June 5: No Lower in Heaven, My Daughter, Cut from the Same Cloth

Merton stretches his wings, with the help of his godfather . . . 

What I most admired about Tom and Iris, from the start, was that they knew everything and had everything in its proper place.  From the first moment when I discovered that one was not only allowed to make fun of English middle-class notions and ideals but encouraged to do so in that little bright drawing room, where we balanced coffee-cups on our knees, I was happy.  I soon developed a habit of wholesale and glib detraction of all the people with whom I did not agree or whose tastes and ideas offended me.

They, in turn, lent me all the novels and told me about the various plays, and listened with amusement to Duke Ellington, and played their records of La Argentina.  It was from them that I was to discover all the names that people most talked about in modern writing:  Hemingway, Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, Celine with his Voyage au Bout de la Nuit, Gide and all the rest, except that they did not bother much with poets.  I heard about T. S. Eliot from the English Master at Oakham who had just come down from Cambridge and read me aloud "The Hollow Men."

It was Tome who, once when we were in Paris, took me to see a lot of pictures by Chagall and several others like him, although he did not like Braque and the Cubists and never developed any of my enthusiasm for Picasso.  It was he who showed me that there was some merit in Russian movies and in Rene Clair:  but he never understood the Marx Brothers.  It was from him that I discovered the difference between the Cafe Royal and the Cafe Anglais, and many other things of the same nature.  And he also could tell you what members of the English nobility were thought to take dope. 

Really, all these things implied a rather strict standard of values:  but values that were entirely worldly and cosmopolitan.  Values they were, however, and one kept them with a most remarkably nice fidelity.  I only discovered much later on that all this implied not only esthetic but a certain worldly moral standard, the moral and artistic values being fused inseparably in the single order of taste.  It was an unwritten law, and you had to be very smart and keenly attuned to their psychology to get it but there it was, a strict moral law, which never expressed any open hatred of evil, or even any direct and explicit condemnation of any other sins than bourgeois pharisaism and middle-class hypocrisy, which they attacked without truce.  Nevertheless their code disposed of other deordinations with quiet and pointed mockery.  The big difficulty with me and my failure was that I did not see, for instance, that their interest in D. H. Lawrence as art was, in some subtle way, disconnected from any endorsement of his ideas about how a man ought to live.  Or rather, the distinction was more subtle still:  and it was between their interest in and amusement at those ideas, and the fact, which they took for granted, that it was rather vulgar to practice them the way Lawrence did.  This was a distinction which I did not grasp until it was too late.

Until the time I went to Cambridge, I developed rapidly under their influence, and in many ways the development was valuable and good:  and of course, there must be no question of the kindness and sincerity of the interest which they took in me, or their generosity in devoting themselves so whole-heartedly to my care and to my training, in their informal and unofficial way.

It was Tom who definitely assured me that I should prepare for the English diplomatic or at least consular service, and did not spare any effort to see that I advanced steadily, in every possible way, towards that end.  He was able to foresee an infinity of little details that would have to be taken care of long before they arose--the value, for instance, of "reading for the bar" which simply meant eating a certain number of dinners at one of the Inns of Court, so as to fulfill the minimum residence requirements of a London Law student, and the payment of a fee for a minor distinction which would be useful in the diplomatic service.  As it happened, I never got around to eating those dinners, and I dare to hope I shall be no lower in heaven for my failure to do so.

Thomas Merton is young.  Thinks he understands the world, and views it with the jaundiced gaze of a teenager.  Teenagers are pretty astute at recognizing adult pretensions and hypocrisies.  Adult caution is seen as being old-fashioned.  Or just plain old.  Merton seems to be rejecting most of the expectations being thrust upon him by the adults in his life.  Instead, he's embracing new ideas and literature and art.  Hemingway.  Picasso.  Lawrence.  Merton is deconstructing his world, trying to make sense of its pieces.

My daughter is sort of doing the same thing right now, although she's not as stupidly foolhardy as Merton.  She's a thinker.  Before she makes a decision, she does her due diligence.  Doesn't rush in where angels fear to tread.  In that way, she's a lot like me when I was her age.  Example:  before Governor Whitmer ordered people to stay at home in Michigan, my daughter had been social distancing/avoiding contact for at least a month.  She simply stayed up in her room and came down to use the bathroom, shower, and eat.  I would have done the same thing at her age.

Some people might view my daughter as an alarmist, too old for her years.  I was speaking with her the other night, before she disappeared back up into her room, and she said, "I'm not worried about me getting corona.  I'm worried about bringing it home to you and what would happen."  I have been an insulin-dependent diabetic since the time I was 13-years-old.  My daughter knows this and has been concerned for me since the pandemic began.  Since before I was worried about myself.

At an age when most young people are going to parties and on road trips with friends, she is being forced to adult.  She was a one-year-old when the 9-11 attacks happened.  She has never known a world that wasn't ruled by the fear of some kind of daily threat--terrorist or virus or Trump.  I'm not saying that she's a skittish rabbit everywhere she goes.  She isn't.  As a young person person, she dealt with crippling social anxiety, but she overcame it.  Forced herself into situations that made her uncomfortable and worked her way to comfort.  That's how she operates.  She doesn't hide from challenges.  She confronts them head on.

I'm saying all this because she came to me for advice about a decision she's mulling over.  It involves friends and travel.  As I said, she and I are sort of cut from the same cloth.  We examine and analyze and reflect.  There's a reason I'm a poet and she's studying to become a doctor.  Both professions require precision and thoughtfulness.  An ability to see the bigger picture and put things into perspective.  I have every confidence my daughter will make a choice that is smart, healthy, and responsible.

So, tonight my miracle is my daughter, who is not too old to come to her old man for advice.  She is a remarkable young woman.

And for that, Saint Marty gives thanks.