My Argument with the Gestapo: A Macaronic Journal

The only one of the full-length prose works Merton wrote before entering the Cistercian Order in 1941 to survive, published by Doubleday in 1969, the year after his death; he had arranged its publication and written a foreword for it. It tells of a young man, named Thomas Merton, who travels from America to Europe to report on the war from the viewpoint of a poet, in a dreamlike narrative interspersed with passages in an invented macaronic language that parody the propaganda of the war. New Directions, which reissued it, notes its autobiographical scenes and its early signs of his lifelong concern with peace and nonviolence; Merton did not in fact return to England after the war began.