Introduction

WELCOME to my new blog! The ex-con and the secular monk with a sexual mysticism. This is my vehicle for preparing a paper on that title to be presented at the upcoming Twelfth General Meeting and Conference of the International Thomas Merton Society in Chicago in June 2011.

The paper will explore the parallels and convergence in the lives and writings of Thomas Merton and Henry Miller; in many ways two very different individuals and yet on closer inspection have more in common than might be expected. Formative times spent in New York and France are two very obvious links; both became disenchanted with New York, which they viewed as a symbol of mid-twentieth century American culture, itself an emblem of the decline of western civilization; both had a love of France and of French literature and language with which they were both familiar and in which they were both fluent. Each admired the other's work, and through mutual contacts in the publishing world (in particular, James Laughlin of New Directions) became correspondents in the early 1960s.

Each had a profound religious and spiritual sensibility, both drawn towards mysticism, and a willingness and a predisposition to think outside the religious box. In reading their letters to one another it becomes apparent that they were both very much on the same page and speaking the same language; two great minds recognizing themselves in each other. Miller was struck by Merton's resemblance to an "ex-convict, of one who has been through fires"; Merton in turn described Miller as "a kind of secular monk with a sexual mysticism."

What I want to do in this paper is both to pan-out from this mutual caricature of each other to set their correspondence with one another in the wider context of their lives, and to focus in on these depictions of one another as a way of understanding the convergence and the distinctions between them.