NewWorld

Four Writers Worthy of Their Calling
In this interview with Paul Elie, editor and literary critic, we revisit the literary experience of Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy in light of the great theme of Christian vocation. An example and challenge for our culture today

by Santiago Ramos

Inspired by the 20th century’s Catholic literary triumphs–by Mauriac and Bloy in France; Greene and Waugh in England; Merton and O’Connor in the USA–editor and critic Paul Elie has attempted to map out the intricate relationship between Christian vocation and artistic endeavor. His essays have appeared in Commonweal, the Village Voice, and the New York Times Book Review; his second book, the dynamic literary study, The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage, analyzes the lives of four Catholic American writers: the novelists Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor, the journalist Dorothy Day, and the mystic Thomas Merton. From his post as Senior Editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, he helps to midwife some of the latest contributions to English-language literature. He talks to Traces about his book, about Catholic literature, and about the past and the future of the Church in America

Why did you write this book? For whom?
It’s interesting that you ask this question a few days after Pope Benedict arranged for the Tridentine Mass to be practiced more widely again. I grew up in a Catholic family in upstate New York in the 1970s and 1980s, and I remember feeling that, while my family was very definitely and admirably Catholic, the Catholicism of my experience had very little to do with the Catholicism of the past–the Catholicism that, as I grew older, I read about in books by writers like Newman and Chesterton. They described the Church as firmly fixed and drenched in mystery, whereas the Church of my experience was shaped by changes that were very plain to see. By the time I got to college, at Fordham, I needed to figure out for myself what the relationship was between the post- and pre-Conciliar Church; as a literary person, I naturally sought to do so through books. I turned to the four writers in my book looking for explanations, and found theirs especially credible. They are the writers who in my mind gave the most affecting account of the Church in America as it was, and at the same time spoke powerfully to the present. Their work suggested to me that the pre-Conciliar Church and post-Conciliar Church were one Church after all. And that was enough to send me on my way.

Many notable Catholic writers flourished in the first half of the twentieth century, in the United States, England, France, and Spain. What was the source of this literary fecundity, especially in England and the United States, two countries without a dominant Catholic culture?
My own instinct is to run away from sociological explanations–the ones that take Catholic writers as voices of a “thick” Catholic culture that has since vanished, and that take it as our business to re-establish something like a “thick” Catholic culture so that Catholic literature might flower. There’s no question that Catholic culture was quite vigorous in France and in England in the twenties and thirties and then in America in the postwar years, but when you look at the careers of people like Mauriac or the Maritains in France, Waugh and Greene in England, or the four writers I wrote about in the United States, the idea that they were expressive of a larger culture breaks down pretty quickly. For one thing, those writers were energized by the fact that Catholicism was not the dominant culture–not a culture at all, as Flannery O’Connor insisted. For another, they were (with O’Connor as the exception) converts, who drew on their experiences prior to their encounter with so-called Catholic culture. And, on top of that, they instinctively shied away from what was typical of Catholic life at the time, instead emphasizing the unique and exotic: English country–house culture and chattering–class adultery, Trappist monasticism, the South, semiotics, voluntary poverty in the Bowery… For all these reasons, I prefer to see them as confident individual writers who had a sense of themselves strong enough to trust what attracted them to the Church and to make something of it as artists.
In writing the book, I was often amazed in the opposite direction–by how fleeting the connections among the four writers were. Today, we think of them as the four great Catholic American writers of the 20th century. O’Connor and Percy met once for 15 minutes and swapped a few letters. O’Connor and Merton never met. Day and Merton never met. Percy met Merton once; Percy met O’Connor once. That was it. They were sustained by the knowledge that others were out there. They didn’t need an institution or a program to make it real.
There is a lesson for us in this. It’s a Catholic temptation to try to devise a program for everything. Some of us who are involved with the movements–I myself am a “friend” of Sant’Egidio–are often preoccupied with how we can transform the culture, how we can make the culture hospitable to artists and writers who are believing Catholics. It seems to me that the lives and work of these writers tell us to go in the opposite direction. Percy didn’t wait for the culture to be ready for his art, nor did Merton, O’Connor, or Day. They did what they were capable of, taking account of their surroundings but not surrendering to them. They framed their art in recognition of a culture that wasn’t Catholic or necessarily ready for their work, but they figured out how to get it to the public anyway.

