Walker Percy: Dostoevsky of the Bayou

by Ann Gilbert

When his medical career was short-circuited by tuberculosis, Covington writer Walker Percy became a diagnostician of a different sort. He turned from the pathology of the body to the spiritual pathology of modern man.

“I was the happiest doctor who ever got TB and was able to quit. It gave me an excuse to do what I wanted to do,” he told a reporter.

Novelist and physician have something in common, said Eudora Welty at Percy’s memorial service in New York City in the fall of 1990: “The physician’s ear and the writer’s ear are pressed alike to the human chest.”

Percy’s love of literature had been fostered by his “Uncle Will,” William Alexander Percy, actually a cousin. Will took Walker and his two brothers into his bachelor quarters and adopted them after the boys’ father committed suicide and their mother died in an automobile accident three years later. In Will’s home in Greenville, Miss., Shakespeare and Keats were read aloud, and William Faulkner, Carl Sandburg and Stephen Vincent Benet were visitors.

Will was a lawyer, writer and planter; a sponsor of the arts and a supporter of the early civil rights movement. His autobiography, “Lanterns on the Levee,” is a classic. Walker absorbed it all. He published essays at age 19, but decided to pursue medicine, unlike the law careers of most of the men in his genteel Southern family. Percy studied first at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (where his papers are archived), and then received his medical degree from Columbia University.

During a pathology internship at Bellevue Hospital, he contracted tuberculosis, was laid up two years, and then a third year after a relapse. Confined and isolated, he read to occupy his time, choosing the great European philosophers Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Kierkegaard, and novels by Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Kafka. He didn’t read many English writers, saying, “They are not metaphysically oriented.”

As if his disease weren’t enough of a trial for the young physician, about the time he entered the sanitarium in upstate New York, Uncle Will died and World War II began. Percy could only observe. He would later write, “It left me in a confused and brooding state, and I found solace in books.” Percy had entered psychoanalysis during medical school. When asked if his father’s suicide, when Percy was only about 10, had depressed him, he said, “It made me damn angry why it happened to him, and I am going to make sure it doesn’t happen to me.”

College classmates recall how Percy regularly cut classes to go to the movies. He told a reporter, “It wasn’t escapist. I was getting to know how people looked at the world and what they thought.” He also believed “the study of the external man was necessary for understanding the internal man.” St. Tammany friends recall how, when going to dinner with Percy, he would always sit so he could observe people and overhear conversations.

Percy has been called the “most provocative voice in American letters.” His six novels are: “The Moviegoer” (1961), “The Last Gentleman” (1966), “Love in the Ruins” (1971), “Lancelot” (1977), “The Second Coming” (1988) and “The Thanatos Syndrome” (1987). Two non-fiction works are “Message in a Bottle” (1975) and “Lost in the Cosmos” (1983).

Percy knew if he got preachy or moral about his observations of man’s alienation, he would lose his audience. He never lapses into a serious tone. Far from being glum and dogmatic, his commentary on Western society is laced with humor and irony. A satirist, he wraps his thoughts in comedy, parody and illusion. In his prose, one sees how hollow man’s pursuit of life, liberty and happiness can be.

Percy’s novels are not easy reads. They are not books one brings to the beach. They are standard fare in college literature classes and even in some high school religion classes. His first novel, “The Moviegoer,” was given to the religion editor at Knopf.
Because of the metaphysical themes, his works can be somewhat challenging and puzzling. They have been compared to Hermann Melville, Robert Penn Warren and Nathaniel Hawthorne. But dozens of books, essays and dissertations have been penned to help us understand Percy. As one critic said, “His novels yield their riches more readily to the well-informed reader.”

Retired judge and longtime Percy friend Steve Ellis says he’s read “The Moviegoer” three times, and each time was like the first time, so many new ideas came forth. Cleanth Brooks wrote that Percy writes with a “lively, sharply perceptive prose that accurately mirrors life.” Maybe Percy is difficult to read because the reader doesn’t like what he sees. His novels are filled with a sense of despair, but also humor and hope. The author himself said, “It is as if discouragement were necessary, and that one has to first encounter despair before one is entitled to hope.”

Percy author and Holy Cross College English professor Eddie Dupuy recalls being confused upon his first reading of “Love in the Ruins,” one of Percy’s more difficult books. It was right after Dupuy left St. Joseph Abbey Seminary College, and he was deciding what path to take in life. “I went to a lot of trouble studying Percy, because I knew he was writing about something very important—namely me.”

Percy won the National Book Award for fiction in 1962 for his first and most popular novel, “The Moviegoer.” A serendipitous event in New Orleans would lead to Percy’s nomination for the prestigious honor. A.J. Liebling found “The Moviegoer” in a French Quarter bookstore when he was in the Crescent City researching his book, “The Earl of Louisiana.” He took it home to his wife, who was on the committee for the National Book Award for fiction. Percy beat out J.D. Salinger’s “Franny and Zooey” and Joseph Keller’s “Catch 22.” Fortune smiled on Percy again in 1966, when his second book, “The Last Gentlemen,” was a contender for the award.

