MERTON: A Biography

by Monica Furlong ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 27, 1980

Since his death in 1968, the literature on Thomas Merton has multiplied astonishingly. Many of these studies (e.g., George Woodcock's life of Merton) have been fairly well done, but Furlong's is possibly the best of the lot. It's unquestionably the best biography--the fullest, fairest, and critically sharpest picture of ""Fr. Louis"" to date--and it suggests that he may be worth all the fuss that's being made over him. Furlong treats Merton as a man, lovable and fallible, not as a disembodied thinker, theologian, or, still less, saint. She traces the way, for example, his fathering an illegitimate child (while he was a student at Cambridge) and abandoning its mother haunted him for years. She chronicles his many fights with the narrow-minded abbot of Gethsemane, Dom James Fox, and shows how, by the time he died, Merton had for all practical purposes left the Trappists: when not traveling, he lived physically in his own hermitage and mentally in the world outside monastery walls. She follows his evolution from a passionate but priggish young monk, telling his readers to ""Do everything you can to avoid the amusements and the noise and the business of men,"" to the equally passionate middle-aged prophet: the ""guilty bystander"" denouncing H-bombs and racism; the tough, earthy, Christian Zen-master, wisecracking that married Catholics would stop having sex just for fun when priests ""got around to giving up whiskey."" Merton conducted a huge correspondence, and Furlong quotes generously from it. His finest letters are probably the warm, zany notes to his Columbia classmate Robert Lax, mostly written in their private dialect (""Also was here Maritain, very fine, very noble, back from the old days when there used to be people""). Furlong's book is not, to be sure, the whole story: some of Merton's journals are still under lock and key, and will be for another 13 years. Till then, this is as close to the man as we're likely to get.

Pub Date: Aug. 27, 1980

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1980

Categories: NONFICTION