The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition (2 page)

Then a crisis arose in the midst of the editing. Merton told Naomi that another censor, the last to be heard from, was refusing permission for the book to be published! Unaware that the author had a contract, this elderly censor from another abbey objected to Merton’s “colloquial prose style,” which he considered inappropriate for a monk. He advised that the book be put aside until Merton “learned to write decent English.” Naomi expressed my opinion when she wrote: “
We
consider your English to be of a very high order.” We also felt that these anonymous censors would have suppressed St. Augustine’s
Confessions
if given the chance. Under the circumstances I advised Merton to appeal to the Abbot General in France and to our relief the Abbot General wrote that an author’s style was a personal matter. This cleared the air and the censor wisely reversed his opinion. (My own guess was that Merton, born in France, wrote the Abbot General—who did not read or speak English—in such excellent French that he concluded Merton’s English prose must also sing.) At last the
Mountain
could be published.

When advance proofs arrived in the summer of 1948, I decided to send them to Evelyn Waugh, Clare Booth Luce, Graham Greene, and Bishop Fulton Sheen. To my delight they all responded in laudatory, even superlative terms, and we used the quotes on the book jackets and in ads. At this point Mr. Brace increased the first printing from 5,000 to 12,500 and later to 20,000 when three book clubs took it. In November, a month after publication, it sold 12,951 copies but in December it shot up to 31,028. From mid-December to after New Year’s is usually the slowest period for orders, because bookstores are so well stocked by then. This new pattern of sales was significant—the
Mountain
was a best-seller! It’s hard now to believe that the
New York Times
refused to put it on their weekly list, on the grounds that it was “a religious book.” By May 1949, when the monastery invited me and other friends for Merton’s ordination as a priest, I brought along, as a gift, copy No. 100,000 in a special morocco leather binding. (During a visit there last year, Brother Patrick Hart, who had been Merton’s secretary, pointed it out to me on their library shelf) The records show that the original cloth edition sold over 600,000 copies in the first twelve months. Today, of course, including paperback editions and translations, the total sale has reached the multiple millions, and
Mountain
continues to sell year after year.

Why did the success of the
Mountain
go so far beyond my expectations as an editor and a publisher? Why, despite being banned from the best-seller lists, did it sell so spectacularly? Publishers cannot
create
bestsellers, though few readers (and fewer authors) believe it. There is always an element of mystery when it happens: why
this
book at this moment? I believe the most essential element is right timing, which usually cannot be foreseen. The
Mountain
appeared at a time of great disillusion: we had won World War II, but the Cold War had started and the public was depressed and disillusioned, looking for reassurance. Second, Merton’s story was unusual—a well-educated and articulate young man withdraws—
why?
—into a monastery. The tale was well told, with liveliness and eloquence. There were other reasons, no doubt, but for me this combination of the right subject at the right time presented in the right way accounts for the book’s initial success.

One sign of its impact was the resentment it inspired in certain quarters—not only with hostile reviewers but with fellow religious who thought it inappropriate tor any monk to write. I remember receiving hate mail saying, “Tell this talking Trappist who took a vow of silence to
shut up
!” Though silence is a traditional part of their lives, Trappists take no such vow. Maintaining silence (to increase contemplation) does not by itself rule out communication (which they do in sign language). I had an answer for the hate-mongers: “Writing is a form of contemplation.”

One amusing incident soon after publication was a phone call I received from a police station in the Midwest. Some drunk, loudly proclaiming he was Thomas Merton and had left the monastery, was arrested for disturbing the peace. The police asked me to talk to him, but I said, “There’s no need for that. Just ask him to name his literary agent.” Of course he didn’t know her name and exposed himself as a fraud.

