Blog – Page 13 – Robert Lax

Greek Orthodox Easter on Patmos, 1989

The following description of an Easter eve service on Patmos comes from a journal entry I made on Easter Sunday, April 30, 1989. Happy Greek Orthodox Easter 2016!

Spent a cool morning washing clothes and reading bits & pieces of Merton’s A Vow of Conversation. Sleepy Easter morning after a late night of celebration. Met Petros [Lax] & his two young friends—Eva from Switzerland and Gary from New York—and after a series of tête-à-têtes and a dinner of beans & bread, then pasta and finally lamb entrails in an avgolemono soup broth, all shared round and consumed with draughts of conversation about the place of eggs in religion and history and plenty of laughter, we set out into the unexpectedly cold night to attend an Easter service. At first we couldn’t get a taxi so we tried the service at St. John’s in Skala. I was itching to go up to the cave or monastery, though, and finally Gary indicated a similar wish, so he, Eva & I (Petros was not in a mood to wander far from home) tried the taxi stand again, finding a car this time and speeding to the top of the hill where cars were already lining both sides of the street.

We went in and found ourselves at the end of a large crowd on the steps just inside the monastery door. Around us children with sleepy eyes clutched candles while their elders leaned against the whitewashed walls, waiting. For what? 20 minutes, 30 minutes. We could just barely hear the chanting of the monks. We lit our candles from those around us and waited, too. Then, at midnight, the bells began to ring and voices began to sound all at the same time as the people around us smiled broad smiles and hugged and kissed each other with cries of “Christ is Risen” in Greek. Then the exodus began. Those within the church and in the courtyard began to file out—gush out, actually. They pushed and pushed, swelling from one to two and then three across, pressing us up against the walls and making it difficult for the children caught in the press to find space to breathe. I moved to the top of the stairs and could just see into the courtyard where candlelight lit a hundred faces.

Along a stone gallery above, candles and faces alternated, solemn sentinels keeping the vigil. We waited as the crowd continued to pour out; then there was release, we were in the courtyard and the blackened murals beneath the arches of the church were before us. We moved to the church doorway, into the antechamber where we held our candles up with the others and watched the monks in their black robes and round, pill-box hats or gold and white embroidered garments, each with a medallion with the face of Christ on it placed between the shoulder blades. Gushing gray beards, the soft faces with their few strands of black of the young. Solemn islanders who broke into smiles as they filed forward and kissed first the silver-gilded book and then the ring of the abbot or patriarch, exchanging warm smiles and greetings with him. As Eva said, there seemed to be a genuineness to their interactions.

More people filed out and we were within the church, standing in a corner near the altar screen beneath the great silver lamps that hung everywhere from the ceiling, beautifully clean and white against the black from centuries of candles. Beneath a red & white Tiffany-style lamp to my left an old priest in gold and a young monk in black combined their voices with that of a young boy in suit and tie, trading chants with a balancing trio on the other side. To my right an almost obscured ikon—St. John?—wore a silver halo built out from the flat surface of the painting. The monks went in and out of the innermost chamber and by positioning myself in a doorway beside the ikon I could see inside it. They chanted alternately before an altar, behind which languished a figure of Christ painted on a wooden cross with John and Mary kneeling on either side. On the altar stood a chalice with a silver-threaded Greek-cross-shaped cloth covering.

Back out in the sanctuary a young monk brought in a tray on which a large, 30-foot-diameter loaf of bread had been placed. It was prayed over and removed and a folding support with a cloth draped over it was brought out. A monk appeared from behind the screen and after walking back and forth a couple of times, put down the book he had been carrying—a book covered in silver with images of saints or the trinity on its cover—and began to read—actually, chant—what I took to be the gospel. While he was reading, the oldest monk on either side tapped a bronze bowl with a metal rod, sometimes slowly, sometimes rapidly. Earlier, one of the younger monks had gone out into the courtyard and tapped a long piece of rough-hewn wood with two wood mallets. This was the calling of the people of the world to Christ, using a replica of the piece of wood tradition holds was used by Noah to call the animals to salvation on the Ark. The reading finished, the incenser appeared once more and was waved at the bowing, crossing few still left within the church.

