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American Spiritual Voices
The Life You Save May Be Your Own:
An American Pilgrimage
By Paul Elie
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003. xiv plus 555 pages.
Reviewed by John Tintera
Going to college in New York City affords a young impressionable undergraduate plenty of opportunities to meet colorful characters. One such was a street monk named Richard who spent his evenings studying the Bible on the second floor of the B. Dalton in Greenwich Village where I worked. Richard read the Bible so literally that it would make Jerry Falwell put on sackcloth and ashes. He practiced poverty, wouldn’t eat meat that didn’t have the blood drained out, and believed, among other things, that according to the Book of Revelation Christ was coming back in 464 days. While Richard was definitely a little touched, he taught me something that my professors didn’t -- or couldn’t: that books ought to be read with one’s whole life. Richard was as serious about Emerson and Eliot as he was about the Bible. He taught me what it means to have an eternal soul.
Reading books with one’s life is the theme of an exciting new book called The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage. Paul Elie, a first-time author, has given us a quadruple biography of four eminent Catholic writers of the twentieth century. These four, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Flannery O’Connor, and Walker Percy, took very seriously the Bible and literature, reading them with their whole lives, and setting forth a profound example for the rest of us. Elie recounts their lives and gives a fresh, long-overdue reassessment of their literary achievements.
On the surface, there seems to be little more to connect Elie’s four protagonists than the fact that they were all serious Catholic writers who lived at approximately the same time. Merton was a self-obsessed monk and mystic; Day, an activist who stood up to both political and ecclesiastical powers; O’Connor, a sickly recluse in whose stories “a good man is hard to find;” and Percy, an upper class Southerner and amateur philosopher on a quest to write the great American novel. Reading their biographies together is akin to reading the four Gospels right in a row. While they’re frustratingly contradictory, each biography becomes an emblem for a certain kind of spirituality. The effect created is deep and indelible.
Elie shows us that an obsession with books also unites these four very different individuals. For Merton and Day, it was reading fiction that ignited their passion to delve below the surface of things. For O’Connor and Percy, it was philosophy. As a student at Columbia, Merton became enthralled with James Joyce and read him as if his work were scripture itself. Day was a devotee of Dickens, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky, whom she read in her youth and turned to again and again during her long life. O’Connor found her voice through a close reading of the philosopher Jacques Maritain, and Percy’s head was so full of philosophy that it overflowed into his novels, forming the backbone for his unique fictional vision. Elie is clearly fascinated with this, and marvels especially at the irony of the anti-cleric, James Joyce, being the inspiration for Merton’s vocation, the most famous of the twentieth century.
Readers who pick up this book will most likely be familiar with only one or two of four the writers, and for that may not be aware of the span of their careers. Personally, my knowledge of them was limited to a glowing admiration of Merton’s autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain; O’Connor’s widely anthologized and terrifying story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find;” Percy’s enthralling essay on the difficulty seeing things afresh, “The Loss of the Creature”; and a handful of essays by Day from my long-ago-expired subscription to the “Catholic Worker” newspaper. What a delight it was to read excerpts from Merton’s powerful and searching journals; to be led through the philosophy and theology that are the backdrop to the novels and stories of O’Connor and Percy; and to draw closer to Dorothy Day through Elie’s extremely sympathetic portrait of her. Indeed, Elie exceeds at both biography and literary criticism and he gives enough of both to assure pleasure when the reader inevitably turns back to their original works, as I, with gusto, have subsequently begun to do.
For me, however, the true strength and worthiness of The Life you Save May Be Your Own lies in Elie’s willingness to penetrate beneath the surface of his subjects’ lives and writings and focus on their moral character. He’s not afraid to ask whether these four men and women, who aspired to preach the gospel with their lives and in their writings, are saints. To his credit, he does not sugarcoat them in order to arrive at a pre-determined answer. We learn that Merton fathered a child before entering the monastery and had an affair with a nurse years after becoming a monk. Dorothy Day had an abortion before starting the Catholic Worker. O’Connor, a Southerner from Georgia, was quite bigoted toward African-Americans in her personal letters and took a gradualist view of civil rights. Percy was also a gradualist and had a predilection for booze; he may or may not have had an affair with his secretary and doesn’t seem to have had a wonderful marriage.
Hearing about their sins, however, only increases my admiration of these writers. It makes them more human and brings them down to earth. What’s more, the question of sainthood is inextricably bound to the quality of one’s faith. Since all four grew up and lived most of their adult lives before Vatican II, they were acclimated to an ecclesiastical culture where the “medievalness” of the Church was as visceral and exotic as Flannery O’Connor’s peacocks. Merton, Day, and Percy were all converts; each was uniquely critical of the dominant culture in America and attracted to the alternative worldview the Church offered. O’Connor was a cradle Catholic, but growing up in the deep South made being a Catholic no less strange or counter-cultural for her as it did for the others. For each, “Catholic” was probably the most important personal descriptive they would use. Merton and Day, because of their “mortal sins” prior to conversion, took an Augustinian view of themselves and their salvation. O’Connor and Percy were more sanguine about themselves, but nevertheless took the Church and all that is implied in the concept of eternal salvation very seriously, as is evident in their art.
As a Christian and a lover of great literature, it makes my heart leap with joy to be re-discovering four great writers whose primary motivation for writing was the conversion of humankind. As devoted as these four were to writing in such a way that their works would find an audience outside the religious subculture, the fact of their religious framework cannot be escaped. All of their works, from Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood to Walker Percy’s The Thanatos Syndrome, are essentially religious tracts. To deny that is to deny them their raison d’être. Fortunately or unfortunately, in this culture of political correctness no one is denying them their right to have a particular vantage point. Instead they are ignoring them. The cause, whether ignorance or prejudice, is irrelevant. The great gift that Elie has given us is a way for everybody who loves great literature to go back and see if they might not be missing something by ignoring these writers. Conversely, for those who would much rather read the new Joan Chittister book than the latest Pynchon novel, Elie’s four offer readers of spiritual literature enough oil to fuel their spiritual quests for many days and nights. No doubt, whoever does that, whether they are religious or not, will be giving themselves a very special gift indeed. It may even change their lives.
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