IN 1948, A HERMIT was made known to the world by another hermit. Like many Christian holy men, the Jewish-born Catholic contemplative and poet Robert Lax had his early spirituality enshrined in a book: The Seven Storey Mountain, the bestselling autobiography authored by his friend, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton.
“He had a mind naturally disposed from the very cradle to a kind of affinity for Job and St. John of the Cross,” Merton wrote about Lax. “And I now know that he was born so much of a contemplative that he will probably never be able to find out how much.”
Better known to many for what was written about him than for what he wrote (and he wrote a lot), Lax, who died in 2000 at age 84, wanted, according to his archivist Paul Spaeth, “to put himself in a place where grace can flow.” For Lax in the 1940s, New York City was not such a place. Though he worked with the poor at Baroness Catherine de Hueck’s Friendship House in Harlem, and had enjoyed jazz with Merton, he balked at the gaspingly fast pace and materialism of the city. He was also unhappily employed at The New Yorker.
In 1962, he packed up and moved to Greece, then an inexpensive country under the warm Mediterranean sun, where he could disappear among the fishermen and sponge-divers of Kalymnos. For almost 40 years the expatriate wrote, prayed, wandered, and drew to him spiritual seekers, fellow poets, and Merton enthusiasts who, his friend Judy Emery remembers, “would just barge into his house,” wanting to engage him in conversation. A World War II conscientious objector, whose final book was titled The Peacemaker’s Handbook, Lax immersed the issues of the world in the language of the spirit.
“Lax already considered himself a pacifist by 1939 or 1940,” said Michael N. McGregor, author of the Lax biography Pure Act (2015). “This came mainly from his reading about Jesus in the Bible. For him, being a conscientious objector was a spiritual act. The idea that a war may be just didn’t mean anything to him. He didn’t think it right for an individual, he himself, to kill another individual.
“Lax was a very immediate kind of guy. He saw the people at Friendship House doing something that mattered, helping the poor, being with the poor. At The New Yorker, he felt that what he was doing didn’t matter. To help the poor was something straight from scripture, from God. The beauty of Lax was that he spent his life trying to figure out what Lax should do, what will bring him closer to God. He wasn’t trying to make big manifestos or statements.”
For Lax, poetry grew out of the same soil as prayer, as meditation. “I believe that in many ways art is an act of love,” he said. His abstract poems, with their vertical lines often consisting of a single word, sometimes a single syllable, empty into the vast white space of silence. A minimalist, he rebelled against our culture of excess and high speed. Lax forced his readers to slow down and absorb every word and syllable before going to the next.
In his prose poem “21 Pages,” Lax reflected on a rigorous kind of waiting, the waiting done by the spirit in its dark night. “When I’m there, you’re there; when I’m not, you’re not. If I’m not here, I’m waiting. Try it again: when you’re here, I am here too, and when you’re not, then I’m not. Where am I when you are not here? I’m nowhere. What am I doing nowhere? Waiting. I’m sitting in (what we’ll call) nowhere, looking into the dark, and waiting.”
The mystery of connecting was something to which Lax was dedicated on every level. Steve Georgiou, a teacher, writer, and Lax devotee from California, wrote extensively about Lax’s method of being:
“Always smiling, sometimes faintly humming, he would slowly pour me a glass of bottled water into one of the two mugs that were usually on the table, and then fill his own cup with equal care. Perhaps nothing would be said at first, but eventually a sound, a poem, an artwork, or an impression would spark an exchange, and there would be a rich flow of meditative, constructive thought. Periodic silences would follow, to which we both listened almost as if the quiet were a third party speaking to us.”
The man who enjoyed reminiscing about his jazz days in New York with Pee Wee Russell and Hot Lips Paige was also a man who saw the spiritual dilemma of our age as the inability to slow down, look inward, listen, discover the truth of wonder, and rejoice in the silent voice of God.
Robert Hirschfield is a poet and journalist in New York City whose work has appeared in the National Catholic Reporter, the Jewish Review of Books, and other publications. His new poetry collection is The Road to Canaan (Presa Press).
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