sacred Wood |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 105
| [T. S.] Eliot's Sacred Wood remains a book of singular value, one of those books in which every sentence stops you. This for instance on M. Arnold The temptation, to any man who is interested in ideas and primarily in literature, to put literature into the corner until he cleaned up this whole country first, is almost irresistible. |
| 1966/08/13 | Edwin Muir | Autobiography |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 113-14
| Yesterday my arm hurt so much I could hardly type a letter (to Dame M[arcella Van Bruyn] at Stanbrook and to [Robert] Lax). Two days ago finished the first draft of an article on Camus (and went over it again yesterday and today making additions). I like his notebooks. Intend to write to Jean Grenier. Hope to write on "Zen and the Cloud." Got Edwin Muir's Autobiography from the U. of K. and it is most impressive. |
| 1966/08/21 | Edwin Muir | Autobiography |
Ltrs: RtoJ p. 52
| Do you know Edwin Muir? You must have read some of his poems. I am sure you would like him very much"”you have much in common. I am doing some reviews on him. But what I really wanted to say is that if you never read his Autobiography I think you would be delighted with it. I don't presume to recommend books usually to others, but I really think this would please you. But you probably know it well. Who knows perhaps you even recommended it to me twenty years ago. That is possible too, except I think the first edition was more recent. |
| 1966/09/05 | Samuel Beckett | Waiting for Godot |
Ltrs: CforT p. 248-49
| I am working on another longer series of short ones ["Edifying Cables," published as Cables to the Ace] which might interest you. Maybe you will feel it does not communicate: it is imprecise, noisy, crude, full of vulgarity and parody, making faces, criticizing and so on, and not like what you are doing at all, in fact almost the exact opposite. Of Beckett I like very much Waiting for Godot and think it says a lot. The others I can't read for more than a few pages. But I like Ionesco a great deal. |
| 1966/09/13 | Douglas Bush | John Milton: A Sketch of His Life and Writings |
Ltrs: RtoJ p. 257
| "¦ I have Douglas Bush's new book on Milton and like it. I think I will finally get back to some Milton and give a few talks on him myself. I have been giving one talk a week still to the gang. Lately it has been on modern world, and dialogue with Marxism. Notes will get to you eventually I hope. But I am going back to literature. Last year I talked a lot on Rilke. Never typed that up yet, and probably won't get a chance "¦ |
| 1966/09/17 | Rene Char | Fureur et mystère / Rene Char ; pref. de Yves Berger |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 135
| Yesterday in the woods I read the whole of Rene Char Feuillets d'Hypnos [Leaves of Hypnos] - powerful, compressed, authentic, rock-like and alive too. (The Sisyphus project of Resistance: necessary and inevitable!) The young murdered husband Roger, who had become to his wife the husband in whom God is given her, made me weep. The nice dog, greeting the Maquisards in silence. The forest fire. The execution in the village, which to save the village, they did not prevent. Thoughts of the young Maquisards. Landscape of resistance. And so much else. I got down what is on the surface of my mind here at the moment. |
| 1966/09/26 | Henri Montherlant | Va jouer avec cette poussière; carnets 1958-1964 |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 143-44
| In [Henri de] Montherlant's Va jouer avec cette poussière; carnets 1958-1964 [Paris, 1966] - a note on a mistress called M. who lay with her fists over her eyes "et jouait des reins [and was playing games of the loins]" got me in a turmoil over M. And I was sad for a little, and randy in my sleep when I got home. But this does not much disturb me. The fact that I love her with my whole being is simply to be accepted and coped with: and she loves me as I love her. It is beautiful and difficult, full of pain and joy, and since it is real love it is rewarding and irreplaceable. And there is no human hope for natural fulfillment. Also in Montherlant - a procession (funeral?) for Briand. One man marches carrying a sign "Ligne des Braves gens [Line of the Good Old Guys]." He is all alone! |
| 1966/10/04 | Douglas Bush | John Milton: A Sketch of His Life and Writings |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 144-45
| Have finished Douglas Bush's excellent little book on Milton [John Milton: A Sketch of His Life and Writings (New York, 1964)], have been seriously reading Paradise Lost for the first time in my life. Here the "ground" is much more truly and deeply present - even though the movement is so like a movie scenario. And that is all right. But a basic restlessness (metaphysical I mean). Beneath Camus, Char and even Milton is a metaphysical current which is unthinkable in Dante. Yet Dante builds a Cathedral. And we are no longer in the age of Cathedrals. Milton's movie is more like us. |
