Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty: An Intimate Portrait of My Grandmother Hardcover – January 24, 2017

Dorothy Day is an interesting historical figure, the woman that founded The Catholic Worker, which was initially a combined newspaper, homeless shelter, and soup kitchen. I once subscribed to The Catholic Worker, and since it cost one penny per issue, you couldn’t beat the price. I saw this biography available and snapped it up from Net Galley; thanks go to them and Scribner, who provided me with a DRC in exchange for an honest review. This title was published in late January and is now available for purchase.I always had a difficult time getting a handle on what The Catholic Worker stood for. The name suggests radicalism, and indeed, Day was red-baited during the McCarthy era. Day was a Catholic convert and a strong believer in sharing everything that she had with those that had nothing. She worked tirelessly and selflessly, and despite often living an impoverished existence somehow made it into her eighties before she died, an iconic crusader who became prominent when almost no women did so independently—though she was no feminist, and believed that wives should submit to husbands. Since her demise, speculation has arisen as to whether she might be canonized.What was that huge crash? Was it a marble statue being knocked the hell off its pedestal? Hennessy takes on the life and deeds of her famous grandmother with both frankness and affection. In the end, I came away liking Day a good deal less than I had when I knew little about her. Her tireless effort on behalf of the poor included anything and everything her very young daughter had in this world, and at one point she remarked that she felt unable to ask others to embrace a life of poverty if her child wasn’t also a part of that. It was a different time, one with no Children’s Protective Service to come swooping down and note that the child was sleeping in an unheated building in the midst of frigid winter; that there was no running water, since the building was a squat; that the only food that day was a single bowl of thin soup and perhaps a little hard bread donated from the day-old stores of local bakeries; that even small, personal treasures and clothing given the child by other relatives and friends would either be stolen by homeless denizens or even given away by her mother, a woman with the maternal instincts of an alley cat. Day did a lot of good for a lot of people, and no one can say she did it for her own material well being, but she more or less ruined her daughter’s life, and even when grown, Tamar’s painful social anxiety and panic attacks derailed her efforts to build a normal life for herself.Nevertheless, the immense contribution that Day made at a time when the only homeless shelters were ones with a lot of rules and sometimes religious requirements cannot be overlooked. She is said to have had a commanding presence, endless energy (and the mood swings that accompany such energy in some people), and a mesmerizing speaking voice. Day’s physician also treated the great Cesar Chavez, and reflected that their personalities were a lot alike.I confess I was frustrated in reading this memoir, because I really just wanted the ideas behind the Catholic Worker laid out for me along with the organizational structure. Was the whole thing just whatever Day said it was at the moment, or was there democratic decision making? I never really found out, although I gained a sense that the chaotic events shown in the memoir reflected an unarticulated organizational chaos as well. This is a thing that sometimes happens with religious organizations; the material underpinnings are tossed up in the air for supernatural intervention, and the next thing they know, there’s an ugly letter from the IRS.Only about half of this memoir was actually about Day; my sense was that the author did a lot of genealogical research and then decided to publish the result. The first twenty percent of the book is not only about Day’s various romantic entanglements; a significant portion of the text is mini-biographies of those men, and frankly, I wasn’t interested in them. I wanted to know about Day. Later I would be frustrated when long passages would be devoted to other relatives and their lives. Inclusion of daughter Tamar was essential, because Dorothy and Tamar were very close all their lives and shared a lot, and so in some ways to write about one was to tell about the other. But I didn’t need to know about Day’s in-laws, her many and several grandchildren, and so on. I just wanted to cut to the chase, but given the nature of the topic, also didn’t want to read Day’s own writing, which has a religious bias that doesn’t interest me.Those with a keen interest in Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker may want to read this, because not many books are available that discuss her life and work. On the other hand, I don’t advise paying full cover price. Get it free or at a deep discount, unless you are possessed of insatiable curiosity and deep pockets.

