One thing that [Flannery O’Connor] always does is seems to cross two wires that don’t usually belong together. There’s a story, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” about a character called The Misfit, an escaped con who murders an entire family in the woods in Georgia. But this family is a very funny almost kind of ’50s Disney family, so everyone is laughing through the story. At a certain point two people have now been shot, and The Misfit is spouting nihilist existentialist philosophy, and you start thinking, well, this isn’t funny. I can’t laugh at this. So that kind of queasy moment where you’re not sure, when you have two reactions at once, seems very Flannery O’Connor. She’s done a lot with extreme religious figures and backwoods prophets, and there’s almost an apocalyptic mood and violence to these stories mixed with comedy, and I think that this seems very current, like out of the 24/7 news cycles.

Usually people don’t realize that she’s Catholic. That’s the first reaction. Conan O’Brien wrote his senior essay at Harvard on Flannery O’Connor, and he was being interviewed about it once, and he mentioned that you read these stories and you think they’re by this bitter, drunken old alcoholic guy in Georgia, and then it turns out they’re actually written by this pious woman living with her mother. One way to read these stories is to not get the Catholicism at all. There are only two walk-ons by Catholic priests in these stories. Her real subjects are these kind of Protestant backwoods characters that she saw around her, although she also wanted to then explain that part of her work a lot, so when she started giving lectures and started writing essays, she set out to emphasize or try to frame her own work that way.

I think that she purposefully, almost cannily found a way to make stories that were about God in some way. She started a correspondence with a woman named Betty Hester just because Betty Hester wrote her letters saying these stories were really about God. No one had said that before. But she—unlike, say, a Catholic writer who’s writing about parish life—found a way to make these stories that were entertaining to everyone and yet almost writing on different levels, and if you put it on the stained-glass glasses you could see the whole Catholicism in them.

Her father died of lupus, which she developed later in life herself when she was 15 years old, and there’s one kind of unpublished journal that she kept where you see it’s this teenage Mary Flannery O’Connor writing about the death of her father, and she said that the consciousness of God came upon us like a bullet in the side. It’s very interesting. So she already, as a teenager, made a connection between grace and violence, really, so in a sense, it’s this kind of rattling experience that always brings out the grace in her stories, and I think she had these kind of rattling experiences in being faced with death in her own life that made her connect these two.

Her whole view was almost satiric of modern secular culture, and that basically people weren’t at all tuned in to these issues of grace and the meaning of life, and so she felt that her explanation of these extreme, violent characters was that they would shock people and that you needed to shock people at this point to get their attention.

In some ways O’Connor’s also making fun of herself often. The character Joy-Hulga in the story “Good Country People,” who’s this 30–year-old lady with a PhD or something who’s reading Heidegger on this farm with her mother and has a wooden leg, so in many ways a mirror image of herself, and of course she’s always making fun of that kind of intellectual pretension and the college girl and the over-intellectual woman, and there’s some of O’Connor always in that, so she’s making fun of people and she’s puncturing everyone, but finally you feel, thankfully, that it’s also herself that she’s making fun of.

She grew up in Savannah’s Irish Catholic community, but this was very much a subset of a subset in the South. Especially at a certain point, when they moved to Milledgeville in the middle of Georgia, Catholics were very rare. It was the Protestant South. And so early on she was almost figuring she was an outsider, figuring out how to get over to people, and certainly humor worked for her. She taught a chicken to walk backwards when she was a little girl. She walked chickens dressed in bowties down the streets in Milledgeville on a leash. So early on she was trying to bridge this, in a way, and I think that in her work there she went for very startling and extreme kinds of characters to get across in that way.

Incomprehension was this joke to her. She almost took pleasure in it. In a certain sense she needed to be misunderstood by this culture for all of her arguments and criticisms to make sense. She also said at a certain point that she would give up 100 readers in the present for one reader in 100 years. So this is also someone who is trying to get across to the ages and to posterity, so she had a very weirdly confident sense of her own talent and genius, too.

She used [the word “mystery”] sometimes when talking about her lupus, and I think that this kind of autoimmune disease that would come and rise and fall and no one ever understood exactly what it was, meant that she was living with a kind of mystery about her own mortality. But she also came then to see religion as mystery. Her understanding of God and the world had to do with mystery, and then fiction was a way of delving into mystery. So instead of trying to explain things she would write a story, and so she sort of felt that fiction, because it was capturing this world that she was so good at recording almost by the way that things looked and the comedy of people’s speech patterns, somehow that full view of the world gave people more of a sense of recognition, I think.

The way mystery practically worked out in her stories was that she wrote every morning for three hours, invariably seven days a week, and that she never knew where a story was going. A friend of hers, Robie Macauley, said that she was a demon rewriter, and this was because she kept sort of working through material and then she would hit a dead end and then she would go in another direction or she would reuse something in a novel later. I think that’s a very particular way of working, almost poetic way of working on a story. She even said in “Good Country People” that the reason the reader gets a shock at the end when the Bible salesman steals the wooden leg of Joy-Hulga in the hayloft is because she didn’t know that that was going to happen until about five lines before she wrote it. Because the writer got a shock the reader gets a shock, and I think that becomes part of her way of exploring mystery through the imagination.

What she meant by manners was just the way people behave. I mean she spent most of her time observing, so she was extremely quiet. She had lunch every day with her mother in a restaurant in Milledgeville, and her mother would sit out and talk to people. Flannery would say nothing, but she would listen. She would sometimes get her mother to start conversations at the gas station with the attendant, so she had a great ear for the way people spoke. She was also a painter. Everyone doesn’t realize that, and she would spend time painting the farm also as a way to learn to look. So I think in that way she was recording what people do in this kind of manners and etiquette of life, and somehow the more she did these kind of caricatures the more it also points to what’s behind them.

I think she was very true to her material in having these highly functioning eyes and ears, and at the same time always would give a sense of something breaking through, and it always does. This annoying grandmother character who says she wanted to wear a hat and white gloves on the family vacation so if there was an accident and anyone found her on the road they would know that she was a lady, so that’s the ultimate send-up of manners in a way. And yet the grandmother at a certain point, when faced with the rifle, finally sees The Misfit is her own son and sort of breaks through that, so I think that kind of tension is key to O’Connor’s work.

She got in trouble early on at the Iowa writer’s school for the use of the N word in stories, and this has kind of shadowed her career always in a sense. But her point at that time was that she couldn’t change that word because that’s the way those people speak. So partly it’s staying true. In a way, what we would almost call unpolitically correct at the moment is where she would almost put on blinders and just went for what was really there and worried about reaction later.

There’s some “South Park” in Flannery O’Connor, but she made fun of everything. She was an equal-opportunity satirist in that way, but I do think satirists are often utopian in a way, like Waugh and Swift, and she had some of that, that Catholic sensibility of a perfect world and a heaven and things only made the comedy and the violence and the grotesque more obvious.

She was very aware of Southern issues. In another way she would also say, when people tried to label her as a Southern writer, well, the South is really just an accent, and I think that’s true. She’s obviously a universal writer. You don’t say that Chekhov is only for Russians—and O’Connor has that, but you know it’s definitely set in a place and she was a great proponent of that, the local, the regional, that a writer works from the world that’s around them. Partly, I think, again, it was her making the best of her situation. I mean, she did seem to be planning on a life in the north. She’d gone to Yaddo, she lived a little bit in Manhattan, she was at the Iowa writer’s school. She was really forced home because of her disease, but there she found her material, really, so it was this kind of prodigal daughter story. She found this great gift by coming home, and she certainly became its great hero and proponent from that point on.

My intuition is that she found her material by being forced home, and when she went to live on the dairy farm with her mother in the middle of Georgia, in those first six months she wrote three stories—“The River,” “The Life You Save May be Your Own,” and “A Good Man is Hard to Find” that are the three kind of classic, trademark, signature Flannery O’Connor stories, so she obviously looked around her and suddenly found all these people no one was writing about, and that she had a great talent to write about them and realized that, and so that would not have happened, and so the idea of her being another southern writer living in New York City—I don’t know what she would have done, but certainly none of these great stories that we think of as O’Connor would be possible.

Surprisingly, O’Connor was writing about black characters in high school in stories and fiction, which no young southern lady did. She said that she became an integrationist when she was taking the bus to Atlanta to go to the Iowa writer’s school in 1946. She then had a black woman friend in graduate school, and her mother told her that wasn’t appropriate, and she refused to go along for that. She voted for Adlai Stevenson and for John F Kennedy, who in the south then were very much associated with integration. But what happened then in the late ’50s and the early ’60s when the civil rights movement became politically correct in a sense and you had people coming from the north to the south, then she sort of went in reverse and at first she didn’t like the idea of people from the north coming and preaching to the people of the south about what to do. Now obviously these are all excuses—Faulkner said the same thing—to slow things down, in retrospect, but she didn’t like a kind of sanctimony about the movement, and so she started making fun of it, and there are unpublished letters to a friend where she then became a connoisseur of these race jokes which sound horrible when you read them now, and she’s like challenging her own redneck characters sometimes, and you can’t tell like where’s the real Flannery O’Connor, and certainly there’s not great empathy there. But it’s complex.

