A Monk’s Habit: Thomas Merton’s Other Affair

What are we to make of Thomas Merton’s affair? The nurse? No, not the affair with “M,” but his affair with “A”—alcohol. Merton was restless and fearful the summer evening in 1966 when he wrote, “Where will I be when the dark falls and the dragons come and there is no more beer?”  

The careful reader of the nearly 3,000 pages of his journals covering three decades will find Merton often discontented, a sense that he’d rather be somewhere other than where he was or someone other than who he was. To wit, in February 1964, on the twenty-second anniversary of his reception of the Cistercian habit, Merton offers an evaluation of his life citing “twenty-two years of relative confusion, often coming close to doubt and infidelity, agonized aspirations for ‘something better.’” 

At times, these sentiments are accompanied by lamentations of his drinking.

They are most evident in Volumes Six and Seven of his journals, 1966-1968, but also surface in The Seven Storey Mountain, where Merton describes his prep school and collegiate years.  Crossing the Atlantic at age seventeen, he and some “Bryn Mawr girls” had “quite a big bar bill.”  Later that year, while at Oakham, he and his friend Andrew would sneak bottles of “a foul purple concoction” into the library. It was the time of life, he wrote, where, like many, he “believed in the beautiful myth about having a good time so long as it does not hurt anybody else.” 

At Columbia, he wanted to join the cross-country team but failed to train and would not give up drinking or smoking. He would ride the New York subway with friends to party at various nightclubs and often woke with terrible hangovers, filled with remorse. He became depressed. “I was spiritually dead. I had been that long since.” 

His drinking wasn’t confined to campus. “We went down to Washington once for no very good reason, drunk, too, I might add.”  

His time in Olean, New York—home of St. Bonaventure College where he taught before entering the monastery—at the cottage owned by the family of Robert Lax, was rife with drinking episodes. 

So, Benjie, Lax’s brother-in-law, gave us this place, and let us live there, trusting more than he should have in our ability to live in a house for more than a week without partially destroying it. Lax and I and (Ed) Rice moved into the cottage and looked around for a place to put our typewriters. 

In The Man in the Sycamore Tree: The Good Times and Hard Life of Thomas Merton, a book that author Ed Rice calls “an entertainment,” we read about the first summer (1939) at the cottage where a favorite drink was gin added to grape juice. They often went to a bar called Lippert’s, where they would drink and play the piano and drums. Rice noted, “Merton has more money than Lax and me and buys bottles of Scotch” and “becomes very drunk, laughing and singing; the next morning he awakes, feeling fine and remarks, ‘No hangover. Shows the advantage of drinking good Scotch.’” At the cottage, Merton grills hamburgers soaked in Scotch, but they are so bad they are thrown out.   

They go to nearby Bradford, Pennsylvania, where they “are cleaned out by a confidence man at a carnival,” drink, pick up some girls, and get arrested for undisclosed reasons.

On July 23, Merton wrote, “What we forgot to buy yesterday in town was food for today. Now we will have to have gin and wine for supper.” Four days later he recorded, “For about three days or perhaps more we have been drunk, either on wine or beer, or gin, a party all the time, for all the fellows.” 

“Behind it all,” according to Rice, “was that relentless, restless search to find himself, to learn who he was.”  

Well, okay, typical for a college kid, right? But here’s the thing—and it’s best expressed by a man who lived similarly in his youth, Bill W., co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, who noted in As Bill Sees It (p. 12): “Those adolescent urges that so many of us have for complete approval, utter security, and perfect romance—urges quite appropriate at age seventeen—prove to be an impossible way of life at age forty-seven or fifty-seven.” 

Fast forward three decades from the Olean cottage years and we find Merton in his fifties, struggling with that “impossible way of life”—and again, there are witnesses.

In Song for Nobody, that author Ron Seitz calls a “remembrance portrait,” Seitz draws from his own journal of his decade-long friendship with Merton, the last ten years of the monk’s life.  Seitz was a poet and college professor who, as Brother Patrick Hart wrote in the Foreword to Seitz’s book, had “a profound understanding of the monastic charism” and was not “a detached observer standing on the outside trying to make Merton fit into some preconceived idea.” That endorsement from Merton’s literary executor lends Seitz’s observations a certain gravity. 

