One man's search for meaning
Walker Percy finds a home in Vincent J. Kopp's classroom

Editor's note: A June 12 Gazette story explored the life and writing of Southern novelist Walker Percy. Currently on display at the Wilson Library Rare Book Collection room is Walker Percy: From Pen to Print, an exhibit drawn from a University collection of his books and papers.

Yet it is not in libraries and display cases that Percy's work holds its power. It is in the lives of the individuals who have encountered his work, sometimes on the recommendation of friends, but usually by chance.

This article discusses the impact of Percy's work on one Carolina faculty member, Vincent J. Kopp, who stumbled upon Percy's work while preparing for medical school here in the mid-1970s.

Kopp agreed to discuss Percy's influence on his life because he believes others may benefit, as he has, from a closer reading of the author's work. That his story is personal, at times painful, yet unremarkable in the grand scheme of things, is an irony suitable for a Percy novel.

Vince Kopp arrived on the Carolina campus in the fall of 1969. Unaware of the coincidence, he, like Walker Percy before him, landed in Manly dorm on north campus. He came to Carolina intending to major in chemistry, a standard underpinning for a career in science or medicine.

But that plan changed when, at the end of his first semester, he decided to major in English and religion. At Carolina, the world had opened up for Kopp in a shocking way. The Viet Nam war raged, news of social upheaval permeated campus life, and for the first time education seemed to be about more than preparing for the next stage in a lock-step life.

He was all of 18 years old, and the world seemed large and open and full of exciting things. "I decided I wasn't going to let college get in the way of my education," Kopp said.

That notion was reinforced when Kopp read Eric Hoffer's The True Believer. Hoffer was a longshoreman who had engaged in self-directed education throughout his life, and it struck Kopp that is was possible for him to pursue a similar course. "I remember being very impressed that A, he never went to college; and B, he knew so much anyway," Kopp said.

Independent as he was, Kopp encountered teachers such as English Professor Weldon Thornton and religion Professor Bill Peck, as well as others who would have a profound influence on him. Later, John Dixon, another professor of religion, raised the question that would intrigue Kopp for years afterward: Is there a physiology of faith?

And then there was Ruel Tyson, now the director of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities. "Ruel helped me to develop my overall attitude toward myself, my story, my desire to learn and to keep learning."

Kopp's problem, if one can call it that, was a curiosity too voracious to limit itself in any one direction. He wanted balance.
There was the ordered, analytical side of him that wanted to look for a fundamental understanding of life that only science can provide. But there was the aesthetic side, too, the side that led him as a senior in high school to write poetry.

Kopp graduated in 1973, with not one clue as to what he would do. He had no skills, no craft. All he had was a Carolina liberal arts education. He had learned well how to question the world, but at the end of all that questioning he was still left with the prospect of finding his place within it.

Nearly 30 years have passed since then, and in those years Kopp has traveled a long, hard way to find his place back on the campus where his journey began.

Finding a calling
After graduation, Kopp left his job as a waiter at the Carolina Coffee Shop and moved to Nantucket, Mass., to be with his girlfriend. She, he felt with the certainty of a 21-year-old, was the love of his life. Eventually they were engaged and planned to open a bookstore together after marriage, but the relationship ended.
He was left alone with a shattered life plan, a casualty of circumstance and fate. Love was gone. Nothing made sense. Life was full of invisible pain. He thought he was all alone.

He moved back to his hometown of Raleigh and took a job as an assistant manager of a bookstore, intending to learn the book business well enough to eventually open his own store. But his heart wasn't in it. Stripped of purpose - or so he thought - life itself had turned into one endless, pointless, painful chore.

He had wanted to lead a writer's life, but he felt as far away from that then as he could have imagined. To write would have meant revisiting pain. In college, he had immersed himself in literature and art and philosophy, but it provided no solace, no understanding, no buffer against his new, cut-off condition. He felt a profound imbalance. His highly aestheticized worldview felt acutely inadequate. There was still the analytical side to develop, still the scientific side of the world he yearned to explore.

Something had to give.

Kopp didn't think of all of that in any conscious way, he said, but he went to bed on the night of Sept. 10, 1974, and woke up knowing he was going to be a doctor. It was the first time he had ever had that clear knowledge about what he was supposed to do. "And from that point on I knew I had a vocation," Kopp said. "It was almost a calling."

Sept. 11 was his mother's birthday, and he had pre-arranged to take her out for lunch. When Kopp told her of his plan, all she said was, "Well, it's about time." She had never quit believing in him. His father, an IBM man, practical and strong, who had moved his family to Raleigh from New York when Kopp was 13, responded just as predictably: "We're not off on another wild goose chase are we?"

