Good trouble along with Dorothy

John Loughery and Blythe Randolph, the authors of Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century, are biographers. By that I mean they are a quite particular sort of writer "who specializes in true stories of other people's lives." They are not historians or admirers or academic critics or hagiographers.

And precisely because this book is a biography, I found it by turns delightful, fascinating, puzzling, superficial, arid, and under-contextualized. And for all that, it seems to me a good, secondary-source, introduction to Dorothy Day (1897-1980) and the Catholic Worker.

Full disclosure: I spent much of the 1970s in Catholic Worker communities, in New York in close proximity to Dorothy and later in San Francisco. I loved and still love these fools for Christ and consider the lives they choose some of the best available to any of us, though completely impossible and maybe not even desirable for most of us. I'm not a neutral commentator on this book.

Eager for independence and excitement, Dorothy Day dropped out of the University of Illinois at Urbana where she'd won a scholarship, hoping to make it as reporter. Drifting to New York City and Greenwich Village, she caught on with leftist journals that were closed down for opposing the draft in the European war of 1917-18. Later she wrote for socialist periodicals about strikes and the women's suffrage agitation.  She tossed about among the New York literary lions of the 1920s, a fringe participant in the circles of the poet Eugene O'Neill, John Dos Passos, Hart Crane, Katherine Anne Porter, Marianne Moore and Edna St. Vincent Millay. There were boyfriends, mostly cads except the future communist Mike Gold. She was notorious for being able to drink any of the men under the table. She tried to write fiction and was never very good at it. She had not yet found herself, but she was packing in life experience as she made a wandering way. I enjoyed Loughery and Randolph's picture of that distant bohemian socialist world.

And always, Dorothy felt a religious tickle -- a yearning for something more that wasn't always top of mind, but never went away. She wasn't getting what she hoped for in a relationship; she wanted children and a secure family. She was isolated. When she got pregnant, her partner didn't want to be a father. She wasn't going to have another abortion, she knew that. She wanted the child to have something she had lacked, a place within a mature faith. Her upbringing had included only a glancing acquaintance with highly conventional and unsustaining mainline Protestantism. Loughery and Randolph tackle the question, why the attraction of Roman Catholicism?

... why did Dorothy have to choose Catholicism of all religions, a faith that made unique demands and extravagant claims, a faith that in Protestant America seemed plausible only if one was born into it? The Catholic Church, seen in that light, was nothing that a rational intellectual person of the twentieth century would commit herself to ... [But milk toast Protestantisms] would not have have served the same purpose; they were profoundly different, in Dorothy's view, less concerned with a mystical essence, more attuned to the rationality of faith and a progressive here-and-now -- lesser in all ways. ... she could have echoed Maggie Tulliver, the heroine of that same wonderful George Elliot novel: "I was never satisfied with a little of anything."

And so she had her new daughter Tamar baptized, took instruction in Catholicism herself, and began praying to receive her new religion's call to a single mother whose writing career was stalled and whose sympathies were with workers and the poor struggling against destitution at the beginning of the Great Depression.

And then, along came Peter Maurin (1877-1949), a French itinerant intellectual out of a European Catholic personalist tradition. His passionately preached social theory meshed creatively with Dorothy's newfound Catholicism and continuing allegiance to the downtrodden masses. Peter's ideas and Dorothy's creativity and organizing energy issued in the Catholic Worker movement. During the 1930s, offering a Catholic alternative to godless Communism, the movement mushroomed. 

Catholic Workers fed the hungry, clothed the naked, housed the homeless, and stuck up for the strikers. The infrastructure of American Catholicism, then concentrated in Irish-, Italian-, and eastern European-American communities which still remembered their immigrant origins, welcomed this energetic grassroots activism -- not that many bishops didn't look askance at the enthusiasts in their domains.

Dorothy's absolute rejection of all wars, even the war against the Nazis, became a speed bump for the movement. Its newspaper lost its welcome on many Catholic campuses and in local parishes. Never again would the Catholic Worker seem quite such an unalloyed gift of godly energy to the Church. But Dorothy never quit and the story of the productive tension between this uncompromising force and uneasy institutional allies continued through anti-nuclear protests in the 1950s, draft card burnings during the Vietnam war, and forward to this day as Plowshares activists repeatedly invade bases and bang on nuclear missile silos.

Dorothy died in 1980, but her movement and its contradictions live on. Pope Francis included her in a catalogue of Catholics who matter to this nation when he spoke to Congress. The Church is still trying to figure out what to make of her witness and whether this unmarried mother who had a gift for selective listening to authority is a saint.

I enjoyed the Loughery and Randolph biography. Its limitations derive from the difficulty in writing both about a perfectly fascinating, very human character -- and a chaotic, inspiring, perhaps holy institution. The Catholic Worker movement -- a rich archival source -- sometimes seems to overwhelm the narrative of the individual (something Dorothy wouldn't have necessarily minded). These authors do especially well in following the difficult course of Dorothy's relationship with her daughter and family. Raising a child in the maw of any social movement is tough; one where you intentionally bring crazy home to dinner presents challenges to all.

Sadly, too much of Loughery and Randolph's story of Dorothy's life and accomplishments within the Catholic Worker movement reads as flat, almost canonical. This is the Catholic Movement as it teaches its history to itself. It is the story as told in its newspaper, primarily by Dorothy. She was an ardent advocate against injustice and for poor people and a charming story teller. She employed a writing persona both honest and also creatively shaped to spread her message through her columns. None of us do it as well she did, including these biographers.

But do I recommend this book? Absolutely. Perhaps in part because the archival remains are so voluminous, some efforts to chronicle Dorothy's life and movement have been pedantic. This is not; it flows and invites a reader in.