The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition

by Thomas Merton

  On every piece of luggage, by way of identification, Pop had pasted a pink American two-cent stamp, a device which had aroused sharp and instantaneous criticism from myself and John Paul. “What are you trying to do, Pop,” we asked with sarcasm. “Are you going to send that stuff through the mail?”

  The first day was not so bad for me and Father, because we were still in France. We saw a little of Dijon, and the train passed through Besançon on the way to Basle. But as soon as we got into Switzerland, things were different.

  For some reason, we found Switzerland extremely tedious. It was not Father’s kind of landscape, and anyway he had no time to sketch or paint anything, even if he had wanted to. In every city we hunted, first thing of all, for the museum. But the museums were never satisfactory. They were filled mostly with huge canvasses by some modern Swiss national artist, paintings representing monstrous great executioners trying to chop the heads off Swiss patriots. Besides, it was always hard for us to find the museum in the first place, because we did not know German, and we couldn’t make any sense out of the answers people gave us. Then when we finally did get there, instead of the comfort of a few decent pictures, we would immediately be confronted by another immense red and yellow cartoon by this Swiss jingo whose name I have forgotten.

  Finally we took to making fun of everything in the museums, and playing around, and putting our hats on the statues, which was all right because the place was always totally deserted anyway. But once or twice we nearly got in trouble with the stuffy Swiss custodians, who came around the corner by surprise and found us mocking the hatted masterworks, kidding the busts of Beethoven and the rest.

  As a matter of fact, the only pleasure Father got out of the whole expedition was a jazz concert he heard in Paris, given by a big American Negro orchestra—I cannot imagine who it was. I think it was too far back for Louis Armstrong: but Father was very happy with that. I did not go. Pop did not approve of jazz. But when we got to Lucerne, there was an orchestra in the hotel, and our table in the dining room was so close to it that I could reach out and touch the drum. And the drummer was a Negro with whom I immediately made friends, although he was rather shy. Meals were very interesting with all this business-like drumming going on right in my ear, and I was more fascinated by the activities of the drummer than I was by the melons and meats that were set before us. This was the onl pleasure I got out of Switzerland and then, almost immediately, Pop got our table changed.

  The rest of the time was one long fight. We fought on pleasure steamers, we fought on funicular railways, we fought on the tops of mountains and at the foot of mountains and by the shores of lakes and under the heavy branches of the evergreens.

  In the hotel at Lucerne, John Paul and I nearly came to blows (Bonnemaman being on John Paul’s side) over the question as to whether the English had stolen the tune of God Save the King from My Country ‘Tis of Thee or whether the Americans had cribbed My Country ‘Tis of Thee from God Save the King. By this time, since I was on Father’s British passport, I considered myself English.

  Perhaps the worst day of all was the day we climbed the Jungfrau—in a train. All the way up I was arguing with Pop, who thought we were being cheated, for he contended that the Jungfrau was not nearly so high as all the other mountains around us, and he had embarked on this excursion on the more or less tacit assumption that the Jungfrau was the highest mountain around these parts: and now look, the Eiger and the Monch were much higher! I was vehement in explaining that the Jungfrau looked lower because it was further away, but Pop did not believe in my theory of perspective.

  By the time we got to thejungfrau joch, everybody was ready to fall down from nervous exhaustion, and the height made Bonnemaman faint, and Pop began to feel sick, and I had a big crisis of tears in the dining room, and then when Father and I and John Paul walked out into the blinding white-snow field without dark glasses we all got headaches; and so the day, as a whole, was completely horrible.

  Then, in Interlaken, although Pop and Bonnemaman had the intense consolation of being able to occupy the same rooms that had been used only a few months before by Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, John Paul humiliated the whole family by falling fully dressed into a pond full of gold-fish and running through the hotel dripping with water and green-weeds. Finally, we were all scared out of our wits when one of the maids, exhausted by the strain of waiting on so many hundreds of English and American tourists, fainted, while carrying a loaded tray, and crashed to the floor in a tornado of dishes right behind my chair.

  We were glad to get out of Switzerland, and back into France, but by the time we reached Avignon, I had developed such a disgust for sightseeing that I would not leave the hotel to go and see the Palace of the Popes. I remained in the room and read Tarzan of the Apes, finishing the whole book before Father and John Paul returned from what was probably the only really interesting thing we had struck in the whole miserable journey.

  V

  POP HAD COME VERY UNWILLINGLY TO ST. ANTONIN, AND AS soon as he got there he tried to leave again. The streets were too dirty. They disgusted him. But Bonnemaman refused to move until the full month, or whatever time they had planned to stay, had passed.

  However, one of the official family acts that took place during this time was an excursion to Montauban, and the inspection of the Lycée to which I was to be sent in the fall.

  I suppose those brick cloisters looked innocent enough in the afternoon sun of late August, when they were empty of the fiends in black smocks who were to fill them in late September. I was to get my fill of bitterness in those buildings, in due time.

