In the summer of 1939, Thomas Merton, then 24, and Robert Lax spent a few weeks in an Olean, NY cottage. I’ve been to the cottage twice, lamenting its condition each time, but also trying to imagine the scenes Merton records in The Seven Storey Mountain:
“Lax’s brother-in-law had a cottage, on top of a hill, from which you could see miles over New York and Pennsylvania—miles of blue hilltops and wooded ridges, miles of forest smudged here and there, in the dry weeks, with smoke, and gashed open, in the neighboring valley, by the lumbermen. All day and night the silence of the wood was broken by the coughing of oil-pumps, and when you passed through the trees you could see long metal arms moving back and forth clumsily in the shadows of the glade, because the hills were full of oil.”
The lumbermen and oil rigs are gone, but the cottage and porch remain.
“Lax and I and (Ed) Rice moved into the cottage and looked around for places to put our typewriters … There was a porch which looked over the hills and where eventually we erected a trapeze. It was very pleasant to sit on the top step of this porch and look at the valley in the evening and play the drums. We had a pair of bongos …”.
Notice first consideration is given to the typewriters. Standing there, as I did, facing the screened-in porch, it was easy to imagine the click and clack of typewriters, but not so much the bongos, and even less a trapeze!
And what was Merton typing?
“The thing I got started on grew longer and longer and longer and eventually it was about five hundred pages long and was called first Straits of Dover and then The Night Before the Battle, and then The Labyrinth. In its final version it was shorter, and had been half rewritten, and it went to several publishers but to my great sorrow never got printed—at least I was sorry about it in those days, but now I am full of self-congratulation at the fact those pages escaped the press.”
And what was he reading?
“The cottage would have made a good hermitage, and I now wish we had more exploited its possibilities. The closest I got to using solitude for meditation was when I spent a few afternoons under a little peach tree in the high grass of what might have been a lawn, and read, at last, Augustine’s Confessions and parts of St. Thomas’s Summa.”
I didn’t find a peach tree on the grounds, but one is left to wonder if Merton threw peaches from the tree, ala Augustine’s famous pear tossing.
