In our 2018 book, The Martyrdom of Thomas Merton: An Investigation, we identified John Howard Griffin as one of four key people responsible for cementing in the public mind that the great Catholic monk and public intellectual, Thomas Merton, had died from accidental electrocution. The other three were Merton’s abbot at the Our Lady of Gethsemani Abbey, Flavian Burns, Merton’s secretary there, Brother Patrick Hart, and Merton’s authorized biographer, Michael Mott. For the recently published Thomas Merton’s Betrayers: The Case against Abbot James Fox and Author John Howard Griffin, we have delved more deeply into Griffin’s background.

The Texas-born journalist and author John Howard Griffin, is known almost exclusively for his 1961 book, Black Like Me. It is an account of his journey through the Deep South, disguised as a Black man. It created quite a sensation in its day and made him a national celebrity. A movie with the same title as the book, starring James Whitmore as Griffin, was made in 1964. As one can see from sampling it on YouTube, it has not aged particularly well. Its satirizing by Eddie Murphy, who captures quite a bit of the absurdity of the book and movie’s premise, has been a good deal more popular than anything one might find there from the movie itself.1

acques Maritain, Fr. Stanley Murphy, Fr. Dan Walsh, and Penn Jones with Thomas Merton, OCSO

What few people know about Griffin is that in 1969 he was chosen by the Merton Legacy Trust to write the official biography of the Catholic monk and writer Thomas Merton. Merton had died mysteriously at a monastic conclave in Thailand on December 10, 1968. The trust had been set up in 1967 to handle Merton’s estate in the event of his death. Griffin and Merton had known one another since 1961.

The second of four children, Griffin was a man with a remarkable personal history. He was born in Dallas, Texas, in 1920 and raised in Fort Worth. His mother was a classical pianist and longtime piano teacher, and his father though professionally a wholesale grocery salesman was also an Irish tenor and radio personality. His artistic family imbued him with a love not just of music, but of literature. He had intrepidly gone off the France at the tender age of 15 in search of a classical education. He attended the Lycée Descartes, a secondary school in Tours, France. As his widow has written, he “completed studies in French and literature at the University of Poitiers, and then studied medicine at the École de Médecine.” As an intern at the Asylum of Tours, she reports further, he conducted experiments on the use of music as therapy for the criminally insane. He also received certificates, she tells us, in musical study from the Conservatoire de Fontainebleau, studying under renowned teachers. There he became a musicologist, specializing in the Gregorian chant. In that capacity he would later spend time as a musicologist at the Benedictine Abbey of Solesmes where he did more study of the Gregorian chant.2 That experience would provide the setting for his first novel, published many years later in 1952, entitled The Devil Rides Outside. He had become a Roman Catholic the previous year.3

World War II began while he was in France, and he purportedly worked with the French resistance army as a medic and helped evacuate Austrian Jews. Escaping France, according to his biographer Robert Bonazzi he joined the U.S. Army Air Force in 1941, serving for four years, 39 months of which were spent overseas. He was sent to the lonesome outpost of the Solomon Islands where he worked as something of an ethnographer with the local population. The experience would dramatically affect his health in a delayed-reaction fashion. Leaving the Army in 1946, he slowly began to go blind, the after-effect, according to his authorized biographer Bonazzi writing in 2018, of a severe concussion that he had received from a Japanese bomb.4 He would be completely blind from 1947 until 1957, when his sight miraculously returned.5 During his period of blindness, however, he would write five novels, only two of which, The Devil Rides Outside and Nuni, based on his South Sea experience, were published. Like Merton, he kept a journal, which at his death in 1980 had reached 20 volumes.6

In 1954, Griffin would suffer paralysis in both legs and numbness in both hands. That ailment was eventually diagnosed as spinal malaria, which had an eight-year incubation period, and then it was successfully treated with small doses of strychnine.7

Readers may well notice that these writing activities of Griffin that we have described hardly add up to a livelihood. Indeed, his financial situation would seem to have been precarious for many years. During the period of his blindness, he was apparently heavily dependent upon his parents. We learn from his widow that in the immediate years after emerging from his blindness, 1957 through 1960, he worked as a journalist, writing syndicated features for the International News Service and King Features.8

His primary source of income during this period seems to have been working for the Fort Worth-based Sepia magazine. The magazine may be described as somewhat short of respectable. Its owner, George Levitan, a Jewish man from Michigan, had moved to Fort Worth and had made his fortune salvaging and selling used plumbing parts. In 1950 he purchased the Good Publishing Company, which had started up in 1946, from its local founder, a Black man by the name of Horace J. Blackwell. Good Publishing produced several magazines, Bronze Thrills, Jive, Hep, Soul Confessions, and Sepia. The magazines targeted a Black audience, publishing lewd romance stories, sexual sagas, and bawdy pictures. Titles of Sepia articles included: “Exposed: Men Who Dress Like Women,” “Why Hollywood Stars like Negroes,” “The Inside Story of Black Pimps,” “Women Learn the Art of Teasing in School for Strippers” and “Are Chorus Girls Immoral?”

