Video Film captures Day's dark night of the soul
By MARY ANN GLENDON
One hundred years after the birth of the founding mother of the
Catholic Worker movement, renewed interest in her life has prompted
HarperCollins to reissue Dorothy Day's 1952 autobiography, The Long
Loneliness, and Paulist Pictures to make "Entertaining Angels: The Dorothy
Day Story" (available now in local rental stores; for sale from Paulist Press
after Nov. 8, Day's birthday).
There is irony here. The woman who wrote The Long
Loneliness would surely have cringed at the film's frank portrayal of the
part of her life she was most reluctant to discuss -- her far-from-saintly
years in the Greenwich Village of the 1920s. After Dorothy's conversion, she
used to scour libraries in an attempt to remove every copy she could find of
The Eleventh Virgin, her lightly fictionalized account of those more
libertine days.
The events she most wanted to forget, however, are the very ones
that enable her life to speak powerfully to young women today. It would, on the
other hand, be hard for most people to identify with the second half of Day's
life. As Fr. Daniel Berrigan has written, those who knew her, or of her, only
in her later years "saw her as a phenomenal presence whose greatness and
goodness had descended full-blown in our midst, easily won and as easily
dispensed." By the time she died in 1980, "she seemed always to have been as
she was: serene, graced with her aura of piety and pity."
That is the stuff of which plaster saints are made. But when the
producer of "Romero" told Dorothy he wanted to tell her story, the elderly
Dorothy must have understood only too well what that would entail. "Wait until
I'm dead," she told Paulist Fr. Ellwood Kieser. And he did.
Kieser explains that he chose to concentrate on the years from
Dorothy's 20th to 40th birthday because that was when she faced her greatest
crises and made her most important decisions. The film thus begins with the
arrival of the young Dorothy (winsomely played by Moira Kelly) on a New York
scene where she encountered intellectual excitement, social unrest and
degrading poverty.
Happy to be leaving home, she threw herself into the exciting
milieu of artists, radicals and reformers. She broke into journalism, hobnobbed
with the likes of Eugene O'Neill and embraced the causes of women's rights,
trade unionism and socialism. Along the way, she picked up a fashionable scorn
of religion, began to smoke, drink and swear, and sought affection in a series
of love affairs.
The most significant of these romances was with a newspaperman,
Lionel Moise, who refused to marry her when she became pregnant and dumped her
after she had an abortion at his insistence. On the rebound from the caddish
Moise, she was briefly married to a man named Barkeley Tobey about whom little
is known. In short, she lived a life that was to become commonplace after the
1960s when an entire culture began to imitate the ways and tastes of the
avant-garde of an earlier era.
In 1925 Dorothy cohabited happily for a time with anarchist
Forster Batterham. From this union came her treasured only child, Tamar. By
this time, however, she was being drawn to the Catholic church. This turn of
events horrified the freethinking Batterham. In The Long Loneliness, Dorothy
wrote of the pain after their breakup: "For a woman who had known the joys of
marriage, yes, it was hard. It was years before I awakened without that longing
for a face pressed against my breast, an arm around my shoulder. The sense of
loss was there. It was a price I had paid. I was Abraham who had sacrificed
Isaac. And yet I had Isaac. I had Tamar."
From that turning point, "Entertaining Angels" moves quickly to
the historic meeting with Peter Maurin (Martin Sheen), the early years of the
Catholic Worker movement, and Dorothy's dark night of the soul as she pays the
price for the lifestyle she has chosen.
The decision to dwell on Dorothy's spiritual journey may have hurt
the film at the box office. Even to some of Dorothy's admirers, her orthodox
Catholicism is an embarrassing aspect of her life. They would prefer more
picketing, less piety. But that would have taken the yeast out of the loaf. As
Kieser saw, his film's power derives from its depiction of one who was lost,
then found, then transformed, a life changed through relationship with Jesus
Christ.
There's no getting around it: Dorothy Day made practically
everyone, including herself, uncomfortable. Her chosen life was a scandal to
secular intellectuals and folly to social engineers. Her social activism was
inextricably bound up with her intensely orthodox Catholicism. Her commitment
to the poor was part and parcel of her life of prayer.
Even when she became a venerated figure in her 60s, Day did not
lend herself to the soft lens treatment. "Entertaining Angels" provides only a
glimpse of her at that stage of her life: a gray-haired woman in a jail cell,
arrested after some protest. At first, all one sees is the glowing red tip of a
cigarette, then the outlines of the familiar, craggy face. Yes, it's Dorothy,
still a troublemaker after all these years.
One of the most affecting scenes in "Entertaining Angels" deals
with a crisis that drives Dorothy to storm into church in an Old Testament
fury. "What do you want from me?" she angrily demands at the foot of the
crucifix. The answer, she comes to realize, is: everything. And everything is
just about what she ultimately gave.
Robert Coles recounts how she once thought it her "lifetime job"
to track down every copy of The Eleventh Virgin. But one day a priest
reprimanded her, "You can't have much faith in God if you're taking the life he
has given you and using it that way. God is the one who forgives us if we ask
him, and it sounds like you don't even want forgiveness -- just to get rid of
the books."
"Entertaining Angels" is the fruit of Dorothy's "letting go," her
tacit permission to let her story become a gift of consolation and hope to
future generations of searchers, flounderers and single parents. Though the
film had a short life at the box office, the video has a potentially vast
audience. It is a compelling modern rendering of a timeless story, a drama of
looking for love in all the wrong places and being found by the most demanding
lover of all.
Mary Ann Glendon is a professor at Harvard Law School. She led
the Vatican delegation to the 1995 United Nations Women's Conference in
Beijing.
National Catholic Reporter, October 3,
1997
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