Thomas Merton's ambivalent war novel, "My Argument with the Gestapo"

Thomas Merton's ambivalent war novel

By Mark Pritchard

On the first day of the war with Iraq, I stood with a friend and his 12-year-old daughter outside the downtown headquarters of the Bechtel corporation. Linking arms with others, we stood blocking the rear doors of the 50 Beale St. skyscraper, with the goal of preventing the company from conducting business that day.

Over the course of the long morning, irritated office workers -- some of whom worked for other companies in the building, not Bechtel -- came up and tried to get through our lines, and we gently blocked them. In fact, by 10:00 a.m. the security guards closed the building anyway -- not in sympathy with us protesters but in fear of us, in case one of us was a mad bomber. Some of the office workers asked us why we were there, and received a flier printed with various accusations against the Bechtel company, which over many decades has been involved with, and profited from, some dubious American policy in the third world. I don't know if we enlightened anyone, but I thought the symbolic protest was worthwhile.

That protest was one of several I had participated in... but my personal feelings were ambivalent. While I was solidly for any plan that held off the war while holding Iraq accountable for its weapons programs, I also sympathized with the suffering of the Iraqi people under a brutal dictatorship. I thought it was a terrible idea for the U.S. to attack a country which had not attacked us, but it was also obvious that "removal" of the Hussein regime would benefit that country. If it had to happen, I just wanted it done as bloodlessly as possible.

And despite my better reasoning, something in me wanted to see the U.S. speed to the rescue. To someone raised on the standard explanation for World War II -- that the U.S. had entered the war to free people from the oppression of Germany and Japan, and then only when attacked ourselves -- as well as countless cartoonish melodramas, from Superman to James Bond to the Road Warrior, in which some costumed hero saves the world through violent action, that fantasy had a strong attraction. Gen. Tommy Franks and his sidekicks were going to bust down the door of a Baghdad palace and sock Hussein in the jaw! Who wouldn't want to see that?

Resemblances to a bad action movie aside, the war in Iraq offered several moral dilemmas. If it was a war for oil, that's bad -- even the Bush administration seems to agree, since they denied that was the reason -- but will that stop American companies like Bechtel from profiting from the subsequent oil trade? If it was a war to rid the world of Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction" (the chemical and biological weapons they have had in the past, and perhaps still have), what happens if we never find any? Was there ever any real connection, as the President has asserted, between Iraq and Al-Qaeda or the "War on Terror"? How much of our national willingness to start a war has to do with an American antipathy to Arabs or Muslims? And now that the Hussein regime has been vanquished, is the U.S. going to use the same logic against Syria, Iran, Pakistan and other nations?

Mixed feelings about war are nothing new for Americans. Though most people remember World War II as a "good war" where Americans were clear on why we were involved and unquestioning of the wisdom of joining in, back in the late 1930s agreement wasn't nearly as unanimous as we remember. As today, there was a great deal of ambivalence about the threats posed by an evil dictator as well as the horrific notion that a war was necessary to unseat him. As today, there was an antiwar movement on campuses in both the U.S. and the U.K., with students signing a pacifist pledge, promising to refuse induction into the armed forces. And just as today, there was propaganda and sanctimony on both sides of the debate.

In those days, a young Thomas Merton -- born in France to a New Zealander father and an American mother, both painters; a teenage orphan who lived in English boarding schools; a budding novelist, and a recent convert to Roman Catholicism -- struggled with these issues. In 1941 he was a 26-year-old English teacher at St. Bonaventure College in upstate New York. That summer, a few months before he decided to enter the Trappist monastery in Kentucky where he was to spend almost the whole of the rest of his life, Merton wrote a novel, his fourth attempt at the form and the only one ever published. This book was finally published, in 1969 as the world confronted other conflicts, as My Argument with the Gestapo (New York: New Directions, 1969).

