Thomas Merton, Robert Lax, and Edward Rice were college buddies who
became life-long friends, literary innovators, and spiritual
iconoclasts. Their friendship and collaboration began at Columbia
College in the 1930s and reached its climax in the widely acclaimed
magazine, which ran from 1953 to 1967, a year before Merton's
death. Rice was founder, publisher, editor, and art director;
Merton and Lax two of his steadiest collaborators. Well-known on
campus for their high spirits, avant-garde appreciation of jazz and
Joyce, and indiscriminate love of movies, they also shared their
Catholic faith. Rice, a cradle Catholic, was godfather to both
Merton and Lax. Merton, who died some 30 years before the other
two, was the first to achieve fame with his best-selling spiritual
autobiography, "The Seven-Story Mountain". Lax, whom Jack Kerouac
dubbed "one of the great original voices of our times," eventually
received recognition as one of "America's greatest experimental
poets, a true minimalist who can weave awesome poems from
remarkably few words" ("New York Times" Book Review). He spent most
of the last 35 years of his life living frugally on one of the
remotest of the Greek isles. After Jubilee folded, Rice wrote 20
books on world culture, religion, and biography. His 1970 biography
of Merton, "The Man in the Sycamore Tree", was judged too intimate,
forthright, and candid by those who, in Lax's words, "were trying
so hard to get pictures of [Merton's] halo that they missed his
face." His biography of the 19th century explorer and "orientalist"
Sir Richard Burton became a "New York Times" bestseller. This book
is not only the story of a 3-way friendship but a richly detailed
depiction of the changes in American Catholic life over the past
sixty-some years, a micro history of progressive Catholicism from
the 1940s to the turn of the twenty-first century. Despite their
loyalty to the church, the three often disagreed with its
positions, grumbled about its tolerance for mediocrity in art,
architecture, music, and intellectual life and its comfortableness
with American materialism and military power. And each in his own
way engaged in a spiritual search that extended beyond Christianity
to the great religions of the East.
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