Customer Reviews

Beneath the Mask of Holiness: Thomas Merton and the Forbidden Love Affair that Set Him Free

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

When Mark Shaw reviews his own book and gives it five stars - that's a red flag. The appropriate response to Hippie Monk would have been a comment. Mr. Shaw wrote a blog piece in the Huffington Post Dec. 8 in which he writes that in 1965 "Merton was a Trappist monk at the time and not a practicing priest in the Catholic Church." Merton was indeed an ordained practicing Catholic priest. An author who makes such a fundamental error cannot be taken seriously. In an interview with Douglas Hagler, Shaw says, "Thomas Merton was the Bernard Madoff of his day without the fifty billion dollars since Merton wore a mask disguising himself as a peaceful, contemplative monk instead of the struggling man he truly was." Such outrageous and idiotic remarks litter the entire interview, which is patently anti-Catholic and betrays the fact that Shaw's ideas about Merton and Catholicism are utterly skewered. The biggest surprise about this unfortunate book is that it's not self-published. It would be a huge mistake for anyone who respects the writings and the life of Thomas Merton to spend money on it. It is an insult to the memory of Thomas Merton and nothing more than a sensationalistic hatchet job.

Thomas Merton's influence, writings, and his friendships have had a great impact on the spiritual lives of many, and I am one. It is time for a more critical, less worshipful look at Merton (an antidote to writing such as Christine Bochen's introduction to "Learning to Love"), and I thought this book might provide it. But how can one believe Shaw's claim that "here, finally, is the true story of [Merton's] life" (p. ix) written "guided along by the Holy Spirit.... Many days I could actually feel the spirit infiltrating the writing, causing me to witness firsthand the power of divine intervention" (p. 220). Perhaps I should not be surprised by the poor quality of this biography: On the same page, Shaw also thanks his dog, Black Sox, "for his loyalty and patience during the writing process."

How could the Holy Spirit inspire the drivel in this biography? For example: "If Merton was killed, the logical suspects would be directives hired by the Catholic Church hierarchy, who were afraid of scandal if Merton were to return to his lover or leave Gethsemani. This possibility appears remote, but Merton's words in Bangkok implying that 'conditions had changed and that celibacy, even for a monk, was a thing of the past,' must have been cause for concern for Catholic officials watching his every move" (pp. 213-214). Interestingly, the quotation in Shaw's statement is not from Merton, but from Ed Rice's "entertainment" (he had the sense not to call it a biography) "Man in the Sycamore Tree."

Shaw does not provide a "fresh biography" (p. 219); he uses the book as a vehicle to attack the Catholic Church (for its authority, its stand on celibacy for priests and religious, etc.). He sees the Church as a monolith suppressing spiritual freedom. He states that Merton was "imprisoned by the abbot of the monastery he sought to leave" (p. viii) and that "Merton became the abused spouse in a marriage to Gethsemani and the Catholic Church" (p.132).

Shaw distorts Merton's writing. Shaw quotes Merton: "The other day I called [Margie]...--first time in months... It was sad...and in the end she was crying." (p. 182) Shaw states that this telephone call "rekindled Merton's longing for his true love" (p. 182). Merton's full entry reads otherwise: "The other day I called M. from Bardstown--first time in months--since the end of June I believe. It was a sad sort of call and in the end she was crying. She is moving to Miami. I felt we really weren't communicating: she was trying to tell me I ought to leave and 'reach out for happiness.' No way of explaining to her that life in some city would be for me utterly meaningless. And also that I could not live in happiness with a woman--and that it would be a disaster for both of us. Yet I wish I could have a decent talk with her. But what would be the use" (Merton, "The Other Side of the Mountain," p. 11).

