Follow the Ecstasy: The Hermitage Years of Thomas Merton

FOLLOW THE ECSTASY

PROLOGUE

I am in a condition of ecstasy over the human race.

—Thomas Merton

We had read one another’s books. We knew something about one another long before my first visit to Gethsemani. On that first visit, I went simply to spend a few days in a Trappist silence, to follow the office, to be alone.

A number of the family brothers and the guestmaster asked if I would not be seeing Father Louis (Thomas Merton’s name in religion) and expressed mild surprise that I had made no arrangements to meet him. Indeed, they expressed a kind of generous fraternal regret that we would not meet. I told them that I would of course, love to meet him, to shake his hand. But I did not wish to disturb his solitude by any intrusion.

We did meet briefly. Word got to him that I was there. We shook hands; he gave me a book he had signed for me. I explained to him why I had not written to ask for permission to see him. He expressed appreciation, quite simply and frankly, that I had not. We talked quickly about mutual friends—Dom Bede Griffiths, Jacques and Raïssa Maritain. He moved to leave and then returned to tell me, If you have the chance to come here again, don’t write the Father Abbot for permission to see me. It works better if you write me and then I’ll ask for permission to see you.

The entire visit lasted only a few minutes, but we had no barriers to get out of the way, no need to come to know one another. We met as old friends, and quite especially as colleagues.

A few weeks later I was invited back by Father Abbot James Fox, whom I had met on my first visit. He said he knew that I was involved in exhausting work and he hoped I would feel free to come there just to rest any time I felt the need.

I wrote him and Thomas Merton that for many years I had been building a private archive of photographs of men and women, famous and unknown, in their typical activities. I had done this with Jacques Maritain and with Dominique Pire, and I wrote that I would like very much, without any intention of publishing, to do this with Thomas Merton. Permission was given. Father Abbot, in fact, said that they would like to have a contemporary portrait of Thomas Merton, an official one they could release to replace those made in Merton’s youth that were still being used in newspapers and magazines. We agreed that I would photograph freely and without restrictions, but that no photograph would be released without my written consent and the abbey’s.

When I arrived for the photographic session I was gratified to see that Thomas Merton had made no special preparation. He wore his habit, a blue denim jacket and a knitted black wool cap. A slight stubble of whiskers marked his chin. He suggested that we go up to the hermitage and I quickly agreed. He explained that he was not living there yet but hoped to move in completely in the future. He spent some of his days on the mountain top working in the concrete block house.

We climbed the hill. He talked but I could not answer because my lungs were not accustomed to such strenuous activity. When we arrived at the hermitage, my hands shook so badly I could not work and I could speak only in gasps.

Tom sat me down on the edge of the porch in a clear cold sunlight so I could recover from the climb while he went to fetch wood for the fireplace.

I rested in the silence of that isolated place and watched him make trips to the woodpile, load his arms with firewood and carry it inside. In twenty minutes my trembling had stopped and I began to smell the fragrance of wood smoke from the chimney. Tom came out to see if I were sufficiently recovered to walk inside. We dubbed the climb heart attack hill and I promised him I would never attempt to walk it again—at least not at the pace he set.

Tom explained rather apologetically that the hermitage was not as poor as it should be, but that it had been built as a conference room, a place for discussions with visiting groups. Though handsome, with no electricity and no water the hermitage seemed appropriately poor to me. The morning sun, reflecting from the stone floor and walls, filled the room with a soft brilliance ideal for photography.

I began to prepare my cameras on the long work-table near the window. Tom showed no stiffening. Would he, like so many subjects, have masks that a photographer has to penetrate before photographing the person?

May I begin shooting? I asked.

Sure. What do you want me to do?

Just whatever you would do if I weren’t here. Read, write, tend the fire, anything so long as you pay no attention to me.

I began to shoot frames to accustom him to the sight and sound of the camera. We talked easily. No problems about his assuming any poses. He was perfectly natural. He was rare in this, utterly unconcerned about his image. He retained the denim jacket and wool cap until the fire warmed the room.

Though Tom didn’t wear masks, I had other problems. His face concealed nothing. It changed every moment, swiftly, with changes in his thoughts or moods. How to catch all of that? How to capture what was truly characteristic? He was up, down, grabbing books to show me things as new topics for discussion were introduced. We talked of Victor Hammer, his old friend, and Tom showed me the things Victor had made for him. I mentioned Victor’s chapel at Kolbsheim—the one he had designed and built for the Gruneliuses. I had visited it. Tom had photographs of it.

We talked photography. He knew nothing about it, but he was fascinated by what I was doing. He was amused when I told him of the tendency of very intelligent men to freeze up and become unnatural the moment the lens was pointed at them. I told him of Jacques Maritain’s discomfort, the first few times I photographed him, at what he called my machine-gunning.

Most people are like that, I said. You and Pierre Reverdy are the two easiest to photograph.

In that day’s photographing and talking I became aware of a quality that was to characterize all our subsequent meetings—an unblemished happiness with the moment, a concentration on the moment, as though there were no yesterday or tomorrow. It was like the experience of music, each moment felicitous, enough in itself. This is rare in human contacts, I think.

Tom was a man of enlightened pessimism about the world. Many of our meetings left us with the feeling that this country was moving toward ever increasing sacrifice of the freedoms we professed to uphold. But even with such a depressing prognosis, his natural buoyancy, his robust humor and his grasp of the absurd made the most pessimistic meetings happy ones. He demonstrated a completely selfless capacity for affection that freed his friends from the need to role-play or to be anything except what they were. His friendship demanded nothing—it did not seek to dominate or possess or convert or in any way alter another—and rarely judged. He created an atmosphere of such reality that his friends were freed from any need to be careful in his presence out of fear of introducing some jarring note. Any deliberate or contrived attitude of pietistic high-mindedness would have appeared utterly false in his presence. So meetings with him had a kind of joy that remained untainted no matter what else might be happening around us.

