Book Report: More Catholic Than Irish?

By Tom Deignan

FOR better or worse, most Irish Catholic writers in American culture have proven to be more Irish than Catholic, in the mold of James T. Farrell, a onetime socialist who found the church suffocating.

First-time author Paul Elie, however, has stumbled across four writers who are more Catholic than they are Irish, in his hefty new tome The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage (Farrar Straus Giroux).

Perhaps this is why Elie’s appearance on September 17 at The American Irish Historical Society should make for a particularly interesting talk. Is there much to say, from the Irish angle, about these writers? We’ll see.

Elie’s book is about Flannery O’Connor, Dorothy Day, Walker Percy and Thomas Merton. The title comes from one of O’Connor’s most famous stories. However, despite her name and faith, O’Connor was far from a typical Irish American writer. She was a “Christ-haunted” literary prodigy, as well as a southerner to the core, not a common Irish American experience.

Thomas Merton, meanwhile, was a Trappist monk in Kentucky. Dorothy Day was the founder of the Catholic Worker in New York City. And Walker Percy was a doctor in New Orleans who quit medicine to write fiction and philosophy. A friend came up with a name for the group – the School of the Holy Ghost – and for decades they exchanged letters, ardently read one another’s books, and grappled with what one of them called a “predicament shared in common.”

AIHS organizers have made the case that there is a clear Irish element to Elie’s book. Both O’Connor and Day, they note, are of Irish descent.

Merton, they add, “was a Joycean, who was particularly influenced by A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.”

As for Percy (another Southerner) they say “What (American) Catholic of his generation isn’t part Irish Catholic?”

However you look at it, Elie’s unorthodox book has been getting rave reviews. Among the admirers is Thomas Cahill, the best-selling author of several important books on Irish and religious history. Says Cahill: “We are surrounded by many examples of mediocre criticism and not a few of good criticism, but great criticism comes our way but once or twice in a generation. Paul Elie’s witty searchlight of a book is great criticism. Shining with insight on the multitesselated mosaic of American literature in the postwar period, it manages miraculously to illuminate the complexities of religious experience in real human lives.”

Elie himself is an editor at the prestigious publishing house, Farrar Straus and Giroux. He has written for The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, and Commonweal and lives in Manhattan.