Walker Percy, 1916-1990

On May 10 of this year, Binx Bolling, a stockbroker in New Orleans, emerged from the matinee screening of a Hollywood film and was told the news. Across town, word reached Lancelot Lamar in his madhouse cell. In Manhattan, Will Barrett, employed at night as a maintenance engineer at Macy’s, received word as he was training his high-powered telescope on a young woman sitting on a bench in Central Park. And in Covington, La., across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans, Dr. Tom More, a psychiatrist recently released from federal prison, was notified of the death of his neighbor and chief defender, Walker Percy, of cancer, at age 74.

No bells tolled for “Doc” Percy, as he was called around Covington. No flags in his honor were lowered to half-mast. But in each of these lost souls there was sorrow; each fell silent, frozen in time. Walker Percy was a part of them--a rather large part, one might say. And though he had now joined them in their non-material existence, in the eternal present that is at once the realm of fiction and of the dead, they were lucky indeed in their station. Percy, after all, had created them and given them and a host of other remarkable characters an immortality that will last as long as there are literate readers.

Trained at Columbia medical school but never practicing medicine after his internship, Percy wrote six novels and two books of philosophical essays. Starting in 1962, when he won the National Book Award for his first novel, “The Moviegoer,” he was the darling of literary critics, if not necessarily of students of philosophy. Twice he won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (for “The Second Coming,” a novel, and for “Lost in the Cosmos,” a book of essays). “Name another voice in American writing that is as beguiling and civilized as Walker Percy’s,” wrote Time magazine’s R. Z. Sheppard. Alfred Kazin spoke for a generation of critics in calling Walker “the satiric Dostoevski of the bayou.”

Percy is that and more. He is a writer’s writer, a prose stylist of the first order. I remember Monroe Engel, a fine novelist in his own right, on the first day of his fiction- writing class at Harvard, reading aloud the opening pages of Percy’s second novel, “The Last Gentleman.” My classmates and I took notice. This, the professor was telling us, is how it’s done: “It was a beautiful day but only after the fashion of beautiful days in New York. The sky was no more than an ordinary Eastern sky, mild and blue and hazed over, whitened under the blue and of not much account. It was a standard sky by which all other skies are measured. As for the park, green leaves or not, it belonged to the animal kingdom rather than the vegetable. It had a zoo smell. Last summer’s grass was as coarse and yellow as lion’s hair and worn bare in spots, exposing the tough old hide of the earth.”

Though he is writing here about Central Park, Percy the novelist writes primarily about Southerners living in the South. In his last two novels, he is a bit of the self-conscious sage, and the fiction at times ossifies into philosophy. But Percy is the Faulkner of his generation, the exemplar for other Southerners now writing. I recently heard Doris Betts, the distinguished North Carolina novelist, remark that she felt more kinship with Percy than with any other Southern writer, and one encounters that sentiment from Charlottesville to Baton Rouge.

He detested the phrase, but Percy’s South is the New South, dotted not with Faulkner’s mules and horse-drawn wagons but with suburbs and condos. It is the South that has long since surrendered not to the Yankees but to the culture of Hollywood. For many contemporary Southern writers, Percy’s fiction blazes the trail into the disturbingly homogeneous terrain.

As a native Virginian, I stumbled on Percy’s work, not in Monroe Engel’s class but at the Harvard Divinity School, where, like Will Barrett in “The Last Gentleman,” I was a young, fish-out-of-water Southerner searching for God, sans telescope. At HDS, as the inmates called it, the theology of record tended to be the writings of the great systematic Protestant theologians--men such as Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr. Making sense of their books required arduous flights into the intellectual stratosphere--and left one’s soul blue as heaven, gasping for oxygen.

A Catholic, Percy had the right tonic: mere human beings. His fiction confirmed the idea--somewhat heretical at HDS--that storytelling, too, can be a form of theology. For me, the most compelling “licensed” theologians were those like Harvard’s own iconoclastic Richard Niebuhr, Reinhold’s nephew, whose flagship work, “Experiential Religion,” veered powerfully and honestly between faith and doubt at the level of mundane existence. Percy’s theology, too, began at ground level. His characters were obsessed with “everydayness,” a favored term in the Percy canon, and they were searchers, not finders. In Percy’s characters there is no grand finality of vision. They were fellow pilgrims on a pilgrimage without assured destination.

