Né de parents d’origine anglaise établis dans l’Etat de la Carolinie du nord, Forster Batterham était un anarchiste amoureux de la nature.
Dorothy Day était la mère de leur enfant, une anarchiste, une journaliste dans le milieu radical, et serait dans le futur la cofondatrice de l’organisation Catholic Workers.
Leur relation était un genre de tragédie grec, mettant en scène l’amour, la religion, la politique, la nature et les enfants.
Ce qu’on sait de Forster vient surtout d’écrits autobiographiques de Dorothy. “I had known Forster a long time before we contracted our common-law relationship,”elle écrit, décrivant une relation où ils vivaient ensemble sans se marier à partir de 1924. “He worked as little as possible, he shared in all the expenses of the house, but he never spent any money if he could help it,” elle écrit. Il était pessimiste concernant l’humanité : “He loved nature with a sensuous passion and he loved birds and beasts and children because they were not men.”
“He had all the love of the English for the outdoors in all weather. He used to insist on walks no matter how cold or rainy the day, and this dragging me away from my books, from my lethargy, into the open, into the country, made me begin to breathe. If breath is life, then I was beginning to be full of it because of him. I was filling my lungs with it, walking on the beach, resting on the pier beside him while he fished, rowing with him in the calm bay, walking through fields and woods—a new experience entirely for me, one which brought me to life and filled me with joy.”
Dans le passé, Dorothy avait été dans une relation où elle a eu un avortement. Cette fois-ci, quand elle est tombée enceinte, elle voulait avoir l’enfant.
Pour sa part, Forster ne voulait pas d’enfants.
Un autre conflit se dessinait aussi. Forster était athée. Elle écrit, “I am surprised that I am beginning to pray daily. I began because I had to. I just found myself praying.””I am going to mass now regularly on Sunday mornings.”
Sa priorité maintenant était de faire baptiser son enfant. Dans ce but elle a abordé une religieuse quand elle était en train de promener son enfant dans une poussette. “She knew of me by reputation—indeed all of the neighbourhood knew that we and our friends were either communist or anarchist in sympathies.” La religieuse a promis de l’aider à faire baptiser son enfant et elle a commencé à lui donner des leçons de catéchisme trois fois par semaine.
L’arrivée de la religieuse dans leur vie de couple ne faisait pas du tout l’affaire de Forster :
“She never came into the house directly, but used to peer in the window or the back door with a sepulchral whisper, ‘Is he here?’ as though it were the devil himself she was inquiring after. And if Forster was there, he used to slam out of the other door to show his displeasure, greeting her through clenched teeth. I didn’t blame him, nor did I blame her.”
Elle décrit son état d’esprit à l’époque : “I had become convinced that I would become a Catholic, and yet I felt I was betraying the class to which I belonged, the workers, the poor of the world with whom Christ spent his life.”
Ses conversations avec Forster était devenues des chicanes métaphysiques :
“His ardent love of creation brought me to the Creator of all things. But when I cried out to him, ‘How can there be no God, when there are all these beautiful things?’ he turned from me uneasily and complained that I was never satisfied. We loved each other so strongly that he wanted to remain in the love of the moment; he wanted me to rest in that love. He cried out against my attitude that there would be nothing left of that love without faith.”
Cette période dans leurs vies coïncidait avec l’assassinat par l’État des anarchistes Sacco et Vanzetti, qui avait été faussement accusés d’avoir commis deux meurtres. Dorothy décrit la réaction de Forster :
“Forster was stricken over the tragedy. He had always been more an anarchist than anything else in his philosophy, and so was closer to these two men than to communist friends. He did not eat for days. He sat around the house in a stupor of misery, sickened by the cruelty of life and of men.”
Curieusement, elle essaie de récupérer Sacco et Vanzetti pour le catholicisme : “These men were Catholics by tradition, inasmuch as they were Italians. Catholics by tradition, but they had rejected the Church.” “Where were the Catholic voices crying out for these men ?” elle demande. Ces voix étaient absentes, on dirait, parce qu’il s’agissait d’anarchistes.
Leur relation de couple tirait à sa fin : “We both suffered in body as well as in soul and mind. He would not talk about the faith and relapsed into complete silence if I tried to bring up the subject. The point of my bringing it up was that I could not become a Catholic and continue living with him, because he was averse to any ceremony before officials of either Church or State. He was an anarchist and an atheist and he did not intend to be a liar or a hypocrite.”
Au mois de décembre, 1927, elle a exigé qu’il quitte la maison.