| 1966/10/04 | Edwin Muir | Autobiography |
Ltrs: HGL p. 229
| Here is uncorrected bit on Muir, thought you would like it. His literary essays are very fine and as a poet I like him very much too, though he is a bit bumpy at times. A great man. If you have never read his autobiography I think you would greatly enjoy it. |
| 1966/10/16 | Albert Camus | Carnets janvier 1942 - mars 1951 / Albert Camus |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 150
| Three small harlequins - two sweetgums and a maple - stand bright against the dark background of pine and cedar. Dim brilliance of the woods on a grey day. [ "¦ ] I am full of obscure lonely happiness because of her and because of the miracle of her existence. I tried to write a poem for her about it but the poem could come nowhere near. What finally started me off was this from Camus (in his Notebooks II - 274): Quand on a vu une seule fois le resplendissment du bonheur sur la visage d'un être lu'on aime, on sait qu'il ne peut pas y avoir d'autre vocation pour un homme que de susciter cette lumière sur les visages qui l'entourent "¦. [When you have once seen the glow of happiness on the face of a beloved person, you know that a man can have no other vocation than to awaken that light on the faces surrounding him "¦.] It is one of the most beautiful passages in all Camus and so well expresses my own deepest belief. |
| 1966/10/31 | Albert Camus | Malentendu |
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." |
| 1966/11/10 | Antonin Artaud | Oeuvres complètes |
Ltrs: CforT p. 264
| I like very much your piece on [Carl Theodor] Dreyer's St. Joan [the film La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc]"”not having seen this I don't get whole picture but see there is a lot in what you say. [Rene] Char I was reading this summer, full of great things and especially I wonder as you do at the marvel of the Hypnos notes [Feuillets d'Hypnos]. Now I am in [Antonin] Artaud's great annotations on Balinese theater and theater in general. I might translate some of this material, I don't think it has been done. Finished a long poem sequence ["Edifying Cables"], but I am not happy with it, it is not rich enough, hot enough, cerebral maybe, ironic, testy, blah. I am not anxious to show it to anyone or I would send a copy. |
| 1966/11/10 | Rene Char | Fureur et mystère / Rene Char ; pref. de Yves Berger |
Ltrs: CforT p. 264
| I like very much your piece on [Carl Theodor] Dreyer's St. Joan [the film La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc]"”not having seen this I don't get whole picture but see there is a lot in what you say. [Rene] Char I was reading this summer, full of great things and especially I wonder as you do at the marvel of the Hypnos notes [Feuillets d'Hypnos]. Now I am in [Antonin] Artaud's great annotations on Balinese theater and theater in general. I might translate some of this material, I don't think it has been done. Finished a long poem sequence ["Edifying Cables"], but I am not happy with it, it is not rich enough, hot enough, cerebral maybe, ironic, testy, blah. I am not anxious to show it to anyone or I would send a copy. |
| 1966/11/12 | T.S. Eliot | On Poetry and Poets |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 159
| Eliot's essay "What Is a Classic?" is short, brilliant and absurd. His definition of a Classic is solidly useful, and then he proceeds to make its use impossible except for a few choice spirits - Virgil, Dante, Racine and for no one in English. Perpetual somersaults of logic in order to make sure that this title must be denied Milton precisely because he is such a genius, but also because he does not completely exhaust the possibilities of language - etc. This is apparently one of the great problems of literary criticism: one can formulate splendid principles - and their use is always contestable unless it is so restrained that it is hardly a use at all. Here more than anywhere else one always has the sense that the opposite to what is said can be convincingly asserted. |
| 1967/01/20 | Giles Lytton Strachey | Eminent Victorians |
Ltrs: CforT p. 210
| I have just read a beautiful book by [Romano] Guardini on Pascal [Pascal for Our Time]: this same Pascal who so fascinated and repulsed Camus. Yes, there might be too much bitterness and pessimism in Pascal's solitude and yet he is so right and so acute. Also, I have reread his remarkable discourses on the passions of love. But I am the one who is too talkative. |
| 1967/02/04 | William Faulkner | Essays, Speeches and Public Letters / ed. James B. Meriwether |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 191