The April 1957 issue of Sepia had a malicious racist smear against the newly popular singer Elvis Presley under the headline, “How Negroes Feel About Elvis.” The magazine relayed a supposed rumor about something Elvis had said that was still being repeated in the 21st century. What Wikipedia has to say about that episode on its Sepia magazine page is worth repeating in its entirety for what it tells us about Griffin’s primary employer and the magazine that turned him into a national celebrity and something of a civil rights icon:

According to African American author Joyce Rochelle Vaughn in the preface of her book “Thirty Pieces of Silver: The Betrayal of Elvis Presley” an aunt who raised her had forcibly told her to never listen to Elvis Presley’s music because “Sepia” magazine had run an article in early 1957 in which he had been quoted as saying, in Boston, that the “only thing Negroes can do for me is buy my records and shine my shoes.” She then decided, forty years later, to undertake a full study and complete unmasking of falsely reported news surrounding his life and career. According to Ms. Vaughn, the truth about the invented slur lay in white liberals making money exploiting statements and falsifying others because so many whites during the era openly made stupid remarks against black people. So when a black radio station decided to play Elvis’ music and black people started acknowledging that they listened to and bought Elvis’ records, white liberals went into panic mode and the slur was invented.

“Jet” magazine sent its most prestigious writer, the late Louis Robinson, to the set of “Jailhouse Rock” to raise the matter with the then 22-year-old Presley and, after interviewing African American musicians like BB King, who knew Presley since his teen years, as well as Presley himself, he cleared him of all charges but the damage was done, the slur continuing to be utilized as late as in the first two decades of the 21st Century.

The false story about Elvis Presley in Sepia deceived Black readers and promoted racial unrest. Two years later Levitan would sponsor John Howard Griffin’s adventure of “going undercover” as a Negro in the Deep South.

At this point, a more critical examination of Griffin’s background, and particularly the primary source for it, the 2018 “authorized biography” by Robert Bonazzi, is in order. As we have seen, Bonazzi’s story of how Griffin sustained the severe concussion that supposedly produced Griffin’s delayed-reaction blindness is contradicted by other sources, including, apparently, Griffin himself. We should also point out that Bonazzi’s account, while the most dramatic, also appears to be the least plausible. After the serious fighting that had taken place on the main island of the Solomons, Guadalcanal, the area where Griffin was stationed had been well neutralized by early 1943. Bonazzi tells us, though, that from his job embedded with the Solomon Islanders, Griffin was transferred in 1945 to Morotai, some 2,000 miles to the west to work as a radio dispatcher where he happened to be on patrol “during the anticipated invasion.”

At that stage of the Pacific War, the Japanese were well past invading anywhere. Their invasion of Morotai had taken place early in 1942, shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The Americans had retaken it with a massive attack in 1944. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Bonazzi has the Army Air Force making a rather odd personnel move to put Griffin somehow in the line of Japanese fire. In fact, Bonazzi’s account of Griffin’s four years of military service is very sketchy, and when he is specific, his account is replete with such peculiarities. According to Bonazzi, Griffin was shipped out to Guadalcanal in 1942 as a radio operator. The major naval battle at Guadalcanal did not take place until November of that year and the American authorities did not declare the island to be secure until early February of 1943. The job that Griffin supposedly had there, playing music as a sort of disc jockey for the occupying forces, was far removed from any military activity, the sort of thing that takes place securely behind the fighting lines. After a year of that, Bonazzi tells us, Griffin volunteered as a “language specialist” in 1944 and spent a year in a village on one of the Solomon Islands.

The very telling term that Bonazzi scrupulously avoids using is “military intelligence.” Griffin’s work in the village which involved, among other things, befriending grand Chief John Vutha, is classic intelligence work. It’s hardly the sort of thing that one would usually get into as casually as Bonazzi describes it. What is more likely is that Griffin was given some preparation for it before he was shipped to the Solomon Islands and that would have been his purpose for going there in the first place.

