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The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage

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I stumbled upon an advance reader's copy of this work in a used bookshop--I had never heard of the book's author, an editor at FSG, but I was curious to find out how he would weave together the stories of his four subjects: Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Flannery O'Connor, and Walker Percy. At first glance, they seemed to have little in common apart from their religion.

As Elie shows in this entertaining and informative book, these writers were all highly aware of each other, and would meet on their separate "pilgrimages" toward authentic spirituality in increasingly secular times. "The School of the Holy Ghost" (as this quartet was once called) was not a school at all, as the Imagists or the Beats were; however, Elie shows, they felt a profound kinship, and one of the most fascinating aspects of the book is Elie's depiction of how they reached out to each other, through fan letters, postcards, reviews, publishing each other's work, and not-always-successful meetings (Merton and Percy had little to say to one another as they sipped bourbon on the porch of Merton's hermitage in Kentucky.)

Above all, what brought these Catholic believers together was a love of literature, and Elie's book happily overflows with this same virtue. Whether discussing Day and Merton's dispute over Vietnam draft card burning, or the racism of O'Connor's letters, Elie writes elegant and opinionated prose. He shows how hard these people had to struggle to find a path for themselves, and how they came to see struggle as an inherent quality of faith. His readings of O'Connor and Percy's fiction are astute, and he productively contrasts Day's activism with Merton's withdrawal into solitude. Elie's use of letters--especially O'Connor's--brings out the voices of the principals, and at the end of the book, you feel that you know them personally. I would recommend this superb synthesis to anyone interested in the intersection of faith and literature.

The title of Paul Elie's book THE LIFE YOU SAVE MAY BE YOUR OWN is borrowed from a short story title of Flannery O'Connor, one of the four writers discussed in his book. The other three are Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, and Walker Percy. The focus of Elie's work is not as much biographical as it is literary. He looks at the two things that connect these four great people: faith and writing, and shows how both work together to produce the great literary output of each author. Elie sees these four people as being part of an informal "Catholic" school of writers. Elie looks at an analyzes many of the writings of each author, and presents it in a manner that will appeal to the scholar and lay reader as well. Though the book has biographical information, and is arranged in a chronological manner, biographical and historical details are only provided where absolutely necessary to discuss the literary works of Day, Merton, O'Connor, and Percy.

There has been a temptation to see Merton and Day as larger than life, almost saintly figures, Percy and O'Connor as eccentric southerners who happen to be Catholic, and in the case of O'Connor, a Catholic writer trying to impose blatant symbols of faith in all of her writings. Elie certainly admires all four, but shows them from a human point of view. In doing so, he debunks many of the myths surrounding these four figures. From a spiritual point of view, they are just as human as we are, and it is because of their very human struggles that their literary output is possible.

Elie breaks important ground by looking at these four great Catholic figures as writers, and his work will undoubtedly set the stage for further study of the literary connections of Merton, Day, O'Connor, and Percy. His book includes copious endnotes that will enable a person to easily find works by and about these four authors. In most chapters Elie discusses each of the four, but he uses breaks after sections about each author which makes reading easier. Elie himself is a book editor and he uses his skills as an editor to write a concise work. The length of the book demonstrates this alone. The text without endnotes is approximately 475 pages. There are certainly individual works about Merton, O'Connor, and Day equal or greater in length than Elie's work, but hardly say as much. I cannot say for certain about Percy since I am not familiar with scholarly or biographical works about him.

This book will more than likely be of interest to Catholic readers, but anyone who wishes to study the role of faith in Day, Merton, O'Connor, and Percy, will find this book a great read an a valuable resource.

If you are interested in any one of the four authors represented here (Day, Merton, O'Connor, Percy) you will find the context and comparisons that Elie makes extremely illuminating. It is a challenging task to interweave four biographies in a way that is interesting and mutually enriching. Elie does it. He writes well and his comparisons of these four along with other important influences are always clear and helpful. Very well done piece of work.

This book is undeniably a classic of literary criticism and biography. Paul Elie gets it just right--he takes the spiritual concerns and the religiosity of the four authors very seriously while demonstrating a careful concern for the complexities and ambiguities of their faith. And he has a real knack for analyzing how all of this informs and undergirds their writings in ways that aren't necessarily straightforward and obvious. Furthermore, he accomplishes all of this in clear, jargon-free prose that is almost literary in its own right.

Certainly other biographies and autobiographies of Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Flannery O'Connor, and Walker Percy are out there (sorry, Barthes, "the author" is not dead), but "The Life You Save" accomplishes something a little different. Elie weaves in and out of their different lives and in so doing both suggests commonalities and similarities shared by them (the chapter titles are usually a reliable clue to these) as well as differences and contrasts that mutually highlight their characteristic particularities. Developing along these lines, later as the book progresses and our foursome become aware of each other Elie discusses their communications with each other and impressions of each other, which sheds invaluable light on all four of them and their concerns.