| I picked up Faulkner's Essays, Speeches and Pub[lic] Letters [ed. James B. Meriwether (New York, 1965)] at the library. Some of his worst writing is here. But I'll still read anything and everything that's his. In the Holiday [April 1954] essay on "Mississippi" he sounds sometimes like our Fr. Peter - vain, double and involved |
| 1967/03/10 | William Carlos Williams | Selected Essays |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 204
| Reading W[illiam] C[arlos] Williams' Essays in the early morning - they are very informative. Back in the 30's I was trying for this kind of outlook and could not make it - had to get hung up in some kind of materialism instead. I was simply not ready for Doc Williams then and in any case I don't remember trying to read him. If I had. I would not have understood, I thought I was looking for Studs Lonigan or something (who remembers that I wonder?). Fine essay of W.C.W. on Gertrude Stein and what she was at. |
| 1967/03/23 | William Carlos Williams | Selected Essays |
Ltrs: RtoJ p. 257
| "¦ I thought of you and your work on Marianne Moore the other day when I was reading some excellent stuff on her by William Carlos Williams in his Selected Essays. Have you seen his essays on her? Very useful. I am just beginning to realize how valuable a man Doc Williams was: great poet and one who developed a new directness of consciousness which I think very salutary. Also I have been in contact with [Louis] Zukofsky (you saw the review ["Paradise Bugged"] I did of him I think) and here too is a very fine poet who has been ignored "¦ |
| 1967/04/28 | Alex Haley | Autobiography of Malcolm X |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 226
| I am reading the Autobiography of Malcolm X, which is an impressive book. Took it out into the sun in the wood's edge this afternoon after writing one or two necessary letters. |
| 1967/06/22 | Albert Camus | etranger : roman |
Ltrs: HGL p. 636
| For me, the turning-on that fails abysmally with Beckett comes with Kafka. I discovered a lot of his little short pieces lately and they are fine. I hope to compare The Stranger and The Trial. |
| 1967/06/22 | Franz Kafka | trial / by Franz Kafka |
Ltrs: HGL p. 636
| For me, the turning-on that fails abysmally with Beckett comes with Kafka. I discovered a lot of his little short pieces lately and they are fine. I hope to compare The Stranger and The Trial. |
| 1967/07/20 | Albert Camus | Reflexions sur la guillotine |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 267
| I am working on Camus's Reflexions sur la guillotine [Reflections on the Guillotine] - a powerful and subtle piece of work and very important for a real understanding of his novels. Perhaps the real key to them. Yesterday I corrected and sent back proofs of the review article on Camus to the Sewanee Review. |
| 1967/07/27 | Victor Hammer | Fragments for C.R.H. |
Ltrs: Hammer p. 253
| Victor's beautiful book - surelyhis most beautiful in every way - arrived this morning and I have spent the afternoon reading it. And thinking of so many things. And looking over again at the catalogue of the North Caroline exhibit. Remembering also the picnics at which we had discussed this or that piece of the then "Pebbles" (I do think the new title is better). |
| 1967/08/12 | John Howard Griffin | Black Like Me |
Ltrs: CforT p. 206
| I am looking for a photograph, taken by John Howard Griffin, the one who chemically changed the color of his skin so as to live among black people, and wrote a tremendous book [Black Like Me] about this experience. |
| 1967/08/30 | George Orwell | Politics and the English Language |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 283
| The Church now being finished there is no more noise of machines from the monastery. The woods are once again beautifully quiet. Last night I slept badly for some reason. Perhaps the pressure of working on that "messag" and my own conflict about it. Today I read [George] Orwell's fine essay Politics and the English Language [Evansville, IN, 1947]. How much the same trouble is found in my "messag"! Semi-officialese. |
| 1967/09/02 | Peter Nabokov | Two Leggings: The Making of a Crow Warrior |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 284-85
| Walked barefoot in a mossy spot under oaks and pines reading a new book of which a review copy came today - Two Leggings [edited by Peter Nabokov, New York, 1967] about a Crow Indian, his fasts, his efforts at acquiring vision and "medicine." I could use a little medicine myself! |
| 1967/10/18 | Leonard Woolf | Downhill Alle the Way. An Autobiography of the Years 1919-1939 |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 3
| Last evening at supper (wild rice, barbecued beans, knocked out my stomach) I read some of Leonard Woolf's Autobiography-the 4th volume (Downhill All the way). What a job they did with that Hogarth Press! And what their list brings back to m"”the days when I bought second-hand novels and poetry in London Bookshops-Eliot, Graves, Lawrence-and Roger Fry whom they published also. Bloomsbury and their friends-and the Royal Hotel which L.W. sued. All this was a world where I was once a citizen. |
