Word: mertonism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...MERTON: A BIOGRAPHY by Monica Furlong...
Just 32 years ago, The Seven Storey Mountain appeared in American bookshops. Within weeks the autobiography became the most unlikely bestseller in American history-600,000 copies in the original clothbound edition. The author, Thomas Merton, was a young Roman Catholic convert who had scuttled a promising literary career to seek the austere and silent cloister of a Trappist monastery. But the career pursued him. At the time of his death in 1968 at the age of 53, the monk who dwelt in a hermitage at Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky had become the most celebrated religious recluse in the Western...
...might have been a disaster. Merton was so restless in infancy, his mother recorded, that only by singing to him could she quiet him sufficiently to dress the boy. His artist father, a New Zealander, cultivated his son's passion for the creative; the talented but apparently frustrated American mother gave him a compulsion to be perfect. That Thomas would long feel unloved may well have come from his desperate efforts to please this fastidious woman. When she lay dying of cancer, she refused to let her children see her; she sent the six-year-old Thomas a farewell...
...childhood restlessness plagued Merton through school in France and in Britain, where he entered Cambridge. His first year there was his last. He spent too many nights in beds other than his own, and fathered an illegitimate child. His furious guardian, a family friend, dealt with the indiscretion. But when Merton left for a visit to the U.S. the next summer, the guardian wrote to suggest that Thomas stay there. (The young woman and her son died in a London air raid early in World War II.) The Seven Storey Mountain was so circumspect about Merton's youthful sins...
...philistine" to various friends, but then seemed hurt when outsiders found him as obnoxious as he tried to be. He was also, as his letters reveal, generous in praising contemporaries like Graham Greene, George Orwell and Anthony Powell and encouraging to such newcomers as Louis Auchincloss and Thomas Merton. He was not entirely the Tory skinflint that his denunciations of the welfare state suggested; he assigned a number of foreign royalties to Catholic charities. His prejudices were surprisingly flexible. He enjoyed mocking the U.S. and calling its citizens "louts"; yet he told his agent to withhold publishing rights from Communist...