The abbey at Monte Cassino is situated atop a rocky hill about eighty miles south of Rome and was founded in 529 by St. Benedict of Nursia. It was there that the Benedictine order established the principles of Western monasticism. From Monte Cassino, monks went out and set up monasteries across the Christian world. Generations of scribes labored in the abbey’s library to copy texts and preserve artifacts that dated to antiquity. According to “Monte Cassino,” a history by Matthew Parker, by the start of the Second World War the monastery’s collection had grown to forty thousand manuscripts, including the majority of the writings of Tacitus, Cicero, Horace, Virgil, and Ovid. While the monastery’s perch on top of fifteen hundred feet of rock provided security, its location, near the main road between Naples and Rome, made the structure an attractive strategic asset. The abbey has been sacked many times: by the Longobards in 581, the Saracens in 884, and by Napoleon nearly a millennium later. Each time, it was rebuilt grander than before. And with each reconstruction the abbey took on more of the characteristics of a citadel.
From November, 1943, to May, 1944, the hill on which the abbey stood was at the center of one of the largest and bloodiest battles of the Second World War. Monte Cassino was a crucial part of the Gustav Line, a string of fortified German defenses that bisected Italy. In anticipation of the Allied push toward Rome, Hitler ordered that the Gustav Line be upgraded to “fortress strength.” Seeing the opportunity for a propaganda victory, the Nazis helped the monks box up many of the abbey’s treasures and transfer them to safety before the fighting began. Most of the monks then fled. The Allied command, believing that the Germans were using the abbey as a garrison and ammunition dump, made the controversial decision to bomb Monte Cassino. On February 15, 1944, American B-17s, B-25s, and B-26s dropped more than four hundred tons of explosives on the monastery. (Film of the bombing can be seen on YouTube.) Hundreds of civilians who had taken refuge there were killed. A handful of monks and other survivors left the abbey the next day. The fighting continued for another three months before a group of Polish soldiers planted their nation’s flag among the ruins of the monastery, signaling an Allied victory.
One of the American airmen who participated in the bombing of Monte Cassino was a young radio operator and tail gunner from Florida named Walter M. Miller, Jr. Miller, who enlisted in the Army after the attack on Pearl Harbor, flew on more than fifty combat missions in B-25 Mitchells above the Mediterranean region and the Balkans. Following the war, he got married, studied engineering at the University of Texas, and converted to Catholicism. In the fifties, he began publishing stories and novellas in Amazing Stories, Galaxy, Astounding Science Fiction, and other magazines_._ Miller also wrote scripts for the popular television show “Captain Video and His Video Rangers.” The list of writers for “Captain Video” includes some of the biggest names in midcentury science fiction: Arthur C. Clarke, James Blish, Isaac Asimov, and Jack Vance.
Miller is best known for the only novel he published in his lifetime, “A Canticle for Leibowitz.” Composed of a trilogy of novellas that originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction,_ _”Canticle,” which was released in 1959, has never been out of print, selling more than two million copies. While it hasn’t attracted the following enjoyed by “The Lord of the Rings” or even “Dune,” it remains a hugely influential book and a landmark of post-apocalyptic fiction. Along with Ray Bradbury’s “The Martian Chronicles,” “A Canticle for Leibowitz” was one of the first novels to escape from the science-fiction ghetto and become a staple of high-school reading lists. Its legacy can be seen in the works of Gene Wolfe, Margaret Atwood, and many other speculative-fiction authors who came after him, as well as in the current flood of end-of-the-world novels, TV shows, and movies.
The book’s first novella, “Fiat Homo” (“Let there be Man”), is set at a monastery in the Utah desert some six hundred years after a nuclear holocaust known as the Flame Deluge. The war caused a backlash against learning and knowledge, called the Simplification, which wiped out almost all traces of civilization. Most of the people on earth are illiterate. Many are deformed by radiation. The monks who reside in the monastery are devoted to honoring the memory of Isaac Edward Leibowitz, a Jewish scientist at Los Alamos who was martyred for his efforts to safeguard scientific knowledge in the aftermath of the conflict. They collect and transcribe the “Leibowitz Memorabilia,” including shopping lists, technical documents, and circuit diagrams that they cannot even begin to understand. The protagonist of “Fiat Homo” is a bumbling but well-intentioned novice named Francis who, during a Lenten fast in the desert, accidentally discovers the fallout shelter Leibowitz used. This discovery results in Leibowitz’s elevation to sainthood. Francis makes the treacherous journey to New Rome to witness the canonization and is killed by mutant tribesmen on his way back to the abbey.