| 1967/11/22 | Boris Pasternak | Letters to Georgian Friends / Translated by D. Magarshack |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 15
| Pasternak's Georgian letters are good. Real love for his friends, and contagious enthusiasm about Tiflis, etc. There is a great newness and freshness about P."”his own bright and living world. A paradise man, full of wonder, and even the Stalinists neverstamped it all out of him. Never silenced him really. |
| 1967/12/28 | Louis Zukofsky | Prepositions: The Collected Critical Essays of Louis Zukofsky |
Ltrs: CforT p. 295
| Even in the woods you cannot have quiet unless you determine not to have a shadow anymore and not to cast any. How? So many lovely things in "A" 18, I could see Chagall coming long before he appeared, announced pages ahead by Chagall fiddles, etc. And also Prepositions. It finally reached me and I went to the Chaplin bit like iron filings to the magnet, remembering everything perfectly. But I have read it all, I do not get carried away by it like by the "A's." |
| 1967/12/30 | George Steiner | Language & Silence: Essays on Language, Literature and the Inhuman |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 32
| I have [James] Mooney's wonderful Ghost Dance book finally and am reading the new George Steiner book [Language and Silence] which critics have to a great extent ignored or treated coldly. Very good. |
| 1968/01/04 | Homer | Iliad / Translated by Robert Fitzgerald |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 32
| You shall not die in the bluegrass land of A"¦. rather the gods intend you for Elysion with golden Rhadamanthos at the world's end. (Fitzgerald's Homer) |
| 1968/01/05 | George Steiner | Language & Silence: Essays on Language, Literature and the Inhuman |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 34
| George Steiner's book Language and Silence is an important one and I can't read more than half a page without having to get up and walk up and down and let all the ideas sink in a little. Very much on my wavelength. Interesting criticism of F.R. Leavis"”both criticism and appreciation"”failure of the peculiar kind of integrity Leavis represents because it closes in on itself, refuses the future, refuses most of the present, and then becomes mere snobbery. I am now in the article on Levi-Strauss. The section on the Jews is harrowing, lucid, deep, everyone should know this! |
| 1968/01/08 | Boris Pasternak | Letters to Georgian Friends / Translated by D. Magarshack |
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. |
| 1968/01/08 | George Steiner | Language & Silence: Essays on Language, Literature and the Inhuman |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 35
| George Steiner on Marxist critics, etc. Still interesting, but not the best part of the book. Useful however. |
| 1968/01/20 | Samuel Beckett | More Pricks Than Kicks |
Ltrs: HGL p. 640
| Beckett arrived in the midst of a flu epidemic and so it happened that last night, being holed in up here in the woods and unable to sleep, I finally hoisted my ruined frame out of bed, opened up the Mass wine and the Beckett underground Xerox special. Great midnight illumination. The book is every bit as good as [Joyce's] Dubliners and perhaps better. Anyhow I like it better. The writing is superb. "Dante and the Lobster" is a perfect piece of work, and shattering. Much to be said about all the loneliness stuff, solitude and society and so forth throughout the book. And merciful Mother Church ("Ding Dong"). The whole question of mercy, suffering. I mean, is the man such a cur if he demands that, after all, those who talk about mercy finally mean something by it? And if he declines to be convinced by their protestations in a dead language? (By which I don't mean Latin, either) "¦ Still flung face down with flu. |
| 1968/03/23 | William Blake | Complete writings : with all the variant readings / William Blake ; ed. by Geoffrey Keynes |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 71
| And Anitharmon named the Female, Jerusalem the holy Wond'ring she saw the Lamb of God within Veil The divine Vision seen within the inmost recess Of fair Jerusalem's bosom in a gently beaming fire Blake, Four Zoas {"Night the Eighth"} |
| 1968/03/26 | Thomas J.J. Altizer | New Apocalyps: The Radical Christian Vision of William Blake |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 72
