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Preface Influence, Wayfaring, and the Catholic Novelist

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Preface Influence, Wayfaring, and the Catholic Novelist Preface Influence, Wayfaring, and the Catholic Novelist This past June marked the sixth annual Walker Percy Weekend held in St. Francisville, Louisiana, part of the West Feliciana Parish that was the fictionalized “Feliciana Parish” setting for some of Percy’s greatest novels. Limited to four hundred tickets, the two-day festival starts with registration at a bookstore, a casual conversation with organizer Rod Dreher (of The Benedict Option fame), and an opening night party in the cemetery at Grace Episcopal Church, shaded by beautiful oak trees. The second day is the day of substantive intellectual engagement about Percy with nationally known speakers. Past Percy Weekend lecturers include Percy scholars Ralph Wood and biographers Jay Tolson and Patrick Samway, SJ. This year’s speakers were perhaps even more up- market, with New York Times columnist David Brooks, best-selling Hillbilly Elegy author J. D. Vance, and journalist Walter Isaacson, best-selling biographer of Leonardo DaVinci, Benjamin Franklin, and Steve Jobs. The final events of the festival are—in the spirit of an author whose celebrated essay “Bourbon, Neat” proposed a few logos 22:4 fall 2019 6 logos bourbon shots in order to “warm the heart, reduce the anomie of the late twentieth century, to cut the cold phlegm of Wednesday afternoons”—a “progressive front porch and bourbon-tasting tour” and a “crawfish and craft beer celebration.”1 With such a lineup of speakers, culinary offerings, and alcoholic delights in a romantic locale, selling four hundred tickets isn’t hard. One could sell out four hundred tickets with a generic literary festival without mention of Percy. But my guess is that the hard- core enthusiasts who come to the Walker Percy Weekend would also consent to spending their weekend in the public library in Paducah, Kentucky, or a bomb shelter in Sheboygan to talk about Percy’s life, work, and importance. For Percy is one of those writers who is valued not just for the purity of his art—like Homer, he nodded at times—but for the purity of his search for truth. Chesterton observed that one of the problems with news is often that we read about the death of persons we never knew lived. My own discovery of Percy was this way. I had begun reading Flannery O’Connor in high school and happened to read an article in my denominational magazine about another southern Catholic author who had just died in May 1990. While the author, later a professor of mine at Calvin College, “had me at ‘Flannery O’Connor,’” I was doubly intrigued by the story of the writer who had come from a family of suicides, survived, and found strength in a Christian faith that didn’t simply solve his problems but made them understandable as part of a journey. Given that my own father had a history of mental health issues, some of which had flared up again around the same time Percy died, my adolescent concern was that I too would inherit them. At one point in that summer of 1990 I had had a kind of small breakdown about my sanity that lasted several days. My Christian Reformed pastor, a saintly World War II veteran named Charles Terpstra, came over to the house on the second day with some information about mental health issues and some stories about his wife’s family, who also had a history of mental illness. Pastor Terpstra’s help got me out of the house on the third day. I was preface 7 ripe, however, for Percy, who, in the article I read, struck me as the kind of man and author who had faced down the crazy in the world and the crazy within. I immediately went to the library and picked up the Percy on hand, his 1980 novel, The Second Coming. Given that my own father’s long-time diagnosis was schizophrenia, it was perhaps providential that I came upon this volume. The main character, Will Barrett, a retired widower who has tasted of life’s successes but finds them wanting, is haunted both by the suspicion that life is meaningless, because God either doesn’t exist or doesn’t care, and his family’s history of resolving this suspicion by suicide. He decides that he will hide out in a cave close to his North Carolina home with a supply of barbiturates. If God reveals himself, good, but if he doesn’t, Barrett will kill himself. What brings Barrett out of his miasma after a night of inner turmoil is real physical pain caused by an abscessed tooth. He then falls from the cave into an abandoned greenhouse inhabited by Allison “Allie” Huger, a schizophrenic who has escaped from a mental hospital. Barrett, trapped by the weight of his past, finds Allie, whose condition keeps her firmly in the present and makes her curiously aware of the meaning of words, fascinating and lovable. Upon return to the ordinary world, Barrett is consigned by his daughter into the care of a hospital that diagnoses him with “inappropriate desires” and prescribe for him a drug regime to get rid of them. He eventually escapes to find love with Allie and a new suspicion that “Christ will come again and that in fact there are certain unmistakable signs of his coming in these very times.” I doubt how much of this novel I understood at seventeen. The structure of it vascillates between the perspectives of Will and Allie, only joining up these visions toward the end of the novel. And, frankly, two characters who are slightly off attempting to understand the world makes for a bit of sleuthing. C. S. Lewis was famously averse to the novels of Evelyn Waugh because he thought that one could have a sane person observing a crazy world or a crazy 8 logos person reacting to a sane world, but not an insane person reacting to an insane world. The reader, he believed, would be lost. But like Waugh, Percy understood that the problems in the world are both external and internal. The Second Coming was captivating for all the personal reasons I’ve mentioned and more: the connection between romantic love and the love of God; the questions of how and whether language really does work to connect people to each other and truth; the strange nature of humans in this world who often find themselves more at home and more normal when in excruciating pain or danger than when things are going well; and the sense that the only way to live in the world is as a wayfarer. I was hooked. His novels, essays, and letters became part of the way I looked at the world, and six or seven years after my discovery, his Catholic faith did, too. When I was received as a Catholic, I was joined by my best friend, with whom I had bonded over our shared love of Walker Percy. Percy was born May 28, 1916, in Birmingham, Alabama, to a family both famous and prone to suicide. Their history goes back perhaps to the Percys of Northumberland, whom Shakespeare himself wrote about. And the family history in the United States goes back to the eighteenth century, to a certain Charles “Don Carlos” Percy, who arrived in 1775, was granted a thousand acres in Louisiana, and settled down. Though he kept to the broader Shakespearean mythology, labeling his plantation “Northumberland,” he was confronted by a son from England, Robert Percy, who came to the New World and revealed that his father was a bigamist. “Don Carlos” committed suicide, and two sides of the family were established through his two sons. Walker was from the American side. The family included a number of high achievers, including a Civil War hero and a U.S. senator, but also a number of suicides. Walker himself was the eldest of three sons of LeRoy Pratt Percy and Martha Phinizy. When Walker was thirteen Leroy committed suicide, and two years later Martha drove off a preface 9 bridge—though not proven such, considered a suicide by Walker himself. The three brothers were taken in by a cousin, William Alexander Percy, a single lawyer and poet who had studied at Princeton and lived a literary life in Greenville, Mississippi. Uncle Will, though attracted to Catholicism early on, had settled into a kind of aristocratic stoicism that Walker would long think of as a foil to his mature Catholic thought. At the time, however, the Percys, raised as nominal Presbyterians, took to his gentle secular moralism quite easily. Will provided a steadying influence on them and access to his marvelous collection of classic books and his literary friends, who often stopped and stayed with them. Walker, prone to hay fever and other ailments, thrived in this atmosphere of reading and writers. He was introduced by Uncle Will to another sharp young man, Shelby Foote, a young man of Jewish heritage who went on to become a famous Civil War historian and novelist. The two at one point decided to drive to the Mississippi home of William Faulkner, but Percy was too shy to get out of the car. They passed from Greenville High School to the University of North Carolina where Percy wrote for the school paper and studied chemistry. When he graduated in 1937 and passed on to Columbia University for medical school, Foote dropped out. But their correspondence continued until Percy’s death. The Percy of medical school was a young man who was in love with the power of science. He believed that it provided an explanation for the world around him—and himself.
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