Walker Percy: A Life

Matthew Carolan

Walker Percy: A Life, by Patrick Samway, SJ (Farrar, Straus, 506 pp, $35)

Mr. Carolan is NR's executive editor.

ONE day some years ago, while working for Thought magazine (a religious journal published by Fordham University), I was instructed to typeset an article about some author named Walker Percy. As I set routinely about my task, a sense of horror came over me, and my fingers recoiled from these, the first words from a Percy novel I had ever read (or typed):

And what samurai self-love of death, let alone the little death of everyday f -- -you love, can match the double Winchester come of taking oneself into oneself, the cold-steel extension of oneself into mouth, yes, for you, for me, for this, the logical and ultimate act of f -- -you love f -- -off world, the penetration and union of perfect cold gunmetal into warm quailing mortal flesh, the coming to end all coming, brain cells which together faltered and fell short, now flowered and flew apart, flung like stars around the whole dark world.

I wondered out loud just who this awful man could be. "Oh, he's a famous Catholic novelist," said Patty, the editor's assistant, and an evangelical Christian. She didn't say anything more, but I wondered if Patty knew enough about Percy to classify him as Whore-of-Babylon material.

So imagine my shock when I later found out that there were also readers of the very conservative Catholic newspaper The Wanderer who recommended Walker Percy. And that my Thomist professors paraphrased him in class: "Modern man is a Cartesian cogito, attached to a set of balls." Puzzled as to why this crude man was so appealing to Catholics, and being a crude Catholic myself, I decided I had to read him.

Well, I have since read several Percy novels, and I am still mystified. Percy's fiction is thin on plot and characterization --let alone Catholicism. His main contribution to Catholic culture, it seems, is his attack on modern secular culture, in which he offers his own fragmentary vision of what is terribly wrong with living as a modern man. I say this with some hesitancy, however, since when I read the early novels (The Moviegoer, The Last Gentleman) the failings of modernity didn't seem to have anything to do with it. Only when I read some official interpretations by die-hard Percy fans did I realize that I had missed the anti-Cartesianism.

In fact, these exegetes can get a little carried away. Some defend every nuance of Percy's writing, including his biological references -- to organs, blood, even attractive female derricres -- as a brilliantly calculated attempt to weigh down the abstract rationalism of our times. Try as I might, however, I cannot read either the murderous windpipe-slitting scene in Lancelot, or the prurient sexual matter that surrounds it, as a rebuff to Descartes.

This myth distorts the real triumph of Percy's life, amply illustrated by Fr. Samway in this workmanlike biography, which was to endure courageously through terrible struggles, managing to communicate something of himself and -- an achievement in which he took a certain pride -- not committing suicide.

Suicide is a persistent theme in Percy's work. During his youth in Birmingham, Alabama, both his grandfather and his father killed themselves with rifles. In the same period, his mother died in a mysterious car accident, which he believed was an intentional act of despair.

After their parents' death, Walker and his brothers went to live with their cousin, "Uncle" Will Percy. Uncle Will, a wealthy man, took good care of them, but it seems that he steered Walker into a profession, medicine, for which he had no calling. During his medical studies in New York City, Walker became infected with tuberculosis and was forced into a long period of isolation during his recovery. Only after that trauma did he try writing regularly. After several false starts, and constant haggling with his editors about revisions, he succeeded in publishing The Moviegoer.

Percy's sufferings were mostly of the spiritual kind. He often accused himself of "acedia," or sloth, in which a person does nothing because he despairs of living up to his potential. Percy said he had a hard time just getting through Wednesday. He complained of his spiritual barrenness, and of the necessity to make his living as a writer. These problems coincided with a growing awareness of the spiritual problems and temptations of the modern world. Percy desperately wanted to find a way to some more refreshed manner of being in the world, for himself and for others.

To that end, he sought nothing less than a complete refashioning of the epistemological basis for our culture -- a daunting task, one would have said, for anyone short of Aquinas, let alone a man suffering from acedia. Nonetheless, Percy set about it -- for instance, in the philosophical essays reprinted in The Message in the Bottle. It would be, he said, a relief from writing novels, where there was the risk that people like me wouldn't quite get it. In a letter to Shelby Foote, Percy listed his two main goals: "1) write a good novel, 2) correct the Cartesian mind - body split which has screwed up the West for three hundred years. Actually 2) will be easier than 1)."

In his more concentrated attempts to repair the divide in our perceptions between matter and spirit (which, of course, is much older than Descartes) -- Percy tackled the age-old question of the transmission of knowledge. Influenced by Jacques Maritain, he argued that knowledge has a mystical dimension, with something vague, personal, and poetic about it, as opposed to the direct, sterile "intuition" of matter in motion which dominates modern science. Such a small-c catholic approach allows for various forms of knowing and also suggests a fundamental role for other minds and traditions.

Of course, there is nothing distinctively Catholic in this. However, modern Catholic intellectuals find Percy's philosophical mission intriguing, since any epistemology that effectively refutes the solipsism in Descartes suggests that there must be an ideal communal relationship -- and Catholics have one in the Three Persons of the Holy Trinity. What's more, as Percy reflected on the manner by which linguistic signs transmit knowledge, he employed the semiotic theories of the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. These rely on the notion of triads, and the idea that absolute Truth (as Aquinas would describe God) can be known only at the end of a long historical process (not unlike salvation history) by an ethically ideal community of inquirers (a secular communion of saints, so to speak).

Where did Percy's interest in dualism come from? Nearly every aspect of his work points to the mystery of individual existence and to an element within the human person that Pope John Paul II calls the "incommunicable." Percy's writing almost always seems to be about what it is to understand the meaning of being "me," in this body, in this place, at this time, with these sufferings and joys, in Covington, Louisiana, or in New York City -- about the impossible challenge of reconciling that inner mystery with the demand of our nature to be social beings who communicate ourselves to others, and the demand of our God to love our neighbor, who is, also, incommunicable.

For Christians, of course, the true resolution of such "dualism" comes in the new life, when, as the Biblical passage says, God calls us by a new name (Isaiah 62:2) which is distinctively our own and communicates all that we are and have been. Walker Percy, succumbing to cancer, took that name in 1990.

Percy's writing is sharp at times. Even his most boring novel, The Last Gentleman, contains passages that make you stop and say, "Yes, I know that about life." But there is also a kind of academic chatter about Percy's work -- undoubtedly encouraged by his Catholic orthodoxy -- that tries to make him into a very rare, if not impossible thing: a great Catholic novelist.

Percy was actually just a very good, maybe great, Catholic man.

COPYRIGHT 1998 National Review, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning