November 30, 2012
By Erin Overby
“The only difference between saints and sinners,” (click here) Oscar Wilde wrote, “is that every saint has a past while every sinner has a future.” Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker, has an unusual past for a potential saint. As Virginia Cannon points out in her post on our News Desk blog, Day, who was born in Brooklyn, moved to Greenwich Village at age nineteen, hoping to begin a career as a writer. Taking an apartment above the Provincetown Playhouse, on Macdougal Street, Day befriended the writer Malcolm Cowley and his wife, Peggy, and soon got to know others writers in their circle, including John Dos Passos, Lewis Mumford, Hart Crane, and, most significantly, Eugene O’Neill.
In a two-part Profile, which ran in The New Yorker sixty years ago, Dwight MacDonald describes how Day became a central figure in the literary set that frequented a Village dive bar called the Golden Swan, which was nicknamed the Hell Hole by its regulars. The Hell Hole was a gathering place for gangsters, writers, and other disreputable characters. O’Neill, Day, and others in their circle would while away the evening hours drinking and regaling the patrons with recitations of poetry. Frequently, MacDonald writes, those assembled included members of the Hudson Dusters, a notorious local gang. In “Exile’s Return,” Malcolm Cowley’s portrait of the period’s Village habituées, he writes that “the gangsters admired [Day] because she could drink them under the table; but they felt more at home with [O’Neill], who listened to their troubles and never criticized.” The Hell Hole helped inspire Harry Hope’s saloon in O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh,” while Day was rumored to have been one of the inspirations, along with Christine Eli, for the character of Josie in “Moon for the Misbegotten.” Recalling her early days in the Village, Day told MacDonald how she and her companions used to pick up “interesting-looking strangers” in Washington Square and take them to dinner. “We made friends with the world,” she told him. It was during this period that Day began making her frequent stops at St. Joseph’s Church for early-morning Mass....
By Erin Overby
“The only difference between saints and sinners,” (click here) Oscar Wilde wrote, “is that every saint has a past while every sinner has a future.” Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker, has an unusual past for a potential saint. As Virginia Cannon points out in her post on our News Desk blog, Day, who was born in Brooklyn, moved to Greenwich Village at age nineteen, hoping to begin a career as a writer. Taking an apartment above the Provincetown Playhouse, on Macdougal Street, Day befriended the writer Malcolm Cowley and his wife, Peggy, and soon got to know others writers in their circle, including John Dos Passos, Lewis Mumford, Hart Crane, and, most significantly, Eugene O’Neill.
In a two-part Profile, which ran in The New Yorker sixty years ago, Dwight MacDonald describes how Day became a central figure in the literary set that frequented a Village dive bar called the Golden Swan, which was nicknamed the Hell Hole by its regulars. The Hell Hole was a gathering place for gangsters, writers, and other disreputable characters. O’Neill, Day, and others in their circle would while away the evening hours drinking and regaling the patrons with recitations of poetry. Frequently, MacDonald writes, those assembled included members of the Hudson Dusters, a notorious local gang. In “Exile’s Return,” Malcolm Cowley’s portrait of the period’s Village habituées, he writes that “the gangsters admired [Day] because she could drink them under the table; but they felt more at home with [O’Neill], who listened to their troubles and never criticized.” The Hell Hole helped inspire Harry Hope’s saloon in O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh,” while Day was rumored to have been one of the inspirations, along with Christine Eli, for the character of Josie in “Moon for the Misbegotten.” Recalling her early days in the Village, Day told MacDonald how she and her companions used to pick up “interesting-looking strangers” in Washington Square and take them to dinner. “We made friends with the world,” she told him. It was during this period that Day began making her frequent stops at St. Joseph’s Church for early-morning Mass....