All the senses but one had been involved—then the chalice appeared. Bread was handed around and people began to push forward to the center entry through the altar screen where a priest stood with a long-handled, ornamented spoon and served bits of bread soaked in heavy wine to the supplicants while another priest held the end of a red cloth below each chin, wiping it after the giving of the sacrament, sure to let nothing fall to the ground. A basket of plainer, dryer bread was held out by a young monk at the corner of the church. I ate it first and then the sweeter, ginger-and-anise-flavored bread I had received earlier. I went back out into the antechamber and left my candle in front of the ikon of St. John, a postcard of which I had taped up behind my computer at home.

It was after 2 a.m. when we began to make our way down the hill, a thousand stars and a wayward cloud or two above and the lights of the city petering out into the dark, distant sea below. For some reason we spoke of the oppression of the Palestinians and in South Africa. Our conversation was somber, but undergirded with hope, too, for we had each, in his or her own way, been touched by the gentle, loving finger of God.

Hyperallergic Website Reviews Lax’s POEMS (1962-1997)

Beguiling Simplicity: The Poetry of Robert Lax

A review of poems (1962-1997) by Robert Lax, edited by John Beer

by Louis Bury, posted on Hyperallergic on April 16, 2016

Lifelong friend of Trappist Monk Thomas Merton and abstract painter Ad Reinhardt, Robert Lax wrote spare poems that, in their beguiling simplicity, provoke anxieties about how and why we read. A typical Lax poem forms a narrow vertical column, each line of which is only one or two words long, that descends down the center of the page in repetitions and permutations: “one stone/ one stone/ one stone,” opens poems (1962 – 1997), edited and with a superb introduction by poet John Beer, “i lift/ one stone/ one stone// i lift/ one stone/ and i am/ thinking” (3). Such phrases, repeated and varied, make the reader aware, if not self-conscious, about the reading act. However, unlike other poets whose work causes readers to read themselves reading it, such as Gertrude Stein or e.e. cummings, Lax’s poems present no obvious difficulties or impediments to sense. Instead, stanzas like the above — difficult in their easiness, complex in their simplicity — lull the reader into committing the heresy of paraphrase: Lax lifts one stone and he is thinking. It’s easy, all too easy, to be lax when reading Lax.

The difficulty of reading Lax in part stems from a temporal dissonance. His poems contain so few words, repeated so many times, you almost can’t help but read them fast, too fast, much too fast, even as their form and content gesture toward a meditative slowness that remains just out of reach. “hurry/ up/ hurry/ up/ hurry/ up,” beseeches one stanza, only for the next to admonish, “slow/ down/ slow/ down/ slow/ down” (48). The two stanzas’ forms are almost identical to one another but their contents advocate for opposite reading cadences,each facilitated by the repetitive form. Quick: the reader can skip over the repeated words without much loss because she’s already read them anyway. Slow: the repetitions force the reader to take notice of them and slow down. The back-and-forth commands to “hurry/ up/ slow/ down// hurry/ up/ slow/ down” represent the simultaneous conflicting imperatives of Lax’s poetry (48).

–to read more, click here.

poems (1962 – 1997) (2013) is published by Wave Books and is available from Amazon and other online booksellers.

Kalymnos: The Island Lax Loved

The photograph here is of Kalymnos, the Greek island Robert Lax loved most. He moved there shortly before Easter in 1964 and stayed for most of the next 10 years, recording the wisdom of the fishermen and sponge divers who lived on the island. He might have stayed the rest of his life if his hasty (and temporary) departure in 1974 to work as a writer-in-residence at a new arts venue near Buffalo, NY, hadn’t convinced many islanders that he was a spy.

Unfortunately for Lax, he left the island just as the Cyprus Crisis was making it look as if Greece and nearby Turkey would go to war. The islanders had never quite figured out why he was living there among them, scribbling things down and taking photographs. When he left suddenly just as war loomed, they thought they knew.

