Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American…

TALL AND BROAD-SHOULDERED, BLOND, JEWISH, thirty years old, devastatingly well featured, with nothing of Mike Gold's kindness or Eugene O'Neill's ambivalence, Lionel Moise was everything Dorothy was looking for in the autumn of 1918. In her novel, she contrived to be near the attractive man employed by the hospital whenever possible, stopping by the kitchen at odd moments for something more to eat and, once he had commenced his duties as an orderly, helping him get a rowdy patient back into bed. Then it is sneaking out of their rooms and meeting after dark on the hospital grounds or making out at the back of the kitchen, with the Dorothy character indicating her readiness, if a time and a place could be found, to go further. Those pages of The Eleventh Virgin have a romantic throb. In prosaic reality, a subway ride to Manhattan brought Dorothy to her lover's apartment.

Lionel Moise came with a perfect package of a life story. He was a wanderer and a journalist, at home in city hall or in waterfront saloons. The year before he came to New York, he had been a newspaperman for the Kansas City Star, one of the best papers in the country. (By the end of his life, his journalistic résumé would be formidable, with stints at the Boston Record, the Milwaukee Sentinel-News, the San Francisco Examiner, the Salt Lake City Tribune, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, two Chicago papers, two New York City papers, and two Los Angeles papers.) It was a peripatetic path he had already committed himself to, exhibiting the sort of restlessness that precluded a stable home life or secure reputation in any one city, but his talent was such that he had no trouble finding a job as a journalist when he felt it was time to move on and see another part of the country. He had a "massive mind," the poet Kenneth Rexroth wrote in his memoir of writers he had known, and a "hard-boiled magnanimity" that impressed many of the young men who came into his orbit.