In jail she asked for a Bible and read it intensely. Other prisoners told her stories of the solitary confinement cells where prisoners would be locked up for six months at a time. “Never would I recover from this wound, this ugly knowledge I had gained of what men were capable of in their treatment of each other.”15
Day was taking a stand against injustice, but she was doing it without an organizing transcendent framework. She seems to have felt, unconsciously and even then, that for her, activism without faith would fail.
Her second imprisonment was even more emotionally devastating. She had gone to stay with a friend, a drug addict, in her apartment on Skid Row, in a building that served as both a whorehouse and a residence for members of the IWW, the radical union. The police raided the place, looking for subversives. The cops assumed that Day and her friend were prostitutes. They were forced to stand out on the street, semiclad, before they were hauled off to jail.
She was a victim of the Red hysteria of the time. But she also felt she was a victim of her own imprudence and lack of integrity. She took the arrest as an indictment of her scattered life. “I do not think that ever again, no matter of what I am accused, can I suffer more than I did then of shame and regret, and self-contempt. Not only because I had been caught, found out, branded, publicly humiliated, but because of my own consciousness that I deserved it.”16
These are episodes of extraordinary self-scrutiny and self-criticism. Looking back years later, Day took a dim view of her own rowdy life. She saw it as a form of pride, as an attempt to define what was good and bad for herself, without reference to anything larger. “The life of the flesh called to me as a good and wholesome life, regardless of man’s laws, which I felt rebelliously were made for the repression of others. The strong could make their own law, live their own lives; in fact they were beyond good and evil. What was good and what was evil? It is easy enough to stifle conscience for a time. The satisfied flesh has its own law.”
But Day was not just lost in a world of shallow infatuations, tumultuous affairs, fleshly satisfaction, and selfishness. Her extreme self-criticism flowed from a deep spiritual hunger. She used the word “loneliness” to describe this hunger. For many of us, that word brings to mind solitude. And Day was indeed solitary, and she did suffer from it. But Day also used the word “loneliness” to describe spiritual isolation. She had a sense that there was some transcendent cause or entity or activity out there and that she would be restless until she found it. She was incapable of living life on the surface only—for pleasures, success, even for service—but needed a deep and total commitment to something holy.
Childbirth
Day had spent her twenties throwing herself down different avenues, looking for a vocation. She tried politics. She took part in protests and marches. But they didn’t satisfy. Unlike Frances Perkins, she was unfit for the life of politics, with its compromises, self-seeking, shades of gray, and dirty hands. She needed a venue that would involve internal surrender, renunciation of self, commitment to something pure. She looked back on her early activism with disquiet and self-criticism. “I do not know how sincere I was in my love of the poor and my desire to serve them…. I wanted to go on picket lines, to go to jail, to write, to influence others and so make my mark on the world. How much ambition and how much self-seeking there was in all of this.”17
Then Day went the literary route. She wrote a novel about her disordered early life called The Eleventh Virgin, which was accepted by a New York publisher and optioned for $5,000 by a Hollywood studio.18 But this sort of literature did not cure the longing, either, and the book would eventually make her feel ashamed—she later thought of buying up every existing copy.
She thought that romantic love might satisfy her longing. She fell in love with a man named Forster Batterham, and they lived together, unmarried, in a house on Staten Island that Day bought with the proceeds of her novel. She describes Forster romantically in The Long Loneliness as an anarchist, an Englishman by descent, and a biologist. In fact, the truth is more prosaic. He made gauges in a factory; he had grown up in North Carolina and gone to Georgia Tech. He had an interest in radical politics.19 But Day’s love for him was real. She loved him for his convictions, for his stubborn attachment to them, for his love of nature. She would, after their disagreements about fundamental things had become clear, still beg him to marry her. Day was still a passionate, sexual woman, and her lust for him was real, too. “My desire for you is a painful rather than pleasurable emotion,” she wrote in a letter that was released after her death. “It is a ravishing hunger which makes me want you more than anything in the world. And makes me feel as though I could barely exist until I saw you again.” On September 21, 1925, during one of their separations, she wrote to him, “I made myself a beautiful new nightie, all lacie and exotic, also several new pairs of panties which you will be interested in I am sure. I think of you much and dream of you every night and if my dreams could affect you over long distance, I am sure they would keep you awake.”
When you read of Day and Batterham living their secluded life in Staten Island, reading, talking, making love, you get the impression that they, like many young couples newly in love, were trying to build what Sheldon Vanauken would call a “Shining Barrier,” a walled garden, cut off from the world, in which their love would be pure. Ultimately, Day’s longing could not be contained within the Shining Barrier. Living with Batterham, taking long walks with him on the beach, she still felt a desire for something more. Among other things, she wanted a child. She felt her house was empty without one. In 1925, at age twenty-eight, she was thrilled when she learned she was pregnant. Batterham did not share her feelings. A self-styled radical, a modern man, he did not believe in bringing more human beings into the world. He certainly did not believe in the bourgeois institution of marriage, and he would never consent to marry her.
While she was pregnant, it occurred to Day that most of the descriptions of childbirth had been written by men. She set out to rectify this. Shortly after giving birth, she wrote an essay on the experience, which eventually appeared in the New Masses. Day vividly described the physical struggle of the birth itself:
Earthquake and fire swept my body. My spirit was a battleground on which thousands were butchered in a most horrible manner. Through the rush and roar of the cataclysm which was all about me I heard the murmur of the doctor and answered the murmur of the nurse in my head. In a white blaze of thankfulness I knew that ether was forthcoming.
When her daughter Tamar arrived, she was overwhelmed by gratitude: “If I had written the greatest book, composed the greatest symphony, painted the most beautiful painting or carved the most exquisite figure, I could not have felt the more exalted creator than I did when they placed my child in my arms.” She felt the need for someone to thank. “No human creature could receive or contain so vast a flood of love and joy as I often felt after the birth of my child. With this came the need to worship, to adore.”20