Walker Percy played a rather large, complicated, and difficult game, one easily misconstrued and in which conventional success was no sure sign of victory.
In 1962, shortly after receiving the National Book Award for his first novel, The Moviegoer, he answered a letter of congratulations from his friend and mentor, the novelist Caroline Gordon, with the following outburst:
Your letter has the effect of encouraging me to expectorate a chronic bone-in-the-throat. It has to do with my main problem as a fiction writer. Actually I do not consider myself a novelist but a moralist or a propagandist . . . What I really want to do is tell people what they must do and what they must believe if they want to live. Using every guile and low-handed trick in the book of course . . . The problem which all but throws me all the time is this: How does a Catholic fiction writer handle the Catholic Faith in this novel?
A remarkable declaration, to be sure. And the source of a natural question: If Percy wasn’t a novelist, why then was he writing novels, much less prize-winning ones? The matter is complicated further by the testimony of others. His best friend, Shelby Foote (the novelist and Civil War chronicler) claims that Walker Percy was “in simple and solemn fact—a novelist.” The Harvard psychiatrist Robert Coles, in Walker Percy: An American Search, paints Percy as Christian existentialist. More recently, Kieran Quinlan, sensitive to Percy’s faith as perhaps only a hostile ex-seminarian could be, is quick to tag him as a neo-Thomist dinosaur—the last of that dying breed, the Catholic Novelist.
Converted Novelist
In taking a closer look at the nature of Percy’s game and asking how well he played it, we could probably do worse than to start by taking him at his word when he identifies himself as a “moralist and propagandist.”
Percy triumphed as a novelist rather late in a vicissitudinous life. The Percy family was a distinguished Mississippi clan, long on the tragic romance, which over the centuries had produced notable senators, lawyers, statesmen, and, in the case of Percy’s father and grandfather, suicides.
A science-oriented atheist as a teenager, Percy went to medical school at Columbia where, while interning in pathology, he contracted tuberculosis and was sent to a sanitarium in upstate New York. The professional hiatus changed his life. Compressing the story somewhat, but getting the essentials just right, Flannery O’Connor put it this way: “He came down with TB and had to be confined for a period during which he and St. Thomas became friends and he became a Catholic.”
The break also changed Percy’s profession, for he soon decided to drop medicine, settle down in Louisiana, and become as he put it, “a writer.” He first tried his hand at fiction. The meager result was two unpublishable manuscripts. A series of philosophical essays, however, written during the ’50s and mostly dealing with language, enjoyed a modest success, appearing in journals like Partisan Review, The Modern Schoolman, and Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
By the time Percy returned to fiction with The Movie-goer, he was already 45 years old. Before his death in 1990, he published five more novels, a satirical self-help book (Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book), and a book-length collection of his essays from the ’50s, entitled The Message in the Bottle.
Despite its variety, Percy’s writing is, philosophically, all of a piece. Noting the continuity between the essays and the novels, Hugh Kenner speaks of the essays as “abstracted ghosts” of the novels (since the essays came first, it might be slightly more accurate to say the novels are, as it were, “illustrated essays”). Percy himself spoke of his ambition to “novelize philosophy,” as Camus and Sarte had done. Clearly, Percy approached fiction less with stories to tell than with ideas to expound, and he was committed to vending his ideas in the largest market possible. Shortly before sitting down to write The Moviegoer, he complained to his wife about the limited impact of his essays. “Nobody reads these things,” he said. “I need to put some of the things I’m saying into a novel so that people will read them.”
Scriptural Anthropology
Percy’s point of view is best characterized, to use his own words, “as a certain view of man, an anthropology.” Although Percy was fond of drawing on modern thinkers like Kierkegaard, C. S. Peirce, and Heidigger, he also warned against exaggerating his debt to them and insisted: “[M]y ‘anthropology’ has been expressed better in an earlier, more traditional language—e.g. scriptural.” Toward the end of his life, he told the Peirce scholar Kenneth Ketner exactly what kind of “anthropology” he had been working on all those years: “As you know, I have been at some pains to sketch out an ‘anthropology,’ a theory of man by virtue of which he is understood to be by his very nature open to the kerygma and ‘news.'”
Percy’s religious motives notwithstanding, he often disappoints readers looking for a “religious novelist” because his anthropology is not a study of Christian man, but rather of man per se—the human creature made for faith. Typically, his heroes are either non-believers or “fallen away” Catholics. Nevertheless, as Quinlan correctly observes, “with Percy philosophy and fiction are always a prelude to faith.”