I think the person who described her as a cultural racist was a Trappist monk who’s still in a monastery in Georgia that she used to visit, and he said there was no doubt that—I mean O’Connor never questioned that all, even black people and all races, had shared the blood of Christ in that way, he said. But she could also channel this southern attitude, half herself, half in making fun of it, and so that’s, I think, what he meant by cultural racism. Robert Giroux, her publisher, said to me that Flannery was too intelligent to be racist, and there is an aspect to that. I mean it wasn’t pure prejudice, but in another way she was a little too finely protective of her material and her culture.

She was a great reader of theology. One of the surprises to me was when I went to Milledgeville and saw her library was vast. It’s probably one of the more important collections of 20th-century theology in America, so she loved reading theology. She used to read Thomas Aquinas for 15 minutes before she went to bed. She ssaid reading theology made her fiction bolder. She also became the reviewer for the Atlanta diocese magazine, and she would review a lot of works of theology. I think it was partly to get free copies of all the books. But she was annoyed that the Protestant theologians were a lot more interesting. She had to go back to Aquinas and she wanted a Catholic theologian. I think part of Teilhard to her—and she said literally he was the new Thomas Aquinas for the 20th century, so she was almost looking for him, and she was attracted to this cosmic vision that he had. She was attracted to his language. It was very poetic and almost an unlikely pairing, because Teilhard was then accused of heresy because there was no place for sin in his work, but O’Connor’s stories are all about sin.

Since he was a paleontologist and he worked with discovering the Peking Man in China, basically Darwinian evolution was also spiritual and that the people are moving eventually towards creating the body of Christ through television and media and all of these ways that they are becoming connected, so a very visionary, poetic view, and that had some kind of appeal for her. Finally, of course, all of this became practical in the craft of fiction for O’Connor. She wrote a story, “Everything that Rises Must Converge,” which is a phrase taken out of Teilhard, so there were certain ways in which it comes into her work in that sense, I think.

She’s always trying to say four things in one sentence. When O’Connor went to Iowa City she was actually disturbed at first, she was writing these early stories of “Wise Blood,” the beginning of the novel “Wise Blood,” which opens with Hazel Motes seeing the number for a house of prostitution on the men’s room wall and going off and spending a night with the madam while leaving his tall preacher’s hat on the bed, this kind of comic scene. But she was worried a little how this Catholic girl could be writing such fiction, and she went to see the local priest, and the local priest said to her you don’t need to write for 15-year-old girls. So we can be thankful for that, but then she developed and needed even more of a kind of theological underpinning for this, and she found it in Jacques Maritain, who was doing translations of Thomas Aquinas at the time. These translations were very important for a lot of intellectual conversions at that moment in the late ’40s of people who were friends or acquaintances of hers, Thomas Merton, Robert Lowell, Allen Tate, Carolyn Gordon. O’Connor herself, though, was a cradle Catholic. Aquinas had this idea that an artist wasn’t a moral function like being a priest, that it was a creative function or a craft function, so for the artist, the way in which they showed devotion was by writing the best possible story, and this kind of freed her up. She said good news, you don’t have to be a good person to be a good writer, and in a way that’s what she’s saying, that she has this gift and that therefore following through on this gift becomes an act of devotion. These kinds of comments get people to laugh and are pretty folksy, but O’Connor has another reverberation going on in her own head, and writing her biography you start getting more aware of those reverberations.

[O’Connor and Merton] knew each other by proxy. They were both published by Robert Giroux. O’Connor was first brought into Giroux’s office by Robert Lowell, and Giroux told me, actually, that he knew right then he wanted to sign her up, and he knew that she would be a great writer. I said, well, did you read anything that she had written? And he said no, I could just tell from her demeanor that she would do whatever it took—interesting publishing intuition, but he just published “The Seven Storey Mountain,” and this was a big bestselling book at the time, so O’Connor asked for a copy of “The Seven Storey Mountain,” and then Giroux would go visit his writers at certain times, and he went first to see Thomas Merton who was in Gethsemani, and then Merton, who was an admirer of O’Connor’s, gave a book to go to her, and then she, I think, sent him a peacock feather at a certain point, so they had that sort of back and forth. They were very interested in each other. When O’Connor died, Merton wrote very high praise about how when you think of O’Connor you don’t think of Faulkner or Katherine Ann Porter, you think of Sophocles. I don’t know how much it was in reverse, with O’Connor’s enthusiasm for Teilhard. She never quite went around recommending Thomas Merton to people. I mentioned that to Robert Giroux ,and he thought that was interesting and hadn’t thought of it, but there is some truth there. Merton was an early kind of political left sort of thinker and definitely ahead of her curve on some of that, although she also at the same time he was starting to translate the desert fathers, she was working on a third novel that is unfinished, which relied a lot on the desert fathers, so she seemed to be like Merton, moving towards a kind of more global Vatican II view of Catholicism.

She really liked European Catholic writers, like Francois Mauriac or Waugh or James Joyce. She liked Gogol a lot, which you can see, this sort of exaggerated, grotesque characters. I think she was actually much more influenced by Faulkner than she liked to let on. She had a kind of anxiety of influence going on there with him, so she would say, well, her one-cylinder syntax could never have matched Faulkner, or that when the Dixie Limited is roaring down the track you get your little buggy out of the way, with the Dixie Limited being Faulkner. But, actually, in her library you find that she had every book by him and had read them earlier on than she claimed that she had, so I think he is a kind of big influence.

Francois Mauriac

Actually, one of the few writers that she mentioned was Nathanael West, who wrote “Miss Lonely Hearts,” which is funny, again, offbeat dark humor about an advice columnist who becomes a kind of Christ figure in a certain way. Edgar Allen Poe was a big influence on her, especially early on. She read Edgar Allen Poe when she was 12 and 15 and 17 and you can see later she especially liked the humorous tales of Edgar Allen Poe. There’s one story called “The Man Who Was Used Up,” where a kind of fashionable socialite goes home to his apartment. Someone trails him and looks through the window, and he comes home and sort of takes out his teeth, which are fake, and his eyes, which are fake, and he has a fake arm on and things, and you can see that in “Good Country People” with the unscrewing of the wooden leg, so she liked that kind of grotesque character. More serious later was Nathaniel Hawthorne. She said that she was of the lineage of Nathaniel Hawthorne, you know, the way that he had a kind of dark grotesque that could also have a moral quality to it, so I think “Young Goodman Brown” is an influence on “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” In fact, you can hear Goodman and good man in those titles, and that story about going into the woods and meeting the devil is really what happens in “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” going into the woods and meeting The Misfit. So she had those models. At the same time, she didn’t really like to be called gothic or southern gothic, and she didn’t really like labels at all, so in that way if you called her gothic she’d say she was grotesque; if you said she was grotesque then she’d say she’s gothic. But I think that kind of lineage, this dark comic sensibility she really liked. She was interested in not just Poe but the humorous tales of Poe, so when you get those together you get more of O’Connor than you might get elsewhere.

I think Robert Lowell’s influence on O’Connor is huge, and he became the surprise to me in the book, and a secret hero of it. I actually have my own private theory that I presented lightly in the biography that he was the model for Hazel Motes, because Lowell was going through his conversion, he’d been converted to Catholicism, he was lapsed, and now was on his way back into the church. He was kind of canonizing her, so she became Saint Flannery to him, so he was putting those categories onto her, but at the same time you had someone who was struggling like Hazel Motes, an extreme character, between non-belief and belief, so possibly that way. At the time that she was in Yaddo she had trouble with her publishers. She’d gotten a fellowship to write “Wise Blood” while she was at Iowa, and the publisher didn’t like the first draft and was kind of pushing her towards a more conventional novel and a more commercial novel, and Lowell was kind of bolstering her about going for, I think, the high road of art a little bit more, and also he was the one who really saw in her, almost, his interest in her faith, in religion and Catholicism, partly maybe enhanced her own sense of it, and I think he really encouraged that in her, so they both became kind of interested in medieval saints lives and things like that and spent Christmas Eve listening to Gregorian chant and Mass on records that Lowell had. So I think part of that really encouraged her medievalism. At that point at Yaddo she’d told someone she was a 13th-century Catholic. You can see all of that in “Wise Blood.” And also most practically Lowell introduced her to everyone who became important in her future life and career. He introduced her to Robert Giroux, her publisher, he introduced her to Sally Fitzgerald and her husband Robert Fitzgerald, the poet and translator, and she went to live with them for a year-and-a-half. So I think that he had this galvanizing influence on her, and she did say later in a rare moment in a letter that he was one person she really loved. I asked Robert Giroux if she was in love with him, and he said no, I think she was infatuated with him, and that’s a good kind of answer, but she did tend to like certain men who were larger than life and movie-star handsome in the way that her father had been, and I think Lowell had some of that, and Robie Macauley had some of that in Iowa, but I think it was a marriage of true minds between those two, and he was infatuated with that aspect of her.

