Providence (5 page)

Well, you can see that this is an entirely different vision of the monastic life than is known to the average layman, who thinks of the monk (or the nun) as someone who is simply “running away from life”—from what they perceive to be “real” life.

Did I embrace this worldview? You mean at the age of
sixteen? Yes, I think I did, though I would not have been able to articulate it as fully as this. This was what was meant by being a “serious” Catholic, and I was certainly one of those. A “serious” Catholic “really believes” that all this stuff matters—sin, grace, redemption, heaven and hell, God and Satan. I wasn’t just serious, I was super-serious.

This was an enterprise that no one could— What?

Oh, the enterprise I mean is saving the world. Even then I was obsessed with saving the world, though it meant something completely different to me then, of course.

Where was I? I was saying I wasn’t just serious, I was super-serious. I was like a superpatriot; naturally I wanted to be sent right into action. Being super-serious, I naturally wanted to join the absolute toughest, most demanding outfit I could find, and that was the Trappists. The Trappists were fighting right at the front. People like the Jesuits and Dominicans and Benedictines were so far behind the lines they were practically civilians.

Of course at the age of sixteen this was something for the future. For the indefinite future.…

I’d have to say that from the age of twelve or so it was a settled thing in my mind that I was going to be an artist of one kind or another. This was because being an artist was like being perfect and like loving God: something I could do all by myself, without outside help. Do you see what I’m saying? I knew I couldn’t succeed at something that required me to be
liked,
but I could succeed as an
artist whether anyone liked me or not. I’m speaking now of the way a twelve-year-old understands such things. Artists can just sit in their garrets all by themselves and write or paint. No one can stop them, and if they’re good at what they do, then they’re good.

How is this like loving God? Well, you see, no one can stop you at that either. You can just sit there burning with love for God, and he’s got to love you back, and that’s that. You don’t need to depend on anyone’s
support
to succeed at being holy—or to succeed at being an artist. It’s all up to you, all in your hands.

I don’t mean to suggest that I could have verbalized all this as a child. It’s simply my present estimate that I was drawn to the arts for the same reason I was drawn to piety, because I could be good at them even if I wasn’t good at anything else.

I started taking private art lessons when I was ten or so. Luckily, I wasn’t tremendously encouraged in this. I did a lot of painting in the next twenty or thirty years, but I was never going to be anything more than good.

Yes, that’s right, the paintings on the walls are mine. I agree, they’re good. I wouldn’t hang them if they weren’t, but look, there are eighteen million starving painters out there who are good, and most of them are better than I ever would have been.… These are all quite old. I haven’t done any painting in fifteen years.
This is because when I paint, I paint, and when I write, I write. I couldn’t do both. I had to choose one or the other, and I chose writing. I began to experiment with writing when I was in my mid-teens. It’s no surprise that I found language a more satisfying medium than paint. Paint is unruly stuff, you know, not the best material for achieving perfection, whereas language does exactly what you want it to, no more and no less. If you want an elephant in a story, you say, “There was an elephant standing in the garden,” and by God there it is—in three seconds flat—trunk, tail, ears, and everything, perfectly proportioned, exactly the right color and texture, every muscle and sinew in precisely the right place. Try to duplicate that feat with a brush and paint!

Like most people then and today, I lacked any clear idea about what writers are and what writers do. Obviously they fill pages with words, and they do this in such a way that people want to buy and read their books. Even this apparently naive and superficial statement reflects more understanding than I actually had. Writers, as I imagined them, sat in their rooms and were impelled or inspired to fill pages with words. Publishers, on learning that this activity had taken place, would then say to them, “You know, if these pages were done up into a book, people would want to read it.”

“What good news that is,” the author would reply. “How fortunate it is that there is some correspondence between what I am impelled or inspired to write and what the general public likes to read!”

As the time drew near for me to give serious thought to my adult career (always provided I didn’t become a Trappist
monk), I decided that winning the esteem of the world by filling pages with words would suit me very well. At this time, the best known and most admired authors in America were William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. I read their work and found it not too difficult to fill up pages of my own that seemed very similar to theirs. I sent a collection of these pages to the Writers’ Institute at St. Louis University, and they replied by awarding me a full scholarship.

Nowadays it seems to be fairly well understood that writers know something about writing that English teachers don’t. In 1953, however, this apparently wasn’t even guessed at, for there wasn’t a single writer on the faculty of the Writers’ Institute. As a result, when we aspiring writers handed in stories, they didn’t come back with comments like “Nicely written, but no one on earth will publish it.” They came back with the same comments we’d had from our high school English teachers, comments like “Very good” and “Interesting idea.” In our classes, to the best of my recollection, no one ever talked about what was involved in getting published. It seemed to be taken for granted that if we were “good enough,” publication would surely follow and was not something that could otherwise be usefully thought about.

