Catholic Worker odds & ends
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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "personalist" journal:[<< Previous 20 entries]
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04:21 am
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Communism
"We need always to remember that it is atheistic Communism which we oppose, but as for economic Communism---it is a system which has worked admirably in religious orders for two thousand years."----Dorothy Day, 1952.
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07:48 am
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Unemployment is at 10.2%
" 'Why don't you work like other men do?' I could answer this, in these days of automation, with the old wobblie refrain, 'How in the hell can I work when there is no work to do?' They work for companies where a with-holding tax is taken from their pay for war. I have to bootleg my work and work by the day where there is no tax taken out, such as migrant work or in self-made jobs such as speaking in colleges and schools.
I worked for my keep at the Catholic Worker (in New York), getting up early for the mail, recording the income, answering letters selling CWs each day on the streets, which is much harder than walking around; speaking upon call at the office to visitors, and when called upon to do so, traveling over the country. Now, since November of 1961 I am in Salt Lake City, directing the Joe Hill House of Hospitality and St. Joseph's Refuge, collecting food daily to feed thousands who come here from the 'freights.' ---If anyone thinks that sleeping on the floor by the door, with from thirty to fifty people snoring, coughing, mumbling in the after-affects of liquor, answering the door a dozen times a night as drunks pound for entrance is fun, let them try it.
I am sixty-nine and I do not ask the state for any social security or old age pension. I have worked up to the age of nineteen on a farm, and eleven years, not long ago, at stoop labor on the ranches of the southwest. I have worked eleven years in Milwaukee as a social worker, and six years on a farm near there.
I fast and picket the tax office each year and several times have fasted for over forty days and picketed. If you think this is easy work, try it!"-----------------Ammon Henacy in THE BOOK OF AMMON, 1964
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08:20 pm
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The Site of Dorothy Day's First Holy Communion
This church is located on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village, NYC, between Washington Street and Greenwich Street.
It was while visiting John Stanley, (CW 1952-54),in about 1955, who had invited me and Dorothy to tea at his flat on the same block, that Dorothy mentioned that she had made her First Holy Communion at St. Veronica's shortly after her baptism on Staten Island back in the 1920s. On the way over from 223 Chrystie St. on the Lower East Side, whether by bus or taxi I don't remember, she pointed out to me the two storey white house, on Christopher St., near Sixth Avenue, which had at one time housed Romany Marie's bistro, an establishment Dorothy knew well.
St. Veronica's is now a "mission" church, not a parish. Fifty years ago, the neighborhood was much like it was pictured in the film "On the Waterfront," working-class Irish, five Masses on Sunday morning. Now rents are sky-high. Movie stars live there among the yuppies. St. Veronica's rectory is an AIDS hospice run by the nuns of the order founded by Mother Teresa.
John Stanley's apartment is on the fourth floor of an "old law" tenement which was then and still is reached by a circular, stone staircase. Dorothy groaned as we walked up it back in 1955 as she was even then plagued by arthritis. (I was just watching a re-run of WEST WING in which Moira Kelly appears. She portrayed Dorothy in ENTERTAINING ANGELS. She didn't look like D.D. but something of her determination came across.) After we had had more than one cup of tea Dorothy asked to use the toilet. In John's tiny apartment the toilet was in a small closet just off the kitchen. (Anyone who has lived in a tenement in lower Manhattan will know this lay-out.) The door had been painted so many times that it would not close properly but there was a latch. Soon after she got inside this tiny space, with only room for a commode she shouted out: "Talk, make some noise," followed a peal of her delightful, girlish laughter. Shades of the young, pre-Catholic Dorothy. John and I looked at each other and grinned but couldn't think of anything to say at that moment. RS
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10:10 am
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To Vote or Not To Vote/Did you vote for Obama?
"A good man is worse than a bad man for he finds a good reason for doing a bad thing that a bad man couldn't figure out, so he lends his goodness to evil. The devil doesn't have horns, he has a halo as big as a hoop. We elected Wilson to keep us out of war, and Roosevelt when he said, 'I tell you again, and again, and again, that no boys will be sent across to foreign soil.'