| And then Hugo Rahner. I have read bits of a new book (Theology of Proclamation). But I come to this: "Through the historical visibility of the Papacy our faith must experience the divinity of the Church and seek it with anxious lov"¦. Loving faith will discover there hidden divinity"¦surrendered to the human element. Only in this most bitter visibility does the invisible become comprehensible." Quite apart from the Church doctrine on the Papacy"”the tone of the statement, the manner, the resonances, make me impatient and suspicious. Most of the time I don't bother about the Papacy one way or another. I accept it and hope for the best. This kind of writing tempts me to active questioning and to doubt. So anyone who does not experience the invisible divinity by looking at Pope Paul is a "gnostic"? Especially if he claims to experience the presence of God somewhere els"”in his own heart for example? How can I believe this does not reflect in Rahner an unconscious bad faith, bred of his Jesuit hangups? A willful effort to convince himself? And to use me to help him do it! The kenoticism of Altizer seems to me more open and more honest. (The Blake book.) [Note 16: Thomas J. J. Altizer's The New Apocalypse: The Radical Christian Vision of William Blake was published by Michigan State University Press (Ann Arbor) in 1967. Merton wrote a review article that appeared in the Sewanee Review 76 (Autumn 1968) and was later included in The Literary Essays of Thomas Merton, edited by Patrick Hart (New York: New Directions, 1982).] But is this whole kenotic thing too much of a mannerism? |
| 1968/03/30 | John Cohen (ed.) | Essential Lenny Bruce |
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. |
| 1968/04/01 | Morris Ernst | Teacher / editor |
Ltrs: RtoJ p. 364
| I get such a quantity of letters that it is not possible to answer even half of them. When it comes to requests like yours, the best I can do is try to send material for you to look over. Unfortunately I cannot find a copy of an essay that has something about education in it. All I can send is a sheet with some dates about my life. In the section of The Seven Storey Mountain about my days at Columbia you may find some reflections on education, and also in a recent anthology edited by Morris Ernst, The Teacher, I have a chapter ["On Remembering Monsieur Delmas"]. But you may not be able to locate the book. |
| 1968/04/16 | Italo Svevo | Confessions of Zeno / translation of La Coscienza di Zeno 1923 |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 81
| Easter Day, grey and stuffy, ended in thunderstorms while I was having supper (and reading the Confessions of Zeno). |
| 1968/04/18 | John Cohen (ed.) | Essential Lenny Bruce |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 82
| Last evening at supper I finished Lenny Bruce. Sometimes he is really inspired"” sometimes just dull. And, though he is in some sense a kind of "martyr" for honesty, yet I think his gospel of excess was delusive and self-destroying. That is the problem! Also read the last half of Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents"”a truly prophetic book! A bit of Ibn Battuta, whose travels are sometimes marvelous. But I don't read much these days. |
| 1968/05/01 | Charles Augustin Saint-Beuve | Port Royal |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 92
| The priest, Monsieur de Sainte Martre, he went sneaking out from Paris by night, along the wall of Port Royal to a tree which he climbed and from which he gave conference to the nuns inside. Of this Sainte-Beuve says: "Voilà presque du scabreux, ce me semble; voilà les balcons nocturnes de Port Royal!" ["There, nearly scabrous, it seems to me; there the nocturnal balconies of Port Royal"]. [Note 4: Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve (1804-69) was a French essayist, poet, critic, journalist, professor, senator, and novelist. See his Port Royal (Paris:Gallimard, 1961).] |
| 1968/07/03 | Brother Antoninus | Poet is Dead: A Memorial for Robinson Jeffers / pseudonym of William Everson |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 138
| New Directions sent me Bro. Antoninus's book on Jeffers. I began reading it immediately, on account of the coast. (I never paid much attention to Jeffers before. But Ping was talking about him when I was at the Redwoods and called him in Santa Barbara, enthusiastic about the sunny day at the shor"”May 13"”and Steller's Jay.) |
| 1968/07/09 | Darcy O'Brien | Conscience of James Joyce |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 140
| Went and lay down dopey for ½ hour, then got up and looked for something new. So Darcy O'Brien on The Conscience of Joyce. Not a marvelous book itself (a bit obvious"”and limited perspectives), but Joyce himself woke me up again and now I am very involved in it. Dedalus's aesthetics. The essentially contemplative vocation of joyce. His revolt is that of the contemplative and creative man called to self-transcendence and "held down" by the prosaic, legalistic, provincial Catholicism of the Irish middle class"”the bourgeois Catholicism of the 19th century"”which continues in another form in the 20th"”liberal, pragmatic, pedestrian, "practical," exalting matter and science, etc. and still putting down contemplation as "gnostic," "unchristian," enemies of the imagination, but not really earthy either. O'Brien tends to give Joyce this same stereotyped business: "rejection of the faith" (the girl standing in the water), "hatred of life." (How can he say such a thing? Surely he'll take that back.) |
