University Gazette

 

Piecing together Walker Percy

The picture looks casual enough.

It was taken in 1933 or 1934, when Walker Percy was a waif of a man and a serious student majoring in chemistry who loved to go to movies as a diversion from that heady pursuit. He looks in the photo to be exactly what he was: another freshman out on the town on Franklin Street. He stands in the middle of a line outside Carolina Theater. He wears a jacket and tie, and his wavy hair is slicked back in the greasy pompadour of the day. His hands thrust deep into his pockets, and it almost appears as if he is whistling, or getting ready to start.

Unlike most of the others in line, he appears intensely aware of the camera and stares directly into it, almost as if he knows that his cooperation is somehow needed for reasons he cannot yet know.

When Charles McNamara, the curator for the rare books collection at Wilson Library, came upon the picture, he got the prickly sensation of a detective who stumbles upon a clue he would not have believed could exist until seeing it with his own eyes.

Over the past year, McNamara had pored over Percy's manuscripts and letters and the many books from his personal library that had been penciled with annotations.

It is part of McNamara's job to build meaning in exhibitions by first making, and then showing, the subtle connections between artifacts. Here, with this picture, he had found a connection so blunt, so obvious, so perfect that it was almost eerie, McNamara said.

"It's eerie in the sense that here is this picture taken in his freshman or sophomore year at college. Of course he was an avid moviegoer who was always going up to the theater on Franklin Street, which is now The Gap store. The theater itself has moved around the corner."

McNamara found that some of Percy's writings as a student at Carolina dealt with movie themes as well.

"So movies were central to him at that point."

None of this would have been remarkable at all, of course, had Percy not, at the age of 46, won the National Book Award for his first novel.

It is called The Moviegoer.

It is about a character named Binx Billings who, as a young man, read serious books such as The Chemistry of Life and went to movies as a diversion before he discovered the possibility of "the search."

The search, Billings believed, is "what anyone would undertake if they were not sunk in the everydayness of their own life." The movies, Billings suspected, were already onto it.

Percy's Carolina connection

The picture of Percy outside the Carolina Theater is one of many that are displayed now in a Wilson Library exhibition, Walker Percy: From Pen to Print. The exhibition will continue through Aug. 15.

McNamara, with help from graduate assistant Joby Topper, put it together.

In 1981, Percy decided to place his manuscripts and printed materials on deposit in the Southern Historical Collection that is now part of Wilson's Manuscript Department.

After Percy's death in 1990, his widow either sold or donated all these materials to the University, along with her husband's library. The books, McNamara said, are enormously important in unlocking the mind of Percy, not only because of the selection of books he acquired, but because of the scribbled annotations he left in them. Those annotations and markings are like breadcrumbs marking the ground Percy covered through a tangled thicket of existentialist philosophers, scientists and pioneers of psychiatry.

"It is the most complete literary collection that we have because we have his manuscripts, his library and his books," McNamara said. "At this point, that is virtually unique."

And that is what has made creating the exhibition exhilarating and daunting.

As a curator, McNamara sees himself more as a generalist than a scholar, someone who must have a free-floating curiosity that can move from subject to subject without sinking too deep into any one. The Percy collection, because of its size and completeness, made that task all the more difficult.

"This collection has the manuscripts, the books, the library," McNamara said. "All that material fits together and creates a kind of critical mass out of which new and interesting observations, thoughts, insights can emerge.

"What is most amazing to me -- and the most interesting and the most fun often is exactly that -- seeing these materials and seeing them together and suddenly, out of their proximity something new emerges you wouldn't have seen perhaps before."

One display shows Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn next to Jack Kerouac's On The Road.

By the annotations that Percy left in the pages of those books, McNamara was able to see that Percy was comparing how both writers -- one on a log raft floating down the Mississippi and the other in a roadster barreling across the country -- were on the same kind of journey to discover the America of their time.