A leap of faith
Kopp returned to Carolina as a special student in 1975, needing science courses to qualify for medical school admission. Neither seeking nor being offered any money from his parents, he took a job as a laboratory assistant, got student loans and qualified for food stamps. Kopp didn't blame his father for thinking what he did. He had no more idea than his father if he would succeed in becoming a doctor. But unlike his father, he knew he had no choice but to try. If this were to be his vocation, he would live like a monk until it was fulfilled.

"Around the time that I decided that I was going to pursue this calling, the choice was: I could kill myself, or I could go into medicine. I decided, 'You are put on this earth to help other people. You're smart. You're competent. You may not be able to help yourself, but at least you can help other people.'"
Kopp worked as a research technician in neuropathology where he cared for laboratory animals, then killed and prepared them for experiments on the effects of lead toxicity on developing neural tissue. One of his jobs was to use an electron microscope to study ultra structural pathology.

"It was like being in a space station somewhere and being given the most powerful pair of optics that you could possibly hope to have in order to look at the superstructure, the infrastructure of cells," he said.

By holing up in the lab, surrounded by dead things, he found he could hide from other people and forget for a while the hollowness he felt inside.

In addition to his medical textbooks, Kopp assigned himself books of great literature to read. In his self-directed journey, such books became required reading for him, too.

He read James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and studied the Walker Evans photographs in the book that helped tell the story of three tenant families and their struggle for survival in the Deep South of the Great Depression.

Afterward, Kopp decided to delve deeper into Southern literature.
He read Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men and was trying to decide whom to read next, Faulkner or O'Connor, when one day, leafing through Esquire at Sutton's Drug Store, he stumbled upon an essay titled Bourbon.

It was written by a Southern novelist and fellow Carolina graduate he had never heard of, Walker Percy.

And it opened up a whole new world.

"This essay was not about bourbon as a connoisseur would drink it but bourbon as a vehicle for recapturing something that has been lost from oneself."

Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, who was central to Walker Percy's vision of the world, referred to the practice of setting up "a rotation," to capture the notion that by repeating an activity one could recapture a memory so as to extract deeper meaning from a previous experience than that which was obtained through the original experience.

When Kopp finished Percy's essay, he resolved "to read the rest of this guy." And being a former English major, he set out to do so in chronological order.

A map to the soul
Kopp's reading plan led him straight to The Moviegoer, Percy's first novel. The shock of recognition when he encountered Binx Bolling, the novel's main character, was deep and instantaneous. It seemed less that he was reading a book than viewing himself in a magic mirror.

Or tracing a map to his soul.

"I started reading The Moviegoer, and I was absolutely floored," Kopp said. "I thought, 'This man has written a version of my life.'"
Percy sets up the novel on the opening page with a line from Kierkegaard: "The specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair."

Here was this young man in New Orleans, sitting in his house with the television blaring and air conditioner humming, wondering what life was all about, but not knowing, exactly, that that was what he was anxious about. He sat on a wallet full of credit cards and had a pretty secretary to flirt with, one whom he could drive in his spiffy sports car to either the beach or take to the movies as the mood struck, but with whom he otherwise felt no authentic connection. Here, too, was a man who had consulted Consumer Reports to make sure he had the longest-lasting deodorant and who read books such as The Chemistry of Life to get answers to all the great mysteries of life that science could answer. Here was this stockbroker who found it easy to earn enough money to make a good living but hard to find any meaning on which to base his life.

And here was a book, critics now recognize, that set up the problem of living in the post-modern world. For the first time, Kopp could relate to the world, not as a Romantic aching for impossible connections, but as a person embarked on his own important search for answers to his own vexing questions.

Percy had Bolling hit upon a way out of his despair by embarking on a search. Kopp recognized he had begun a search not unlike Binx's by answering the call to become a doctor. What made the book all the more strange and exciting to Kopp was that in the epilogue he discovered that Bolling had quit selling stocks to become a doctor.
"All I knew was that I had read something that had spoken to me, and I did not understand how it happened," Kopp said. "Here I was, this Carolina-educated English major, who prided himself on a Carolina education, which pretty much guaranteed I could step back from any work of literature and analyze it, and yet this thing had penetrated me in a way that I did not understand."

But as much as the book mystified him, it also sustained him by giving him a fresh lens through which to see the world.

