Among the Believers (Page 3)

Merton, born in Europe, raised in France and New York (Douglaston, Queens, to be exact) and educated at Cambridge and Columbia, converted to Catholicism in his early 20s, was ultimately ordained a priest and entered the Trappist monastery at Gethsemani in Kentucky. His autobiography of his wild and youthful wanderings, his ultimate conversion and his journey into monasticism, The Seven Storey Mountain, was published in 1948 and became an international bestseller. He was only 33 years old; he would spend the next thirty years in monastic life, writing journals, poems, prayers, contemplations and studies of various religious themes. His writing and his political beliefs (antiwar when the Church hierarchy was adamantly and bizarrely not) drew him into greater and greater realms of controversy before he died during a trip to Asia in 1968. (He slipped getting out of the bath, apparently grabbed onto a fan and was electrocuted. Elie gives no credence to the rumors of this being a suicide, and rightly, I think, for there is no evidence whatsoever in his journals or correspondence at the time of his being in any significant despair, other than at the state of the world.)

Percy was born to Southern gentility and after his parents died, he was raised by an uncle, Will Percy, a wealthy man and also a writer of essays and memoirs. Percy went north in the late 1940s to study medicine at Columbia, got TB from the clinical work he did and converted during his recuperation. He wrote several failed novels and a number of philosophical essays through the 1950s before he published The Moviegoer (1961), a novel of a lost suburban man, as so many of his later novels would be, which won the National Book Award and established him in his mid-40s as a major American novelist.

O'Connor, for my taste, is the great artist of the group, with a purity and intensity of ambition that is utterly idiosyncratic and unaccountable. She was from a landed but not very lofty Georgia Catholic family, educated at a local "women's college," as they were then drearily called, recognized by the early director of the Iowa Writer's Workshop as a talent, admitted there and, despite cultural inferiority and a rudimentary sense of aesthetics, grew ever more tenacious in pursuit of her own vision. She taught herself not only to write but how to be a great writer, step by painful step, as she would have to teach herself how to get about on crutches in her 30s, after the treatments for her lupus softened her bones. Her Catholicism was fierce and consuming, and it was the sole motivation for her work, for its look and sound and thematic expression, and she has been enormously influential on Catholic writers who have followed. It's an influence that has not diminished the appeal she still holds for other, less religiously inclined readers, who recognize in her a startling drama and a Gothic, compelling vision.

Elie brings these writers together in history, as it were: places them in their locales as if on a map, and with almost invisible effort shows us the massive cultural and historical forces at work around them, the events and forces that affected them and that were affected by them. He is comfortable in ways many modern writers would not be with the specific language of their piety (he eloquently captures the appeal of the monastery, for instance, as "a place of retreat, where the world was left behind so that God might be glimpsed") and, but for one case, comfortable too with the paradoxical evidence of their holiness and their human foibles.

The exception is a brief passage where he takes O'Connor to task for the evident racism of her everyday speech and some of her correspondence. It is an odd slip in the book, a slightly sanctimonious disapproval that asks her to put aside an essential part of her sensibility, her withering irony and comic vision (from which she never for a moment protected herself or anyone else in her purview, regardless of color), in order to protect a special class of people, African-Americans, based on a historical conception of their status that she didn't live to see. (Not that, had she lived to see it, she would have changed her ways all that much--as tragic as her early death was, it is not at all clear how she would have managed to grow as an artist and even less clear that she would have been a tolerable elder stateswoman.) Elie admits that her racism is not present in her work. Hilton Als made that case even more convincingly in a brilliant essay about O'Connor's putative racism published in The New Yorker two years ago. Her fiction demonstrated an understanding that was nuanced and realistic to late 1950s, early 1960s conditions in the South, and at the same time was suffused with a profound moral understanding of suffering, oppression and the elaborately ironic manners that Southern blacks developed as strategies for their social and sometimes even physical survival.

For the rest--Day's early moral struggles, later bursts of temper and frequent and sometimes ill-placed fervor, for Percy's disengagement and frequent depression, for Merton's early sex life and later, odd affair with a young woman when he was a 51-year-old Trappist monk--Elie shows an informed sympathy and understanding, and the necessary, large sense that life is complicated and everyone makes mistakes. He is, blessedly, not subject to the biographer's disease, a creeping hatred of and contempt for his subjects.

What has been for many readers, including me, so potent about these writers, has been the force, driven into a masterful language, of their conviction that our recognition of the truth of the universe, of its unimaginable creation and invisible purposes, really is a matter of the greatest possible importance, of life and death: an eternal concern tied to the notion of salvation. Two of them, Day and to a lesser degree Merton, were able to balance that spiritual view with ongoing interest and considerable involvement in worldly affairs, in movements and actions for justice and for peace. Percy and O'Connor shaped an art from their belief and, socially speaking, let it stand for itself. Elie, in his borrowed title and in his descriptions of various critical moments in these four lives, indicates his concurrence with that large and life-changing view, though he has not shown an arrogance akin to theirs and tried to make the case himself. Thus for the Catholic intellectual, he is a gentle, perhaps too-polite guide, but an essential one, back to the sources of an irreplaceable inspiration.

• « Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 68 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
• Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.