The Seven Storey Mountain: An Autobiography Of Faith, Thomas Merton, 1948, 1998

 

See this note: link here.

Spelling:

• story: American
• storey: British

With one of the better introductions I've read:

Introduction: Robert Giroux, 1914 - 20008 -- editor and publisher.

In his career stretching over five decades, he edited some of the most important voices of the 20th century, including T.S. Eliot, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Merton, and published the first books of Jack Kerouac, Flannery O'Connor, Jean Stafford, Bernard Malamud, William Gaddis, Susan Sontag, Larry Woiwode and Randall Jarrell and edited no fewer than seven Nobel laureates: Eliot, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Derek Walcott, Nadine Gordimer, Seamus Heaney, William Golding and Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

In a 1980 profile in the New York Times Book Review, poet Donald Hall wrote, "He is the only living editor whose name is bracketed with that of Maxwell Perkins," the editor of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.

From the 1980 profile:

Mr. Giroux was T. S. Eliot’s American editor and published the American edition of George Orwell’s “1984,” accepting it despite the objection of his immediate superior, whose wife had found some of the novel’s passages distasteful.

But to his lasting regret Mr. Giroux also saw two momentous books slip from his grasp, J. D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye” and Kerouac’s “On the Road.” 

Advance proofs of Seven Storey Mountain reviewed by Evely Waugh, Clare Booth Luce, Graham Greene, and Bishop Fulton Sheen.

Chapter One: Prisoner's Base

Born, 1915, at the time of "the Marne," in France, during WWI, trench warfare.

Phrase very first page: his parents "were in the world and not of it." I seem to recall almost this exact line in the movie The Great Gatsby. 

Birthplace: Prades, France -- far south of France, near the Spanish border, in the Pyrenees, and close to the Mediterranean Sea. But didn't stay there long.

NYC: The Cloisters, page 7. Originally in the Pyrenees, ended up being brought stone-by-stone to NYC.

Wow, father New Zealand --> London --> Paris
mother: NYC --> Paris

WWI

Prades, France --> NYC when he was a year old

In NYC, at one year of age, Flushing, Queens, Long Island, NYC ("Valley of the Ashes" in The Great Gatsby).

This would have been about 1916. The Great Gatsby published 1925. F Scott Fitzgerald -- died age 44 --  born 1896 (my own maternal grandmother, Reka, born 1899). 

*******************

Page 28:

• The Seven Storey Mountain: An Autobiography Of Faith, Thomas Merton, 1948, 1998.

Page 28: Thomas Merton talking about his grandfather by whom he was raised after his mother died and his father sailed to France to paint and leave his two sons back on Long Island, with the maternal grandparents. 

The chief reason was that he himself belonged to some kind of a Masonic organization, called, oddly enough, the Knights Templars.

Where they picked up that name, I do not know: but the originall Knights Templars were a military religious Order in the Catholic Church, who had an intimate connection with the Cistercians, of which the Trappists are a reform.

I first became of aware of the Cistercians when visiting the monasteries of Yorkshire with Pat. 

***********************

Merton: 1915 - 1968.

Me: 1951 -- 36 years different

Vietnam War: both of us

In high school, maybe starting in middle school, I shared a bedroom in the basement with my brother, four years younger than I.

I graduated from high school, 1969.

I followed the Vietnam War very closely, marking geographical locations on a huge map of Vietnam that I huge on our bedroom wall, above my bed. I don't recall my parents once mentioning the Vietnam War. My dad, having served in WWII, probably had this attitude: done that, been there; don't need to do it again.

My coming of age years:

fall of 1966: beginning my sophomore year of high school -
summer of 1980: began my first operational assignment, USAF
1980 - 1966: fourteen years

High school: active, busy, in everything
day started at 7:30: band (coronet, French horn)
finished well after last athletic activity, getting home about 8:00 p.m. every night

editor of high school newspaper, then editor of college newspaper

lost my virginity twice

Linda:
drove from Los Angeles to San Francisco; took forever, taking Pacific Coast Highway;
I read East of Eden and Tannery Row while Linda drove

Years later I read out loud Giants of the Earth to Pat.

PCH with Linda: stopped at Hearst Castle; only time I've ever seen Hearst Castle; with Linda.

Linda: birth control; no birth control pill; fitted for diaphragm; after we separated, BCP widely available; Open Marriage; I assume Linda felt that I could never "grow."That I could never have an "open marriage." She was two years older than I; much more experience in love. How much? I don't know. She was East Coast, NYC; Harvard graduate. I was North Dakota conservative; two years younger and "no" experience in love.

Every nice morning and every amazing evening I'm reminded of my walks with Pat in the middle of the night and on weekends.