“The World Will Be Saved by Beauty” by Michael Centore

Dorothy Day: Radical Devotion
Written by Jeffry Odell Korgen
Artwork by Christopher Cardinale
Paulist Press, 2024
$16.95   114 pp.

Between Two Sounds:
Arvo Pärt’s Journey to His Musical Language
Written and illustrated by Joonas Sildre
Plough Publications, 2024
$26   230 pp.

Towards the end of her life, in her slower and more meditative seventies, Dorothy Day would retire to her room in the Catholic Worker house on the Lower East Side of Manhattan every Saturday afternoon to listen to a radio broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera. It was a sacrosanct ritual, as Jim Forest relates in his 2011 biography, All Is Grace: “[S]he was willing to have company to listen with her so long as no attempt was made at conversation.” To one of these respectfully silent visitors, a member of the Worker community at the time, she expressed a revealing wish: “If I am reincarnated, I hope I come back an opera singer. Then I’ll bring joy to everyone instead of always having to tell what’s wrong with the world.”

Like all poetic images, the composition of this Servant of God huddled beside the wireless works on us in multiple ways. There is the visual, the would-be saint ensconced in her version of the monastery cell, the voices of performers dramatizing human life drifting in like angelic transmissions; the symbolic, when we consider the sumptuousness of the opera as a counterpoint to the spartan earnestness of her endless self-gift; and what, for a lack of a better term, we might call the iconographic—the way the image completes our portrait of Dorothy, rounds it out as an iconographer incorporates selected objects into her representation of a saint. These relics of the material world—a book, a scroll, a building—index the subject’s life for us; they show us the essence of the person, how they might appear to God’s transfiguring eye when all the filters have been lifted from the light of the kingdom.

The benefit of the graphic novel as a form is that it allows these multiple levels of apprehending the image to collapse. The novel becomes a kind of written cinema: instead of projecting a film onto a screen through the medium of light, the eye of the reader itself becomes the projector, bringing the visual and textual information to life as it moves across the page. It is no coincidence that graphic novelists speak of “scriptwriting” and “storyboarding,” two terms borrowed from film, as elements of their creative process. In addition to “projecting” the image, the reader serves as “director” within this filmic framework, interpreting the material and controlling the pace of its narrative flow. This happens in text-based reading, too, of course, but the provision of images in the graphic novel frees up the part of the reader’s mind normally devoted to conceptualizing the narrative to focus on its application to her life and time.

Nowhere is this more important than with exemplary stories such as Dorothy’s, the subject of a recent graphic novel by Jeffry Odell Korgen and Christopher Cardinale, or that of Estonian Orthodox composer Arvo Pärt, whose artistic journey has been singularly rendered in a similar format by illustrator Joonas Sildre. Immersing oneself in these two books side-by-side makes for a unique “double feature” where each subject’s biography informs the other; together, they give us a holistic portrait of the Christian life as it might be countersigned by one of Dorothy’s favorite quotes from Dostoevsky: “The world will be saved by beauty.”

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This commitment to beauty—and not a purely aesthetic beauty, but a beauty wedded to sacrifice, a beauty that costs something for the beholder—is the through line that links the lives of these two figures who are not so distant as they might first appear. Both were adult converts to their faith, Day to Catholicism and Pärt to Orthodoxy; Day reverenced the Eastern church, particularly its strain of Russian mysticism, while Pärt professed admiration for the Western Catholic intellectual tradition. Day’s path to spiritual maturity was a public, outward-facing one, taking her to the front lines of pickets and protests and inspiring broadsides against the prevailing social order even as it led her to a private, inward place of prayer; Pärt’s was more hidden, partly due to the circumstances of his life behind the Iron Curtain, partly to the solitary nature of his search to find “that one note that holds life,” yet was still punctuated by recitals of works that grew ever more religious the deeper he went into his faith and resulted in his becoming one of the most performed composers in the world.

