THE CAME OF ABNORMALITY

...She substitutes the word "Violent" for the word "dreadful" in the title of the Miller book...

...But probably Ammon had never thought in such modern terms- he had an old-fashioned kind of 'integrity'-(he only liked to beg for "his bums" actually-it was like cleaning up the litter on the streets, which he always liked to do, for he was fastidious by nature-or, answering letters...

...People were notified of his death and arrived...

...What could be more normal than that...

...But that's not how Joan Thomas tells it...

...Weeping, she pours them "into a plastic basin" and "with a hammer, pounded the bones into powder," because she had promised Ammon to sprinkle his ashes on the grave of the Haymarket martyrs in Chicago's Wald-heim Cemetery-not his bones...

...Joan bent down and kissed his lips for the last time...

...When Professor William D. Miller wrote about Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement in his book, A Harsh and Dread' ful Love, he gave some space to the famous-in pacifist circles-Ammon Hennacy, noting that "during the decade of the fifties, Ammon Hennacy dominated the action of The Catholic Worker...

...The Years of Grief and Laughter is written in a diary-style, and has many of the egocentric deficiencies that mark diary-style books, but it also has the power of candid self-revelation, and the pathos of human beings floundering through the murk of our times...

...At the conclusion, the reality of down-to-earth normal people trying as all normal people do, to be abnormal, comes through with the ring of truth, and this is the tale of The Years of Grief and Laughter...

...An active virus of 'normality' got him...

...Later, Joan Thomas writes, Dorothy Day said to her: "I was deeply touched when you went up and kissed him...

...She had come to New York to look up Dorothy Day, not because she cared about the Worker Movement, but because they had mutual friends, and because she cared about fasting...

...So you were the last to touch him...

...They lived like married people live, but it's true they tried to say they didn't...

...There is poetry at the end, written by the young wife-because old men must die and young girls must write poems.ung girls must write poems...

...The patient has not to learn how to get rid of his neurosis, but how to bear it," she quotes in another place from Jung...

...Joe Hill House went down the drain...

...He missed his old life, missed "being a well-known character on the streets of Salt Lake City," missed going all over town greeting everybody and being greeted, collecting food for "his bums...

...The reason is not hard to find once you open Joan's book...

...With characteristic psychological probing, the young wife has to figure out how to fit these words into the norm of the soap opera mentality...

...But in Joan Thomas' case, there seems a reluctance to admit they were ordinary normal wedded male and female...

...And he likes pretty girls...

...And so she does sprinkle his ashes...

...Perhaps it ought to be that the first question asked I is: "Why call any person who works hard for an ideal 'a saint...

...At any rate, Joan Thomas quotes Dorothy as telling the poor hostess who was villainously trying to foist macaroni on all present: 'Take that away . . . I'm not going to eat in front of a guest who's fasting," and then, apologetically, explained to the younger woman: "That's why I'm so fat, we eat so much starch...

...Everyone familiar with Ammon Hennacy and his connection with the Catholic Worker knew that he had to come to New York to join the Worker Movement and to enter a church he detested, the "Romans," because he fell in love with Dorothy Day...

...Dorothy watched...

...She herself had an obsession with weight...

...After you kissed him...

...When Dorothy Day offered Joan a share of their macaroni lunch, the young girl instantly said she was on a fast...

...he never liked to leave people unan-answered...

...When Joan Thomas sent me the book she wrote about her husband, Ammon Hennacy: The Years of Grief and Laughter (Hennacy Press, Phoenix, 1974), she said: "I could not believe when I read A Harsh and Violent Love that Miller would make no mention of me-considering how Am used to say that next to solitary I was the best thing that had ever happened to him...

...Yet even this could not altogether damp the fire of the old pacifist-he sold his Autobiography along with Fuller brushes...

...It was June, 1960...

...She was going on twenty-six...

...When Dorothy Day came, Joan took her to see Ammon's body on view...

...Their life together was like any soap-opera marriage-he would read to her from his Autobiography, while she wrote novel after novel projecting various erotic adventures, incest, black men loving white women, etcetera-all of which would any day now become a best seller and make them rich...

...Like so many senior citizens, Ammon Hennacy lost his home...

...When Hennacy was living at the New York Worker house and engaging in his Spartan feats of fasting, picketing, and selling Workers, Dorothy Day made a comparison of him with Peter Maurin...

...After Joan said she wanted to learn how to fast more efficiently, Dorothy Day sent her to Ammon Hennacy, saying: "He knows all about fasting...

...When the ashes of her dead husband come back from the crematorium, Joan Thomas opens the box and sees "fairly sizable chunks of bone fragment...

...His long hair, his one tooth, a lone yellow tooth, right in front like a tablet of the law, made his appearance abnormal in comparison with everyday types...

...Up early every morning, he went out and walked door to door the streets of Phoenix (which he described as "a chickenshit town...

