98 of 104 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
save your money for a better book, December 17, 2009
This review is from: Beneath the Mask of Holiness: Thomas Merton and the Forbidden Love Affair that Set Him Free (Hardcover)
This is the review I wrote for the winter 2009 issue of The Merton Seasonal, a quarterly review:
While still a young, aspiring writer who had not yet set his sights on becoming a monk, Merton lamented his latest rejection letter in a journal entry with which any writer can identity: "Other people's bad books get published," he noted in his journal. "Why can't my bad book get published?"
Mark Shaw has much to celebrate. Despite (or perhaps because of) his purple prose style and sensationalist approach to the life of Thomas Merton, his particular bad book has gotten published.
The book centers on what Shaw presents as shocking revelations of closely-guarded secrets. The reader learns that, while a college student in England, Merton had a sexual liaison that resulted in the birth of an out-of-wedlock child; and then later in life, long after becoming a monk, fell in love with a nurse he met while recovering from surgery.
Is there anyone with the remotest interest in Merton's life who is unaware of Mark Shaw's headline news? Soon after Merton's death in 1968, his friend Ed Rice became the first to write, in The Man in the Sycamore Tree, about Merton fathering a child while at Clare College, Cambridge. No subsequent biographer has ignored the event. As for his affair with the nurse when he was 50, it was first described a quarter century ago by Michael Mott in The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton. It is now more than a decade since Merton's journals about the affair, included in Learning to Love, were published.
Shaw is indignant that Merton's autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, published in 1948, referred in only "watered down" terms to the more serious sins he committed before he became a monk. This is nothing less than intentional misrepresentation, Shaw asserts, "the result of a concerted effort to disguise a tormented sinner as some sort of plastic saint rehabilitated through monastic practices." (p 21) The real Merton was transformed into a Catholic "poster boy." (p vii)
Continuing in the same vein, Shaw sees the lack of detail as nothing less that the result of "a quiet conspiracy, a cover up, if you will, by not only Merton, but also the Catholic Church hierarchy stretching from the United States to the Vatican, Abbot Frederic Dunne [Merton's abbot when he wrote the book], Merton's literary agent, and his publisher, none of whom did anything other than promote the book as factual even though critical parts did not disclose the whole truth. Strict censorship, in effect, issued a restraining order on Merton's true story, omitting crucial information about him, and readers were hoodwinked and misled into believing that while Merton may have been a sinner prior to entering Gethsemani, he was not 'that bad' a sinner." (p 21)
Thus the book's title: Beneath the Mask of Holiness. Shaw sees "holiness" as a disguise that the Catholic Church and the Trappist Order managed to squeeze Merton into. But, thanks to his affair in 1965, Merton finally discovered what life was all about and thus was no longer "a schizophrenic persona, passive on the outside while pangs of anguish and fear patrolled within him." (p 9)
If such over-heated sentences appeal to you, either for content or prose style, I urge you to rush out and buy a copy. Otherwise save your time and money for a better book.
Perhaps it's not entirely accidental that the reader is reminded of Dan Brown's novel, The Da Vinci Code, populated by evil Catholics whose goal in life is to conceal the truth. In Shaw's book, Merton is assigned the starring role in an anti-Catholic tract. (In the book's last chapter, Shaw speculates that Merton may have been murdered, in which case "the logical suspects would be directives hired by the Catholic Church hierarchy, who were afraid of a scandal if Merton were to return to his lover or leave Gethsemani." [pp 213-4])
If you want to know about actual Merton's life, including those events that he brought to confession, read Merton himself or one of his less conspiracy-minded biographers.
Regarding his year at Cambridge, Merton asked aloud in The Seven Storey Mountain, "Shall I wake up the dirty ghosts under the trees of the Backs and out beyond the Clare New Building and in some rooms down on Chesterton Road?" He decided to let the ghosts slumber. "There would certainly be no point whatever in embarrassing other people with the revelation of so much cheap sentimentality mixed up with even cheaper sin," as he put it in an earlier draft of the autobiography. It was characteristic of Merton to take pains not to embarrass others.
What Merton makes crystal clear in The Seven Storey Mountain, as published, is that it was a hellish interval in his life, "an incoherent riot of undirected passion," as he put it -- a time of "beer, bewilderment and sorrow," in the words of his friend, Bob Lax. "I had fallen through the surface of old England," Merton wrote, "into the hell, the vacuum and the horror that London was nursing in her avaricious heart." He remembers reading Freud, Jung, and Adler, struggling to understand "the mysteries of sex-repression."
