ESC: English Studies in Canada

But all this is to depart somewhat from my text. MacLean does not go in for such value judgments. His aim has been to show, not tell, and he has done this on the whole very effectively. My most serious reservation about Narcissus and the Voyeur is that he could have made some of his points more clearly, for in his earnestness he sometimes lets his syntax get away from him completely. He or his editor should also have exercised more care over the finish of the book, for there are too numerous misprints — one of which is the amusing and thought-provoking “ neglibible.” Unfortunately there is, I am last of all compelled to say, no index. p e t e r b u it e n h u is / Simon Fraser University Ross Labrie, The Art of Thomas Merton (Fort Worth, Texas: The Texas Christian University Press, 1979). xiii, 188. Cloth, $11.00. Paper $8.00 In 1949 The Seven Storey Mountain was published and became, un­ expectedly, a best seller. The present reviewer was in New York at the time — studying, as it happened, where Thomas Merton had studied and taught some years before — and recalls the interest which the book evoked in people who would never read another of the more than forty books Merton was to publish. The popular reaction seemed to be an intrigued astonishment that such a well educated and “promising” young man should “give it all up” to become a monk, especially a monk in an order which demanded complete silence. Here was a new version of that enduring figure of American life and fiction, the young man on a quest to discover himself and his America. Merton’s personal America was a most unusual one, a haven of medieval peace. Perhaps Merton’s journey somehow expressed the deep yearning of a people who had just endured a great mechanical modern war. The retreat to the monastery at Gethsemani was a way to perfect peace; few would try it, but they wanted to read about one who would and, almost incredibly, did. As Merton himself came to realize, his book was, to a very large extent, popular for the wrong reasons. His aim — and achievement — was not to escape from the world and the pleasure of verbal communication; he wanted rather to reinstil in the language a forgotten faith and certainty, to restore its power as an expression of what he called “God’s silence.” A basic image, expressed in both his poems and meditations, was not man looking out of a window enquiringly, but God looking in reassuringly. His stance as a writer was always “on the bridge” (it is interesting, as Ross Labrie points out, that Hart Crane’s long poem was one of Merton’s models). Merton gave up, not the world, but modern worldliness. Paradoxically, he could best participate 385 at a distance, viewing, assessing, and prophesying — as such book titles as Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander and Contemplation in a World of Action indicate. Even his last lecture, given shortly before he met his death because of the malfunctioning of a modem electrical device, expresses this viewpoint; it was entitled “ Marxism and Monastic Perspectives.” Given this basic stance of viewing the world not from a premise of liberal non-belief but from a confirmed belief, Merton wrote prolifically in a variety of forms. The question for the literary critic is how, especially in a short study of less than two hundred pages, to categorize this profusion. Ross Labrie takes a more formal approach than his fellow resident of Vancouver, George Woodcock, who, in a book published the year before Labrie’s, con­ centrated on a thematic combined with a chronological approach. Labrie separates Merton’s work into four genres: he considers Merton as a writer of narrative, as diarist, as essayist, and as poet. Whatever method of cate­ gorization is used, introductory writing is not an easy craft. Labrie practices it very competently. For the literary student approaching Merton for the first time, The Art of Thomas Merton is to be recommended; Labrie has a sound sense of what books to choose and what he should quote from...