Dorothy Day had a rather idiosyncratic life. She started out as a reporter on one of the many issue oriented papers in the early part of the twentieth century and that in New York managed to associate with a mix of the bohemian and left wing crowds of the day. She was involved with several different men, having first an abortion for a pregnancy and then giving birth out of wed-lock on what may have been the second. After that she converted to Catholicism and aggressively pursued the Social Justice movement popular at the time. This included a focus on seeking better conditions for labor and immigrants.The book by Hennessy, her granddaughter, is a well written and somewhat balanced presentation of her life. Now for Day there have been a multiplicity of biographies as well as autobiographies so that one approaching Hennessy from that perspective will see a great deal of repetition of events. But Hennessy presents them in a fresh and readily readable manner.One may ask why Day still plays an interesting role. First, it is the movement amongst Social Justice activists in the Catholic Church to seek Sainthood for her. Support is coming from many directions, such as Dolan in New York and Francis in Rome. This book by Hennessy is not a plea for Sainthood but a balanced presentation of her life. The second reason is that Day was a Social Justice advocate and as such one can examine her life and through it try to obtain a better understanding of just what that entails.Now from my personal perspective I approached Day tangentially. In writing about my grandmother, Hattie Kruger, a Socialist in New York, a Suffragette, a woman who rand for Congress in 1918 and for New York State Office with Eugene Debs in 1920, I found that Hattie was arrested with Day and the two were in the first batch of women arrested in November 1917 by order of President Wilson and sent to Occoquan Prison where they were brutalized and force fed, again by orders of Wilson. Thus my grandmother spent time with Day and thus I wondered what type of person she was. Furthermore Day lived three blocks from my Grandmother on State Island and my parents are buried a few grave sites from Day in the same Cemetery. So much for coincidences!I was writing a piece on my Grandmother and her time as a Suffragette. I especially was focused on her time being arrested under the direct orders of Woodrow Wilson, that misogynistic, racist, anti-Semite, anti-Catholic, all around good guy. And we worry about Robert E. Lee, but I digress. Wilson hated these women walking around with signs asking for the right to vote. After all, he was a Virginian, a man, and more importantly the President. So off with their heads, or the next best thing was to arrest them and ship them off to prison. Get them past a friendly judge, and then to Occoquan Prison, now Lorton. Throw them in cells, host then down, let them starve! Yes indeed a real nice fellow Wilson was. After all he had just gotten us into WW I, sent a few hundred thousand to France, no uniforms though, but what the heck, let them figure out how to deal with the French snows.My Grandmother was in the first batch of women on that cold November day thrown into the back of the Black Marias, the police wagons. There were no Paddy Wagons in DC, not enough Irish. Along with her was a young lady called Dorothy Day. I had originally thought Day was there as a Suffragette. Not really. She was sent down as a reporter to cover the protest for her New York newspaper. She just happened to "be on the corner when the bus went by" so to speak. She became an "accidental Suffragette". Now Day recalls but one of the people with her and Day recalls that they joyfully discussed literature in the prison. Day at this time seems to have been more interested in the "adventure" of the moment and somewhat apart from the underlying cause, the right to vote for women. That surprised me, at least until I discovered a bit more about Day.Days life during the teens and twenties was somewhat that of a libertine. In Day's writing and in that of Hennessy there are no holds barred regarding this period. One could surmise that this period is a bit like that of Augustine of Hippo, who took his concubine to Italy to study, abandoned her, then let his child loose, and then his son died. Augustine then returned to Hippo and had a career writing against the likes of the Donatists and Pelagians. The theme may have some parallel.What did this "accidental Suffragette" do after her exposure to this world? It seems that she found God in the Catholic Church. Like many converts I have known, my mother having been one, they often move aggressively into their new found faith, and accept it in all its deepest dimensions. For Day is was a move which led to the founding of the Catholic Worker, a rather left wing but "Catholic" weekly. It focused on helping the oppressed, especially during the Depression period. Day indicates that the naming was in contradistinction to that of the Daily Worker, the paper of the Communist Party.She then was accompanied by a French intellect and wanderer who convinced her to leverage this paper into a full blown mission, a mission to the poor and homeless, for which there were many in the 1930s. She soon found herself at the center of a movement, dedicated to this new found faith and its focus on human equality and justice.By the 1940s she had also become an avowed pacifist and was strongly opposed the US entry into WW II, especially after Pearl Harbor. In the 1950s, she vehemently opposed the use of nuclear weapons and the execution of the Rosenbergs. By the 1960s she had a multiplicity of "farms" and similar places where people assembled and had what we called "Retreats", which were week-long "spiritual" get-togethers where they contemplated and listened to religious lectures. During this period she strongly opposed the Vietnam War, was pro-integration, and supported the farm workers actions and other similar equal rights movements.She developed a wide cadre of admirers and fellow movement supporters ranging from labor leaders to religious figures such as Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk. By the 1970s, in her later years, she saw a slow reduction of many of these ventures, especially as she aged and was in poor health.There is often comparison of Day to such figures as Francis of Assisi and others yet one can see Francis as the founder of a sustained Order of Friars who had a substantial impact on Catholic teaching. It is not clear what the sustained influence of Day will be. But it is worth the while to see through the eyes of her grand daughter what Day did, why, and to examine the consequences of her efforts. As with Ms. Hennessy, I also look back in awe to some of the actions of my grandmother, and the event that led to the passing of these people as ships in the night.

Intimate, authentic, challengingKate Hennessy's book is not only a portrait of her grandmother, Dorothy Day, but also a moving account of the life of her mother, Tamar. The richness of their relationship, the calling of the work of the Catholic Worker and the joys, struggles and beauties make this a book to savor.If this is the first book that you are to read on Dorothy Day, I suggest that you first pick up one of Dorothy's books like On Pilgrimage, Loaves and Fishes or The Long Loneliness.Read one of these first and then immediately read Kate's book. Although the Catholic Worker started 85+ years ago, the writing by and about Dorothy Day are even more powerful today.The ending was stunningly beautiful. For Kate to return to multi-generational relationships between mothers and daughters was very rich. There were many scenes at the Catholic Worker either in NYC or at the farms that were challenging. I had lived in a Catholic Worker House for 3 years and it brought back many fond memories AND anxieties!For those who listen to this book ---It is a book that needed to be listen to over a good length of time in order to reflect on her words and the life of Dorothy Day.It is too bad that Kate Hennessy was not asked to be the reader. I have listened to her present on her book tour and she would have been fabulous. There is something intimate and beautiful in this book that would have been enhanced by subtle inflections had Kate been the reader.