| 1968/07/12 | Darcy O'Brien | Conscience of James Joyce |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 141
| The Darcy O'Brien book on Joyce is simply pathetic. The man seems to have no conception of what Joyce is all about. Identifies him completely with the romantic idealism of Stephen D. in portrait. Says he was a dualist, a manichaean, etc. Found a sexy letter to J.'s wife and gloated over it, etc. O'Brien is the kind of person who feels himself threatened by the kind of idealism that was part of Joyce's youthful character. This kind of book is simply stupid-probably a Ph.D. dissertation that got into print because of that horny letter or something. No"”it's Princeton Press-someone must have taken it seriously as "scholarship"!! |
| 1968/07/21 | James Joyce | Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man |
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 | Darcy O'Brien | Conscience of James Joyce |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 147
| I am working on my Joyce review article for the Sewanee. Some of the things said in two of the books (Darcy O'Brien and Virginia Moseley) are simply incredible. It was a nice afternoon and I would have liked to spend it over at Linton's reading the Dhammapada. But the work was good too and the house was not too hot. There are some nice things in Giacomo Joyce. But I see the idiocy of the mystique of spiritual seduction. And all the mental nonsense that goes along with such imaginings. |
| 1968/07/29 | Virginia Moseley | Joyce and the Bible |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 147
| I am working on my Joyce review article for the Sewanee. Some of the things said in two of the books (Darcy O'Brien and Virginia Moseley) are simply incredible. It was a nice afternoon and I would have liked to spend it over at Linton's reading the Dhammapada. But the work was good too and the house was not too hot. There are some nice things in Giacomo Joyce. But I see the idiocy of the mystique of spiritual seduction. And all the mental nonsense that goes along with such imaginings. |
| 1968/08/27 | Roland Barthes | Last Happy Writer |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 161
| Fine bright day. Reading the German book by Schumann on Indonesian Mysticism"” lent me by Soedjatmoko. It is very fine. A bit of Barthes on Voltaire. "The last happy writer." |
| 1968/09/17 | George Wickes | Lawrence Durrell & Henry Miller: A Private Correspondence |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 180
| I borrowed the letters of Miller and Durrell [Note 3: Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller. A Private Correspondence, ed. George Wilkes (New York: Dutton, 1963).] from Ron S[eitz] and don't feel like reading them. The first one, with Durrell putting down Ulysses (saying Tropic of Cancer was better) turned me off. |
| 1968/11/17 | Anaïs Nin | Under a Glass Bell |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 281
| "Dear Father Merriton," said the note, "Please make yourself at home the moment you arrive and just ask the bearer for anything you may require." Without my having to ask, the generator went on, the lights began to work, tea was provided in the big comfortable drawing room. I escaped quickly to the bungalow, aside, apart, alone, silent. Fire lit. Books unpacked, including one on Japan by Ruth Benedict and also Anaïs Nin's Under the Glass Bell, which I hope to finish. Along with the Buddhist books I have to return to Harold Talbott, who remains in the Windamere where he reads wrapped in a blanket. |
| 1968/11/21 | D.H. Lawrence | Twilight in Italy |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 290
| "And the ice and the upper radiance of snow are brilliant with timeless immunityfrom the flux and warmth of life. Overhead they transcend all life, all the soft, moist fire of the blood. So that a man must needs live under the radiance of his own negation." [Note 70: See D. H. Lawrence's Twiligt in Italy (New York: Viking, Compass Book.s. 1962),6.] |
| 1968/11/29 | D.H. Lawrence | Twilight in Italy |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 306
| I read large chunks of Lawrence's Twilight in Italy and found it boring, especially the bit about the amateur dramatics. It's not a good book, barely interesting, though occasionally he'll have an intuition that makes sense-such as, self and not-self. The "selfless" world of the machine. A good angle. Are we really heading for a kind of technological corruption of Buddhism? A secular nirvana? |