The Souths Lost Gentleman
WYATT-BROWN, BERTRAM
The South's Lost Gentleman Walker Percy: A Life By Patrick H. Samway, S. J. Farrar Straus Giroux. 506 pp. S35.00. Reviewed by Bertram Wyatt-Brown Professor of history, University...
...Southerners of his class and education place a very high value on a privacy designed to protect family andpersonal honor...
...The parents were magnificent, as Samway records, in teaching her to speak and understand by reading lips...
...Walker Percy: A Life adds much to our knowledge of a tortured, enigmatic and elegant master of words, perhaps the most profound male writer the South has produced since William Faulkner...
...However...
...In a literary career that began later than that of most male fiction-writers, Percy published six highly acclaimed novels—The Moviegoer, The Last Gentleman, Love in the Ruins, Lancelot, The Second Coming, and The Thanatos Syndrome—as well as several nonfiction works, most notably the Pascalian Lost in the Cosmos...
...his account of Percy's exchanges with Kauffmann and later with Robert Giroux greatly enliven the text...
...Nonetheless, minor events dominate...
...Yet, mindful of family traditions, Walker never entirely shook off the conservatism and noblesse oblige that had always marked his cousin's life...
...In connecting Percy's experiences, both spiritual and emotional, to his creative process, Samway might have reached more deeply into the interpretive well...
...Samway has made excellent use of his exclusive access to his subject's correspondence, confidences and kinspeople...
...For instance, throughout the 1970s Percy felt especially gloomy about his home life and himself for reasons that are not much explained...
...Percy strove toward the idea of Christian redemption in his novels...
...Driven inward by inaction, grief, ill-health, a sense of wartime uselessness, and the family's predisposition to gloom, he began to rethink his life...
...Samway skims over the premarital flirtations that resembled those of Will Barrett in The Last Gentleman...
...Summers were spent at his mountain cottage, Brinkwood, at the college town of Sewanee, Tennessee...
...However, he has provided a thoroughly readable and gratifying study...
...The Moviegoer might never have launched his literary career but for the unquenchable faith of Stanley Kauffmann, his editor at Alfred A. Knopf, in its potential...
...The mental abnormality afflicted all six generations of Walker's progenitors, stretching back to the drowning of Charles "Kettle" Percy in 1794...
...In The Moviegoer, Walker Percy gently satirized his mentor's Aurelian philosophy in the character of great-aunt Emily Cutrer...
...Although the biography presents some problems, it contains material not to be found anywhere else, and will long remain a resource for those interested in Percy's life and work...
...To the chagrin of the New York intelligentsia, who backed Joseph Heller's Catch-22, The Moviegoer won the National Book Award in 1962...
...Lancelot (1977), his grimmest work, reflects a very dour, angry mood...
...By 1946 Percy's recovery was complete enough for him to contemplate such innovations as literary career, marriage and change of faith...
...More interesting is the biographer's exploration of his training at Columbia's College of Physicians and Surgeons...
...In treating educational matters, Samway reveals how Walker learned as much from association with precocious classmates as he did from his rigorous teachers at Greenville High School...
...Yet when psychological or temperamental issues are noted at all by Samway, they are given less attention than his meeting a new literary figure, winning a prize, or making a decision about a daughter's schooling...
...Understandably Samway highlights Percy's conversion to Catholicism...
...Percy's interest in linguistics was doubtless related to his daughter's handicap...
...Walker had contracted tuberculosis, the first of a number of career-altering blows to which he was subjected in the early 1940s...
...Samway dwells too long, for instance, on the failed project to film The Moviegoer...
...After Vatican II changed the theological landscape in the 1960s, he glorified the Catholicism of the late 1940s and mourned its demise, sometimes in a satirical vein as in Love in the Ruins...
...In 1930, 15-year-old Walker, his two younger brothers, LeRoy and Phinizy, and their widowed mother, Martha Susan, settled in Greenville, Mississippi, under William Alexander Percy's roof...
...Phinizy, her youngest, scrambled free...
...His memoir...
...Yet he deals effectively with Percy's lengthy apprenticeship years a fiction-writer...
...Equally impressive is Samway's treatment of Percy's sojourn at the sanitarium on Saranac Lake, New York...
...Guests with lively minds stayed, sometimes for weeks at a time...
...Samway's treatment of the composition, publication and critical reception of Percy's succeeding novels demonstrates his appreciation of the editorial process...
...Samway begins inauspiciously with two discursive and confusing chapters describing tragic early events that were to burden Walker Percy in later life...
...The statement represents a change in a longstanding family policy of unqualified denial...
...In an interview with me, Walker Percy agreed that the source of the familial depression was most probably genetic rather than being a repetition of some Freudian trauma...
...For those who remember or can identify with the angst and uncertainties that accompanied entry to adulthood, his novels, especially The Moviegoer and The Last Gentleman with their young, charmingly distracted heroes, have long had a special appeal...
...During this time Percy read deeply in works that dealt with depression in literary or theological terms, including those by Dostoevsky, Mann, Sartre, Camus, and Soren Kierkegaard...
...Thus, biographical officialdom proves to be a mixed blessing...
...Then, in April 1932, Mattie Sue swerved her roadster from a rail-less bridge into a swollen creek...
