Pure Act: the uncommon life of Robert Lax
MICHAEL N. McGREGOR

Samuel Beckett once leafed through a book of Robert Lax’s poems in the mid 1980s, looked up and said, “This is good, isn’t it?”

Yet Lax, if he is known at all, is best-known not for his writing but for being Thomas Merton’s closest friend. The two met as students at Columbia University in the 1930s, and Lax appears in The Seven Storey Mountain as a preternaturally-centred and sagacious young man whose selfless self-possession stood in contrast to the racket Merton was creating as he strove for intellectual and personal fulfilment. Merton wanted literary fame, but Lax couldn’t have cared less. Merton writes of his friend: “His whole attitude about writing was purified of such stupidity, and was steeped in holiness, in charity, in disinterestedness.”