The Life You Save Hay Be Your Own by Paul Elie
Gernes, Sonia
Four characters f rind an author The Life You Save May Be Your Own An American Pilgrimage Paul Elie Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $27,544 pages Sonda Gernes nn 1906, Dorothy Day, age eight, woke...
...In detailing his four pilgrims, Elie makes no claim to original research...
...Even if it doesn't, it's an awfully good ride...
...For some readers, The Life You Save May Be Your Own may constitute a small pilgrimage in itself...
...All but Day lose one or both parents in their teens...
...All four are isolated, by choice or circumstance, from the general literary scene...
...Why don't you make up another one...
...These vignettes are typical of a prose that sparkles with the concrete particulars of a scene: Dorothy Day in her fisherman's cottage on Staten Island, reading Thomas a Kempis in a search for "a pattern to set against her own experience...
...Perhaps what makes The Life You Save May Be Your Own such an absorbing book is that it succeeds in recreating the era of insular but invigorating American Catholic intellectual life that reached its peak in the fifties-the era when everyone read Maritain, Etienne Gilson, Evelyn Waugh, and Graham Greene-the era that instilled in young Catholics "the belief that their way of life was separate from, and superior to, the Protestants...
...Percy, Merton, and Day were all involved in the sixties peace movement but distance themselves from the radical left...
...Significantly, their pilgrimage is literate as well as literal...
...Novelist Walker Percy was thirteen when in 1929 his father went up to their attic in Birmingham, Alabama, and shot himself in the head...
...All four writers read the philosopher Jacques Maritain...
...Trappist censors made him delete all references to the affair and to the child, who supposedly died in the London blitz...
...Flannery O'Connor in a "shiny blue-black dress with a corsage affixed" signing copies of Wise Blood for the unsuspecting ladies of Milledgeville...
...Elie is scrupulous in acknowledging his scholarly sources, and for readers other than the scholars themselves, the book provides the particular pleasure of filling the gaps in the somewhat familiar...
...While this might make the book old news to a reader thoroughly immersed in all four of these life stories, Elie's compelling narrative style makes it new, as does his ability to synthesize, crafting from these remarkable lives a portrait of the ills and aspirations of a nation, a church, and the better part of a century...
...Day goes to Georgia and is shot at while keeping watch at an interracial farm community, but her account in the Catholic Worker disturbs O'Connor, who is struggling with her own demons of a racist heritage...
...In fact, he tells us that he "decided early on to forgo documentary and archival efforts-the biographer's approach-and instead to draw on and appraise readily available materials, hoping to fashion a fresh work from them...
...Mutual friends write O'Connor about Percy and bring her Merton's Prometheus...
...He had made a young woman pregnant in England and got away scot-free when his guardian paid her off...
...In The Life You Save May Be Your Own, Paul Elie casts these four as twentieth-century pilgrims, awash in a Zeitgeist of economic depression, impending war, and moral uncertainty, intent on arriving at truth and embracing belief as the vehicle to get there...
...But Merton knew what he was talking about...
...This is not ha-giography...
...Though clearly he admires all of them, Elie resists the temptation to engage in elevated rhetoric on their behalf, insisting, for example, that Merton's death by accidental electrocution was "a spasm of pure and terrible experience, with no significance outside itself...
...Sonia Gernes is a poet, novelist, and professor of English at the University of Notre Dame...
...These four do travel, but the central narrative is "a story of readers and writers-of four individuals who glimpsed a way of life in their reading and evoked it in their writing," thereby becoming "part of a larger story of the convergence of literature and religion in the twentieth century...
...And why did the Franciscans tell him he had no vocation...
...Have impure thoughts...
...Thus begin the tales of four mid-century American writers so influential and so overtly Catholic that they've been called "the School of the Holy Ghost...
...The false tone I had detected in the text was not his own doing...
...Merton, "robust, dressed in jeans and a Tshirt," greeting visitors to his hermitage with "a camera and an open bottle of bourbon at his side...
...Elie posits no one central event, but gives us a series of historical moments in which these writers intersect, however briefly, as he traces each of their separate arcs: Dorothy Day in the Bowery is critical of Seven Storey Mountain for its superficial view of the world's problems, but she and Merton begin a long correspondence...
...What did he do...
...When I reread Seven Storey Mountain a couple of years ago, I found Merton's proclamations of great (pre-monastery) sinfulness puzzling, since he offered no evidence...
...I thought...
...Percy "draped over a garden chair-gangly, his hair slicked back, wearing a V-necked sweater and a sports jacket and saddle shoes," discussing Dostoyevsky with his lifelong friend, Shelby Foote...
...All but O'Connor are converts to Catholicism, joining the church in young adulthood...
...And in 1930, five-year-old Mary Flannery O'Connor of Savanna, Georgia, appeared in a news-reel with a chicken that walked backward as well as forward, an experience she later claimed "marked me for life...
...Four characters f rind an author The Life You Save May Be Your Own An American Pilgrimage Paul Elie Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $27,544 pages Sonda Gernes nn 1906, Dorothy Day, age eight, woke up to a San Francisco earthquake that would be "the most haunting of her 'remembrances of God.'" In 1925, at the age of ten, Thomas Merton moved with his artist-father to the medieval village of Saint Antonin in France...
...Though he comes up with an admirable number of times they themselves used the term "pilgrim," his repeated characterization of Day as reformer, Merton as rebel, Percy as seeker, and O'Connor as independent is less convincing, especially since there is ample evidence that the "seeker" category applies to all of the first three...
...If there is a flaw in this eminently readable book, it's that occasionally Elie tries a bit too hard to put his four authors into his schema...
...Percy visits Merton in his hermitage on the monastery grounds and finds inspiration for a character in Love in the Ruins...
...Similarly, though I've written about O'Connor and have made my own pilgrimage to her Milledgeville farm, I was unaware until I read Elie of the encoded heartbreak in her letter to Erik Langkjaer, congratulating him on his recent marriage, or of her wrenching public meeting with Walker Percy near the end of her life, when she was too exhausted to say more than, "That was a good story you wrote...
...This may bring a nostalgic note to Elie's text, but he quickly reminds us that "we come to life in the middle of stories that are not ours," and that "there is no way to seek truth except personally...
...O'Connor, the only "cradle Catholic," seems never to question received dogma, but she has reason to question her own proud certainties, and Elie doesn't soft-pedal the negatives for her or for any of the others...
...Organized chronologically, rather like a novel that introduces each character separately and gradually brings them to a common place or event, Elie's book moves through the decades, treating each writer in turn...
Vol. 130 • April 2003 • No. 8