And what were Seitz’s observations of Merton’s alcohol use? He opens by recalling what he knew about Merton before they met, “Fresh out of Columbia and on to Bonaventure, making his pilgrimage to Cuba. All this between beer-drinking sessions in a New York tavern with his professor-friend, Dan Walsh.” 

Walsh was ordained a priest in Louisville in 1967. Seitz and Merton attended the ordination and at the reception Seitz recalls Merton uncomfortably fielding questions from well-wishers in the room and “refilling his champagne glass and sipping it ever more rapidly to sustain his kind attention…” before he “graciously backed out of the crowded room with the neck of the large champagne bottle in one hand and an empty glass in the other.” That, Seitz wrote, was his single best memory of Merton that day. In the afternoon he “heard Tom’s immortal definition and appreciation of the poet’s beverage, ‘Champagne’s no good unless you drink it all!’” 

Seitz wrote about the “two-sided face of Tom Merton,” one side, the need for solitude, and the other, the need for human contact. He chronicled the many picnics he and his wife, Sally, had at Monks Pond, recalling Merton saying, 

I’m getting fat from the easy life out here in the woods eating and sleeping and having too many picnics with all that good food that lovely Sally cooks up and you bring down with cold beer too…it’s too much! 

Seitz’s word-portrait of the monk is telling: “Merton was a guy with big baggy pants, needed a shave, laughed too much, drank too much beer, just an ordinary guy.” One problem with that picture is that ordinary guys don’t drink too much beer.

But Merton loved beer. He wrote an essay for the June 3, 1966, issue of Commonweal, titled “Is the World a Problem?” In it he makes the admission, “I drink beer whenever I can lay my hands on any. I love beer, and by that very fact, the world.” 

Three months earlier, Merton, then fifty-one, began his affair with “M.” The matter has been widely dissected—but what of his affair with alcohol? Were the two connected? Did one fuel the other?  Three months earlier, Merton, then fifty-one, began his affair with “M.” The matter has been widely dissected—but what of his affair with alcohol? Were the two connected? Did one fuel the other? Tweet This

His journal entries throughout the duration of their relationship are telling, awash with drinking, restlessness, and fear. Again, Bill W. (As Bill Sees It, p.330): 

The chief activator of our defects has been self-centered fear—primarily fear that we would lose something we already possessed or would fail to get something we demanded. Living upon a basis of unsatisfied demands, we were in a state of continual disturbance and frustration. Therefore, no peace was to be had unless we could find a means of reducing these demands.

On Thursday, June 23, 1966, the temperature hit ninety-one degrees in central Kentucky. That evening, in his hermitage, Merton noted the heat and grieved his dwindling stash. He was reading and rereading his journal from previous days. “Everything has been going into letters to M. or poems, or things like this journal.” He was worried and self-searching. 

So, I go and get another beer. The supply is already running out. I only had five cans. It is a hot night. Where will I be when the dark falls and the dragons come and there is no more beer? 

“Here I am crazy mad with love and sitting around the hermitage drinking beer like a damn fool (Running out though).” 

It has been a long time since I just sat and drank beer. Years in fact. It takes me back to the time when…(Oh, God, there we go again)…I was a kid on Long Island and so on. There is no point wasting time and paper on that kind of stuff. It seems to me very likely, dear, that if we had got married you would have found yourself hooked to an alcoholic ex-priest.

The following day, he ties his drinking to “M,” writing, “When I take the beer cans to the dump this morning, I will also take the following masks: the monastic failure; the poete maudit; the ex-priest alcoholic driven to drink by M; the loner misunderstood by everyone….” 

I think where I was lying was when I pretended to be guilty about a) being in love and b) drinking beer. Actually, I do not really feel guilty about either, deep down. I know that neither of these fits anyone’s standard idea of what a hermit ought to be…. But I don’t think that in loving or drinking beer I am at all untrue to myself and to what God wills for me—except in details. Because I can see too that I don’t need for instance to drink beer, or five cans of beer at one sitting, while being here. I am really not all that lonely. I am certainly not unhappy. I do not have to drink to be happy. I think probably what I was really doing was slipping back into an act I had given up long ago, ‘when I was a kid on Long Island,’ playing a very old role that was so phony that even I could detect it. 