Returning to the climactic event of Griffin’s military tour as Bonazzi recounts it, the unconscious Griffin was discovered in a trench the morning after the attack, and he did not regain consciousness “until days later.” Already, according to Bonazzi, Griffin realized that he had “lost most of his eyesight.”

At this point Bonazzi’s narrative turns really bizarre. For some reason, Griffin withheld this information from his doctors, and the doctors remained ignorant of Griffin’s loss of sight. One might well conclude that that Japanese bomb had also blown away some of the man’s ability to reason. Doctors are there to cure our ills. If Griffin, upon regaining consciousness, found that he had lost a good deal of his vision and it was getting worse daily, would he not have been greatly alarmed and would he have not had every reason to let the doctors know in hopes that they might do something about it? Instead, Bonazzi tells us, Griffin “played the role of the fully-recovered man.” Then Bonazzi contradicts himself, telling us that the doctors released him, even though they didn’t believe him, upon Griffin’s assurance that he would see a civilian eye specialist, although he had just finished telling us that Griffin had successfully concealed his vision problems from the military doctors. Bonazzi also leaves the impression that they released him from the Army by telling us in the very next sentence that, “Griffin’s separation papers were dated December 15, 1945, and he was shipped out to San Francisco.” No one there in the South Pacific would have had the authority, least of all military doctors, to release him from military service before the appointed time.

Griffin’s subsequent actions, per Bonazzi, are even more incredible. But first we must note another contradiction. “He lived most of 1945 at his parents’ home in Fort Worth,” he tells us in the very next paragraph. Something’s wrong here. That was supposedly the year of all his major military action in the Pacific, and Bonazzi just got through telling us that Griffin, “shipped out” from there in the middle of the last month of 1945. He also tells us that Griffin never claimed the medals that he had earned nor filed for any service benefits, having rejected war, and declaring himself to be a pacifist.

Pacifist or not, these actions make absolutely no sense for a war-wounded veteran who might be facing a lifetime of disability as a result. Besides the Veterans’ Administration hospital attention that he supposedly passed up on, Griffin also eschewed the very generous education benefits of the GI Bill, which went into effect in 1944. His studies in France had been interrupted by the war. His widow’s article for the Texas State Historical Association notwithstanding, he was not even close to having a college degree and his career prospects would appear to have been bleak, especially if he was losing his sight. According to Griffin’s authorized biographer, Bonazzi, though, he decided to return to France to study the Gregorian chant at a Benedictine monastery there, relying completely upon the generosity of his parents, who were not exactly wealthy.

These seem to be very much the actions of a person who was little concerned about where his next dollar was coming from. The impression that this is someone whose career skids had been greased for him by powerful people beyond his family is greatly enhanced by the over-the-top article that appeared in his hometown newspaper a month before the publication of his first novel in 1952. Right off the bat they tell us, “The New York Times had declared, ‘...It’s our bet that the book out of Texas that will make history this fall is one by a young, blind war veteran, John Howard Griffin, whose novel, ‘The Devil Rides Outside,’ has mightily impressed everyone who has seen advance proofs.” They tell us that no less a personage than the New York critic Clifton Fadiman writing in the Book-of-the-Month Club News called it, “A staggering novel...Griffin’s intense psychological analyses...recall Dostoyevsky or Pascal. The pure doctrine of asceticism has rarely been so effectively demonstrated in 20th Century fiction. Griffin’s baroque excesses are easy to ridicule, but—at least to this reviewer—they seem the excesses of an intense temperament and possibly of a notable literary talent.”10

After writing that four motion picture companies had requested copies of the manuscript to consider bidding on the rights to make a movie of it, the article continues in this gushing tone for column after column.

Despite the best efforts of the national tub thumpers, nothing much came of the book. No movie was made of it, and to anyone who has taken the time to read it, it’s easy to see why. The book is wordy in the extreme, lacks dramatic tension, and seems to go nowhere. Usually, in the case of books written in the first person as this one is, the reader naturally comes to like the narrator and to identify with him. It’s difficult in this instance. The young American man who first lives at the monastery for a few cold and miserable months while studying manuscripts and observing the daily routine comes across as rather shallow and sex obsessed. At the first opportunity, he has a liaison with a local matron, and because he later boasted about it, the scandal got around the small town and the talk forced her to leave the community. Later, when she surprisingly returns to seek medical attention, he fears that it is because she is pregnant, so we surmise that the sex they had was unprotected. He seems almost relieved to learn that her medical condition turns out to be terminal cancer. In another instance, when he is asked to escort to the train station a flirtatious Parisian woman nearer his own age with whom a couple of the local ladies have set him up for a group dinner, he arranges for the town’s licentious and talkative cab driver to drive them around while he has sex with her in the back seat.11

The central character of the book, other than the narrator, is a rather haughty and complicated upper-class woman who is his hostess after he escapes the physical ordeal of the unheated monastery. Her concerns—indeed her obsessions—seem to be so uniquely Catholic and small-town French that one must wonder what anyone could have possibly seen in the manuscript that could interest a general American movie audience for more than a minute.

