To die in New Orleans

...Evagrius Ponticus's fourth-century treatise, Rerum monachalium rationes, insists that a monk think on the moment he will die every day of his life: Sitting in your cell, Collect your thoughts, Remember the day of your death...

...This remarkable writer, with his unblinking and severe assessment of human beings, sees hope and salvation in their finitude...

...They might have been redeemed if Daniel, his lawyer (Rip Tom), and the prosecutor (Lee Grant) had provided a running, wisecracking commentary...

...But, in Defending, with Brooks more subdued than usual, the other characters must pull more comic freight...

...Percy died last May and is buried in Louisiana...

...this church has not stood apart from society since the time of Constantine...

...the Past Life Pavilion, hosted by--Shirley MacLaine...

...All flesh is grass, our yearnings after wisdom, righteousness, and immortality are powerfully offset by the pulsings of life, the throb of sexuality, our own sense of displacement and propensity to evil...

...As a literary piece, it is droll, witty, quickly tossed down, like frothy beer...

...An ascetical lesson then of Percy, of Catholicism, of monasticism, and of New Orleans is that the presence of death gives life new vibrancy...

...It is in this private, inner place that the frescos climb the walls and ceiling in a riotous explosion of tropical color and Christian imagery...

...He describes the country rather than the city, but in his flawed characters there is an assessment of the natural forces of life that I do not find elsewhere...

...The fast-talking, covertly needling control-freak that Brooks plays to perfection, both in his own films (Real Life, Lost in America) and those directed by others (Taxi Driver, Broadcast News), sets the pace of each scene he's in...

...Subduing the imp in himself, Brooks fails to instill it in anybody else...

...No one could play the demon neurotics Brooks writes as well as Brooks himself...

...But this yeasty draught is then absorbed and yields many deep and nourishing insights as one's life develops, sometimes along lines predicted by Percy...

...There at St...

...Asceticism, as we define it, is that point where religion intensifies, touches down, "practifies...

...And yet against this "depressed" reality must be set the exhilarations of a prose that continues to take the world, despite all doubt and gloominess, as an object worthy of praise...

...In the interminable rain of his prose, I felt goodness...

...I am sure that if Percy or O'Toole had anything to do with it, that procession of the holy ones would be led by all the broken-down, sinful, normal, and not-so-normal people of their novels, with a drunk 322: Commonweal or a mental case leading the parade...

...SCREEN HEAVEN WITHOUT HASSLES BROOKS'S 'DEFENDING YOUR LIFE' atching Albert Brooks on screen is like watching a man have a creative, selfdelighting anxiety attack...

...His jumpiness makes the other characters jump or else sit back in staring bewilderment at this one-man collection of urban tics and choked-back desires...

...Likewise, that boisterous place, where the dead are trumpeted to their graves, is a city of life because it is a city of death...

...This is a brave departure for such a domineering performer...

...Since I have learned to appreciate Louisiana almost entirely through his writings, it was for me an appropriate meeting indeed...

...As I look at this grave, for me death comes closer, is less abstract, more real...

...I came to Louisiana to attend a series of theological conferences, the first a small gathering, the second an enormous megameeting of six thousand brought together in the largest hotels of New Orleans...

...Brooks's acting is not just something he does in addition to writing and directing...

...Joseph's you are far from the formal, above-ground vaults where the dead of New Orleans lie ringing their city...

...hanging around the kitchen, after his daughter serves him a low-cholestoral frozen yogurt dessert, to stuff himself with "three quick vanilla cookies and a broken pretzel...

...Could Percy have learned the lessons he has taught us in his novels and essays if he had lived elsewhere than in Louisiana...

...The paintings in the church are impressive, but they pale in power beside those of the refectory, that second center of community life...

...Thus perhaps have Catholic cities always appeared to their northern visitors...

...Not that Percy is a writer of local scope only...

...There is in Percy a wise reckoning, a knowledge of deep things, a realization that most of life, philosophy, and religion boil down to the yearnings of organic matter for transcendence and resurrection...

...Nowhere is this expressed more cannily than in Percy's deceptively simple philosophical essay, Lost in the Cosmos, the Last Self-Help Guide...

...Monasteries can be rather severe places, but this abbey is decorated with huge frescos, all executed by the Dutch monk-artist, Gregory Dewitt...

