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Southern Conservative Superfluity and the Work of William Alexander Percy, Walker Percy, and Peter Taylor William Matthew Immonss University of South Carolina

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Southern Conservative Superfluity and the Work of William Alexander Percy, Walker Percy, and Peter Taylor William Matthew Immonss University of South Carolina University of South Carolina Scholar Commons Theses and Dissertations 6-30-2016 The Last Gentlemen: Southern Conservative Superfluity and the Work of William Alexander Percy, Walker Percy, and Peter Taylor William Matthew immonsS University of South Carolina Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Simmons, W. M.(2016). The Last Gentlemen: Southern Conservative Superfluity and the Work of William Alexander Percy, Walker Percy, and Peter Taylor. (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd/3508 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you by Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Last Gentlemen: Southern Conservative Superfluity and the Work of William Alexander Percy, Walker Percy, and Peter Taylor by William Matthew Simmons Bachelor of Arts North Carolina State University, 2005 Master of Arts North Carolina State University, 2008 Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English College of Arts and Sciences University of South Carolina 2016 Accepted by: Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr., Major Professor Brian Glavey, Committee Member David Shields, Committee Member Susan Copeland, Outside Reader Lacey Ford, Senior Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies Dedication To Meredith, for everything and more. To Sallie Jo, that you might one day come across this and perhaps understand something about your daddy. To Mama, God rest your soul, for teaching me to love books. Soli Dei gloria. ii Acknowledgments This dissertation was a long and arduous labor, the product of countless frustrations, two steps forward, one-and-a-half steps back movements, and heartaches aplenty. In the end, I am deeply grateful to all of my friends who gave me encouragement and advice, and anyone who shared a beer or a cup of coffee with me when I just felt like quitting. I would like to thank three friends in particular—Ali Arant, Bhavin Tailor, and Graham Stowe—for their selfless giving of time and brain power to proofread, revise, and suggest ways of improving both my argument and my writing throughout the process. I would also like to give thanks to my readers, who gave generously of their time to read and consider my work. I especially thank my director, Dr. Robert Brinkmeyer. His demanding excellence and generously sharp criticisms focused this project, making me a better scholar, writer, and thinker. Finally, I thank Meredith. Her saintly patience was tested throughout this process, and her encouragements, as well as her help with planning and structuring my time when multiple commitments pulled me in conflicting directions, are why I finished this dissertation. And beyond that logistical help, she gave me a reason to finish it. iii Abstract This dissertation proposes that a robust, serious treatment of Southern conservatism can provide readers with effective ways to interpret works of Southern literature. Southern writers have always dealt with issues we might identify as “conservative,” and scholars have shown us three typical ways of Southern writers approaching conser- vatism. First, some writers have treated conservatism as one of many characteristics of the South; their treatments of conservatism have been part of their descriptive project. Other writers have used conservatism for more didactic, political purposes, whether that be showing the South’s sins or arguing that the South’s conservative character makes it a distinct, and superior, part of the modern American Repub- lic. I argue that we can see a fourth means for how some writers utilize Southern conservatism. Some writers feel a sense of deep and significant alienation from the South, yet they recognize something in it that keeps them from flatly decrying or repudiating it. Many of these writers find in the Southern conservative tradition a means for making sense of how to live in this alienating, disorienting world. But to find the good in the Southern tradition, these writers must critically engage and reinterpret the Southern conservative tradition, taking lessons from its core tenets and applying them to particular exigencies, challenges, and situations in which they find themselves. Ultimately, because these authors are arguing not for a return to the past, but for a critical reappraisal of the usefulness of the past in terms of present exigencies, they must face the possibility of their project’s failure. Further, because Southern conservatism represents a way of thinking so radically at odds with the American vision of progress and infinite possibility, these writers must also face an- iv other reality—even if they can succeed in re-interpreting the Southern conservative tradition for the exigencies of their current moment, they are inevitably superfluous, vis-à-vis the culture in which they live. This project examines three such writers: William Alexander Percy, Walker Percy, and Peter Taylor. These writers navigate their own sense of superfluity and their own idiosyncratic reinterpretations of the Southern conservative tradition in order to find spaces of existential stability and meaning in a changed and changing South. I set up the terms of the argument in the introduction, including providing a brief overview of what “Southern conservatism” is. I then proceed to analyze William Alexander Percy’s memoir, Lanterns on the Levee; works from both Peter Taylor’s early and late periods (including his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Summons to Memphis); and two of Walker Percy’s novels, The Last Gentleman and Love in the Ruins, in terms of how these writers reinterpretations of the Southern conservative tradition allows them to arrive at what intellectual historian and rhetorician Richard Weaver calls a “theory for living” within the contexts of a changed and changing South that marks individuals like these writers as increasingly superfluous. v TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION ........................................................................................................................................... ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ......................................................................................................................... iii ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................................................. iv CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................. 1 CHAPTER 2: WILLIAM ALEXANDER PERCY, SUPERFLUITY, AND THE SUCCESSES OF THE SOUTHERN CULTURE OF FAILURE .............................................................. 43 CHAPTER 3: EARLY PETER TAYLOR: NOSTALGIA AND VICE .............................................................. 77 CHAPTER 4: LATE TAYLOR AND THE SOUTHERN TRADITION’S VIRTUOUS INDIVIDUALISM ...................................................................................................... 123 CHAPTER 5: WALKER PERCY’S METAPHYSICAL WAR AGAINST SOUTHERN GNOSTICISM ......................................................................................................... 170 CHAPTER 6: CONCLUSION: FURTHER POSSIBILITIES FOR AND CONSEQUENCES OF SOUTHERN CONSERVATIVE SUPERFLUITY .................................. 220 WORKS CITED .................................................................................................................................... 229 vii Chapter 1 Introduction 1 “. a hall hung with splendid tapestries in which no one would care to live; but from them we can learn something of how to live.” Richard Weaver, The Southern Tradition at Bay In the second decade of the 21st century, the history of the American South con- tinues to be written, at least in part, in terms of its distinctiveness vis-à-vis the rest of United States. A significant portion of this distinctiveness is connected to the South’s conservatism. Despite immense demographic and economic changes over the past forty years, changes that have made Southern states look and work in ways that are more similar to their Midwestern and Eastern counterparts than not, our national punditry still regards Virginia and North Carolina’s recent emergence as “purple” states an intriguing, and even surprising, electoral phenomenon. Yet on the local and state levels, even these two states are often as politically conservative as their neighbors in the Deep South. Even such simplistic analysis illustrates that the South, even in the second decade of the 21st century, continues to be “conser- vative,” and to be a Southerner continues to demand contending with the effects of conservatism on a person’s own life, no matter her or his individual beliefs. To say that Southerners contend with conservatism in their own lives is not a particularly insightful or original thought, yet the ways in which Southern artists have dealt with the conservatism of their native section forms one of the most intriguing aspects of their work. This is especially true if we understand that conservatism is not merely a political phenomenon, but rather representative of a broad range of socio-cultural thinking. Contending with Southern conservatism has long been a feature of Southern literature, finding real significance after the Civil War. That conflict’s undoing of the old order produced a South that necessarily had to
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