Dorothy Day, the World Will Be Saved by Beauty: An Intimate Portrait of My Grandmother by Kate Hennessy (review)

Intimate is the operative word. Kate Hennessey, the youngest of Dorothy Day’s nine grandchildren born of her only child, Tamar, pens a portrait that is moving, sometimes lyrical, loving, beautifully written, a more than worthy addition to the corpus of writings by and about Dorothy Day, with Jim Forest’s All is Grace (Orbis, 2011), and Professor William Miller’s Dorothy Day: A Biography (Harper & Row, 1982). Hennessy corrects Dr. Miller who took for reality the portraits of characters in Dorothy’s 1924 roman a clef, The Eleventh Virgin. Although autobiographical, it is still a roman. Lionel Moise wasn’t at all as cruel as Miller portrays him. And we get a much fuller picture of Forster Batterham, Tamar’s father.

In her preface, Hennessy writes: “(W)hen someone like Dorothy Day is your grandmother, an examination of her life isn’t an intellectual, academic or religious experience. For me, it is nothing less than a quest to find out who I am through her and through Tamar. It is a quest to save my own life, though I don’t yet know what that means . . . We all need to live our lives as if we were Dorothy’s children and grandchildren, being comforted and discomforted by her as she invites us to be so much more than how we ordinarily see ourselves . . . and each other.”

At his death, Tamar found in her father’s apartment a shoe-box full of letters, with seventy that Dorothy had written to Forster between 1925 and 1932. In them Tamar “could see once again her mother, the Dorothy Day she so loved and who seems to be in danger of being lost to the world—a woman of great joy and passion, humor, and love of beauty. Tamar grieved the loss of this vibrant woman to hagiography and at times to Dorothy’s own nature, especially through her ‘severe and pious stage.”

This book, because it shows her as thoroughly human, will surely advance Dorothy’s cause for canonization. Kate saw Dorothy both in the context of family life and in the beautiful chaos of the Catholic Worker movement. She does not obscure Dorothy’s faults. Dorothy could be cranky, arbitrary, overly rigorous, judgmental, even dictatorial though she prized freedom above all else and her virtues were the contrary of her faults; a complex of contradictions mellowing over time.

Tamar’s faith and that of the children suffered from early exposure to the rigorist seven-day silent retreat developed by the Canadian Jesuit, Onesimus Lacouture. Dorothy found “The Retreat” just what she had been looking for as a Catholic. It did her good, but it was too much for most and drove many to drink who didn’t need the ride.

Tamar and Dorothy were opposites in many ways, Tamar more like her father, laconic, a lover of nature and country living. She was highly intelligent and aware of social injustice but not inclined to action or religious practice, whereas Dorothy was a model activist and deeply devout, “haunted by God” from her early youth as if she were a character in a Dostoevsky novel. Kate examines the resolution of those tensions in an unbreakable bond of love and loyalty. She also sheds light on the difficulties in Tamar’s marriage never before revealed. Tamar married at age eighteen a man thirteen years her senior. David Hennessy was never able to support his family adequately nor tame his demons. Tamar, with Dorothy’s support, finally asked him to move out.

This book will surely take a major prize or more and go into many future printings.