...A small anthill has formed at a point right above Percy's heart...

...It is this organic, but still critical, Augustinian note in Percy that makes him so Catholic...

...Inevitably, there is the drawing down of age and death...

...Each year a group of us meets to discuss ascetical practices in just such a monastic setting, fortifying ourselves before entering the "Sea of Tweed...

...In the first third of Defending Your Life, as adman Daniel Miller gets used to the idea of being dead and starts to enjoy himself, everything on screen charms the viewer...

...Asceticism is to theology as root is to plant and leaf--it is the thorny, heavy, solid part...

...Rabbit at Rest should be seen as the final campaign in a losing battle for faith, bespeaking substantial spiritual gloom not only for Rabbit, but, one senses, for his creator as well...

...His acting in his own movies is the culmination of his writing and the most important tool of his directing...

...the restaurants where huge, magically nonfattening portions are literally forced on the guests...

...It is alive in a way unmatched by superior, Emersonian New England or my native California, with its vineyards and Disneylands...

...The remorseless pessimism of Proust's disquisitions on the heart [Updike writes], the abyss he makes of human motives, the finality of all our little deaths, did not appall me...

...Theologians are at their worst when trying to make points in this sea of tweed...

...The pains, when they come, seem hostile and deliberate, the knives of a strengthening enemy...

...I wonder if there is not something about that place that contributed to his genius...

...Joseph's Abbey in the swampy woods of Louisiana...

...Unfortunately, it functions in this movie as a liability...

...It was a romantic moment...

...17May 1991:321 Louisiana, as I have known it through the writings of Percy, plus occasional supplements from the more sonorous and dated Faulkner, or the saucy, sarcastic John Kennedy O'Toole, is a study in sensuality, a place of fecundity and decay, a city of canals, old streets, overgrown plots, flamboyant music, Catholicism, and striptease...

...17 May 1991:323...

...It's little more than a pile of dirt in the woods, marked only by a small bronze plate with name and dates...

...Joseph's Abbey, where he is buried, would appear to be an eloquent witness to the special spirit of this locale...

...The gleam in his puckered, Nelson Rockefeller eyes is mysteriously eloquent and, for the pretrial scenes, Brooks gives Torn some good lines...

...the weather stations that can only endlessly relay the news that it's seventy-four degrees and clear all day, every day...

...It is the only art I have seen by a Catholic in America that combines strong color and distorted, somewhat surreal figures to produce the same effects as a Byzantine icon...

...The lawyer reveals that, on the universal scale of intelligence, earthly humans only rate as "little brains": "But if you could use more than 5 percent of your brains, you wouldn't want to be on earth...

...The Catholic religion contributes to the sense of colorful intensity of such a city, for, unlike the message of careful aloofness from society that is transmitted in Protestantism, the "Catholic gospel" has always connected itself to previous paganisms...

...This movie differs from Brooks's previous films in that the humor isn't rooted in his personality but in the basic situation (an adman is killed in an accident and arrives at a sort of celestial way station where he must justify his life in court before he can go on to a higher existence), the setting (Judgment City is nothing but a cozy composite of several sunbelt villages), and the bafflements inherent in any comedy about afterlife (how do you tip an otherworldly bellhop when there is no money in the Great Beyond...

...It is an ascetic choice, a drawing apart...

...The early monks haunted the cemeteries, as if to show that they had died to this world...

...This book provides enough critical insight into the human condition to last a lifetime...

...And the aggressions he perpetrates on his fellow actors are the lashes that make the crew row...

...So, too, with Updike himself, a writer who has substituted for transcendental reassurances the small answers of texture, mastering the artistic paradox by which even deathly realities are redeemed in the vivid life of prose...

...Just as the ascetic withdraws from society to achieve detachment, we scholars depart from the Sheraton and the I MICHAEL O'LAUGHLIN, a translator and interpreter, lives in Medford, Massachusetts...

...Percy fits this city where the saints go marching in...

...Most of them aren't up to the job...

...3 TO DIE IN NEW ORLEANS REFLECTIONS AT WALKER PERCY'S GRAVE MICHAEL O'LAUGHLIN recently came face to face with Walker Percy, or what remains of him...

...We get instead humdrum episodes observed by the court in silence...