A good man cannot get any legislation passed or enforced unless he plays ball with the bad men who have a head start on him and surround him. He has to vote for their post office, harbor graft, or other larceny-minded bills to even get his bill out of committee.
I only voted once in my life and that was in 1916 when I voted for Allan Benson, the Socialist candidate for President, who was against the war. And before I was out of Atlanta Prison, Benson was for the war. I might as well have stayed at home. My capitalistic brother is not a pacifist nor an anarchist, but he had sense enough never to vote in his life, as he does not trust politicians.
In 1960 I was asked to run for Vice President on the Vegetarian ticket, but of course I refused to do so. Both major party candidates believe in the return of evil for evil in courts, prisons and war. The Socialist parties believe in violence and Socialism, so as a pacifist and an anarchist I could not vote for them.
I have already seceded from the idea of government. If I voted for a pacifist and he was not elected, I would be honor bound to obey the winner, who of course this time (1960) would either be Kennedy or Nixon, both of whom believe in greater armaments and in war as a means of defeating Communism, although, of course, they say they believe in peace. I vote every day by my anarchist actions."----Ammon Hennacy in THE BOOK OF AMMON, 1970
To read a current condemnation of war and military cemeteries, etc. Google: truthdig and read articles by Chris Hedges, a man after Ammon's own heart. RS
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08:08 pm
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Anniversaries, Coincidences
While browsing through Thomas Merton's journals for the years 1952-1960 this morning I observed that today is the fiftieth anniversary of the death of the Ukrainian/Russian psychiatrist Gregory Ziboorg. By coincidence it is also the sixtieth anniversary of my reception into the Roman Church, a circumstance which led me into the Trappist monastery in Kentucky which was the home of Thomas Merton from 1942 until 1968. From there I migrated to the Catholic Worker communities in Memphis, New York and Salt Lake City. I am no longer a Catholic.
I met Zilboorg through the agency of Dorothy Day. On my request she called Zilboorg and asked him to see me on a personal matter, my homosexuality. I didn't tell her what I wanted to see him for and she didn't inquire about it. He readily agreed telling her that it was "providential" that she had called him on that day because it was the anniversary of his reception into the Roman Church. In the course of discussing the matter, which I found throughly liberating, though he took the RC line regarding the morality of the matter, I mentioned that I had been a novice at Gethsemani and had seen Merton daily for two years. He responded: "I met Merton; he's a prima donna!." He also characterized Dom James Fox, the abbot of Gethsemani during the Fifties and Sixties, as "a homosexual type." I wondered how he came to this conclusion but then when a friend of mine who had been a novice in the early Fifties at Gethsemani told me that Dom James had kissed him on the mouth many times. I figured that Zilboorg knew his business. He was a wise old bird and despite a gruff exterior he was, I think, a kind man. It was Dom James who gave me a copy of Peter Maurin's "Easy Essays" which was promptly confiscated by my novice master. In Russia Zilboorg had worked in the governments of Kerensky and L'vov between the abdication of the Czar and the Bolshevik revolution. He came to the U.S. in 1919, got his medical degree from Columbia University and became psychiatrist to the stars: George Gershwin, Lillian Hellman, and Moss Hart, among others. I learned when I met him that Zilboorg was suffering from the cancer that would soon kill him. Dorothy and I attended his funeral Mass at the big Jesuit church, St. Ignatius', on Park Avenue. Bishop Wright, of Pittsburgh, presided, though he did not officiate. This was in 1959,
Zilboorg and Merton had a long talk in 1956 at the Abbey of St. John, outside St. Cloud, Minnesota, where they were both taking part in a conference on psychological problems in the monastic life. I had heard through the grape-vine that Dom James had arranged the meeting so that Zilboorg could take Merton down a peg or two and bring him into line as he was in Zilboorg's words "a gadfly to your superiors" and "very stubborn" and "afraid to be an ordinary monk." Merton says Zilboorg looked like Stalin; I thought he looked like Pierre Monteux.
