University of Cambridge

The University of Cambridge marks a troubled interval in Thomas Merton’s early life. After receiving support for his schooling in England, he enrolled at Cambridge, where he spent most of his time on alcohol and sex. The book calls the year terrible and disastrous, placing the university within a period of personal failure rather than intellectual accomplishment.

Enrollment and a Disastrous Year

Merton’s path to Cambridge followed the deaths of both parents and years of travel with his father. A kindly physician, who had been a friend of his father, provided for Merton’s education in England. Merton then found his way to the University of Cambridge, but, by the account given, he devoted most of his time there to alcohol and sex. The book offers no further detail about his studies or daily life at the university; its emphasis is on the stark gap between the educational opportunity he received and the direction his year took.

The Break with England

After that year, Merton visited his maternal grandparents in New York for the summer. The physician who had arranged his schooling wrote to him and told him not to return to England. The account does not specify the physician’s reasons, but the letter forms a decisive break in Merton’s English education: instead of going back, Merton settled in New York and enrolled at Columbia College.

Contrast with Columbia

Merton later remembered Columbia in sharply different terms. Compared with Cambridge, he saw the New York college as full of light, fresh air, and genuine intellectual vitality. The contrast is his own retrospective judgment, not a fuller assessment of Cambridge’s academic life. In the book’s account, Cambridge is important chiefly as the failed year preceding his move to Columbia, where new friendships and intellectual influences helped redirect his development.