Reclaiming Our Children: A Blog About Healing After Abortion

I am indebted once again to Jim Forest for providing the text of The
Eleventh Virgin, which I have been wanting for years to read, and to
Paul Bowers for an inciteful introduction. (see above post)

I want to contribute a reflection and some information that Dorothy
entrusted to me.

The reflection:  All true art originates in the creator's experience.
Hack art may be constructed from a formula.  But true art comes from
deep within, is not predictable, discovers itself in the process of
creation, and is based on life.  I write that from experience and from
reflection within a community of artists with whom I write in the
Hudson Valley.  It is, at least, our more or less common
understanding.

That does not, however, mean that all art novels are strict
autobiographies of their authors. Which segues directly into the
information that Dorothy entrusted to me at a time when very few other
people had been entrusted with it, sometime I think in 1976-77.

Bill Miller may have written the account of Dorothy's abortion from
the account in The Eleventh Virgin.  Whether he did or not, the
version that Dorothy told me is not the account that appears in the
autobiography that Bill wrote.  Dorothy did not ask me to keep what
she said secret, but I took it in the context as a trust to be
conveyed to history after she died.  Here is the story:

One day, I found myself at a rare moment alone with Dorothy at the
Tivoli Catholic Worker farm.  We were  in the yard beside the old
former boarding house and summer camp, at a bench beside the wire
fence that guarded the spot at which our ravine went underground, the
front end of the yard.

I seized the opportunity to ask Dorothy to write in the paper about
abortion as possibly the central moral issue of our time.  She paused
and gently answered, "I don't like to push young people into their
sins."

Then after another pause, she spoke about the problem of
writing about others:  "I believe in memoir," she said.  "I want to
write my memoir.  You know, The Long Loneliness was not an
autobiography.  What do you think of writing about others involved in
one's life?"  I thought of her brother who was still alive at the
time, not to mention Forster Batterham, whom Dorothy visited regularly
until she died, or at least until she could no longer travel, and whom
I met with Dan Berrigan at her wake--another story.  "I believe that
he will accept faith before he dies," she said to me one day.  I may
have offered some stumbling thoughts.  She said,"I think that maybe
one should wait until fifty years after a person dies before
publishing anything about him."

Then Dorothy said, "You know, I had an abortion.  The doctor was fat,
dirty, and furtive.  He left hastily after it was accomplished,
leaving me bleeding.  The daughter of the landlords assisted me and
never said a word of it.  He was Emma Goldman's lover; that's why I
have never had any use for Emma."

I hung on every word that she said, not only because she was Dorothy,
but because, although I had heard a rumor that she had an abortion, I
was aware that few people knew of it from her.

I understood from Dorothy that she was asking me to comprehend what
the consequences would be of a public statement from her on abortion
and also that the public consequences might be a distraction from the
issue and the cause.  What she thought of abortion was clear as a bell
from what she said.

I believe that this recounting in her words is a richer and more
realistic account than the one in the autobiography that Bill Miller
wrote and that it rings more true.  Truth is stranger than fiction;
you can't make this stuff up, as the truisms have it.

As to what Dorothy meant by saying that The Long Loneliness was not an
autobiography, I take it that she wrote the book at a particular time
to a specific end:  to tell the story of the slow workings of God in
the soul of a most unlikely lover, first to attract her and then to
lead her to Peter Maurin and to fulfillment in becoming the spiritual
mother of a major Catholic movement for peace and justice.  Half the
book consists of reflections and stories about the essential aspects
of a Catholic Worker vision.  It answered the question:  How could
this former passionately committed Communist/Socialist writer lead a
Catholic movement?  Is she still a Communist trying to infiltrate the
Church?  The book disposed of the appellation "Moscow Mary" and
replaced it with the notion "Dorothy Day potential saint", a term
equally unwelcome to Dorothy as long as she remained among the church
militant.

Dorothy liked to suffuse her writings with her awareness of the
presence of God in all things and she may have missed this in The
Eleventh Virgin.

Cheers, and peaceful mischief,
God bless us all, every one!

Daniel Marshall
danielmarshall@aol.com

----

Some bio info on Daniel Marshall and his connection with Dorothy and the CWer:

During the five years between mid-1972 and mid-1977, I lived, in two
stretches, for 2 1/2 years at the CW Farm in Tivoli, NY.  I had
earlier founded a short-lived CW house in Berkeley, become a military
CO, traveled from community to community in this country and Europe,
and homesteaded in New Hampshire.  Dorothy put me in charge of cars.
In the long run, this turned out to be very wise.  I ate at Dorothy's
table each day, when she was at the farm, with Deane Mowrer, Helene
Iswolsky, and others close to Dorothy.  She disapproved of my vegan
and natural hygiene diet.  I was persistent.  She resolved it by
asking me sometimes for a few nuts because of something she'd heard
about eating nuts and an apple for health.  I resolved it by
retrieving and cleaning fresh over-ripe fruits and vegetables for the
house each week from Hoffman's produce, packaged food, and gift store
in Red Hook.  Each year except her last, for her birthday, I gave her
several luscious ripe persimmons and a jar of nut butter, which I knew
she loved.

In the mornings, returning at 6:30 AM from my meditation, I saw
Dorothy in her robe making coffee for herself in the dining room, and
at 8 AM she called me into her room, radiant, still sitting up in bed in her robe
under the sheets, door open, sunlight streaming through the
window beside her, to share the fruit of her morning lectio divina on
the Pauline epistles.  She called me "My theologian", maybe because I
had been to Holy Cross, as Tom Cornell had been to Fairfield, but it
shows the real poverty of Dorothy that she had to rely on such as me
for theological discussion, though she was in correspondence with such
as Thomas Merton and Dan Berrigan for tough questions and more
extended reflections.  I was the only one in the house who dared
accompany Dorothy when she went driving.  Many other stories, another
time.  In September 1976, Dorothy had her series of severe heart
attacks.  She was exhausted from a major speech that she had given in
August.  I tried to protect her from petty house concerns, but other
core members of her circle pressed her, and she had the attacks.
After that, she was sequestered at Maryhouse, and I went to Arthur
Sheehan House in Brooklyn.

I didn't think of Dorothy as a mother.  She didn't condescend to me in
the way a mother might.  But related more as a big sister, who had
maybe left home before I was born.  Though we didn't know each other
well in that short time, there was an affection between us.
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