Again, the Merton I observed at Gethsemani for two years, though I never talked to him, was cheerful, even-tempered and observant but there was more going on under the surface than was evident to most members of the community,
Dorothy Day had been corresponding with the abbots of Gethsemani for years. This began, I understood, when she wrote to Dom Frederic Dunne, who was abbot when Merton entered, when, because of problems she had at the Easton farm, she felt a need for the monk's prayers. I think she suspected diabolical possession. A faction which opposed her authority eventually wrested the "upper farm" away from her. This group was headed by a man who fancied himself a spiritual leader; under his rule women were obliged to knock before entering a room where men were. When I visited the place once with Michael Kovalak, who had been there in the old days, there was one woman from the upper farm still living there who put us up for the night. In her living room was a photo of this "spiritual leader" and her husband with flowers and candles in front of it as if they were saints. There is a letter in the library at Yale University to the poet Claude MacKay, who had visited the Easton farm, in which Dorothy complains about the loss of the upper farm and the "loss" of her daughter to a marriage she opposed.---Robert Steed
"It seems indeed that most of the novices of this monaster are ex, whether at Catholic Workers or Presidents of Whelan Drugs, all depends, many indeed attending college, others trussed up in the armed forces. Novice life at our abbey leads to a variety of careers." ---'Merton in letter to Robert Lax, 4/2/59, in WHEN PROPHECY STILL HAD A VOICE, edited by Arthur Biddle, Univ. of Kentucky Press, 2001
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11:09 am
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Author or Journalist?
"Dorothy Day (1897-1980), writer and founder of the Catholic Worker. Typed letter signed to Sister Mary Joseph, dated July 24, 1935, with reference to her recent election to the Gallery of Living Catholic Authors:...'Much as I am complimented and overwhelmed by your invitation to join...I do really feel that I have no place there...I am a journalist and would prefer not to have people think of me as an author...' "------from the Biddle Family papers, Women of Letters, Library of Georgetown
Note: Dorothy Day had published a novel, THE ELEVENTH VIRGIN, eleven years earlier and had written another novel soon after that which has disappeared. In 1936 a piece of short fiction under the by-line of Dorothy Day appeared in THE NEW YORKER. Some years earlier Dorothy had been told by Katherine Anne Porter (definitely an author) that she should give up writing as she was not talented in that area. Dorothy seems to have been conflicted in the matter. In 1944 she wrote a short story for THE CATHOLIC WORKER which was criticized by the English writer Caryll Houselander in a letter to Maisie Ward, half of the publishing house Sheed & Ward and a friend of Dorothy's. RS
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08:15 am
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The Tates and Dorothy Day
"The Tates (Allen Tate and Caroline Gordon) each responded to Dorothy Day as they would to their conversion to Catholicism over a decade later. Allen was impressed by her theoretical grasp of the similarities between Agrarianism and the Catholic Worker movement...Characteristically, Caroline seemed more interested in how her Catholicism affected her character and way of life."----Farrell O'Gorman in PECULIAR CROSSROADS, Louisiana State University Press, 2004
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09:53 am
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She baffled Eugene O'Neill's brother Jamie
"He [Jamie O'Neill] had ideas, of course, of what Gene [Eugene O'Neill] should do or not do; that superficial and mocking advice that he loved to give him, then and later. He appeared to like me very much and urged Gene to give up any memories of any other females and cling to and cherish this new Irish rose. Nor did he seem to feel that I was interfering in his relationship with his brother, but when Dorothy [Day] appeared he would gaze at her with silent, baffled curiosity."---Agnes Boulton in PART OF A LONG STORY, Eugene O'Neill as a young man in love, London: Peter Davies, 1958.