...I didn't touch him...

...Everyone knew this, not from gossip, but because Ammon told it far and wide and wrote it in his autobiography...

...At home he could prance with Joan "in gleeful nudity" but abroad, as in Gilbert and Sullivan's "Ruddigore," they only "cut respectable capers...

...She wasn't but had no intention of getting fat by eating macaroni...

...There are many such quotations from Jung in the book, and this one strikes home at the idealist...

...That it should enter anyone's head to educate them to normality is a nightmare for the former because their deepest need is really to be able to lead 'abnormal' lives," quotes Joan Thomas from Jung...

...And who dare say that this be not pure and simple truth...

...She decides the words were "a consideration from the other woman...

...Even the ending has the pathos of normalcy...

...In our times particularly, the person who lives any dedication to an ideal is suspected of being really a seeker for attention...

...When Dorothy Day persuaded Ammon Hennacy to leave the wide-open spaces of Arizona, where she had joined him to picket the tax office on one of his Hiroshima penance-fasts, and come to their movement in New York, he was-as she described him-"Like a wild man...

...the need to be slender is paramount in this book -she calls herself The Willow...

...But once he arrived at the Catholic Worker house, Ammon Hennacy- despite his determination that no dentist would ever get near his mouth-was outfitted with teeth by a dentist smitten with the CWs...

...And, he was missed...

...not to be lost in the crowd is the search for abnormality, and this is God and self-fulfillment-a game of abnormality...

...Joan Thomas suggested they could still play the "Christian con game," and wanted him to write Dorothy Day to send them rent money...

...he was a Fuller brush salesman...

...The only trouble with the real life story of Ammon Hennacy's wedded life with Joan Thomas is that it doesn't appear at all abnormal, nor even neurotic...

...He did not want to ask Dorothy Day to send rent money when he no longer ran a "charity house...

...Perhaps, in Ammon's case, he really was afraid his religious friends would be scandalized so he had "to holy-shit them" (one of his favorite phrases...

...The health department people even drove him around, trying to find another house when they had to close down his old Joe Hill House...

...there are just as many people who become neurotic because they are merely normal, as there are people who are neurotic because they cannot become normal...

...Not long after that he met Joan Thomas...

...Cornelia jessey, a member of the editorial staff of Way, a San Francisco-based magazine, has appeared in the National Catholic Reporter and Saturday Review and World, among others...

...They moved to Phoenix and now, in old age, the famous old pacifist had to do what had always been the most repugnantly 'normal' thing about normal people...

...Perhaps Dorothy Day was oversensitive to this youthful contempt for macaroni-eaters...

...Salt Lake City rather liked the character he'd formerly portrayed, the old prophet fasting and picketing against capital punishment and doing penance for Hiroshima...

...Professor Miller makes a point of noting that Ammon's love for Dorothy Day "was indeed of the spirit, for, as he (Ammon) said, 'With my Life at Hard Labor, vegetarian diet, and mind on the One Man Revolution, I did not have to have physical contact with any woman: I had work to do.'" Joan Thomas in her intensely personal account of her life with Ammon Hennacy remarks on "the making of human beings into sexless, sugar-coated 'saints'" and wonders if this is necessary to their canonization...

...But it was too much for him, and he fell ill, almost died-of flu, or pneumonia, or perhaps even loneliness...

...a mysterious gypsy pseudo-saint," who noted happily that Dorothy Day was not only elderly-looking but heavy...

...Only if we understand and accept the neurosis as our truest and most precious possession can we be sure of avoiding stagnation...

...As she puts it: "At all the homes of his friends, A and The Willow maintained the charitable fiction that tneir friendship was a chaste and holy one...

...a native American radical from the Midwest, a Thoreauian character who was honest and pure, who did all that a brave heart could do to end violence and cruelty...

...Since her own thought is militantly psychologizing, one might psychologize in turn, that the thing the author of The Years of Grief and Laughter really feels is that the author of A Harsh and Dreadful Love did violence to the depiction of Ammon Hennacy...

...Miller points out that "he came to be their hero...

...The following January of 1970, he died while at his favorite abnormalcy, picketing the state capi-tol in protest of capital punishment for three murderers...

...He was forty-one years older...

...Joan Thomas writes: ". . . his pathetically thin heart walls caved in...

...Joan Thomas describes herself, with a sense of mockery, as "a healthfully emaciated woman of twenty-five years young...

...In the late spring of 1969, Ammon Hennacy and Joan Thomas returned to Salt Lake City...

...She tells the outspoken* fun they had when her old man took his young girl to bed- perhaps he was an old Solomon, or even an old Gandhi, seeking to keep warm in old age...

...Probably it was the moment he glanced in the mirror and saw all those glorious teeth smiling at him, that he began to lust for young girls...

...He had to go to work...