A Life in Full

IN DOROTHY DAY: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty, author Kate Hennessy, Dorothy Day’s youngest granddaughter, gives a deeply intimate and highly credible account of her grandmother, a writer, social activist, and co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement with Peter Maurin in the 1930s. Hennessy explores themes of integrity, vocation, and community, portraying Dorothy Day honestly in her gifts and faults. But the most powerful thread is raw beauty that links together the author to her grandmother, strangers to one another, and people to God.

Day’s life was often complicated and marked by loss. Nonetheless her worldview was postured toward the words of poet Max Bodenheim: “I know not ugliness. It is a mood which has forsaken me.” Queen Anne’s Lace growing in the city, spinning wool with her grandchildren, her love for the father of her only child, standing in a breadline with seamen, or walking along the shore are all examples of the beauty that both guided and followed Dorothy Day.

Day, who was born in 1897, wasn’t yet a Catholic when she moved to New York City from Illinois in 1916 in pursuit of a writing career. She mingled with writers, artists, and radicals and was active in the social movements of the time. Hennessy notes that Day “was not always the clear-eyed visionary that we now see her as.” Day considered her life “disorderly” and moved from job to job, from one lover to another; she tried to commit suicide on two different occasions.

But even before Day knew God, she knew that God was leading her. She said, “I cannot help my religious sense, which tortures me unless I do as I believe right.”

Day began intensely exploring Catholicism while pregnant with her daughter, Tamar, born in 1926. Tamar’s father, Forster Batterham, was hostile to religion. Day decided to baptize Tamar anyway, a decision, Hennessey writes, that “would set her on a path she never could have imagined, and it would set her daughter on a different path that would take a long time for Tamar to disentangle herself from.” Day converted to Catholicism a few months later, recorded as a “quiet affair that gave her no joy” (around the same time, she asked Batterham to move out, since he refused to marry her).

Conversion did not end Day’s internal struggles. Hennessy says, “Dorothy was groping in the dark, undergoing a long, slow fundamental shift that would continue to the end of her days.”

As her daughter Tamar grew up, Day was critical and often controlling. This behavior probably stemmed from a desire to protect Tamar from the same mistakes Day had made, but it did more damage than good.

Hennessy describes a letter Day sent to Tamar at a time when Tamar was in deep conflict with her husband and they were struggling to feed their large family:

Dorothy snapped back and wrote the letter that Tamar kept for decades ... the one in which she blamed Tamar for being ungrateful and needy, and taking and taking from the Worker without a thank-you. For not loving her husband enough and not supporting his good qualities. And most unfairly, for accusing Dorothy of neglecting her as a child. Grit your teeth and bear it, she told Tamar, and she wasn’t going to write anymore until Tamar made the best of things, did her share in the marriage, and quit complaining.

Eventually Day and Tamar reconciled, but healing took time and space. Tamar and her family left the Catholic Church.

Day, Hennessey writes, said that in all her experiences she “encountered the same old problems, ‘our human condition—our discontent.’ She always came back to the needs of flesh-and-blood people, for it was there she felt the love of God and could see the face of God.”

Depression, loneliness, hardship, and mistakes were part of Day’s life. But, Hennessey writes, “Dorothy wrote beautifully about what was wrapped in tragedy. Part of her genius was this ability to see beauty in what didn’t seem to possess it. To repurpose the words of St. John of the Cross, ‘Where you find no beauty, put beauty—and you will find beauty.’”