The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Epigraph

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  A Note to the Reader

  PART ONE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  PART TWO

  ONE

  TWO

  PART THREE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  EPILOGUE

  INDEX

  About the Author

  Footnotes

  “For I tell you that God is able of these stones

  to raise up children to Abraham”

  Introduction copyright © 1998 by Robert Giroux

  Note to the Reader copyright © 1998 by William H. Shannon

  Copyright © 1948 by Harcourt, Inc.

  Copyright renewed 1976 by the Trustees of the Merton Legacy Trust

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhbooks.com

  The poem “Song for Our Lady of Cobre” on [>] by Thomas Merton, from The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton. Copyright © 1944 by Our Lady of Gethsemani Monastery. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

  The poem “For My Brother: Reported Missing in Action, 1943” on [>], by Thomas Merton, from The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton. Copyright © 1948 by New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1997 by The Trustees of the Merton Legacy Trust. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

  Ex parte Ordinis:

  Nihil obstat: FR. M. GABRIEL. O’ CONNELL, O.C.S.O.

  FR. M. ANTHONY CHASSAGNE, O.C.S.O.

  Imprimi potest: FR. M. FREDERIC DUNNE, O.C.S.O., Abbot of Our Lady of Gethsemani

  Nihil obstat: JOHN M. A. FEARNS, S.T.D., Censor librorum

  Imprimatur: ✠ FRANCIS CARDINAL SPELLMAN, Archbishop of New York

  ISBN-13: 978-0-15-100413-3

  ISBN-10: 0-15-100413-7

  ISBN-13: 978-0-15-601086-3 (pbk)

  ISBN-10: 0-15-601086-0 (pbk)

  eISBN 978-0-547-54381-9

  v2.0113

  CHRISTO

  VERO

  REGI

  Introduction

  by Robert Giroux

  The Seven Storey Mountain was first published fifty years ago, on October 4, 1948. As Thomas Merton revealed in his journals, he had begun to write his autobiography four years earlier, at the Trappist monastery in Kentucky where he had journeyed in December 1941, at age twenty-six, after resigning as a teacher of English literature at St. Bonaventure College in Olean, New York. “In a certain sense,” Merton wrote, “one man was more responsible for The Seven Storey Mountain than I was, even as he was the cause of all my other writing.” This was Dom Frederic Dunne, the abbot who had received Merton as a postulant and accepted him, in March 1942, as a Trappist novice.

  “I brought all the instincts of a writer with me into the monastery,” Merton revealed, adding that the abbot “encouraged me when I wanted to write poems and reflections and other things that came into my head in the novitiate.” When Dom Frederic suggested that Merton write the story of his life, the novice was at first reluctant to do so. After all, he had become a monk in order to leave his past life behind. Once he began to write, however, it poured out. “I don’t know what audience I might have been thinking of,” he admitted. “I suppose I put down what was in me, under the eyes of God, who knows what is in me.” He was soon “trying to tone down” his original draft for the Trappist censors, who had criticized it severely, especially the account of his years at Clare College (Cambridge University), during which he had become the father of an illegitimate child (killed with the mother apparently in the bombing of London). For this Merton was “sent down”—expelled—from college, and his English guardian advised him (both his parents were dead) to leave England. He also told Merton to forget about his hopes of a London career in the diplomatic service, so Merton sailed for America and enrolled at Columbia College, where I met him in 1935.

  The United States was still in the Depression; the times were serious and so were most undergraduates. Among Merton’s and my classmates were Ad Reinhardt, who became a famous painter; John Latouche, who became famous in the musical theater; Herman Wouk, who became a famous novelist; John Berryman, who became a famous poet; Robert Lax, Edward Rice, Robert Gibney, and Sy Freedgood, close friends who were associated with Merton on the college humor magazine, Jester; and Robert Gerdy, who became an editor at the New Yorker.

  We met on the campus when Merton walked into the office of the Columbia Review, the college literary magazine, and showed me some manuscripts, a story, and several reviews, which I liked and accepted. I thought to myself, “This man is a writer.” He was stocky, blue-eyed, with thinning blond hair, and he was a lively talker, with a slight British accent. He was a junior and I was a senior. He told me of his interest in jazz, Harlem, and the movies—especially W. C. Fields, Chaplin, Keaton, the Marx Brothers, and Preston Sturges, enthusiasms I shared. We were also enthusiastic about Mark Van Doren as a teacher. We went to a couple of movies at the old Thalia, and of course in those leftist days words like religion, monasticism, and theology never came up. I graduated in June 1936, failing to get a job in book publishing (as I had hoped) and finding one at CBS. Then in December 1939 Frank V. Morley, head of the Trade Department of Harcourt Brace & Company, hired me as a junior editor, with the approval of Donald C. Brace (who had cofounded this distinguished firm in 1919 with Alfred Harcourt). Among the first manuscripts I was asked to evaluate was a novel by Thomas James Merton, submitted by Naomi Burton of the Curtis Brown Ltd. literary agency. The hero of The Straits of Dover was a Cambridge student who transfers to Columbia and gets involved with a stupid millionaire, a showgirl, a Hindu mystic, and a left-winger; it all took place in Greenwich Village. I agreed with the other editors that the writer had talent but the story wobbled around and got nowhere. Six months later Naomi resubmitted it as The Labyrinth, an improved replay of the same novel, which was also rejected. ¡Vlerton was an interesting writer but apparently not a novelist.