Although he had been warned that some islanders wanted to kill him, Lax returned to Kalymnos in 1976. He stayed off and on for the next four years but he never felt entirely comfortable there again. In 1980 he moved permanently to Patmos, where he would live for most of his last two decades.

In honor of Orthodox Easter, coming up on May 1, here are some thoughts about Easter on Lax’s favorite island:

Easter is one of the best times to visit the Greek islands. Icons are paraded through the streets, there are lamb feasts, and everyone gathers at the church the night before Easter Sunday to celebrate the risen Christ at midnight. When I was on Patmos at Easter one year, a basket of colored eggs and cookies appeared one day in my rented room and the town was full of joyful visitors. On Kalymnos, the islanders take things even further, “celebrating” the holiday by throwing sticks of dynamite into the air. According to anthropologist David Sutton, the practice goes back to the 1960s, when Lax first lived on Kalymnos (and, indeed, he mentions it in his journal). Here’s how Sutton described his own experience with Kalymnian dynamite in a 1996 article in Anthropological Quarterly:

“I was warned about renting the house across from the churchyard. I had arrived on the Greek island of Kalymnos in the Eastern Aegean with my wife and six-month old son and had been directed by friends to a large house overlooking the main town. The only drawback, I was told was “the dynamite” (i dinamites), but that was only one night, at Easter, not worth worrying about.

“What I had visualized as a large fireworks display, however, turned out to be a bombing. Amid cries of “Christ is risen” several hundred pounds of TNT formed into projectiles of two or three pounds each were hurled into the sky from the church courtyard at midnight on Easter eve, rattling our house to its foundations, cracking two window panes, and sending the window handles flying across the room. As the explosions continued sporadically throughout the day, I felt that I had gotten a taste of life in a war zone. I later found out that the dynamiting was considered to be light that year, and that the toll of damage was nothing compared to that of twelve years earlier, when four people were killed in what later became known as “the Accident” (to atihima).”

Let me end with a quote from a journal entry Lax made about Kalymnos on August 5, 1969:

“sometimes it seems as though the island were a school of thought; as though there were living somewhere in the mountains, an invisible zen-master who kept everyone on the beam. if you walk along in dark thoughts (down the main street0 no one will say hello to you, or if they do, they say it timidly, knowing not only that it would be wrong to interrupt you now, but even to recognize you as a visible being when you were not (as they usually manage to be) in your full find feeling. but if you are feeling very well, the say hello with joy.

“on such a day, someone may run over spontaneously & shake your hand.

“the joy i am talking about, the full fine feeling, in greek is called kefi. some days you have kefi & some you don’t. when you do, you are full of spontaneous good actions, every one of which may be expected to turn out right.”

(from Journal C by Robert Lax, Pendo Verlag, 1990, pp. 50-52)

PURE ACT Chosen as Finalist for the 2016 Association of Catholic Publishers’ Excellence in Publishing Award in Biography

From last Friday’s press release from the Association of Catholic Publishers:

BALTIMORE, MD – The Association of Catholic Publishers (ACP) is pleased to announce the finalists for the Excellence in Publishing Awards. The goal of these awards is to recognize the best in Catholic publishing.

Biography:

A Still and Quiet Conscience (Orbis Books); Elizabeth Ann Seton (Pauline Books and Media); Flannery O’Connor (Liturgical Press); Fly While You Still Have Wings (Ave Maria Press); Joan Chittister: Her Journey from Certainty to Faith (Orbis Books); Oscar Romero: Prophet of Hope (Pauline Books and Media); Pure Act: The Uncommon Life of Robert Lax (Fordham University Press)

First, second and third place winners will be announced in June.

