Walker Percy by Patrick Samway

...Samway deserves great praise for gathering all the biographical informa-tion one could ever imagine necessary for making that case, but he has left the more serious and pressing task to oth-ers...

...And yet, I cannot help but feel that, though the popular image of Walker Percy's life has developed, the image of his writing has begun to fade a little around the edges...

...The writer led what was in many ways a narrow and even tidy life, but tidy lives are not so common anymore: "If a total stranger," he wrote of the hero of his sec-ond novel, The Last Gentleman (1966), "had thrust into his palm a note which read: Meet me on the NE corner of Lindell Blvd...

...Samway's new work is the fruit of many years of toil, and it quickly becomes obvious why Percy gave this biographer his blessing and assistance...

...In the seven years since his death, however, Walker Percy's biography has emerged as a topic of unusual interest...

...And without such a work, the literary image of a writer necessar-ily begins to fade...

...Even while the public learns of Walker Percy- Catholic apologist, Southern intellectu-al, amateur linguistic philosopher, and correspondent of many of the most in-teresting figures of his time-it may need reminding of why it should much care about Walker Percy, writer of nov-els...

...next Thursday-have news of utmost importance, he'd have struck out for Saint Louis (the question is, how many peo-ple nowadays would not...

...At times, in fact, the stream of detail becomes some-thing of a problem in the book: It's hard to imagine an anecdote involving Joseph Liebling, Jean Stafford, and Alfred Knopf being dull, but Samway's effort to show all sides of the controversy that swirled around the presentation of the National Book Award to Percy for The Moviegoer buries the story in overre-porting...

...He had, in the hackneyed phrase, a gift for friendship, and from many sources after his death- but particularly from Jay Tolson's 1992 biography, Pilgrim in the Ruins-read-ers learned of the importance of his life-long friendship with the historian and novelist Shelby Foote (see Commonweal, February 28,1997) and the early support he received from the fascinating char-acter of the Southern Gentleman who was his Uncle Will...

...Who now can recollect precisely what it was that made Love in the Ruins (with its mar-velous subtitle, "The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World") seem in 1971 one of the most astonishing best-sellers in years...

...A painstak-ing scholar rather than a freewheeling critic-his study of William Faulkner, for example, is a close reading of the type-scripts-Samway has carefully assem-bled and set in a generally competent narrative astonishing amounts of information about the novelist...

...The re-sult is that he never did quite manage to produce that single great work his tal-ent promised...

...Who now, among general readers, is able to bring firmly to mind the plot of The Moviegoer...

...We need, in other words, someone to make the case for Walker Percy, not as an interesting man, but as an important writer...

...One unfortunate consequence of all this is that the new biography Walker Percy: A Life by Patrick H. Samway, S.J., though excellent in many ways, is not quite the book we need on Percy now...

...His life had been large-ly uneventful, marked by little beyond his conversion to Roman Catholicism and the tuberculosis that put an end to his medical career in the early 1940s...

...This is in part the novelist's fault...

...The literary editor of America magazine and an acquaintance of the novelist, Samway is a student of Southern liter-ature and the editor of two Percy vol-umes: a posthumous gathering of the novelist's fugitive pieces, Signposts in a Strange Land, and a collection of letters exchanged with Kenneth Laine Ketner on the linguistic philosophy of Charles Saunders Pierce, A Thief of Pierce...

...So too, readers will receive from Samway's wealth of information-about, for in-stance, the continuing irritation the nov-elist felt with the blighted attempts to film his stories-a new appreciation for the seriousness with which Percy watched and thought about movies...

...J. Bottom Home writers are remem-bered mostly for how they wrote, and some writers are remembered mostly for how they lived...

...And in six novels, from The Moviegoer in 1961 to The Thanatos Syndrome in 1987, he had left a substantial body of fiction, se-rious in purpose, popular in form, and elegantly written...

...What Samway's readers will not re-ceive, however, is the reason they should concern themselves with all these details, for the biographer is not a compelling literary critic...

...When Walker Percy died in 1990 at the age of seventy-four, there seemed little doubt that he be-longed among those known primarily for their writing...

...He started late-when he accused himself of laziness, Shelby Foote de-clared that he was merely feeling guilty for all the years he wasted before he found his vocation as a writer at thirty-five-and he invested too much effort in what was a fairly unimportant lin-guistic theory that ought to have been, like Yeats's foray into cosmology with A Vision, nothing more than a device for focusing his artistic imagination...

...Walker Percy is the sort of study that presupposes its subject's im-portance and the widespread knowledge of his writing...

...Samway's work consists not so much of new facts about the novelist as new confirmation and new detail...

...Though Percy managed, with considerable self-conscious irony and humor, to keep the canvas of his own life deliberately small, he painted within its confines an utter-ly compelling picture...

...But those days are near-ly gone, I think, in which one could as-sume that Walker Percy is a writer for the ages...

...From that detail there emerges, for me at least, a greater appreciation of the freedom given to Percy by his in-herited wealth-a freedom, for instance, to practice by writing two apprentice works, The Charterhouse and The Gramercy Winner, before producing, at age forty-five, his first published novel...

...and Kings Highway in Saint Louis 9 A.M...

...For the most part, there are no sur-prises in Walker Percy...