On the Banks of Monks Pond: The Thomas Merton/Jonathan Greene Correspondence

This is a book that might well begin, "Once upon a time… and a place." The time, 1967 and 1968, a period of now mythic cultural significance; the place, central Kentucky, from all appearances far from the epicenters of that cultural upheaval. Yet it was then and there in that other, less centralized community, that Jonathan Greene, a young poet and fledgling publisher from New York City by way of California, met one of the world’s most famous and public hermits, Thomas Merton. The result was the tragically brief friendship and literary collaboration that is celebrated in this volume.

Greene’s introductory memoir sets the scene, describing the unexpectedly rich intellectual and artistic milieu out in the "hinterland" of Kentucky where he was introduced to Merton through mutual friends. Two brief essays on Merton provide further context for the letters that follow, and demonstrate both the breadth of Merton’s literary interests and the depth of Greene’s knowledge of his friend’s writings. Their letters, all too few, coincided with the limited run of Merton’s literary magazine, Monks Pond, and his exchange with Greene (then publishing his own journal, Gnomon) reveals two deeply erudite and abundantly witty minds at work with the earnest joy of language. The longing of the reader that this collaboration might have lasted for many more years is underscored by the poignancy of Greene’s elegiac poem that closes the volume.

Both Greene and Merton have been hermits in their respective fashions, yet both in finding their footing away from the larger world found that their feet were nevertheless on the pathway connecting them to that world, engaging them in the life of the mind and of the spirit. Their words, surviving the silence of decades, are indeed all the better for it.