Though clearly something dreadful occurred, the reader was left guessing exactly what actually happened -- something to do with the mysteries of sex-repression, clearly, but what? On the other hand, what Merton shared with his readers is a great deal more than is provided by most authors of autobiographies. In Charlie Chaplin's autobiography, to give one typical example, Chaplin simply skipped over some of the more painful or humiliating moments in his life, while inventing or radically revising others.
For all its sorrows, Merton's year at Cambridge wasn't a total loss. Perhaps the high point was Professor Edward Bullough's class on Dante. Canto by canto, Merton read his way to the frozen core of hell, finally ascending through purgatory toward the bliss of heaven, a "slow and majestic progress of ... myths and symbols." It was purgatory's seven storey mountain that provided Merton with the metaphor for his autobiography.
While Shaw provides a compact if voyeuristic chronicle of how Merton fell in love with a young nurse and what occurred between them in the weeks that followed, by far the best and most vivid and three-dimensional account of the same story is related by Merton himself in Learning to Love. Here the reader gets both a day-by-day history of what happened as well as a poignant account of his struggle to make sense of what all this meant, his justifications side-by-side with his self-recriminations. Here one can also can read about the very human community Merton was a part of and his frustrations with his abbot, James Fox - and then hear him express his gratitude for both.
Unfortunately, Shaw seems to have no understanding of or sympathy with Merton's basic choices: to become a Christian, to be baptized in the Catholic Church, and then to embrace monastic life in a penitential order. It was ultimately because of Merton's renewed realization that he had a monastic vocation, not a vocation to marriage, that made him end the affair.
It wasn't, in my opinion, Merton's finest hour. Many priests suffer from extreme loneliness and have affairs which, in most cases, end as Merton's did. I have known several women at the other end of similar stories who felt abandoned, suffered from a deep sense of rejection for years afterward, and even wrestled with thoughts of suicide. The fact that this particular story involves Thomas Merton doesn't make it better and mean that, thanks to the special magic of the Merton factor, it became an encounter sprinkled with pixie dust for the young woman who so desperately loved him.
"God writes straight with crooked lines," says a Portugese proverb. After the affair, Merton realized he needed not only a hermitage but also vital relationship with several Kentucky families he had begun to know. Never a hard-hearted man, he became even more compassionate. One hopes the nurse he loved was also able to make good use of the intense relationship she had with Merton in that period of her life. (In the past, biographers have shielded her identity, either using the initial "M," as Merton did in his journals, or her first name, Margie. To his shame, Shaw reveals her family name.)
One could write much more about Shaw's book and its thesis that it was only thanks to his affair that the true Merton at last emerged from hiding rather than remaining a masked counterfeit coined by the Catholic Church. But then I would have to discuss every chapter, the reading of which is a penance I leave only to those who find ordinary penances inadequate.
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48 of 51 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
A Distorted Portrayal of a Complex Man, December 16, 2009
This review is from: Beneath the Mask of Holiness: Thomas Merton and the Forbidden Love Affair that Set Him Free (Hardcover)
One need not regard Merton as a saint to find fault with this unfortunate book. Those who appreciate Merton's human complexity--his contradictions, his finely tuned sense of the absurd, his willingness to meet his own shadow--will barely recognize the person depicted here.
The author purports to write "a complete portrayal of the true Merton....an unbiased account." But his biases practically leap off the page. He expresses admiration for Merton's writings, calling him "a gifted wordsmith" with "an outstanding body of work." But he doesn't seem to like the man himself. He refers to Merton as "the celebrity monk," "a poster boy for the Catholic Church," known for his "holier-than-thou writings." In his pre-monastic days, he was "a sinner of the first degree," who experienced the "depth of depravity."
Merton was often incredibly hard on himself, but Shaw gives him some competition, proclaiming him "spoiled, morally weak, ethically handicapped, narcissistic, deceptive, secretive, independent to a fault, and by all accounts, irresponsible."
Readers of The Seven Storey Mountain are said to have been "hoodwinked and misled," because of a "conspiracy" and "cover-up" perpetrated by Merton and his "enablers"--"a concerted effort to disguise a tormented sinner as some sort of plastic saint rehabilitated through monastic practices." Merton is seen as "the abused spouse in a marriage to Gethsemani and the Catholic Church," who remained "confused and tormented" throughout his monastic life, until he fell in love with Margie, "a sensual student nurse half his age." Their relationship, called a "wondrous, magical story" in one place, is referred to elsewhere as a "sordid affair."
