Books

Old Favourites: The Long Loneliness (1952) by Dorothy Day

Dorothy Day’s autobiography is ‘a conversation with the world’

Dorothy Day in 1965. The anarchist writer and activist often reacted negatively when people praised her as saintlike. Photograph: Judd Mehlman/NY Daily News via Getty Images

Brian Maye
Sat Jan 23 2021 - 06:00

Dorothy Day (1897-1980) was a brilliant, radical American social activist, writer and journalist. Having defied gender and political norms for some 30 years, she converted to Catholicism and, with Peter Maurin, co-founded the Catholic Worker newspaper and movement, aiming to expose and reform the injustices of capitalism and to combat American industry’s terrible effects on the poor.

A lifelong pacifist, Day’s protests against racism, war and injustices of all kinds frequently landed her in jail. Although her faith inspired her actions, her pursuit of social justice and the protection of human dignity had most of all a secular motivation. The anarcho-syndicalist ideas of Peter Kropotkin, Tolstoy and the International Workers of the World influenced her. She advocated the Catholic theory of “distributism” as an alternative to capitalism or socialism.

The Long Loneliness, her autobiography, omits some parts of her earlier bohemian life, such as her abortion (fictionally camouflaged in her 1924 novel, The Eleventh Virgin) and her heavy drinking (once literally drinking Eugene O’Neill under the table), but its account of her journey to faith, told without piety, is still remarkably candid.

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She is open (and too charitable) about how men in her life treated her, such as her distant father who tried to stop her becoming a journalist; the bohemian radicals who used her sexually and then abandoned her; and the self-centred lover and father of her only child who turned against her when she converted to Catholicism.

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She gives too much credit to the self-taught, self-absorbed and know-it-all Maurin, who probably did as much harm as good to the Catholic Worker movement, although she does allow herself a slight side-swipe at how he “never filled the chasms, the valleys, in his leaping from crag to crag of noble thought”.

Day’s autobiography has been compared to St Augustine’s Confessions. But whereas his is “a conversation with God”, hers is “a conversation with the world”, according to one perceptive commentator.

She sees the longing for communion as the main driving force of human life: “The final word is love… To love we must know each other … We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.”