The Percys of Mississippi
Callahan, Sidney
would get a just price for their eggs, ture of the world of the rural poor in Latin chickens, or pigs. When the National America. Gabriel Garcia M~irquez's Guard tries to intimidate people to keep...
...The final chapter of this history analyzes the contemporary novels of Walker Percy, the Gray Eagle's great-grandson...
...By early afternoon, the POLITICS AND LITEtlATIJR17...
...While the father went hunting for rest and relaxation, once even hosting a hunt for Teddy Roosevelt, Will Percy went to the opera and New York's Greenwich Village...
...William Alexander Percy, whose silver hair, piercing eyes, and qualities of leadership earned him the name, "the wealth, travel, and cultivated intelligence, the Percys possessed sophisticated enlightened views which inevitably embroiled them, generation after generation, in struggles against bigotry...
...The Vintage-Random House edition inaugurates the Aventura Library of Contemporary World Literature...
...served for a term in the U.S...
...LeRoy tain a tradition of "noblesse oblige...
...Well -- perhaps in the best tradition of southern gentility, I can recast my criticisms in a positive way...
...Will adopted and raised Walker Percy and his brothers after their father's suicide and their mother's death in an automobile accident...
...The dramatic organizations...
...IN TH17...
...Will fought for the fights of local blacks and dispensed charity generously, but he thought of most Negroes as happy primitives incapable of coping without white guidance...
...Happily, most of the time doing the good thing and doing well were not in conflict...
...into Will Percy's complex personality...
...When the last great flood of 1927 came, wreaking havoc, LeRoy and Will's leadership and exhausting rescue operation provides an example of aristocracy in action, an elite Catholic belle of the Delta, and gallantly justifying its privilege...
...MARC EDELMAN, a doctoral candidate in anthropology at Columbia University, spent a year in Costa Rica working among Salvadoran refugees...
...As a young man Will had gone to Sewanee, Harvard Law School, served in the First World War, and after a time writing poetry in the North, come home to live...
...Such a family, as Will at least made explicit in his writing, would abhor and deplore the modern tendency to pry, psychoanalyze, and publicize private lives...
...NEW guards have visited yet another tragedy SOOTH on Lupe's family and she steels herself to Lewis Baker carry on and to deny them the satisfaction Louisiana State University, $20, 237 pp, of seeing her pain...
...The first Percy in the new world committed suicide, and over the generations there appear tragic accidents, private and professional renunciations, nervous disorder and suicide...
...Let us say that Lewis Baker, either by birth or devoted study has become imbued with the Percy family ethos...
...Similarly, the its uneven treatment of topics and supersearch and destroy operation which ficial psychological analysis...
...A public accounting of thp...
...Also, any published work of family members can be considered public property, so extended treatments of these are acceptable...
...One Day of Life would be a special book even if El Salvador were not the scene of a growing civil war...
...For those not catalyzed opposition to the government similarly entranced, this historical work among the peasants of his poor may, I fear, appear dull or frustrating in Chalatenango parish...
...Camille Percy was a Catholic, LeRoy wasn't, Will lapsed, and Walker converted, but there isn't much more said than that...
...He played the role of paternal planter aristocrat, as well as that of poet and encourager of regional artists...
...The main body of the book is devoted to the concerns and careers of Col...
...Consider the enigma of Will Percy: lawyer, planter, poet...
...The military reacted by banning the book, seizing the existing copies and forcing Argueta into exile in Costa Rica...
...Senate, but Wealth buttresses a family against matepreferred exercising power behind the rial disasters and provides access to the scenes, working all his life for the good benefits of education and leisured culof his region...
...It has since been translated into a dozen languages and published throughout Europe and Latin America...
...While quotes from Walker Percy's books are used to introduce each chapter, the reader gets the distinct impression that he never talked to the author and cooperated not at all in this history of his family...
...rp.nl fant.~ PnnP.r $7.~5 4 May 1984:285...
...Will moved into his friend's house in order to nurse him and then buried his friend in the Percy plot...
...PglICY| 0l' I~I$111111PP...
...own writing...
...One Day of Life was first published in 1980 by the Jesuit-run Central American University in San Salvador...
...The final chapter's analysis of the existential themes and characters of Walker Percy' s novels is no substitute for the historian's task of understanding the reality of the individual family members' actual existence...
...In championing the largest and most radical of the guerrilla Gray Eagle of the Delta...
...What of the beautiful Camille' s life...
...In the first chapter the focus is upon the military and postwar adventures of Col...
...Will was widely traveled, moderately productive as a poet, and the author of the popular memoir, Lanterns on the Levee...
...The official documents exchanged between the Vatican Congregation for the Faith and Edward Schillebeeckx...
...Bill Brow's translation captures well the Salvadoran peasant's vernacular and Argueta's austere prose...
...Percy's son, LeRoy, and LeRoy's son, Will...
...Few novels provide so authentic a picbeginnings of the Percy family might come straight from the pages of Faulkner's fiction...
...Gabriel Garcia M~irquez's Guard tries to intimidate people to keep works capture many of the absurdities them from going to Mass and then inherent in societies long dominated by brutalizes and drives into exile one young military dictators and oligarchs, but their priest, more and more people begin to often surrealistic tone reflects the vision listen to local Christian Farmworkers of a cosmopolite, not of the rural dweller...