  Pop and Bonnemaman and John Paul and all the luggage left on the express for Paris as August came to an end. Then, in the first week of September, came the patronal feast of Saint Antonin, with torchlight processions, and everybody dancing the polka and the schottische under the Japanese lanterns on the esplanade. There were many other attractions and excitements, including a certain fanciful novelty in shooting galleries. At one end of town, there was a pigeon tied by the leg to the top of a tree, and everybody blasted at it with a shotgun until it was dead. At the other end of town, by the river bank, men were shooting at a chicken which was tied to a floating box, moored out in the center of the stream.

  For my own part, I entered a great competition with most of the boys and youths of the town, in which we all jumped into the river and swam after a duck that was thrown off the bridge. It was finally caught by a respectable fellow called Georges who was studying to be a school-teacher at the normal school in Montauban.

  At this time, too, being eleven and a half years old, I fell in love with a mousy little girl with blonde locks called Henriette. It was a rather desultory affair. She went home and told her parents that the son of the Englishman was in love with her, and her mother clapped her hands and their household rang with alleluias on that day. The next time I saw her she was very friendly, and during one of the dances, with a kind of official artfulness, she allowed me to chase her ’round and ’round a tree.

  Then the artificiality of the business dawned on me and I went home. Father said to me: “What’s this I hear about you chasing after girls at your age?” After that life became very serious, and a few weeks later I put on my new blue uniform and went off to the Lycée.

  Although by this time I knew French quite well, the first day in the big, gravelled yard, when I was surrounded by those fierce, cat-like little faces, dark and morose, and looked into those score of pairs of glittering and hostile eyes, I forgot every word, and could hardly answer the furious questions that were put to me. And my stupidity only irritated them all the more. They began to kick me, and to pull and twist my ears, and push me around, and shout various kinds of insults. I learned a great deal of obscenity and blasphemy in the first few days, simply by being the direct or indirect object of so much of it.

  After this everybody accepted me and became quite friendly and pleasant, once they were used to my pale, blue-eyed, and se
emingly stupid English face. Nevertheless, when I lay awake at night in the huge dark dormitory and listened to the snoring of the little animals all around me, and heard through the darkness and the emptiness of the night the far screaming of the trains, or the mad iron cry of a bugle in a distant caserne of Senegalese troops, I knew for the first time in my life the pangs of desolation and emptiness and abandonment.

  At first I used to go home nearly every Sunday taking the early train from Montauban-Villenouvelle, at about five-thirty in the morning. And I would plead with Father to let me out of that miserable school, but it was in vain. After about two months I got used to it and ceased to be so unhappy. The wound was no longer so raw: but I was never happy or at peace in the violent and unpleasant atmosphere of those brick cloisters.

  The children I had associated with at St. Antonin had not been by any means angels, but there had at least been a certain simplicity and affability about them. Of course, the boys who went to the Lycée were of the same breed and the same stamp: there was no specific difference, except that they came from families that were better off. All my friends at St. Antonin had been the children of workmen and peasants, with whom I sat in the elementary school. But when a couple of hundred of these southern French boys were thrown together in the prison of that Lycée, a subtle change was operated in their spirit and mentality. In fact, I noticed that when you were with them separately, outside the school, they were mild and peaceable and humane enough. But when they were all together there seemed to be some diabolical spirit of cruelty and viciousness and obscenity and blasphemy and envy and hatred that banded them together against all goodness and against one another in mockery and fierce cruelty and in vociferous, uninhibited filthiness. Contact with that wolf-pack felt very patently like contact with the mystical body of the devil: and, especially in the first few days, the members of that body did not spare themselves in kicking me around without mercy.

  The students were divided into two strictly segregated groups, and I was among “les petits,” those in “quatrième,” the fourth class, and below it. The oldest among us were fifteen and sixteen, and among these were five or six big morose bullies with thick black hair growing out of their foreheads almost down to the eyebrows. They were physically stronger than anybody else and, though less intelligent, they were craftier in the works of evil, louder in obscenity and completely unrestrained in their brutality, when the mood was on them. Of course, they were not always unpleasant and hostile: but in a sense their friendship was more dangerous than their enmity and, in fact, it was this that did the most harm: because the good children who came to the school quickly got into the habit of tolerating all the unpleasantness of these individuals, in order not to get their heads knocked off for failing to applaud. And so the whole school, or at least our part of it, was dominated by their influence.

  When I think of the Catholic parents who sent their children to a school like that, I begin to wonder what was wrong with their heads. Down by the river, in a big clean white building, was a college run by the Marist Fathers. I had never been inside it: indeed, it was so clean that it frightened me. But I knew a couple of boys who went to it. They were sons of the little lady who ran the pastry shop opposite the church at St. Antonin and I remember them as exceptionally nice fellows, very pleasant and good. It never occurred to anyone to despise them for being pious. And how unlike the products of the Lycée they were!

  When I reflect on all this, I am overwhelmed at the thought of the tremendous weight of moral responsibility that Catholic parents accumulate upon their shoulders by not sending their children to Catholic schools. Those who are not of the Church have no understanding of this. They cannot be expected to. As far as they can see, all this insistence on Catholic schools is only a moneymaking device by which the Church is trying to increase its domination over the minds of men, and its own temporal prosperity. And of course most non-Catholics imagine that the Church is immensely rich, and that all Catholic institutions make money hand over fist, and that all the money is stored away somewhere to buy gold and silver dishes for the Pope and cigars for the College of Cardinals.

