Pilgrim in the Ruins
Tolson, Jay
/ n a 1983 lecture on Herman Melville, Walker Percy remarked that Moby Dick "was a consequence, not merely of great gifts, but also of great good luck"—the luck of a novelist "breaking into the...
...When Uncle Will died of a stroke in January 1942, he left a substantial fortune to his three adopted sons...
...His depression, with the attendant self-disgust, dogged him most of his life, and Percy's keen interest in bourbon would have turned into a problem were it not for the moderation imposed on him by chronic diverticulosis...
...Percy also had the good fortune of superb editors—sympathetic craftsmenlike Stanley Kauffmann at Knopf and Robert Giroux at Farrar, Straus...
...In Birmingham, his parents belonged to a small congregation of progressive Presbyterians whose "diluted religiosity" was taken up with ethics and social action more than with mystery and belief...
...At about the time Percy was writing that spare description of his adopted world-view (1974), he was entering the worst spiritual crisis of his own pilgrimage, one that would culminate in the publication of his fourth novel, Lancelot (1977), a bitter yet faintly hopeful rant about the reality and presence of evil...
...in 1941, he contracted pulmonary tuberculosis during his internship as a pathologist working on the corpses of derelicts at Bellevue...
...twelve years later, when Percy was 13, the father took his own life in a grisly repetition of the grandfather's self-inflicted gunshot wound...
...In 1948 they settled in the town of Covington ("This is the nonplace for me...
...n a 1983 lecture on Herman Melville, Walker Percy remarked that Moby Dick "was a consequence, not merely of great gifts, but also of great good luck"—the luck of a novelist "breaking into the freedom of his art," as happened to Melville when a whaling yarn somehow evolved into "a narrative that unfolds not merely itself but oneself and others' selves...
...There is no consensus to animate the culture and give meaning to life, certainly no consensus of the sort Percy uncovered at Saranac: the belief that man was created in the image of God with an immortal soul, that he occupied a place in nature somewhere between the beasts and the angels, that he suffered an aboriginal catastrophe, the Fall, in consequence of which he lost his way and, unlike the beasts, became capable of sin and therefore became a pilgrim or seeker of his own salvation...
...Liebling bought a copy of The Moviegoer, which so enthralled him that he recommended it to his wife, Jean Stafford, one of the judges on the NBA fiction panel...
...Once settled, Percy was certain he wanted to write, and he had found a theme, which Tolson identifies as "the question of why man feels so sad in the twentieth century...
...After Lancelot, he referred to himself obliquely as "an ex-suicide...
...Years later Percy would joke that if it hadn't been for Uncle Will he would have wound up selling cars in Athens...
...Distracted from his reverie and without pausing a beat between sentences, Percy said, "Well, hello, Wyatt...
...Except that by then he had every reason to call it by a different name: grace...
...Tolson recounts a "strangely gratuitous and self-dramatizing" comment Percy made to a student at Louisiana State University almost half a century later, when Percy was on a one-year teaching stint at LSU...
...Both the younger brothers served with distinction in the Second World War, which left Walker feeling all the more useless during the stay at Saranac...
...He was angered—and taken with a seething determination from the age of 13 "to make damn sure that it didn't happen to me...
...And the rejection started a chain of circumstances that brought Percy into contact with Elizabeth Otis, whose literary agency served him well for the rest of his career...
...Percy was almost 46 when he accepted the National Book Award for The Moviegoer, acquiring instant fame and a generous new print run...
...But there was nothing flippant about his closely written tribute in an introductory essay to a 1973 reissue of Will's memoir, Lanterns on the Levee (1941...
...A lengthy period of enforced inactivity at sanatoria in Saranac (New York) and Connecticut gave Percy ample time—four years, all told—to explore his own deepest convictions, while grappling with the awkward discovery that he was now a certified medical doctor with no real interest in being a physician...
...Come here, have a seat...
...Nonetheless, by the time he died, at his home in Covington on May 10, 1990 (of the "metastases from prostate carcinoma" that he blandly reported to Shelby Foote the previous year), Walker Percy knew that his life had been favored with great good luck...
...Bunt and Walker took religious instruction together, and were received into the Roman Catholic' Church in 1947...
...Will Percy promptly adopted the three boys...
...After receiving his M.D...
...But if the serendipity of his rise is something of a legend in American publishing, this and other instances of Percy's good fortune came to him the hard way...
...Another influence was the Catholicism Percy embraced under the usual conditions of disaster and good fortune...
...they also learned character, and Walker himself gained "a vocation and in a real sense a second self...
...Lawyer, planter, war hero, poet, lifelong bachelor (owing, apparently, to an "extreme idealization of women"), Will Percy had "a complete, articulated view of the world as tragic as it was noble...
...Percy had been firmly agnostic since his late childhood...