One of the principal concerns in your book is the way in which O’Connor, Day, Percy, and Merton interpreted the relationship between their vocation as writers and their vocation to become saints of the Church. In researching the ways that they approached this issue, what surprised you?
All four writers initially perceived a tension between their calling to be writers and their calling to be believers or saints in the Church. In each case, the tension was resolved in favor of the calling to be a writer, and that led them, paradoxically, toward the sanctity that was theirs to seek through their writing–toward the kind of holiness that they thought was not possible. Dorothy Day, for example, did not become a Catholic with any intention of starting a Catholic newspaper. She converted to Catholicism, had some tough times, and asked herself, “Well, what can I do to serve Christ and the Church? My gifts are those of a journalist, so I guess I’ll use them.” Merton attempted to sacrifice his calling as a writer, to renounce his literary gifts in favor of the “elected silence” of the Trappist monastery. Things turned out differently. The abbot asked him to use his gifts as a writer to serve the Church, and the more he wrote, the more he recovered his literary calling–and the more completely, if paradoxically, he fulfilled his monastic calling. When Flannery O’Connor went to the Iowa Writers Workshop, she was struggling to figure out how to be a Catholic writer. Upon reading Maritain’s Art and Scholasticism, she concluded that the best way to write as a Catholic was to write about rural, Protestant Georgia, even though the subject matter wasn’t Catholic–that is, to write from a Catholic point of view rather than simply treating Catholic subject matter. Paradoxically, she wound up the most intensely Catholic of modern writers and the Catholic writer most accessible to people of little faith or no faith at all. As for Walker Percy, his early work wasn’t conspicuously Catholic, and that worried him–but instead of worrying, he followed his instincts as a writer, trusting that the Catholic dimension of his work would be present if you knew how to look for it.

On the face of it, those are four very different approaches. Is there a common way that all four approached this issue?
I think there is. One of the distinct aspects of the Catholic faith is that we persist in taking the notion of vocation or “calling” fairly literally. We believe that we are “called” to do something particular with our lives on this earth. Well, these four took very seriously their calling to be writers. Flannery O’Connor would astonish college students by telling them that the reason she wrote was “because I’m good at it.” Her point was clear, and theologically rich, too: I’ve been given this gift. I must have been given it for a reason. I have a responsibility to develop it. I have to use it in service.” This was true of the others, too. They all figured out that the best way to fulfill their vocations was to do what in many respects they were “good at”–writing, that is.

In your book, you write that some of the questions that agitated Day before her conversion where, “How might the writer take part in the affairs of the day? How could [the writer] reconcile the solitude and apartness of the writer’s life with concern for the general welfare of society?” There was a distinctive political concern in the writing of Merton and Day, and to a lesser extent in Percy and O’Connor. Yet all four seemed to ask the same questions that Day was asking.
In her youth, Day was animated by her desire to be in solidarity with the poor of the world. She found that the problem with the Marxist-Communist approach, which she explored in her teens and early twenties, was that the poor in big cities like New York and Chicago were Catholics, not Marxists. In becoming a Catholic, then, she felt that she was joined to the poor, physically by being with them in worship and spiritually through the doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ, which for her affirmed, more concretely, or, as it were, existentially, that the human race is one family–that she and the poor were all one people. All of the Catholic Workers’ activities grew out of that radical insight.
As for Thomas Merton: in the book, I try to dramatize my sense that, as a young man, one who was, after all, an expatriate and an orphan, he yearned for a place where he could feel at home, and felt that not until he was at home could he go on living his life. This is the Augustinian Merton: “My heart is restless until it rests in You,” and so on. When he entered the Abbey of Gethsemane, he felt so profoundly that he belonged there that, paradoxically, the place, despite its rule of silence, actually freed him to be a poet, and later freed him to be politically engaged–freed him because he knew who he was, a monk, and where he belonged, at a certain monastery in Kentucky.

One gets the sense that with Percy and O’Connor there was less of an interest in writing a social novel or a social tract, that they were more focused on perennial, existential concerns–as opposed to Dorothy Day, who was mostly a political writer.
I’m not sure that’s the case. Dorothy Day wrote a dozen books and something like fifteen hundred newspaper articles and columns. She was a journalist in the root sense, the writer giving an account of the events of the day. Her column came to be called, “On Pilgrimage,” but its original title, a bad pun, “Day by Day,” was literally accurate. The root of most of her writing is what happened that day. In contrasting her with O’Connor, too, it’s important to keep in mind how one picked up where the other left off. O’Connor did strong work in her mid-twenties and died at 39. Day didn’t start the Catholic Worker until her middle thirties, then stayed the course into her eighties. Imagine if O’Connor had lived to 83, as Day did–she would still be with us… I don’t have words for my sense of how much might be different in the Church in America had she lived to a ripe old age.

As a Senior Editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, you handle a lot of contemporary American writing. Is there a Catholic presence in American literature today?
I find today that there are many books with a distinctively Catholic aspect, but that there are few (or no) exemplary lives akin to those of the four figures I wrote about. William J. Kennedy’s Ironweed, for example, is a powerful novel, one that is Catholic to the bone, but Kennedy’s work as a whole is not religiously preoccupied. Rob Hansen’s Mariette in Ecstasy sits alongside books he wrote about Jesse James and Nebraska… Why is this? I’m not sure.

How do you see the Church faring in the near future in the spheres of literature and of the arts? Is another renaissance on the horizon?
My sense is that that is too general a way to approach the question, whether you are a Catholic literary critic (and we need one of those) or a Catholic artist. It’s not right for us to fret about whether we are having a “significant impact.” It’s for us to ask ourselves whether our writing is worthy of our callings and the religious faith in which the call is heard. The rest, as T.S. Eliot wrote, is not our business.