...Meanwhile, LeRoy and Phinizy entered the armed services and fought overseas, while their eldest brother had to confront his own mortality in a consumptive's bed...
...Artists, too, seldom confess how close their fiction is to autobiography...
...A major influence was Caroline Gordon, a fellow Catholic convert and Sewanee acquaintance...
...But too many questions about Percy's life remain unresolved because of the constraints that made the very composition of this authorized work possible...
...Lanterns on the Levee (1941), reviled the contemporary age for spurning the virtues that had once sustained the plantation South...
...The Percys adopted an infant girl, christened Mary Pratt, and then "Bunt" gave birth in 1949 to Ann, born irremediably deaf...
...Thus began his lengthy pilgrimage toward writing and Catholicism—and away from the science and scientific rationality that had previously sustained his selfprotective denial of the strife he felt within...
...Suffering from hypertension and a series of strokes, Will Percy died in January 1942, a loss that all three brothers took very hard...
...She helped him master his craft, even though his attempt at a first novel, a semi-autobiographical story of religious quest titled "The Charterhouse," was too plotless to win publication...
...Reviewed by Bertram Wyatt-Brown Professor of history, University of Florida: author, "The House of Percy: Honor, Melancholy and Imagination in a Southern Family" In 1987 the novelist Walker Percy anointed Patrick H. Samway as his official biographer...
...His philosophical predilections, wit, melancholy turn of mind, sense of human frailty, and urge to find meaning in simple things have won him an ever-growing readership...
...The children's adoptive father, Samway bluntly declares, was a homosexual...
...Perhaps Walker Percy: A Life treats such secondary matters so lavishly because Samway is reluctant to probe more delicate issues...
...But he also set before his mock-heroic figures, practically all of them near-suicides, the task of searching obsessively for a lost father and perhaps for a lost mother, too...
...Two earlier events were almost as dismaying...
...LeRoy Pratt Percy, a prominent lawyer in Birmingham, Alabama, shot himself in the same manner that his own father had ended his life in 1917...
...the progress of the disease is meticulously recorded by Samway...
...Three years later Percy died, age 74, at his home in Covington, Louisiana, the victim of a slow-moving cancer...
...Female relatives mothered the orphans, but Will Percy, their legal guardian, supervised their upbringing...
...Percy never lost his allegiance to the conservative formulations current at the time of his conversion...
...Samway does not mention it, but melancholy and even suicide were thoroughly embedded in Percy family history...
...Too often Samway indulges in unnecessary trivia—telling us Percy's sophomore grades at the University of North Carolina, for instance...
...Samway's predominantly institutional approach in handling the roots of Walker Percy's conversion may be oddly disappointing...
...Walker Percy: A Life might have more richly portrayed postwar Catholic thought...
...Samway has not fully conveyed the intellectual excitement that areviving Catholicism generated...
...Janet Rioch of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute handled her patient...
...she drowned inside...
...Inaccurately, but affectionately, they called their rich first-cousin-once-removed "Uncle Will...
...Using a more interpretive and tighter framework, Samway might have better outlined the deeply Southern culture in which Percy was immersed, the family's wealthy and aristocratic background, and the long history of depression and compensating literary creativity that set the members of this extraordinary clan apart from their neighbors in the Lower South...
...He managed a vast plantation, practiced law, published poetry, and led Greenville's civic life—all with a hearty spirit that belied claims of world-weariness...
...Samway does not, however, elaborate, nor does Will Percy emerge as the remarkable, gifted personality that he was...
...The family founder tied a pot to his neck and leapt into a Mississippi River tributary...
...Nevertheless, Samway recognizes Will Percy's invigorating effect on Walker's intellectual development...
...The match proved lasting despite his periodic slides into dejection...
...Percy's trust in his biographer's judgment was not misplaced...
...He retained a deep skepticism about human ability to reach new moral heights that couldbe traced to Uncle Will's Stoic mordancy...
...By his own admission Walker withheld his inmost feelings from her but still gained much insight from the experience...
...A devout Catholic, Percy felt comfortable placing his personal and literary reputation in the hands of a man who was at once a Jesuit father, a Fordham professor and the literary editor ofAmerica...
...In July 1929, when Walker was just 13, he lost his father to suicide...
...Percy, after all, was careful to retain as best he could some control of Samway's enterprise...
...Uncle Will" enjoyed his faculty friends at the University of the South, where he had matriculated and briefly taught...
...Will Percy's legacy gave him the financial freedom to choose a life of study...
...The cause of her death was suicide, not accident, Samway assures us, citing Walker's own recollections...
...Instead, the biographer celebrates his marriage to Bernice Townshend, a nurse with whom Percy had worked at a wartime clinic...
...His rambling house was equipped with shelves groaning under the strain of classical phonographrecordsandbooks of chiefly Victorian weightiness...
...The boys' guardian was by no means forward-looking...
...While there Percy sought psychiatric help, and Samway brilliantly describes the astute way in which Dr...
...As a result of his work as a Bellevue Hospital resident...
...At that time, Gabriel Marcel, Jacques Mauritain, Thomas Merton, and other outstanding thinkers were attracting American intellectuals, Percy among them, to the Catholic faith...
Vol. 80 • June 1997 • No. 11