...Liebling had just finished writing a book on Louisiana politics, and his interest was piqued by a review mentioning the New Orleans setting of this first novel by an unknown Southern writer...
...Consider how Percy's first published novel, The Moviegoer (1961), took the 1962 National Book Award...
...There was, too, the regular correspondence with his lifelong friend Shelby Foote, a major source for Tolson...
...Stafford arranged for the other two judges to receive copies of Percy's novel along with the ten other novels nominated that year...
...They were not a happy family...
...Late one afternoon the student, a young man named Wyatt Prunty, happened by the open door of an English department office and stopped when he saw Percy sitting alone in the office, his feet propped up on another chair and "his gaze, fixed in the middle distance...
...When the novel was rejected by Scribner's in 1953, Gordon's blunt reaction kept Percy's spirits up: "They just don't get it...
...Percy's keen interest in science—to which, as a chemistry major at Chapel Hill, he attached a rather callow hope for a complete worldview—led him to medical school at Columbia...
...In fact, by his own account Percy was neither deeply saddened nor idly fascinated by his father's suicide...
...It would not have been inconsistent with Walker's depressive temperament if he had taken his inheritance and settled into the life of a genteel bum...
...Although never precisely autobiographical, Percy's novels, as Tolson shows, "grew out of states of mind—psychological, moral, and spiritual predicaments—through which he himself had passed...
...I guess the central mystery of my life will always be why my father killed himself...
...Percy exclaimed when he first saw the town), near the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, across from New Orleans...
...Wells...
...ut that is to ignore the B immeasurable influence of Mary Bernice (Bunt) Townsend, whom Percy married in 1946, a personal triumph related by Tolson with tenderness and humor...
...In a letter to Shelby Foote, written when he was in his early sixties, Percy took exception to his friend Robert Coles's portrait Walker Percy: An American Search (1978), which Percy appreciated but thought too generous...
...When the judges met in March 1962, their choice was unanimous...
...It is in paperback to this day, and none of his six published novels has gone out of print...
...Roy took over the Percy plantation in Greenville, and Phin eventually took up a career in law...
...H e was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in May 1916, the first of three sons, to LeRoy Pratt Percy and Martha Susan Phinizy...
...Percy's answer—which he would compose in several (continued on page 69) forms, including six tightly crafted novels and a sophisticated theory of language elaborated in two books of philosophical nonfiction and assorted posthumously published lectures—is that the contemporary, "postmodern" mishmash of residual Christian ethics and regnant scientific methodology leaves us without a coherent theory of man...
...Both parents were of the Southern aristocracy, freighted with the artful strategies of noblesse oblige, the father's family going back through several generations of stoic achievers given to bouts of melancholy...
...Uncle Will, the spiritual loner, was himself a lapsed Catholic, without formal religion...
...Young Percy, a voracious reader, embraced the scientism of Julian Huxley and H.G...
...In Saranac, however, his confidence in science started crumbling, as he waded into extensive readings of Dostoevsky and Camus, Jaspers and Heidegger...
...And there was Percy's apprenticeship under the formidable Caroline Gordon, a close reader who guided Percy through his unpublished The Charterhouse...
...He read deeply in Kierkegaard, and in spirited debate with a fellow patient who happened to be a well-informed Catholic, he discovered Marcel and Maritain...
...The year after Percy's birth, his paternal grandfather committed suicide...
...Percy's deeply conservative vision always got mixed reviews, and he usually had mixed feelings about the many critics who, as Caroline Gordon had said, "just don't get it"—even if their obtuseness gave an ironically gratifying vindication of his theory about the "postmodern predicament...
...The usual procedure for deciding the award begins with publishers' recommendations, but Percy's publisher, the disagreeable Alfred Knopf, felt no enthusiasm for The Moviegoer and was annoyed by its poor sales...
...At this time in his life, though, Percy was still more of a woolgathering misfit than a serious thinker...
...Within a few years of their move to Greenville, Martha Susan always rather aloof and emotionally distant from her sons—died in a car accident...
...Percy, too, knew the feeling: on many occasions in his life, he enjoyed luck of a variety so decisive that it's hard to come away from Jay Tolson's Pilgrim in the Ruins without a sense that Walker Percy's life was charmed...
...He read Aquinas...
...After spending a year with the mother's family in Athens, Georgia, Martha Susan Percy and her three sons were invited by the well-to-do "Uncle Will" (William Alexander Percy, first cousin to Walker's father) to stay with him at his home in Greenville, Mississippi...
...As it happened, however, A.J...
...What little I accomplish," he wrote, "seems to get accomplished through a peculiar dialectic of laziness, malice and self-centeredness...
...From Uncle Will, Walker and his brothers learned Shakespeare, Keats, Brahms, Beethoven...
Vol. 26 • March 1993 • No. 3
