Thomas Merton becomes disenchanted with Communism . . .
My active part in the world revolution was not very momentous. It lasted, in all, about three months. I picketed the Casa Italiana, I went to the Peace Strike, and I think I made some kind of a speech in the big classroom on the second floor of the Business School, where the N.S.L. had their meetings. Maybe it was a speech on Communism in England—a topic about which I knew absolutely nothing; in that case, I was loyally living up to the tradition of Red oratory. I sold some pamphlets and magazines. I don’t know what was in them, but I could gather their contents from the big black cartoons of capitalists drinking the blood of workers.
Finally, the Reds had a party. And, of all places, in a Park Avenue apartment. This irony was the only amusing thing about it. And after all it was not so ironical. It was the home of some Barnard girl who belonged to the Young Communist League and her parents had gone away for the weekend. I could get a fair picture of them from the way the furniture looked, and from the volumes of Nietszche and Schopenhauer and Oscar Wilde and Ibsen that filled the bookcases. And there was a big grand piano on which someone played Beethoven while the Reds sat around on the floor. Later we had a sort of Boy Scout campfire group in the living room, singing heavy Communist songs, including that delicate anti-religious classic, “There’ll be pie in the sky when you die.”
One little fellow with buck teeth and horn-rimmed glasses pointed to two windows in a corner of one of the rooms. They commanded a whole sweep of Park Avenue in one direction and the cross-town street in another. “What a place for a machine-gun nest,” he observed. The statement came from a middle-class adolescent. It was made in a Park Avenue apartment. He had evidently never even seen a machine-gun, except in the movies. If there had been a revolution going on at the time, he would have probably been among the first to get his head knocked off by the revolutionists. And in any case he, like all the rest of us, had just finished making the famous Oxford Pledge that he would not fight in any war whatever...
One reason why I found the party so dull was that nobody was very enthusiastic about getting something to drink except me. Finally one of the girls encouraged me, in a businesslike sort of a way, to go out and buy bottles of rye at a liquor store around the corner on Third Avenue, and when I had drunk some of the contents she invited me into a room and signed me up as a member of the Young Communist League. I took the party name of Frank Swift. When I looked up from the paper the girl had vanished like a not too inspiring dream, and I went home on the Long Island Railroad with the secret of a name which I have been too ashamed to reveal to anyone until this moment when I am beyond humiliation.
I only went to one meeting of the Young Communist League, in the apartment of one of the students. It was a long discussion as to why Comrade So-and-so did not come to any of the meetings. The answer was that his father was too bourgeois to allow it. So after that, I walked out into the empty street, and let the meeting end however it would.
It was good to be in the fresh air. My footsteps rang out on the dark stones. At the end of the street, the pale amber light of a bar-room beckoned lovingly to me from under the steel girders of the elevated. The place was empty. I got a glass of beer and lit a cigarette and tasted the first sweet moment of silence and relief.
And that was the end of my days as a great revolutionary. I decided that it would be wiser if I just remained a “fellow-traveller.” The truth is that my inspiration to do something for the good of mankind had been pretty feeble and abstract from the start. I was still interested in doing good for only one person in the world—myself.
Merton is young. He has some kind of urge to make the world a better place for humankind, but he lacks the skills to do it at the moment. He's too focused on his own needs and wants to worry about anyone else's. That's pretty typical for a teenager. A teenager doesn't see the big picture. It's too hard to have a broader vision when all you're focused on is your own pain and awkwardness.
I have been preoccupied these last few days myself. I started my new job two days ago, you see. I am now the Adult Programming Coordinator for Peter White Public Library in Marquette, Michigan. That means that I get to sit in an office most days, dreaming up events and readings and concerts and performances. For instance, today I worked on a program for December that involves a virtual reader's theater of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. I spent over an hour just hunting down a good script to use. And I got paid to do it.
This is sort of a dream job for me--earning money for creating and promoting art. While, at the moment, I feel a little overwhelmed, I am slowly but surely finding my footing. For a half hour this afternoon, I caught up with a friend of mine I haven't spoken with in a long time. We directed and acted in musicals together way back. I'm trying to involve her in one of my dream projects. It was a wonderful half hour or so of catching up. And tomorrow, I get to work at home, sitting at my kitchen table with my laptop, e-mailing and dreaming some more.
In a year that has been marked only by struggle in so many areas of my life (personal, political, parental, professional), these last few days at the library have been quiet and productive and thrilling. Yet, there are still struggles present. My son's constant battle with going to school. My daughter's recent heartbreak and confusion. My daughter's boyfriend of four years, and his heartbreak and despair. I just want the world, and everyone I love in it, to be safe and happy.
So, tonight, I pray for my son--that he will find his excitement for learning again. I pray for my daughter--that she will know love and peace once more. I pray for my daughter's boyfriend of four years--that he will realize that he is still loved and that his happiness is inside of himself.
All of these miracles are about abiding love in some way, and Saint Marty's greatest faith is in the power of love.