Author Monica Weis’s Lovely, Comprehensive Review of Pure Act in The Merton Seasonal

“slow boat / calm river / quiet landing”

Review of

Pure Act: The Uncommon Life of Robert Lax

By Michael N. McGregor

New York: Fordham University Press, 2015

444 pages / $34.95 cloth

Reviewed by Monica Weis, SSJ

The above words, etched into the gravestone of Robert Lax (1915-2000) capture the life and spirituality of this poet-solitary and friend of Thomas Merton. Michael N. McGregor of Portland State University has presented the literary world with a rich and graceful portrait of a talented and saintly man. Pure Act has already been widely reviewed in the New York Times Sunday Book Review (12/24/15), Publishers Weekly (9/15), America (11/30/15), Commonweal (1/*/16) and The Oregonian (11/4/15), to name a few. From them we learn that McGregor’s personal memoir passages are “vivid and engaging,” that this is a “warm, sympathetic literary biography of this complicated man who lived life as simply as possible,” and that Lax’s poetic subjects were both “visionary and ordinary, celebrating the apocalypse of the everyday.”

But it is Lax’s relationship with Thomas Merton that is of primary interest to the present audience, and Pure Act offers us keen insight into their meeting at Columbia University (1935) as well as the depth of their friendship evidenced in thirty years of correspondence and six visits. For sure, they were a salutary influence on each other despite notable temperamental differences. As McGregor perceptively notes, “Merton was a brilliant and tireless self-promoter, while Lax was often taciturn or tongue-tied in public . . . Merton was vitally concerned – in college and later – with finding answers, while Lax seemed much more comfortable with questions” (32). Yet both of them were not searching, as McGregor rightly distinguishes, but “pursuing . . . a sense of truth and of God and of themselves free from the expectations and trappings of the culture surrounding them” (78; emphasis added). Merton, for his part, discovered Roman Catholicism and his vocation as a writer and Trappist monk. Lax, a later convert to Roman Catholicism, remained a lifetime reader of Hebrew scripture and had, perhaps, the greater struggle and longer spiritual journey.

Bereft after Merton entered the monastery at Gethsemani in December 1941, Lax felt drawn to be with the poor in Harlem. In dire need of psychological healing and a philosophy of solitude – the dark aspect of Lax’s life that James Harford could not develop fully in his 2006 Merton and Friends: A Joint Biography of Thomas Merton, Robert Lax, and Edward Rice – Lax worked for a time in a menial job at The New Yorker which he considered a “toxic” environment. His unrest persisted because he could not write on command, preferring instead sudden inspirations he called “trumpet attacks” (103). He briefly tried his hand at teaching at the University of North Carolina, Connecticut College and a state college in South Dakota, and for a short period also wrote scripts for the Hollywood film industry; he traveled back and forth between Europe and New York City, worked as an editor for New-Story, was a roving reporter in Greece and Europe for Ed Rice’s Jubilee, and much later annually visited Paris and his publishers in Switzerland. In his early years, he seemed unable to settle in one place for very long, always needing a job and money to subsist, yet never abandoning his commitment to writing and reflection. By age thirty-five, notes McGregor, Lax willingly embraced poverty and a life of quiet, moving between Rome, Paris and Marseille, committed to his vocation of writing “that spoke of the beauty of God’s world. God’s people. And he could show those around him what harmony, grounded in love, looked like” (159-60).

From several comprehensive chapters we learn that Lax’s poetry gained a wider audience when Emil Antonucci, working as a graphic designer for Jubilee, began releasing hand-press versions of his poems (204). (It was Antonucci who illustrated Merton’s Original Child Bomb for PAX, a short-lived attempt by Lax to publish poems and art that would promote peace.) Throughout Europe Lax was seen as a forerunner of the concrete poetry movement, although he preferred to be regarded as a minimalist. The Merton-Lax connection was in the spotlight again with the 1978 publication of A Catch of Anti-Letters and a 1980 conference on Merton and Jacques Maritain in Louisville. For some unexplained reason, Lax’s talk, “Harpo’s Progress: Notes toward an Understanding of Merton’s Ways” was not given but later published in the inaugural volume of The Merton Annual (1988). Lax was again in the public eye in the 1984 PBS documentary Merton: A Film Biography, in Michael Mott’s The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton, and in his invited review of the first volume of Merton’s correspondence, The Hidden Ground of Love, for St. Bonaventure’s literary journal Cithara. McGregor’s research unearths not only these connections, but also the complexity of Lax’s publishing history, his invitations for readings, a major exhibit of his work in Stuttgart, and his growing reputation in Europe. We experience his personal and literary struggles and triumphs. Quoting Stephen Bann’s critique of Lax’s poetry, McGregor offers two reasons why Lax’s poetry matters: he is countering the “overly secular approach to poetry” then popular and making “momentous statements about human existence in our times” (289).

