Pilgrim in the Ruins: A Life of Walker Percy

National Review, Dec 28, 1992 by Chilton Williamson, Jr.

CAROLINE GORDON, the novelist and wife of Allen Tate, was mentor to both Walker Percy and Flannery O'Connor, whom she considered the most promising writers of their generation. Miss Gordon believed that the end of what she called "the Protestant mystique" in literature was at hand, owing to the fatal tendency of the Protestant artist to assume "the responsibility of setting up a new heaven and a new earth," whereas his Catholic counter-part knows that "God has already created the universe and that his job is to find his proper place in it." For Shelby Foote, himself an accomplished novelist as well as an historian and Percy's lifelong friend, religious doctrine in general and Catholic dogma in particular could only serve as a straitjacket to the literary artist, compelling him to see and to render according to a narrowly conceived formula. The falsity of this view is proved by the careers of Percy and O'Connor, whose respective work, while inspired by a common faith, is utterly dissimilar in sensibility, form, and content. Miss O'Connor, in speaking of her own writing, suggested a fundamental difference: "one reason why I can write about Protestant believers better than Catholic believers ... [is] because they express their belief in diverse kinds of dramatic action which is obvious enough for me to catch. I can't write about anything subtle." Whereas Percy's specialty, particularly in the earlier novels, is rendering Angst experienced by lapsed or proto-Catholics for whom action, let alone dramatic action, is almost impossible. A second difference is a function of the first: every character of O'Connor's is finally either saved or damned, while the fate of Percy's men and women remains indeterminate. Flannery O'Connor represents the modern Catholic artist of resolution, Walker Percy that of irresolution.

Questions of character and temperament aside, what seems determinative here is avocation: O'Connor's intellectual passion for theology versus Percy's for philosophy. In this respect, O'Connor kept her hand better hidden than Percy kept his: from the philosophical doctor's first novel (The Moviegoer) at least to his penultimate one (The Second Coming), the intellectual framework is perceptible behind the action. This for some readers is a failing of Percy's fiction, for others a strength: one way or the other, it is essential to it. Although Percy in his later years claimed that "existentialism" was a word that he had never really understood in the first place, and that had come through abuse and overuse to mean nothing at all, still the term as it is loosely understood today is the central philosophical thread through Percy's novels, as the word in its relationship to The Word is the underlying theological concern of his linguistical essays. "Percy's attraction to speculative thought," his biographer claims, "was no different, at bottom, from Aquinas's: he hoped to show not only the compatibility of faith and knowledge but their interconnection. The problem was finding the right key to make this demonstration." At the poetic level, the object of Walker Percy's artistic search was "the mystery that surrounds the individual life," its theme the fact of human sadness in the modern world, the twentieth century especially.

In youth and early manhood, Percy was a cocky rationalist who trusted to scientific thought to solve every philosophical problem and answer all man's questions. He received an MD from Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City and never denied the validity of the scientific method, even after coming to the conclusion that science was incapable by itself of explaining the mystery of man's individual being. His fellow medical students, aware of his regular disappearances from P&S in midafternoon, supposed he had gone to relax at the movies; instead, he was on West 54th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues consulting Dr. Janet Rioche, a psychoanalyst. Eventually Percy became disillusioned by psycho-analysis, but he continued to suspect that the psychiatric malaise of the age was related to the spiritual one--an hypothesis he explored in fiction and that is largely responsible for the deceptively contemporary quality of his essentially reactionary work. O'Connor wrote as a prophet; Percy as a seeker--a far more modern and, for the times, sympathetic and acceptable role. The fact helps to explain how he succeeded as far as he did in foisting his counter-cultural Catholicism upon a hostile but (in his case) mostly unsuspecting audience; though Percy's unpleasant relationship with his first publishers, Alfred and Blanche Knopf, suggests that they were more perceptive readers of The Moviegoer than many of its reviewers.

Pilgrim in the Ruins is superior biography. Jay Tolson, who edits The Wilson Quarterly, is competent to handle matters pertaining to theology, philosophy, and literature, and remains entirely composed in the activity. The life he chose to tell was uneventful even for a literary life, but it was not without a quiet interior drama--Percy's conversion to Catholicism, his illness from tuberculosis, and a six-year emotional crisis in the 1970s that seems to have tested his long and otherwise happy marriage and that nearly cost him his faith. ("The connection between Percy's life and his work during the years he wrote Lancelot may well be one of the greater mysteries of his biography. Put rather simply, the mystery boils down to this: Did Percy write an infernal novel because he was going through a hellish time in his life, or did he compel himself to go through hell in order to write an infernal novel?") To say that Tolson makes the best of this material is to understate his accomplishment in producing a book that keeps pace with the novels themselves. If he takes an artistic gamble early on by providing a long and closely detailed history of Percy's family and of the city of Birmingham, Alabama, which Percy's ancestors helped to found and develop, he finally wins it. Walker Percy's Southernness, as casually as Percy himself treated it, ought not to be undervalued; while Tolson's relaxed presentation of the story culminating in the tragedy of the House of Percy--the suicides of Walker Percy and of Leroy Pratt Percy, respectively the author's paternal grandfather and father--emphasizes the horror of the events. Following Leroy's death, William Alexander Percy--the deceased's cousin and a noted lawyer and poet of Greenville, Mississippi--brought the widow and her three sons to live with him in the Delta. (There, two years later, Mattie Sue Phinizy Percy was drowned when her car ran off a bridge and over-turned in the creek.) William Alexander, the man who became a second father to Walker and his brothers, had fought in France and Belgium in the Great War and received the Croix de Guerre for his almost suicidal bravery. 'That short period of my life spent in battle," he later wrote, "is the only one I remember step by step--as if it moved sub specie aeternitatis. Not that I enjoyed it; I hated it. Not that I was fitted for it by temperament or ability, I was desperately unfitted; but it, somehow, had meaning, and daily life hasn't; it was part of a common endeavor, and daily life is isolated and lonely."