Lionel Trilling once lamented that our age has few “representative figures,” people who live their visions as well as write them. In his first book, The Life You Save May Be Your Own, Paul Elie—an editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux—presents four Catholic writers who did live their visions and who successfully dramatize the religious questions posed by the nihilistic, secular culture of mid-twentieth-century America. Elie’s four subjects—the French-born monk Thomas Merton, the left-wing activist Dorothy Day, and the novelists Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor—form a disparate group. Yet all were keen observers of life and society, all wrote out of their own struggles with belief and unbelief. Elie’s decision to tell their stories chronologically is one strength of the book. By continually moving back and forth among the writers, he is able to highlight various patterns, similarities, and contrasts in their lives and their writing. Among other things, he shows that for these writers the activities of reading and writing were themselves redemptive.

All four were assiduous readers. All found that reading literature clarified their religious sense as well as their artistic vision. Thomas Merton—whose spiritual autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain (1948) was a bestseller—found his way into the Church by following his attraction to French medieval thought and art. From the philosopher Etienne Gilson he learned of a God he could believe in, and from medieval art he gained the sense of order that his restless soul craved. He and Dorothy Day were both socialists, Merton (1915–1968) a rebel against bourgeois society, Day (1897–1980) an enemy of a capitalist economy. She formed her moral vision reading Russian novelists and lived it by founding a New York hospitality center for the poor.

Merton settled into an austere life as a monk whose vow of silence did not prevent him from writing voluminously: an expression of his garrulous nature, perhaps, as well as an expression of his effort to renew monastic life in modern culture by finding ways to share the monastic experience with others. Dorothy Day, whose unhappy marriage gave her an only child, lived among New York’s tenement poor and pursued the idea that only saints could reform society. In her books, her autobiography, and her annual fund-raising appeals for the newspaper The Catholic Worker, she promoted anarchism and pacifism as the best way to live the Gospel. She never changed her radical views but her moral vision expanded as she pursued personal holiness. New York’s Cardinal O’Connor proposed her candidacy for sainthood in 1997.

Walker Percy (1916–1990), a Southerner from a distinguished family, gave up the practice of medicine in order to diagnose the existential lostness of the modern person, to read philosophy, and to write novels about finding the self by getting out of the self. In The Moviegoer (1961), Binx Bolling, a New Orleans stock-and-bond broker, suffers a special kind of angst. He finds daily life unfulfilling and discovers his real life at the movies and watching other people. He is not a traditional believer but lives what Flannery O’Connor called a “kind of sub-religion which expresses its ultimate concern in images that have not yet broken through to show any recognition of a God who has revealed Himself.” Binx is a postmodern pilgrim, seeking signs of reality but unable to analyze what he finds.

Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) was a Georgian of fiercely independent disposition who created similar characters struggling with belief and unbelief drawn from the country people she knew. She traced her interest in the grotesque and freaks to her childhood and her chicken that could walk forward and backward, an exploit filmed by Pathé news. In Wise Blood (1952), Hazel Motes is a veteran who founds his own religion, the Church without Christ. Motes does not want any Lord to redeem him and yet craves religious experience. He is, says Elie, “the postwar American pilgrim … trapped between belief and unbelief, torn between the promised land of religious faith and the fallen world of his own experience.” O’Connor drew out-sized characters for readers who needed to be startled out of their ennui. Elie observes that, half a century later, Wise Blood is less dated and more powerful than most other American novels of 1952.

In some ways, the strength of Elie’s procedure is also its weakness. The chronological mosaic he builds is sometimes revealing, sometimes a bit tiresome and forced. Is it really significant that O’Connor went off to Yaddo in Saratoga Springs the same week that Percy bought a house in Covington, Louisiana? I doubt it. Still, by the end of the book, Elie’s balancing of the details of four lives has the cumulative effect of connecting the writers in new and engaging ways. We learn that these like-minded writers were aware of each other’s work and in some cases were influenced by it.

Percy found himself indebted to O’Connor’s sense of character and her colorful language. When he won the National Book Award in 1962 she telegraphed him, “I’m glad we lost the [Civil] War and you won the National Book Award. I didn’t think the judges would have that much sense but they surprised me.” Anyone familiar with Percy’s novels or essays can imagine how he would have savored O’Connor’s tart judgment that  

the moral sense has been bred out of certain sections of the population, like the wings have been bred off of certain chickens to produce more white meat on them. This is a generation of wingless chickens, which I suppose is what Nietzsche meant when he said God was dead.

As Elie observes, O’Connor spoke in the “common language of the South: familiar, colloquial, allusive of a shared history, suspicious of outsiders.”

The religious vision of the four writers that Elie discusses seems even clearer today than when first broached. At the beginning of her career, Flannery O’Connor, the most original of Elie’s writers, struggled with the question of how to integrate her religious passion and her fiction. Should her characters be virtuous? Should their stories have only happy endings? She learned from the philosopher Jacques Maritain that a religious writer can choose any subject. What matters to the religious artist is not subject matter per se but the technical and artistic demands of his craft. O’Connor came to understand that she could be true to her religious convictions and still write about country people and freaks.

Merton, Day, O’Connor, and Percy were religious artists in the sense that faith influenced their vision—not that they wrote only about religious subjects. Merton did write about his life in the monastery and the search for contemplation with a deprecatory style that engaged the reader in his search. And Day always described her advocacy for the poor—sit-ins, marches, fasting—as a way of serving God and the people He loved, the poor. O’Connor saw herself as a regional writer called “to observe our fierce and fading manners in the light of an ultimate concern.” She died of lupus at the age of thirty-nine having offered a disbelieving society the vision she cultivated, an “enlarged view of the human scene.”

Percy lived through the change of the old-time religion. “The churchgoer was giving way to the moviegoer, and in years to come the churchgoer and the moviegoer, though related, would be strangers to each other.” Believers can no longer float along buoyed up by a friendly culture but must deal with hostility, misunderstanding, and solitude. There is no Christendom any more. All believers are wayfarers now, seekers, looking for signs and rumors of angels.

Elie’s erudition, literary analyses, and extensive notes give this “American pilgrimage” a power to evoke the cultural climate of the 1960s. He finds less to criticize than I would in Merton and Day’s enthusiasm for the Catholic peace movement—a movement, alas, that seems to be gaining favor among Church leaders. Readers of The Life You Save May Be Your Own will experience four sophisticated writers who demonstrate that in the midst of a hostile culture and slouching beasts still advancing toward Bethlehem it is possible to identify the path that leads to fulfillment and to faith.

---

---