The second novella, “Fiat Lux” (“Let there be Light”), takes place hundreds of years later, in the thirty-second century. Like most middle parts of trilogies, it is the least compelling—”the long belly of a dachshund, slung ... between two pairs of sturdy legs,” as Peter Matthiessen characterized the second volume of his Watson trilogy. After more than a millennium, mankind is on the cusp of emerging from the dark ages brought about by the Flame Deluge. Hostility is brewing among the city-states (Denver, Texarkana, Monterey) that have risen out of the former American nation. A prominent scientist named Thon Taddeo, a latter-day Newton or Einstein, visits the monastery to investigate its holdings. He is astonished to find that one of the monks has created a working electric light, which is powered by a sort of treadmill. Taddeo believes the Leibowitz Memorabilia will lead him to breakthroughs in his work, but the abbot refuses to let Taddeo take items from the library back to Texarkana. Meanwhile, the abbey narrowly avoids being used as a military base for an attack on Denver.
The final part, “Fiat Voluntas Tua” (“Let Thy Will Be Done”), describes the beginning of another nuclear war, this time between the world’s two dominant powers, the Atlantic Confederacy and the Asian Coalition. It is the year 3781 and civilization has not only recovered but has developed beyond the level it was at in the mid-twentieth century. Nation-states once again have nuclear arsenals. Space travel between earth and distant colonies has become common. There is even a communication device in the abbey that is a combination of Google Translate and Google Voice. As the war begins, the abbot Dom Zerchi, instructs a group of monks to flee the earth for a colony near Alpha Centauri. They take the Leibowitz Memorabilia with them. After they depart, the abbey, which has stood for nearly two thousand years, is demolished by an atomic bomb. The abbot is crushed in the ruins. The final passages of the book are an eerie imagining of the Earth without mankind:
Every generation conjures its own apocalypses and dystopias. They give us an index of the collective anxieties of the era. In the decades before the First World War, “invasion stories“ such as H. G. Wells’s “The War of the Worlds” populated the best-seller lists in Britain and the United States. Yevgeny Zamyatin’s “We” and George Orwell’s “1984” were fuelled by widespread fears of authoritarian governments during the first half of the twentieth century. Postwar American science fiction is overflowing with thinly disguised freak-outs about Communism and nuclear Armageddon. More recently, we have seen a plethora of books that fret about economic collapse, the spread of infectious diseases, and the destruction of the environment. Colson Whitehead’s “Zone One,” Karen Thompson Walker’s “The Age of Miracles,” Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, Edan Lepucki’s “California,” and Emily St. John Mandel’s “Station Eleven” are all part of this wave. Looming is Junot Díaz’s work-in-progress, which combines alien invasion with viral illness and an overheated planet. (Part of the novel was published as the short story “Monstro“ in The New Yorker in 2012.)
“A Canticle for Leibowitz” sits squarely at the heart of the subgenre of novels about nuclear holocaust. (Miller’s preferred term was “Megawar.”) The subject was enough of an obsession for Miller that he later edited, with Martin Greenberg, an anthology called “Beyond Armageddon,” which featured post-apocalyptic tales by Bradbury, Clarke, Harlan Ellison, J. G. Ballard, and many others. In his introduction to the collection, Miller noted that the stories shared a nostalgia for things that have been lost. “Post-Megawar stories are about an afterlife,” Miller wrote. “Survivors don’t really live in such a world; they haunt it.”
Beyond being a repository for his fears about the bomb, “A Canticle for Leibowitz” was a means for Miller to work through the trauma and guilt that haunted him from his wartime experiences, especially the bombing of the abbey at Monte Cassino. By his own admission, the Miller did not become fully aware of the driving force behind his novel until he was working on its third part. “I was writing the first version of the scene where Zerchi lies half buried in the rubble,” Miller recalled. “Then a light bulb came on over my head: ‘Good God, is this the abbey at Monte Cassino? . . . What have I been writing?’”