The microscope yielded answers to what Percy called "the vertical search" that dealt with things like the nature of minute matter. Percy's novel put him onto the possibility of a different kind of search, "a horizontal search." And at the heart of this search were two fundamental questions that none of the science books asked - or sought to answer: Why am I here? And what's the purpose of my life?

"At least through Percy I knew I was living in despair and that I was not alone," Kopp said. "Until then I was that one person referred to in that epigram at the beginning of The Moviegoer. Afterward, I knew I was one among many beginning to emerge from despair."

Teaching Percy at Carolina
Of course, Kopp didn't get into or through medical school, two specialty-training programs in pediatrics and anesthesiology, and two careers in private and academic practice dwelling on Walker Percy's writings alone.

He had to master the medical sciences as well as apply his humanities training.

He had to put the vertical component of his search into action while pursuing the horizontal component Percy's writings addressed.

After finishing his pediatric residency at Duke in 1985, Kopp spent eight years in private practice, a stint that including starting the Chapel Hill Children's Clinic. He returned to Carolina in 1993 as a faculty member in the Department of Anesthesiology after completing a second residency in anesthesiology.

Even as his medical career took root and blossomed, literature in general continued to help him make sense of things he saw and felt - his and others' suffering, victories, disappointments and joys.
"Literature slows you down long enough to where you can actually pay attention to the details of the lives of the characters with more attention than perhaps you would pay to the details of your own life, and in so doing, allows you to connect with the details of your own life."

Soon after he joined the faculty here, Kopp decided to teach medical students about medical ethics. He found, however, that in the midst of all their technical education, the "soft" field of medical ethics held little appeal for most of them. Many of them seemed intellectually unprepared for the subject as well.

He concluded that it would be best to reach undergraduate students who were thinking about becoming doctors by creating a course they could take through the Honors Program. He taught "Medical Ethics and Literature" using literature that dwells on medical themes as a platform for approaching the subject of medical ethics.

It should come as no surprise that Percy was among the authors he assigned.

"I think Percy, as a doctor, as a physician and as a novelist has a decidedly diagnostic purpose in the way he writes," Kopp said. "He sees this, to some extent, as an extension of his medical role. He's not an aesthete. He's not writing to satisfy the latest fashion of the New York editorial scene.

"He is writing because he is in the process of diagnosing, in his words, 'some deep sickness in the soul,' the malaise. Jimmy Carter was roundly criticized for referring to 'the malaise' back in the Seventies, but I would not be surprised if he read The Moviegoer."

Kopp has used two other Percy novels, Love in the Ruins and The Thanatos Syndrome in the course because more than any others he wrote they transparently relate to medical ethics.

Both novels have as their main character Dr. Thomas More, descendant of Thomas More -- the author of Utopia -- confronting scientism and post-modern irrationality in a modern, fictionalized, dystopic setting centered in Feliciana Parish, La.

As Percy moves More through this dystopic world, where people are abstracted from themselves in the pursuit of hollow perfection and are subject to unnamed anxieties while obsessively indulging in sensory pleasures, he touches upon the specific duties of a physician to patients, how a physician should behave, what physicians' obligations are to each other and what ethical conundrums result from carrying certain premises to their logical, though extreme, conclusions.

Still, Kopp found it is easy for undergraduates to "overdose" on Percy and now assigns only Love in the Ruins for the course. He knows many students who read the book are not yet ready to grasp its full weight. He accepts that and tells his students as much. "If they pick that book up again years later and read it again, it may have a new meaning for them because they have reached that stage in their development where they can relate to it."

Understanding life backwards
As important as Kopp sees his work, he no longer views his search as the most important thing in his life.

His greatest responsibilities and joys are bound to his 24-year marriage to his wife, Katherine, and rearing his three daughters, Margaret, 22, and Elizabeth and Katherine, both 16.

His wife writes for Carolina's development office. Margaret graduated from Carolina in May with a degree in English, summa cum laude in creative writing. "She even has a job, a tribute to her excellent Carolina education," Kopp said.

Beyond his family and work, Kopp has established himself as a good citizen on campus as well.

He served on the Faculty Council and was awarded a Chapman Family Faculty Fellowship in 2001 and is a fellow of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities. He has served on committees set up to tackle problems ranging from bicycle paths and parking to improving student intellectual life. He is the faculty adviser for iris: the UNC journal of medicine, literature and visual art.

The last thing he did before graduating in 1973 was to co-found Cellar Door, a literary magazine to which undergraduates submit short fiction, poetry and photography. Margaret was co-editor of the magazine this past year.

Seeing his daughter work on the magazine he helped start is the kind of rotation one can fully appreciate even without a glass of hard bourbon in hand.