...to my mind New Orleans remains the least assimilated of American cities, a place dark and riotous, tropical and latinate, a polar opposite certainly to the puritanical, Irish Boston where I make my home...

...His whines and incredulous smiles are the orchestral accompaniment for his dialogue...

...It is simply too French, too hot, charming, and sexual to be a real part of this most corn-fed, vigorous, and Protestant of countries...

...fingering the bottle of nitroglycerin pills in his pocket and looking forward to the "cute little rush" of "inner loosening" they give him--made more delicious, it turns out, by a Nutter-Butter cookie and a big glass of milk...

...I am sure there is a final lesson in his decision to lie among the monks...

...I try to imagine this refectory elsewhere in the country and simply cannot picture it...

...But New Orleans is the polar opposite to almost any other American city as well...

...In his previous work, Brooks brought out the oddity of seemingly "normal," faceless people...

...Rip Tom does the best work...

...At the heart of this mental description lies a fundamental paradox: the positive force of religion can be tangled and, yes, supported by outright sinful revelry and a mass of unredeemed purposes and enthusiasms...

...The figures represented, from Adam and Eve to the Good Shepherd, are drawn in an intense style, at once magical and realistic...

...But when the main action begins, Daniel's defense of his life before two judges, the movie goes flat fast...

...This annual meeting of scholars of religion, although highly stimulating, is also predictably marred by careerism and commercialism...

...Cinematographer Allen Daviau gives the movie a spaciousness that well suits the spirit of instant gratification of a New Age paradise...

...I am somewhat surprised that Percy did not choose to lay his body down among those other, more worldly mortals, as a final act of solidarity with the humanity he spent his life puzzling over and describing...

...Brooks's relentless nervousness can no longer drive this action because often he is just an observer, especially in the trial scenes which are dominated by the wrangling attorneys...

...Even the morbid messages of Harry's heart are converted, through the tribute of description, into a readerly pleasure: At times it seems a tiny creature, a baby, pleading inside him for attention, for rescue, and at others a sinister intruder, a traitor muttering in code, an alien parasite that nothing will expel...

...His glib lawyer is both amusing and unsettling because his agreeableness seems to mask his knowledge of what is in store for his client...

...These frescos fit in this: swampy, Latin piece of our country where life and death are both so vivid and flow so closely together...

...There is something holy, something profound there, beneath the bon vivance, and I would love to be in that number, when those saints rise up and begin to march...

...it is a place where business is conducted, contracts are signed, job interviews scheduled, and one's sensibilities consequently assaulted...

...The veterinary in Real Life, the casino manager and the employment counselor in the brilliant Lost in America (one of the two or three best comedies of the eighties), all revealed unexpected, buggy facets as they reacted to the aggressions of the Brooks persona...

...I stayed at a Benedictine monastery for the smaller gathering...

...For Harry, the path toward cardiac disaster is strewn with illicit satisfactions: noticing someone sicker than he is, and liking him for it...

...Brooks's inventions are excellent: the soap operas on the hotel TV in which characters must revile each other not only for their past deeds but their past lives...

...Percy's Catholicism, acquainted with sorrow, familiar with failings and yet confident in God, belongs and connects in that swampy, beautiful place...

...I think for example of the erotic and primal allure of Italy in Thomas Mann's A Death in Venice, or E.M...

...So I found myself in St...

...Marriott to achieve our separateness, our own point of intense contact...

...Distortion is there, along with a reverence for detail...

...p ercy, of course, writes frequently of death, and New Orleans is to my mind a city of death...

...In an essay on Proust, Updike described the French writer as "one of those rare men...who lost the consolations of belief but retained the attitudes and ambitions of a worshiper...

...It is no accident that the signature song of the city, "When the Saints Go Marching In," that bawdy, colorful rag, was written to be played in a funeral procession...

...I found Percy's grave a few thousand feet out into the woods from the Benedictine refectory with its vivid frescos...

...But in Defending Your Life, the taskmaster has turned into a genial host...

...Forster's A Room with a View...

...Episodes of Daniel's earthly existence are shown on a movie screen in court, but these scenes are written and directed without flair...

...It is the only American city where the smell of vegetation, food, sewage, and decay unite with sights and sound to convince the heart that life is built on death...