In short, there seemed to have been something very artificial about the big build-up that The Devil Rides Outside was given. Griffin’s second novel, Nuni, based upon his Solomon Islands experience, was even more boring, and although the major publisher Houghton Mifflin put it out, it went nowhere. Like his first novel, Nuni is semi-autobiographical, but the protagonist, the sole survivor of an airplane crash living among primitive South Sea islanders, doesn’t actually marry one of the native women as Griffin did, but he does purchase a pre-pubescent girl.12 Griffin was 32 years old when he began to tutor his future wife, his mother’s prize piano student Elizabeth Ann Holland, who was 17 at the time.

[…] This is just an excerpt from the February 2023 Issue of Culture Wars magazine. To read the full article, please purchase a digital download of the magazine, or become a subscriber!

ENDNOTES FOR COMPLETE ARTLICLE

1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_LeJfn_qW0.

2 Elizabeth Griffin-Bonazzi, Texas State Historical Association, January 1, 1995, https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/griffin-john-howard. From the account of Robert Bonazzi, his biographer and later Griffin’s widow’s husband these educational claims are great exaggerations. He tells us that Griffin “audited literature classes at the University of Poitiers and attended the École de Médecine de Tours in 1938.” He would have been only 18 years old at the time. He says nothing about any study at or certificates from the Conservatoire de Fontainebleau. See Bonazzi’s Reluctant Activist: The Spiritual Life and Art of John Howard Griffin, TCU Press, 2018, p. 39.

3 Bonazzi, p. 74.

4 Bonazzi, pp. 43-44. Curiously, other accounts say his wartime concussion was suffered in an “accidental bomb explosion.” See William Jolesch, AP writer, “Blind Novelist Watches Supreme Court Session,” The Herald Sun (Durham, NC), October 21, 1956. Another AP story without a byline is more specific about the supposed accident, saying, “He suffered a concussion when a B24, loaded with bombs, exploded.” “Once Sightless Author Seeing World with Awe,” The Pomona (CA) Progress Bulletin, January 11, 1957. In still another account, the B24 is there, but it’s the airplane’s crash landing that caused Griffin’s injury leading to his loss of sight. See Irvin Farman, “Mansfield Veteran’s First Novel Attracting Widespread Response,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, September 12, 1952. A 1980 obituary says he was injured in an “air accident” and then again when the hospital in which he was recuperating was bombed. See Jordan Sollitto, “Author’s Journey Tested Racial Climate,” The Los Angeles Times, September 15, 1980. In his own account, Griffin wrote only that “bomb concussions (plural) had damaged my vision.” “Now I Can See,” The San Francisco Examiner, May 19, 1957.

5 His widow dates the commencement of his total blindness, however, to 1946. See Griffin-Bonazzi, Texas State Historical Association. But Griffin still had some vision in the spring of 1947 according to his own San Francisco Examiner series and to the biographer Bonazzi, p. 61. To show how slippery the facts about Griffin’s blindness can be, the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas that houses many of Griffin’s documents, says that the blow to the head that he suffered in the war caused him to be “struck blind while walking down the street one day in France.” https://norman.hrc.utexas.edu/fasearch/findingaid.cfm?eadid=00050&kw=john%20howard%20griffin.

6 Griffin-Bonazzi, Texas State Historical Association.

7 Bonazzi, p. 91.

8 Elizabeth Griffin-Bonazzi.

9 Justice Payne Publishing, 2017.

10 Irvin Farman, “Mansfield Veteran’s First Novel Attracting Widespread Response,” Fort Worth Star-Telegraph, September 12, 1952.

11 Like the author himself, his first-person character is a chain smoker, as we gather from the frequent mention of his enjoyment of or craving for cigarettes, but at least Griffin doesn’t have him lighting up after his backseat conquest. The character, also like Griffin, has a relapse from a previous bout with malaria. Although the story is derived from Griffin’s experience at the monastery in 1947, the young man has no problem with his eyesight, though.

