Bohemia
Day was one of three students in her high school to win a college scholarship, thanks to her excellence in Latin and Greek. She went to the University of Illinois, where she cleaned and ironed to pay for room and board and was an indifferent student. She threw herself, willy-nilly, into activities that she hoped would lead to an epic life. She joined the writers’ club, accepted for an essay in which she described what it was like to go without food for three days. She also joined the Socialist Party, broke from religion, and began doing what she could to offend the churchgoers. She decided the sweetness of girlhood was gone. It was time to be at war with society.
At age eighteen, after a couple of years at Illinois, she decided that college life was unsatisfying. She moved to New York to become a writer. She wandered the city for months, desperately lonely: “In all that great city of seven millions, I found no friends; I had no work, I was separated from my fellows. Silence in the midst of city noises oppressed me. My own silence, the feeling that I had no one to talk to overwhelmed me so that my very throat was constricted; my heart was heavy with unuttered thoughts; I wanted to weep my loneliness away.”7
During this lonely period she became indignant at the poverty she saw in New York, its different smell from the poverty she had seen in Chicago. “Everyone must go through something analogous to a conversion,” she would later write, “conversion to an idea, a thought, a desire, a dream, a vision—without vision the people perish. In my teens I read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and Jack London’s The Road and became converted to the poor, to a love for and desire to be always with the poor and suffering—the workers of the world. I was converted to the idea of the Messianic mission of the proletariat.” Russia was very much on people’s minds then. Russian writers defined the spiritual imagination. The Russian Revolution inflamed young radicals’ visions for the future. Dorothy’s closest college friend, Rayna Simons, moved to Moscow to be part of that future, and died of illness after a few months there. In 1917, Day attended a rally celebrating the Russian Revolution. She felt a sense of exaltation; the victory of the masses was at hand.
Dorothy finally found work at a radical paper, The Call, for five dollars a week. There she covered labor unrest and the lives of factory workers. She interviewed Leon Trotsky one day and a millionaire’s butler the next. Newspaper life was intense. She was carried along by events, not reflecting on them, just letting them sweep over her.
Although more an activist than an aesthete, she fell in with a bohemian crowd, with the critic Malcolm Cowley, the poet Allen Tate, and the novelist John Dos Passos. She formed a deep friendship with the radical writer Michael Gold. They would walk along the East River for hours, happily talking about their reading and their dreams. Occasionally, Gold would break into joyful song, in Hebrew or Yiddish. She had a close though apparently platonic relationship with the playwright Eugene O’Neill, who shared her obsessions with loneliness, religion, and death. Day’s biographer Jim Forest writes that Dorothy would sometimes put O’Neill to bed, drunk and shaking with the terrors, and hold him until he fell asleep. He asked her to have sex with him, but she refused.
She protested on behalf of the working classes. But the most vital dramas of her life were going on inside. She had become an even more avid reader, especially of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.
It’s hard now to recapture how seriously people took novel reading then, or at least how seriously Day and others took it—reading important works as wisdom literature, believing that supreme artists possessed insights that could be handed down as revelation, trying to mold one’s life around the heroic and deep souls one found in books. Day read as if her whole life depended upon it.
Fewer people today see artists as oracles and novels as a form of revelation. The cognitive sciences have replaced literature as the way many people attempt to understand their own minds. But Day was “moved to the depths of my being” by Dostoyevsky. “The scene in Crime and Punishment where the young prostitute reads from the New Testament to Raskolnikov, sensing sin more profound than her own; that story, ‘The Honest Thief’; those passages in The Brothers Karamazov; Mitya’s conversion in jail, the very legend of the Grand Inquisitor, all this helped to lead me on.” She was especially drawn to the scene in which “Father Zossima spoke glowingly of that love for God which resulted in a love for one’s brother. The story of his conversion to love is moving, and that book, with its picture of religion, had a lot to do with my later life.”8
She didn’t just read Russian novels, she seemed to live them out. She was a heavy drinker and barfly. Malcolm Cowley wrote that gangsters loved her because she could drink them under the table, though that is hard to believe, given her rail-thin frame. The tragedies of her raucous life were there, too. A friend named Louis Holladay took an overdose of heroin and died in her arms.9 In her memoir, she describes her moves from one rancid and airless apartment to another, but even she, self-critical as she was, leaves out some of the messiness. She leaves out her promiscuity, calling it “a time of searching” and referring vaguely to “the sadness of sin, the unspeakable dreariness of sin.”10
In the spring of 1918, she volunteered as a nurse at King’s County Hospital as a deadly flu epidemic swept through the city and the world. (More than 50 million people died of it between March 1918 and June 1920.)11 She began work at six each morning and worked twelve-hour days, changing linens, emptying bedpans, administering shots, enemas, and douches. The hospital was run like a military unit. When the head nurse entered the ward, the junior nurses stood at attention. “I liked the order of life and the discipline. By contrast the life that I had been leading seemed disorderly and futile,” she recalled. “One of the things that this year in the hospital made me realize is that one of the hardest things in the world is to organize ourselves and discipline ourselves.”12
She met a newspaperman named Lionel Moise at the hospital. They had a tumultuous physical relationship. “You are hard,” she wrote to him lustfully. “I fell in love with you because you are hard.” She got pregnant. He told her to get an abortion, which she did (also neglecting to mention it in her memoirs). One night, after he dumped her, she unhooked the gas pipe from the heater in her apartment and attempted suicide. A neighbor found her in time.
In her memoirs she writes that she left the hospital job because it eventually made her numb to suffering, and it left her no time to write. She neglected to mention that she had also agreed to marry a man twice her age named Berkeley Tobey, a rich man from the Northwest. They traveled to Europe together, and after the trip was over, she left him. In her memoirs she describes it as a solo trip, embarrassed that she had used Tobey for a chance to go to Europe. “I didn’t want to write what I was ashamed of,” she would later tell the journalist Dwight MacDonald. “I felt I had used him and was ashamed.”13
She also, crucially, was arrested twice, first in 1917 at age twenty and then in 1922 at age twenty-five. The first time, it was in the name of political activism. She had become active in advocating for the rights of women; she was arrested for taking part in a suffragist protest in front of the White House and sentenced, with the rest of the protesters, to thirty days in jail. The prisoners began a hunger strike, but Day, sitting there gnawed by hunger, soon slipped into a deep depression. She flipped from feeling solidarity with the hunger strikers to feeling that it was all somehow wrong and meaningless. “I lost all consciousness of any cause. I had no sense of being a radical. I could only feel darkness and desolation all around me…. I had an ugly sense of the futility of human effort, man’s helpless misery, the triumph of might…. Evil triumphed. I was a petty creature, filled with self-deception, self-importance, unreal, false, and rightly scorned and punished.”14