The Mountain

A short book published only a month ago, yet already enjoying the worldly success of a third printing, contains this unworldly advice:

"Do everything you can to avoid the amusements and noise and the business of men. Keep as far away as you can from the places where they gather to cheat and insult one another, to exploit one another, or to mock one another with their false gestures of friendship. Do not read their newspapers if you can help it. Be glad if you can keep beyond reach of their radios

. . . Keep your eyes clean and your ears quiet and your mind serene."

Seeds of Contemplation (New Directions; $3) is already riding to a whacking success in the high-altitude wake of an earlier book, The Seven Storey Mountain (TIME, Oct. 11), by the same young Trappist monk. Both books are the work of 34-year-old Thomas Merton, who has retired from the world to live under a monastic rule so strict that it forbids even the self-indulgence of talking. Trendspotters have begun to wonder whether some of the U.S. reading public, in its search for peace, subconsciously wishes it could follow him.

The Seven Storey Mountain is the best-selling non-fiction book in the country. From the sedate lending libraries of New England to the bustling women's clubs of the West Coast, people are reading and talking about Poet Merton's sensitive, unhappy groping through the litter of modern civilization to find peace at last. Word-of-mouth endorsements are largely responsible for the demand; bookstores are accustomed to coping with those who did not quite catch the title and come in asking for "Seventh Storey Monk" or "Second Storey Mountain." Protestants and Catholics, businessmen and housewives, in 26 weeks since its publication, have zoomed the Mountain's sales to a total of 162,700 copies.

Halfhearted Search. "America," Trappist Merton has written, "is discovering the contemplative life." British Novelist Evelyn Waugh- supports such a possibility. In a letter to Author Merton, Waugh said: "I believe there are thousands of men and women in the world who are temperamentally suited to monastic life but have no effective vocation simply because they are ignorant of the very existence of religious life. Indeed, a thesis might be developed to show that the health of society depends on a right balance between monks and laymen--the revolution of the 14th Century took place because the monasteries were full of people ... who had no business there, and the present revolution is being made by people who ought to be in monasteries and are not. I think your book ought to prove potently suggestive to many of these."

But, according to booksellers, no discernible number of those who buy The Seven Storey Mountain feel themselves called to contemplation. In Boston, where booksellers estimate that 85% of Merton's buyers are Catholics, readers have objected that the faith he writes about is too emotional, and not sufficiently based on cold reason. Commonest objections of Boston Protestants: "A life of contemplation is all very fine, but it doesn't help solve any of the world's problems."

In Baptist Atlanta, the demand for the Mountain caught booksellers by surprise. Said Mrs. Georgia Lecken, manager of the book department in Rich's department store: "I would say that Protestants and Jews are buying it from us more than Catholics." But Georgia bookdealers do not see this as evidence of the South's yearning for the contemplative life. The booming sales are rather attributed to Protestant curiosity about behind-the-scenes Catholic activities--especially within a Trappist monastery.

Chicago Bookdealer Georgia Lingafelt concluded that "people have a halfhearted search going on inside them, even though they don't know it and would be embarrassed to admit it . . ."

Big Thing Happening. The Mountain is not the only religious book in the bestseller ranks. Rivaling it in popularity, though not in caliber, are The Greatest Story Ever Told (Fulton Oursler's rewrite of the New Testament), Lloyd Douglas' The Big Fisherman, and Father James Keller's account of the Christopher movement, You Can Change the World. Some hard-boiled book men are cynical at the suggestion that this betokens a "trend." Said Robert W. Faith of a St. Louis Doubleday bookshop: "Some books on two themes always draw interest . . . those on sex and those on religion."

Other book men are convinced of increased public interest in spiritual matters. "Practically nobody has moral security," says an editor of Simon & Schuster. "People are now simply more than ever interested in spiritual values and finding a home in them."

Some see a special significance in the fact that the U.S., where religion has most strikingly expressed itself in the activist tradition (i.e., hospitals, orphanages and other forms of good works), has taken so well to Merton's inward-looking brand of spirituality. Whether or not U.S. religious interests are growing more contemplative, they are certainly growing. Chicago Daily News Columnist Sydney J. Harris said of The Seven Storey Mountain: "This book shows how far we have traveled since the 'sos. First, we were the social revolutionaries, looking down our noses at Babbitts. Then we realized that social problems were linked to politics and economics. We became political revolutionaries. Finally we came to see that all political questions are fundamentally religious ones. It's a big thing that's been happening, and this book helps spell it out."

*Whose edited version of the Mountain will soon be published in England.

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