"Special" Correspondence
SPECIAL CORRESPONDENCE Tunney vs. Gilder Joshua Gilder's review of Walker Percy's The Second Coming in the October American Spectator is a travesty of literary criticism. Most if not all of his...
...Gilder concludes that Allie "decided never to grow up," despite the evidence that, rather, she was forced to grow up too fast (she showed markedly precocious talent in music and entered college several years early...
...At the end of the book, Barrett begins to piece things together: Is (Allie) a gift and therefore a sign of a giver...
...No, it is an opening-out delight and a wanting...
...Gilder accuses Percy of "romanticizing" mental illness...
...Gilder's is neither...
...Of course, it's possible that this is Gilder's idea of romance...
...Her speech, Gilder sneers, is "just this side of baby-talk'': Allie...
...I would much rather read Miss Tunney's passionate and heart-felt opinions, though they be of a "private reader," than the supposedly more informed opinions of professional critics...
...Just as the isolated or unexpected example of genius goes ignored-because who, after all, was there to warn them it was coming-it's almost impossible for certain authors at certain points in their careers to get a negative review...
...Taste must only be honest...
...The Savior's name, after all, was Emmanuel- '' God is with us...
...It was the rare critic indeed who pointed out that Joan Didion's latest, The White Album, was a compilation of that author's worst indulgences...
...As to the rest, I would think one might want to reconsider a Christianity such as Percy's that more often than not finds expression in insanity and infantile regression...
...Why is Gilder so appalled at the idea of Will Barrett or Binx Boiling undertaking the detailed guidance of a lost soul, as if he were undertaking to care for a child...
...Moreover, he criticizes Percy's use of "ideas" in his fiction, then fails to demonstrate an understanding or even an awareness of the ideas that motivate Percy's writing...
...Kissing is like now fine, more is better, and what about it...
...No...
...Needless to say, the passage quoted by Miss Tunney on the aftereffects of electroconvulsive treatment only supports my point...
...I think it's downright unfair to try to pin this on Dante...
...Christianity doesn't mean glossing over uncomfortable realities with an affected "good feeling" or "brotherly love...
...I don't...
...Here again I wonder how closely Gilder read the material involved...
...As it happens, I speak in a Christian context...
...The objectionable-indeed the downright erroneous-statement follows...
...Gilder claims that this kind of "childishness" is characteristic of the way Percy romanticizes the mentally ill in his novels...
...Yes...
...No, not want, must have...
...But especially for Peicy, the separation of philosophy from fiction is unthinkable...
...An Inordinate Fear of Labor...
...That's why critics are always at least one or two books behind...
...What's going to happen...
...Gilder is under the impression that the "language theory" Percy discusses in The Message In The Bottle constitutes the underlying philosophy of his fiction...
...I didn't attempt, indeed it would have been foolish to attempt in such a confined space, a comprehensive analysis of Percy's entire oeuvre...
...One is necessarily selective when writing a review of less than 1,500 words...
...Could I have known you in another life...
...The idea is not a new one in literature, nor is it one necessarily identified with poor writing (cf...
...his late wife was a devout Episcopalian...
...Christian questions pervade The Second Coming...
...Though many reviewers mentioned Will Barrett's previous incarnation in The Last Gentleman, not one, including myself and, apparently, Miss Tunney, had much to say about it...
...A positive example of this in Second Coming (as I pointed out in my review) is Percy's compassionate and knowing treatment of Jack Curl, a character who on the surface is almost insupportable...
...Gilder describes Allie as "an innocent, a tabula rasa...
...Here are the big bad psychiatric beasties mistreating poor little Allie (they've as much as raped her, for goodness sake...
...Note Barrett's revulsion with Preacher Curl's plans for a "Love and Faith" community...
...In fact the virility of Percy's male antagonists (yes, even including the impotent Lancelot) has been their most appealing quality-which just makes Will Barrett's Second Childhood all the more disappointing...
...You're going to have a fit...
...Continued on page 36...