Written in the form of a journal -- the original title was "Journal of My Escape from the Nazis" -- the book follows a young man as he wanders in wartime London and occupied France. The narrator, who has no name, whose occupation is vague (he allows that he is a kind of journalist, but only in the sense that he is writing a journal), and who claims citizenship only of an imaginary country called Casa -- the language of which is a macaronic blend of romance languages and English, a kind of proto-beatnik Esperanto -- documents his encounters with the populace, with soldiers, and especially with officialdom in the form of censors, detectives, and secret police.

Merton's book was written at a time when the U.S, officially neutral, was providing the U.K. with crucial support. Americans were watching newsreels of German (and Japanese) wartime cruelty and of England suffering under German bombing. The American public was expected to strongly sympathize with the English, whose stiff upper lips were supposed to be both a model of courageous resistance and a warning that the U.S. might soon find itself involved in the same fight.

Merton looked upon all this with a jaundiced eye. Having lived his childhood in France and most of the decade of his teens in England, he much preferred the former; English food, fashions, habits, domiciles, and above all English kitsch and sentimentality all revolted him. As a recent and zealous convert to Roman Catholicism, he regarded England's Protestantism as a nadir of spirituality, not to mention taste.

Thus his treatment in his novel of the much-heralded British pluck is more cynical than sympathetic. His narrator has gone to London to see the war for himself. Confined in a tube-station bomb shelter with the hoi polloi, his eye and ear is merciless: "The sound of the lamentable, croaking, gay songs they have been singing, down there, to the tune of the broken accordions, makes me shudder in my sleep," he writes.

An old man comes up to me. "What nationality are you?" he says. "You are not English. Where do you come from, to see us English people in our silent, incomprehensible courage? What do the people in your country think of our resistance? Do they know how brave we are? Do they understand our bravery?"
The whole earth shakes with a giant bomb above us, so great that spontaneously, all over the tunnel, voices begin at once the words of the very same song, together: a song full of lying gaiety, cloaked in smut.
"Listen to them," says the man who has been talking to me. "You say you do not know your own nationality. Then if you have no national pride, how can you expect to understand our bravery?"

Merton's narrator resists nationality, in so far as it imposes any sort of emotional cant, because during wartime nationality is inextricably linked to sentimentality and to its rhetorical cousin, propaganda. He understands that "national pride" and "bravery" are just code words.

"Why are you fighting?" I ask him. "Tell me clearly, what for: not in the language of politicians. Tell me some concrete things you are fighting for."
"We are fighting for Cadbury's chocolate, for Woodbines, for the London County Council, for the Gasworks, for the Doulton Pottery at Lambeth, and for the broken span in the middle of the Waterloo Bridge. We are fighting for Lord Nelson's blind eye, for his last words ('Kiss me, Hardy') and his notorious mistress, Lady Hamilton, portrayed in our films by Vivian Leigh..."

But this novel is not just satire. By becoming a stateless person and confessing allegiance only to an inviolate country of the heart, Merton's narrator is testing what is true and what is false about the world's situation and that of the individual. He rejects the comforts of popular culture, especially cinema, and the easy answers it offers. After finding his way to France through a secret route, he encounters a German officer, who tries to establish his brotherhood with the narrator by recalling the anti-war film All Quiet on the Western Front. Thus Merton finds the Germans quite as sentimental, and thus as misled and misinformed, as the English.

This equation of the English and the Germans, sacrilegious as it must have been in 1941, is not extended to the French, whom Merton likes better. When he steps into a Parisian café to ask directions, the narrator finds no sentimentality among its embittered patrons, only "fierceness": "The men stand there with a strictly human and French anger in their eyes, offended, not like dogs, offended like men." In this, too, he takes a contrary stand. The defeat or surrender of the French in 1940 was (and still is, as we can see from recent mockery) looked down upon. But for Merton it was no disgrace; it didn't suggest anything inferior about them, in contrast to the vaunted "bravery" of the English, because the French were still confronted with -- indeed, forced by their situation to confront -- moral questions.