Within the cathedral of post-apocalyptic and dystopian literature, there ought to be a small sanctum reserved for books produced out of the author’s personal experience with cataclysmic events. Other works that fit into this niche include Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five,” which was inspired by the writer having witnessed the fire-bombing of Dresden, and “The Forever War,” Joe Haldeman’s 1974 novel, which drew directly on his tour of duty in Vietnam. (A lesser case could also be made for Nevil Shute’s “On the Beach,” which was published two years before “Canticle.” Shute was an engineer who worked for the Royal Navy’s Directorate of Miscellaneous Weapons Development during the Second World War. He later covered the Normandy landings as a writer for the Ministry of Defense.)
A second link between these works by Miller, Vonnegut, and Haldeman, is humor. While a post-apocalyptic novel set in a monastery may not strike most readers as rich terrain for comedy, “A Canticle for Leibowitz” is a surprisingly funny book, in small ways and large. Even Miller’s basic premise—that the Catholic Church, like a cockroach, cannot be killed by a nuclear war—made me chuckle throughout. Miller proves himself a dab hand at slapstick: Francis, the protagonist of “Fiat Homo” is as hapless as one of the Three Stooges, and Thon Taddeo, the brilliant scientist in “Fiat Lux” is a stuffed-shirt academician who would be at home in a David Lodge novel. In “Fiat Voluntas Tua,” Miller satirizes the political doublespeak with the rhetoric that obscures the start of the book’s nuclear war. Overlying it all is the irony at the core of so many apocalyptic fictions: that self-destruction is an immutable part of the human condition. In “A Canticle for Leibowitz,” the knowledge that the monks faithfully preserved ultimately contributes to the obliteration of the world.
“Canticle” has aged well, but for many contemporary readers the book will have a glaring flaw: a nearly total lack of women. Of course, setting your novel in a monastery does limit the opportunities to include female characters, but even among the scenes set outside the walls of the abbey, there is only one significant female character: a two-headed mutant who ends up being a kind of blessed virgin. (The old Madonna-mutant paradox.) Readers could reasonably assume that female members of the species did not survive the first nuclear holocaust. Their absence is a sign of a deeper problem in the book: there is a conspicuous absence of physical and emotional intimacy. Miller is grappling with Big Questions, but I occasionally wished for scenes in which the pressures of those big questions would manifest themselves in private moments of comfort between characters. Those kinds of intimacies are a more common feature of the recent crop of apocalyptic novels.
After the success of “A Canticle for Leibowitz,” Miller withdrew into Salinger-like seclusion in Florida. His longtime agent, Don Congdon (who also represented Bradbury), said that Miller was his only client whom he never met in person. When Miller wrote a fan letter to fellow science-fiction author and Florida resident, Lucius Shepard, he added the following post script: “This does not mean I want to meet you.” Miller didn’t publish any new fiction from 1959 until his death, almost four decades later. (“Beyond Armageddon,” which he co-edited, appeared in 1985. Collections of his stories from the fifties were also re-issued.)
“Walt was deeply depressed by post-traumatic stress disorder and had been for half a century,’’ Joe Haldeman told the Washington Post. ‘‘I don’t know how many people he felt responsible for killing, but it was a lot.’’ Miller took his own life in January of 1996. Police found him sitting in a chair on his lawn, with a gunshot wound to the head. Miller himself had placed a 911 call before pulling the trigger. No major newspaper printed an obituary for him, apparently bowing to the wishes of Miller’s family to respect his privacy.
Miller had spent years working on a sequel to “Canticle.” In the nineteen-eighties, Congdon brokered a six-figure deal for the book with Bantam, based on sixty pages. Miller worked hard but struggled to finish the manuscript. ‘‘He couldn’t get rid of it—it was basically depression and booze,’’ said Congdon. Miller managed to compose more than five hundred pages, which amounted to nine-tenths of the projected book. At Congdon’s request, and with Miller’s approval, the respected science fiction author Terry Bisson agreed to edit and complete the manuscript. Bisson recalls Miller saying that “any idiot with a sense of humor can finish the book.” The book, “Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman,” was released in 1997 to very mixed reviews. Miller, sadly, did not live to see it published, but his début still haunts the world, just as the bombing of Monte Cassino haunted him.
