What treasures lie buried in the “vasty deep” of cyberspace!
I just now discovered MANAS Journal. I was on the prowl for an online comparison of John Tettemer and Thomas Merton. I finally found something in volume 5 , no. 39, September 24, 1952 of the aforementioned journal. Scroll down a bit for a review of Tettemer’s autobiographical I Was a Monk, 1951, entitled “In and Out of Rome.” The writer is presumably the editor of MANAS, Henry Geiger. Near the end, Geiger offers a brief comparison of Tettemer’s book with Merton’s autobiographical 1948 Seven Storey Mountain.
These two fascinating characters deserve an extended comparative study. No surprise there isn’t one, Tettemer being pretty much forgotten except for aficionados of the arcane and the neglected such as your humble correspondent. His mind drifts back to the ’90s and solo backpacking trips into the Sierra Nevada above Bishop, California and nights in the tent reading Tettemer by flashlight at 12,000 feet. Solitude and high mountains make for deep thoughts. Being alone prevents self-loss into the social and sharpens the sense of the mystery of things.
For more on Tettemer see the Wikipedia entry, and here is a more personal response.
Bill,
I knew nothing of Tettemer’s story until you introduced me to his autobiography, I Was a Monk, in 2018. Since then, I have read all of it twice and the last chapter, in which he recounts his break from Rome, several times. This post brought me back to his little book once again, along with Merton’s arresting Seven Story Mountain. I keep them side-by-side in my library. Reading portions of both this week, I was overcome by a terrible sadness, some of which arises from an acute sense of the loss of so many good things that once defined not only the Church and but also our nation. Tettemer and Merton speak to us from a vanished world, a taste of which we, growing up in the 1950s, were probably the last generation to experience, albeit certainly in a less robust form than either of these two men of faith, born in earlier times, But the other source of my sadness arises, I think, from my feeling that faith, no matter how deeply embraced, remains a poor substitute for knowledge. I know, as you have argued so cogently many times, that we have to choose, and I have made my choice, but rereading the intellectual and spiritual journeys of these “fascinating characters,” which ultimately diverged so radically, made me aware, once again, of the disturbing reality of our epistemological situation.
Vito
Vito,
I am very happy that you glommed onto Tettemer as I did years ago when I chanced upon his little book in the open stacks of ASU library. (An argument for open stacks.) Happy, and charmed by the tidbit about Merton and Tettemer side-by-side in your library.
Tettemer and Merton in those two books speak of a vanished world, as you say, one that is personally remembered only by old men like you and me, especially you, since you are older. If I had to assign dates, I’d say that that world ended in 1962, with its fate finally sealed in ’65 with the conclusion of Vatican II. Even Merton, in his late journals, long after he had moved away from the pious enthusiasm and contemptus mundi of Seven Storey Mountain, regretted deeply the liturgical changes and the dumping of Latin. And this despite his being the hipster he always was.
There is a lot one could say by way of contrasting these two me. I’ll mention just one difference for now. Merton was trapped by his past in a way Tettemer never was. Seven Storey Mt was a blockbuster success that appealed to many young men coming home from the War and caused many of them to enter the monastic ranks, the Trappists in particular. The great success of the book , and its earnings for the monastery ‘inspired’ the abbots (esp. Merton’s nemesis, Dom James) to encourage Merton to write, and he, being a natural-born scribbler, with a deep need for love and recognition (because of his difficult childhood) wrote his head off. Some of his books are very good but many are bad, and Merton would be the first to admit it.
For Merton to ‘pull a Tettemer’ and return to ‘the world’ was then psychologically impossible for him: he would be ‘betraying’ all the men he cajoled into the monastic enclosure and his own earlier self which he had laid before the public in print. And besides, by the end of the ’60s, he was too old and sickly to make a break and start a new life as did Tettemer, whose worldly ‘afterlife’ appeared to have been highly successful.