Yours Ever (31 page)

Any reader who finishes Schulz’s surviving correspondence—a slender single volume—ends up applying this kind of imaginative effort to the rest of it, all the letters that were set ablaze, somewhere beyond the pale.

WITHIN A FEW YEARS
of Schulz’s murder, Poland had found a new, different gruesomeness in Communist subjugation. The poet and diplomat Czeslaw Milosz took flight from it in 1951, two years before publishing
The Captive Mind
, a book that would find an enthusiastic reader in the American Trappist monk and author Thomas Merton. In 1958, Merton began a ten-year-long correspondence with the Polish exile by sending him a sort of spiritual fan letter: “It is an important book,” he wrote of
The Captive Mind
, “which makes most other books on the present state of man look abjectly foolish.”

The letters that Merton continues sending to the self-exiled Milosz, first in France and later in California, often make it hard for a reader to remember that their writer is in his forties and early fifties and has already been settled for two decades at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky. Merton may be established as a literary figure (he offers Milosz help securing an agent), but it is Milosz
who sets the moral and intellectual pace of their exchange, into which the monk seems gratefully to relax, a needy and agreeable postulant.

Merton admits to naïveté about Communism and sees what some members of a later generation would sarcastically call “moral equivalence” between the Cold War’s superpowers. Looking for “a third position,” he predicts to Milosz that “One day we are going to wake up and find America and Russia in bed together (forgive the unmonastic image) and realize that they were happily married all along.” Milosz has to warn the priest about “placing both camps on the same level,” let alone in a connubial embrace. Milosz himself is squeezed inside the bipolar world: “For
The Captive Mind
I have been denounced to the police: ‘not enough’ anti-communist and probably an agent; while [giving off a] hideous smell in Paris literary circles: a bourgeois, he writes against what is sacrosanct.” Even so, he can remind Merton that “of the two [camps] not the West is pushing and probing for new ways of expansion.” He can also warn him against peace movements that create only an “
exasperation
which pushes many people to the right.”

A chastened Merton tends, almost always, to concede the point, though if he thinks, even for a moment, that he hears Milosz moving into an early sixties groove, he fairly clamors his encouragement. When the Polish poet worries briefly over the complacency that leaves America “grazing like a cow,” Merton cooks up an over-the-top metaphor of America as “this continual milkshake”—or, better yet—this “Calypso’s Island where no one is ever tempted to think and where one just eats and exists and supports the supermarket and the drug store and General Motors and the TV.” It’s easy for a reader to see Milosz, only four years older than his correspondent, as a sort of elderly bishop, offering the overeager novice a sympathetic but cautionary pat on the head.

And yet, their minds do meet, often provocatively, on the treacherous ground of politics and religion. When Milosz explains the unexpected spiritual benefit of Poland’s experience with Communism, which “made [the] inner life of human beings more intense” there, it’s a paradox that can be appreciated by Merton, who recognizes sinners as “the ones who attract to themselves the infinite
compassion of God.” Milosz confides that the writings of Simone Weil helped him through the worst of the despair that produced
The Captive Mind
, and admits to a belief in the Resurrection, if not the soul’s immortality. He settles for calling himself “crypto-religious,” the pull of the Church being still strong enough that he has trouble finding the right sign-off for his letters to Merton: “there is this respect for the priest’s robe,” he explains, so “let me say with brotherly love …”

The two men’s connection is made easier by Merton’s own feeling that he is, even within the walls of the Church, a “complete lone wolf” as a Catholic. “I have
not
coped with the basic theological questions,” he writes in 1961. “It only looks that way.” The censors of his order give him trouble, and his religious searching will eventually send him, at the end of his abbreviated life (he died at fifty-three), toward Buddhism and the Far East.

But Milosz is the more reluctant customer when it comes to any sort of ontological comfort. He explains his own ill-suitedness to Merton’s Trappist silence and solitude by saying: “I cannot afford too great interiorisation and have to keep myself on the level defined by
The Cloud of Unknowing
as contemplation of one’s own wretchedness.” He complains, too, that Merton does “not pay much attention to torture and suffering in Nature”—provoking a rare rebuttal from the monk: “Nature and I are very good friends,” Merton writes, “and console one another for the stupidity and the infamy of the human race and its civilization … Spiders have always eaten flies and I can shut it out of my consciousness without guilt.”

In fact, Milosz agrees with Merton about the ultimate separate-ness of nature and mankind but draws a very different—and finally more optimistic—conclusion from the split. He may “have always felt the burden of blind and cruel necessity, of mechanism, in Nature, in my body, in my psychology,” and yet, “History, as a purely human domain, alien to Nature, meant liberation.” What to Merton seems a friend is, to Milosz, a chrysalis—one that humans can transcend together, if not individually.

The Merton/Milosz letters are the kind of considered exchange to which e-mail is now doing such chatty, hurry-up violence. In the manner of Hopkins and Bridges, the men write each other for more
than two years before using first names in their salutations. Both have a sense that the correspondence is sufficiently important to be conducted only at thoughtful intervals. Because each takes pains, in Milosz’s phrase, to “avoid bavardage,” their published letters
(Striving Towards Being)
take up fewer than two hundred pages. When Merton apologizes for “rambling,” he’s actually done nothing of the kind; the apology is just a tic of epistolary politeness, as old as Pliny the Younger, and forever peculiar, since people almost never apologize for the real rambling that they do in conversation.

A couple of years into the correspondence, each writer admits to the other that he would enjoy meeting face to face. That ends up happening just twice, once at the abbey and once in Berkeley, and it is one measure of the letters’ richness that their production falls away to nearly nothing, as if by some literal disenchantment, after the word turns flesh. The sacred or at least rarefied nature of their correspondence becomes ever so slightly profane. Whereas in 1959, Milosz would pose the question “perhaps Prometheus was not an ancestor of modern revolutionaries, perhaps he was in revolt against a heavy, false God, but not against God the Father?”—Merton will eventually just ask, “What is new with you?”