In all Kopp has done he has tried to incorporate the lessons he learned at Carolina, taking to heart things he has only recently, in some cases, come to understand in the full sense of the word.
For instance, it was Ruel Tyson who introduced him to Kierkegaard's work long before Kopp found Percy by chance. There is a quote from Kierkegaard that Tyson often repeats that Kopp took to heart.

"'We live our lives forward but understand them backwards,' Tyson would say. That's a profound thought. Too many of us never accomplished the second part. Ruel taught me never to ignore the need to finish the job, to try to understand not just the meaning of life but what each of us contributes to life," said Kopp.

That perhaps explains why the pull of Percy remains as strong as when Kopp first assigned himself the task of reading everything Percy ever wrote. It is a task that Kopp may never end. He has read all the novels, but he has read many of them over and over again. And they are still teaching.

"I encountered Percy at a time when my posture toward life was precisely that of a seeker without an overtly transcendent or religious disposition," Kopp said. "I was looking for answers in science - clear cut, measurable, reproducible answers born out of pure and systematic analysis of phenomena, not the subjective answers of the aesthetic perspective - or so I thought.

"Call it stoic acceptance of my lot, call it a purely ethical posture toward living; it was predicated on nothing more than a strong sense - an intuition - that there was a right way and a wrong way to live and that this was not only not arbitrary but discoverable."
Anybody who tries to understand Percy without acknowledging the fundamentally religious drive behind his work is going to miss a very large part of what Percy is about, Kopp said.

Through Percy, Kopp discovered there is another dimension to his nature to which attention had to be paid. Beyond the aesthetic and the analytical side of his nature there is also the transcendent side that can never fully be expressed through art or explained away by science. It is the side held together with faith and love and hope - and by the grace of God.

And it was through this discovery that Kopp realized that a merely stoic and narrowly defined scientific response to life is neither correct nor satisfying in an absolute sense.

"Call it the first hint that truth is neither arbitrary nor knowable as anything less than a whole unknowable thing; that our imperfect ability to characterize truth did not, necessarily, inhibit our ability to know that truth exists. We just can't characterize it in normal human language. Something larger must be in the background. That something would always elude any human effort - analytical or aesthetic - to contain it, what ever 'it' is."

While still preparing for medical school, Kopp became friends with a man named Jim McLean, who like Kopp planned to become a doctor. McLean also had read Percy, and their friendship, in large part, was based on the profound effect that Percy had on them both.
It reached the point that they decided to hop a train to Covington, La., where Percy lived, and camp out on his porch until Percy came out to share his wisdom or chase them away.
"We never did make that trip," Kopp said. "I just wrote a letter to him that said: 'Dear Mr. Percy, Thank you for writing your books. Vince Kopp.' I didn't feel I needed to do anything else. It was just to let this guy know that he did something good."

More Percy

Walker Percy: From Pen to Print, an exhibit drawn from a University collection of the author's books and papers, is currently on display at the Wilson Library Rare Book Collection.
Exhibit hours are 8 a.m. - 5 p.m., Monday - Friday, and 9 a.m. - 1 p.m., Saturday. The exhibit will run through Aug. 21.

Walker Percy's books

The Moviegoer. New York: Knopf, 1961;
London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1963.
The Last Gentleman. New York:
Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1966;
London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1967.
Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World. New York: Farrar, Straus,Giroux, 1971;
London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1971.
The Message in the Bottle:
How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other.
New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1975.
Lancelot. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1977; London: Secker and Warburg, 1977.
Going Back to Georgia. Athens:
University of Georgia, 1978 [Limited edition; in Signposts, or SS, below].
Questions They Never Asked Me.
Northridge, CA: Lord John Press, 1979
[Limited edition; in SS].
The Second Coming. New York:
Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1980;
London: Secker and Warburg, 1981.
Bourbon. Winston-Salem, NC: Palaemon Press, 1982 [Limited edition; in SS].
Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1983.
How to Be an American Novelist in Spite of
Being Southern and Catholic. Lafayette:
University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1984 [Limited edition; in SS].
The City of the Dead. Northridge, CA:
Lord John Press, 1985 [Limited edition; in SS].
Diagnosing the Modern Malaise. New Orleans: Faust, 1985 [Limited edition; in SS].
Novel Writing in an Apocalyptic Time. Afterword by Eudora Welty. New Orleans: Faust, 1986 [Limited edition; in SS].
The Thanatos Syndrome. New York:
Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1987; London:
Andre Deutsch, 1987.
Signposts in a Strange Land. New York:
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux,1991.

University Gazette