Shaw's treatment of the Catholic Church and Merton's religious superiors is thoroughly negative and one-sided. While Merton may at times have felt like a prisoner, he was in fact free to walk away at any time, as countless others have done. He chose to stay, remaining a Catholic priest and a monk of Gethsemani for the rest of his life. As for Merton's complicated relationship with his abbot, Dom James showed his trust and respect for the monk by choosing him as his personal confessor. Weekly, for fifteen years, the abbot literally got down on his knees and confessed his sins to Merton. As Dom James said years later, "I knew he was the best."
In terms of style, the book is a curious mixture of term paper and pulp novel. Errors in syntax and word choice abound, and logical connections are often elusive. Some sentences are almost impossible to parse: "For pages on end, the character while writing in the summer of 1941 months before he entered Gethsemani, Merton addressed his uncle in adoring terms." And Merton would surely be amused to see his first confession referred to as "confessionary tribunals"!
More significantly, there are factual errors, along with many instances where the author has misread or mischaracterized passages from Merton's own journals. Despite hundreds of footnotes, the book is not even an accurate of the available details of the love affair itself.
The reality is that Merton actually saw Margie on very few occasions, all of them duly noted in his journals. So it is puzzling that Shaw cannot seem to keep track of when and where they met, and who else was present. His account certainly suggests that there were more private "interludes" than the evidence supports. Even after rereading portions of Beneath the Mask alongside a copy of Merton's journal, I continue to be baffled by some bits of Shaw's chronology. Such details might seem trivial, were it not for the fact that the author uses specific dates and passages from the journals to support his own conclusions about the nature of the relationship.
Finally, Merton's all-too-human weaknesses have hardly been a secret all these years. When I first heard about him back in the sixties, his youthful transgressions were pretty much understood to have included heavy drinking and an active sex life. (In those years, he was far more likely to be regarded as a dangerous radical than a plastic saint--especially by many Catholics.) Information that he had likely fathered a child has been out there since Edward Rice's book was published in 1970, and is acknowledged in the introductory notes to the 1998 edition of The Seven Storey Mountain.
Merton's love affair with Margie was written about in detail a quarter of a century ago by his official biographers: his close friend John Howard Griffin (Follow the Ecstasy, 1983), and Michael Mott (The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton, 1984). Both accounts are balanced and well-written, as is Jim Forest's Living with Wisdom (1991, revised 2008). For Merton's own thoughts and feelings, there is no substitute for going directly to the source: his journal, Learning to Love.
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57 of 64 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Tedious, prurient and misguided, November 22, 2009
This review is from: Beneath the Mask of Holiness: Thomas Merton and the Forbidden Love Affair that Set Him Free (Hardcover)
Having read a lot of books by and about Thomas Merton over the years I was interested to see what new insights this book could offer. Not only did I not find anything new in this book, it was also badly written, full of both factual and grammatical errors, and really seemed to lack little, if any, understanding of Thomas Merton's sense of vocation and the commitment he freely took, and kept, to remain a monk of the Abbey of Gethsemani - as Merton himself would write late in life: "I have never for a moment thought of changing the definitive decisions taken in the course of my life: to be a Christian, to be a monk, to be a priest."
The book seems to rely heavily on the biographies by Monica Furlong and Edward Rice, certainly not the best of biographies, and yet he seems to focus on the errors of these biographies whilst overlooking the real contributions they made to Merton studies. Following Furlong Shaw is completely misguided in his interpretation of Merton's relationship with the Catholic Church, the Abbey of Gethsemani and his Abbot, James Fox. Certainly Merton and Fox had their ups and downs, but it was an incredibly dynamic and creative relationship - for example, if, as Shaw suggests, Fox didn't trust Merton he would not have made him first Master of Scholastics and then, for ten years, Master of Novices, charged with the formation of the large numbers of young men joining Gethsemani in the fifties and early sixties.
Shaw writes of The Seven Storey Mountain as a cover-up, wrongly expecting of an autobiography the retelling of factual details that is expected of a good biography. An autobiography gives the authors own perspective on his life from the vantage point from which the author is looking back and viewing it. This is precisely what Merton does in The Seven Storey Mountain in telling his story in a captivating and compelling way that has influenced countless readers over the years.
In stringing together mostly minor references by Merton to women and dreams Shaw distorts the picture of Merton he draws almost beyond recognition and anyone who knew Merton, or who has read his work or a decent biography of him, will find Shaw's work prurient, misguided and little better than pulp fiction.
If a reader wants a decent, well-written, biography of Merton there are many available - Mott's The Seven Mountain of Thomas Merton, Shannon's Silent Lamp: The Thomas Merton Story or Forest's Living with Wisdom.
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