To be fair to the faculty, I gave the program only two years. To be fair to me, in two years I didn’t acquire a single new skill or a single new understanding that would
be relevant to a writing career. I don’t mean to suggest that I was outraged by this failure. I was, after all, only marking time until I could take up my true vocation, which was to the religious life. It seemed to me now, though, that I’d waited long enough, that I’d given the idea long enough to go away if it was going to go away, and it hadn’t. I still wanted to become a Trappist monk.…

Yes, that’s a valid point. I’m expressing this as I perceive it now. Naturally, when I was twenty years old, I spoke in terms of “having a vocation,” but this didn’t presuppose that I’d received a personal summons from God. If you felt an attraction to the religious life, this was assumed to be a reasonable indication that you had a vocation.

On the subject of attraction and assumptions … it’s often assumed that my attraction to the Trappist life must have been inspired by Thomas Merton. After the appearance of
The Seven Storey Mountain,
he’d become the world’s most renowned Trappist as well as one of the world’s most renowned religious writers, but I wasn’t going into the Trappists to pursue the intellectual life or to become a writer. Merton was far less what I had in mind as a model than that roughneck cowboy of
The Man Who Hated God.
Although I made my application for admission to Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky, where Merton lived, I had no reason to suppose that I’d ever meet him or exchange a syllable of conversation with him. In fact, I wasn’t particularly asking to be admitted at Gethsemani and said in my letter that I’d gladly go wherever I
was told to go. At that time the Trappists had several U.S. foundations.

As it happened, however, Merton was at that time the novice master at Gethsemani, which meant that it was he who received my letter and he who decided there was no reason why I should go anywhere else.…

I’m smiling because when I say “as it happened,” I really mean “as Providence would have it.” If I’d written to a different monastery, if someone other than Merton had been the novice master, or if he’d sent me to a different monastery, my whole subsequent life might well have been quite astonishingly different.

Yes … my family. I remember my mother making the expected speech about “throwing my life away,” and what terrible thing had I ever done that I needed to go and do penance at a monastery? I don’t recall my father’s reaction; I can’t think he would have been much surprised. After all, I’d always been a queer boy, in every sense.…

That’s an acute observation. I don’t remember their reactions very well because they were no longer deeply involved in my life or I in theirs. I’d given up on them, you see. They were clearly hopeless, still tearing and rending each other like a couple of savages, and my being perfect had been completely wasted on them. But now I
had another use for perfection. Now I could be perfect for someone who
appreciated
perfection, who knew the
value
of perfection—indeed for someone who had said in so many words, “Be perfect, as your heavenly father is perfect.”

That too is an interesting observation. I
do
sound as if I despise this boy, who was having so much difficulty becoming a
real
boy. Let me think about that.…

I don’t think I despise him, in fact I’m quite sure I don’t. It’s simply that I’m allowed to laugh at him. I’m allowed to laugh at him and at his very painful adolescence, because, after all, he was me. I wouldn’t take it kindly if
you
were to laugh at him, however. You don’t know him well enough for that.

Now where was I? I guess I was on my way to the monastery. I got there somehow, but, for all I remember, it might have been by bicycle.

F
IVE

         
People of modern sensibility
can admire someone who enters a religious order to do good works of some kind, to teach or tend the sick or feed the poor. Even sanctity can be swallowed if it’s a good, healthy,
active
kind of sanctity, like Mother Teresa’s. What people don’t like to see nowadays are saints skulking in their cells staring glassy-eyed at a crucifix. This sort of sanctity strikes them as morbid and sickly, and naturally this was exactly the sort of sanctity I had in mind for myself.

In my school career, all my efforts had gone into demonstrating that I was a genius. If I was a genius, then it didn’t matter if I was queer. Or, perhaps more accurately, if I was a genius then being queer was okay, because all geniuses are queer, aren’t they? But I wasn’t entering the
monastery to continue this career. I didn’t need or want to demonstrate my brilliance. I wanted to be shed of all that. I didn’t want to shine, I wanted to become nothing, to be enfolded in the Lord, and disappear.

No, no, here I’m speaking the literal truth. Hold on, I’ll be back in a minute.…

This is a poem I wrote a few months before I left for the monastery. It’s called “The Old Acolyte’s Easter.”

This is what I had in mind for myself, self-effacement to such a degree that I could die and not be missed.

Apparently you find this puzzling. I’m not sure why.…

Ah, yes, I see, that’s a good point. When I thought of myself as a writer, the objective was entirely different. As a writer, I wanted to stand in the spotlight of public attention and adulation, there’s no doubt of that. These were the two forks in the road ahead of me, and each had its attractions. I could go either way, toward what I imagined
would be fame and glamour and fortune or toward complete poverty and anonymity. It had to be one extreme or the other. The middle of the road has never had any attraction for me.

In my fantasy of monastic life, I would on arrival, as the newest newcomer, be given the humblest chores to do, and I would do them—to perfection, of course. Naturally my fantasies didn’t run to cleaning latrines or washing dishes. I thought in terms of scrubbing floors. There I’d be, lost in meditation, scrubbing away for hours on end but oblivious of the passage of time. In ten or twenty years I could work my way up to being the candle-lighter of my poem.