By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
A colorful painting of a bald man with large ears and a mischievous smile hung on an otherwise unadorned wall at the Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah that was my boyhood home away from home in the 1970s.
One day, I pointed to the painting and asked my friend Brother Boniface Ptasienski, a tall lanky monk with angelic blue eyes and his own set of large ears, “Who is that?”
The Brooklyn-born monk looked at me, some puzzlement mixed in with his usual kind countenance. He then said, “Why that’s Thomas Merton, of course.”
Not sure what he meant, I followed up. “Who?”
The Utah monk smiled and gave me a “Merton 101” talk, explaining in the simplest terms possible what the man in the painting meant to spirituality and to the Trappist order. Ever modest, Boniface never mentioned that he’d known the famous Kentucky monk personally.
Still clad in his U.S. Army uniform, Boniface had arrived at the Abbey of Gethsemani near Louisville in 1945 just after World War II ended. Merton got there just a few years earlier.
According to the Merton Center at Bellarmine University, Boniface’s Kentucky colleague (who died in 1968) evolved into “arguably the most influential American Catholic author of the twentieth century.”
While it’s probably not astonishing that a pre-teen Catholic boy like me from rural Northern Utah had never heard of Merton, I’ve been surprised to learn recently that Merton knew the Beehive State quite well.
For Merton, Utah was a source of fascination, frustration, and friendship.
In the post-war period, thanks largely to the success of Merton’s spiritual memoir The Seven Storey Mountain, would-be monks packed into Gethsemani Abbey. To relieve the overcrowding, abbot Father Frederic Dunne decided to build a new monastery in Huntsville.
The abbot often discussed the progress of this project with Merton in 1946 and 1947. The young monk was fascinated, and documented the conversations.
Merton’s journals detail Dunne’s efforts to secure funds from a Churchill Downs investor to buy the Utah land. They also recount the abbot’s fears about placing Catholic monks in the middle of what might be a hostile Latter-day Saint population.
Merton concluded, “This will be the most difficult foundation in the history of the Cistercians.”
Perhaps he even wanted to come to Utah himself, but the closest he got was writing an August 1947 article in Commonweal magazine called “The Trappists Go to Utah.” He also wrote about the new monastery in his 1949 New York Times best seller The Waters of Siloe.
In Commonweal, Merton described the July 1947 train trip west by the pioneer monks (including Brother Boniface). He noted that the Utah Trappists initially lived in surplus wooden POW barracks placed on their 1800 acre mountain ranch.
Merton then explained, “A temporary monastery is already under construction. It will be made of metal ‘quonset huts,’ but will be one of the most elaborate ‘quonset’ structures that has ever been attempted.”
He also described the lovely Ogden Valley land on which Holy Trinity Abbey was built as “a wild and lonely spot” which on one side is “a wilderness without roads or farms.” Noting that deer drink at “two plentiful springs,” Merton said the only sound there was “the howling of coyotes,” at least until the Trappists “set up their bell and began to ring it.”
That bell was still ringing some twenty-five years later when my family and I made its way to the abbey too. I tell that whole story in my 2021 memoir, Monastery Mornings.
One of our Utah monk friends was Cincinnati native Father Thomas Aquinas Porter. For a time, he locked the monastery doors at the end of the evening chant called compline.
We often attended the service and chatted with Father Thomas afterwards. He had a kind face, salt and pepper hair, a pleasant demeanor, and a quick, loud, infectious laugh.
Little did I know that the scholarly Father Thomas also had served as one of Merton’s official Cistercian order censors.
Merton had to submit his manuscripts for approval by his order, probably a frustrating experience even for a writer with the patience of a monk. These editors commented on and criticized the drafts, and suggested changes.
Unfortunately, I never discussed this intriguing literary relationship with my Utah friend Father Thomas. Fortunately, however, the story was told elsewhere.
After Father Thomas died in 1997, Utah monk (and author) Father Charles Cummings noted in a letter (to poet Denise Levertov) that his two fellow deceased Trappists “did not see eye to eye about dotting the i’s.” Merton also wrote about the difficult relationship in letters republished in 1983 in a book titled The School of Charity.
Apparently, during a 1956 exchange with Father Thomas about one of Merton’s works (Basic Principles of Monastic Spirituality), Merton overreacted to some edits. In the process, he hurt Father Thomas’ feelings quite badly and the Utah monk objected.
The dispute eventually reached the head of the entire Cistercian order in Rome. The abbot general, as Merton put it, “lays this at my door.”