  For the first time after college, I encountered him in Scribner’s bookstore on Fifth Avenue; this was in May or June 1941. I had been browsing and felt someone touch my arm. It was Merton. “Tom!” I said, “it’s great to see you. I hope you’re still writing.” He said, “Well, I’ve just been to the New Yorker and they want me to write about Gethsemani.” I had no idea what he meant and said so. “Oh, it’s a Trappist monastery in Kentucky, where I’ve made a retreat.” This revelation stunned me. I had had no idea that Merton had undergone a religious conversion or that he was interested in monasticism. “Well, I hope to read what you write about it,” I said. “It will be something different for the New Yorker.” “Oh, no,” he said, “I would never think of writing about it.” That told me a great deal. For the first time I understood the extraordinary change that had occurred in Merton. I wished him well and we parted.

  I next heard about him from Mark Van Doren, when I called our old teacher at New Year’s. “Tom Merton has become a Trappist monk,” Mark said. “We’ll probably never hear from him again. He’s leavi
ng the world. An extraordinary young man. I always expected him to become a writer.” Tom had left with Mark his manuscript, Thirty Poems, and Mark later submitted it to my friend Jay Laughlin at New Directions, who published it in 1944. Little did we know how many other books would follow.

  The partially approved text of The Seven Storey Mountain reached Naomi Burton late in 1946. Her reaction, as Tom noted in his journal, was good: “She is quite sure it will find a publisher. Anyway my idea—and hers also—is to turn it over to Robert Giroux at Harcourt Brace.” This entry was dated December 13. Fourteen days later he wrote in his journal: “Yesterday at dinner Father Prior handed me a telegram.... The first thought that came into my mind was that the manuscript of Mountain had been lost. Naomi Burton gave it to Harcourt Brace only a week ago. I knew quite well that publishers always make you wait at least two months before saying anything about it.... I waited until after dinner and opened the telegram. It was from Bob Giroux and it said: “‘Manuscript accepted. Happy New Year!’”

  After I had received it by messenger from Naomi, I began reading the manuscript with growing excitement and took it home to finish it overnight. Though the text began badly, it quickly improved and I was certain that, with cutting and editing, it was publishable. It never once occurred to me that it might be a best-seller. Since Frank Morley had left the firm, Donald Brace was temporarily my boss. When I asked him to read it, I was finessed by his asking, “Do you think it will lose money?” “Oh, no,” I replied, “I’m sure it will find an audience.” I told him that Tom had been my classmate at Columbia (both Brace and Harcourt were Columbia men), but I was worried that I might not have been as objective as I should be. “Merton writes well,” I added, “and I wish you’d take a look at it, Don.” (I had just become the editor-in-chief) “No, Bob,” he said, “if you like it, let’s do it.” The next day I phoned Naomi with (for that era) a good offer, which she accepted on the monastery’s behalf (Merton, of course, did not receive one penny of his enormous royalties owing to his monastic vow of poverty; all income went to the community.) Then I sent off the telegram to the monastery.

  There were two editorial problems—the offputting sermon-essay with which the book opened and the need of cutting. The opening was an example of misplaced “fine” writing. It began as follows:

  When a man is conceived, when a human nature comes into being as an individual, concrete, subsisting thing, a life, a person, then God’s image is minted into the world. A free, vital, self-moving entity, a spirit informing flesh, a complex of energies ready to be set into fruitful motion begins to flame with potential light and understanding and virtue, begins to flame with love, without which no spirit can exist. It is ready to realize no one knows what grandeurs. The vital center of this new creation is a free and spiritual principle called a soul. The soul is the life of this being, and the life of the soul is the love that unites it to the principle of all life—God. The body that here has been made will not live forever. When the soul, the life, leaves it, it will be dead....

  And so on and on for many more pages. I pointed out to Tom that he was writing an autobiography, and readers would want to know at the start who he was, where he came from, and how he got there. The opening was too abstract, prolix, dull. He cheerfully accepted the criticism and finally found the right beginning. In books that become classics (“A classic is a book that remains in print”—Mark Van Doren) the opening words often seem to be inevitable, as if they could not possibly have been otherwise—“Call me Ishmael,” “Happy families are all alike,” “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Merton’s new opening began: “On the last day of January 191 s, under the sign of the Water Bearer, in a year of a great war, and down in the shadows of some French mountains on the borders of Spain, I came into the world.” This is personal, concrete, vivid, and it involved the reader in the story immediately. There remained the job of editorial polishing—removing excess verbiage, repetitions, longueurs, dull patches. I must say that Merton was very responsive and cooperative about all these minor changes. “Really, the Mountain did need to be cut,” he wrote a friend. “The length was impossible. The editor at Harcourt was, is, my old friend Bob Giroux.... When you hear your words read aloud in a refectory, it makes you wish you had never written at all.”

