Sharp Elbows and a Hacking Cough
Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness (1952)
When news broke of the death of Dorothy Day, in November 1980, I was a naïve nineteen-year-old helping homeless people in the inner suburbs of Melbourne, places which were yet to see the renovator’s paintbrush. Some of them still haven’t. My father had died about a year before and I, a young Jesuit novice, was trying to find my way in the world before it ran me over. I had the supreme good fortune to fall in among idealistic and generous people who knew that there are lessons you can’t learn from the comfort of home. For many of them, this was more than a passing stage. They never grew into those tight-fitting suits called CV and career. Their youthful idealism became middle-aged idealism and, in some cases, the idealism of old bones. Their generosity became wisdom.
One of the places I lent a hand was the House of Welcome, which shared its name with the Houses of Hospitality that Dorothy Day started in New York in the 1930s. Its doors were open to whoever turned up for a meal or a shower, most of them from the streets and rooming houses of the area. Almost forty years later, I am still taking young students from school to help with breakfast at the House of Welcome. They are always kept busy: there is plenty of coffee to be served and a stack of pots to be scrubbed. But the place has changed. There are many more rules and regulations about the service of food and so on. I understand this. Yet I sometimes wonder if our students get to really encounter the people of the streets and rooming houses other than as clients or, worse, convenient examples from an abstract lesson about finding happiness by ‘giving back’.
Dorothy Day believed wholeheartedly in the creative power of words. She started life as a left-wing journalist and also wrote fiction. The Houses of Hospitality germinated from a movement that began with a newspaper she established in 1933, the Catholic Worker. For her, the most important part of hospitality was conversation. She believed in sharing her table: food and talk went hand in glove. With so many strictures these days around the provision of social services, this can get lost. You can’t have protocols, guidelines, professional standards or performance indicators for conversation.
I recall Dorothy Day’s death made a heavy impact in that part of the world. Indeed, the death of John Lennon ten days later did not seem to strike such a tender nerve. He was a celebrity. Dorothy Day celebrated others: the poor, the voiceless, the odd, the left-out, the unlovely. People spoke of the way her inspiration had helped them to find a direction for their lives and they still discussed her visit to the district ten years earlier. Mother Teresa and Mary MacKillop were also habitués of the area. Some days you could hardly move for the number of saints wandering around. Dorothy Day said she never wanted to be treated as a saint, because ‘I don’t want to be dismissed that easily.’ Nonetheless, I had her on a pedestal.
I was relieved then, a few years later, to encounter Chris Jenkins. He wore a straw hat in summer and a beret in winter; other than that, he was not much concerned with his wardrobe. Chris had spent some years engaged in his own heartfelt search, living for a long period in a community that was squatting in a house that had been abandoned in Quex Road, in North London. Before that, he had spent two years in Maryhouse on Fifth Street, in the Bowery district of Manhattan. You don’t have to have been to New York to know there is, or was, a world of difference between Fifth Street and Fifth Avenue. Maryhouse was the place where Dorothy Day, then quite elderly, was living in retirement. Chris remembers her as ‘very straightforward’, a woman who spoke her mind bluntly. ‘She was a lady with sharp elbows.’
Chris was assigned a bed directly beneath her room. I was impressed that he had been so close to such a personage. For him, it was a nuisance more than anything else. She coughed all night and he couldn’t get any decent sleep. Her cough was persistent, a bit like everything else she did. Dorothy Day had been a career smoker. She smoked in the bath as she read fiction when she was pregnant with her daughter, Tamar Teresa. She smoked on the way to the hospital to give birth. She smoked at the dining table, hardly the most hospitable thing to do. I relished this story. It got Dorothy Day off her pedestal and brought her back to street level. You can’t be properly human without getting on the nerves of at least someone. Dorothy Day got on the nerves of many. That was her job.
Her powerful autobiography, The Long Loneliness, gives the clear impression that a significant part of Dorothy Day’s formation came through reading literature. She warmed to novelists such as Jack London and Upton Sinclair, writers who are all but forgotten now but who were prepared to ask society to look at itself. She also loved Hugo and Tolstoy (see Chapter 26), the last fuelling her lifelong commitment to non-violence and total opposition to war. Dickens crops up over and again in her writing; Dostoyevsky was a passion.
The Long Loneliness speaks a lot about Day’s work and the search for a spirituality to sustain that work, a radical journey that began with her first imprisonment as a suffragette at the age of twenty, in 1917. She writes about how scared she was and how two things got her through the time in jail: books and community. These were the constants throughout her life. As she was dying, she read the letters of Flannery O’Connor (see Chapter 15).
The Long Loneliness also explores three of the most significant human relationships in Day’s life. The first was with Foster Batterham, Tamar’s father. Before teaming up with Batterham, Day had been through the experience of an abortion, manipulated by a man who used her badly. For her, this was such an ordeal that she wrote very little about it, dealing with it instead in the space provided by fiction. It features in her first novel, The Eleventh Virgin (1924), to which a studio bought the film rights. She used the money to buy a cottage near the sea on Staten Island which she shared with Batterham, a botanist, in what she called rather coldly ‘a common-law marriage’. The only hint in the autobiography of the abortion which caused her such grief is the line: ‘For a long time I had thought I could not bear a child.’
Day loved Batterham and his fascination with the natural world; he got her walking in nature and this made her lungs feel better. ‘If breath is life, then I was full of it.’ But when Day became pregnant, he was not happy because he thought it was wrong to bring children into ‘such a world as we lived in’. He was also uncomfortable with Day’s rediscovery of God. So the couple split and Day brought up Tamar as a single mother. This was both the happiest and loneliest time of her life. Day was always a force to be reckoned with. As soon as she had given birth, she wrote a newspaper article from her hospital bed.
The other two relationships she dwells upon are those with Tamar, who married, had nine children, lived on a farm which was part of the hospitality movement and made the best of a frugal life. And, finally, a Frenchman called Peter Maurin, twenty years her senior and a former Christian Brother, who stepped into Day’s life at the right moment. He was the philosopher and she was the person who could translate the philosophy into action. The Long Loneliness is made tender by the writer’s affection for Maurin. His gift of the gab makes for some of the funnier moments in the book, such as when he insists on delivering an ideological address at Tamar’s wedding. He could be torrential. Day’s description of his dementia and loss of speech before he died is beautiful.
Soon after Dorothy Day died, I found The Long Loneliness sitting in the office at a community for homeless alcoholics called The Way, where I was also helping out. It wasn’t an office, really, just a space under the stairs where there was a jar in which we put whatever coins we had to keep the place running. I was instantly absorbed and challenged. The book allowed me to see beauty in the chaos and broken lives around me. It took the place in my affections of a work that was published just a few months before it, in the same city, The Catcher in the Rye (1952). Salinger’s book about phoniness is slick and sassy, and for generations thousands of its young fans boasted of being able to read it in a single sitting. The Long Loneliness asks far more of its readers. It asks them to build community and to make a place at the heart of that community for someone other than themselves.