Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century, by John Loughery and Blythe Randolph. Published by Simon & Schuster.
Dorothy Day was disdainful of the inertia of the Catholic Church in the U.S.A. in the face of mounting inequality and increasingly mechanised and unethical warfare. Such disdain led to a very antique solution. A Medieval House of Hospitality in New York for the exponentially increasingly impoverished and homeless population, influenced by the vision of Peter Maurin, a French vagabond who chanced into Dorothy. This House of Hospitality (which originated from the paper, Catholic Worker) was of its time; it helped to alleviate the worst excesses of the Great Depression. It also helped to provide a refuge for conscientious objectors, who were still sent away for their refusal to draft during World War II. It was part of a sustained vision for a humane world, in opposition to warfare and the idea that a military government could be expected to reliably alleviate poverty, which also included farming communes.
This story is well-known, and telling it risks cliché, or consigning this difficult struggle to the annals of grisly twentieth century (American) history. We needed Houses of Hospitality then: now, especially in the U.K., we have a benefits system which ensures that nobody needs Dorothy Day’s fiery and urban brand of voluntary poverty. Yet so much of the latest biography of Dorothy Day – written by John Loughery and Blythe Randolph – places her squarely in the maelstrom of the twenty-first century; in conflicts which have simply not been resolved yet. Her endless struggles for racial equality are skilfully and presciently highlighted in the book; she persistently and forcefully asked why there so few black Catholic priests, and was part of a committee lambasting anti-Semitism before World War II. She had a fierce dispute even with some in her House of Hospitality in New York City – one of her fellow residents and community members called her a ‘nigger-lover’ because of her profound and pioneering generosity to the black community in New York. On the question of racial discrimination, she was at odds with so many around her, even Catholic writers, like Hilaire Belloc, who influenced the Catholic Worker so profoundly.
That Dorothy Day’s life matters now, and her struggles are unfinished (she was also an anti-nuclear campaigner, and nuclear warheads emphatically persist), is made alive by this timely and meticulous biography. Nor is Day’s struggle solely “American”. We learn, in countless ways, that Dorothy was a committed Anglophile, and that her ideas and dynamism were charged with interactions with English writers. W.H. Auden, of all people, rescued the New York Catholic Worker from financial ruin, and Dorothy corresponded with Aldous Huxley, sharing his fear of a modern society in which true humanity is sanitised away. The relationship is one of the many surprising relationships that the two biographers draw attention to, informing us that Huxley and Day were in “full agreement about prayer as an act of mortification”.
Thus, for those in the U.K. energised by Day’s message, this biography brings Day’s vision across the Atlantic and pinpoints its enduring relevance to the conflicts of today. This is aided by the extensive research of the biographers, which leaves no stone unturned in Dorothy’s early life. A harrowed incident in Dorothy Day’s Greenwich Village days recalls an Augustine-like moment in her journey towards faith, one that Day rightly avoids in her autobiography The Long Loneliness, in which she witnesses the heroin-induced death of one of her accomplices. However, while the biography beautifully relates the full intellectual and political history of Day’s life, I do find it difficult to reconstruct what daily life at the New York Catholic Worker must have actually been like. Namely, we don’t get a sense of how Dorothy Day’s day took shape, and how New York Catholic Worker – at its less intense moments – was lived. This is slightly frustrating to someone with such an enduring commitment to a Catholic Worker community in London. Yet perhaps we must seek this elsewhere, and embrace how deeply pertinent this biography makes Dorothy Day.
Squidditas 