Peak moments for this reader are the links between Merton, Lax, Mark Van Doren, and Bramachari, and the pull of the Olean roots which offered Lax the balance to his “attraction to urban energy and rural peace” (51). Also engaging is the extensive attention paid to Lax’s deep friendship with the Cristiani family whose circus act he followed through western Canada in 1949. This early relationship with acrobats who knew how to concentrate on the present moment inspired Lax’s poem-cycle The Circus of the Sun (thought by some to be the best writing of the twentieth century) and Mogador’s Book (1992) published almost fifty years after meeting Paul (Mogador) Cristiani. Lax was fascinated, too, by Limnina, the rug weaver on the Greek island of Kalymnos and the local fishermen/sponge divers who persisted in their age-old, dangerous practice of sinking deep into murky waters to retrieve their catch. Each – the acrobats, the rug weaver, the sponge divers – presented Lax with a contemporary expression of Thomas Aquinas’ notion of God as pure act: “when we act consciously and yet spontaneously, . . . we become pure act ourselves – we become like God. If, that is, we act in love” (25).

Lax’s extended years on Kalymnos offered him the physical and psychic space he longed for, and he often sent poems and journal entries to Mark Van Doren, whom he considered his ideal reader (273). Sadly, by 1967, his Columbia friends were dying (Ad Reinhardt, Bob Gerdy, John Slate), and also his brother-in-law Benji Marcus, followed in 1968 by the death of Seymour Freedgood and Lax’s soul-mate Thomas Merton. Lax and Merton had spent six days together the previous June with Lax planning to return to Greece and Merton to travel to Asia. McGregor remarks that after so many deaths, “the tenderness and concern between them must have been palpable” (291). Now Lax was more alone than ever. By 1972 he was shuttling between Kalymnos, Lipsi and Patmos, his three favorite islands, mourning the death of Van Doren, his primary audience, reading in the mornings, journaling in the afternoons and talking to the locals – reminiscent of what Thoreau called his “morning work” – a balance of wakefulness and work. Greek life, Lax said, taught him how to pray (314).

Lax’s journey to New York State’s Art Park for a month-long residency two days before the 1973 political coup on Cyprus, however, reinforced the islanders’ suspicion that this gentle man who chatted with everyone and took notes on all he was seeing was in reality a spy. His eventual return to the island two years later did not completely reinstate their trust; consequently, at age sixty-six, Lax settled on Patmos for the last years of his life – when fortuitously he met Michael McGregor. Only when his health declined in 2000 was Lax persuaded by family to return to his home in Olean where he died on September 26, no doubt surrounded by memories of the late 1930s when Lax, Merton and Ed Rice spent summers there as “literary bohemians” in their “Himalayan kindergarten” (80-81) reading Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and writing their own novels.

Presenting Lax as an embodiment of the “wisdom of simplicity” (11) and himself as a “naïve boy who had washed up on his shores” (13), McGregor becomes both unobtrusive character and reliable narrator in this text, connected to Lax by the author’s own need for personal searching. McGregor’s fifteen-year acquaintance with Lax, his voluminous research, and six years of constructing the twenty-six chapters of Pure Act entitles him to offer credible insight into the trajectory of Lax’s life. This is a readable biography interspersed with snippets of poetry, and pertinent passages from Lax’s journals. The text follows a loose chronological order, with chapters focusing on themes, then looping back to Lax’s life pilgrimage where, says McGregor, Lax had finally found “his own way of walking. His own way of singing the song. His own way of being pure act” (393).