...They are all presented as lovely, spirited, and full of charm -period...
...LeRoy and Camille's only ture...
...Was the project too intrusive of family privacy, or was he all too sure that literary criticism and family history cannot be done at the same time without poor results in each genre...
...SIDNEY CALLAHAN'S books include The Illusion of Eve and Parenting...
...None of these are analyzed in any depth in Lewis Baker's bland reading of e~,ents and character...
...The brutalization of l[ l: YOU are obsessed with the South, the young priest in Argueta's novel is ]i Walker Percy, Faulkner's world, or very much like the 1977 assassination of family histories, you will read this acFather Rutilio Grande, whose death count with fascination...
...carded on his father's profession of law, But at what price does an elite mainplanting, and political leadership...
...LeRoy Percy married Camille, a French rights of the Delta Negroes, for instance, they also helped keep their labor force from fleeing north...
...Throughout his life he appears as a person steeped in deep nostalgia for lost loveliness, or as Faulkner once described him, a man estranged from his times...
...What remains is a gentleman' s history of political and literary gentlemen -- which whets our appetite to know more...
...Why the suicides, and how were they and the tragic accidents coped with...
...Adolfina protests by participating in the occupation of the San Salvador cathedral is clearly modeled on one which the military ironically dubbed "Operation Rutilio...
...This campaign was one of the first steps in converting Chalatenango into what it is today, a bastion of the Popular Liberation Forces (FPL), the ren Lives on the Brazilian northeast and Paulo Carvalho-Neto's as yet untranslated Mi Tio Atahualpa on the Ecuadorian Andes are as genuinely moving as Manlio Argueta's novel on the peasants of Chalatenango...
...Why and at what cost did these allegiances stand, invert, or fall...
...For all the effort and conscientious work expended by Baker, more is missing than Walker Percy' s authentic voice or insight AL REVIEWERS PATRICK JORDAN was formerly one of the editors of The Catholic Worker in New York...
...While still in college, Will left his ardent Catholicism inherited from Camille, his idealized mother...
...Therefore Baker concentrates on the public battles with the Ku Klux Klan and the struggles for flood control...
...Supporting the FPL in Chalatenango are the real-life members of the Christian Farmworkers Federation, not unlike Argueta's Chepe and Adolfina...
...Sexuality is definitely absent from this history, as is any acute analysis of the Percy women...
...He never married and yet maintained an elaborate household for his adopted sons and a constant stream of artistic and intellectual company...
...Federation organizers who urge them to Perhaps only Graciliano Ramos's Barunite to struggle for their survival and their fights...
...But this picture of genteel detachment is upset by a short passing paragraph referring to the death of a lifelong male friend who cried out for Will in his final illness...
...Only a book about the Percys could keep me plowing through so many paragraphs devoted to levee construction...
...The author makes no further comment on this, or on Will's friendship with another man with whom Will owned a summer house at Sewanee...
...besides the mystery of Will, a host of other intriguing questions are left hanging...
...Raymond E Brown, S.S, A distinguished scholar looks at seven different New Testament churches after the death of the Apostles...
...How was the deep conflict between 'Will and LeRoy resolved when they disagreed over how to rescue the blacks stranded in the last great flood...
...At home in the Delta, LeRoy and Will exercised their influence as eloquent advocates of progress, reason, and moderation...
...Few family conflicts or family dynamics of any kind are explored...
...Lupe's day begins like any other, but by 9:30 in the morning the dreaded National Guard comes to her house, looking Tlr...
...Religious experience is also scanted...
...From the conflicts surrounding Reconstruction, to the dramatic fight against the Ku Klux Klan, the Percys courageously stood on principle and battled for the fight as they saw it...
...Will was an avowed follower of the detached stoicism of Marcus Aurelius...
...Above all, the threegeneration Percy effort to obtain flood control for the Delta combined personal and community interest...
...for Adolfina...
...Indeed, Lewis Baker takes as the surviving son, Will Percy, eventually theme of his history the Percys' continupracticed law with his father, but he was ing ability to lead "the good life...
...The Churches The Apostles Left Behind...
...Cloth $8.95 Paper $4.95 The Schlllbeeckx Case, edited by Ted School O.P...
...Will's-inner emotional life remains opaque to the reader, and one wonders whether some reticence is at work here, or whether this is just another example of the author's obtuseness...
...Yet also dedicated to art, literature, and his Wealth and high social position may also Commonweal: 284 close off experience and bring peculiar pressures...
...But the complex rules of gentlemanly behavior do not sanction delving into sexual habits, family conflicts, the character of women, religious struggles, or unfortunate family tragedies...
...Shaped by their traditions of A gentleman's history This version of the Percy story begins with the romantic tale of the founding of the Percy family in the pre-Civil War South...
...MARGARET WIMSATT teaches English at the University of New Mexico...
...his renunciation ofsmarriage is explained by Baker as an idealist's inability to combine romantic feeling with sexual desire...
...Why not...
...One Day of Life is only thinly- tgidneu C a l l a h a a disguised history...
...thus the Percys could maintain their honor along with their wealth and social position...
Vol. 111 • May 1984 • No. 9
