Perhaps one of the few people ever able to dramatize metaphysics, Walker Percy was one those quiet people blessed with the ability to provoke thought and evoke change.
Born in 1916 in Birmingham, Percy choose Covington as his home in 1947, where he died 13 years ago. Percy wrote six novels, most at his home on the banks of the River of Mist, some great but all substantial, even momentous in thought, content, and style.
In many ways Percy was a tortured soul. His father committed suicide when Percy was 13, as did Percy’s grandfather, great-great-great grandfather, several uncles, and some historians believe, his mother who died in a car accident shortly after the death of his father.
Perhaps it was a young author’s suicide that played on Percy’s emotions that he agreed to the pleas of a grieving mother’s that Percy read her son’s final work-the volume would become the most lucrative collegiate press book ever published, John Kennedy Toole’s “A Confederacy of Dunces,” printed by LSU Press in 1980.
Gripped by the stoicism and tradition of an aristocratic Southern family, merely choosing to live was a battle to be fought each day for Percy, both in life and through his literature. A Christian existentialist, Percy and his wife converted to Catholicism in 1947. Percy has been named along with fellow southern writer Flannery O’Connor as one of the most influential Catholic writers of the century.
A student of Kierkegaard, Sartre, Camus, and Marcel, Percy subtly interlaced all of his novels with philosophical thought. Percy’s first novel “The Moviegoer”, which won the 1962 National Book Award, brilliantly converted Kierkegaard’s “Leap of Faith” into the life of a New Orleans stock-broker plagued by malaise.
The adopted son of Louisiana, Percy usually avoided but sometimes satirized the South and its clichés but yet still defended them. Northerners’ hypocritical view of the South as a bastion of racism, sexism intolerance, and ignorance annoyed Percy, a social liberal, which led to a hysterical, quintessential Percy passage replying to John Howard Griffin’s “Black Like Me.”
Percy realized and believed in the beauty of the South but was never disillusioned by Spanish moss hanging on huge oak trees lining the way to a huge columned mansion. Instead, Percy fought those images, such as in “Lancelot”, where the main character is only liberated though such Southern symbols’ destruction.
Percy loved the South, but chose to reject its stifling intensity, much different than his best friend and Civil War historian Shelby Foote and the man he watched playing tennis with his uncle as a child, William Faulkner.
Percy mocked the subdivisions of the New South but realized the importance of progress, especially of education.
Like Robert Penn Warren, Walker Percy is one of the many talented authors graced and enchanted classrooms at LSU.
Walker Percy wrote an article in 1985 reassuring Louisiana of her talents and resources, urging us to go forth from the victimization corrupt state government has relegated the citizens of this state to for so many years and turn our time, energy and money to public education.
It’s such a joy to know Louisiana agreed with the man once called the “moralist of the Deep South.”
Louisiana is on the eve of electing a governor that is either a woman or an Asian. How far we have come. It’s such a shame that one of the state’s greatest writers and defenders is not alive to make fun of it.
He would be proud.