Word: berrigan
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...Francine Gray chosen a different radical subject, her two-year-old book-though well-written and informative-might by now be obsolete. But as it is , her central characters-Philip and Daniel Berrigan-have stirred more interest and controversy from prison than have almost all movement leaders who are still at large. And the Berrigans are only a small-though highly visible-part of a movement which has rapidly grown in strength and significance...
Norman Mailer and James Dickey playing muse to the moon shot (or, as Berrigan puts it, "Court Historian"), and a brief, witty dictionary of definitions. The result is an uneven book, often written from the bottom of the heart but sometimes off the top of the head...
Striking a parallel to John of the Cross (author of The Dark Night of the Soul), Berrigan assigns himself the literary priest's ancient task: accounting for "one man's spiritual journey." It is a very special journey, however. He is performing his walk, he suggests, as a "high-wire act" stretched between contemporary politics and Catholic tradition, explaining his actions to God, the Church and himself...
National Illness. When Berrigan is talking politics, he often sounds commonplace. In a significant concession -and a dangerous one for a poet-he writes: "The gesture that counts, today, is not the word at all." Even other protesters, he admits, "all look alike to me; they all say the same thing." He makes little apparent effort to speak differently himself as he turns on the old rhetoric of the New Left. "The conflagration is rising"-as ever. It is "a time to tear and pull down," a time to "resign from America in order to join the heart...
...Berrigan's political models are no more defined than slapped-up posters of Che and Ho. His political villains are opposite-and-equal cliches, crude, hasty caricatures of a "Brooks-suited investor" whose "manicured fingers" are "infinitely removed from the bloodletting." When it comes to the America he wants, Berrigan sidles into a vision of "Paradise Park"-a Utopia straight out of the pixiest moments of The Greening of America: "Let the people enter, grow, run, fly, perambulate, consume, pull corks from, spread jams and peanut butter on, swim and sun in, et cetera, as the day is long...