12 Griffin-Bonazzi tells us in her Texas Historical Association article that the Vatican gave him permission to marry a second time. We have not seen the question addressed as to whether that second marriage was legal in the eyes of Texas law or if they even knew of the existence of that other wife. Apparently, Griffin simply abandoned her.

13 Ernest Sharpe, Jr., “The Man Who Changed His Skin,” American Heritage, February 1989. https://www.americanheritage.com/man-who-changed-his-skin#5.

Curiously, in his biography of Griffin, Bonazzi makes no mention of this medical explanation of the sight restoration. He tells us only that after the first glimmering of sight return an unnamed specialist prescribed a blood-circulation stimulant, but without any particularly hopeful prognosis, since the cause of the initial loss of sight was unknown. Bonazzi does tell us that the miraculous return of Griffin’s sight was covered by the national press, including Time, Newsweek, and the AP and Griffin fulfilled other requests to write about it himself. Bonazzi, pp. 109-110. Further complicating the story of Griffin’s sight restoration, one Griffin obituary suggested that it resulted from “a series of treatments to relieve scar tissue from the nerves of his brain” in 1956. That article also said that Griffin’s diabetes was a contributor to his blindness. See Donna Darovich and Doug Clarke, “John Griffin FW Author Dead at 60,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, September 9, 1980.

14 Black Like Me, New American Library, 2003, p. 10. Black Like Me was first published by Houghton Mifflin in 1960. This and subsequent page references are to the New American Library version.

15 Black Like Me, p. 126.

16 Darovich and Clarke. Bonazzi went a bit farther in describing Griffin’s cooperation with the U.S. authorities in tying the agitators to Soviet agents in the 2009 book that he edited, Available Light: Exile in Mexico: Essays and Photographs of John Howard Griffin (Wings Press), than he did in his 2018 biography. In that account as with the obituary, Griffin’s sleuthing skills come across as quite extraordinary for a mere civilian.

17 Hugh Turley and David Martin, The Martyrdom of Thomas Merton: An Investigation, p. 215. For a survey of Merton’s critical writing on the American press, see David Martin, “Is the American Press the Enemy of the People?”, January 18, 2018. https://www.dcdave.com/article5/180118.htm.

18 Black Like Me, p. 4. That FBI Dallas office would play a crucial role in “investigating” the assassination of President John F. Kennedy some four years later. In contrast to Griffin, Merton was under surveillance by the FBI and by the CIA. See Robert Grip, “The Merton Files: Washington Watches the Monk,” The Merton Seasonal, Vol. 11, Winter 1986.

19 It is also of some interest that in most of the photographs we have seen of Griffin during his blindness period he is wearing what we can best describe as opaque welding goggles. They would appear to turn even one with 20/20 vision into a sightless person.

20 In Available Light: Exile in Mexico, Bonazzi wrote that it was three years and that he was wounded. p. 45.

21 Kevin Connolly, “Exposing the Colour of Prejudice,” October 25, 2009, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8318628.stm; Yesterday in History, “What Happened When a White Man Became Black in Mid-20th Century America,” December 17, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfcBxGpuBhY.

22 Turley and Martin, p. 242.

23 Nelson, “The Mysterious Death of Thomas Merton,” March 22, 2018, https://www.lewrockwell.com/2018/03/phillip-f-nelson/the-mysterious-death-of-thomas-merton/.

24 Penn Jones, Jr., Forgive My Grief, Volume I: A Critical Review of the Warren Commission Report on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Midlothian Mirror, Inc., 1966, unnumbered preface page, https://archive.org/details/ForgiveMyGriefPennJonesJr/Forgive_My_Grief_01/.

25 John Howard Grifffin (Robert Bonazzi, editor), Follow the Ecstasy: The Hermitage Years of Thomas Merton, Orbis Books, 1993, p. 1. The year of the first visit comes from Bonazzi, Follow the Ecstasy, p. 263.

26 Thomas Merton, Turning Toward the World: The Pivotal Years, March 24, 1962.

27 Thomas Merton and John Howard Griffin, Wholeness: The Visual World of Thomas Merton, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1970, p. 36.

28 Merton’s father, who was from New Zealand, and mother, who was from the United States, had met in art school in Paris. Merton was born and spent most of his formative years in France, later going to a boarding school in England before going one year to Cambridge University and then completing his education at Columbia University.

29 Follow the Ecstasy, p. viii.

30 John OLoughlin, McDuff Lives! The Life and Untimely Death of Thomas F. O’Loughlin, Jr., Screaming Ospreys.com, 2021, pp. 30-31.

31 Available Light: Exile in Mexico, pp. 103-109.