The Correspondence of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy. - book reviews

Commonweal, Feb 28, 1997 by Andrew Santella

Foote is also the more provocative of the two. He needled Percy about his work habits, about his reading, even about his conversion to Catholicism. Percy's faith was a source of real conflict between the two. When Percy told Foote, on a trip to New Mexico in the late 1940s, of his plans to join the church, Foote reportedly responded, "Yours is a mind in full intellectual retreat." Fearing that Percy's faith would impede his growth as a writer, Foote wrote in 1949, "There is something terribly cowardly (at least spiritually) about the risks to which you won't expose your soul. Pushed, you'll admit that doubt is a healthy thing, closely connected with faith; but you won't follow it....

"I seriously think no good practicing Catholic can ever be a great artist; art is by definition a product of doubt."

That their friendship survived challenges like that was probably testament to Percy's strength of character. So are Percy's last letters to Foote. "Dying, if that's what it comes to, is no big thing since I'm ready for it, and prepared for it by the Catholic faith, which I believe," he wrote ten months before his death from cancer. "What is a pain is not even the pain but the nuisance. It is a tremendous bother (and expense) to everybody."

It is reassuring to close this collection with Percy professing the faith that had so deeply informed his career as a writer. And it is reassuring to know that Foote was with Percy at the end, as the two had been with each other in friendship for sixty years.

Andrew Santella is a free-lance writer. He lives in Chicago.