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09:27 am
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Auden, Trotsky and Dorothy Day
"This building, at 77 St. Mark's Place, New York City, was the residence, for many years, of the Anglo-American poet, W.H. Auden. He was amazed and delighted to learn from Dorothy that she had interviewed the Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky, there in 1917, when he had had a newspaper office on the ground floor, which is now a restaurant. Auden shared the apartment above the restaurant with his long-time companion, Chester Kallman. Auden's friend and some say surrogate mother, Elizabeth Mayer, told me that she was not allowed to attend Auden's famous birthday parties there because of the naughty goings-on. RS
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09:54 am
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Judith Malina meets Dorothy & Ammon
"...I saw folks distributing copies of THE CATHOLIC WORKER. I introduced myself and offered to help. Ammon Hennacy gave me some to hand out and despite my religious difference I did so gladly. Ammon had seen "The Idiot King" and treats me like a friend. I like his ornery plainness, and Dorothy Day, to whom he introduced me, won all my heart instantly. She is a tall woman, strong boned and sharply molded, her white hair wound in braids around her head and a face and a glance that are fire and poetry. She wore a Hopi cross and a locket that contains a relic of St. Anthony."---from THE DIARIES OF JUDITH MALINA, Grove Press, New York, 1984.
Judith Malina and her late husband, Julian Beck, were the founders of The Living Theater. This item goes on to describe the first mandatory air raid drill in New York City in 1955 and the 30 days the women protesters, including Dorothy Day and Deane Mowrer, spent in the Women's House of Detention on Greenwich Avenue in New York's Greenwich Village. It graphically describes a strip search they had to undergo for illegal drugs! RS.
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02:17 pm
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A Novel About the CW in the Sixties
A book review: CITY OF BELIEF by Nicole d'Entremont
Nicole came to the Catholic Worker headquarters at 175 Chrystie Street in 1964. She was quite unmistakably one of the young leaders and lights of that community for several years. She was good friends with Roger La Porte and was one of the last people to speak with him before he immolated himself for peace in November of 1965. She has been wrestling with the sadness and the questions his death engendered during all the intervening years. She has now published a sensitive, thinly-veiled novel of those days---CITY OF BELIEF, Fox Print Books, 2009, $16 from Amazon. The portrait of life in the house is accurate and engaging. For anyone who knew the Worker in those days the real characters are easily recognizable. Italian Mike, and particularly Julia, are well drawn. Dorothy Day appears as herself and is sympathetically evoked. It is very much worth a look.
Bob Gilliam
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08:11 am
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Peggy Baird Johns Cowley Conklin
"It is wonderful how young and old turn to Peggy (Baird), who is always calm, equable, un-judging. 'She has something,' Kay says, speaking of the way men are attracted to her. Her continued enjoyment of life, for instance, as epitomized by the bottle of wine by her bedside. Her enjoyment in books and flowers, and nature. She is a Collete. But she prays too. I love to hear her join in. 'Pour forth we beseech The O Lord. Thy grace into our hearts.'"---from The Diaries of Dorothy Day, 2008, Marquette Univ.
"...what was Peggy herself, the last---and in some ways the most improbable---player to enter Hart Crane's life?...Regarding her age, at least, she was more than she claimed, generally she registered 1890 as her year of birth...the small print of life was never Peggy's specialism, a born bohemian, insouciant, inventive, easygoing and vain, she lived in the moment and took people as they came. Nobody expected her to earn her living and she seldom indicated a contrary ambition...Once settled in Greenwich Village she established herself as drinking companion to its editors, artists, poets and journalists."---from Hart Crane, a life, by Clive Fisher.
Peggy Baird had persuaded Dorothy to accompany her on a demonstration at the White House for women's suffrage in 1917. They were arrested, sentenced to 30 days and went on a hunger strike. They were separated, briefly and in an effort to rejoin Peggy, Dorothy was man-handled by guards. Sometime later Peggy married literary critic, Malcolm Cowley. During their separation and eventual divorce Cowley fell in love with Dorothy's sister Della. During this time Peggy became emotionally involved with the poet Hart Crane and they lived together in Mexico. Whether their involvement became sexual is still in dispute since Crane was homosexual and never gave up his pursuit of men during this time. While they were on a boat returning to New York in 1932 Crane jumped overboard off Cuba. His body was never recovered. Later, Peggy married a seaman, Howard Conklin. I met them in 1955 at the Peter Maurin farm on Staten Island N.Y. where they were Dorothy's guests. Howard died at Bellevue Hospital during this time. Peggy died at the CW farm in Tivoli, NY in the 70s. By that time she had become a Catholic. RS
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09:46 am
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Dell and Day
"In 1914 (Floyd) Dell moved to New York and joined Max Eastman helping edit the radical journal THE MASSES. Dell wrote articles on several issues including support for Margaret Sanger and her birth control campaign. He also recruited promising writers such as Sherwood Anderson, Dorothy Day and Carl Sandburg to write for the journal." ---from the internet.