I strongly recommend reading (and enjoying) this book, especially before the June 15-18, 2017 Fifteenth General Meeting of the International Thomas Merton Society at St. Bonaventure University, when participants will be able to visit the Lax family cottage as well as to steep themselves in a special exhibit of Lax’s poetry and journals curated by Paul J. Spaeth, Director of the Library and Curator of the Lax Archives.

Monica Weis, SSJ received the ** “Louie” award for service to the International Thomas Merton Society. Emeritus Professor of English at Nazareth College, Rochester, NY, she is the author of Thomas Merton’s Gethsemani: Landscapes of Paradise (2005) and of The Environmental Vision of Thomas Merton (2011); her new book on Merton and Celtic spirituality will be published later in 2016.

Luminous Paintings Inspired by Lax’s “the light — the shade”

A few days ago, I received an email from a young painter named Abbey Ryan, who embarked several years ago on a series of paintings inspired by Robert Lax’s poem “the light — the shade.” Among the things Abbey told me were that her father, a Merton scholar, once corresponded with Lax, her middle name is Merton, and her childhood drawings might have been part of the mosaic on Lax’s wall on Patmos.

Abbey’s light/shade series is marvelous, with a simplicity and luminosity that make these paintings a lovely and fitting homage to Lax. You can view them–and even bid for them–on her website.

You can read her original post about the series (from December 2012) here.

And if you’re interested in taking online painting classes from Abbey, you’ll find more information here.

Free One-Hour Podcast of A Celebration of Robert Lax

Late Night Library’s Paul Martone (left) interviews Robert Lax biographer Michael N. McGregor (center) and former Lax literary assistant and poet John Beer (right) for an LNL podcast.

On December 9, 2015, Oregon Literary Arts hosted A Celebration of Robert Lax to mark the poet’s 100th birthday. At the event, Michael N. McGregor gave an introduction to Lax’s life and work and then read selections from his biography Pure Act: The Uncommon Life of Robert Lax. Poet John Beer followed this with a marvelous reading of Lax’s later poems from the Beer-edited collection poems (1962-1997) by Robert Lax. The evening concluded with Late Night Library founder Paul Martone interviewing McGregor and Lax on their friendship with Lax, his approach to life, and his writing.

The entire evening was recorded and is available for free as a Late Night Library podcast. You can listen to it here. It is one of the best audio introductions to Lax and his work.

Robert Lax Week in the Bay Area

It was Robert Lax week in the Bay Area in mid-February. On Thursday, Feb. 11, Michael N. McGregor, John Beer and S. T. Georgiou (who all knew Lax and have written or edited books by or about him) spoke, read and reminisced about their friend at City Lights Books in San Francisco. Five nights later, McGregor read from his biography Pure Act: The Uncommon Life of Robert Lax at Pegasus Books in Berkeley. (The images below are from the two events.)

It was standing-room-only at City Lights as the three men talked about Lax’s friendships with Jack Kerouac and Thomas Merton, his avant-garde poetry, and his role as a spiritual inspiration for many. Among those in attendance were Kerouac biographer Gerald Nicosia and Mike Antonucci, nephew of Lax’s first publisher and close friend Emil Antonucci. The Pegasus reading was well attended too, leaving the Bay Area with broader knowledge of this important poet and spiritual figure.

McGregor and Beer will appear at another reading at 6:30 p.m. this Tuesday, February 23, in room 333, Smith Memorial Union on the Portland State University campus in Portland, OR.

A German flyer for THE SIREN OF ATLANTIS, Robert Lax’s only screenwriting credit

A few weeks ago, a cardboard package marked “Do Not Bend!” arrived at my home. Inside was a fragile German movie flyer from 1949 advertising “Die Herrin von Atlantis,” the German name for “The Siren of Atlantis,” the only film Robert Lax received credit for writing. The first image here is from the cover; the others are from the flyer’s interior. The closeup shows Lax receiving second credit after Rowland Leigh under “Drehbuch” (Script).