Besides the Lowell infatuation I think that there was one person, Eric Langkjaer, who’s still alive, who I spoke with in Copenhagen, who was very helpful, sent me all the letters that O’Connor had written to him. He was a college textbook salesman, he had been to Princeton, he was working for Harcourt, and he was in the south and became introduced by a professor at Georgia College because she was a local author. He became, like Lowell, interested in her mind, I think, and they liked to discuss religion and theology, and she definitely, I would say, had this romantic interest in him, and also he got her off the farm. He would take her for rides, like dates that they went on. One culminated in a kiss, so there was definitely a romantic aspect to this, and Langkjaer then went for the summer to Europe, and there are these letters back and forth, one from O’Connor which she wrote at the bottom, if you were here we would talk for hundreds of hours on the porch, which crosses in the mail with one from him saying that he’s engaged to be married. So that was this crunch moment for her, because it was also the moment when she was moving towards first using a cane, and I think it was almost a last opportunity in that sense. But O’Connor being O’Connor, she got a kind of revenge. She wrote the story “Good Country People,” and the main character is this Bible salesman, and actually Eric Langkjaer, they used to joke and call his catalogue for college textbooks “the Bible,” and so the way in which he seduces almost the invulnerable Joy-Hulga and makes off with her wooden leg becomes a tale of vulnerability and intimacy, so she got revenge. She was never a victim. I mean, that’s the great thing about O’Connor. Sometimes writing about someone who died when she was 39 and seemed to have a constricted life might seem that it would be sad, but it wasn’t, because she was so indomitable in that way and because she had this sense of humor and she would just turn everything around. I could write about her being in the hospital at the end of her life, and she was just so funny about the nurses that there’s always something buoyant there.

Obviously her illness influenced the writing, and she was very private. She wasn’t comfortable, really, with too much gossip about her. She wasn’t comfortable with photographs of her particularly, but the Flannery O’Connor stories that we know and think of as O’Connor stories she started writing after she returned home to live with her mother, which also meant after she accepted and knew that she had lupus, actually, because for about a year-and-a-half her mother told her that she had rheumatoid arthritis, and she was still thinking about moving back to the north, and she went on a kind of vacation visit with the Fitzgeralds, and Sally Fitzgerald decided to tell her that she didn’t have rheumatoid arthritis, she had lupus, and she said, well, that’s good, I thought I had lupus and I thought I was going crazy. I’d rather be sick than crazy. Classic O’Connor humor at an incredible moment. But she moves home, and Sally Fitzgerald said that she began writing “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” when she herself began to face the other end of a rifle, in a sense. I mean her work becomes not just about the south and these people around her, but also about death, and I think you had to see that that moved her into the zone of writing that she hadn’t been in, and I also think that there’s an aspect there of magical thinking to her writing, that she really somehow felt that writing was keeping her alive. Her father died very quickly of lupus, so her own expectation was that it could be some very quick thing, I mean 6 months. She was actually then one of the early people on cortisone, and that kept her alive for these extra, really, 13 years while also causing her bones to break down, and I think very much that she was staying alive through writing, and you see it at the end of her life, where it becomes a real race with death, and she’s trying to finish this second collection of stories. She’s working on stories she keeps under her pillow in the hospital so the doctor won’t take them away from her. She’s editing one story after she’s had last rites, so all of this seems to me a very clear kind of sense that this is what’s keeping her alive, or why she’s alive. I mean she was definitely a woman on a mission in that sense. There’s a sense of mission behind her work, even if it’s not preachy and moralistic in that way, and I think that that’s all connected with lupus and death.

O’Connor often has these caricatures of her mother in her stories. In “Greenleaf” Mrs. May is probably the closest to Regina, and she’s gored by a bull in the end of that story. So these mothers who look like Regina often don’t come to happy ends. One of them is shot in the comforts of home. A friend of hers said, “You should be brought up on charges of matricide. What does she think when she reads them?” And O’Connor said, “Oh, she don’t read none of them,” so obviously a testy relationship, and I mean Regina O’Connor was tough. She was running a business on her own. There was something indomitable about her, but what can sometimes be missed is that first of all she was very caring and loving towards her only daughter and was really making this whole environment of this dairy farm possible for her, and they moved there really when O’Connor moved back home so she wouldn’t have to climb stairs, and soon after O’Connor’s death her mother moved back into town. So she basically got a whole dairy farm in operation, providing her daughter with material. I don’t know if she’s thinking of that. Robie Macauley, who was a novelist who knew O’Connor in Iowa, said the sense was that Regina was a tyrant, but a beloved tyrant, so I think you get both in O’Connor, the humor about Regina. At one point [O’Connor] said to Sally Fitzgerald, on a trip to Lourdes, her only trip outside the country she took with her mother, they were riding on a train and she said, “I don’t know what I would do if anything happened to my mother,” so there’s a sense in which she also was dependent on her. They came to some détente. Flannery had her writing time, and that was sacrosanct, at her desk, and the rest of the time she was willing to compromise.

I actually thought of [O’Connor] as reclusive and Emily Dickinson-like. Actually, she turned out to be having this very full life. She wrote letters every day, 3 or 4 letters. If anyone, if a reader wrote to her she would always answer them. During the afternoons, after writing in the mornings, she would have guests come on her back porch and talk to them, and she’d become somewhat of a cult figure, so driving up could be the poet James Dickey or Faulkner’s translator. She also had this, really, madness to explain her work and gave over 60 talks and lectures across America, often on crutches, going to Notre Dame or the University of Chicago or Smith. So all that is pretty active, but interestingly, the work, too, had a lot of life in it. I wrote one other biography, of the poet Frank O’Hara. He described his work as deep gossip, and everyone kind of got that. His poems were about his friends, about art openings, and kind of busy New York cosmopolitan life, but [O’Connor] had a lot of deep gossip in her work also. She would take names from the Milledgeville phonebook, like Tom T. Shiflet. The story “The Displaced Person”—the Guizac family was a displaced Polish family who had come to work on a farm, the Matysiak family who came to work on their farm, and I talked to Al Matysiak, the son, who is still alive and living in Milledgeville and has never read the story. So on the farm that all these stories take place on is a kind of photograph of Andalusia, and besides these inside jokes about her mother and her friends who would show up sometimes as characters in these stories she was also, again, taking on issues of the time, topical issues. She wrote “Everything that Rises Must Converge,” which is this kind of interracial ballet taking place on a newly integrated bus in the south. The year that Martin Luther King gave his “I have a dream” speech, which was televised, she wrote “Revelation,” which has its own kind of trip to the mountaintop visionary ending, although her mountain is purgatory, so she also corrects in a certain way MLK. And religion, big time, she takes on in her work, and the changing south. I mean, she was a writer of the south, but Faulkner was a writer of the Old South. She was maybe the first writer of the New South, which is the Atlanta New South and the south of cars and people actually being displaced from the farms, I think, to the cities, in the way we see Hazel Motes kind of wandering around through half-empty southern towns and abandoned farms.

The letters are interesting. First of all, you get the gossip of daily life. You have thoughts about art, theology, literature. You don’t get confessional presence necessarily, and you don’t ever hear a complaint, and when you then realize what’s going on with her life, medically especially, it’s slightly amazing what she can turn into a joke. She wrote in one of those letters there won’t be any biographies of me for the simple reason that life lived between the house and the chicken yard here doesn’t make exciting copy. But she’s keeping carbon copies of every letter that she’s sent, and when she did go abroad on a trip to Lourdes she wrote up a will and put Robert Fitzgerald in charge of these letters if something were to happen, so I do think that she did see them and was aware somehow that she was putting in these letters also thoughts about art, theology, and things that people would like to read. In fact, her early letters to the woman who is called “A” in that collection we later found out was Betty Hester. Although one woman was living in Atlanta and the other in Milledgeville, 90 miles apart, they didn’t meet, and in a way those letters are almost the most interesting. They’re like the letters to a young poet. O’Connor is using this occasion to explain to this sympathetic reader how she sees literature and theology, and she’s also trying to convert her. At a certain point Betty Hester then becomes Catholic, so it’s a kind of theological version of these letters to a young Catholic a little bit in them. I think [O’Connor] is one of the great apologists for Roman Catholicism in the 20th century, and this is probably because she’s trying to get Betty Hester to see what she sees in Catholicism in those letters.