Shaw ignores the end of the affair between Merton and Margie Smith, Merton's remark that if married he would become "an alcoholic ex-priest," and Merton's later remarks about the "ridiculous love letters" he wrote and the "inanities of the past year" in the journal "Learning to Love." Merton's return to monastic interests is documented in the final journal, "The Other Side of the Mountain," where Merton declares himself a "monk of Gethsemani." "The Springs of Contemplation," published in 1992 and now reissued and available from Amazon, is a transcription of a retreat Merton gave to women religious at Gethsemani in December 1967 and May 1968. A responsible scholar or biographer would find Merton's statements in the latter book pertinent and consistent with his private thoughts in his final journal. The retreat chapter "Collaboration, Penance, Celibacy" gives Merton's May 1968 views on married priests (he thinks parish priests should have the option to marry) and the advantages of a celibate life for monastics. He speaks of celibacy as freeing those called to it, as he is, so that much of Shaw's and Rice's conjecture is disproven.

Shaw quotes Jim Forest's statement that "a kind of wedding" occurred between Margie and Merton. But Merton did not move to the "wedding" stage, he stopped at the emotional and physical thrills of courtship. Shaw writes that Merton "surprised Dom James with a sacred vow of sorts" (p. 173), but Merton's journal reveals that Dom James had asked Merton to make a written promise to live the rest of his life as a hermit. During the period Shaw focuses on, Merton was not living in what Shaw calls "hermitude," a word not found in the dictionary. Merton resided in a hermitage, but acted like one of the "wandering monks" that St. Benedict speaks about.

When writing of Merton's death, Shaw uses Ed Rice's metaphor that Merton "died ... under the sign of the Archer, Sagittarius, who had stuck [sic] him down with a bolt from the the heavens..." (p. 185). Only on page 214 does Shaw note that Merton died on December 10, 1968, the 27th anniversary of his entrance into Gethsemani.

Shaw calls Merton a "poster boy" for the Catholic Church, criticizes the superiors of the Trappist order for making an appropriate and prudential judgment to exclude a catalog of Merton's sins from "The Seven Storey Mountain" and sees this deletion as a conspiracy, not as an accurate reading of a time that was more conservative than today. Shaw describes Merton as "an imposter of sorts who put on a good front so others would not know of his inner agony" and who "intentionally concealed feelings and misrepresented facts by shading the truth and rationalizing his behavior." Later Shaw notes that Merton was a "very private person" and calls this "imposter" a great spiritual master, claiming that Merton's late-life illicit affair was the critical element in his spiritual development! As Jim Forest advises, Save your money and buy a better book--I recommend "The Springs of Contemplation"!

If anyone wants to read a _real_ account of Merton during this period, aside from Merton's own journals, the most reliable and unvarnished is "Follow the Ecstasy: The Hermitage Years of Thomas Merton" by John Howard Griffin, Merton's biographer and contemporary, who was the author of the (truly ground breaking) book Black Like Me.

This is, without question, the worst work about Merton ever undertaken; juvenile drivel; this jackass
has brought a bag of marbles to a chess game. Utterly pathetic.

I've been reading and studying Merton's writings and those of others about him for some 50 years. Also met and talked with Thomas Merton personally on a retreat. When Shaw's book appeared, I was looking forward to reading it for any new insights I might pick up. I think I got to page 3 before I chucked the book in the trash can!

As a writer, Mark Shaw appears to lack basic skills. Even in the few pages I read, there were glaring inaccuracies. Shaw's only "credentials" to write about Merton seem to be that he's a member of the Thomas Merton Society.

My advice: save your money.

First, let me say that I am fairly new to the world of Thomas Merton. I've only read "No Man Is An Island" and I loved it. This intriguing read about our favorite monk serves as a great reminder that all breathing things are capable of failure and disappointment. The most saintly of people have their own struggles; yet they pull it together and smile and remind you that you can and will make it through.
Here, Thomas Merton stares down an army full of struggle. He resents his Dom, he resents the monastery, and obviously, he struggles with a decision to keep his vows or not.
While the contents within this book may be new to me, I think readers that are more versed in Merton will be disappointed as the author borrows a lot of text from Merton-related books that you all have already read. In other words, it seems there's nothing new here, just an author analyzing and putting together the pieces of existing information.
Overall, it's a great story of Thomas Merton and his struggles.

