The Long Loneliness

Dorothy Day

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780062796677
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Biographies

The compelling autobiography of a remarkable Catholic woman, sainted by many, who championed the rights of the poor in America's inner cities.

When Dorothy Day died in 1980, the New York Times eulogized her as “a nonviolent social radical of luminous personality... founder of the Catholic Worker Movement and leader for more than fifty years in numerous battles of social justice.” Here, in her own words, this remarkable woman tells of her early life as a young journalist in the crucible of Greenwich Village political and literary thought in the 1920s, and of her momentous conversion to Catholicism that meant the end of a Bohemian lifestyle and common-law marriage.

The Long Loneliness chronilces Dorothy Day's lifelong association with Peter Maurin and the genesis of the Catholic Worker Movement. Unstinting in her commitment to peace, nonviolence, racial justice, and the cuase of the poor and the outcast, she became an inspiration to such activists as Thomas Merton, Michael Harrinton, Daniel Berrigan, Ceasr Chavez, and countless others.

This edition of The Long Loneliness begins with an eloquent introduction by Robert Coles, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and longtime friend, admirer, and biographer of Dorothy Day.

Part One

SEARCHING

THE GENERATIONS BEFORE

WHEN we were little children, my brothers and sister and I, we used to sit around the supper table at night and listen to our mother talk about “when I was a little girl.” Our father worked nights on a morning newspaper, so we seldom saw him and our evening meals were leisurely. We never learned much about his family from mother except that he was from Cleveland, Tennessee, and that his people despised her because she was a Northerner.

Cleveland is a small town just over the border from Rome, Georgia, where my grandmother, Mary Mee, was born. She married Dr. Sam Houston Day who was a surgeon and served in the Confederate army. My mother’s father, Napoleon Bonaparte Satterlee, was from Marlboro, New York, a chairmaker, who went to war very young, was taken prisoner and came home with tuberculosis of the larynx, which made him speak, the remaining years of his life, in a hoarse whisper. My mother recalls bringing him eggnog with whiskey and sipping it on the way, and he used to reward her for her service by gay flattery, calling her Graceful. Her name was Grace.

That house in Marlboro still stands on Route 9, and I have driven past it often and past the Episcopal church where my mother was baptized and the churchyard where doubtless my forebears are buried. If I wish to go back still further, on Charity Hummel’s side (she was my mother’s grandmother), I could go to the cemetery at New Paltz, and on the Washburn side to the Massachusetts branch of the family, since tradition has it that there were nine brothers, all of them captains of whalers, and all lost at sea save a Christian Washburn who married Charity.

Tradition! How rich a word that is. To a thinking child it means a great deal. Children all love to hear stories of when their parents were young, and of their parents before them. It gives the child a sense of continuity.

Aunt Cassie, my mother’s aunt, used to skate down the river from Poughkeepsie to Marlboro to bake a batch of bread and cookies and then skate back again. Was she in love then? And did love give strength to her limbs and wings to her feet? It was a sad love story, the story of her affair with one of the engineers who built the railroad bridge over the Hudson. But Aunt Del was a telegrapher in Baltimore, a Russellite or a Bible Christian, and helped support the family, and Anna, my grandmother, had enough to do with her five children and her invalid husband. So Aunt Cassie had to stay unmarried to take care of her mother, Charity Hummel Washburn, who had been married herself at fourteen and borne eighteen children of whom only six lived.

Charity’s husband had been captain of a whaler which sailed up the Hudson with a cargo of whale oil. He fell from a mast and cracked his head and was never quite right after that, running down Delafield Street in his night shirt and finally drowning in a brook.

How we loved to hear these stories and how welcome our warm house was as we heard of terrible winters with the Hudson freezing over so that skating and ice-boating were commonplace.

Tradition! We scarcely know the word any more. We are afraid to be either proud of our ancestors or ashamed of them. We scorn nobility in name and in fact. We cling to a bourgeois mediocrity which would make it appear we are all Americans, made in the image and likeness of George Washington, all of a pattern, all prospering if we are good, and going down in the world if we are bad. These are attitudes the Irish, the Italian, the Lithuanian, the Slovak and all races begin to acquire in school. So they change their names, forget their birthplace, their language, and no longer listen to their mothers when they say, “When I was a little girl in Russia, or Hungary, or Sicily.” They lose their cult and their culture and their skills, and leave their faith and folk songs and costumes and handcrafts, and try to be something which they call “an American.”

“Tradition,” G. K. Chesterton says, “is democracy extended through time. Tradition means giving the vote to that most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. Tradition is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who are walking about.”

I wonder if those stories of our ancestors took away the fear of death that comes to us all, or whether it mitigated it.

Aunt Cassie is by now united to her love. Grandfather Napoleon is now young and dashing once more and free from all pain. But their tragedy, their pain made their lives a rich and colorful tapestry for us to gaze at, a Berlioz requiem with its glory and mourning to listen to.

