I think that now I do really experience the whole M. thing as something that is credible – and acceptable – in the past tense. Not that it is not also present, but present tamely, in a friendship that does not need that much passion – and is perhaps free of complication. The wrenching of yesterday and the fiction of a “New Year” seem to be a help. I know, to claim it is “free of complication” is a bit optimistic. But I am lucky that it is not much more complex than it is.
January 4, 1967
Finished [Joseph P.] Lyford’s book – The Airtight Cage [New York, 1966] – a clear-cut and impassioned report on what happens to people in a slum. In this case the “Area” – South of Columbia in the 80’s and 90’s on the West Side of NY – which was a somewhat comfy middle-class Jewish—Irish area when I was in college. I still remember so many things about it – the dark brownstone rendezvous club for girls where the Alpha Delts [Alpha Delta Phi] used to get dates. Cold shadows on Broadway on a winter morning. Walking down Broadway around 1:30 a.m. shouting Merry Christmas to everyone after Midnight Mass – the Thalia, the Wurno, and other movies …
He shows the life of utter helplessness, rootlessness, lack of community, lived by people (poor and middle class) who have no recourse, i.e. a system that deplores the slum but needs it as a human refuse dump.
The slum life is lived by 1/5 of the population of the country – a life where people are destroyed. In order to witness the fact that the system itself is in grave trouble and is self-destroying. Yet there are so many rich resources that could be used. Will we ever do this? My guess is that only more and more cataclysms will force it upon us, and we don’t know what lies ahead.
Importance of what he calls the “total facts” that no one really sees. What use is a monk in the world if he does not see those facts? Or a priest either? (He mentions priests in the area that seem to be really and effectively concerned.) I am left with a great respect for the Puerto Ricans. And with a confirmed conviction that one of the purposes of the social institutions is to fabricate lies about society. And that this is true also in monasteries. And that today the process is inevitably bureaucratic because in a bureaucratic system petty cruelty and evasion and compulsive futility and masked irresponsibility and greed can be perfectly rationalized and indeed automated for full effect.
January 7, 1967
High wind last night. This morning – going out into inky darkness full of the cold and roar of wind in the forest, everywhere. Then rain. And the wind stopped. Rugged black sky when I went down for Mass. Finished a paper for that Harvard magazine and turned it in to be typed.
There was a very touching card from a Haitian nun in the school at Bel-Air – picture of the map of Vietnam (drawn for her) with a star of peace over it – and promise of prayers for peace from her and all the girls in the class who all signed – lovely Haitian names. I can imagine them. It was a sweet card, and moved me to tears.
Some photos from J. H. Griffin came – taken when Maritain was here 3 months ago.
Doris Dana, friend and literary executor of Gabriela Mistral, was here for a couple of days – she left early on the Epiphany to go to Griffin at Fort Worth. We had a good talk and drove around a lot, drank some beer in a quiet hollow between New Haven and Howardstown and looked at the bare woods. Much about South America. She brought the Misa Criolla which is quite good – a bit too slick perhaps, and the Misa Gitana which impresses me a great deal more. The Spanish texts themselves are great too. The Chilean Mass is not so striking but there are good folk dances on the other side. She brought up the story of Ishi – that is what impressed me most. She says she will send the book, which I had heard of before and wanted to get.
This evening I had a talk with Bro. Finbar who is thinking of leaving when his temporary vows expire next month. He was one of those in the Brothers Novitiate when the two novitiates merged in 1963. Bro. Mark – another, and one of the best, also left a few weeks ago. Really this situation is quite disturbing because as far as I can see these were two very good monastic vocations. The trouble is obviously not with them but with Gethsemani and the Abbot. And the combine, Dom James – Father Eudes which seems to be disastrous for a great many people.
Though I have a great deal of difficulty putting up with Dom James, I am much better off than some, since he has long since decided to give me plenty of lee-way (at least what he considers such). Those he completely dominates are in a really terrible position. This Abbot-Psychiatrist combination works in some cases as a real tyranny – and very unfairly too. Though Fr. Eudes tries harder to be fair than the abbot does. Between them it is a deadly business.
The other day when I saw Dom J. he brought up the “sad case” of Fr. Charles Davis, the English Jesuit theologian who got married and left the Church. Immediately I realized this was a dire “warning” to me – and got a little irritated, so that I spoiled his game for him by saying a few things that he was not too willing to hear. The deviousness of it repelled me. Also his total intolerance and incapacity to understand the first thing about it.
Finally Bro. Finbar was talking about the man – and the side of him I see least and can least abide. It is totally repellent. His sickening sentimentality, emotionalism, and all that – and the ludicrousness of it. The man is incredible. Really he is something to worry about: and nothing can be done. His position is so strong, that no recourse to superiors will mean anything. Only I think what will happen is that one by one all the young men will leave. God will quietly give us His idea about the place and the way it is run.
What makes me most angry is of course the mail situation, the opening of conscience letters, the xeroxing of outgoing mail that is “interesting” and so on! There is a real smell of police state in that office of his! Yet he pretends to be so kind, so unaware of it all … He can’t realize what his monks really think of him and evidently no one is able to tell him in a way that will make any impression – except to make him think he is “betrayed” and “martyred.” I think Jim Wygal is really right about him. It is pathological.