Merton apologized to Father Thomas in another letter, saying that others had told him “I was much more aggressive than I realized” and thus “I deeply regret if I have wounded you.” Merton urged Father Thomas to continue working with him and even included with the apology more writing for review.
Noting that “authors and censors inevitably tangle once in a while,” Merton later explained, “An author, certainly a Trappist author, is always eager to comply with the censor, but at the same time, when the correction affects some very minute point and involves perhaps a mere matter of opinion, the author would like a little freedom so as to spare his text from the sort of mutilation involved by the forcible injection of a technical phrase.”
Merton avoided similar bruising battles with another editor and publisher named James Laughlin. In fact, the two men were about the same age and became close friends.
Laughlin was a seeker of the way, just like Merton. Unlike the poor monk, however, Laughlin remained a bit of a playboy, came from privilege, and enjoyed inherited wealth.
Laughlin invested some of that family money in a new Utah ski resort called Alta and bought the rustic Alta Lodge, which he owned for almost 20 years. He liked it so much he moved here.
Profits from these investments helped sustain Laughlin’s New Directions publishing house, which in turn nurtured the writing genre now known as American modernism.
Laughlin knew Gertrude Stein and Tennessee Williams, and published the great modern writers of the day, including Ezra Pound, Dylan Thomas, and Henry Miller. He rescued The Great Gatsby from publishing exile.
He also brought Herman Hesse’s Eastern novel Siddhartha to America in paperback. I have (and read) a copy of the New Directions 1951 edition, courtesy of the Utah monastery bookstore.
Laughlin even hosted Vladimir Nabokov (soon to be infamous for Lolita) and his family at Alta in the summer of 1943. The opinionated Russian author spent several months writing, hiking, and catching butterflies amid the mountain meadow wildflowers.
Of all his many celebrated writers, however, it was Merton who Laughlin loved best. From the early 1940s up through Merton’s untimely and accidental death in 1968, the two men exchanged over 700 letters.
Laughlin’s correspondence often originated from the Alta Lodge, a return address Merton knew well. Laughlin also sent Merton picture postcards, one showing the Wasatch mountain peaks from the vantage point of Germania pass at Alta.
Their letters discussed mundane topics such as copy editing, proofs, book sales, and galleys. Yet, Laughlin also wrote to Merton in late 1947 with a fulsome description of the publisher’s recent visit to the brand new Trappist monastery in Huntsville.
Laughlin even sent (sometimes smuggled) books to Gethsemani Abbey that he thought Merton should read. David Cooper, a Michigan State professor who published many of their letters in a 1997 book, also has explained that “Merton nourished Laughlin’s nascent spirituality” and Laughlin “was instrumental in helping Merton become the poet he never really wanted to be.”
Laughlin loved to go see Merton at Gethsemani. He described a typical visit during a 1983 interview for a documentary:
“Tom would usually start out very circumspectly… Then we would get out a few miles and he’d stop by the woods and he’d say, ‘Stop here’; then he would go into the woods and he would take off his bishop’s suit and he would put on his blue jeans and his old sweater and his beret. And then we would head east, stopping, I must say, at a few beer parlors on the way, where Tom always was very popular with the local farmers.”
Laughlin later confessed, in verse, how he had initially misjudged both the monks and the monastery:
“How wrong I had been about the inhabitants!
These brothers and monks,
Were warriors of joy.
Happy and friendly, laughing
And joking, rejoicing in the
Hard life of work and prayer.”
Merton returned the compliment in his journals too, calling Laughlin a “fundamentally simple person. He is basically religious because he is clean of heart…I like him very much. He is the kind of person I can understand.”
In early January 1969, just weeks after Merton’s unexpected death in Thailand, Laughlin wrote to a fellow publisher mourning their mutual friend:
“I’m still shattered by Tom’s going, just can’t believe it or accept it. I know…that this was what he wanted, the complete union, but it sure is going to be rough on all of us who loved him so much, and depended on him for so much. He was a wonderful friend, and a constant incentive to try to live life one tenth as fully, as vitally, as he did.”
Why such a contemplative mood for this letter? Laughlin penned it from his own monastery—the snowcapped mountain peaks of Alta, Utah.
(The Salt Lake Tribune published a version of this article on October 13, 2024.) (Merton photo by Sibylle Akers and courtesy of the Merton Legacy Trust.) (Correspondence by James Laughlin used by permission of the Laughlin Estate.)
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022.