While it is true, as Jay Tolson argues in his splendid biography Pilgrim in the Ruins, that Percy was fundamentally a “moralist,” he was a moralist in a special sense. For him, the crucial distinction was not, as it is for so many moralists, between living a good life and living a bad life. The real moral problem was how to live a human life at all—that is, how not to die in the spiritual and psychological sense. Percy was truly a moral anthropologist: His theme was “how to be human.” As Binx Bolling, the hero of The Moviegoer, observes: “Death in this century is not the death people die but the death people live . . . It happens when I speak to people. In the middle of a sentence it will come over me: yes, beyond a doubt this is death.”
Like the good pathologist that he always remained, Percy pinpointed the source of this living death, and he labeled it the “theoretical mindset.” By this expression, Percy referred to a phenomenon, prevalent among the educated classes of the West; that is broad enough to include the theoretical systems of Descartes, Hegel, Marx, Darwin, and Freud, but also New Age theosophy, political ideology, popular “scientism,” and all the radical forms of spiritualism or materialism—in short, all the typically modern strains of gnosticism.
Singularity of the Self
What all these forms of speculation have in common is that, in return for universal explanatory power, they situate man as part of a system, rather than part of a story. Such theories offer the individual man, as such, no particular reason to exist. The psychological effect is readily imaginable: depression, alienation, angst, ennui, what Percy called “the malaise.” The sad state of the scientist Chesterton describes, who “understands everything,” and for whom “everything does not seem worth understanding,” is, for Percy, the situation of modern man, insofar as he shares the theoretical mindset.
Percy dedicated his life to presenting a picture of man that would puncture the mindset’s pretensions. He did so chiefly by concentrating on the singularity of the human, and all the other phenomena that slip through the clutches of the theoretical mindset. These phenomena, which are anomalies from the theoretical point of view, have, for Percy, the character of “signs!’ He also calls them “contradictions,” “stumbling blocks,” “scandals,” and “clues!’
Thus, to St. Thomas’s famous Five, Percy seems to have added a Sixth Way to the existence of God, or at least a reverse-corollary to the argument from order. One might dub it the “argument from strangeness”: Only the Christian story can account for the contradictoriness, the perversity, the unpredictableness, the sheer out-of-whackness of the world and man. This explains the curious subtitle of The Message in the Bottle, Percy’s collection of essays: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other. The phenomenon of language resists the explanations of the theoretical mindset, which would reduce man either to matter or to spirit. Percy credits C. S. Peirce for spotting this: “Peirce saw that the one way to get at it, the great modern rift between mind and matter, was the only place where they intersect: language. Language is both words and meaning. It is impossible to imagine language without both.”
The second important sign is, for Percy, “the Jews,” by which he means not only “Israel, the exclusive people of God, but the worldwide ecclesia instituted by one of them, God-become-man, a Jew.” The theoretical mindset is naturally inimical to Christianity. After all, the Bible presents a story, not a theory. The Gospels offer Good News: Once, on a certain day, in a certain village in Palestine, something extraordinary happened—a baby was born who was God. On this, the theoretical mindset can only draw a blank.
News and Good News
The “newsiness” of the Good News sets it apart from all other kinds of spiritual wisdom. Percy writes:
Kierkegaard (and I) would see Buddhism, and most of the great contemplative religions as “scientific” in a broad sense, that is, as professing general truths which can be arrived at by anyone, anywhere, at any time. Christianity and (Judaism) would fall into what Kierkegaard (and I) would call the “religious” stage, that is, the being open to “news,” of the singular (scandalous) event, the Jewish covenant and Christian incarnation and news of the same.
For Percy, all of this has practical consequences for man’s relations with other persons, both human and divine. If each of us is a singular being for whom mere speculative knowledge is insufficient, then the truth I am looking for—”Why am I here?”—must be singular and personal as well. In short, the Good News for man is a person—Christ the Way, the Truth, and the Life. At the end of the story, the truth is a person, unencompassed by any human theory. Thus, Percy’s novel, The Second Coming, ends with the hero reflecting on his love for the heroine and for God, and asking himself “Am I crazy to want both, her and Him?” Percy does not supply the implicit answer that this is the kind of typically human craziness that only the Judeo-Christian account can explain.
Where Are the Hittites?
