Catholic Worker odds & ends
Below are the 10 most recent journal entries recorded in the "personalist" journal:[<< Previous 10 entries]
|
08:38 am
[Link] |
Photos from the past
Dorothy Day and Rita Corbin
Marty Corbin and Cesar Chavez
Bill Miller, Marty Corbin and Dorothy Day
|
|
11:25 am
[Link] |
Memories of Maryfarm, Newburgh by John Stanley*
"There was an authentic, commercial farm across from Maryfarm, owned and worked by a real farmer...Charlie...an Italian name...possibly Petrillo. John Filiger would work for him betimes and get money and get drunk and Dorothy(Day) would go over to Charlie and try to persuade him not to hire John. She may have eventually sold or leased him Maryfarm...can't remember. It would not surprise me to learn that it's been laid-over with square miles of ticky-tacky housing development as was the farm and house, Peter Maurn Farm, on Staten Island.
It is astonishing to contemplate that there were no radios or TV sets at Maryfarm, Newburgh! I think I might have left the grounds once or twice in two years. Once was when a priest (a Josephite?) took me to see their place on the river. Oh yes, two Josephite priests came to Maryfarm each Saturday in the late afternoon, heard our confessions and stayed to dinner. They never missed, it's my recollection, a Saturday. They were really gents. They and Father Faley (a resident priest) had no contact. He never came to dinner when they did! He said Mass at Maryfarm but lacked "faculties" to hear confessions, I think. There was briefly another priest at the farm but I forget his name, Fr Kiley perhaps? Then there was a man -Boris?- a Russian aristocrat whose mistress persuaded Dorothy to let him stay at the farm, but he was a hopeless drunk. (His mistress was a successful designer of fabrics.) This guy had to visit a U.S. official from time about his immigration status and I had to accompany him into Manhattan because if he was given the money for the trip he probably would spend it on drink. I was given the carfare and money for lunch for the both of us. He loved the British aristocracy. Perhaps he came to us through Helen Iswolsky (A friend of Dorothy's whose father had been Foreign Minister under Tsar Nicholas II) and also a friend of Kerensky and Countess Tolstoy.) Boris was for a few months part of the Maryfarm scene. He claimed to have excaped the Bolsheviks on Royal Navy man o'war during the October Revolution."
*John Stanley was at the Catholic Worker from 1952 until 1954, He is 90 years old.
|
|
12:22 am
[Link] |
John Stanley on the Bodenheims at Maryfarm, Newburgh
"One day in, perhaps, 1952 or '53 the old station wagon, driven by Charlie McCormick, slowly rolled onto the property, on the un-paved, rutted driveway, and came to a halt. After a few minutes the backdoor of the car opened. And after a few minutes more, a bright, white plaster cast on a leg protruded out. Then, Charlie got out and a young woman and a young man. The woman was, I think, Ruth, young, slender, long black hair. Finally, someone helped the man in the plaster-cast leg on to his feet, and all involved made their way to the kitchen door very slowly.
"The owner of the plaster-cast leg was a thin, past-middle-aged man with longish hair, which had been blond, called Maxwell Bodenheim. The woman, Ruth, was Max's lover of
some years. The young man was Joe F., a quite handsome man of 20 or so, who was dodging the draft (it was the time of the Korean War.) The procession moved slowly from the car, some one hundred feet, to the kitchen door, keeping pace with Max on crutches. Once inside, a chair was fetched for Max, and he sat, and coffee was brought to him. We came to understand that Max was a friend of Dorothy's from the 'old days.'
"Max and Ruth were installed on the second floor immediately above the chapel, where, previously, only women had lived. For a while, meals were taken to this room, to Max by Ruth. But, after a week or so, Max commenced coming downstairs to the dining room to eat in commons. At the end of lunch Max took to reading poems he had written that day in honor of one or another in residence there--save for me! There were usually about twenty persons at lunch.
"In the living room Ruth would gently brush Max's hair. It was the first long hair I'd ever seen on a man. It was long and fine and came down to his shoulders. And the Sixties were not even a gleam on the horizon."