“Dull is the word,” declared Alexander Wolcott in his review for the New York Times when the film debuted. In a more recent review on the website The Spinning Image, Graeme Clark wrote:

“A remake of L’Atlantide, Siren of Atlantis was the victim of a troubled production, seeing at least three directors run through its scenes, which might be surprising for a film barely over an hour long and filled with stock footage and borrowed sets – or maybe not. Its chief draw, then and now, was the famed screen beauty Maria Montez who guarantees interest from those film buffs who have a liking for camp; she may have been glamorous, but that doesn’t mean she had the talent to back those good looks up…”

Despite these harsh judgments, the film has acquired something of a cult following. The only viewer review on its imdb page is titled “Camp de luxe… but oddly watchable.”

You’ll find a full write-up on the film and Lax’s participation in it in Chapter 9 of Pure Act, “The Siren Call of Hollywood” (pp. 138-145).

To give you a brief taste, here’s the original trailer:

Jim Forest Reviews PURE ACT in The Catholic Worker

Bob Lax’s Circus of the Spirit

The Catholic Worker / January-February 2016

Review by Jim Forest

Pure Act: The Uncommon Life of Robert Lax
By Michael McGregor
Fordham University Press, 2015, 472 pages, hardcover, $35

In The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton recounted his memories of Bob Lax during their student years together at Columbia University. Lax was “a gentle prophet” who seemed to be meditating “on some impenetrable woe,” a born contemplative who could “curl his long legs all around a chair, in seven different ways, while he was trying to find the right word with which to begin.” Lax possessed “a natural, instinctive spirituality, a kind of inborn direction to the living God.” Lax saw Americans as a people “longing to do good but not knowing how,” waiting for the day when they could turn on the radio “and somebody will start telling them what they have really been wanting to hear and needing to know…. somebody who is capable of telling them of the love of God in language that will no longer sound hackneyed or crazy.” As Michael McGregor relates in this hard-to-put-down biography, in the course of Lax’s long life he became a quiet voice telling his readers about the love of God in language that is never hackneyed or crazy but is lean, surprising and drawn from deep wells.

It happens that Pure Act appears just as a 136-page anthology of Lax’s poetry and journal writing has been published by Templegate: In the Beginning was Love. The editor is my friend Steve Georgiou, who, like McGregor, also knew Lax in his later years and whose vocation as teacher was given its shape in large measure thanks to his mentor on Patmos.

Lax was one of the several friends who witnessed Merton’s baptism and it was Lax who, as the two of them were walking along Sixth Avenue not long afterward, asked Merton what he wanted to become. For Lax, the question wasn’t so much what to become as who to become. It was obvious to both of them that “Thomas Merton the well-known writer” or “Thomas Merton the assistant instructor of Freshman English” were not good enough answers. “I don’t know,” Merton finally said. “I guess what I want is to be a good Catholic.”

“What do you mean,” Lax responded, “you want to be a good Catholic?” Merton was silent — he hadn’t figured that out yet. “What you should say,” Lax went on, “is that you want to be a saint.” That struck Merton as impossible. “How do you expect me to become a saint?” “By wanting to,” said Lax. “I can’t be a saint,” Merton replied with conviction. To be a saint, he imagined, would require a magnitude of renunciation that was light years beyond him. But Lax pressed on. “All that is necessary to be a saint is to want to be one. Don’t you believe God will make you what He created you to be, if you will consent to let Him do it? All you have to do is desire it.”

It is not stretching the truth to say that both Lax and Merton spent the rest of their lives attempting to become the persons God created them to be — not aiming for capital S sainthood, complete with holy cards and a niche on the church calendar, but run-of-the-mill saints who have a talent for disappearing.

I met Lax at the Catholic Worker in Manhattan in 1961 and found him to be as lean as an exclamation mark, as tentative as a question mark and quiet as a comma. He occasionally came down for Friday night meetings and one evening read aloud some of the amazing poetry that eventually became part of his most treasured book, Circus of the Sun (now the first section of Circus Days and Nights). His circus poetry has ever since been a special love of mine, joyfully re-read more or less annually.