Our relationship took on a comic quality in our attempts to say goodbye forever. Every time we were together we parted with the intention of not seeing one another again. He had a vocation for the solitary life, the life of silence and contemplation and creativity. Nothing is less compatible with the quality of solitude he needed than visits from friends. Only after his death did we realize the enormous demands that were made on his solitude by individuals who did not, of course, realize how many other individuals sought his time and attention.

How often did I write him: I will consider it a failure of my friendship for you if I ever hear from you again. Please do not take the time from your life to write to me.

He would agree, but ask me to continue faithfully sending him material. You once said you were astounded that a white man could have such perception of the problems of black men, he wrote. If that is so it is because friends like you keep me informed. So it was agreed that I would send him whatever I thought important, but that he would not answer me.

On each visit to Gethsemani, I wrote him that I was coming but that I would not ask to see him since there was no need for any personal contact. Invariably our paths would cross at the abbey, or he would come to my room, and we would visit as though it were for the last time, with that special flavor of a few moments together that we had not anticipated we would have.

Finally, when he moved to the mountain-top hermitage, he wrote with great happiness that all visits would cease, that his mail would be curtailed, that he would have true solitude. I wrote him that I was overjoyed. At last he would have the silence and solitude that had been so often interrupted.

For months I heard nothing more from him, and I supposed that I would never hear from him again. I was deeply happy for him. Occasionally I would get a mimeographed poem or article he had written, with a few words written in his hand on the title page. Then he sent me some photographs he had made of roots with an Instamatic camera. He wrote a letter, explaining that his interest in photography had grown, and he wondered if I could make some prints in my darkroom. I made the prints he wanted, sent them back with high praise, and asked him to call on me for any future such service.

I began to learn of his life there in the hermitage through the writings and drawings he sent me. His energies flowed in all directions—in his writing, in his calligraphy, his occasional photography whenever he could borrow a camera. I knew that he chopped his wood and gathered it for the fireplace.

In 1966 I received a letter from Jacques Maritain saying he had heard that Tom was having some back problems and was in a hospital in Louisville for surgery. Jacques asked me to get all the details and write him immediately.

When I telephoned the abbey, Father Abbot Fox suggested I could get more precise information from the hospital and gave me the number to call.

After some explaining, the hospital asked if I would like to speak directly with Tom.

Do you mean that’s possible? I asked. I think we can plug a phone in his room.

Some minutes later I heard his voice, jovial and full of enthusiasm. We cleared away the details of his illness and then he asked me how I was fixed for money.

I’m all right, I said, wondering if he needed money. Why?

If you’re flush, then let’s talk a long time, he suggested. Since we had never anticipated talking to one another again, this was too good an opportunity to miss.

We talked. I told him about our new daughter, Amanda, that Jacques Maritain was the godfather, and that he was coming to visit us in a few weeks. But please, don’t tell anyone, Tom, I said. He doesn’t want anyone to know he’s coming—he’s afraid the TV and press will pester him.

Couldn’t you bring him to Gethsemani to see me, Tom asked. It’ll probably be the last chance we’ll have to see each other.

It will be, I said. He doesn’t plan any more trips to the U.S. But I thought you were never going to see anyone again. Jacques would hesitate to disturb your solitude, just as I would.

Oh, but something like that—a chance to see Jacques once more.

Are you sure it would be all right? Won’t you have to get permission from Father Abbot? I don’t want to suggest it to Jacques until it is cleared with the abbot. No sense building up Jacques’ hopes for a reunion and then …

Tom assured me that Father Abbot would be happy to receive him.

Almost immediately I received an airmail letter from Father Abbot Fox urging me to bring Jacques there for a visit.

Our meeting at Gethsemani turned into a magnificent reunion of old friends. Penn Jones and Babeth Manuel accompanied us because I was in a wheelchair and Jacques had become so frail. We needed help getting around. At the abbey we met other friends who had come to see Jacques and Tom—Father J. Stanley Murphy, C.S.B., from Canada, and Dan Walsh, the philosopher.

For Jacques and Tom the meeting had a special autumnal significance. Tom held Raïssa Maritain in special esteem, the love of a poet for a poet. She had died in 1960, a few weeks after the death of Pierre Reverdy.

After supper and a bull session the night of our arrival, we retired early in order to begin the next day at dawn, with Mass celebrated by Tom. Afterward, Penn Jones drove us up the hill to Tom’s hermitage. The air was still chilled. Tom had risen much earlier and had warmed the room with a fire in the fireplace. We arrived an hour after sunrise, went inside and sat around the fireplace to talk. The topics were unimportant. We were simply aware of an overwhelming joy at being together in that time and place, surrounded by the woods, the isolation, the brilliance of sunlight in autumn. All enthusiasms were heightened by the rarity of it. I photographed endlessly, not only to capture the hours, but because the excitement made us feel that exaggeration was the right and normal emotion. Where ten shots would have sufficed under ordinary conditions, a thousand seemed appropriate for the jubilance of the light and of our feelings.

Tom was everywhere doing everything. To save Jacques from the fatigue of English, Tom spoke only French with his old friend. They discussed mutual acquaintances, their work—Tom was preparing a study of the poetry and songs of Bob Dylan, the American Villon, as he described him. Tom put on some recordings of Dylan’s songs so Jacques would know what he was talking about. Played at full volume, the Dylan songs blasted the still atmosphere of Trappist lands with the wang-wang of guitar and voice at high amplification. He prepared coffee for us in the two cups he possessed and saw to our needs, expressing an energy that seemed electric, but with no loss of