A Multiple Biography Tracks The Connections Among Four Of The 20th Century's Most Influential Catholic Writers—Boston Globe
Author: Laura Claridge
Date: May 18, 2003
Page: H8
Section: Books
In the late 1970s, the writings of social activist Dorothy Day and, especially, the Cistercian monk Thomas Merton overspilled campus religious centers and became common reading fodder at student unions and at the front stands of bookstores; colleges hugged both revolutionaries to themselves and declared them thoughtful rebel role models. As a passionate young convert to Catholicism, I devoured books by and about these two pacifist heroes, latecomers to Rome themselves. Around the same time, I discovered that it was almost impossible to go to graduate school in English literature without encountering at least one professor gone mad over Walker Percy, and another hung up, students would mutter, on that crazy Flannery O'Connor. Sometimes these two writers appeared on the same syllabus, but O'Connor's farouche Southern Gothic contrasted too sharply with the cool elegance of Mr. Percy to ensure a merger of pedagogical lusts, in spite of the novelists' proximate time and location.
Now, several decades later, Paul Elie, an editor at Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, has set about entwining these four Catholic voices, emphasizing the connections between their individual texts and their religious quests. "The Life You Save May Be Your Own" is an ambitious, thoughtful, comprehensive, and mostly satisfying mosaic of at least three, arguably four, major cultural influences on the mid and late 20th century. And in light of the recent success of such books as Po Bronson's bestseller, "What Should I Do with My Life?," the theme of secular and spiritual pilgrimage resounds with a large audience these days. For my money, Elie's portrayal of Merton is the most finely nuanced - no surprise, given the near cottage industry of Merton scholarship Elie had at his disposal. He reveals Merton, in his life as Brother Louis, struggling with everything from the temptations of the flesh (he lost) to the narcissism that keen intellect often entails. Most important, he does a strong job of illuminating Merton's fidelity to the Roman Catholic tradition (especially of meditation and mystical revelation) while demonstrating the monk's belief that people are called variously to the divine and are responsible for answering in their own way.
Day is a more problematic figure than Merton, whose failings form part of his charm. Day (with Peter Maurin) founded the Catholic Worker, a radical newspaper, and established soup kitchens and houses of hospitality under the same aegis. Like Merton, she wrote an autobiography, "The Long Loneliness," which detailed her conversion from radical communist to Catholic socialist. Day's primary writerly outlet was the column she penned for her newspaper, but she also devoted much time to correspondence, limiting herself to postcards.
Elie writes perceptively and eloquently about the differences in their literary accounts of "sin and regeneration": "Day . . . bred on Dickens and Tolstoy, is Victorian in her reticence, untroubled by the need to smooth over some things and leave others out. Merton, a devotee of the modernists and especially James Joyce, writes as if suppression of specifics is a violation of the pattern he is creating, a betrayal of life and art alike." In one sense, Merton and Day are easy subjects; after all, they make Christian pilgrimage the very substance of their lives. Their writing is necessarily an extension of that exploration, and for the most part, their art is exhortatory.
O'Connor and Percy, on the other hand, were literary folk first, and in spite of their popularity and critical acclaim, neither sustained the kind of public attention lavished on Merton and Day. Nor were O'Connor's and Percy's spiritual quests as clearly to the fore of their lives - they privileged literature with a capital L ahead of the gospel. O'Connor, the only Catholic-from-birth among the group of four, did intend her writing to open readers to God's presence. As Elie points out, both she and Merton were influenced early in their careers by Jacques Maritain's "Art and Scholasticism," especially by Maritain's proposition that the properly motivated artist serves the Lord as faithfully as a priest. O'Connor's stories (one of which gives Elie his title) and two novels show holiness in the ungodly and hollowness in those we expect to represent the good. How much her writing informed or was affected by the pilgrimages of Elie's other figures remains unclear to me. Even her correspondence was rarely directed to or from them; at best, Sally Fitzgerald or Caroline Gordon functioned as conduits for its infrequent dissemination to Percy or Day or, at least on one occasion, to Merton, all of whom admired O'Connor's spiritual viands.
The religious milieu of Percy, physician turned writer, is quite distinct from the rest of Elie's company, for all that Percy was yet another convert to the faith. Percy came from one of those tragic, illustrious Southern families where every generation provided a predictable suicide. The cost of alienation and ennui courses through his works, from "The Moviegoer" to "The Thanatos Syndrome," culminating in the conclusion that spiritual rescue is the only one worth pursuing. In Percy's most redemptive novel, "The Second Coming," salvation occurs in human relationships, akin to O'Connor's fungible theology, where pilgrimage consists of seeing God instantiated among the least attractive of her brethren. (Similarly, Day wrote an eloquent reflection on worshiping the immanent God through loving the unlovable: "Room for Christ: Seeing Christ in the Unsightly.")
But Percy's self-conscious homage to Thomas Mann places his work at a far remove from O'Connor's, in spite of their shared emphasis on grace. In the end, the novelist/semiologist seems to have had but slight impact on the spiritual voyages of the other members of the School of the Holy Ghost (so named by Gordon). His writing feels distant from Merton's and Day's spiritual commitments, and his pilgrimage for meaning seems more generic to writers in general, a working out in fiction of his personal preoccupations. Of course, unlike the other figures, Percy came to the world of the spirit after leaving that of medicine.
It is heterodox for those in the know to avow their interest in the divine. It is also not very fashionable and certainly socially risky for a New York intellectual to write what is, in more than one respect, a very large book on the ways that four significant mid-20th-century Catholic writers wrote their way to personal salvation. Free of irony, closer to earnestness (though too sophisticated for that sin), "The Life You Save" is an often compelling, intriguing, at moments glorious marriage of literature, religion, and celebrity. Its heartfelt personal conclusion echoes something that Thomas Merton wrote in "No Man Is an Island": "Each one of us has some kind of vocation. . . . For each one of us, there is only one thing necessary: to fulfill our own destiny, according to God's will, to be what God wants us to be."