For fans of the Moviegoer, McNamara assembled an extensive display. At the heart of it is the dust jacket from the first printing. Beside the jacket is a page from the typescript of an unpublished short story from which the novel evolved. On the other side is a page with the corresponding scene from the novel's first draft.

In the exhibition, McNamara notes that the short story "tells of a young Princeton graduate who takes a year off to explore life and himself in New York City. Never published, the story may in fact represent an early-stage gestation of a new novel."

Also on display are some of the letters that Stanley Kaufmann, Percy's editor at Alfred Knopf, sent to Percy during the period he toiled to get the book in shape for publishing. The letters reveal the many rounds of revisions that McNamara had Percy make. Kaufmann saw both the promise in Percy's works and the main flaws in the novel.

Even the final congratulatory letter came with one more suggestion to change the title of the book from A Carnival in Gentilly to The Moviegoer.

The life behind the literature

Who was Percy? And why read him?

The questions seem simple enough. Their answers are not, but it may be true that his life and art were so intricately bound together that it would be impossible to answer one without exposing clues to the other.

Percy was born into a world of Southern privilege ripped apart by sudden tragedy. When he was 13, his father, a successful lawyer in Birmingham, Ala., shot and killed himself in the same way that Percy's grandfather had done12 years before. Two years after his father's death, Percy's mother died in an automobile accident.

After the death of his parents, Percy went to live with William Alexander Percy, his "Uncle Will," in Greenville, Miss.

Farrell O'Gorman, a visiting assistant professor of English at Wake Forest University who earned his Ph.D. at Carolina, spoke of the profound influence that Percy's uncle had on the author in a speech he gave here to mark the opening of the Wilson Library exhibition.

He talked of how Percy's biography partly explains "the range of his interests and the structure of his work."

His Uncle Will, O'Gorman said, was a distinguished "lawyer-poet-planter" who raised Percy with what O'Gorman described as "a radical skepticism toward Christianity but a strong moral sense" that derived from the patrician values that the Percy family had long put into practice.

When Percy came to Chapel Hill, O'Gorman said, he majored in chemistry with the intention of becoming a doctor. During this period in his life, literature, like the movies, "seemed largely a diversion from the realities of the world, which could only be understood beneath a microscope."

In 1937, Percy enrolled in the medical school at Columbia University, and it was there that he developed a keen interest in psychiatry and underwent psychoanalysis for several years before he decided finally to abandon the field in favor of pathology.

He received his M.D. in 1941, but Percy's career as a physician was halted when, as an intern at a New York City hospital, he contracted tuberculosis while performing autopsies.

Percy would spend the next several years recovering in sanatoriums in New York and Connecticut. It was during this period of isolation and inactivity that he began to read in earnest the authors who challenged and ultimately changed his understanding of the world, O'Gorman said.

Some of the books that Percy read during this period are on display at the exhibition. Among them are Soren Kierkegaard's Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript and Martin Heidegger's Existence and Being.

Percy later credited this period of confinement as the most fortunate of his life in that it enabled him to choose a life that he could not have imagined before.

Percy turned 30 by the time he recovered and decided to return to the South, propose marriage to Mary Bernice Townsend, convert to Catholicism and turn away from medicine to write.

Over the next decade, Percy would write two failed novels as well as articles in philosophy journals that dealt with the philosophy of language and semiotics, which is the theory of signs.

He was 44 when The Moviegoer was accepted for publication in 1960 and 46 when it won the National Book Award and secured his reputation as a novelist to be reckoned with.

The body of work Percy produced over the next three decades secured his place as one of the most important and influential writers of the century.

A different kind of Southern writer

Who was Percy?

Fred Hobson, a Carolina English professor, described Percy as "the sanest social commentator of any Southern writer of the second half of the 20th century."

"He truly had incredibly keen insight into society and into personality and into the way people are and how people are products of places and how place shapes a person," Hobson said.

And yet, he said, Percy never has attained the popular appeal of a Mark Twain or the wider acclaim of a William Faulkner.

