Walker Percy. - Review - book reviews

Walker Percy A Life Patrick Samway Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $35, 488 pp.

Some writers are remembered mostly for how they wrote, and some writers are remembered mostly for how they lived. When Walker Percy died in 1990 at the age of seventy-four, there seemed little doubt that he belonged among those known primarily for their writing. His life had been largely uneventful, marked by little beyond his conversion to Roman Catholicism and the tuberculosis that put an end to his medical career in the early 1940s. And in six novels, from The Moviegoer in 1961 to The Thanatos Syndrome in 1987, he had left a substantial body of fiction, serious in purpose, popular in form, and elegantly written.

In the seven years since his death, however, Walker Percy's biography has emerged as a topic of unusual interest. The writer led what was in many ways a narrow and even tidy life, but tidy lives are not so common anymore: "If a total stranger," he wrote of the hero of his second novel, The Last Gentleman (1966), "had thrust into his palm a note which read: Meet me on the NE corner of Lindell Blvd. and Kings Highway in Saint Louis 9 A.M. next Thursday--have news of utmost importance, he'd have struck out for Saint Louis (the question is, how many people nowadays would not?)." Though Percy managed, with considerable self-conscious irony and humor, to keep the canvas of his own life deliberately small, he painted within its confines an utterly compelling picture. He had, in the hackneyed phrase, a gift for friendship, and from many sources after his death--but particularly from Jay Tolson's 1992 biography, Pilgrim in the Ruins--readers learned of the importance of his lifelong friendship with the historian and novelist Shelby Foote (see Commonweal, February 28, 1997) and the early support he received from the fascinating character of the Southern Gentleman who was his Uncle Will.

And yet, I cannot help but feel that, though the popular image of Walker Percy's life has developed, the image of his writing has begun to fade a little around the edges. Who now, among general readers, is able to bring firmly to mind the plot of The Moviegoer? Who now can recollect precisely what it was that made Love in the Ruins (with its marvelous subtitle, "The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World") seem in 1971 one of the most astonishing best-sellers in years? Even while the public learns of Walker Percy--Catholic apologist, Southern intellectual, amateur linguistic philosopher, and correspondent of many of the most interesting figures of his time--it may need reminding of why it should much care about Walker Percy, writer of novels.

One unfortunate consequence of all this is that the new biography Walker Percy: A Life by Patrick H. Samway, S.J., though excellent in many ways, is not quite the book we need on Percy now. The literary editor of America magazine and an acquaintance of the novelist, Samway is a student of Southern literature and the editor of two Percy volumes: a posthumous gathering of the novelist's fugitive pieces, Signposts in a Strange Land, and a collection of letters exchanged with Kenneth Laine Ketner on the linguistic philosophy of Charles Saunders Pierce, A Thief of Pierce.

Samway's new work is the fruit of many years of toil, and it quickly becomes obvious why Percy gave this biographer his blessing and assistance. A painstaking scholar rather than a freewheeling critic--his study of William Faulkner, for example, is a close reading of the typescripts--Samway has carefully assembled and set in a generally competent narrative astonishing amounts of information about the novelist. At times, in fact, the stream of detail becomes something of a problem in the book: It's hard to imagine an anecdote involving Joseph Liebling, Jean Stafford, and Alfred Knopf being dull, but Samway's effort to show all sides of the controversy that swirled around the presentation of the National Book Award to Percy for The Moviegoer buries the story in overreporting.

For the most part, there are no surprises in Walker Percy. Samway's work consists not so much of new facts about the novelist as new confirmation and new detail. From that detail there emerges, for me at least, a greater appreciation of the freedom given to Percy by his inherited wealth--a freedom, for instance, to practice by writing two apprentice works, The Charterhouse and The Gramercy Winner, before producing, at age forty-five, his first published novel. So too, readers will receive from Samway's wealth of information--about, for instance, the continuing irritation the novelist felt with the blighted attempts to film his stories--a new appreciation for the seriousness with which Percy watched and thought about movies.

What Samway's readers will not receive, however, is the reason they should concern themselves with all these details, for the biographer is not a compelling literary critic. Walker Percy is the sort of study that presupposes its subject's importance and the widespread knowledge of his writing. But those days are nearly gone, I think, in which one could assume that Walker Percy is a writer for the ages. This is in part the novelist's fault. He started late--when he accused himself of laziness, Shelby Foote declared that he was merely feeling guilty for all the years he wasted before he found his vocation as a writer at thirty-five--and he invested too much effort in what was a fairly unimportant linguistic theory that ought to have been, like Yeats's foray into cosmology with A Vision, nothing more than a device for focusing his artistic imagination. The result is that he never did quite manage to produce that single great work his talent promised. And without such a work, the literary image of a writer necessarily begins to fade.

We need, in other words, someone to make the case for Walker Percy, not as an interesting man, but as an important writer. Samway deserves great praise for gathering all the biographical information one could ever imagine necessary for making that case, but he has left the more serious and pressing task to others.

J. Bottom is associate editor of First Things and a contributing editor of the Weekly Standard.

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