When Catholic giants walked the land: remembering Merton, Day, O'Connor and Percy

National Catholic Reporter, August 1, 2003 by Tim Unsworth

"Aw shuddup," he said and then bared his back. "Look!" he shouted. "Who's that?" she answered. Her irony was wonderful. Lupus prevented her from traveling from her Georgia home. She once wrote a friend that she desired to go to Los Angeles some day for five minutes to study the culture. Flannery O'Connor's entire oeuvre consisted of two short novels and two collections of short stories. But her characters burned holes in their readers. They were unsmiling monuments to the strangeness of ordinary life. Dorothy Day Walker Percy was just a year younger than Thomas Merton and the last to die (1990). He was from a prominent, though troubled Southern family. He trained as a pathologist but didn't practice because of illness and because he felt drawn to writing.

His first novel, The Moviegoer, was about a New Orleans stockbroker who was addicted to the movies and his relationship with a depressed woman from whom he learns compassion. It won the National Book Award. His later books were also about Southern gentlemen who were feeling the effects of changing times.

He became a Catholic in 1947 and gradually moved to the theological right aisle in the church.

Percy spoke at Chicago's Loyola University where my wife was a professor of Fine Arts. We went; noshed on finger sandwiches and went to the little auditorium to snatch a good seat.

It was empty except for Walker Percy who was sitting in the back, reviewing his lecture.

Percy isn't easy. His sentences can be as dense as hard salami. But he's worth the effort.

Now comes Paul Elie, an editor with Farrar, Straus & Giroux, who has written a wonderful book about all four of them titled The Life You Save May Be Your Own, a title taken from Flannery O'Connor.

The last of these four American masters died in 1990. Three of them were converts to the church. There simply aren't another four like them in our present Catholic writers' roster.

Catholic writers are like vintage grapes. They come in bunches. The British have Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh and G.K. Chesterton; the French have Francois Mauriac, Leon Bloy and Georges Bernanos. It was a blessed period.

Virtually every word Merton, Day, O'Connor and Percy wrote is still available in bookstores and libraries--a remarkable achievement in an age when the shelf life of a book is about four months.

Read Elie's book. It's a huge bowl of literary popcorn. Then, go back to your bookstore or library and check out the four authors' books. It's not too late, in Flannery O'Connor's words, to be "spattered with the blood of redemption."

Tim Unsworth writes from Chicago. Write him at unsworth@megsinet.net