  Then a crisis arose in the midst of the editing. Merton told Naomi that another censor, the last to be heard from, was refusing permission for the book to be published! Unaware that the author had a contract, this elderly censor from another abbey objected to Merton’s “colloquial prose style,” which he considered inappropriate for a monk. He advised that the book be put aside until Merton “learned to write decent English.” Naomi expressed my opinion when she wrote: “We consider your English to be of a very high order.” We also felt that these anonymous censors would have suppressed St. Augustine’s Confessions if given the chance. Under the circumstances I advised Merton to appeal to the Abbot General in France and to our relief the Abbot General wrote that an author’s style was a personal matter. This cleared the air and the censor wisely reversed his opinion. (My own guess was that Merton, born in France, wrote the Abbot General—who did not read or speak English—in such excellent French that he concluded Merton’s English prose must also sing.) At last the Mountain could be published.

  When advance proofs arrived in the summer of 1948, I decided to send them to Evelyn Waugh, Clare Booth Luce, Graham Greene, and Bishop Fulton Sheen. To my delight they all responded in laudatory, even superlative terms, and we used the quotes on the book jackets and in ads. At this point Mr. Brace increased the first printing from 5,000 to 12,500 and later to 20,000 when three book clubs took it. In November, a month after publication, it sold 12,951 copies but in December it shot up to 31,028. From mid-December to after New Year’s is usually the slowest period for orders, because bookstores are so well stocked by then. This new pattern of sales was significant—the Mountain was a best-seller! It’s hard now to believe that the New York Times refused to put it on their weekly list, on the grounds that it was “a religious book.” By May 1949, when the monastery invited me and other friends for Merton’s ordination as a priest, I brought along, as a gift, copy No. 100,000 in a special morocco leather binding. (During a visit there last year, Brother Patrick Hart, who had been Merton’s secretary, pointed it out to me on their library shelf) The records show that the original cloth edition sold over 600,000 copies in the first twelve months. Today, of course, including paperback editions and translations, the total sale has reached the multiple millions, and Mountain continues to sell year after year.

  Why did the success of the Mountain go so far beyond my expectations as an editor and a publisher? Why, despite being banned from the best-seller lists, did it sell so spectacularly? Publishers cannot create bestsellers, though few readers (and fewer authors) believe it. There is always an element of mystery when it happens: why this book at this moment? I believe the most essential element is right timing, which usually cannot be foreseen. The Mountain appeared at a time of great disillusion: we had won World War II, but the Cold War had started and the public was depressed and disillusioned, looking for reassurance. Second, Merton’s story was unusual—a well-educated and articulate young man withdraws—why?—into a monastery. The tale was well told, with liveliness and eloquence. There were other reasons, no doubt, but for me this combination of the right subject at the right time presented in the right way accounts for the book’s initial success.

  One sign of its impact was the resentment it inspired in certain quarters—not only with hostile reviewers but with fellow religious who thought it inappropriate tor any monk to write. I remember receiving hate mail saying, “Tell this talking Trappist who took a vow of silence to shut up!” Though silence is a traditional part of their lives, Trappists take no such vow. Maintaining silence (to increase contemplation) does not by itself rule out communication (which they do in sign language). I had an answer for the hate-mongers: “Writing is a form of
contemplation.”

  One amusing incident soon after publication was a phone call I received from a police station in the Midwest. Some drunk, loudly proclaiming he was Thomas Merton and had left the monastery, was arrested for disturbing the peace. The police asked me to talk to him, but I said, “There’s no need for that. Just ask him to name his literary agent.” Of course he didn’t know her name and exposed himself as a fraud.

  The celebrity that followed the book’s publication became a source of embarrassment to Tom, one reason being that he quickly left his twenties behind and developed incredibly as a scholar and writer. Like Huckleberry Finn, he grew up fast. Of all the writers I’ve known—and I’ve known some great ones—none had his speed of intellectual growth, which deepened and matured as the years went by in a way that is remarkable. If he had expected to “withdraw” from the world, it did not happen. Instead, as his fame and writing increased, he heard from Boris Pasternak in Russia, from Dr. Daisetz Suzuki in Japan, Dr. Louis Massignon and Jacques Maritain in France, Canon A. M. Allchin at Canterbury Cathedral, poet Czeslaw Milosz in Poland, and Dr. Abraham Joshua Heschel at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. Many others, famous and unknown, with whom he corresponded widened his horizons more and more.

  Two years before his death he wrote a preface to the Japanese edition of The Seven Storey Mountain, which contains his second thoughts about the book almost twenty years after he had written it:

  Perhaps if I were to attempt this book today, it would be written differently. Who knows? But it was written when I was still quite young, and that is the way it remains. The story no longer belongs to me.... Therefore, most honorable reader, it is not as an author that I would speak to you, not as a storyteller, not as a philosopher, not as a friend only. I seek to speak to you, in some way, as your own self. Who can tell what this may mean? I myself do not know, but if you listen, things will be said that are perhaps not written in this book. And this will be due not to me but to the One who lives and speaks in both.