
I can idle away more than a single Sunday afternoon collecting odd morsels on the Internet, but this afternoon's work of an hour or two related to the American novelist Walker Percy. If you've heard of him, it's probably because of his first novel, The Moviegoer, which won the National Book Award in 1962. The introductory paragraph of the Wikipedia article about Percy concludes:
His work displays a combination of existential questioning, Southern sensibility, and deep Catholic faith. He had a lifelong friendship with author and historian Shelby Foote and spent much of his life in Covington, Louisiana, where he died of prostate cancer in 1990.
This was interesting enough so that I kept reading, and, assuming the article isn't marred by wholesale invention, Percy's life doesn't get less interesting when you descend into the details. He was born at Birmingham, Alabama, in 1916. Next year, his paternal grandfather committed suicide. When Percy was 13, his father died the same way as granddad had, a self-inflicted gunshot wound at home. Two years after that, his mother died when she drove her car off a bridge: probably another suicide. Percy and his two younger brothers were then taken in by a first cousin once removed who was a bachelor, a lawyer, and a poet living in Greenville, Mississippi. I'm confused about the relationship indicated by "first cousin once removed," and am coming toward the view that this is because it can refer either to your parent's cousin or to your cousin's kid. Seems crazy, inasmuch as the former would usually be quite a bit older than you and the latter would usually be quite a bit younger. I'm thinking that William Percy, who took in Walker and his brothers, was the boys' deceased father's cousin. He might have thought he had a tidy life going there in Greenville.
At least the eldest boy, Walker, was already 15. In a few years he was off to the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where he majored in chemistry and was a good enough student to then be admitted to the medical school at Columbia University. He obtained his M.D. in 1941 and accepted an internship in psychiatry at Bellevue Hospital. His life then took another dramatic turn when, after working on an autopsy, he contracted tuberculosis in 1942. At the time, the only known treatment was rest. He entered the Trudeau Sanitorium at Saranac Lake, New York, in the Adirondacks. The Wikipedia article says he "spent several years recuperating" there. I have no idea how the finances of that worked. His brothers were off fighting in the war. The sanitorium, however, had a 7000 volume library and, while the world war raged, Percy read through the works of Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Sartre, Kafka, and Thomas Mann. In 1946 he married Mary Townsend, a medical technologist, and the two of them were received into the Roman Catholic Church the next year.
With regard to religion, Percy's family background was casual Protestant. Beware the converts! They self-select for being in earnest about it. Except for a brief stint teaching pathology at Columbia, Percy never returned to medicine. Though this is speculative, to me it seems likely that the traumas of his youth account for subsequent events—the child of two suicides going in for medicine, psychiatry in particular, and, when that didn't work out, turning to existentialist authors, a new religious faith, and literature. He made his debut as a "Catholic writer" in 1956, an essay on race in Commonweal magazine called "Stoicism in the South" that, according to Wikipedia, "condemned Southern segregation and demanded a larger role for Christian thought in Southern life." Since "southern life" is not ordinarily considered to suffer from a deficit of Christianity, I'm thinking maybe the emphasis is meant to fall on "thought"—"a larger role for Christian thought." And then his first novel, The Moviegoer, wins the National Book Award. Though I haven't read it, the impression I get, reading hither and thither about Percy, is that his characters tend to be smart and active, often young, sunk in modernity and trying to enjoy their sports cars and nice restaurants and disposable incomes, but feeling nevertheless estranged, sad, empty: thus, a quest for meaning.
The Wikipedia article includes an enjoyable anecdote about Percy and his lifelong friend, Shelby Foote, whose face and voice became known to millions on account of Ken Burns's film on the Civil War. (Foote's life's work was a 3-volume history, The Civil War: A Narrative.) Anyway, "lifelong friendship" is a slight exaggeration, for Foote grew up in Greenville, Mississippi, and they met only after Percy moved there as a teenager to live with his first cousin once removed. They graduated from Greenville High the same year and then both went to Chapel Hill for college; Wikipedia notes that Foote, on account of a Jewish ancestor, could not join Percy's fraternity. The anecdote, however:
As young men, Percy and Foote decided to pay their respects to William Faulkner by visiting him in Oxford, Mississippi. However, when they arrived at his home, Percy was so in awe of the literary giant that he could not bring himself to speak to him. He later recounted how he could only sit in the car and watch while Foote and Faulkner had a lively conversation on the porch.
The Wikipedia article on Foote is pretty interesting, too. I think his rather large place in Burns's film may be explained by the desire to show all sides, and Foote is one of the comparatively few eminent historians who is sympathetic to the South. He said he would have fought for the Confederacy then, and that he'd fight for it now, the absurdity of which reminds me of my favorite exercise in alternative history: What if Lincoln had just let the South go? But enough.