I went into the project pretty clear-eyed, which was expecting this prickly personality, and I didn’t entirely agree with all of her politics and things, so I didn’t have that biographer’s being in love with your subject and then being let down or disillusioned, and indeed it worked a bit in reverse, so that by the time I finished the biography, especially in writing about those last months of O’Connor’s life, where she’s kind of in a race with death to finish these stories, you just can’t help but so much admire her discipline and courage, that in a way she became a more profound character than I expected, and I became a more sympathetic and empathetic with her life.

If she’s a saint she’s definitely a medieval saint, not a 19th-century saint, because she’s an extreme character and cranky and has a kind of W.C. Fields sensibility about those kinds of things, but one who can speak to us because she’s not saccharine, she’s not moralistic, but she has this kind of consciousness that goes with it that makes her, if anything, a postmodern saint.

O’Connor’s absolutely a great American writer and especially a great American short story writer. Robert Giroux told me that when he got “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” in the mail from her, the first draft, and he took it home with his papers from work and read it that night, he thought this is as great as “Bartleby the Scrivener,” I mean a classic American story. When you read an O’Connor story, it continues to have some powerful effect. It has this kind of tug on your heart. I mean there’s something very grounding about those stories and disturbing about them, so they have powerful effects. I think part of why we’re drawn to them is no one can exactly, finally label what that effect is or solve the riddle of those stories, and her personality—I think that’s why we keep coming back to her. I think people have an expectation sometimes that I’m supposed to explain this story forever, or I’m supposed to explain O’Connor with one kind of psychological key, but she retains mystery herself and retains paradox. But that’s her fascination and the fascination of those stories.

Surprisingly, she never wrote about her Lourdes experience. She was forced into going to Lourdes by her cousin, Katie Seemes, a kind of wealthy older woman who had lived next to the family in Savannah and had decided to put up the money for this trip. Remember O’Connor was now on crutches and had lupus, so there was a cure kind of motivation there, I think. So she went with her mother, and she was resisting it. At the same time there was an obvious kind of fascination that she had. She talked about it with Katherine Ann Porter, and there she was very positive about doing this. Having written this biography, one thing that’s had a big influence on me is this “what would O’Connor think of this?” is constantly with me. You know, I’m like, on unlikely occasions, “what would O’Connor think of Madmen?” In Lourdes she said that she was someone who would rather die for her religion than take a bath for it, which means that she didn’t really want to go into the waters. She did finally and said that she didn’t pray for her bones, she prayed for her novel. She had her own take on this. It is interesting that she didn’t write about it, and it points to that she had a very strong sense of her material and she would write about that, that in a way when she tried to write about other kinds of material, it didn’t really work. People were meant to write about what they were meant to write about, and the Lourdes experience—she wasn’t a memoirist or a particularly confessional writer in that way, but she did come back from that trip and get to work on “The Violent Bear It Away” and had a kind of gust of energy for that, and that’s a novel in which, it just occurred to me now, where there’s this kind of baptism that involves a drowning and things, so the whole fear of getting in the water in that way might have reverberated in that book.

Robert Lowell

I’m very drawn to the novelistic biography, where you really, like in a 19th century novel, get a sense of someone from birth till death. You keep their pulse alive on every page as much as possible, and you have mixed with this all these facts and all this information that we love. And so in a certain way that allows room for a more complex and mysterious person, and I think that people’s lives are more complex than fiction, so biography is great in trying to reconcile all this. I open with a prologue called “Walking Backward,” and it’s a story, first, of O’Connor at five or six years old trying to teach her chicken to walk backwards and this being filmed by Pathe newsreel company who comes to Savannah to film this. The archive still exists. O’Connor, in a rare essay, “King of the Birds,” wrote about this. It was a rare example of confession and memoir and meditation on herself, and why she’d been so, she called it, marked for life by this experience, partly a joke on her own fame, in a sense. But she did talk about it often. She liked to tell the story of the chicken walking backwards to Robert Lowell and people later on, and I do think, though ,that if I had to pick one kind of trait, the contrariness of O’Connor explains a lot, so in a sense while I was leaving it open to hopefully capture the mystery and complexity of her life, I also started by pointing out contrariness. She was working counter-clockwise to the culture, writing stories with religious messages in a kind of secular culture. The way she lived her life, it was all contrary. When I mentioned race before, that she almost developed backwards, that she was in favor of integration when it was shocking to everyone in town in 1948, and when it became more popular in the early ’60s then she was suddenly against it. So in that way I did have certain interpretations of her that go through, like leitmotifs.

There’s a lot of significance to the peacocks, and it’s become her logo. It’s on the cover of my book. It’s often associated with O’Connor. I do think the key to the peacock is a little bit of the chicken walking backwards. She said it herself: whatever that was all about, actually it led to my peacocks. In her life, when she returned to the south and comes to live with her mother on the dairy farm, two things happen. She starts writing these great stories, and she orders her first peacock, and she’d never actually seen a peacock. By the end of her life she had 39 peacocks, which would, at least twice in the correspondence, they would all open their tails simultaneously, she said. These tails were a map of the universe, so there’s great beauty, and so she was obviously a great pattern-maker in her fiction. The last story that she wrote, “Judgment Day,” was a retelling of the first story, “The Geranium,” that she had published in Iowa. But also in her life she was sending messages and living by design, and so the peacock becomes her self-chosen kind of a symbol, and I think she liked it because it was a comic and gawky bird, like herself. It ate her mother’s flowers and kept everyone awake all night, and then at a certain transfigurative moment tails would open, and here’s all this beauty, which she saw as a symbol of the way her fiction worked, and also in the Middle Ages the peacock was a symbol of Christ in the church, so it all lined up for her in the peacocks.

“Is there anyone here who yearns for life and desires to see good days?”

Those stirring words come from one of the most durable spiritual guides of all time, the Rule of St. Benedict.  It’s been said everything one needs to know about living the spiritual life is contained in this little book. Over the past year, this 1,500-year-old treatise has become, for me, a constant companion.

Since June of 2008, I’ve had the extraordinary opportunity to spend an average of a week a month at Mount St. Scholastica, a Benedictine monastery for women in Atchison, Kansas. I’ve been invited to share as deeply as a lay person can in the spiritual life of the sisters for a book I’ve been asked to write. I admit I questioned at first what practical wisdom a monastery might hold for a modern, married, professional woman like me. It turns out I’ve learned plenty.

I used to think of monasteries as outmoded remnants of a past era. But now, when I enter Mount St. Scholastica, I feel as if I’m peering into the future, a future our world so desperately needs—one that stresses community over competitiveness, service over self-aggrandizement, quietude over gratuitous talk, and simplicity over constant consumption. The Mount is a place where those who listen are valued as much as those who speak up; a place where people forgo personal wealth but want for nothing, where prayers are said for the victims of violent crime and bells are tolled when a Death Row prisoner is executed.

I identify now with the words of Thomas Merton, the famous Trappist monk and spiritual writer. After his first visit as a young man to the Abbey of Gethsemani, Merton wrote in his journal: “I had wondered what was holding this country together, what has been keeping the universe from cracking in pieces and falling apart. It is this monastery.”

Whenever I walk into Mount St. Scholastica, I have the sense that I’m entering a deeper reality. It starts with the beginning of the day. The sisters don’t wake up and immediately turn on National Public Radio or read The New York Times, as I do. Day begins with Morning Praise. The sisters trace the sign of the cross over their lips and say, “Lord, open my lips, and we shall proclaim your praise.” It’s a way of promising that the entire day is going to be a form of praise. It’s not about checking off all the things on one’s to-do list, or plotting to sell more things today than yesterday or, as in my case, writing more words than I did the day before. It’s about making sure everything we do in the course of the day is an act of praise, an expression of gratitude for life.

After the sisters say that little prayer, they sing. Imagine how different our days might begin, if we started out each morning singing—even just mentally singing something in our head. If you’re someone who loves Broadway show tunes, as I do, you might choose “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning.” Or it could be a favorite hymn (“We Rise Again from Ashes” is one of my morning favorites).

People think of monasteries of very quiet, perhaps even lonely places. But the truth is they teem with activity. The sisters work outside at many different jobs: teaching, doing social work, counseling, and hospital chaplaincy (one at the Mount was even a firefighter, another a funeral director), but everyone also has a job to perform within the monastery. Each sister takes a turn at cleaning the bathrooms and doing the dishes (albeit with industrial-size mechanical dishwashers). Even the prioress and the PhDs have their “at bat” at these menial jobs. It’s a way of saying that all work is sacred. Ora et labora, work and prayer, is the Benedictine motto. I like to think of it not so much as work and prayer, but work as prayer.