January 10, 1967
Cold. Grass in the dark slippery with hard frost. I went out into the latest dark (before dawn) to see my big bad friend Scorpio – rising – and there he was. First time I have seen him up there – all the way to Antares and beyond – this year. I have not been starwatching much lately.
Pascal is my kind. The [Romano] Guardini work on him [Pascal for Our Time (New York, 1966)] is fine – one of G.’s best, at least for me. Whole thing so full of ideas they rush in from all sides and I have to stop and walk around. Yes, I know, the world is full of people who will want me to know that my reading of Pascal is vicious – like taking LSD. Fatal pessimism and all that. Jansenism.
Yesterday I got a letter from an ex-Trappistine who is out between convents and returning to the Order she hopes. An incredibly naive and narcissistic document – mental age of about 10, so I would judge. Scolding me because she had read the review in NCR [National Catholic Reporter] of Raids and Conjectures, telling me I was a naughty old world-hater and that the world was really lovely, how everyone really loved everyone else and all was paradise in Texas. It is true I guess that this failure to understand my stuff is partly my fault. Too loud, too sweeping, too excited, too preachy. When I criticize a system, they think I criticize them – and that is of course because they fully accept the system and identify themselves with it. All love and bliss!! And they seem to have no idea that the affluence (which for them is Kingdom of God) has another side to it – the burned bodies of children in Vietnam and the Negro-Puerto Rican ghettoes.
Strange that the people who are really in the world and know what it is, like my stuff – or more of them do. In the same mail a letter from another girl, mature and with real problems and difficulties!!
These pious ones with their pretty myths and images about “the world” – they have not got beyond the old holy cards. Only the subject is now: instead of sweet sweet Mary and Baby Jesus it is now sweet sweet world o
f automation and jets and freeways – and tranquilizers I guess also. Perhaps the tranquilizers are the real exasperation of this new beatific theology of the world.
Another “natural” for me – Loren Eiseley. Amiya Chakravarty spoke of him and sent two books, and Harcourt Brace is giving out a little privately printed lecture of his which I have just read. Perfect. And clicks perfectly with what I have had on my mind all morning. I hope to begin The Firmament of Time [New York, 1960] – seems to fit in with what I read in Guardini – Pascal on Nature. Perhaps another good start.
Book Providence!!
January 18, 1967
Visits lately.
Last week, Jim Holloway and Will Campbell. Much talk of Faulkner, his drinking, his connections with Ole Miss (an underground paper there, mimeographed, on Will’s machine: “Just another rat hole for them to watch”). Its unpopularity with “the (Civil Rights) movement” – and with everyone else on that issue: penalty for taking a unique personal position and not electing to run with some pack. Will disagrees with F.’s “idealization of the Negro” and with his idea (mine too I guess) of the Negro as (possible) Redeemer. My idea in “Black Revolution”1 was simply that if at a certain moment white and Negro had responded to Kairos [decisive moment] there could have been a naturally redemptive act and a kind of conversion of the country. Not any more. Anyway it was only a possibility. Not something essentially inherent in the Negro, a historic chance.
We drank some beer under the loblollies at the lake – should not have gone on to Bardstown and to Willett’s in the evening. Conscience stricken for this the next day. Called M. from filling station outside Bardstown. Both glad.
Jonathan Williams, Guy Davenport and Gene Meatyard were here yesterday. Williams impressive but seemingly a little aloof, though friendly. All were friendly. Williams said all the poets sooner or later get into a fight with Cid Corman and he would be prepared to publish an anthology of “My last letter from Cid Corman” contributed by various – or all the – poets. Williams gets around and knows everybody and has marvelous books full of drawings and writings of all these people – and some excellent pictures in them. Guy Davenport – a recluse, vulnerable, pleasant and kind, touched no beer. The one who made the greatest impression on me as artist was Gene Meatyard, the photographer – does marvelous arresting visionary things, most haunting and suggestive, mythical, photography I ever saw. I felt that here was someone really going somewhere.
For the rest Williams and Davenport were tired of young poets in Lexington and I read them bits of “Edifying Cables” which got nowhere – in the end we went and looked at the lake and they got cheese and went home. But I hope Gene Meatyard – and Guy – will come back.
Next week – boring – I have to see a man from Time-Life books about a big Bible project I made the mistake of getting involved in. After that I am I think free for a while and can just hang around the woods and think.
Ping [W. H. Ferry] sent Charles Davis’ statement, in The London Observer, on why he left the Church. Powerful attack on the institutional arrogance of Rome and the distortions, the untruth, the inhumanities that result all down the line. It is incontrovertibly true. And it opens a real question whether the only loyal and honest thing to do is to keep a stiff upper lip, offer it up, accept the evil, close ranks and remain obedient. Though that is often all less honest, less courageous. Or at any rate the thing is no longer a certainty. It is perhaps something one may be called upon to risk for the love of God! A wager – one way or the other.