***************************************
Some time later in a flee-bag hotel on the Bowery Max Bodenheim and Ruth were stabbed to death by a young drifter they were sharing their room with. (Ruth, according to John Stanley, was an inveterate flirt.) Dorothy Day, who had known Max since their days around the Provincetown Playhouse, in the early years of the century, wrote a moving obituary in THE CATHOLIC WORKER. As Ed Turner always says, "Dorothy was always loyal to her friends from the old days." ------Robert Steed
|
|
04:15 pm
[Link] |
RITA CORBIN---CATHOLIC WORKER ARTIST---R.I.P.
Dear Robert,
Thank you for sending me the Rita Corbin memorial piece---very generous of you to remember. To a degree, I see (Eric) Gill in Rita's work. I regret I didn't maintain any sort of relationship with her, but, then, I wouldn't have known how. John Stanley.
POEM
Regrets, regrets, how they pile up
dustily in the corner as I hobble
towards my final days. What am I
saying? I'm already in my final
days; it only remains to be seen
how many of them there still remain
to be counted.
I know I'm not an artist because I
don't work hard and constantly.
Usque ad mortem. Real artists do.
I've always been tired, and I
remain weary to the end.
I guess they don't pile up
"dustily;" they gather dust
after they've piled up.
Rita, Rita! I regret I did
not take the care to cultivate
Rita...Ham, wasn't that her
Maiden Name? I always felt I
was intruding, she was so
withdrawn.
Requiescat in pace, sweet Rita.
Strike "sweet;" tough and
stalwart Rita, sitting at a
table hour on hour in the
White Horse at 3 AM, with
Marty, flat-out cold and out
head-on-the-table across
from her in the mid-Fifties.
Once I tried impetuously to
rouse him, and Rita angrily
turned me away---for interfering.
Marty was her problem, not mine.
Not, indeed, that he was a
Problem to her---manifestly.
Till death did them part---then unite.
John Stanley
|
|
11:37 pm
[Link] |
Mandatory Air Raid Drills/NY State/1955
"They brought me to the Second Street precinct, where Julian (Beck) awaited me. The cop who asked me my name told I had a prominent lawyer, a former judge, Morris Ploscowe, who was 'running around like Groucho Marx' getting me bailed out. The cops talked (God help us!) about torture devices. I joined in this talk, perhaps too lightheartedly.
"While the court recessed for lunch I was locked in a cell with a young girl who said she had taken a girdle from Macy's but was going to plead innocent.
"She asked me what I had done. I said 'civil disobedience." Her eyes widened. 'Man,' she exclaimed, 'that sounds like a crime.'
"Alan Hovaness brought $500 in cash, and the bail was made out in my name.
"Dorothy (Day) came with some of the Catholic Worker people and we all had ice cream sodas.
"That night I gave an excellent performance. I was told it was the best 'Phedre' to date."
-----from THE DIARIES OF JUDITH MALINA 1947-1957, Grove Press,
Inc. /New York
|
|
03:55 pm
[Link] |
The Hell Hole
"They (E.E. Cummings and William Slater Brown) They did a good deal of drinking. They went to McSorley's , the now-famous ale house that still exists on (East) Seventh Street, not far from the Lower East Side. In the Village they drank in a place on Sixth Avenue and West Fourth (St.) called the Golden Swan, which was generally known as The Hell Hole, a hangout for gangsters and whores, as well as artists and writers. A few years earlier it had been the regular drinking place for Eugene O'Neill, who later used it in his classic, THE ICEMAN COMETH. The owner kept a pig in the cellar. One of the habitues was Dorothy Day, later to become famous as a left-wing journalist, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, and key figure in the influential paper, THE CATHOLIC WORKER. According to Malcolm Cowley, the gangsters in the joint "admired Dorothy Day because she could drink them under the table." Louis Sheaffer, in his book about O'Neill, gives a picture of Day, " She sat in the saloon for hours, matching the men drink for drink and knew ribald choruses of "Frankie and Johnny" her companions never heard of." And then, sometimes after a night of carousing she would go to St. Joseph's on Sixth Avenue for early mass."---from "B" [William Slater Brown] by James Lincoln Collier {Spring 6: 128-151}
|
|
10:41 pm
[Link] |
Peter Maurin,
"He is gnarled and shabby and somewhat disreputable, and seems to enjoy being called an agitator and a bum, because he regards activity and poverty as two indispensable qualifications for his particular apostolate."---Joseph A. Breig in THE COMMONWEAL, April 29, 1938.