“Let the cellarer [the monastery supply clerk] handle the kitchen utensils as if they were the sacred vessels of the altar,” St. Benedict says in the Rule. It’s a reminder to respect the common objects and utensils of our lives and a promise to extend that respect to the people around us, the community we live in, our natural resources, and our environment.

In his book on the Rule of St. Benedict (Always We Begin Again: The Benedictine Way of Living, Morehouse Publishing, 1996) John McQuiston, a trial attorney, points out, “Everything we have is on loan. Our homes, businesses, rivers, closest relationships, bodies, and experiences, everything we have is ours in trust and must be returned at the end of our use of it.” This is the way of monastics. As we continue to reap the damages of our throw-away society, we can see just how far-sighted monasteries have been.

There are some old monastic customs that the sisters don’t follow anymore, and frankly I wish some of them could become a part of our everyday lives. My friend, Sister Thomasita Homan, told me that for many years, whenever a group of sisters were assigned to work together a project, they would bow to each other and say in German (the native language of the first Benedictines in Atchison), “Have patience with me.” Imagine doing that in today’s workplace! I think about how much more pleasant it might be, when I’m out reporting a story for PBS, if I bowed to the cameraman, bowed to the producer, and they to me, and we asked each other to have patience, please, with each others’ human frailties.

Such humility forms the core of monastic life. It is especially important for Benedictines, who take a vow of stability. The vow commits them to live—and grow—with the same group of people at the same monastery for the rest of their lives. Stability recognizes, as one sister put it, that “there’s nowhere else but here.”

At Mount St. Scholastica, there are sisters who have lived together for as many as 75 years. Having moved from state to state here in the U.S. and lived in three European cities over the course of my career, the notion of spending one’s entire life in the same place seems quite foreign to me. In fact, the whole concept is alien to our highly mobile American society. Stability reminds us to grow where we’re planted. A monk was asked, “What is it then to be stable?” And he answered, “You will find stability at the moment when you discover that God is everywhere; that you do not need to seek God elsewhere. God is here, and it is useless to seek God elsewhere, because it is not God that is absent from us. It is we who are absent from God.”

Often that absence stems from a simple lack of balance. We have an abundance of food in this country, plenty of gadgets and opportunities for recreation. What we lack is time to enjoy them. The rhythm of monastic life opens the way for balance. Benedict in his Rule stipulates that monks get seven hours rest a night. Those who require more food because they are ill or weak should get it, and those who aren’t strong enough to do physical labor won’t be forced to do it. The Benedictines even go so far as to call leisure “holy.”

I saw firsthand the Benedictine way of balance when I was at Mount St. Scholastica as Lent began this year. First, the sisters enjoyed the monastic version of Mardi Gras. All of them, even the elderly ones living in the nursing home wing, gathered for beignets and hot chocolate. Not just any hot chocolate, but hot chocolate spiked with peppermint schnapps. The sisters laughed and joked and were having a grand time. But at the appointed moment, everyone got up from their tables and walked in a procession from the community room to the dining room. There, a fire blazed in the fireplace. One of the sisters carried in the palms from last year’s Palm Sunday. One by one she threw the branches in the fire to create the ashes for this year’s Ash Wednesday, and from that moment on there was complete silence in the monastery for the rest of the night and all day Ash Wednesday. A time for fun and leisure, yes, and a time to be serious and prayerful. Balance.

Perhaps the most important word I’ve learned at the monastery is a Latin word: conversatio. It refers to another one of the vows taken specifically by Benedictine monks and sisters: conversatio morum, literally “conversion of morals.” The phrase is often loosely translated as “conversion of life.” But I like the definition Sister Thomasita once gave to me:  conversatio as a constant “turning toward,” a constant conversation with life.

I like the idea of turning because it connotes change, and there are certain aspects of my life I’ve been trying to change for a long time. Like my quick temper. I find that I like the person I am at the monastery much better than the person I am in my everyday life, because when I’m at the monastery I’m calm. I’m patient. I don’t lose my temper. Once, just a few days after I returned home from the monastery, I argued with my beautiful husband. It was a totally silly, unnecessary argument, and I emailed Sister Thomasita and asked, “Why do I have these stupid arguments with my husband, who’s the person as close to me as God? Why can’t I live conversatio in my day-to-day life with the people I’m closest to? And she answered, “You are living conversatio. Your struggle. That’s the conversatio.” And that gave me hope—hope that I don’t have to be a saint. I just have to be human.

“Keep death before you daily,” Benedict says in the Rule. It’s a potent reminder not to spend my life twisting in anger or caught up with what Thomas Merton called “useless care.” My stays at the monastery propel me every day to remember what is essential, what gives my life meaning. Merton referred to it as finding “the hidden ground of our being,” finding that place where we not only discover God, but where God can discover us.

I suppose I am just one of the many Benedict has spoken to through the ages who yearns for life and desires to see good days. “Run, then,” Benedict reminds me and all of us, “while you have the light of life, that the darkness of death may not overtake you.”

Judith Valente, a contributing correspondent for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, is also a poet and co-editor with Charles Reynard of Twenty Poems to Nourish Your Soul (Loyola Press, 2005).

JUDY VALENTE: Sunrise at the Abbey of Gethsemani in the misty hills south of Louisville, Kentucky. The 55 Trappist monks who live here awake at 3:00 a.m. to begin their daily regimen of prayer and work — in silence. They gather for communal prayer several times a day. They will rarely venture outside the walls. For most, their lives will end here. The monks support the abbey by making fruitcakes and other products which are sold to the public. Much of the monastery’s 2,300 acres is leased to local farmers.

Brother PAUL QUENON (Trappist Monk, Abbey of Gethsemani): The essence of the Trappist life would be living in God, and I don’t think I would want to say much more than that. And of course, you’re living in God with other people in the same community, and it’s a life of continual prayer, and it’s a life of deepening — going deeper into your own capacity to love and live with God.

VALENTE: In 1941, Merton, then an aspiring young writer and a recent convert to Catholicism arrived here seeking to radically change his life. Merton was to have a striking message.

MORGAN ATKINSON (Documentary Producer): He said that anybody could have a deeply spiritual life it they care to. Any person on the street, if they were committed to it and devoted to trying it, then that path was open to them.

VALENTE: For Merton, the deeply spiritual life meant the experience of God’s presence and love at all times, combining that with action in everyday life. Paul Pearson oversees the Merton Center at Bellarmine University in Louisville.

Paul Pearson

Dr. PAUL PEARSON (Director and Archivist, The Thomas Merton Center, Bellarmine University): The essence of Merton’s spirituality is, I think, the humanity of it, that he really speaks to ordinary people. He knows so well the great classics of Christian spirituality, but he can interpret them in a way that people in our world today can understand and relate to.

VALENTE: He spoke especially to lay Catholics in what was then a firmly hierarchical church.

Dr. PEARSON: Spirituality really belonged to the monks and nuns and bishops and what have you, whereas, you know, your ordinary lay person went to Mass on Sundays, the Mass was in Latin, they said the rosary, and that was the extent of it. And Merton, I think, really opened up that whole realm of contemplation and spirituality for people.

VALENTE: Merton’s parents had died when he was young. By his own account, he lived a rootless, hedonistic life. It was rumored he had fathered a child out of wedlock while a student at the University of Cambridge. At New York’s Columbia University, he continued to feel morally adrift, emotionally bereft. As a world-weary 26-year-old, Merton wrote these words, read by Morgan Atkinson.

Mr. ATKINSON (reading from Merton’s journal): Finally has come the time to go the Trappists and try to get in and be completely quiet in the front of the face of peace. It is time to stop being sick and get really well. Out here I could think and yet could not get to any conclusions. But there was one thought running around and around in my mind: to be a monk — to be a monk!

VALENTE: Thomas Merton not only became a monk. He would become a best-selling author and one of the most influential spiritual thinkers of his time. A fellow writer called him “an investigative reporter going into the inner workings of the soul.” As a novice at Gethsemani, Brother Paul Quenon received spiritual direction from Merton, known as Father Louis.

Brother Paul Quenon

Brother QUENON: He doesn’t think of the whole world as, you know, monks. But on the other hand, he can talk to the monk in each person. He sees it as a deep enough thing, that somehow everybody has the capacity to come to the same intensity and depth of experience of God.

Dr. PEARSON: This exhibit is all of Merton’s published work with their varying editions and foreign translations. Merton’s now been translated into I think it’s 30 languages.

VALENTE: In 1948, when he was 33 years old, Merton published his autobiography, “The Seven Storey Mountain,” taking his title from a scene in Dante’s “Purgatory.” The book became an overnight bestseller.  Sister Suzanne Zuercher is a Benedictine nun who has written extensively about Merton.

