Merton and Friends: A Joint Biography of Thomas Merton, Robert Lax and Edward Rice

by James Harford

Thomas Merton, Robert Lax, and Edward Rice were college buddies who became life-long friends, literary innovators, and spiritual iconoclasts. Their friendship and collaboration began at Columbia College in the 1930s and reached its climax in the widely acclaimed magazine, which ran from 1953 to 1967, a year before Merton's death.. Rice was founder, publisher, editor, and art director; Merton and Lax two of his steadiest collaborators. Well-known on campus for their high spirits, avant-garde appreciation of jazz and Joyce, and indiscrimate love of movies, they also shared their Catholic faith. Rice, a cradle Catholic, was godfather to both Merton and Lax.  Merton, who died some 30 years before the other two, was the first to achieve fame with his best-selling spiritual autobiography, The Seven-Story Mountain . Lax, whom Jack Kerouac dubbed "one of the great original voices of our times," eventually received recognition as one of "America's greatest experimental poets, a true minimalist who can weave awesome poems from remarkably few words" ( New York Times Book Review ).  He spent most of the last 35 years of his life living frugally on one of the remotest of the Greek isles. After Jubilee folded, Rice wrote 20 books on world culture, religion, and biography. His 1970 biography of Merton, The Man in the Sycamore Tree , was judged too intimate, forthright, and candid by those who, in Lax's words, "were trying so hard to get pictures of [Merton's] halo that they missed his face." His biography of the 19th century explorer and "orientalist" Sir Richard Burton became a New York Times bestseller.
This book is not only the story of a 3-way friendship but a richly detailed depiction of the changes in American Catholic life over the past sixty-some years, a micro history of progressive Catholicism from the 1940s to the turn of the twenty-first century. Despite their loyalty to the church, the three often disagreed with its positions, grumbled about its tolerance for mediocrity in art, architecture, music, and intellectual life and its comfortableness with American materialism and military power. And each in his own way engaged in a spiritual search that extended beyond Christianity to the great religions of the East.

358 pages, Hardcover

First published August 20, 2007

Reviews

[Edward]

Thomas Merton, is best known as the man who wrote THE SEVEN STOREY MOUNTAIN, an often scathing indictment of materialistic American society, and who then became a Trappist monk. Being a monk did not define him, though. This book has the virtue of humanizing Merton by looking at his lifelong friendships with Lax and Rice, whom he had known from his college days at Columbia. He became a lifelong monk, yes, but he never ceased to be an outward-looking individual, never confined by the monastery he joined, often despite differences with his abbot and superiors.

Merton was a prolific writer who had an impact on countless people with his writings about contemplative prayer for all, not just religious orders, his social criticism, and as important as anything, his common humanity that always emerges.

Merton’s lifelong interest in his friends and his contacts with them puts Merton in the context of mid 20th century cultural and religious thought. Rice, an author of a number of books, the best known of which is a biography of the explorer, Richard Burton, founded JUBILEE, a Catholic literary magazine that was intended to act as a forum for dealing with contemporary issues that confronted church. Along with Lax and Merton, he edited the magazine which was published from l953 through 1967, shortly after Vatican II ended. It combined print, art, and photography. Rice also wrote a biography of Merton following Merton's death in l968, titled THE MAN IN THE SYCAMORE TREE, controversial because Rice described Merton as pushing the limits of his Christian beliefs toward Buddhism.

Lax was a talented writer who had a variety of jobs, inclining a stint at the NEW YORKER, before concentrating on poetry and becoming a semi-recluse on the Greek island of Patmos. His poetry emphasizes simplicity, the need for artists to pay attention to ordinary happenings in their lives, and write about them in such a way that the most common of life’s moments become significant. In a sense, his poetry reflects Merton’s writings on the necessity of prayer for everyone, not just “religious” types. He saw prayer in a deep sense of gratitude for being alive and able to enjoy all the gifts that one has been given.

Lax read everything that Merron wrote, and commented, “he’s most himself, most keen and observant, witty, lost (found) erudite, clean, natural, free, mature, and whatever qualities else are good in man and in Merton.” Again, the emphasis on Merton the man, not limited by narrow rules of monasticism.

Finally, Merton influenced his friends and they in turn influenced him. Harford praises these three men, all of whom were strongly influenced by Vatican II and its openness to change. He writes, “Thousands of non-Catholics and Catholics identify with Merton, his spirituality, his humanity, his vicissitudes, and in the end – his steady proclamation of faith in God. These qualities can be found aas well in Lax and Rice.”

[Nick Jordan]

You absolutely have to be a Merton fanatic to rate it this highly. The last couple chapters, in particular, are super strange and unpolished conversations between the author and Lax and Rice, with whom the author was friends. But getting to see Merton through the lens of folks who knew him before the monastery is invaluable, as they continue to travel with him as he became a celebrity in life and then especially in death.

[Charles]

Fascinating subjects written about poorly do not "make" the less than lucid prose tolerable. Maybe in the summer I'll give it another chance.