Writing lives

The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage.
By Paul Elie. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 555 pp., $27.00.

Profound, original and entertaining, Paul Elie's new book weaves together the life and work of four 20th-century American Catholic writers: Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy. Elie illuminates their literary achievement and makes clear that their spiritual search was far from parochial. He uncovers fascinating connections between his subjects and reminds us of what was going on in America as they passed through the various stages of their separate but interrelated pilgrimages.

The wide reading, interviewing and traveling that lie behind this book are impressive, especially since the result is never fussy or academic. Elie was on a pilgrimage of his own as he studied the four, concerned not just with the quality of their writing but with the meaning of their lives. Rather than making exaggerated claims for his subjects, he strove to understand their development as writers and to illuminate the complexities of religious experience in a rapidly changing society. He gives fresh, insightful critiques of specific books, shows how they fit into individual careers, and makes clear each writer's strengths and limitations.

Elie switches back and forth between his subjects, following the line of their development. He explores Dorothy Day's career as a left-wing journalist and bohemian; Flannery O'Connor's Catholic childhood in a deeply Protestant South; the melancholic and aristocratic family background of Walker Percy, whose father and grandfather both committed suicide; and Thomas Merton's years living with his artist father in a small French village. All four had to revise early decisions about their lives: Percy studied medicine in uptown Manhattan, while Merton dreamt of a literary career during his student days at Columbia--ambitions which were soon modified. Though there was a sense of religious yearning in Dorothy Day's early radicalism, painful wrenches in her personal life preceded her founding of the Catholic Worker movement; and serious illness forced Flannery O'Connor to return home to Milledgeville, Georgia, where she fulfilled her vocation by writing about the lives of the people around her.