All of this could easily fly out of hand, especially in so large and substantial a book, but Elie holds it together and keeps the story/stories flowing along together, using the metaphor of the "pilgrimage" on multiple levels as a sort of common theme smoothing out his narrative while adding meaning and significance to it. At the end, appropriately enough, the image of the pilgrimage symbolizes his own involvement with the four authors and the writing of this book itself.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the relation of literature, religion, and social history. If you take the spiritual dimension of literature seriously while knowing full well that literature is more than just a disguised form of preaching, this book will definitely be right up your alley.

I had read a lot of Flannery O'Connor, but didn't know as much about Merton, Dorothy Day, or Walker Percy. Elie's assessment of O'Connor's writing is not only accurate, but insightful. He is a very gifted theologian, literary critic, and biographer.

In reading him, I gained several new insights into O'Connor's stories and how her life and Catholicism influenced them. Some of his images (for instance, describing Mrs. Turpin in "Revelation" as a "hillbilly Thomist") were absolutely delightful and right on target. Through Walker Percy and Flannery O'Connor, he also paints a wonderful picture of the strange and wonderful world of Southern Catholics.

What is most impressive about this book, however, is how he weaves the lives, writing and faith journeys of four very different persons together, showing that indeed, grace perfects nature, even when the "nature" is quite different from one personality to another. They were all clearly influenced by the same threads of Catholic theology and spirituality, but reflected it back to us in very different ways.

This book was interesting to me because of its literary and theological themes. But even more, it was spiritual reading. Again and again I stoped reading and compared their spiritual journeys to my own. Reading Elie's book has deepened my faith and given me hope that despite my own doubts and the "bumps in the road" on my spiritual journey, I might still one day hope to achieve some measure of holiness. What's more, I highlighted many passages which will surely be fodder for some future preaching!

Fr. Charles Bouchard, OP

Paul Elie ably portrays the lives of four American saints in The Life You Save May Be Your Own. Elie follows the lives of Trappist monk Thomas Merton, Southern outcast Flannery O'Connor, literary gentleman Walker Percy, and Christian radical Dorothy Day. Rather than strict biography, Elie follows each writer's life as a pilgrimage, seeing the progression of the country's history and American Catholicism along the details of their lives.

For a book weighing in at 560 hefty pages, Elie provides a surprisingly quick read. He has an excellent ability to feel with each of his subject's quite different personalities. Elie also examines the strength and limitations of Catholics in America, the heart of a writer, and different ways to express one's faith in art and in life. Not only a read for critics or for Catholics, this is a wonderful bedtime book for anyone who wants to combine their love for God, for literature, and for the poor and outcasts of our world today.

THE LIFE YOU SAVE MAY BE YOUR OWN (an American Pilgrimage)
Peter Elie
This sounds merely like a book that mingles biographies of four Catholic writers. As the subtitle tells, it is an American Pilgrimage and lives like these could only be found in America. The book is a journey to the shrines of life and wisdom found in these four and through their writing. Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton: Four Americans, Three converts, Two Southerners, one Priest, all dedicated to the proposition that each of us is capable of Love. A cripple and a candidate for sainthood, an ascetic and an archetypal gentleman. A motlier crew would be hard to find. Yet the reward is ours. When you realize the pain and passion involved in their lives and writing, you can only ask - what have I done for love? The book is a spiritual history of America from the late 40's through the 70's based on little people whose lives become large enough to model real Faith. We need to remeet such writers.

Paul Elie's combined biographies of Merton, Day, Percy, and O'Connor has many virtues, which other reviewers have mentioned and elaborated upon. No doubt the convergence of the lives of these four gifted writers is a fascinating story, and Elie's footnotes in the back are very detailed and helpful. The main problem I have with this book is that Elie's Catholicism is so attenuated that it can hardly grasp much of what these writers were trying to do with their lives and with their work. On the last page of his book, Elie states plainly his position that "there is no one true faith", true for all people, all times. That's a proposition that I think his four subjects would take issue with, and sharply. As O'Connor famously said of the Blessed Sacrament, "If it's a symbol, well the hell with it." Elie also has a fairly superficial understanding of what a pilgrimage is in traditional Catholic culture and theology. He reduces it to a journey undertaken to see something with one's own eyes, something akin to a story lived out. Well, sure, but of the deeper sense of that word--one central certainly to Percy--Elie has no idea. The "homo viator" is essentially a pilgrim, a wayfarer, and is central to Percy's idea of the self, and thus to all his work. Alas, Elie's faith--at least as expressed in this book--is nothing like the faith of the writers he finds so fascinating. Merton, Day, Percy, and O'Connor knew their faith allowed them to assent to something that transcended their reason, that allowed them to partake of mysteries that are not "projected" by their desires, but are the source and goal of all natural human desires in the first place. Elie's interesting but flawed work shows that heterodox Catholicism is hardly up to the task of really appreciating these gifted writers. Unfortunately, that is the least of its problems.

