Volume 26, Number 14 · September 27, 1979
High Spirits
By J.M. Cameron
Thomas Merton: Monk and Poet
by George Woodcock
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 200 pp., $3.95 (paper)
The Seven Storey Mountain
by Thomas Merton
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (Harvest), 429 pp., $4.95 (paper)
Love and Living
by Thomas Merton, edited by Naomi Burton Stone, by Patrick Hart
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 232 pp., $10.00
George Woodcock and the late Thomas Merton are both of them copious and fluent writers and their coming together in Woodcock's study of Merton seems appropriate in many ways. Woodcock, not a Christian, is predisposed by his gentle anarchism (Kropotkin rather than Bakunin) to be a sympathetic expositor of Merton's religious and moral views. He is far enough away from his subject not to fall into hagiography and he has enough feeling for Merton's spiritual style to make us trust the exposition. If he is, as I shall suggest, too relaxed in his judgments on the quality of Merton's work, his fault is a generous one.
Review, 3151 words
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