Perhaps most compellingly in a Cold War context, each mirrored for the other the dreams and drawbacks of their respective socioeconomic systems. Day, born in 1897, was radicalized in early adulthood by the suffragist and labor movements; even after her conversion in 1927, she remained sympathetic to what she once called the “dangerous goodness” of the Communist ideal and spent the rest of her life shaping a Catholic critique of the excesses of American capitalism, its soul-destroying avarice and sobornost-destroying individualism, its cults of consumption and imperial violence. Pärt, born a generation later in 1935, was a product of what happens when the hope of universal solidarity is captured by the State Planning Committee: every aspect of his creative output was vetted for adherence to the Soviet program, such that his 1968 composition Credo—an expressly sacred piece that incorporated the phrase “I believe in Jesus Christ” along with verses from the Sermon on the Mount—led to his unofficial ban from concert halls, and ultimately to his forced emigration from Estonia in 1980. Each, in a way, dissented from the world in which they lived at great personal cost; and each, in their dissent, witnessed to the fatal flaws of both Western notions of “freedom” and compulsory collectivism when they lack what Thomas Merton identified as the “divine cornerstone” of Christ.

Fittingly for such protagonists, the two books trace their stories in complementary ways. Dorothy Day: Radical Devotion is done in color, with Cardinale’s crisp and vivid illustrations alternating perspectives and layout orientations from page to page. There is a cinematographic rhythm in the way they oscillate from close-up individual panels to widescreen full- and half-page spreads, or in the use of light and dark tones to set a mood or heighten dramatic tension. In depicting the more harrowing passages of Dorothy’s life—the death by overdose of a colleague in the labor movement and the abortion forced upon her by a particularly uncaring and callous partner—Cardinale tints the panels grayish blue, as if applying a gel to a camera’s lens. The abortion scene is one of the most visually arresting in the book. The stream of dialogue is suspended save for a few words between doctor and patient, and a series of images guides us silently through the procedure. Interspersed are four panels where a poster on the wall of the office showing a woman raising her hand in support of the International Workers of the World comes to life; the woman reaches out from two dimensions into three to give the ailing Dorothy a tender embrace. In these panels the blue tint is lifted, replaced with a russet orange—a visual cue to signal the warmth of this moment of sisterly support.

Dorothy once described the founding of the Catholic Worker in disarmingly demystifying terms—“We were just sitting there talking when lines of people began to form, saying, ‘We need bread’”; “We were just sitting there talking when people moved in on us”; “We were just sitting there talking and someone said, ‘Let’s go live on a farm’”—and Korgen’s text captures this spirit of social renewal as ongoing conversation, from the exchanges in the newsrooms of Dorothy’s early years as a reporter through the trials and tribulations of the Catholic Worker and its ever-evolving family of volunteers and associates. Students of Dorothy’s life will appreciate the way Korgen has structured her story into four distinct periods: the apprenticeship as a writer with a growing religious temperament that found its fulfillment in her conversion; the founding of the Worker in 1932 after her legendary prayer for guidance at the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington (a moment rendered here in a striking full-page panel where the kneeling Dorothy is surrounded by a private pantheon of spiritual teachers, including Dostoevsky’s Father Zosima) and her fated meeting with Peter Maurin; the “pilgrimage” years of the 1950s and ’60s, when she traveled throughout the country lecturing and visiting Worker houses of hospitality while finding time to participate in other public actions; and the final passage as a mentor and “Amma” figure to a new generation of Catholic activists like Forest and the Berrigan brothers.

As preamble and postscript to this story, Korgen has detailed, respectively, the influence of mutual-aid efforts in the wake of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake on the worldview of young Dorothy, then living with her family in nearby Oakland, and the process of inquiry into her canonization which he himself coordinated between 2014 and 2021. He’s also included asides for historical context that enrich the reader’s experience, particularly those who may be encountering Dorothy’s life for the first time: there are excerpts from her columns, notes on collaborating organizations such as the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and even a two-page spread illustrating snippets from her three-hundred-plus-page FBI file. All of this creates a portrait drawn with deftness and sensitivity, never sensationalized or sentimentalized. We see how God has worked through the wounds of this unwed single mother, that marginalized member of American society, to become a healing presence whose example impacts us still.