His friend Steve Ellis says Percy was a shy man. But he loved to get his associates into heated discussions. When with a group of men who met regularly, Percy would bring up something he knew two of them disagreed on to get them arguing. Another group of Percy friends, men and women, met weekly for lunch and stimulating conversations at Bechac’s on the Mandeville lakefront.

Ellis says Percy liked to have a drink of bourbon at lunch and dinner. Percy ruminated about bourbon and the pleasure of “knocking back a few shots” in an article for Esquire Magazine.
Writers often keep daily journals, jotting down this and that, ideas for future novels. Percy was no exception. Ellis says, “He noticed things no one else ever noticed. I remember one time we were walking on the Appalachian Trail, and a group of Boy Scouts passed by. I completely forgot about that, and then it showed up in one of his books.”

Percy married Mary Bernice Townsend, known as “Bunt,” in 1946. They converted to Catholicism in 1947, and moved to the northshore in 1950 after a few years in Uptown New Orleans. They eventually settled into a secluded, gracious French Chateau-style home on the Bogue Falaya River, where they raised two daughters, Mary Pratt Lobdell and Ann Moores, who gave them four grandsons and four great-grandsons.

When not writing in his studio at home, which remained unchanged for 15 years after his death, Percy rented space in several locations in downtown Covington—the old St. Tammany Art Association building on New Hampshire Street across from Christ Episcopal School; in a New Orleans-style slave quarter off Theard Street; and upstairs at his daughter’s bookstore, Kumquat, on Lee Lane. Often he would take a break by sitting on the steps of the shop, chatting with visitors on the popular shopping venue, many of whom were probably unaware of his national, even international, stature.

Not a few national writers described the setting in articles after interviews on the Percy porch from the ’60s through the ’80s. Bunt recalls William F. Buckley and George Will coming for lunch, among their many noted guests. On a recent spring morning with a view of the dark, brown bayou through the windows, she shared how “Walker always had time for the young. He was pleased to get letters from students.”

Percy once explained to a young reporter from the Brother Martin High School newspaper why he lived in Covington: “As bad as it is, and everything is bad—the politics is bad, schools are bad, pollution is terrible—still I think the people are the saving grace. I’ve tried living elsewhere, but it is the people here that make it so special.”

Percy cared about the poor. He volunteered for Head Start, supervising the bus drivers and even driving himself. Bunt recalls the day “Walker came home with a child asleep under a seat in the bus. We had to drive to Lacombe to bring the child home,” she recalls, with a disbelieving grin. In the 1960s, Percy organized the biracial Greater Covington Community Relations Council, and a cross was burned in his yard. As a member of the St. Vincent de Paul Society, he helped collect and distribute fresh vegetables to the needy.

Percy was honored many times in his lifetime: with dinner at the White House with President Reagan, participation with 40 other world figures in a series of meetings with Pope John Paul II, presentation of the Jefferson Lecture for the National Endowment for the Humanities and presentation of the Chekhov Festival Lecture at Cornell University.

During a Walker Percy Symposium in Covington, author Jay Tolson discussed the writer’s friendship with fellow writer Shelby Foote. Tolson speculated that the lives of the two men were colored by the fact they both lost their fathers at a young age.
“Such loss leads to artistic development. It spurs reflection and forces one to confront his mortality. There is a need to explain and make sense of the loss and what endures. The loss forged a remarkable friendship,” Tolson said.

Foote also lived in Greenville. The boys’ competitiveness in who could read the fastest or the greatest number of books continued through much of their lives, as reflected in their letters, said Tolson. (He edited the book, “The Correspondence of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy.”) Both wrote for their high school newspapers and the literary magazine at the University of North Carolina, where Shelby wrote short stories and Walker, essays.
Tolson said that during Walker’s early, struggling writing career, Shelby was the master and Walker the apprentice, as he came late to writing novels, publishing his first at age 45.

One letter reveals how Shelby teased Walker upon the latter’s conversion to Catholicism, “You are giving up your mind.” Shelby would later tell Tolson that he was surprised Walker didn’t get angry at some of the things he said.

Percy died of cancer in 1990 at the age of 73. In its memorial column about the author, the Washington Post said, “He called his second book, ‘The Last Gentlemen.’ That distinction belongs in truth to Percy himself.”

The Times Picayune paid similar tribute with: “He was both a gentleman and a gentle man.” Walker’s brother Phin wrote to the Times Picayune that the many memorials missed out on one thing. “He counseled countless aspiring writers even after his own physical pain became so intense he could no longer continue his own writing.”

Patrick Samway, S.J., who has written two books on Percy, said at a local Percy conference, “We can gauge his stature by the critical attention given him. Percy is still teaching me.”

In his tribute to Percy, the Los Angeles Times’ Frank Levering wrote, “He is one of the few contemporary fiction writers who have written as if God matters. And for that reason, he will last beyond our times.”

In 1989, an International Walker Percy Conference was held in Denmark, evidence of the breadth of his influence. Since the early ’90s, the St. Tammany Parish Library has sponsored annual symposiums on Percy, attracting speakers and attendees from across the country. The next local Walker Percy Symposium will be in January 2009.