South Street by Dorothy Day

In the summer of 1917, Dorothy Day was working for The Masses and spending a lot of time with Mike Gold who, besides working as a copy editor for The New York Call and writing for The Masses, drove a horse-drawn truck for the Acme Express Freight Company to support his mother. Dorothy, Mike, and their friends would wander through lower Manhattan talking, often ending up at one of the rivers.

The opening sentence rivals Henry James for its scene painting.

South Street

By Dorothy Day

The Masses, Nov.-Dec., 1917, page 26

Drawing by John Barber

South street, where the truckmen and dockmen sit around on loads of boxes and wait for a boat to come in, where men idle in the September sunlight and dream and yawn and smoke, where the horses clatter along the cobbles dragging huge heavy trucks with a noise resembling a mob of people aroused after long repression, and where the kids sit on the edge of the dock and look with wishful eyes at the water below that swirls with refuse and driftwood. Occasionally there’s a lull in the huge noise of the place and other sensations drift in waves over you until another truck wipes them out. There is a wave of soft silence, golden in the September sunlight with its autumn smell. The smells change too, with everything else, and the mellowness is replaced with a heavy foul odor from God knows what storehouse, and from the river that gulps and gulps at the docks all day long. Then there is a tiny wave of laughter from one of the many ragged boys scurrying about the edges of things, as he succeeds in fishing out a bit of driftwood. Little waves of imagination make the urchin’s every sense more poignant. There’s always the possibility of another fellow coming up behind him and pushing him into the thick water below. And there are wild chances of a bottle drifting in from the sea with a message in it from a shipwrecked crew or a submarine or something. And sunken treasure!

And perhaps waves of imagination drift over the loafers too, as they slouch and droop and rest.

Dorothy Catches a Flu

The following is mere speculation, almost an amusement. Ferreting facts from Dorothy Day’s pseudo-autobiographical novel, The Eleventh Virgin, can be a disappointing experience. 

Nevertheless, in the novel June (Dorothy) has left her room in the East Side tenement and moved to a room in an Episcopal rectory. There she catches a flu and is visited by Ivan (perhaps Irwin Granich) which scandalizes the wife of the rector who calls Dorothy’s mother.

There are three lapses in Dorothy’s writings in The Call which might account for a flu: December 25 to December 30, December 31 to January 14, and March 5 to March 30.

Of these three, the third is least likely. It is more probably due to the absence of a managing director. Chester Wright resigns on March 9 and the staff may have been in disarray until the appointment of Charles Ervin as managing director on March 30. Dorothy admits to attending the rally at Madison Square Garden on March 21 and accompanying Columbia students at anti-draft activities throughout the month.

Although no argument can be made for or against the second lapse, the first one seems most likely. Under this theory, Dorothy worked on December 23 and 24 and filed two articles without her by-line but definitely with her style that appeared on the 25th and 26th, then caught the flu on Christmas, 1916 or the night before.

The evidence supporting this is that in The Eleventh Virgin Ivan brings her a piece by Maxim Gorky. An essay by Maxim Gorky appears in The Call’s Sunday Supplement of December 24. Further, the Diet Squad series should have run through the beginning of January but is terminated abruptly on December 27 with a piece perhaps prepared with the help of Ivan. If this theory is correct, Dorothy recovered in time to enjoy The Guillotine’s feast on December 30 (see the chapter Holiday Cheer).

There are not enough facts here to warrant inclusion in my upcoming book, Unwavering Protest, A Teenage Dorothy Day writes for The New York Call, which I hope you will purchase when it is published in November.