This book is a good book. Paul Elie is a very fine writer, particularly fine at plot, which is ironic and rather odd since he is writing a sort of quadruple literary biography in which the life stages of his protagonists do not align chronologically (e.g., Dorothy Day, 1897-1980; Flannery O'Connor, 1925-64). But he plots the book so that we are reading about four independent authors in relation to each other. Their pilgrimages have similar stages, scattered throughout the years, even as they deal with the same world issues simultaneously: World War II, the Cold War, race relations, etc. We have a sense of four different stories deeply akin, which seems to be the story Paul Elie wanted to tell. Elie is also good at stylistic analysis. Sometimes he will quote from a letter or an essay and, in a few impressionistic words, identify how form and content perfectly fuse. This moved me at several points in the book.

All this is interesting, but I find myself more interested in my dissatisfactions with the book, which other readers may actually see as positive characteristics, so I'll record them and you can be the judge.

1) This book does not seem to me to be a Catholic or Christian book. It is a profoundly religious book, though. Elie in his prologue suggests that he will be reading his four subjects through the critical lens of Harold Bloom-the four creatively misread medieval European Catholicism into their new context. He also introduces them against the historical background of William James and Henry Adams rather than a Catholic background. As I understand Bloom, Bloom insists that misreading is inevitable; at any case, I wonder if reading Catholic works through Bloom's lens, or any lens other than Catholicism, might sentence biography or criticism of these authors to misreading from the beginning. What I fear is that at least some of these four writers might find Elie's conclusion reductive: "They saw religious experience out before them. They read their way toward it. They believed it. They lived it. They made it their own. With us in mind, they put it in writing." It is simply a case of putting "religious experience" (and Bloom's misprision, and William James's naturalism, and postmodern skeptical self-finding) as the transcendent element in the story, instead of the Catholic church in whatever manifestation these authors encountered it. I think Elie is leaving these trails for people who are not Catholics to enter his work anyway, and that's admirable to a point, but, as Flannery O'Connor would say, Catholicism is either true or it isn't, and there is a fundamental inaccessibility within these works which I think Elie might be sacrificing. In short, the trails Elie leaves don't lead to Catholicism, but to a generic "religious experience."

2) The book is as fiercely individualistic as any book about Catholics can ever be. The title says so: The Life You Save May Be Your Own. The dominant motif, according the preface, is pilgrimage, chiefly and most fundamentally individual. As such, with the exception of correspondence, the book gives us very little idea about how these authors related to other people and existed within the context of community. Only cursory attention is given to family and extra-literary friends during each author's productive period. This is alright, especially for the Trappist monk of the bunch, but I am sitting on my loveseat trying to apply these ideas and practices to my life and thinking, "But I'm married." And I'm a son, a brother, a co-worker, etc. These four people were rather solitary people, and created themselves through literature (theirs and others---one of Elie's main points), so perhaps we who live deeply in community might just want to find other examples to misread creatively.

3) The book is about pilgrimage, which sounds either teleological or "the joy's in the journey." You either go on pilgrimage because you want to get somewhere or because you like the company and the situation of the trip itself. But the way the book is written (form vs. content, in this case) clashes with the pilgrimage motif. The book is a series of little sections (less than a page, one page, several pages), each being a little unity, a little vignette to itself. And Elie often closes these vignettes with a pungent quote from the author in question, the sort of burst of insight that you might find at the end of something. Rather than feeling as if I was going somewhere, or that I was on a meandering but pleasant journey, I as a reader felt as if I was perpetually arriving. Generally, each little vignette was a crisis that ended with at least a provisional resolution. I actually liked this sensation (each moment in your life is the end of one story), but it did render the book's pilgrimage to Elie's conclusion rather anticlimactic.

Paul Elie's book is a sort of multiple biography of four well-known American writers (Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, Thomas Merton, and Dorothy Day), as well as a social and intellectual history of 20th century American Catholicism. This is a very ambitious book, but Elie pulls it off with great style. The strongest parts of the book are about O'Connor and Percy; maybe this is because they were the more accomplished writers. Elie makes O'Connor come alive again; we see the maidenishly lovable and strong-willed young author as she is struck down by illness and condemned to a confinement in her rural backwater. Instead of giving into despair she turns to her faith and casts a compassionate but unblinking eye to the human "grotesques" of the South: they come to unforgettable life in "Wise Blood" and "A Good Man is Hard to Find". She becomes interested in the powerful, consoling theology of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who taught that "everything that rises must converge." She dies of lupus at age 39.

Walker Percy also had to battle with despair. Both his father and grandfather committed suicide. The Percys were an aristocratic Southern family with a strong tradition of stoicism; that is, the nobility of suffering as the sole consolation. Percy eventually came to see that wasn't enough. In his first novel, "The Moviegoer", he examined "the greatest despair: that it does not know that it is despair." And in his best novel (in my opinion) The Thanatos Syndrome: A Novel he explores the death wish of western civilization and the necessary faith-based cure.

Elie's accounts of the lives of Merton and Day are also very interesting, but those authors are perhaps not quite as prominent as they used to be. Day is better known for her many good works than her prosaic writing. And the monasticism of Merton seems to be a little esoteric and removed from quotidian, everyday life as it is lived by most of us. But they are still worthwhile as studies of what it means to take religion seriously in your life; to try to see the ultimate, luminous transcendental reality above and beyond the immediately visible one. This is a very moving, soul-satisfying book.