Sister SUZANNE ZUERCHER, OSB: I knew I needed to be in monastic life. I knew he was someone who spoke to me as no one had every spoken to me. He’s funny, he’s profound, he’s human, he’s down to earth, he’s practical, he’s concrete.

VALENTE: Mike Brennan is a baggage handler for American Airlines in Chicago. His home is full of Merton books and memorabilia.

MIKE BRENNAN (Baggage Handler, American Airlines): Working at O’Hare Airport, noisy, crazy, constant activity, constant stimulation, it’s really nice to find a way to let go of all that stimulus and activity and think of being connected with the Lord, and I learned than from Merton.

VALENTE: Merton’s fame allowed him to correspond with presidents, popes, and Nobel Prize winners. But as his public reputation grew, he retreated further into solitude and silence. He would spend a few hours a day in this small wooden shed writing and meditating. But it wasn’t enough.

Brother QUENON: He wanted to have more time for writing, for meditation.

VALENTE: He would later get permission from his abbot to live as a hermit in this tiny cottage about a half-mile from the monastery.

Brother QUENON: He loved being in the midst of nature, you know. The birds were his friends.

VALENTE: What do you think he did out here?

Brother QUENON: Well, read a lot and wrote. For him, praying was just to abide in the presence, the presence of the Lord.

(touring cottage): There’s the kitchen and then a bedroom, and then a chapel was added later on.

VALENTE: Merton wrote this in his journal:

Mr. ATKINSON (reading from Merton’s journal): For myself I have only one desire and that is the desire for solitude: to disappear into God; to be submerged in His peace; to be lost in the secret of His space. I have gone to the hermitage not because I hate the world. I go to the hermitage to deepen my consciousness, to be more in communion with the world.

Thomas Merton

VALENTE: His output was enormous. Over a 20-year period he would write 60 books on topics ranging from contemplative prayer to nonviolence. He also wrote poetry, essays, and criticism. In the 1960s, Merton became increasingly controversial. He began writing on issues of the day like civil rights, materialism, and the nuclear arms race. His superiors blocked the publication of some of his most strident anti-war writings.

Dr. PEARSON: As he changed from the world-denying monk to the world-embracing monk of the ’60s, you know, people began to think “why should he be writing on these issues. He’s away in a monastery. What does he know about them?’”

VALENTE: In 1966, Merton spent several weeks in a Louisville hospital, recovering from back surgery. There he met and fell in love with a young student nurse. He was 51 years old at the time.

Sister SUZANNE ZUERCHER, O.S.B. (Merton Author): It was very brief. It was very intense. It was very passionate. He sometimes felt he had abandoned his vows, and at other times he felt he was living the vows of growth and fulfillment.

VALENTE: The two would sometimes meet clandestinely in secluded parts of the monastery grounds. Within a matter of months, the relationship was over. But Merton had been changed.

Sr. SUZANNE: From that time on he never again thought of himself as being unloved or unlovable, and he himself learned to love in this relationship and that it was the part of himself that he always felt had been underdeveloped.

VALENTE: Merton rededicated himself to his monastic life. He became increasingly interested in Buddhism and Asian monasticism. In 1968, he received permission to attend a conference on monasticism in Bangkok. There is rare footage of Merton from that conference.

THOMAS MERTON (in video from 1968 Bangkok conference): That’s a thing of the past now, to be suspicious of other religions, and to look always at what is weakest in other religions and what is highest in our own religion. This double standard of dealing with religions — this has to stop.

“Our real journey is interior.”

VALENTE: Hours after this film was made Merton was dead, electrocuted after touching a fan with faulty wiring in his hotel room. He was 53. His reputation has only grown since his death. Working with manuscripts he left behind, scholars have published 60 more of his books, including seven volumes of his personal journals. But as a monk, Merton left behind few personal possessions: his work shirt, a cup, boots, eyeglasses.

Dr. PEARSON: With the death of Thomas Merton we lost really one of the great Catholic voices, one of the great prophetic figures within the Catholic Church, and I think that’s why his books are still selling, why they’re still being translated, because that message is as relevant today as when he wrote it.

VALENTE: Toward the end of his life Merton wrote, “Our real journey is interior.” For those seeking to take that journey, he remains an essential guide.

For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, I’m Judy Valente at the Abbey of Gethsemani.

Q: What would you say is the essence of Thomas Merton’s spirituality?

A: The essence of Merton’s spirituality is, I think, the humanity of it, that he really speaks to ordinary people. You know, I don’t think there’s anything particularly new in it. He knows so well the great classics of Christian spirituality, but he can interpret them in a way that people in our world today can understand and can relate to, and I think that was his great contribution, and in the period when he started writing, in the late ’40s and the ’50s, certainly within the Catholic Church prior to the Second Vatican Council, that kind of spirituality was unheard of for your ordinary lay person. Spirituality really belonged to the monks and nuns and bishops and what have you, whereas, you know, your ordinary lay person went to Mass on Sundays, the Mass was in Latin, they said the rosary, and that was the extent of it, and Merton, I think, really opened up that whole realm of contemplation and spirituality for people, and so much that we’re familiar with now came about through that.

Q: Was that his main message to lay people, to the ordinary person, that you too can enter into this type of deep union with God?

A: I think it was in the early days. In the early days, you know, Merton gives the impression that all he’s interested in is a spiritual life, that he’d entered Gethsemani in 1941, and he was turning his back on the evil world outside the monastery. But I think gradually, through his experience in the monastery, through the response to the publication of The Seven Storey Mountain and all the correspondence that he received from people, in dealing with the young men who he was teaching at monastery, Merton realized that he couldn’t leave the world behind at the monastery gate, that he was actually in the monastery for the world. And so his spirituality began to change so that it involved tackling the issues that were of concern to everybody in the world. So in some ways it’s his combination of contemplation and action, I think, that really marks out his spirituality. You know, I think in that period probably there was lots of writing about spirituality. But none of it combined it with action in the same way that Merton did.

Q: What were some of those issues he was concerned about getting people thinking about out in the world and relating to their religious life, their spiritual lives?

A: I think initially some of the issues Merton was most concerned about, you know, were the major issues facing society at that time, and especially going into the ’60s issues surrounding the Cold War, so to do with the nuclear arms race, issues to do with war and peace and nonviolence.
And then, as the ’60s wore on, things like, obviously, the Vietnam War came up and, you know, you can just see similarities with the world today. You know, we seem to have got over the Cold War of the ’60s and now, you know, you’ve got, you know, relations with China or Russia seem to be changing all the time. But then he also began writing about issues to do with civil rights, and certainly prejudice hasn’t gone away in our own day, and gradually beginning to touch on other issues such as feminism, the use and abuse of technology, the effects of the media, ecology. Merton was one of the first people to review Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring, and he also had it read in the monastic refectory and was very much involved with reforestation at the monastery, you know, concerned about the impact that the monks had had on the local environment.

Q: Why do you think people still find him so compelling today and are still reading his books today?

A: I think people are still reading Merton’s books today because he speaks so clearly about all the issues that we’re still dealing with. You know, I think if he were to come back he would be very frustrated with us that we don’t seem to have learned anything; that, if anything, many of those issues that he was writing about have been magnified or they’ve become more kind of ingrained in society, if anything. You know, a lot of the segregation in the ’60s was very marked, whereas now, you know, I think there are more subtle forms of segregation which maybe are even worse than what it was like then. I know people refer to things like ecological racism and things like that and, you know, we can still learn a lot from his writings.

Q: He was extremely prolific. How was he able to accomplish so much in a period of basically 20 years?

A: Merton was, you know, just an extraordinary figure in the way that he wrote. You know, Seven Storey Mountain was published in 1948, and he died in 1968, and the number of books he wrote during that period, you know, along with articles or journals and all the other work that he was doing, teaching first to scholastics and then to novices, the spiritual life of the community, spiritual direction, and yet he wrote this incredible number of books. And I think people often think that he just wrote and published, that, you know, as it flowed off his pen it was ready for publication. But it wasn’t, and we’ve certainly got manuscripts here where you can see him reworking and reworking his material. So, for example, with The Sign of Jonas we actually have five variant typescripts, and that’s not an issue like today of just inserting a few paragraphs on the computer. It’s retyping a whole typescript of 400-plus pages.

Paul Pearson

Q: But how do you think he was able to do that? What enabled him to be so prolific and productive?

A: I think it was an incredible sense of focus, that he could really focus on what he was doing. I think one of the monks told me the story that, you know, with Merton if, you know, a book arrived in the mail in the morning he would’ve read the book, he would’ve drafted a review, revised the review, and had it ready to mail back to a major magazine by lunchtime and that it would be, you know, fit to be published in the New Yorker, or somewhere. Whereas, I know if I write a book review it takes me weeks. So he just works on a different intellectual level and, you know, monks will say that he never wasted a moment of time, that if he was sitting outside the abbot’s office for a meeting, he would be working, and when he was giving spiritual direction he was, you know, always there with the person, but when he felt that the time had come to an end, that they were wasting time, he soon cut it off.

