The Saint & the Poet

"We do not know how we get along," Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker confessed to its few readers in 1934. "We keep simple books . . . We only know that the printing bill is getting paid . . . and so, too, the expenses of feeding our friends."

Twenty-two years later Dorothy Day's books were still as simple, but the bill was not getting paid. She was unable to pay for modernizing her House of Hospitality, a haven and a source of food to the derelicts of Manhattan's Bowery but a firetrap to Manhattan's Fire Department. Even more pressing was a $250 fine imposed by the City of New York for her failure to comply with the fire regulations.

Dorothy Day, a woman of tranquil faith and fierce independence, approached the problem in her usual direct manner. She got up one morning last week, prayed for help to St. Joseph, patron saint of workers, then walked out of the House of Hospitality to persuade the judge to set aside the fine. Outside the hostel, where daily she feeds some 200 to 300 and nightly shelters 60 men and women, a rumpled, seam-faced man stepped from the knot of drifters and pressed something into her hand. "I just read about your trouble," he said. "I want to help out a little bit. Here's two-fifty." She thanked him, but it was not until she was in the subway that she noticed she was holding a check not for a mere $2.50 but for $250. It was signed by the prestigious British-born U.S. poet, W. H. (for Wystan Hugh) Auden. "Poets do look a bit unpressed, don't they?" she mused happily.

The judge, learning belatedly that the House of Hospitality was a charitable enterprise (an outgrowth of Convert Day's pacifist-inclined and anti-industrial Catholic Worker movement), cooperated by setting aside the fine.

Anglican Auden's $250 became the start of a fund to remove the House of Hospitality from the city's firetrap list. The total was expanded to $950 at week's end by a rash of contributions from newspaper readers. That still left some $27,000 needed to pay for the job, but Dorothy Day was unperturbed. "We'll just go ahead with an architect and pray," she said.

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