Wayfaring Between Two Infinities
The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage
by Paul Elie
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003
(555 pages; $27.00, hardcover)
reviewed by Addison H. Hart
The Life You Save May Be Your Own, named after a short story by Flannery O’Connor, is a rare, possibly unique, work of biography. Paul Elie, an editor with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, has produced an account of the lives of four post-World War II American Catholic writers. It is the combination of being Catholic and postwar American that makes the small literary “school” he explores distinctive, and that also makes Elie’s exercise in collective biography an engrossing piece of historical insight.
The book’s subtitle, “An American Pilgrimage,” indicates the theme, and Elie has done such a deft job of interweaving the four life stories that the use of the singular “pilgrimage” for four very different stories is fitting. Since the four writers had little, occasional, or no direct contact with each other, the fact that their stories merge so naturally is testimony to Elie’s perspicacity. It is his first book.
The four thinkers and writers are Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Flannery O’Connor, and Walker Percy: a journalist-social worker in New York, a Trappist monk in Kentucky, and two Deep-Southern writers of fiction. Three of the four were converts to Catholicism, Flannery O’Connor alone being a lifelong member of the Catholic Church. The imbalance reflects a larger truth about English-speaking Catholic intellectual life: It was the converts who were mainly responsible for its existence for more than a century.
Having said that, my own impression is that, of the four, O’Connor stands out in a particularly engaging way in Elie’s book, and I believe this reflects accurately the very real and matchless contribution she made in life. When she dies of lupus at the age of 39 in 1964, the first of the four to die, the reader of this moving account becomes keenly aware that the texture and pattern of Elie’s biographical tapestry has been altered appreciably, and that probably the most gifted artist of the lot has taken something important and irrecoverable away with her.
When Elie attempts to articulate his own master theme in the Prologue and Epilogue, though, he patches together such elements as the role of literature in his subjects’ lives, the idea of pilgrimage, the postwar American Catholic setting, and the legacy of these writers for readers today. It comes across as something of a jumble, especially at the conclusion of the work. Still, we sort of get the picture, and the work holds together well irrespective of his rationale as to why it should.
Unfortunately, at times he can write sheer nonsense. For instance: “We are all skeptics now, believer and unbeliever alike. There is no one true faith, evident at all times and places. Every religion is one among many. The clear lines of any orthodoxy are made crooked by our experience, are complicated by our lives.” This is like saying that the straightness of a yardstick is made crooked when we draw wavy lines, or that the law of gravity is complicated by falling objects.
One can imagine how Flannery O’Connor might have dressed him down for stuff like that—probably with something akin to her justly famous response to Mary McCarthy’s dismissal of the Blessed Sacrament as “a symbol”: “Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.” If there really is “no one true faith” or if “every religion is one among many,” a Christian can, and probably should, say, “To hell with it.” Such an apparently cavalier attitude towards the existence of revealed truth on Elie’s part does not well fit a biography about men and women who regarded the same as a matter of life or death.
When it is all said and done, Elie’s real theme is perhaps to be found as he recounts what Percy discovered in his newly adopted faith regarding the condition of man: that “the human person [is] part angel, part beast . . . a creature suspended between two infinities, a pilgrim and wayfarer.” Now, here indeed is a worthy theme, beautifully stated. There is a suitably Augustinian ring to this, and Elie’s biography, like Augustine’s autobiography, is not a work of hagiography. He fleshes out his subjects with all their anxieties, contradictions, failures, and falls.
In their lives as much as in their writing, they face the dual nature of man, angel and beast that he is, as this nature is brought into transfiguring contact with God’s grace through the Incarnation of Christ. To read about (and to read) these writers is to see four expressions of what it means when someone’s life and work become radically responsive to the truth that the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. Remove that anthropology and the concomitant dogma of the Incarnation from their “pilgrimage” and you really have no common theme to speak of between them.
Addison H. Hart is retired from active ministry as parish priest and university chaplain. He is the author of Knowing Darkness: On Skepticism, Melancholy, Friendship, and God and The Yoke of Jesus: A School for the Soul in Solitude (both from Eerdmans). His forthcoming book is a study of the Sermon on the Mount. He lives and writes in Norheimsund, Norway.
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