Remembering Thomas Merton

At the New Yorker, Alan Jacobs remembers poet, priest, and prophet Thomas Merton, on the 50th anniversary of the writer's death. Jacobs delves into Merton's spiritual and artist development, beginning with Merton's turbulent youth and on to his spiritual awakening and conspiratorial friendship with fellow poet and priest Ernesto Cardenal. A look at Merton's early years:

Thomas Merton was born in 1915, to parents living in the French Pyrenees. His American mother, Ruth, who would die of cancer when Thomas was only six, was a Quaker and an artist, though a less ambitious one than his father, Owen. Owen, a New Zealander, had great hopes to make a career as a painter, some of which he later realized. Living in Catholic France, married to a Quaker, he wanted his son baptized in the Church of England. This was done, bequeathing to Thomas a certain confusion about religious affiliation right from the outset.

For the next twenty years, Merton’s life was peripatetic, oscillating between New York (Long Island, Queens) and various locations in France and England. Eventually, in 1933, he was admitted to Clare College, Cambridge, but he was unhappy there—“Perhaps to you the atmosphere of Cambridge is neither dark nor sinister,” he would later write—and preferred drinking and bumming around on the Continent to studying. When in Cambridge, he was frequently in legal trouble, and, worst of all, fathered a child outside of marriage—a child he never met. At least some of these disorders stemmed from the loss of his father, who had died from a brain tumor, in 1931, but, in any case, Merton would come to think of this period as one in which his soul was dead, and in which, he believed, “I had done all that I could to make my heart untouchable by charity and had fortified it, as I hoped, impregnably in my own impenetrable selfishness.”

Tom Bennett, the childhood friend of Owen’s who had become Merton’s guardian, grew exasperated and declined to continue to bail him out of jail, pay his drinking and lodging bills, or send him back to a university from which, it was clear, he would never graduate. New York seemed a safer location, a point which Merton did not dispute, and, for lack of anything better to do, in January of 1935 he applied and was accepted to Columbia University. There and then his spiritual life began.

Start the new year by reading on at the New Yorker!