Table Of ContentCIRCUITOUS JOURNEYS
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Circuitous Journeys
Modern Spiritual Autobiography
DAVID J. LEIGH
FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York
2000
Copyright 02 000 by Fordharn University Press
All rights reserved.
LC 99-087373
ISBN 0-8232-1 993-3 (hardcover)
ISBN 0-8232-1994-1 (paperback)
ISSN 10964692
Studies in Religion and Literature, No. 2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available.
Printed in the United States of America
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments Vii
Preface iX
Introduction 1
1. Thomas Merton’s Tlze Sever? Storey Mutmtain 32
2. Dorothy Day’s The Lm?g Loneliness 56
3. The Psychology of Conversion in G. K. Chesteron
and C. S. Lewis 81
4. The Dual Plot of Gandhi’s An A~ltobiogvqdzy 102
5, Malcolm X and the Black Muslim Search for the
Ultimate 137
6. Black Elk Syedks: A Century Later 162
7. The Remaking of an American Jew: Paul Cowan’s
AI?0 ryhnr.r in History 178
8. I, Rigobevtn Medlti: The Plotting of Liberation 197
9. Dan Wakefield’s Retu~ttil~g 215
IO. Retraveling the Century: Nelson Mandela’s Long
Walk to Freedom 230
Conclusion 253
Index 257
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to express myg ratitude to colleagues and friends
who have helped with various versions of the manuscript: Philip
Boroughs, Hamida Bosmajian, Jeffrey Cain, PeterE ly, John Haw-
ley, Tibor Horvath, Patrick Howell, JustinK elly, Janet Blurnberg,
Mike MacDonald, Elizabeth Morelli, and Andrew Tadie. It goes
without saying that John Mahoney of Boston College and Mary
Beatrice Schulte of Fordharn University Press have been invalu-
able int he final editing process.F inally, I cannot be thankful
enough for the responses by hundreds of students in my classes
on autobiography at Gonzaga University and Seattle University.
Earlier versions of chapters three and five respectively have ap-
peared in The Ridde $-Joy: G. K. Chcstevm nrfd C. S. Lewis, ed.
Michael H. McDonald and AndrewA . Tadie (Grand Rapids, MI:
Eerdrnans, 1989) 290-304, and in Ultimate Reality nnd Aderrfling:
Ivlterdisciplinary Stdies 13 (March 1990) 33-49. Permission to re-
print has been granted by Wm. B. Eerdmans publishing Com-
pany for the Lewis chapter, and by the Institute for the Study of
Ultimate Reality and Meaning for the Malcolm X chapter.
Several sentences from the chapter on Mencht? also appeared
in a chapter in Histoviciziq Clrristiar-1 Emmzters with the Others, ed.
John Hawley (London and New York: Macmillan and New York
UP, 1998) 182-93. Permission to reprint has been granted by
both Macmillan and New York University Press.
Excerpts from “Little Gidding” in Fow Quartets, copyright
1942 by T. S. Eliot and renewed 1970 by Esme Valerie Eliot,
reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace & Company.
Excerpts from “BurntN orton”i n Four Quartets, copyright
1936 by Harcourt Brace & Company and renewed 1964b y T. S.
Eliot, reprinted by permission of the publisher.
Excerpts from “East Coker” in Fotu Qrrnrtevs, copyright 1940
by T. S. Eliot and renewed 1968 by Esme Valerie Eliot, reprinted
by permission of Harcourt Brace & Company.
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PREFACE
My own story of meeting these ten major religous autobiogra-
phers of our century-Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Gandhi,
C. S. Lewis, Malcolm X, Black Elk, Paul Cowan,R igoberta
Menchu, Dan Wakefield, and NelsonM andela-is no mere ghost
story. They haveh auntedm yi maginationf ort hirty years. In
1961, I was studying Augustine’s Corlfessiorzs in Latin as a daily
exercise between classes to keep up my reading ability in classical
languages for graduate school. In the middle of this exercise, I
came across Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountnifz and immediately
plunged into its detailed story of Merton’s spiritualj ourney from
France to Cambridge to Columbia University and eventually to
a Trappist monastery in Kentucky. Although I disputed the stark-
ness of some of his distinctions, I became a lifelong devotee of his
vision.
My memory of my first encounter with Dorothy Day’s The
Lorg Lanetitress is now a bit hazy, but it was probably in the late
1960s while I was studying theology in Toronto and working in
an urban parish to help build a community organization. It was
just a month before my ordination as a Jesuit priest in 1968 that I
read thes econdi nstallment of Merton’s life story, The Sign of
Jolm, the journalo f his years of entrance into the Catholic priest-
hood in the monastery. The balance he maintained amid the ten-
sions of being both a monk and a writer (“traveling in the belly
of a paradox,” he called it) supported me during that turbulent
spring and summer.
Although I had once sworn to myself that I would never get
trapped in late eighteenth-century British literature, I fell into that
period in writing my dissertation in English at Yale from 1970 to
1972. It was in the middle of my thesis on the relationship be-
tween autobiographical writingsi n pre-romantic writers like Wil-
liam Cowper and in Wordsworth that I first read a new book by
M. H. Abrams entitled Natural Srqevtzatwalisn~.I n this controver-