Q: What made him controversial?

A: Merton became controversial because of his movement away from just writing about spirituality and beginning to write about the issues of his day. You know, I think people love that monk who would write, you know, these wonderful books about spirituality that flowed from his pen or off his typewriter in the ’50s. But as he changed from the world-denying monk to the world-embracing monk of the ’60s, you know, people began to think, “Well, why should he be writing on these issues? He’s away in a monastery. What does he know about them?” And especially when he began criticizing some of the viewpoints that the people were taking, or that the government was taking or the Church at that time, and certainly within the Catholic Church. The first Catholic was in the White House, and so I think there was a sense with a lot of Catholics of loyalty to the country, and yet here was Merton criticizing some of the stances that were being taken by the government. I think nowadays Catholics would much more readily agree that would be the position, you know, they should be taking. But that wasn’t the case in the ’60s.

Q: How about his inquiries into Eastern monasticism, Eastern religions? How controversial and unusual was that?

A: It was certainly unusual in that period, and I don’t think I would say it was controversial in the ’60s. I think in some ways people were much more open to it at that time than maybe they are nowadays. But certainly when, you know, in the late ’50s Merton first started working with students from other Christian denominations, you know, seminarians from the Presbyterian seminary here in Louisville or the Southern Baptist seminary would go down to dialogue with Merton and other members of the community, and that was really unheard of within Catholic circles prior to the Second Vatican Council. And then, gradually, you know, he began to expand that through his correspondence with peoples of other faiths, and often, then, those people would come and visit him at Gethsemani, and he would get them to talk to the novices or to the community. And so there was a real interfaith dialogue that was being generated from Gethsemani, and dialogue not about issues of doctrine, which they’d often not agree about, but more of an experiential approach to God, which was more monastic, in a sense: how do we pray, how do we understand God, and things like that.

Q: What makes him controversial today, to the extent that the Catholic bishops would not even include his biography in an official catechism?

A: I think people get the impression, and you know, I think it’s a very shallow reading of Merton, was that he was, you know, ready when he went to Asia to become a Buddhist or something, and, you know, they’re not seeing what was written in his books when they take it in that way. You know, I think Merton was able to dialogue with people of other faiths because he was so firmly rooted in his own tradition. It wasn’t any wishy-washy New Age kind of thing. Merton could dialogue from within the tradition, and, you know, if you look at his last entries in his personal journal in Asia, he talks about celebrating Mass. He’s got his Latin breviaries with him. He still preferred the Latin to the English translations. He was having lunch with the apostolic delegate, and the conference that he died at was a conference of First-World monasteries assisting Third-World monasteries, you know, Benedictine and Cistercian monks and nuns. Merton wasn’t about to become a Buddhist monk, and, you know, I think there’s a certain element in the Catholic Church that, you know, is almost going back to the pre-Vatican II days that there’s no salvation outside the Church, that kind of attitude. And, you know, I think it was pressure from that group that led to Merton being taken out of the catechism. And yet I hear young people saying, you know, it’s just a sign of how out of touch the bishops are that they would remove somebody like Merton and yet leave in all these other people who, you know, are not relevant to our modern world.

Q: What are some of the main things you think Thomas Merton would have to say to today’s seekers, to today’s world?

A: What would Merton have to say to today’s world? In many ways, I’m not sure it would be that different from what he was writing in the ’60s. I think that’s why his books are still selling, why they’re still being translated, because that message is as relevant today as when he wrote it. You know, just encouraging people to persevere in their spiritual journey, to see how their spirituality integrates with their daily life, with their social life, with their involvement with the world and with politics. I think if people really took that message seriously, you know, the world could change drastically. But people don’t. It’s a difficult message.

Q: Could you briefly describe how he died, how that transpired?

A: Merton died in Asia at a conference in Bangkok. He’d been invited there by a Benedictine monk to give the keynote address, and he did the address, his address, on the morning of December the 10th, 1968, and then sometime in the afternoon, after lunch apparently, he’d had a siesta and took a shower and then after his shower went to adjust one of these large, freestanding electric fans that was in his room, and he was electrocuted by touching faulty wiring on the fan. And, of course, the voltage in Thailand is much higher than here. I think it’s 220 or 240 volts.

Q: Would it be fair to say Thomas Merton was ahead of his time, and in what way?

A: I think so, in a number of ways, and yet in some ways he’s so deeply in the tradition. But, you know, that’s a part in the tradition that often gets overlooked. I think in the church fathers he would find this very different vision of the world, and so although I would say, yes, he was definitely ahead of his time, being ahead of his time was based on the tradition, and he discovered that through his reading, you know, of the monastic fathers, the church fathers, about how they worked with the society of their day. You get this impression of the monks in the early centuries going off into the desert and turning their back on the world. But then you hear these stories of, you know, the emperor or the leading people of their day going to the monks to consult with them about the issues they were concerned about and, you know, these monks off in the desert giving the leaders advice. And in a sense that’s just what Merton was doing in the ’60s, you know, he was communicating with people all over the world: popes, presidents, Nobel Prize winners and, you know, they saw that he had a wisdom that our world needed then and still needs today.

Q: What did the world lose by his dying in his prime?

A: I think with the death of Thomas Merton we lost, really, one of the great Catholic voices, one of the great prophetic figures within the Catholic Church. You know, it’s hard to imagine what he would be doing if he were still alive today and, you know, he could be. He’d be in his 90s, but he could still be alive. In many ways he would be saying the same things he was saying in the ’60s, which is a very sad reflection on us that we don’t seem to have moved forward, or moved forward in the right direction. And yet, you know, he was writing about technology and computers, and all of those things have developed so much more since he was writing about them. I think we miss out on how he himself would have carried his thought forward, how he would have tackled the issues in the way that we’re facing them nowadays.

Q: Describe for me what you think is the essence of the Trappist life.

A: Well, the essence of the Trappist life would be living in God, and I don’t think I would want to say much more than that. Of course, you’re living in God with other people in the same community, and it’s a life of continual prayer, and it’s a life of deepening, going deeper into your own capacity to love and to live with God.

Q: How would you describe the day of a Trappist, the spiritual discipline?

A: Well, the day of a Trappist is rather monotonous, but it’s full of activities. It’s monotonous in the sense that one day pretty much looks like another day. We get up at 3:00 in the morning and the first prayer is at 3:15. And then it’s still dark, you know, and it’s a nice, quiet time for reading until about 5:45 when we have Lauds, which is, you know, like a 25 minute prayer, choral prayer. Mass follows that and work begins at 8:00 in the morning. We work for four hours through, until 12:00. Then 12:15 is midday prayer, then lunch after that. We have the main meal in the middle of the day, and there’s a break until None, which is at 2:15, and then work in the afternoon or some, maybe, yard work or time to read, to do extra things. Vespers is 5:30 in the evening, supper after that, and then Compline at 7:30, and we go to bed at 8 o’clock. We still get seven hours of sleep.

Brother Paul Quenon

Q: Did Thomas Merton influence your decision to come to the monastery?

A: Well, Merton did influence me. I read THE SEVEN STOREY MOUNTAIN when I was deliberating about entering a monastery. I’d already developed a thought reading THE IMITATION OF CHRIST, and then I could see that a modern man can do such a thing and that there actually is a monastery in the United States called Gethsemani Abbey. So I was, of course, filled with the images that he had in the book in anticipation about what the life could be.

Q: Tell me what he was like to live with.

A: Well, Merton – I call him Father Louis, because that was his religious name and that’s how I spoke to him – he was good humored, good natured, buoyant, and resilient. He was also pretty intense, because he was always working. If he wasn’t getting some course work ready, he was writing. And then when he did go to the lumber shed or to the woods to meditate, that’s what he was doing. He had a place where they use to split the logs for the wood furnace, the wood boiler, and he loved to go down there and sit on the hay bales and write his journal. He had this thick bookkeeper’s ledger book which served for his private journals, so when he was down there he was alone. He’d either meditate or fill out his ledger book.

Q: What can you tell us that might be surprising about him, or not so well known to those who read his books?

A: Well, he had false teeth. He actually had false teeth that he took out at night, so I’ve disclosed the worst about Thomas Merton. Actually, his health was not as good as you would expect, because he seemed vigorous. He had a lot of – he was on a special diet. He ate in the infirmary kitchen area, which was a kind of separate room from the monks’ refectory. They were served meat in that. That’s why it had to be separate, so the rest of us wouldn’t have our appetites whetted. I think probably he was a lot funnier than people expect when they’re reading his books. Father Louis had a quick wit. It’s not like he liked to tell jokes. He didn’t [tell] like formal jokes. He would just, on the spur of the moment, come up with something.