Dorothy's sister Della worked for Margaret Sanger and the earliest letter still extant by Dorothy was written to Sanger supporting her movement. After her conversion she evidently changed her mind about birth control. RS
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07:34 pm
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Ammon Hennacy on Mother Jones
"Like Thoreau, Mother Jones stands in a class all by herself. One reading her life would think that it was too good to be true. I regret not having met Jack London and Mother Jones. There is no one with whom you can compare Mother Jones. She was not circumscribed by any dogma. When a show of guns was needed in Charleston, WV, she had her 'boys' buy them. Marx never wrote anything about getting a women's brigade with dishpans and hammers to create havoc among the mules, scabs and mine owners. She told off the union officials and the governors. By her wit she confounded the militia; by her unselfish compassion she shamed the police, and their wives fed her mill children. She, more than most of the rebels today, had suffered more from the police, yet she did not call them 'pigs.'
Perhaps her ancestors, like those of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, had, in County Cork, fought the British, and some of this spirit had to come out eventually, and it did here in America to help the poor miners and the mill children. Her bravery has not been surpassed in American history. Her endurance in fake quarantine was coupled with the endurance of those miners she sought to help.
Mother Jones puts to shame the union 'pie-cards.' She puts to shame the segregated unions whose increased wages come from not allowing blacks, Puerto Ricans and Mexicans to join their unions. She put to shame those today who squabble over radical theory, and who would never stand a tenth of the 'quarantines' that she endured.
She saw the truth about radical communities seventy-five years ago when she said that such groups would succeed only if they had a religious basis. She did not mean a church basis. If the young Hippies today who have their rural colonies will forsake their 'acid' ---mechanical methods of gaining 'interior peace' and will study the life of Mother Jones, of Krishnamurti, and of Gandhi, they might make a success and 'show the world.'
To those who are weak, Mother Jones should give strength. To those who are strong she presents love. To all of us she shows the menace of giving power to others over ourselves. Finally, she shows the power which a truly dedicated life can give to upset tyranny."---from THE ONE-MAN REVOLUTION, Ammon Hennacy Publications, 1970
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11:22 am
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Dorothy Day and Ignazio Silone
"Idealism without illusions, an unsentimental passion for justice---this is Silone's legacy. He called himself 'a Socialist without a Party, a Christian without a Church.' What he meant by both Socialism and Christianity, he explained, was 'an extension of the moral values of private life'---generosity, solidarity, candor---'to all of social life.' It is a simple vision but still a very long way from realization. Few people in his time did more than Silone to keep it alive."----George Scialabba in the BARNES AND NOBLE REVIEW, July 24, 2009
Oct. 23, 1967, Rome, Italy. "Tonight we had dinner with the Silones in Piazza Carlo Goldoni, a restaurant usually very quiet, but tonight very noisy. He is deaf in one ear and I in one, and my placing at table was bad with 2 tables full of noisy young Americans, one Italian family with 2 babies, and one large party of Italians. It was uproarious. Ignazio wanted to know more about Peter Maurin, his background. He knew Marc Sagnier's "Sillon." Wanted to know whether I was a practicing Catholic."---Dorothy Day in "The Duty of Delight." Marquette Univ. Press
There is a longer description of this meal and other comments about Silone in the January, 1968 section of On Pilgrimage: The Sixties by Dorothy Day, Curtis Books, 1972.
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09:12 pm
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Life in Xochimilco, Mexico
"I lived in Mexico as I lived in New York, with the poor. I took rooms with a Mexican family...Breakfast and supper I prepared for Tamar and myself on a little oil stove...I was able to earn enough to remain in Mexico for six months, and to have, in addition to my rooms in Mexico City a little stone hut in Xochimilco where birds flew in and out of the one shuttered window."---from THE LONG LONELINNESS by Dorothy Day
"She went out again to stay in Xochimilco, where Dorothy Day was now living with her daughter in a beautiful Indian shack. Porter took photographs and described the place as the location of Laura's teaching in 'Flowering Judas.'"---from KATHERINE ANNE PORTER by Joan Givner.
