Thomas Merton: Difference between revisions - Wikipedia

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In October 1933, Merton entered [[Clare College]] as an undergraduate. Merton, now 18, seems to have viewed Clare College as the end-all answer to his life without meaning. In ''The Seven Storey Mountain'', the brief chapter on [[Cambridge]] paints a fairly dark, negative picture of his life there but is short on detail.

Some of Merton's Oakham schoolmates, who had gone up to Cambridge at the same time, recalled that Tom drifted away and became isolated there. He started drinking excessively, hanging out in the local pubs (public houses) and bars rather than studying. He was also very free with his sexuality during this period, some friends going so far as to call him a womanizer. He also spent freely - far too freely in Bennett's opinion - and he was summoned for the first of what was to be a series of stern lectures in his guardian's London consulting rooms. Although details are sketchy - they appear to have been excised from a franker first draft of the autobiography by the Trappist censors - most of Merton's biographers agree that he fathered a child with one of the women he encountered at Cambridge and there was some kind of legal action pending that was settled discreetly by Bennett. By any account, this child has never been identified. <ref>{{Citationcite neededbook|last=Elie|first=Paul|title=The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage|date=March2003|publisher=Farrar, 2011Straus and Giroux|location=New York|isbn=9780374529215|pages=41-42}}</ref>

By this time Bennett had had enough and, in a meeting in April, Merton and his guardian appear to have struck a deal: Merton would return to the States and Bennett would not tell Merton's grandparents about his indiscretions. In May Merton left Cambridge after completing his exams.