Are monks and hippies and poets relevant? No, we are deliberately irrelevant. We live with an ingrained irrelevance which is proper to every human being. The marginal [person] accepts the basic irrelevance of the human condition, an irrelevance which is manifested above all by the fact of death. The marginal person, the monk, the displaced person, the prisoner, all these people live in the presence of death, and the office of the monk or the marginal person, the meditative person or the poet is to go beyond death even in this life, to go beyond the dichotomy of life and death and to be, therefore, a witness to life."---Thomas Merton, in The Asian Journal.
|
|
11:08 pm
[Link] |
Why Am I Picketing? by Ammon Hennacy
 "Well, why aren't you? Do the A-Bomb and the H-Bomb make you sleep any better at night? Do you trust our politicians to protect us from destruction in an atomic war? Doest it make good sense to foot the bill by paying income tax? I am not paying my income tax this year, and I haven't done so for the last seven yeas. I don't expect to stop World War III by my refusal to pay, but I don't believe in paying for something I don't believe in--do you? Do you believe that anyone ever 'won' a war? Or that any good can come from returning evil for evil? I don't believe it! And I don't believe I need preachers or policemen to make me behave, either. I do believe in personal responsibility, and that's why I am picketing. Why aren't you?
Ammon Hennacy, March 14, 1950
|
|
10:33 am
[Link] |
Dorothy Day and the Wobblies
"Although relatively short-lived, the achievements of the Industrial Workers of the World in the struggle for decent wages and working conditions were considerable at the time, and significant in labor history. Among writers and artists of the early 20th century, including John Dos Passos, Dorothy Day, and editors of The MASSES, their message and their commitment to workers were an inspiration. Organizing in areas where labor and living conditions were horrible, they employed new and imaginative strategies in their struggle, and are credited with early experiments in slow-down and sit-down strikes, which were employed successfully in the 1930s. Their efforts led to successful campaigns to unionize workers in forests and lumber camps in the far West, and oil fields of Kansas and Oklahoma{-----from the Lokashakti Encyclopedia of Nonviolence, Peace & Social Justice web-site.
Dorothy Day was never a Communist Party member but she was a card-carrying Wobblie. RS
|
|
10:50 pm
[Link] |
Dorothy Day's pre-Catholic Worker World
I am about half-way through Paul Mariani's 1999 biography of the poet Hart Crane, THE BROKEN TOWER, which has been made into a movie to be released next year, written, directed and starred in by James Franco. I keep coming across names of people who knew and inter-acted with Crane whom Dorothy Day knew or was friends with. The book is a mirror of the times and the world which Dorothy was familiar with long before she met Peter Maurin and started The Catholic Worker movement. The following list of names from the index include those of people whom Dorothy told me that she knew or has written of in one or another of her books and articles. There may be in the index the names of others whom she knew but that I am unaware of. Here is the list:
Peggy Baird Johns Cowley Conklin
Maxwell Bodenheim,
Kay Boyle
Sue Jenkins Brown
Kenneth Burke
Malcolm Cowley
Hart Crane
John Dos Passos
Marcel Duchamp
Allen Ginsberg
Caroline Gordon
Ben Hecht
Dwight Macdonald
Lewis Mumford
Agnes Boulton O'Neill
Eugene O'Neill
Katherine Anne Porter
Allen Tate
-----8/6/2011. Now about 3/4 the way through this bio. of Hart Crane I can see why Dorothy Day couldn't stand him; his drunkenness, brawling, sponging, not to mention his openness about his homosexual crusing would all have been anathema to her. RS.
|
[<< Previous 10 entries] |
|
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=91.6){kind=small}
personalist's journal