  Is it any wonder that there can be no peace in a world where everything possible is done to guarantee that the youth of every nation will grow up absolutely without moral and religious discipline, and without the shadow of an interior life, or of that spirituality and charity and faith which alone can safeguard the treaties and agreements made by governments?

  And Catholics, thousands of Catholics everywhere, have the consummate audacity to weep and complain because God does not hear their prayers for peace, when they have neglected not only His will, but the ordinary dictates of natural reason and prudence, and let their children grow up according to the standards of a civilization of hyenas.

  The experience of living with the kind of people I found in the Lycée was something new to me, but in degree, rather than in kind. There was the same animality and toughness and insensitivity and lack of conscience that existed to some extent in my own character, and which I had found more or less everywhere.

  But these French children seemed to be so much tougher and more cynical and more precocious than anyone else I had ever seen. How, then, could I fit them in with the ideal of France which my father had, and which even I had then in an obscure and inchoate form? I suppose the only answer is corruptio optimi pessima. Since evil is the defect of good, the lack of a good that ought to be there, and nothing positive in itself, it follows that the greatest evil is found where the highest good has been corrupted. And I suppose the most shocking thing about France is the corruption of French spirituality into flippancy and cynicism; of French intelligence into sophistry; of French dignity and refinement into petty vanity and theatrical self-display; of French charity into a disgusting fleshly concupiscence, and of French faith into sentimentality or puerile atheism. There was all of this in the Lycée Ingres, at Montauban.

  However, as I say, I adjusted myself to the situation, and got into a group of more or less peaceful friends who had more wit than obscenity about them and were, in fact, the more intelligent children in the three lower classes. I say intelligent; I mean, also, precocious.

  But they had ideals and ambitions and, as a matter of fact, by the middle of my first year, I remember we were all furiously writing novels. On the days when we went out for walks, two by two into the country in a long line which broke up into groups at the edge of town, my friends and I would get together, walking in a superior way, with our caps on the backs of our heads and our hands in our pockets, like the great intellectuals that we were, discussing our novels. The discussion was not merely confined to telling the plot of what we were writing: a certain amount of criticism was passed back and forth.

  For instance—I was engaged in a great adventure story, the scene of which was laid in India, and the style of which was somewhat influenced by Pierre Loti. It was written in French. At one point in the story I had the hero, who was in financial difficulties, accept a loan of some money from the heroine. This concept evoked loud cries of protest from my confrères, who found that it offended all the most delicate standards required in a romantic hero. What do you mean, accept money from the heroine! Allons donc, mon vieux, c’est impossible, ça! C’est tout à fait inoui! I had not thought of that at all, but I made the change.

  That particular novel was never finished, as I remember. But I know I finished at least one other, and probably two, besides one which I wrote at St. Antonin before coming to the Lycée. They were all scribbled in exercise books, profusely illustrated in pen and ink—and the ink was generally bright blue.

  One of the chief of these works, I remember, was inspired by Kingsley’s Westward Ho! and by Loma Doone, and it was about a man living in Devonshire in the sixteenth century. The villains were all Catholics, in league with Spain, and the book ended in a tremendous naval battle off the coast of Wales, which I illustrated with great care. At one point in the book a priest, one of the villains, set fire to the
house of the heroine. I did not tell my friends this. I think they would have been offended. They were at least nominal Catholics, and were among the students who lined up two by two to go to Mass at the Cathedral on Sunday mornings.

  On the other hand, I do not think they can have been very well instructed Catholics, for one day, as we were emerging from the Lycée, on the way out to one of those walks, we passed two religious in black soutanes, with black bushy beards, standing in the square before the school, and one of my friends hissed in my ear: “Jesuits!” For some reason or other he was scared of Jesuits. And, as a matter of fact, now that I know more about religious Orders, I realize that they were not Jesuits but Passionist missionaries, with the white insignia of the Passionists on their breasts.

  At first, on the Sundays when I remained at the Lycée, I stayed in Permanence with the others who did not go to Mass at the Cathedral. That is, I sat in the study hall reading the novels of Jules Verne or Rudyard Kipling (I was very much affected by a French translation of The Light That Failed). But later on, Father arranged for me to receive instructions, with a handful of others, from a little fat Protestant minister who came to the Lycée to evangelize us.

  On Sunday mornings we gathered around the stove in the bleak, octagonal edifice which had been erected in one of the courts as a Protestant “temple” for the students. The minister was a serious little man, and he explained the parables of the Good Samaritan and the Pharisee and the Publican and so on. I don’t remember that there was any particularly deep spirituality about it, but there was nothing to prevent him from showing us the obvious moral lessons.

  I am grateful that I got at least that much of religion, at an age when I badly needed it: it was years since I had even been inside a church for any other purpose than to look at the stained glass windows or the Gothic vaulting. However, it was practically useless. What is the good of religion without personal spiritual direction? Without Sacraments, without any means of grace except a desultory prayer now and then, at intervals, and an occasional vague sermon?