Though he detected it, he nonetheless continued—reminiscent of Augustine’s “Give me chastity and continence, but not yet.” On July 13, he left the monastery grounds, as he often did, with his friend and psychologist Jim Wygal. The following day he wrote, 

Yesterday was one of the hottest days I can remember…the hermitage was stifling because what little breeze there was [was] blocked off by the rise to the SW. Jim Wygal came out to get some books, and we spent the day together, driving around and drinking beer, which was not much help and, in the end, I was hotter, heavier, stupider than ever. Was sweating like a pig all day.  

On October 13, he was in Louisville “at the bar of the Brown Hotel in mid-afternoon, drinking bottled beer and finishing letter to M.” 

Closer to home, Merton was often a guest of Bardstown bourbon distiller Thompson Willett. He went to Willett’s house the last day of November with Wygal, leaving the monastery “illegally or independently if you will.” He had “qualms of conscience” but could not pinpoint the source of his guilt. “Anyway, shouldn’t have been there,” he wrote. Willett, Merton noted, had a “huge bar” where they “drank some of his whiskey and talked. I tried to call M. but couldn’t get her.”   

On December 10, 1966, exactly two years before his death, Merton wrote, 

Two days ago, F. of the Immaculate Conception, Joan Baez was here—memorable day! Out on the tobacco farm—grey skies, cold wind, Joan (Baez) running down the wide field alone in black sailor pants with her hair flying. Ira (Sandperl) and I talking about everything and drinking beer.

The new year brought no resolution to curtail his drinking. January 7, 1967: 

Doris Dana, friend, and literary executor of Gabriela Mistral, was here for a couple days—she left early on Epiphany to go to Griffin at Fort Worth. We had a good talk and drove around a lot, drank some beer in a quiet hollow between New Haven and Howardstown and looked at the bare woods.

January 18: 

Last week Jim Holloway and Will Campbell. Much talk about Faulkner, his drinking…We drank some beer under the loblollies at the lake—should not have gone on to Bardstown and Willett’s in the evening. Conscience stricken for this the next day. Called M. from the filling station outside Bardstown. Both glad. 

In March, he went to Louisville to see a doctor about bursitis in his arm. After buying paperbacks (science fiction), he went for lunch in the Heyburn Building. “Beer at the cooler in the hallway behind the liquor store. The amiable blonde girl who bought us all beers ‘just because she wanted to.’ Very nice.” Who “us” is, is not known. It was, he wrote, “the anniversary of the day I first saw M. in the hospital. March 31 last year was Wednesday in Passion Week…in a week we were in love.” 

According to Mark Shaw in Beneath the Mask of Holiness, the affair with “M” ended the summer of 1968 when Merton burned her letters “as a symbolic act to end once and for all his romantic relationship with her.” But his romance with “A” continued.

The love affair with “M” behind him, Merton began his ill-fated journey to the Far East, drinking along the way, beginning with the generous hospitality of Archbishop Joseph Ryan of Anchorage: “I have been staying at his house since Tuesday night. A comfortable bed in the basement where he also has his bar.” 

After arriving in Asia, Merton met a twenty-nine-year-old Buddhist, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, then the titular head of Surmang Monastery in the Kham region of eastern Tibet. He recorded the occasion in his Asian Journal: 

Yesterday quite by chance, I met Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche and his secretary…Today I had lunch with them, and we talked about going to Bhutan. But the important thing is that we are people who have been waiting to meet for a long time. (He) is a marvelous person. Young, natural, without front or artifice, deep, awake, wise. 

Trungpa remembered the meeting as well, recalling, “We had many gin and tonics.” Merton traveled on to a conference in Bangkok. On the morning of December 10, 1968, he gave a talk to the assembly, ending with his last publicly spoken words: “So I will disappear from view, and we can all go have a Coke…or something.” That afternoon, he was dead, the result of an accident—electrocution from a faulty electric fan.

[Photo Credit: Sibylle Akers / Merton Legacy Trust / Thomas Merton Center]