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.
