Uncommon pilgrims.(Book Review)

Paul Elie The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 555 pages, $27

Lionel Trilling once lamented that our age has few "representative figures," people who live their visions as well as write them. In his first book, The Life You Save May Be Your Own, Paul Elie--an editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux--presents four Catholic writers who did live their visions and who successfully dramatize the religious questions posed by the nihilistic, secular culture of mid-twentieth-century America. Elie's four subjects--the French-born monk Thomas Merton, the left-wing activist Dorothy Day, and the novelists Walker Percy and Flannery O'Connor--form a disparate group. Yet all were keen observers of life and society, all wrote out of their own struggles with belief and unbelief. Elie's decision to tell their stories chronologically is one strength of the book. By continually moving back and forth among the writers, he is able to highlight various patterns, similarities, and contrasts in their lives and their writing. Among other things, he shows that for these writers the activities of reading and writing were themselves redemptive.

All four were assiduous readers. All found that reading literature clarified their religious sense as well as their artistic vision. Thomas Merton--whose spiritual autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain (1948) was a bestseller--found his way into the Church by following his attraction to French medieval thought and art. From the philosopher Etienne Gilson he learned of a God he could believe in, and from medieval art he gained the sense of order that his restless soul craved. He and Dorothy Day were both socialists, Merton (1915-1968) a rebel against bourgeois society, Day (1897-1980) an enemy of a capitalist economy. She formed her moral vision reading Russian novelists and lived it by founding a New York hospitality center for the poor.

Merton settled into an austere life as a monk whose vow of silence did not prevent him from writing voluminously: an expression of his garrulous nature, perhaps, as well as an expression of his effort to renew monastic life in modern culture by finding ways to share the monastic experience with others. Dorothy Day, whose unhappy marriage gave her an only child, lived among New York's tenement poor and pursued the idea that only saints could reform society. In her books, her autobiography, and her annual fund-raising appeals for the newspaper The Catholic Worker, she promoted anarchism and pacifism as the best way to live the Gospel. She never changed her radical views but her moral vision expanded as she pursued personal holiness. New York's Cardinal O'Connor proposed her candidacy for sainthood in 1997.

Walker Percy (1916-1990), a Southerner from a distinguished family, gave up the practice of medicine in order to diagnose the existential lostness of the modern person, to read philosophy, and to write novels about finding the self by getting out of the self. In The Moviegoer (1961), Binx Bolling, a New Orleans stock-and-bond broker, suffers a special kind of angst. He finds daily life unfulfilling and discovers his real life at the movies and watching other people. He is not a traditional believer but lives what Flannery O'Connor called a "kind of subreligion which expresses its ultimate concern in images that have not yet broken through to show any recognition of a God who has revealed Himself." Binx is a postmodern pilgrim, seeking signs of reality but unable to analyze what he finds.

Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964) was a Georgian of fiercely independent disposition who created similar characters struggling with belief and unbelief drawn from the country people she knew. She traced her interest in the grotesque and freaks to her childhood and her chicken that could walk forward and backward, an exploit filmed by Pathe news. In Wise Blood (1952), Hazel Motes is a veteran who founds his own religion, the Church without Christ. Motes does not want any Lord to redeem him and yet craves religious experience. He is, says Elie, "the postwar American pilgrim ... trapped between belief and unbelief, torn between the promised land of religious faith and the fallen world of his own experience." ...