Robert Lax

Robert Lax (November 30, 1915 – September 26, 2000) was an American poet, known in particular for his association with famed 20th century Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton. A third friend of his youth, whose work sheds light on both Lax and Merton, was Ad Reinhardt. During the latter period of his life, Lax resided on the island of Patmos, Greece. Considered by some to be a self-exiled hermit, he nonetheless welcomed visitors to his home on the island, but did nothing to court publicity or expand his literary career or reputation.

Lax was born in Olean, New York on November 30, 1915, to Sigmund and Rebecca Lax. He attended Columbia University in New York City, where he studied with the poet and critic Mark Van Doren. As a student at Columbia University in the late 1930s, Lax worked on the college humor magazine, Jester, with a classmate who became a close lifetime friend, Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk and author of many spiritual books. Others on the Jester staff were Ed Rice, founder and editor of Jubilee magazine (to which all three men contributed in the 1950s and ¹60s) and Ad Reinhardt, the painter. In his biography, The Seven Storey Mountain, Merton describes Lax at a meeting with other Jester staff: "Taller than them all, and more serious, with a long face, like a horse, and a great mane of black hair on top of it, Bob Lax meditated on some incomprehensible woe." Mark Van Doren, one of his Columbia professors, wrote that "The woe, I now believe, was that Lax could not state his bliss: his love of the world and all things, all persons in it."

After graduating in 1938, Lax worked on the staff of The New Yorker, was poetry editor of Time magazine, wrote screenplays in Hollywood, and taught at both the University of North Carolina and Connecticut College for Women. Lax converted from Judaism to Catholicism in 1943, five years after his friend Thomas Merton, and Rice was godfather to both men. But Lax desired a simple life, so he wandered, working in circuses as an expert juggler. He traveled with the Cristiani Brothers circus in 1949, which enabled him to generate material for his collection Circus of the Sun. Lax helped Rice start Jubilee, a lay Catholic magazine, in 1952 and became its roving editor. By 1962, he found his way to the Greek islands, where he was to spend the next 35 years, most recently on Patmos. The correspondence of Lax and Merton, written in a kind of comic argot, was published in 1978. Lax moved back to Olean in 2000, where shortly after, on September 26, 2000, he died in his sleep at age 84.

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