STRIVING TOWARDS BEING: The Letters of Thomas Merton and Czeslaw Milosz.

Edited by Robert Faggen. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 178 pp. $21

What are friends for? The question is usually posed as though the answer were self-evident: friends offer help in time of need. But literary friendships are different. They leave a record, the quality of which depends on the quality of the need—and of the help. In this remarkable 10-year correspondence between Merton, the American Trappist monk best known for his spiritual autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain (1948), and Milosz, winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize in literature, the quality of both is high indeed.

In 1958, when Merton initiated the correspondence, Milosz was living in France, a recent exile from the Stalinist regime in his native Poland. Milosz’s poetry, now celebrated in the West, was untranslated, and his reputation did not extend beyond the bitter controversy surrounding The Captive Mind (1952, trans. 1953). To the Polish exile community, Milosz’s extraordinary dissection of intellectual capitulation to communism was tainted by his having served the regime. To French leftists, the book was a blot on the legacy of Stalin. And to many Americans, The Captive Mind was just another anticommunist tract.

Faggen, a professor of literature at Claremont McKenna College, explains why Merton’s reading of The Captive Mind was so distinctive: he "recognized that the book was not simply a condemnation of Communism but an attempt to understand the lure of Marxism in the wake of the erosion of the religious imagination." Merton’s stance was clearly congenial to Milosz, whose wife and two sons had emigrated to America but whose own visa was being delayed on suspicion that, as a former official of the Polish government, he might be a spy. About his time in France, Milosz wrote, "I live in a little town near Paris and look at that literary turmoil with a dose of scorn—do not accuse me of pride as this is not my individual pride, I share it with young writers from Poland who visit me here, perhaps we all are more mature—at a price." Throughout the correspondence, which ranges beyond politics into fundamental questions of art, faith, and morality in a world darkened by war and genocide, this tension between pride and maturity is central.

Of the two writers, Milosz is the more relentless self-examiner. He agrees with Merton that it is important to resist group causes and political labels, but he goes on to offer a striking meditation on why such resistance should not be regarded as heroic: "Pride or ambition sometimes mislead us when we want to be individuals and not just members of a group. But in general pride or ambition by breaking etiquettes is a positive force—and exactly for this reason writing, as self-assertion, is for me something suspect."

Faggen observes that while in the first letters "Milosz’s eager response to Merton reveals his need for a spiritual father,... Milosz appears to take on that role himself as the correspondence develops." This is true in certain realms, notably the political. Yet some of the most affecting passages are those in which Merton counsels Milosz not to regard exile as a dead end: "What you write for Poland will be read with interest everywhere. You do not have to change your mental image of your audience. The audience will take care of itself." Wise words, not only reassuring but prophetic—and, for one of the greatest poets of our troubled century, exactly the help most needed.

—Martha Bayles