The celebrity that followed the book’s publication became a source of embarrassment to Tom, one reason being that he quickly left his twenties behind and developed incredibly as a scholar and writer. Like Huckleberry Finn, he grew up fast. Of all the writers I’ve known—and I’ve known some great ones—none had his speed of intellectual growth, which deepened and matured as the years went by in a way that is remarkable. If he had expected to “withdraw” from the world, it did not happen. Instead, as his fame and writing increased, he heard from Boris Pasternak in Russia, from Dr. Daisetz Suzuki in Japan, Dr. Louis Massignon and Jacques Maritain in France, Canon A. M. Allchin at Canterbury Cathedral, poet Czeslaw Milosz in Poland, and Dr. Abraham Joshua Heschel at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. Many others, famous and unknown, with whom he corresponded widened his horizons more and more.

Two years before his death he wrote a preface to the Japanese edition of
The Seven Storey Mountain
, which contains his second thoughts about the book almost twenty years after he had written it:

Perhaps if I were to attempt this book today, it would be written differently. Who knows? But it was written when I was still quite young, and that is the way it remains. The story no longer belongs to me.... Therefore, most honorable reader, it is not as an author that I would speak to you, not as a storyteller, not as a philosopher, not as a friend only. I seek to speak to you, in some way, as your own self. Who can tell what this may mean? I myself do not know, but if you listen, things will be said that are perhaps not written in this book. And this will be due not to me but to the One who lives and speaks in both.

Thomas Merton died in 1968 while attending a conference of eastern and western monks in Bangkok. Today, on the fiftieth anniversary of
Mountain,
I think again of Mark Van Doren’s words, which Tom and I as students heard in his classroom: “A classic is a book that remains in print.”

by William H. Shannon

Founding President of the
International Thomas Merton Society

Published on October 4, 1948,
The Seven Storey Mountain
was an instant success. Hailed as a twentieth-century “version” of the
Confessions
of St. Augustine, it has for fifty years continued to sell and sell and sell. Evelyn Waugh, no easy critic, wrote prophetically that
The Seven Storey Mountain
“might well prove to be of permanent interest in the history of religious experience.” Graham Greene suggested that it was “an autobiography with a pattern and meaning valid for all of us.” Its readership has continued to expand, extending far beyond its country of origin. More than twenty foreign language translations have appeared, one of the most recent being Chinese.

Published just three years after the end of World War II,
The Seven Storey Mountain
struck an instant and sensitive nerve in America and eventually in other parts of the world. Its timing was perfect, coming as it did when, disillusioned by war and searching for meaning in their lives, people were ready to hear the well-told story of a young man whose search ended in remarkable discovery.

Yet, like every classic work,
The Seven Storey Mountain
may need some introduction for the new reader. Since it is being released in a special anniversary edition, this Note to the Reader may be able to anticipate some difficulties and offer some clarifications so that the reader can approach the book in a comfortable mood and with a clear understanding of what Thomas Merton is about as he narrates with youthful enthusiasm the story of his conversion to the Catholic faith.

I see three principal ways in which
The Seven Storey Mountain
may surprise or confuse readers: the outdated religious atmosphere that pervades it; the missing information a reader would like to have but on which the author is silent; the interpretation the writer gives to his story.

RELIGIOUS ATMOSPHERE

This book, written by a young monk wondrously happy in his early years in a Trappist monastery and writing while still under the glowing ardor of his conversion experience, is of course unabashedly Roman Catholic. But the Roman Catholic Church you encounter in this book is almost light years removed from the church that we recognize as the Roman Catholic Church today. Today’s church is the product of the revolution (not too strong a term) set in motion by the Second Vatican Council.

The pre—Vatican II church into which Merton was baptized was a church still reacting—even three centuries later—to the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. Characterized by a siege mentality, wagons-circled around doctrinal and moral absolutes, it clung to its past with great tenacity. An institution apart, it showed little desire to open itself to the questions and needs of a world undergoing huge and unprecedented changes. The church prided itself on the stability and unchangeable character of its teaching in this context of a world in flux. At the time Merton wrote his book, Roman Catholic theology had become a set of prepackaged responses to any and all questions. Polemical and apologetic in tone, its aim was to prove that Catholics were right and all others wrong. This arrogance and confident air of superiority are charmingly captured in a Brendan Beahan story about the Catholic bishop of Cork, Ireland, who, when informed by his secretary that the Church of Ireland bishop of Cork had died, smugly remarked: “Now he knows who is the real bishop of Cork.”

