Radical Lives: A New Biography of Dorothy Day
By: Elaine Margolin, Los Angeles Review of Books
A GOOD BIOGRAPHY holds your attention; a great one transcends its subject and sheds light on the myriad forces bearing down on an individual at a particular point in time. John Loughery and Blythe Randolph’s Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century belongs, luminously, to the second.
The authors brilliantly try to make sense of Dorothy’s complicated worldview. They focus on her transition to Catholicism and the questions she must have been forced to ask herself:
What kind of world do we want to live in, and what sacrifices are we willing to make to achieve it? Do we believe that our primary concerns should be our physical ease, our family’s and our nation’s well-being, our happiness as individuals? Can a sense of the mystical thrive in a culture that has made sacred causes of the rights of the individual, material progress, and technology? Is a flight from suffering and struggle actually a flight from God and an escape from the fulfillment of our deepest humanity?
They chart the reading she is known to have done — including Poe, De Quincey, Swinburne, Conrad, political biographies of all sorts, and her beloved Russian writers — searching for clues as to why she transitioned from a bohemian free spirit to something of a religious ascetic. They show how Gorky must have forced her to reckon with the brutal cost of poverty, how Tolstoy might have influenced her with his startling views about the difference between marriage and passion, how Chekhov might have moved her with his emphasis on empathy for all living souls, how Dostoyevsky (whom she revered) might have made her feel closer to God and given her a sense of mission, something she could grab hold of and never let go. Loughery and Randolph do a strong job depicting the urgency and intensity of her thinking, but they also reveal the blind spots that prevented her from seeing her own serious shortcomings, particularly regarding her daughter Tamar, whom she rarely saw and of whom she was extremely critical.