The most obvious difference between Radical Devotion and Between Two Sounds is that Sildre has chosen to illustrate Pärt’s life in black and white. The monochrome tones and sepia tints mute the palette like a Baltic midwinter, a visual echo of the stark, meditative quality of Pärt’s music. Yet the style never feels austere. There is a kinetic energy in Sildre’s gestural line, which makes figures and objects seem to quiver with life, as well as in dreamlike touches such as an image of the composer’s tiny silhouette in triplicate leaping onto a keyboard where his very hands are playing. The sense of motion is heightened by the recurring motif of a black dot that orbits throughout the book: sometimes it stands for a musical note or series of notes; sometimes—as in an illustration of the biblical figure of Sarah, inspiration for one of Pärt’s compositions—for the seed of new life falling into a womb; at one point it swells across two pages to represent the sonic massing of Perpetuum mobile, a work that premiered in 1963.

Like Korgen and Cardinale, Sildre paces us through his subject’s life in four stages. A prologue covers Pärt’s birth in 1935 through his matriculation into the Tallinn Conservatory at age 19. In part one, “Credo,” we follow his creative development as a student and sound engineer at Estonian Radio, his early experimental compositions and life-altering discoveries of Bach and the liturgical music of the Pühtitsa Convent. Part two, “Silentum,” picks up after the debut of Credo and subsequent banishment from public performance, leading to a time of artistic and spiritual searching that, as with Day’s peripatetic early years, results in a conversion to Christianity. “Tabula Rasa,” the third and final part, begins with a revitalized Pärt composing melodic lines for the psalms and documents the development of his now-famous “tintinnabuli” style—a compositional method influenced by Gregorian chant that was first introduced in his breakthrough piece, Für Alina, in 1976. Thus begins a prolific period that is interrupted when Soviet officials finally succeed in exiling him along with his wife and two young sons to Vienna in 1980, where the novel ends.

For me, the climax of the book is in the section Sildre devotes to a solitary walk Pärt takes around the city of Tallinn after the fallout from Credo. It comes in the “Silentum” chapter covering the headiest days of his spiritual awakening, and the scene prior evokes his reading of the Desert Fathers as if to set the stage. Over twenty-two pages, we follow him through parks and beneath trees, down snowy city streets, into St. Nicholas Church to pray before Hermen Rode’s altarpiece, under a rain squall and along Tallinn Bay, all the while overhearing a soliloquy where he interrogates himself and his relationship to music, and music’s relationship to God. “Every sound must be like a jewel,” he tells himself at one point, “Just as every human soul is a jewel.” In the final eleven pages the background drops away, leaving his silhouette to fall and tumble, fly and climb across an abstracted representation of imageless prayer. The monologue picks up here, grows more verbose against the visual silence; it is impossible to do it justice by extrapolating quotes, but suffice it to say that Pärt’s self-talk in this section touches the depths of a heart-centered hesychastic spirituality. The final panel has him leaping off a thin white line angled into a black void in a moment of total surrender. It calls us back to an image earlier in the chapter where he opens his hands beneath a night sky specked with stars and makes the claim that gives the book its title: “Between two sounds there can be a cosmic distance.”

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At age eighty-nine, Pärt continues to be a vibrant presence on the international music scene. The Arvo Pärt Center opened in 2018 in the Estonian village of Laulasmaa, capping a homecoming that began in 2010 when the composer and his family returned to the country after decades abroad. That his exile began the same year that Dorothy died has the feel of another hidden link between their lives, as if both were called to step across the threshold of a homeland: Pärt in one direction, into the “elsewhere” of the West; and Dorothy in another, into the true homeland of the kingdom of heaven that she worked so hard to prefigure here. I like to imagine her spirit passing his in song, where she is free to add her voice to the text of Credo and no one suffers any repercussions.

In depicting Dorothy’s final years, Korgen and Cardinale show her seated at her window in the Worker house, looking down onto the street. “That weed—it’s poking up through the concrete!” she exclaims. The next panel brings us a tight shot of a green shoot sundering the pavement. Sildre grants Pärt an identical epiphany in the midst of his pilgrimage through Tallinn. “Even a little flower can grow through asphalt,” he says over an image of a seedling, “Where does it get the strength?” These two books prove that each of these seekers, separated by distance and circumstance but united in their knowledge that “every human soul is a jewel,” understood the answer to this question in the light of the gospel of John: “unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit.” ♦

Michael Centore is the editor of Today’s American Catholic.