To Dwell in Peace:

...And there's the expected evocation of the evil of nuclear weapons, here in the image of Lord Nuke...

...The early TO DWELL IN PEACE AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY Daniel Berrigan Harper & Row, $19.95, 416 pp...

...The moral outrage he expresses as always (and, again, why not...

...Someone he doesn't think much of will appear only as a passing term in a devastating metaphor or will be dismissed in a caustic quip...

...They're the images that recur: our world as sick, as insane, as run by a war machine, and as ruled by the power of death...

...But some are downright vicious...

...Throughout the book, Berrigan is pretty good about giving dates, as signposts of where he is in the narrative...

...The verbal playfulness which Berrigan can't resist (and why should he...

...And, effective artist that he is, he knows how to match the treatment of images to their medium...

...So the book is quieter than much of Berrigan's previous writing...

...Expected, but not redundant of his other writings on the subject...

...Yet only once does Berrigan show himself struggling against his lack of charity...

...ed with the same napalm that was incinerating Vietnamese children...

...And he has continued to be a writer throughout his busy life, publishing an average of over a book a year for the thirty years since his first volume of poems appeared in 1957...

...When he comes to the past few years, Berrigan doesn't try to be chronological but centers chapters around his main recent concerns...

...Berrigan does deeply love many people, though, and his autobiography is enriched by appreciative portraits of them: his mother, Philip, William String-fellow, Abraham Heschel, the Jesuit re-treatmaster Pere Charmot, the doctor who healed his back ailment, a young artist who died of AIDS, and others...

...There are places in the book where he seems to love language more than he does the people he's talking about...

...Writing is for him clearly a necessary activity, the means by which he makes sense of life as it goes along...

...Berrigan's rich imagination is sometimes, however, put to an unfortunate use...

...is put mostly at the service of his pondering...

...The symbol of fire in the Catonsville action spreads through the written lines from a firebreak, to a light in the heart, to Pentecostal flames...

...This world has plenty of individual villains, too, in his vision of it...

...Nor is he very interested in justifying these events or his role in them, having done this often before...

...In the medium of reflective prose, the image is fluid, slipping into new meanings as it moves through sentences...

...Judge Salus as Caiaphas is hard to take, especially from an advocate of nonviolence...

...There's plenty of material here for a psychological analysis of Berrigan's later battles against dogmatic authority, though to reduce his adult protests to their psychological dimension would be a mistake...

...Here, he's interested mainly in reflecting on them, trying to make sense of them for himself...

...Significantly, it's in the portrayal of a powerless person, the prisoner whom the FBI got to betray Philip at the Harrisburg trial...

...This is the way the book's themes develop...

...Berrigan suggests that his brother Philip was the one to envision these powerful symbols for their joint actions...

...Berrigan's tone as he goes through the process is sometimes playful, sometimes somber...

...Still, the visions are deeply Daniel's as well...

...The Catonsville Nine...

...Those aren't very helpful terms, but I see what they're pointing at...

...To Dwell In Peace follows, for the most part, the expected chronological order of an autobiography...

...Maybe, having said his peace, he wanted here to have some of it - indeed, as the title says, to dwell in it.e says, to dwell in it...

...In either case, he can be done with an image in a single line or can carry it on for pages, stretching and transforming it as it meets new subjects...

...Many people are granted no individual identities but are lumped into collective nouns - "the theologians," "the faculty," "the sociologists" - which then act as supports to the evil forces Berrigan sees operating in our world...

...After a leisurely account of his Jesuit training, Berrigan traces the gradual development of his political consciousness...

...What exactly was the conspiracy charge that led to the scandalous Harrisburg trial...

...is restrained by reflectiveness...

...Berrigan simply isn't interested in merely recording events or listing their participants...

...Peggy Rosenthal chapters are haunted by the figure of the tyrannical father who made the Berrigan brothers' childhood miserable...

...So it's told that he found the opportunity to sit back and write at length about his life as a whole...

...such at least is suggested by the volumes of journals, poems, meditations, and letters he has published...

...Even a single day's experience is apparently incomplete for him until he has found words for it...

...BOOKS Making sense is making metaphors Daniel Berrigan was a writer long before he was a political activist...

...Maybe Berrigan intends these sketches to be comic, and some are...

...Caricatures and satiric portraits are the literary treatments given to authority figures who have blocked him: Jesuit superiors, judges, and university presidents come off particularly badly...

...It's here - in the imagery of death, of a murderous world gone mad with war-making - that Berrigan's roles as writer and activist meet...

...Who were the Baltimore Four...

...A future edition of the book will have to be heavily footnoted...

...In the dramatic medium of the protest action, the image is a single symbol whose unmistakable meaning will remain firm and clear through months of publicity...

...Other arbitrarily unjust adults--relatives, teachers, nuns - also people these opening pages...

...The turning point of his life, when he and his brother Philip "started to say No" to the Vietnam War, occurs -, with nice balance - at the book's mid-point...

...In this epistemology, shared by many writers who love language as he does, to try to understand something is to search for the right image for it...

...Berrigan devotes extraordinary effort to writing generously and forgivingly of this confused, violent man...

...Only Christ, I thought, could love such a one...

...Making sense, for Berrigan, means making metaphors...

...His books have often, however, had to be written (sometimes literally) on the run...

...draft files burnREVIEWERS peggy rosenthal is a member of the Genesee/Finger Lakes Nuclear Disarmament Network and author of Words and Values (Oxford University Press...

...We learn lots about his state of mind during the Baltimore Four and Catonsville Nine actions of the late 1960s, but the 1980 King of Prussia action (in Pennsylvania) is barely touched on...

...Berrigan describes his sadness at seeing this despicable "rag doll of a human...

...But readers not already familiar with the major events of his life will sometimes be frustrated by a scarcity of facts about them...

...So the act of reflection - on an incident, a person, a problem - is a process of testing out images...

...Indeed, often the images themselves become the subject...

...Bitterly satiric language is violent and dehumanizing...

...He wants to reach out in forgiveness but can't...

...Berrigan's treatment of the civil disobedience actions that followed is uneven, however, getting scantier as he approaches the present...

...The tender language lavished on these people contributes to the calm which is the book's dominant tone despite its moments of satire and scorn...

...There's a moving meditation on AIDS, based on his counseling of patients...

...The publisher's blurbs call To Dwell In Peace "poetic" and "lyrical...

...Like the Hebrew prophets, Berrigan has the gift of indefatigable creative energy for envisioning the sins of his age...

...His political protest actions are always symbolic, and the symbolism is of death: blood poured on beaten nuclear missiles...