Q: Are there any vivid personal memories of him you can share?

A: Of course there are many just incidental things that I could think of. I’m thinking now of when we used to go out in a straight line to cut corn with machetes under our arms, all wearing the old blue denim work blouse and then the leggings, and he would be at the head of the line of novices with his straw hat on, and he had a way of walking which, to me, reflected the way a sheaf of corn flops to the side, and he kind of had like a farmer’s strut about him. He obviously enjoyed what he was doing in going out with us.

Q: How did he affect your own spiritual journey?

A: When I used to have spiritual direction with Father Louis, which would be about once every two weeks, one of the moments that comes back to me from time to time is when we were talking about prayer and that prayer is like a struggle with God. It’s like Jacob struggling with the angel in the night, and when you’re encountering God God is not a thing, and so God is more like nothing, so when you enter into the depth of prayer it’s like entering into nothingness. And of course, that’s very central to his whole spirituality.

Q: What was the core of his spirituality?

A: Well, hopefully God was the core of Merton’s spirituality; I think the quest for God in solitude and this coming to the innermost core of your self. You know, he says contemplation is an answer to a call, a call from one who has no voice but who speaks in everything that is, and most of all in the depths of our own being. And so for him there was a mystery about the self, which was like the mystery of God, and they’re just really all one mystery as far as we are concerned. It’s in the process of coming to knowledge of yourself that you come to knowledge of God, or even truer to say that in coming to knowledge of God in a direct way is the only place you come to knowledge of yourself. We are a mystery unto ourselves, and God is a mystery, and the two mysteries merge, and to accept that kind of helplessness, the human mind is helpless in the face of all this. To accept that kind of poverty and emptiness would be the whole atmosphere of Merton’s spirituality.

Q: Why do so many successive generations continue to find his writing so compelling?

A: Well, Merton was a very sincere person. He, you know, was eloquent, but his eloquence came from a kind of directness and honesty about what he’s experiencing. I mean, he was a very sophisticated writer. But he had to learn how to live with himself. He was very quick to say things, but he was also somebody who spoke with a lot of sincerity, and that’s human. That appeals to people.

Q: Why do people not in monastic life respond so positively to what he wrote?

A: That’s still a mystery to me. I think he started out with [the idea] that he would be writing little book reviews in the back of some obscure journal and had no idea that he was going to become a famous writer. Merton was very human, so that, immediately, is one appeal. The other is that he consciously approaches it. He writes for monks, certainly. I mean that’s at the core, and his best writing is for monks about monastic topics, but he was a cosmopolitan, so he always had a broader audience in view. And he is not sectarian. I mean, he’s radically a Christian, but I think he keeps the broader perspective in mind, and he doesn’t think the whole world are monks. But on the other hand, he can talk to the monk in each person. He sees it as a deep enough thing that somehow everybody has the capacity to come to that same kind of intensity and depth of experience of God. And he was convinced, you know, we’re all called to experience God, if not in this life certainly in the next, but hopefully in this life, and so he spoke to awaken that in people.

Q: What do you think he came to this monastery seeking?

A: Well, Merton came to the Abbey at Gethsemani because he perceived it as dedicated to the contemplative life, a simple life, monks who lived in poverty and in silence. I’m not sure he was even aware that there were other such monasteries in the United States at the time. He always had a kind of a dream of that since he was a child, when he would look through these picture books of medieval monasteries in Europe, and some kind of a dream was awakened in him. And he came down here to make a retreat and discovered, just by immediate contact, what the place was – men who are just totally dedicated to the life of prayer, and their whole life is centered around that. That was somehow a dream reawakened.

Q: Is there anything else you want to add about Merton or the monastery?

A: Well, it has been forty years since Father Louis died. We’ve come a long way since then, and a lot of it has been under the impetus that he had, the waves that he made. And I think it’s been a good, for the most part it’s been a good effect. We certainly have a more, a broader perspective on life. I think we have become so popular we’re almost too popular nowadays, and so we’re reevaluating what are the radical qualities of the Cistercian life, and Merton has been somebody who has given us a voice about that. And so he continues to speak to monks and at the same time continues to be a challenge to monks. We have a better appreciation of the variety of vocations within the monastic life. We have developed an appreciation for the solitary life of a hermit, and we have a better appreciation of the intellectual challenges that are present to us in the monastic life which were not considered something a monk would aspire to, but the fact of the matter is that Merton was an example of what can be done within the context of monastic life.

Q: And his interest in Eastern religions is an example as well?

A: Yes, I think we have found a kinship with Buddhist monks. They come here in small groups, and I’ll be meeting with [one] tomorrow, and perhaps at the beginning of November another small group will be coming. Matthieu Ricard came in the spring. He’s been associated with the Dalai Lama for 17 years at least. So there’s a kind of universality that we appreciate more now than we ever did before.

November 10, 1958

…It seems to me that, as a contemplative, I do not need to lock myself into solitude and lose all contact with the rest of the world; rather this poor world has a right to a place in my solitude….

December 22, 1961

…The question of peace is important, it seems to me, and so important that I do not believe anyone who takes his Christian faith seriously can afford to neglect it. I do not mean to say that you have to swim out to Polaris submarines carrying a banner between your teeth, but it is absolutely necessary to take a serious and articulate stand on the question of nuclear war. And I mean against nuclear war….

September 1962

…The illusion of America as the earthly paradise, in which everyone recovers original goodness: which becomes in fact a curious idea that prosperity itself justifies everything, is a sign of goodness, is a carte blanche to continue to be prosperous in any way feasible: and this leads to the horror that we now see: because we are prosperous, because we are successful, because we have all this amazing “know-how” (without real intelligence or moral wisdom, without even a really deep scientific spirit), we are entitled to defend ourselves by any means whatever, without any limitation, and all the more so because what we are defending is our illusion of innocence…

April 5, 1963

…It would seem that small contemplative communities are needed which, while preserving jealously their solitude and life of prayer, might also in discreet and limited ways offer opportunities for dialogue and spiritual communication with members of the surrounding society, particularly the intellectual and religious leaders, whether Christian or otherwise. There is a spiritual work of mercy which has almost become a corporal work in our time: offering to others some small share temporarily in the silence and solitude of a monastic setting.

May 7, 1963

…There is no question that the mystics are the ones who have kept Christianity going, if anyone has….

June 9, 1965

…The more I see of it, the more I realize the absolute primacy and necessity of silent, hidden, poor, apparently fruitless prayer….

September 28, 1965

…Did I tell you that I had moved out to the woods? I came out over a month ago. Go down only once a day, for Mass and dinner, then come back. I get a little supper for myself and as I don’t like to bother with cooking or washing dishes I try to keep it as simple as possible. It is really a wonderful life, a revelation, even much better than I expected. It is so good to get back to plain natural simplicity and the bare essentials, no monkeying around with artificialities and non-essentials. It really gives a wonderful new dimension to one’s life. I didn’t realize, until I got out here, how tense and frustrated I really was in community, though of course I love the monks….I like being a hermit, and I do have real solitude. There is never anyone around in the woods expect an occasional hunter, and we are trying to persuade them to go elsewhere. It is real solitude, and just perfect.

June 6, 1967

…as far as I am concerned the question “why do you have to be a monk?” is like a question “why do you have to live in Nebraska?” I don’t know. It’s what the karma added up to, I guess. Here I am, and it would not be physically easy for me to get somewhere else, but on the other hand I have what I want: a certain amount of distance, silence, perspective, meditation, room to do the things I know I must do. I would go nuts trying to do them in a city. Is this better? Certainly only for someone who knows he has to do it this way, more or less, or something like this. But not necessarily for anyone else. I am sure you are quite right about the ordinary life etc. This is a more ordinary life than you think, and also I wonder if I am more out of life or more in it? To me, the woods are life. Of course there is a lot wrong with it. Certainly it would be wonderful to have children to look after and as you say learn from. But I know for my own part that being married would be a very difficult proposition, much too complicated. Loneliness can be terrible too, but somehow I can handle that better. I’m only saying that is the kind of compromise with life that I have ended up with, and not making out it is wonderful: but it is what I can handle. More or less…

Midsummer 1968

…I am against war, against violence, against violent revolution, for peaceful settlement of differences, for nonviolent but nevertheless radical change. Change is needed, and violence will not really change anything: at most it will only transfer power from one set of bull-headed authorities to another….But the problems of man can never be solved by political means alone. Over and over again the Church has said that the forgetfulness of God and of prayer are at the root of our trouble. This has been reduced to a cliché. But it is nevertheless true. And I realize more and more that in my own vocation what matters is not comment, not statements of opinion, not judgments, but prayer. Let us pray for one another and try in everything to do what God asks of us.