"Percy, interestingly for somebody who has so many incredible advocates and adherents, in some circles is not that well known."

Hobson said Percy's novels capture the contemporary South of shopping centers and country clubs and golf courses. That distinguishes him from writers such as Faulkner who wrote of the old South that emerged after the Civil War.

"He very much belongs to the contemporary or almost postmodern South, so I guess he is different than a lot of writers of his generation and of his age," Hobson said.

Southern writers today operate not under the shadow of Faulkner but of Percy, Hobson said.

"He is almost even more influential than he was important as a writer in his own time and part of it is because he anticipates the postmodern South so well -- the country club South, the South of advertising and public relations and the slickness and polish and contrivance and falsity," Hobson said.

Hobson said a case could be made that Percy occupies the same place for the last half of the 20th century that Mark Twain had for the latter half of the 19th century.

"First of all, they are both great satirists," Hobson said.

"I think Percy had a certain deeper wisdom than Twain. Twain's great flaw was that he fell prey to those very things he analyzed so well in his fiction, such as the excesses of capitalism in the late 19th century."

An influence beyond literature

While Percy occupies a high perch in literature, what makes him different from other writers is the way in which his work skips past and transcends the traditional bounds of art.

For Percy, literature became the tool he used to ferret out truths about human existence, truths that fell beyond the reach of the scientific method to ask or begin to answer.

Unlike most writers, Percy understood science extremely well, Hobson said. It may be going too far to say Percy became anti-science, "but he wanted it to be put in its place." Hobson said.

O'Gorman, who did his dissertation on Percy and Flannery O'Connor under Hobson, talked in his speech of how Percy believed there was a missing dimension to science that could be filled with a deeper understanding of language and literature. In the later years of his life, Percy turned more and more to the study of semiotics and the work of philosopher Charles Sanders Pierce to explore that dimension and lend it legitimacy.

"Percy's thoughts on science, literature and language all converge on one central point: The human being is not merely an organism in an environment," O'Gorman said. "Rather, to be human is to be a self in the world: a world in which the human is free to live authentically or inauthentically, to practice authentic speech and seek true understanding or lapse into idle curiosity and false speech.

"But in American society, Percy well knew, a radical faith in the physical sciences as the primary domain of the real -- along with a powerful consumer economy fueled by constant technological advances -- makes it all too easy for us to become blind to who we are."

Why read Percy?

George Lensing, an English professor at Carolina who also has studied Percy, offers this answer:

"Walker Percy is one with other `postmodern' American novelists in that he sees Americans in the second half of the 20th century as cut off from their traditionally inherited moorings and caught up in a culture of hedonism and materialism that has forgotten how to give and receive love.

"His novels convey, as perhaps few other postmodernists do, what it is like to be afflicted by a lingering sadness in the midst of affluence and pleasure.

"But he goes beyond other postmodern novelists in affirming an allegiance to some kind of transcendence founded in part on Christianity and, more generally, on an ethic of giving instead of receiving, or re-learning how to love. In short, he is a novelist who knows the dilemmas of secular modern life and its emptiness, even as he poses an outline for an alternative direction that can lead to reclaiming an authentic personal identity."

Lensing thinks Percy is not as well-known as he should be, particularly on this campus. When the exhibition ends this summer, there will be nothing on campus to remind people of Percy's connection to it.

"There is no memorial to Walker Percy on campus, and I believe there should be," Lensing said. "Not only is this his alma mater, but we now have the superb collection of his papers and his personal library. Our campus will be the center of Percy studies for decades to come. We should find an appropriate way to honor this major Southern novelist of the last century as a son of UNC."

More to come

Scholars of Walker Percy talk about the powerful effect that the author has had on countless readers who, like Percy and his characters, find themselves on a search for meaning that moves them beyond the prescribed social, religious and scientific formulas of the day.

Look in the next issue of the Gazette for the story of one such reader, Vincent J. Kopp, an associate professor in the Department of Anesthesiology at UNC Hospitals.

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.

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