Dorothy Day by John Loughery & Blythe Randolph

Author:John Loughery & Blythe Randolph
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2020-03-03T00:00:00+00:00

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As the war drew into its final year, Dorothy did her best to reawaken her old energy and balance. She could travel now freed of guilt about Tamar, home with a husband and pregnant within four months of the wedding, and she visited ten cities in the Midwest between mid-1944 and mid-1945, staying for a week in Chicago. She arranged for two weeklong retreats in 1944. Her reading was as eclectic as ever: Cardinal John Henry Newman’s sermons, Arthur Koestler, The Old Curiosity Shop, Maisie Ward’s book on G. K. Chesterton, Raïssa Maritain’s memoirs. In February 1945, she attended a reception for the Maritains at the New School for Social Research; now that France had been liberated, the French philosopher was going to the Vatican as his country’s ambassador. Dorothy gave him copies of The Catholic Worker to give to the pope. Several weeks later, she saw an exhibition of paintings by a friend of the Maritains, Georges Rouault, at the Museum of Modern Art, a body of work in which, Maritain wrote, “all usual canons of beauty are shattered.” Rouault became one of Dorothy’s favorite artists as well.

Two months later, Tamar had the first of her nine children, Becky, and it was possible for Dorothy to hope that she might be wrong about the future of her daughter’s marriage. David Hennessy was in a rare ingratiating period. He had offered to bring his mother-in-law’s manuscript to the attention of an editor he knew, though—probably not a surprise to its author—her biography of Peter was judged too discursive and not remotely publishable in its present form. She put it aside for the moment. Her son-in-law’s interest in William Cobbett had also inspired her to read him more widely, and those unusual essays were something they could happily talk about together. Cobbett was a type Dorothy had always thrilled to, a nonconformist who gave fresh meaning to the term. “He was against the system,” she wrote in her March column, “but his indignation was large, general, and generous.”

At times, the intrusion of politics into her world never seemed to stop. Though the Catholic Worker had long since been taken off the list of potential subversive organizations and the war against Japan was only several weeks from its conclusion, FBI agents came to 115 Mott Street again at the end of June. There they met with a priest who worked at various neighborhood parishes and at Maryfarm, helped out at the house a good deal, and regularly contributed to the paper, especially during the war years. They wanted to know where they could find a man he knew, a young anarchist named Clifton Bennett, who had not reported to his draft office. Father Clarence Duffy—Irish-born, alcoholic, and never a pushover—did know Bennett but declined to say anything concerning his whereabouts. In their report, the agents characterized the priest as adamant on that score but friendly and accommodating in general.

Then they met Dorothy. She was in the house that afternoon and happened to come in while the agents were with Father Duffy.

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