On Thomas Merton by Mary Gordon

Author:Mary Gordon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shambhala
Published: 2018-12-03T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

—

Among the most pleasurable, if the least generous, aspects of the book are Merton’s sardonic ethnographies, the work of a Swiftian anthropologist with a touch of S. J. Perelman or Robert Benchley, the New Yorker humorists he so admired. And of course Joyce, most especially the Joyce of the “Cyclops” chapter of Ulysses, in his scathing satire of Irish nationalism. The novel reflects Merton’s ambivalence about England, evident in The Seven Storey Mountain—his sense that the England of his Aunt Maude had disappeared in favor of a coarse, cold, heartless urban dystopia; his belief that the least admirable of the Old England and the least admirable of the New have come together in the English sense of themselves as participants in the war.

Obviously, Merton was turned off by the diction of English wartime patriotism. He has one of his sinister English interrogators define British courage in the following terms (and once again, the terms are from the movies):

Our courage is like the careless, quiet, grave wit of Ralph Richardson…like the humorous valiance of this calm and funny actor, who makes absolutely no judgments about anything, denounces no one, hates no one, is oblivious to the fantastic wars of the films he is in, and, as if by mistake, catches the spy, wins….Our courage is like Robert Donat, pursued by grim Scotch detectives on one side and terrible German spies posing as Scotch detectives on the other….It is not animal courage, but a wonderful, subtle, and happy versatility that evades all the animal seriousness of those who believe in wars, and we shall conquer because we shall be lucky. We are so humorous our luck can never fail.16

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.