Today, fifty years removed from this rigid ecclesial atmosphere, it may be difficult to identify with Thomas Merton’s enthusiastic acceptance of the church’s triumphalist mentality. Yet, like many converts who found their way into the church after years of aimless wandering, he initially welcomed it lock, stock, and barrel. He was happy to replace the doubts and uncertainties of his past with the unquestioned and unquestioning certitude of the Catholic Church of the mid-twentieth century. Confident in his belief that he belonged to the “one true” church, he all too often speaks disparagingly about other Christian churches—mirroring the church’s complacent triumphalism himself. Even fifty years ago this triumphalism proved a problem for some readers of other religions, who sensed the book’s power but were bewildered by its narrow religiosity. One young woman, although obviously moved by her reading, lamented: “Why is he so vituperative about Protestants? Are they that bad?” Readers today will be better able to put this narrowness in historical perspective and thus be less bothered by it.

People continue to read
The Seven Storey Mountain
because the story of how Merton arrives at this certitude is so compelling. We are swept along with this young man as he seeks to make something out of his heretofore undisciplined life. Today, as we hover on the verge of a new millennium, we can identify with his searching, if not always with the specific direction it took. Merton’s personal magnetism, the enthusiasms of his convictions, the vivid narratives of this born writer, transcend the narrowness of his theology. His story contains perennial elements of our common human experience. That is what makes it profoundly universal.

MISSING INFORMATION

In the early summer of 1940 Thomas Merton, accepted by the Franciscan Order, was living in Olean and planning to enter the Franciscan novitiate in August. In the middle of the summer he was struck with a sudden anxiety. He realized that he had not told the novice director the complete story of his life. There were facts about his past that he had failed to reveal. He returned to New York City to “tell all,” hoping that his past would not matter. Apparently it did. He was instructed to withdraw his application to the Franciscans. His hopes were shattered. Brokenhearted, he looked for a job and was hired to teach at St. Bonaventure University.

In 1948—and later as well—readers had no inkling what he meant by “telling all.” Some years later the story emerged that, while at Clare College, Cambridge, Merton’s sexual drives, unaccompanied by any sense of their true human meaning, led to disaster not only for him but also for an unmarried woman who bore his child. Nothing further is known of her or the child. At one time (in February 1944) Merton did try to get in touch with her, but she seems to have disappeared.

After this devastating experience in New York City, Merton was convinced that he was forever barred from the Roman Catholic priesthood. He does not tell his readers the reason for this conviction, but it must have been based on the conversation he had had with the Franciscan novice director.
The Seven Storey Mountain
is silent about what was said in that conversation. More than a year later, however, a Franciscan priest at St. Bonaventure told him that he had been mistaken in thinking that his rejection by the Franciscans meant that he could never become a priest. There was no impediment to his ordination. This news freed him to go to the Trappist monastery in Kentucky, where in 1949 he was ordained a priest.

INTERPRETING THE MERTON STORY

Like many great works, the Merton story may be read on three different levels of meaning. First, there is the
historical
level: what actually happened in his life. Second, there is the
remembered
level: what Merton was able to recall of the events of his life. Memory is often selective, which means that the remembered past may not always coincide with the historical past. Finally, there is the level
of monastic judgment.
By this I mean that Merton wrote
The Seven Storey Mountain
as a monk. His monastic commitment colors the way Thomas Merton (his religious name was Father Louis) tells the story.
The Seven Storey Mountain
, I believe it can be said, is the story of a young man named Thomas Merton being judged by a monk named Father Louis. It is helpful to the reader to understand that at times the monk tends to be quite severe in his judgments of the young man.