...Oh my, what is happening...
...I think I'm going to have a fit...
...criticism must also be informed and fair...
...As a reader, he has reacted unfavorably...
...Indeed, any review of The Second Coming which fails to consider Will Barrett's previous appearance in The Last Gentleman is immediately suspect...
...Barrett...
...my world view is informed by a certain belief about man's nature and destiny which cannot fail to be central to any novel I write...
...Yet when she reacts with simple confusion to a situation she does not understand, Gilder scoffs that Allie is "too good" for the rest of us...
...What I tried to do was show how certain features endemic to his writing, and apparent from the first, have had a debilitating, almost paralyzing effect on his latest work...
...I don't think so...
...I have no doubt that Gilder's reactions to The Second Coming are sincere...
...Susan Tunney Alexandria, Virginia Joshua Gilder replies: I hope I shall always respond to literature as an amateur (in the best sense of the word...
...Yes...
...But perhaps we should continue this discussion in the personals column: Unread, non-professional heathen seeks scrappy literary type for late night religious discussions...
...Most if not all of his criticisms are unjustified by the text...
...The Christianity Percy talks of in his essays is another one of those promising ideas he fails ever to explain...
...It's true," he said...
...Generally one is faced with reading reviews not of novels but of reputations (and it's fairly easy to predict, even without having seen the book in question, which way the flock will turn...
...Did he not notice...
...I don't believe this," she said...
...Then why is it that I live this life as if it were a dream and as if any minute I might wake up and find myself in my real life...
...Will Barrett's daughter is a born-again Christian...
...Having a) missed the point and b) failed to do his Required Reading, Gilder proceeds to his main charge, that the philosophy behind Percy's fiction is so weak, so infantile, that the author would do better to leave it out of his novels entirely...
...As a critic, he has acted irresponsibly...
...I appreciate the offer...
...Gilder does not understand this special inseparability, for the simple reason that he does not know what Percy's philosophy is...
...This is the Christian philosophy that gives shape and meaning to the search for real Life in The Second Coming, and in the body of Percy's writings...
...This is the first time I've heard the well-meaning but inept Binx Boiling described as a "manly hero.'' Even so, why is it "romanticized" for a weaker person to become dependent on a stronger one...
...If it is, though, he's never getting my phone number...
...In my review, I purposefully avoided giving direct quotations of Allie's baby talk (though I may not always be fair, I try to be discreet...
...A friend) believes in that...
...Where is the pain in Allie's experience...
...Finally, Miss Tunney, the way I read it, if I tell you electroshock is not my idea of romance, you'll give me your phone number...
...Did he find it silly...
...Once in a while it's amusing, as with the reviews of Graham Greene's The Bomb Party, to see the critics feverishly trying to explain away a bad book from one of the gods of the literary pantheon...
...Oh my," she said...
...Indeed he might have noticed that all of Percy's novels deal with severe neuroses, that these neuroses always take the form of a compelling feeling of emptiness and a desire to find "real life," that the search of the neurotic is simply a more focused description of the search of all the characters in Percy's books, and that the Life they search for is Christ...
...that Tom Wolfe's admittedly virtu-osic The Right Stuff was a lifeless technical display compared to his earlier work...
...Your tongue is welcome but you, that is the salient you, would be even more so...
...But Gilder does not even make an attempt to discuss it...
...Yes...
...For all I know I may be unique in this, but Binx Boiling always struck me as "manly," if a bit distracted...
...Which brings us to the real problem with Gilder's review...
...If anyone wishes to find God, he must begin his search where he is: in the world God gave him...
...You'll feel like a rape victim in every way but one...
...Sure this appears to be silly, superficial stuff, but he must have intended it that way...
...and that The Second Coming was just plain sad...
...where is the horror...
...Could it be that the Lord is here . . . ? Am I crazy to want both, her and him...
...The Christian finds Christ in his fellow man, or he doesn't find him at all...
...The Second Coming and its author deserve better...