Did they believe? What did they believe? We never asked these questions. Do happy children ask these questions? Ecclesiastes said, “Only this I have found, that God made man right and he hath entangled himself with an infinity of questions.”

“WHAT ABOUT GOD?”

WE DID not search for God when we were children. We took Him for granted. We were at some time taught to say our evening prayers. “Now I lay me,” and “Bless my father and mother.” This done, we prayed no more unless a thunderstorm made us hide our heads under the covers and propitiate the Deity by promising to be good.

Very early we had a sense of right and wrong, good and evil. My conscience was very active. There were ethical concepts and religious concepts. To steal cucumbers from Miss Lynch’s garden on Cropsey Avenue was wrong. It was also wrong to take money from my mother, without her knowledge, for a soda. What a sense of property rights we had as children! Mine and yours! It begins in us as infants. “This is mine.” When we are very young just taking makes it mine. Possession is nine points of the law. As infants squabbling in the nursery we were strong in this possessive sense. In the nursery might made right. We had not reached the age of reason. But at the age of four I knew it was wrong to steal.

Morality lay in the realm of property and sex. Violence, murder, all had to do with our relations with one another over property.

Sex was a deeper matter, and in some obscure way had a connection with the supernatural law and God Himself. Sex and religion! It was immodest to talk of either. People were uncomfortable and embarrassed in talking about God.

Modesty at first had to do with our bodies. We used to dress around the big kitchen range down at Bath Beach and if anyone came in, the grocer, the laundry boy, we would back out of the room to hide our nakedness. We did not know why and whatever obscure sense of shame we had may have been connected with that part of our anatomy which was seriously smacked for punishment.

We did not learn shame as children until we learned about sex. The dark fascination of this knowledge, incomplete, legendary and instinctive, struck deep into our inmost parts. A shuddering pleasure accompanied the contemplation of it, a pleasure which we knew was evil, but did not know why.

Later we were confused in our adolescence, as to why such a consciousness linked up in some obscure way with beauty and love, could be evil.

Still later we understood the social attitude too. If a girl had a baby out of wedlock, she sinned against God and society. Society would have to support it, and that was wrong. The child had no father. That was a sin. So a stigma fell upon her. She was deprived of the baby, which was put in an orphanage, and she herself was left to starve to death. This was the classic picture in our twelve-year-old minds. It was simple. It was bad enough. It was the warp and woof of all tragedy to us little women. We imagined ourselves in the place of these tragic heroines, these Hester Prynnes, mainly I suppose because they had reached a peak of existence; then, before love had time to grow old and stale and cold, as doubtless our parents’ had (we saw no signs of passionate, romantic love between them, and that is what we ourselves wanted), they were held in that state, solidified in a state of ecstasy as it were, forever noble and sad, a picture enlarged by love.

I do not remember going to church in those years, but Mary Manley, the girl who worked for us, was a Catholic, and she told me years afterward that she took me once to Mass and I stood in the pew looking all around and she did not take me again. I slept in the same room with Mary and I must have seen her saying her prayers but I do not remember it. We were living in Bath Beach, in Brooklyn, where I was born November 8, 1897, and I had two older brothers and a baby sister. We lived there until I was six and had started school. We prayed at school every morning, bowing our heads on our desks and saying the Our Father, and I can still smell the varnish, and see the round circle of moisture left by my mouth on the varnish as I bent close to the desk.

In trying to remember my religious experiences, that is all I can recall of formal prayer during those years.

I can remember well the happy hours on the beach with my brothers, and fishing in a creek for eels, and running away with a younger cousin to an abandoned shack in a waste of swamp around Fort Hamilton, and pretending we were going to live there all by ourselves. I wanted adventure; on one occasion I went away alone, spending what I felt to be long hours one sunny afternoon, blissful enchanted hours until the sudden realization came over me that I was alone, that the world was vast and that there were evil forces therein. I can remember on the one hand my bliss—it was almost a state of natural contemplation—and then suddenly the black fear that overwhelmed me at being alone, so that I ran all the way home.

It seems to me I spent much time alone in spite of the fact that I had two brothers and a sister. There was joy in being alone, and I can remember happy hours after we moved to California. We lived in Berkeley, and later in Oakland. There were hours working in the garden, playing with dolls made of calla lilies with roses for heads, making perfume by crushing flowers and putting them in bottles with water, playing with dirt and sand, watching anthills, gopher holes, sitting and listening to a brook, smelling geranium leaves. There is a great rich sense of joy in these childish memories.

In Berkeley we lived in a house with an attic and I spent hours one rainy Sunday afternoon reading the Bible. I remember nothing that I read, just the sense of holiness in holding the book in my hands. I did not know then that the Word in the Book and the Word in the flesh of Christ’s humanity were the same, but I felt I was handling something holy.

