Even during the most tumultuous times in her life, Dorothy Day would wake up early every morning and spend several hours drinking coffee and reading the psalms. I am not one for psalms, but in these past tumultuous weeks, I have found comfort in reading about Day, specifically the lovely new biography Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty, by her granddaughter Kate Hennessy.
If it’s difficult to be a saint, it may be even harder to live with one. Tamar was seven years old when Dorothy established the Worker. Up till then, Dorothy’s life had been an erratic search for meaning. Starting in her late teens, she earned her living as a journalist and sometimes as a nurse, and was part of the bohemian community in Chicago and Greenwich Village. She had love affairs and an abortion, which she described in an autobiographical novel called The Eleventh Virgin (which she later tried to suppress during what Tamar called her “severe and pious” phase), and a brief and unhappy marriage. She lived for several years with Tamar’s father, Forster Batterham, but her gravitation toward Catholicism and his refusal to follow made their relationship unsustainable.
Like her grandmother, Hennessy is a writer of great skill, blending interviews, family letters, writings by Dorothy and other members of the Worker, and her own memories into a coherent whole. She stays close to the main thread of Dorothy and Tamar’s often chaotic lives, full of children and friends and Catholic Worker characters; like a sermonizer, she gently reemphasizes the important points so they don’t get lost. She clearly absorbed Dorothy’s belief that, as the title says, the world will be saved by beauty, and she insists on finding it in her mother and grandmother’s sometimes sad and difficult lives. (Tamar, by contrast, had what Hennessy calls “a cold, scientific eye.”) There are pages and pages devoted to loving descriptions of Mott Street, then part of Little Italy, where the Catholic Worker set up one of its earliest homes; the back-to-nature Hennessy home in Vermont; and the beach on Staten Island, where Dorothy and Tamar spent their happiest times together.
By Kate Hennessy (Scribner) Hennessy will give the keynote address at “Revolution of the Heart: A Symposium on Dorothy Day” Fri 2/17, 11 AM Loyola University Klarchek Information Commons 6501 N. Kenmore 773-508-8000luc.edu Free