In fact, for Merton's narrator, the technical condition of being free or conquered is not what really matters. After being detained and interrogated about his nationality and the reason for his presence in Paris, Merton's narrator is free to wander around the city and ponder existential questions. In the book's most quoted section, the narrator, having admitted to an interrogator some bare biographical facts, says,

You think you can identify a man by giving his date of birth and his address, his height, his eyes' color, even his fingerprints. Such information will help you put the right tag on his body if you should run across his body somewhere full of bullets, but it doesn't say anything about the man himself. Men become objects and not persons.
Now you complain because there is a war, but war is the proper state for a world in which men are a series of numbered bodies. War is the state that now perfectly fits your philosophy of life: you deserve the war for believing the things you believe. In so far as I tend to believe those same things and act according to such lies, I am part of the complex of responsibilities for the war too.
But if you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I think I am living for, in detail, and ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for. Between these two answers you can determine the identity of any person. The better answer he has, the more of a person he is.

This credo of identity provides the key for his character. Beneath his swipes at English cant, fatuous Germans and the treachery of movies, Merton really does want to know what you're fighting for, whether you're English, French, German or from "Casa." His fundamental concern is with personal integrity, and whether one's principles are linked to ultimate truth. Though his references in his novel to religion are mostly veiled, we can now see -- in light of the fact that Merton was about to make the greatest decision of his life, to become a Trappist monk -- what he thought of his own situation. Finding himself in a war -- not the literal war of the French (though he was most in sympathy with them) but a spiritual war -- he dearly wished to emerge the victor.

Merton's entry into monastic life, in December of that year -- just after Pearl Harbor, as it happened, though in his autobiography he claims this did not enter into his decision -- was one victory in this spiritual war, but not the end of his struggle for integrity. At various times during the rest of his life -- as documented in letters and in the personal journal he kept -- he often wondered whether he was in the right place. Usually this ambivalence had to do with whether, in the Trappist monastery he chose, he was going to be given the latitude to pursue his struggle. Significantly, each time he came close to leaving for another monastic environment, he chose to stay put. He knew his struggle was, like his novel's character, not dependent on place, but was in his own heart.

I suspect Merton would take a dim view of our country's justifications for the Iraq war. He would dispense with the patriotic fervor, the cheerleading and the pious talk from governments on every side; as he ignored Hitler, he would no doubt ignore Hussein as a justification. At the same time, he would question his own feelings and reasoning, and call on others to do the same. Judging from his other writings, I think his greatest sympathy would be with women and defenseless civilians. At the same time, I'm not sure he would be quick to support, for example, the dubious and poorly organized "human shield" movement, because as he learned more and more about nonviolence, he developed a great faculty of discernment when it came to activism.

But whatever I may imagine would have been Merton's reaction to the events of our day, I take heart from his cautious reaction to the war of his own day. Following his example, we should reject the clamor of news and propaganda, think for ourselves, and discover that the origin of war is in our own hearts. Then we can pray, finally, for forgiveness, and repentance.

For further reading

The best introduction to Thomas Merton is his autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain, considered a 20th century classic, in print since it was first published in 1948. Also recommended is The Thomas Merton Reader (New York: Image Books, 1974) with articles, poems, and excerpts from his journals. My Argument with the Gestapo: A Macaronic Journal (New York: New Directions, 1969) is available, with all Merton's other work, at Thomas Merton Books online.

Merton websites: Firewatch; the Thomas Merton Studies Center; the Thomas Merton Society of Great Britain and Ireland.

Making and Remaking: the Many Masks of Thomas Merton, an essay by Michael Higgins.

The Thomas Merton We Knew, a biographical essay by Jim Wright.

Merton's Columbia classmate and lifelong friend Ed Rice was profiled in Columbia University's magazine in May 2001.

A new book, The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage, looks at the lives of four prominent American authors who were Roman Catholics -- Merton, Dorothy Day, Flannery O'Connor, and Walker Percy.