There are some things that REALLY bugged me though: Firstly, the typos/grammatical errors were killing me! Worst of all, one of the errors were right in the middle of one of Merton's quotes, making me miss out on some wisdom. What is this - a self-published book?
Also, toward the end of the book, the author begins to reuse material that appears earlier in the book. Yes, to be fair, he warns that he's going to do this, citing that they are different accounts. But they say the exact same thing! Like he copy and pasted pieces of the book into the end.
Anyway, overall, the book had me gripped. I just wish we could have really gotten beneath the mask, instead, it seems we merely discovered it.

Mark Shaw's book on the life of Thomas Merton has been praised by many but also greatly disparaged by a few lengthy reviews here on Amazon. Although I am not an expert on Merton, I can provide a note of moderation regarding the nature of Shaw's work that may prove useful to some potential readers who may be confused by the disparity of opinion.

The disparaging critiques are themselves a little too careless and bent on exaggeration and tend to overlook the forest for the trees. Jim Forest, for example, says: "The book centers on what Shaw presents as shocking revelations of closely-guarded secrets" which Forest notes are not really secret and nothing new. Yet Shaw makes clear in his Prologue the story he is telling about Merton is one that has been told before but never "in its entirety." One can take issue with whether it is possible to tell any story in its "entirety," but certainly it is always possible to tell a different story even when covering the same facts. Shaw does not pretend to be revealing hidden facts for the first time. Instead, he offers a gathering of all the relevant facts in a way in which they have never before been presented. And in that sense his story can claim to be a more complete version of the life of Merton than others have offered because it emphasizes and organizes the facts in a particular way with respect to a particular goal. That goal concerns adequately addressing what Shaw identifies as the inner conflict and crisis of self Merton struggled with most of his life. Here the key words are "adequately addressing" because Shaw is not even asserting that Merton's inner conflict was unknown to others around him. He is only suggesting the extent and nature of this conflict have been underestimated and misunderstood.

Shaw pulls together events relating to Merton's parents, his early childhood and adolescence, his years at college, and his travels. He weaves these together to tell a story of a repeated sense of homelessness and loss of moorings and a consequent struggle with powerful feelings of abandonment and separation. As Merton grew older these early experiences grew into an inner conflict that greatly impeded his ability to have rewarding relationships with others, especially women. Merton's crisis of self turns out to be a crisis of love and the ability to find sustaining relationships. In this regard interesting parallels can be found in Merton's story as Shaw tells it and that of Sayuri in Memoirs of a Geisha. Sayuri's life story is also one of abandonment and the challenge it presents for finding love and learning to love.

The desire for freedom Shaw finds to be Merton's strongest passion is characteristic of such life struggles with issues of abandonment because so much of a child's early life in such circumstances turns on forms of manipulation by others--being used rather than truly loved by others. The life of a geisha is a strong symbol of such manipulations. And, as Shaw recounts, Merton experienced his share of being manipulated while also doing his share of manipulating, as was the case with Sayuri in Arthur Golden's novel. But like Sayuri, Merton eventually finds someone he realizes loves him in a way he has not previously experienced--with a love that is unconditional in many senses--not least of all the sense of rising above manipulation and short-term gratification. As Shaw rightly explains, this kind of love is extraordinarily liberating. Some people live their entire lives without experiencing or giving such love. So in this sense Merton's, story as Shaw understands, is a profound story of timeless worth. And for anyone who has actually experienced the terrors of abandonment and nomadic existence in early childhood, the journey of overcoming the crisis of self created by such circumstances is anything but trite or sentimental in its significance.

Shaw's book, like most books on complex and controversial subjects, will not please everyone and is not without minor flaws in composition. Nevertheless, it presents, in my opinion, an extensively worked out and worthwhile perspective on Merton. I highly recommend Shaw's version of Merton's life because it serves as a powerful allegory of life and for many readers who may struggle to overcome the same difficulties Merton lived through it will offer significant insight.