History was slowly carrying Milosz, and Poland, to something better. But during 1968, what would be the last year of Merton’s life, the monk seems increasingly sad, caught, a bit like Milosz in the early fifties, in a spiritual-political vise, in his case between “puerile optimism about the ‘secular city’” and the displeasure of conservative local Catholics “burning my books because I am opposed to the Viet Nam war.” Though by now a theological celebrity, one whose published writings, including volumes of letters, are ready to be consumed as good-news epistles by thousands of readers, Merton still feels the need for private, epistolary devotion to Milosz’s obvious moral authority. He last writes him on November 21, 1968, from Darjeeling, amidst India’s “monasteries, temples, lamas, paintings, jungles.” He is weeks away from the accident that will kill him, unaware, as Paul wrote the Romans, that “The night is far spent, the day is at hand …”

IN A LETTER WRITTEN
to her new spiritual advisor, Father John Hamilton Cowper Johnson, near the beginning of Lent in 1951, Rose Macaulay, the English novelist, worried about “the time I must cost you, and the trouble, and the stamps.” By then nearing seventy, the author of
They Were Defeated
(1932) was still trying to recover from two blows she had been dealt a decade before: the death of her married lover, Gerald O’Donovan, and the destruction, during the Blitz, of all the possessions in her London flat: “I am bookless, homeless, sans everything but my eyes to weep with,” she had written a younger friend in May 1941.

The particular loss of O’Donovan’s letters stimulated Macaulay, not long after the bombing, to write a short story in which the only remaining token of the heroine’s lover is a “charred corner of paper,” less than one page of a single, quarrelsome letter quite uncharacteristic of the couple’s long and peaceful, if illicit, devotion: “all that was legible of it was a line and a half of close small writing, the o’s and the a’s open at the top. It had been written twenty-one years ago, and it said, ‘leave it at that. I know now that you don’t care twopence; if you did you would’ … The words, each time she looked at them, seemed to darken and obliterate a little more of the twenty years that had followed them …”

Gerald O’Donovan was an ex-priest and novelist whom Macaulay had met in London during the First World War, when both were employed by the government’s Department of Propaganda. Having once broken his clerical vows, O’Donovan seemed determined to hold on to his marital ones, and Macaulay never pressed the point. Without the survival of their letters, it is difficult to know the exact nature of their relationship throughout the 1920s and 1930s, though biographers have tried to draw inferences from whatever other evidence—including her novels—the decidedly private Macaulay left behind. In her 1991 life of the writer, Jane Emery proceeded cautiously, but did feel able to conclude that the secret affair with O’Donovan resulted in “the continued suppression of emotion in [Macaulay’s] work.”

A measure of the romance’s depth can be found in the letters Macaulay writes to Father Johnson during the early 1950s, while she is trying to find her way back to the Anglican church. Macaulay sends the priest—a distant relative and long-ago acquaintance now living in America—frequent and pain-filled communications by both air and sea, wondering if God has ordained this new correspondence in order to end her absence of almost thirty years from the sacraments.

She tells Father Johnson that her losses are helping to motivate the search for “another sphere of life.” With abashed simplicity, she explains: “The people I love most have died. I wish they had not. But there is nothing to be done about it. Not only my parents—that was to be expected, of course—but my favourite sister, two brothers, and the man I loved.” Though unnamed and otherwise undescribed, O’Donovan, placed at the end of Macaulay’s sentence, seems to bring her grief to a crescendo. And yet, in the letters to Father Johnson, Macaulay appears bent on abandoning his memory as much as cherishing it, because O’Donovan is the heaviest of the sins she believes herself to be carrying through her exile from God’s grace: “is the whole basis and structure of character sapped by the long years of low life? I see horribly clearly how low it was, and how low I am.” After she has returned to confession and the Eucharist, she feels more conscious, not less, of her decades as a sinner: “I told you once that I couldn’t really
regret
the past. But now I do regret
it, very much. It’s as if absolution and communion and prayer let us through into a place where we get a horribly clear view—a new view—so that we see all the waste, and the cost of it …”

The local priest who hears her confession and absolves her of her sins frustrates Macaulay by having little to say beyond what’s mandated by sacramental procedure. The reader of her letters to the faraway Father Johnson realizes that the mailbox provides more relief than the confessional, but even so, Macaulay’s agony remains. She may include her “beloved companion” in the prayers she’s saying these days and may tell Father Johnson that he and the still-unnamed O’Donovan would have liked each other, but she is compelled to disavow the romance that once sustained her and to do it in a way that seems brutally self-punishing: “Not all the long years of happiness together, of love and friendship and almost perfect companionship (in spite of its background) was worth while, it cost too much, to us and to other people. I didn’t know that before, but I do now. And he had no life after it to be different in, and I have lived the greater part of mine. If only I had refused, and gone on refusing.”

Macaulay compliments Father Johnson on the “range, depth, breadth, humour, wisdom, interest, sympathy” and affectionateness of his own letters, qualities a reader cannot assess, since Macaulay asked that Johnson’s part of the correspondence be destroyed after her death. She claims to understand the benefits to posterity in having the letters of such priests and saints as Fénelon and Francis de Sales, but tells Johnson she is queasy about the publication of an Anglican cleric’s once-confidential counselings in
The Life and Letters of Father Andrew
(1948). She finds it “interesting trying to construct, from [Father Andrew’s] answers, the kind of situations his correspondents had written to him of,” but points out that “some of them seem too private, and, though veiled by anonymity, one would know that some of one’s friends and relations would recognise things in them.”