If Percy’s anthropology—at base, Catholic orthodoxy—was not especially original, he was quite daring in combining it with Peirce’s semiotics and in the diagnostic way he applied it to what he called “the familiar oddities and anomalies of modern times, e.g. the rise of boredom and suicide amid the good life, the longing of people for UFOs and trivial magic, the eroticization of society … why people applaud frantically on the Carson show when their hometowns are mentioned.” Thus he manages to show how the strange moods and anxieties of our age might relate not just to the overweaning “scientism” of our times, but also to the more distant errors of Ockham, Luther, and Descartes. He brings a Thomist history of philosophy (specifically, Maritain’s) to bear on the alienation and despair of modern suburban America, creating a funny, quirkily Catholic commentary on the modern soul and society.
Since these “oddities and anomalies” are also signs of the inadequacy of the theoretical mindset, in Percy’s hands, satire and humor become a peculiar kind of apologetics, with Percy’s quizzical, cockeyed view as the point of departure. The following shows him in his classic mode, obliquely highlighting one of his favorite signs:
Where are the Hittites?
Why does no one find it remarkable that in most world cities today there are Jews but not one single Hittite, even though the Hittites had a flourishing civilization while the Jews nearby were a weak and obscure people?
When one meets a Jew in New York or New Orleans or Paris or Melbourne, it is remarkable that no one considers the event remarkable. What are they doing here? But it is even more remark-able to wonder, if there are Jews here, why are there not Hittites here?
Where are the Hittites? Show me one Hittite in New York City.
Sometimes Percy is less oblique. He seems to have agreed with Chesterton’s remark that, “The greatest disaster of the 19th century was this: that men began to use the word ‘spiritual’ as the same as the word ‘good.”‘ One of Percy’s heroes, Dr. Thomas More, has trouble with his wives, the first of whom ran off with a guru. Dr. More says of her:
What she didn’t understand, she being spiritual and seeing religion as a spirit, was that it took religion to save me from the spirit world, from orbiting the earth like Lucifer and the angels, that it took nothing less . . . than eating Christ himself to make me mortal man again and let me inhabit my own flesh and love her in the morning.
If his moral anthropology immediately distinguishes Percy from other writers, so, too, does his humorous tone. Love in the Ruins, one of his most successful novels, is a metaphysical slapstick comedy, featuring the “bad Catholic” psychiatrist-hero Dr. Thomas More traipsing around with his Ontological Lapsometer, measuring people’s levels of alienation, hoping to devise a pharmaceutical cure for the Cartesian mind-body split.
Silent Shouts
More typical, however, is the sardonic tone of Binx Bolling in The Moviegoer. It is no surprise to learn that Bolling’s attitude corresponds exactly to Percy’s own, as he makes clear in a letter:
Perhaps the craft of the religious novelist nowadays consists mainly in learning how to shout in silence. That plus what Jack Bolling called learning how to place a good kick in the ass. As far as I’m concerned, the latter comprises 90 percent of my vocation, and my next novel shall be mainly given to ass-kicking for Jesus’ sake.
Percy was too sharp a critic to overlook the weaknesses of his own novels. Writing itself was never the problem. His first editor, Stanley Kauffmann, wrote, “From the first page I knew I had found a real writer,” and even when Kauffmann found fault with the storytelling, he says, “Percy never stopped being a real writer.”
Percy also knew he had a fatal tendency toward didacticism. While writing The Thanatos Syndrome, he admitted to Shelby Foote that he was “spoiling a novel by didacticism, shaking a finger at the ‘secular humanists.’ You can really mess up a novel doing this.” Thanatos is an extreme case, but the tendency was present from the start in the original manuscripts of The Moviegoer. The novels that followed, written without Kauffmann’s editorial help, were even more openly argumentative, incorporating what one critic called “occasional lumps of unprocessed Franco-American metaphysics.” An alarming number of characters keep notebooks with philosophical ruminations that faithfully reflect Percy’s own concerns—a clumsy enough device for injecting philosophical reflection into a novel. In a letter to Donald Barthelme, Percy admitted that he tended to “Platonize,” that is, to convey ideas rather than character and action through a living narrative. “Plato is killing us,” he said, “Back to things … that’s my motto from here on (a lesson of the Incarnation after all)!’ This resolution, sincere though it may have been, remained largely unfulfilled.