...It is particularly regrettable to have to do So on this occasion, inasmuch as the correction which I must make is addressed to his otherwise excellent review of Norman Podhoretz's The Present Danger (September 1980...
...the fact is that the most embattled defenders of the values of a free society and the policy of resolute defense against the expansion of Soviet totalitarianism . . . have been the members of the organized labor movement of the United States-the AFL-CIO...
...Consider the following passage from The Second Coming (Allie, a refugee from a mental hospital and the heroine of the story, describes post-electrocon-vulsive therapy sensations): Your jaw will hurt and your teeth will be sore from the mouthpiece...
...That's you for true...
...To cut pain and suffering out of the picture falsifies the whole thing-like the liberal theologians who promise their congregations heaven but forget to mention hell...
...I know, I know...
...I It is truly distressing when one finds it necessary to take issue with the venerable Sidney Hook on any issue...
...Critics are sheep, most of them, always keeping an insecure eye on the movements of the rest of the reviewing flock, fearful lest they express an-oh my god!-original opinion, and suddenly find themselves terribly alone...
...How could he have missed the following passage from one of the essays in the Message collection, ' 'Notes For A Novel About the End of the World...
...That is to say...
...And will have...
...professionalism here seems particularly out of place...
...When he conducts his great experiment to settle the question once and for all, he finds . . . Allie...
...Percy at his best (which is rare in The Second Coming) E AMERICAN SPECTATOR TANTIARY 1081 is aware of this...
...The Moviegoer and Lancelot are to my mind Percy's most fully realized and successful novels...
...I wouldn't pass off The Moviegoer as a "first novel written twenty years ago...
...Allie...
...I know...
...The references he makes to Percy's previous writings, as well as, those he fails to make, suggest that his familiarity with Percy's work, which he feels competent to criticize as a "body," is inadequate, not to say scant...
...How could any writer follow it...
...Barrett himself is obsessed with the question of God's existence...
...He points out that the neurotic heroine of Percy's first novel, The Moviegoer, was so overcome by life that she became a "helpless woman-child" whose only hope lay in rescue by the "manly hero.'' This made me wonder how long ago Gilder read The Moviegoer...
...the second coming...
...But I find nothing in Lancelot (one should be wary of mistaking bleakness for sophistication), or Love in the Ruins or The Last Gentleman, to contradict my observations about Percy's dishonest approach to insanity...
...But my hand has been forced: "Kissing you is a delight but not a founded and closed-off delight," she said...
...And he cannot love one without loving the other...
...I always assumed he was dealing here more on the level of affect than idea, or on a holistic level that wasn't pertinent to philosophical dissections, one that could only be adequately dealt with in novel form...
...You will be conscious but still paralyzed from the Anectine (curare...
...Not that I remember.'' ' 'For true ?" "For true...
...The "language theory" he mentions illuminates Percy's thoughts about writing, but it is not the sort of thing that motivates fiction...
...when she came against him from the side, it was with the effect of flying up to him from below like a little cave bat and clinging to him with every part of her...
...Gilder must be acquainted with some unusually articulate (and reflective) infants...
...Still, it's interesting to note that Barrett's final solution, though without the religious overtones, is just as cloy-ingly sentimental...
...So according to the critic, the "tabula rasa" is also a first-degree snob...
...Was there ever such wanting...
...Inferno XXIII: "come'l maestro mio per quel vivagno/portandosene me sovra'l suo petto,/come suo figlio, non come compagno.'') More importantly, if Gilder wanted to discuss the depiction of mental illness in Percy's novels, he might have at least mentioned the highly sophisticated portrait of insanity found in Lancelot (1973), instead of limiting his comparison to a first novel published twenty years ago...
...she asked...
...This is an astounding suggestion...
...it demands that one face the brutalities of life because only through that is redemption possible...
...But they are more befitting a private reader than a public critic...
...It does not speak to the experience of insanity itself, an experience which is unfailingly whitewashed and prettified in The Second Coming...
Vol. 14 • January 1981 • No. 1