In one of his essays, Percy asks the question that permeates his work: “Why does man feel so sad in the twentieth century?” In his essays, he persistently critiques the Cartesian picture of the self, which divorces mind from body, intellect from emotion, objective truth from “merely subjective” personal experience. Cartesian dualism, Percy argues, dominated Western culture in “the old modern age,” the 300 years from the 17th Century to World War I, thus shaping the modern mind--and alienating us from our true, whole selves.

For me, though, Percy addresses his own question more persuasively in fiction, beginning with “The Moviegoer.” In the epigraph to that novel, Percy quotes Kierkegaard from “The Sickness Unto Death”:” . . . (T)he specific character of despair is precisely this: It is unaware of being despair.” By that definition, in the early part of the story, Binx Bolling, the 29-year-old stockbroker protagonist, suffers acutely from despair. He knows how to make more money every year, to romance a succession of secretaries, to sail politely through New Orleans society. But--to put the matter in simplest terms--he doesn’t have a clue as to what he’s missing. Then, one morning, he awakens to the idea of a “search.” The search, he says, “is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. . . . To become aware of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.”

In one form or another, the five subsequent novels are variations on this theme of alienation from self and God. Percy protagonists--invariably witty, ironic, philosophical and offbeat--typically awaken to their condition. Their souls breathe only when they begin to see their lives as meaningless, and when they can look steadily at the most commonplace things around them. Of a scientist, Lancelot Lamar says in “Lancelot,” Percy’s fourth novel: “Unlike him I had been unable to escape into the simple complexities of science. All he had to do was solve the mystery of the universe, which may be difficult but is not as difficult as living an ordinary life.”

One hears in these themes the existentialist echoes of Sartre and Camus, whom Percy admired, as well as of Kierkegaard and Marcel. But Percy, who remained a Catholic to the end, draws very different conclusions from those of existentialists who announce the death of God. In his “Notebooks,” Camus writes, “I love all or I love nothing. Hence it is that I love nothing.” By contrast, Percy’s theology acknowledges the universality of suffering but sees divinity--in the phrase of James Agee--in “the cruel radiance of what is.” In a Percy novel, when a character embraces, rather than denies, the inevitability of suffering, he moves closer to the possibility of empathy for other human beings and, thus, the reality of God. In “The Thanatos Syndrome,” his last novel, published in 1987, Percy depicts a well-intentioned experiment in social engineering in which the town fathers of Feliciana, La., lace the local water supply with sodium, causing suppression of the cerebral cortex. Everyone is relentlessly cheerful; no one is suffering. For Percy, this is death. Life is where suffering, despairing creatures grope--usually with brilliant wit--toward God.

Like Percy while he was in med school, in divinity school I became obsessed with seeing movies, perhaps taking too literally the lines from the rock group Procul Harum: “God’s alive and in a movie/So watch the silver screen.”

Every writer is obliged to meet, halfway or nearer, the proclivities of his readers, and so my favorite Percy novel remains his first, “The Moviegoer,” which is only peripherally about movies, but is wise in the ways of why people watch them.

Hollywood has been wining and dining “The Moviegoer” for many years now without ever going to the altar. After divinity school, when I was a screenwriter living in Los Angeles, I became aware of several screenplay adaptations, and was once summoned for a job interview by Michael Fitzgerald, who produced John Huston’s gritty film adaptation of Flannery O’Connor’s “Wise Blood.” Fitzgerald was interested in teaming with director Wim Wenders on “The Moviegoer,” and was looking for a writer. What did I think of Walker Percy? Of the book? And how could it be adapted for the screen?

The last question was the hardest; frankly, I didn’t have a clue. A movie of “The Moviegoer”? Wasn’t that an oxymoron or some such thing? Besides, wasn’t the story too “soft” for Hollywood?--maybe too soft even for the oblique Wim Wenders, who can make a story disappear on screen faster than a passing shadow on a window shade.

But I did tell Fitzgerald about the book. I told him that if there was a finer American novel in the past 25 years than “The Moviegoer,” I sure hadn’t read it. Percy had rewritten the novel four times. And having read it three times, I told Fitzgerald that every note in it is exactly right. Binx’s first-person voice is perfectly pitched, at once wry and serious. He and Kate, the woman he eventually marries, are entirely believable at every turn of the story--it is a novel of ideas, but the characters embody those ideas. And “The Moviegoer” is brilliantly constructed; the present and past converge seamlessly.

But what could one say about Walker Percy? Only, of course, that any writer would be lucky to be half as good. I did not tell Fitzgerald what I believe now: that Percy, who refused to be self-important in any respect, who in interviews slyly parodied his own religious convictions, is one of the few contemporary fiction writers who has written as if God matters. And for that reason, among others, he will last beyond our times.