In Oakland (I was eight then) we lived next door to a Methodist family who had a little store with a tiny apartment in back. The entire place smelled of fresh shingles. Birdie, my neighbor, took me to Sunday school and church with her, and then I began to experience real piety, in the sense of the sweetness of faith. I believed, but I did not know in what I believed. I became disgustingly, proudly pious. I sang hymns with the family next door. I prayed on my knees beside my bed. I asked my mother why we did not pray and sing hymns and got no satisfactory answer. No one went to church but me. I was alternately lonely and smug. At the same time, I began to be afraid of God, of death, of eternity. As soon as I closed my eyes at night the blackness of death surrounded me. I believed and yet was afraid of nothingness. What would it be like to sink into that immensity? If I fell asleep God became in my ears a great noise that became louder and louder, and approached nearer and nearer to me until I woke up sweating with fear and shrieking for my mother. I fell asleep with her hand in mine, her warm presence by my bed. If she connected my fears with my religious attitude, she never spoke of it.

Even as I write this I am wondering if I had these nightmares before the San Francisco earthquake or afterward. The very remembrance of the noise which kept getting louder and louder, and the keen fear of death, makes me think now that it might have been due only to the earthquake. And yet we left Oakland almost at once afterward, since my father’s newspaper job was gone when the plant went up in flames; we were on our way to Chicago within a week to a new life in another city. I remember these dreams only in connection with California and they were linked up with my idea of God as a tremendous Force, a frightening impersonal God, a Voice, a Hand stretched out to seize me, His child, and not in love. Christ was the Saviour, meek and humble of heart, Jesus, the Good Shepherd. But I did not think of Jesus as God. I had no one to teach me, as my parents had no one to teach them.

Another thing I remember about California was the joy of doing good, of sharing whatever we had with others after the earthquake, an event which threw us out of our complacent happiness into a world of catastrophe.

It happened early in the morning and it lasted two minutes and twenty seconds, as I heard everyone say afterward. My father was sports editor of one of the San Francisco papers. There was a racetrack near our bungalow and stables where my father kept a horse. He said that the night before had been a sultry one and the horses were restless, neighing and stamping in their stalls, becoming increasingly nervous and panicky. The earthquake started with a deep rumbling and the convulsions of the earth started afterward, so that the earth became a sea which rocked our house in a most tumultuous manner. There was a large windmill and water tank in back of the house and I can remember the splashing of the water from the tank on the top of our roof. My father took my brothers from their beds and rushed to the front door, where my mother stood with my sister, whom she had snatched from beside me. I was left in a big brass bed, which rolled back and forth on a polished floor. Whether I realized what was happening I do not know, but I do know that the whole event was confused in my mind with something which might have occurred a few nights earlier, my mother fainting on the floor of my room on her way to the bathroom, and my father carrying her back to bed. The illness of my usually strong and cheerful mother and the earthquake were both part of the world’s tragedy to me.

When the earth settled, the house was a shambles, dishes broken all over the floor, books out of their bookcases, chandeliers down, chimneys fallen, the house cracked from roof to ground. But there was no fire in Oakland. The flames and cloud bank of smoke could be seen across the bay and all the next day the refugees poured over by ferry and boat. Idora Park and the racetrack made camping grounds for them. All the neighbors joined my mother in serving the homeless. Every stitch of available clothes was given away. All the day following the disaster there were more tremblings of the earth and there was fear in the air. We had always been considered Easterners by our neighbors and one of them told my mother he would rather have San Francisco’s earthquakes than our eastern thunder and lightning storms any day!

ON THIRTY-SEVENTH STREET

AS SOON as possible we pulled out for the East. Of course the Red Cross was providing aid and offered free transportation to refugees but my father would not take this help. We had no trouble selling our household furnishings for just enough to get us to Chicago, where we stayed for a while in a hotel, the Briggs House. Mother soon found us an apartment. We went first to the South Side, Thirty-seventh Street and Cottage Grove Avenue, to a flat over a tavern. It had a window in the dining room facing Lake Michigan two blocks away, which was on the other side of a stone wall separating the gardens of a very fine street from the railroad tracks along the lake.

Why is it that the river, lake and ocean fronts of our country are overrun with railroads and factories and polluted by the waste of industry and home? Chicago, amazing city, made land on the other side of the tracks, in later years, by filling in the lake for miles, and turned the waters of the Chicago River backward to keep the lake from being polluted. When we lived on Thirty-seventh Street we could see the mountainous waves in winter which built up hills of ice like dunes all along the shore.

There was a breakwater along the lake, filled with huge yellow slabs of Indiana limestone, but the water seeped through, forming treacherous pools in which two children from our street were drowned. My brothers used to swim “inside the breakwater” they always said, seeking to reassure my mother as to their safety, and I remember the grim sunny day we went down to watch the dynamiting for the bodies of another brother and sister who had been drowned. The little boy had found himself beyond his depth and his sister, leaning over from the breakwater, had taken of...