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09:11 am
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First World War Protest
"In April, 1917, I was given an assignment by the city editor to go to Washington with a group of Columbia (University) students to protest the passage of the conscription act. These young radicals who made up the Anti-Conscription League chartered a bus to make the trip. I had met some of them at meetings so I welcomed the opportunity..."---Dorothy Day in THE LONG LONELINESS.
"In a last-minute attempt to forestall America's entry into the war, isolationists and pacifists from all over the country journeyed to Washington in 1917, to lobby their congressmen. Slater Brown* and Red Lemon were among the contingent who made the trip from Columbia, which traveled on an old 'Chinatown bus, a rubberneck wagon,' and stopped at various places along the way to make speeches and pass out literature; Dorothy Day, then a reporter for the New York CALL, accompanied them."---THE KENYON REVIEW, New Series--Vol. XII--Winter 1990.
*William Slater Brown later married Dorothy's friend Sue Jenkins. Brown was incarcerated in a French prison along with poet E.E. Cummings during the war. In his book, THE ENORMOUS ROOM, recounting the experience, Cummings refers to Brown simply as "B."----RS
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07:12 am
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The Hell Hole
"As it happened, the Golden Swan was one of the Village dives that the Hudson Dusters patronized. Various Village artists and writers---Djuna Barnes, Dorothy Day, Charles Demuth, and Eugene O'Neill, most of them migrants to the Village during its post-1912 bohemian era---also frequented the saloon. They went there, in part, to rub shoulders with the gangsters and other lowlife types who were among its habitues. Unlike the moral reformers who viewed the criminal element with revulsion, the neighborhood's artists approached the Hell Hole scene with undisguised interest."---INSIDE GREENWICH VILLAGE by Gerald W. McFarland, Univ. of Mass. Press
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11:13 pm
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Dorothy Day and the Bohemians
"Dorothy Day was another young feminist and radical of this period. As a young woman she worked for The Masses as assistant to Floyd Dell. He patronizingly described her as 'an awkward and charming young enthusiast, with beautiful slanting eyes,' but she was much more than this,a militant suffragette who had been imprisoned for her activities in Washington where she had staged a hunger strike in order to be recognized as a political prisoner. Malcolm Cowley described her ability to drink her companions under the table, and she wrote a novel, THE ELEVENTH DAY (sic) about her innocent menage a quartre with three men."---,from BOHEMIANS, THE GLAMOROUS OUTCASTS by Elizabeth Wilson
Note: Dorothy's novel was titled THE ELEVENTH VIRGIN. RS.
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03:59 pm
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DOROTHY DAY'S SUICIDE ATTEMPT
On the web-site New York Songlines Number 86 Greenwich Avenue is described thus: "Was the site of the Greenwich Theater. Earlier was the address of James & Susan Light's 17-room apartment, where many leading artists and intellectuals stayed in the 1910s--including writer Djuna Barnes, photographer Bernice Abbott and poet Malcolm Cowley. Dorothy Day was a downstairs neighbor. The building was known as Maison Clemenceau because French statesman, Georges Clemenceau, had lived on the site from 1866-69..."
This seems to have been Dorothy's residence when she attempted suicide following her disastrous liason with Lionel Moise. She told Mary Lathrop* that "Sue Jenkins saved my life," but Susan Jenkins Light Brown later told Mary Lathrop that it was not she but another tenant, known as "Weavy Willie," who smelling gas, entered the apartment and pulled Dorothy to safety. The structure no longer exists but is now the site of St. Vincent Hospital's Material Handling Center and garden. RS
(*Mary Lathrop, joined the NY Catholic Worker community in 1959. She was a recent convert to the Roman Catholic Church and was referred to Dorothy Day by the novelist and convert, Caroline Gordon, a friend of Dorothy's from her Greenwich Village days and a family friend of Mary's. Sue Jenkins was a family friend as well.) RS
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