The simple truth is that Percy was more interested in philosophy than in plot and character. The meaning is conveyed not dramatically, but discursively. And the discourses, it must be said, are often quite fine. Needless to say, this is no minor fault in the novelist, especially one who was out to destroy the “theoretical mindset” by highlighting the particularity and the concreteness of human existence.
There is less irony in this fault than may appear at first glance. If Percy was such an acute critic of the “theoretical mindset,” it is because he had first experienced in himself what he saw as endemic in society. He criticized it in his writings. He recognized its incompatibility with Christianity. Indeed, his decisions to convert to Catholicism, to marry, to settle down, and to live in Louisiana were all declarations of war against it, but he never completely shook it. His brilliance as a diagnostician and critic came in part from his firsthand familiarity with the disease.
Inevitably this affected his writing. One cannot change one’s sensibility as swiftly as one changes one’s creed (Percy was, after all, over 30 years old when he became a Catholic), and, as Flannery O’Connor has tellingly observed, “one writes with one’s sensibility.” As a result, Percy’s legacy could never be other than an inveterate theorist’s critique of the theoretical mindset. From an artistic point of view, this liability afflicts only Percy’s novels, not his essays, where theory is quite at home, and where, in fact, Percy often wields it with admirable lightness.
Percy’s successes and failures as a “propagandist” are also inextricably intertwined. Both stem from his use of what he called “guile and every low-handed trick in the book.” Frequently, he presents his best arguments in the form of questions to which, we know, he firmly believed he had the answer. Or he puts his own ideas in the mouths of apparently comical crackpots or cranks. And when, on occasion, he is direct, it is often with that flip, kick-in-the-ass tone that leaves the innocent reader wondering just how seriously Percy should be taken.
Muted Faith
Surely, a good part of Percy’s success is owed to Stanley Kauffmann, who convinced him to play down the “evangelical” Catholicism of The Moviegoer—at the cost, it is true, of leaving the novel far more ambiguous than Percy intended it to be. However, it is clear in retrospect that, if it hadn’t been misunderstood, it would never have won the National Book Award. The “cool” ambiguity of The Moviegoer was Percy’s ticket to an intellectual world where, on most days, your average neo-Thomist propagandist would be welcome only to leave.
It was Percy’s outrageously comic, kick-in-the-ass tone and his “bad Catholic” hero that allowed him to get away with writing what discerning critics like Wilfred Sheed recognized as “a blatantly theological novel,” Love in the Ruins, in the America of 1971.
Yet Percy knew well that his guilefulness entailed a risk: miscomprehension. The Moviegoer, he said:
was almost universally misunderstood. Its most enthusiastic admirers were precisely those people who misunderstood it worst. It was received as a novel of “despair”—not a novel about despair but as a novel ending in despair. Even though I left broad hints that such was not at all the case.
If there are some readers who misread Percy’s novels, who find him depressing, obscure, or dirty-minded, it may be that he has his own “guile”—his desire not to appear “edifying”—to thank for it. Some would claim that, in his portrayal of the “eroticization” of society, to which he was of course bitterly opposed, Percy ended up contributing a bit to it himself. And while most educated Catholics will have no trouble appreciating Percy’s descriptive restraint, strongly moral point of view, and (usually) satirical intent when dealing with sexual misbehavior, his novels are not for everyone and were obviously written with adult readers in mind.
To judge Percy simply as a novelist or “literary” figure is to make a fundamental mistake about the nature of his game and, consequently, to miss the true nature of his triumph. Judged properly—as a writer, as a “moralist,” as a Catholic pathologist of the modern soul— Percy may be said to have pitched a near-perfect game. What’s more, his strategy of writing novels to disseminate the ideas in his essays succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. Not only did people encounter, as he had planned, plenty of ideas in the novels, but his success as a novelist drew attention to the essays themselves, which were eventually published in book form, to great acclaim and wide readership, 20 years after they’d been written.
It is probably too soon to judge Percy as a thinker, partly because his ambitious plan to bring together Scholastic metaphysics, Peirce’s semiotics, and Christian apologetics in a book tentatively entitled Contra Gentiles remains unfinished. It definitely sounded promising.
Back in the ’40s, Percy had changed the course of his entire life and set out—with intentions of a moralist and propagandist—to be “a writer.” And he became an excellent one. He wanted to tell people what to believe and do in order to live. In a variety of ways, he did that, too. And judging from the number of people who have found the Faith or had it strengthened by reading Percy, quite a few folks listened.