The Catholic Worker was a natural place for Lax to be. He had an affinity for the marginal and for those drawn to them. Earlier in his life he had been part of the community at Friendship House in Harlem. One winter Lax and Tom Cornell shared a $28-a-month apartment on Avenue A that seemed even colder inside than it was outside.

Another aspect of Lax’s affinity for the Catholic Worker was that he was a pacifist and had been one since his student days. Lax was one of those people who would far prefer to die than to end anyone’s life. When draft registration began shortly before the US entered World War II, both Lax and Merton declared themselves conscientious objectors. “Why,” Lax joked, “should I kill strangers when I have been so shy and polite about not killing unpleasant acquaintances?”

In that period of his life when our paths first crossed, Lax was editor-at-large of Jubilee magazine, an eye-opening, photo-intensive Catholic monthly that took an interest in people, places and topics widely ignored by the Catholic press as a whole: eastern Christianity, the works of mercy, lay communities, Christian art and artists, Church life in Europe, Asia and Latin America… No issue of Jubilee was ugly or boring, each issue a voyage of discovery.

One of the joys of life at that time was occasionally walking up to the Jubilee office and having a visit with Lax in his small white-washed cubicle that had, now that I think of it, something of a Greek look about it.

It was no surprise when not long afterward Lax made Greece his home, first Kalymnos beginning in 1964, an isle then famous for its sponge divers, and a decade later the monastic island of Patmos, where he remained until shortly before his death in 2000. By then Lax was something of a hermit, if one understands that many hermits are, as Merton was, intensely social people whose doors open both to friends and strangers nearly every day. But, apart from the cats who found Lax to be a good provider, Lax preferred to live alone.

Lax was born in Olean, New York in 1915 into a Jewish immigrant family. His remarkable mother, Betty, was both a founder of the local synagogue and a member of the Methodist and Presbyterian choirs, a combination that anticipated the wide spiritual reach of her son. During the Depression, Lax enrolled at Columbia where he formed life-shaping friendships with Merton and Ed Rice (later to found Jubilee), the poet Mark Van Doren (one of his professors) and radical abstract artist Ad Reinhardt. Lax also met his first holy man, a Hindu monk named Brahmachari who seemed far less interested in converting Christians to Hinduism than in converting Christians to Christianity. (It was thanks to Brahmachari’s influence that Merton read Augustine’s Confessions and Thomas a Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ.)

Lax was eventually to give up much that his talents, education and background equipped him to do, but in the years following graduation from Columbia he was on the staff of The New Yorker (where some of his early poetry was published), wrote film reviews for Time, and endured a period of script-writing in Hollywood. What he mainly learned in those years was how unhappy he could be attempting to be someone he was not.

The circus had been where he got the clearest glimpse of who he really was. While at The New Yorker he had met the Cristianis, a renowned family of acrobats. The poems knit together in Circus of the Sun were mainly works that had grown out of traveling with their small circus when it was on tour in western Canada. Joining in, Lax proved to be a natural clown.

While not drawn to a fulltime circus life, he was attracted to walking the high wire of voluntary poverty while gradually learning to write a lean poetry which in many cases was a trickle of slim words or thinner syllables cascading down the page. It was a poetry of contemplation in which the word “you” may mean yourself or God or the secret places where the one disappears into the other.

Michael McGregor — who knew Lax well — has written a book I’ve waited a long time to read. It’s a story with many surprises and much beauty. McGregor has the biographer’s gift of not only keeping careful track of Lax’s long pilgrimage, both physically and spiritually, but of bringing the reader into a space in which Lax is permanently alive and well. It’s a luminous story told with love and skill.

* * *

the
juggler

after
his
act

the
juggler

crossed
the
road

quietly
lightly
in
slim
white
suit

a
moving
pillar

a
path
of
light
in
the
darkness.

— Bob Lax
Circus Days and Nights
Overlook Press, p 110