When Prophecy Still Had a Voice: The Letters of Thomas Merton and Robert Lax.

When Prophecy Still Had a Voice: The Letters of Thomas
Merton and Robert Lax
Edited by Arthur W. Biddle
University of Kentucky, $39.95, 472 pp.

Arthur Biddle's exemplary edition of the letters exchanged between Thomas Merton and his Columbia University friend, Robert Lax, ends with a long interview with Lax, conducted on Patmos, the poet's home until ill health forced him back to the United States where he died last year.

Although parts of the correspondence have appeared in other venues, Biddle has transcribed both sides of the total exchange of letters which dates back to the late 1930s and ends with a never-received letter Lax wrote to Merton two days before the latter's death in Bangkok on December 10, 1968. Given both writers' epistolary styles and wide-ranging use of foreign phrases, transcription alone must have presented a formidable editorial task.

As the letters reveal, both Merton and Lax were shaped by the literary modernism regnant at Columbia University in the late 1930s. Both had powerful contemplative instincts, which led one to a Trappist monastery and the other, after a stint at the New Yorker, to a life of pilgrimage, solitude, and dedication to poetry. Merton, of course, has become a figure well known in the world while Lax, esteemed in Europe, is little known on this side of the Atlantic.

Those who read these letters will have to do so with a certain taste for word play, odd spellings, nicknames, puns, and elaborate literary constructions. These friends shared a love for the style of James Joyce and, through that love, experienced a lifelong intoxication with words. The playful names they gave each other or the way in which they would sign their letters are worth a laugh in their own right. Merton called himself "Pope Lozenge the Fifteenth" or "Homer T" or "Luther Burbank" while Lax would address Merton as "O Harry" or "Chet" or by the exclamation "Hoy" or, more simply, "Merton."

A little word play can go a long way, and reading these letters at a long stretch may daunt all but the most devoted readers of Merton. Nonetheless, if one perseveres by cutting through the linguistic underbrush there are wonderful passages from both men about the nature of prayer, their mutual interest in mystical literature, the character of art (they were close friends of the abstract expressionist painter, Ad Reinhardt), the follies of politics, both ecclesiastical and civil. In some of the early letters, Lax writes about his own conversion from Judaism to Christianity, and they both discuss how to make poetry into a prophetic vehicle. Always there is talk of poetry itself, their own and that of their vast circle of friends. Both had a taste for gnomic, abstract verse--a taste that buds forth in these letters.

Most of all, Thomas Merton and Robert Lax were friends, as the ease and joy with which they write each other testify. In reading these letters, I was reminded of the opening lines of a treatise on friendship penned centuries ago by the Cistercian monk, Aelred of Rievaulx: "I recall now two friends, who, although they have passed from this present life, nevertheless live to me and always will so live."

Lawrence S. Cunningham is the John A. O'Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame.