Dorothy Day, a Broken Family, and Sexual Abuse at Maryfarm: Some in the world will not be saved by beauty

Dorothy Day was a journalist, and she left an enormous written record that can help us understand her life and her work. She wrote articles for The Catholic Worker newspaper and Commonweal Magazine. She wrote novels, one of which was published under the title of The Eleventh Virgin. She wrote two memoirs: The Long Loneliness and From Union Square to Rome; and she published On Pilgrimage and Loaves and Fishes, which are collections of brief essays. And she kept a diary. Her diaries, edited by and published by Robert Ellsberg, total more than a thousand pages.

Yet a student of Dorothy Day could read all that Dorothy had written and all that has been written about her and still be shocked and astonished by The World Will Be Saved By Beauty, the story of Dorothy Day's life written by Kate Hennessy, Dorothy's youngest grandchild.

One knows, after reading just a few pages of Hennessy's book, that Kate inherited Dorothy's gift for language and for storytelling. Hennessy's narrative about Dorothy's search for meaning as a young woman is as gripping as any novel.

Second, much of the book is an examination of Dorothy's relationship with the two most important people in her life: Forster Batterham, the father of Dorothy's only child; and Tamar, Dorothy's daughter. People who are generally familiar with Dorothy's biography know that Dorothy loved Forster deeply, but her relationship with him ended after Dorothy baptized Tamar as a Catholic and then became a Catholic as well.

But Hennessy tells us that Dorothy's relationship with Batterham continued for several years after the couple ceased to live together. In fact, at one point Dorothy believed she might be pregnant with Forster's second child. Hennessy gives us deeper insight into the kind of man Forster was--a man of deep conviction but no fortitude--a man Malcolm Cowley described as a person who would not let anything interfere with his whims.

Tamar's life, as told by her daughter, impressed me as deeply tragic. She was wooed by Dave Hennessy, a man loosely attached to the Catholic Worker movement and 13 years Tamar's senior. Dorothy did not want Tamar to marry Dave. As Dave's daughter Kate Hennessy wrote, everyone knew he was trouble. But Dorothy fumbled in her effort to break the bond that Dave had managed to patiently construct with Tamar as he waited patiently for her to reach the marriageable age of 18.

Tamar had nine children with Dave Hennessy, who was never able to support his huge family. Like Forster Batterham, Dave was a dabbler who rarely held a steady job. He was an alcoholic and verbally abusive to his young wife. Long before Tamar gave birth to her ninth child, she had lost interest in her husband.

And now here is the shocking revelation slipped into the middle of Kate Hennessy's book. All students of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement know that the Catholic Worker farms were the brainchild of Dorothy's collaborator, Peter Maurin. Maurin saw communal farms as the way to get people out of the city and into the countryside, where families could support themselves and lead a Christian life.

Dorothy, however, saw the farms as places where food could be raised to support the Catholic Worker's food lines, as  well as quiet, sheltered places for retreats. In fact, Maryfarm, the Catholic Worker's largest experience with rural living, attracted an assortment of misfits, and it was impossible to get all of Maryfarm's residents to work cooperatively and productively.

Of course, we already knew that the Maryfarm was a failure, even before Kate Hennessy's account of the farm was published. What we did not know, however, was that a faction of the Maryfarm residents came under the spell of Guy Tobler, a French attorney, who manipulated the lives of some of the Maryfarm residents, a group made up of a few married couples and single men.

Hennessy reveals that the Tobler perverted the Christian environment Dorothy and Peter Maurin were trying to nurture at Maryfarm and created a culture of manipulation, subjugation of women and children, and even sexual abuse.

Just before Christmas 1946, Dorothy walked away from Maryfarm permanently. In February 1947, she informed the archbishop that Maryfarm was no longer affiliated with the Catholic Worker. How could it be, once it had been perverted by a force of primordial evil?

I was drawn to Dorothy Day many years ago; I felt a kinship with her because we both misspent our youth (although my youth was much more misspent than Dorothy's). But learning these new details about Maryfarm caused me to admire Dorothy Day even more. Surely by the witness of her life, she helps us realize that God calls us to be faithful, not successful. And as Dorothy's life shows us, the Christian life can be a hard and bitter life; it is indeed, to borrow a phrase from Dorothy--The Long Loneliness.