Roundup: Waugh and Merton

In the early summer of 1948, Evelyn Waugh received the galley proofs of an autobiography written by an unknown American Trappist monk. The title was The Seven Storey Mountain. The editor who sent the proofs, Robert Giroux, of the New York publishing firm Harcourt Brace, had felt the need for a big-name endorsement in the shaky hope that the book wouldn’t lose money. He had not expected Waugh to answer.

Waugh’s response was swift, and Giroux placed it on the front cover of the book’s first edition: “I regard this as a book which may well prove to be of permanent interest in the history of religious experience.” … Almost immediately Waugh set about editing the text for a British readership. An entry of 28 August 1948 in his journal is the sole reference to this work: “Tom Burns gave me [the] enthralling task of cutting the redundancies and solecisms out of Tom Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain. This took a week and has resulted in what should be a fine thin volume.”…

Waugh’s editing work on The Seven Storey Mountain consisted of efforts to make the narrative flow: it was the story of Merton’s life from lost and angry youth to Trappist monk that had caught his interest, and he excised words and passages that slowed the story down….The Seven Storey Mountain, with Waugh’s editing, was published in Britain in 1949 by Hollis and Carter under a new title: Elected Silence…

The long-distance friendship between the two men did not last. Waugh’s interest in American Catholic monasteries seems to have waned almost as soon as it began. Although as he was about to sail back to England, Waugh told a reporter that the thing he liked best in America was Gethsemani Abbey, his stay there had lasted less than 24 hours. Their correspondence lasted for a few more years, but there is no indication that Waugh had any desire to return to Gethsemani or that he had any further interest in Merton or his books. Elected Silence, his labour of love on Merton’s behalf, published 75 years ago, has long been out of print, and The Seven Storey Mountain, with all its imperfections, is what people want to read.

A complete copy of the article is available online at The Tablet’s website. Mary Frances Coady is a Canadian author and editor. Her most recent book is Caryll Houselander: A Biography (Orbis Books). The article in The Tablet is probably based on Coady’s 2015 book Merton & Waugh: A Monk, A Crusty Old Man & The Seven Storey Mountain (Paraclete Press). That is available here. Waugh’s edition of the book (Elected Silence) is out of print but still available in the second-hand book market where it sells at a premium price starting at $50. See this link.

—The Spectator has an article by Robin Ashenden about the books of Hungarian-born writer George Mikes. These are known for their sardonic humor and are mostly entitled How to be a ….., the best known being How to be an Alien. After discussing several of Mikes’s books, the article concludes with this:

…[Mikes] went on to tell a story from his childhood, when a friend, Tibor, had called him out for making others the butt of his savage jokes. ‘He said that one’s spiritual powers were given one to protect the weak against the unjust tyrant… making a fool of harmless and defenceless people was a worse crime than stealing.’ As a man, Mikes said, he had felt gratitude to Tibor for a long time for showing him the error of his ways. It was only when he became a professional humourist that he realised the gratitude was perhaps misplaced.

Tibor’s ‘nobility of soul,’ Mikes wrote, ‘is the cause of my pending downfall; it is [the] more or less general acceptance of his mentality that has killed Humour… In many great practitioners – from Swift through W. S. Gilbert to Evelyn Waugh – a strong streak of cruelty is noticeable and, for weaker souls like myself, disturbing.’ But, he added, ‘to deprive humour of its streak of cruelty is like depriving the elephant of its trunk, like depriving water of its wetness. It is like putting a meek, old cow, kindly disposed to the world and to all toreros, in the bullring… The ensuing spectacle is pleasanter, less bloody and less hair-raising than those provided by more spirited animals, but it is not a bullfight. And it does not quite satisfy the crowd…’

Those who make the case for woke comedy, who rail against punching down, or who work in publishing houses as sensitivity readers – that dismal non-job devoted, at its worst, to casting its own patina of mediocrity over the individual writer’s voice – should sit up here and pay attention. So should we all. It seems that in 2025, even from beyond the grave, George Mikes – that most astute and generous Boswell to the British – has something important to tell us about who we are.

The full article can be read at this link.

–A brief article about the career of Somerset Maugham appears in Chronicle: A Magazine of American Culture. This is by Taki Theodoracopulas. Here is an excerpt:

…Maugham had married and was grandfather to two grandchildren by his daughter Liza (one of them, Camilla, Countess Chandon, is still a great beauty and a friend of mine). Despite that, the master writer openly lived with two men who were his secretaries. Homosexuality was illegal in Britain until 1967, two years before Maugham’s death, but he didn’t bother to hide. Fellow writers in the closet, like Evelyn Waugh, were obviously jealous because Maugham was highborn and did not have to put on an upper-class accent, hide his sexuality, or live in grubby digs—everything he did was first class.

Maugham is almost unknown today, something that doesn’t surprise me. Artistic merit nowadays is not matched with success, while fame and mediocrity go hand-in-hand. Back in the ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s, the Bloomsbury Group literary elite predictably denigrated Maugham’s work, while themselves putting out unreadable experimental crap. But novels like Of Human Bondage, Cakes and Ale, The Moon and Sixpence, Mr. Know-All, The Razor’s Edge, and short stories like “Rain” are superb, psychologically deep, and imaginative, as well as technically superior and precise.

I can’t say where Taki got the impression that Waugh was jealous of Maugham’s open homosexuality. His only collected review of a Maugham novel (Christmas Holiday, 1939) treats it as a work of genius. I recall that Maugham and his wife were separated and that he afterwards lived openly with his male lovers, but outside of England (mostly in the South of France) because of English laws. Waugh’s best known comment on Maugham’s homosexuality comes from a 1952 letter to Harold Acton. This was about Waugh’s brief visit to Maugham at Cap Ferat: “I…made a great gaffe. The first evening he asked me what some one was like and I said ‘A pansy with a stammer.’ All the Picassos on the wall blanched” (Letters 371-72). Maugham was well known to have had a serious speech defect.