Coldest morning this winter – down to around 15. And I have a cold.
January 24, 1967
A week later and it is warm again, 60 now, at 5 a.m. It has been cloudy and warm for a couple of days, smelling of rain, and I need rain to fill my water-buckets, and none comes. Sunday was Septuagesima. I am giving talks on Faulkner still (“Old Man”) and rereading the whole of Wild Palms. Also writing my piece for a Panichas book (Mansions of the Spirit)2 of which I have a Xerox here. Some fine things in it. This morning I finished the [Georges] Florovsky essay. Which explains perhaps why I never could get into Tolstoy. But it also makes me see that the negative and inconclusive radicalism of Tolstoy could be a danger for me too. Except that I am very different from him.
The NCR printed my (inadequate) reply to Michele Murray’s review and sent a Xerox of her reply which was sound.3 There is no question that I don’t communicate as I should. Fortunately there has been a minor revolution here. The Council (of the Abbot) ganged up on Dom James and told him the mail situation here was idiotic. All the letters being opened and read, money and clippings taken out. The censorship of my mail by the A. Personally, also withheld much of it and even real conscience letters on occasion! All this has been changed (at least for the moment). Mail comes in and goes out sealed. I am getting even the magazines (most of which I can’t read). Yesterday I. F. Stone’s Weekly came for the first time in many months and the Vietnam war is more fantastically inhuman and absurd than ever. Huge destructive operations – clearing and razing thousands of acres of jungle, villages etc. The total idiocy of technological war.
Where I really think Michelle M. misses my point is that I see a basic irrationality and inhumanity in our system, in which she sees and takes for granted human hopes. One must of course hope. But the contradictions are so glaring. A few gestures in a futile “war on poverty” that changes nothing. A few slogans about a “great society.” And a frenzied absurd all-out effort at mammoth war with machines – a war on women and children and trees and rice fields – this society is cursed with destructiveness and thinks itself – I suppose it could be – creative and progressive. And in a way it is – for its technology is fabulous. But for what? Am I crazy to see something demonic in it?
Today Russell B[rowne] from Time-Life books comes, about a big Bible project, and I don’t want to get into it, and am not sure I can keep myself out of it. Am not sure what it really is. But I don’t trust Time-Life books. Heard from Sy Freedgood (at Fortune) the other day. He is not too favorable – but is himself finishing a TL book on New York.
Last night – moon almost full, behind scudding clouds. I walked in the warm dark wind. Lonely again for M. and troubled and wanting to write to her, wanting to hear from her, wanting to see her.
January 29, 1967. Sexagesima
Early morning. Good coffee that Beatrice Olmstead sent. I am finishing the ms. of the book of essays edited by George Panichas. (My piece on Faulkner is being typed now.) The essay on [Saul] Bellow raises the question of Bellow, who, I think, appears to be in the same kind of predicament I am in with the critics. I have not read any of Bellow and have been put off by the negative noises, not really knowing what the noises are about. They are just vague scolding noises. Bellow is “popular” but not really “in” – that is, he is disapproved by those who are really in. And yet also approved by critics who are smart but belong to other groups. Reading the essay on him I could see the reasons. He writes of alienation, mass-man, the doomed city, and all that instead of happy growing collective technological man building the city of hope on earth etc. It is very naughty to write like this.
[Handwritten marginal note added in April:] Apparently this is off target. Still have not read B[ellow] (April).
At the same time from the quotes I can see he is a careless writer but perhaps worth reading. And I will probably never get around to doing it. The fuss about him for and against is very likely among Jews: some will be swearing by him and others will be furious at him for creating an image of the Jew which they can’t stand. All that nonsense.
So it is with me to some extent. I am, to begin with, judged by my early books. Either I am rejected entirely because the “monasticism” is unacceptable, or my later work is rejected for not being “spiritual” and “unworldly” like the earlier ones.
I see clearly that I must inevitably sound like a stranger and outsider to the people who watch TV, and are fully immersed in a world I left 25 years ago. And there is l
ittle point in pretending I am not an outsider – why should I? So I will resolutely continue to be me, and say what seems to me to be true, and if nobody listens that is all right. I am not asking to be listened to. On the other hand I think there are quite a few people who are glad to have someone say what I am saying.
January 30, 1967
A warm, pleasant day. Work – some letters and burned brush a little. Outside the house stands a truck and well-rig marked Pee Wee McGruder, Shep., KY (for Shepherdsville). It stands there. I have seen nothing of any Pee Wee McGruder. Maybe tomorrow, my birthday, he’ll start – whaling and banging away at the rock on which my place sits.
Today an invitation came from France – Dom Columban of Melleray has been awarded the Legion of Honor, and as I was involved in this, he wants me there when he receives it. As he is the Father Immediate of Gethsemani, the request would normally be respected, but I am sure Dom James will find some way of saying “no.” Anyway I have turned the letter over to him for his decision. It would be nice to go to France after all these years, but I really don’t care that much. I am perfectly content walking in the fields here by myself, and it would be a bore to be involved in all this socializing and rituals and chatter that would be the price I’d have to pay.
Learning To Love Page 24