PERCY, Walker

(b. 28 May 1916 in Birmingham, Alabama; d. 10 May 1990 in Covington, Louisiana), physician and author whose novels of alienation and society made him one of the few authors to integrate Christian faith with a coherent view of modern science and technology.

Percy was born into a wealthy family. His father, LeRoy Pratt Percy, a lawyer, committed suicide in 1927; two years later his mother, Martha Susan (Phinizy), was killed in an auto accident. His father's first cousin, William Alexander Percy, took Percy and two of his brothers to live in Greenville, Mississippi.

By high school Percy was writing poetry, and at Greenville High School he wrote a column for the school's newspaper. He majored in chemistry at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, graduating with a B.A. in 1937. He next attended the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University. After receiving his M.D. in 1941 he interned at New York City's Bellevue Hospital, where he worked as a pathologist.

Dealing with cadavers of homeless people who had died of various diseases, he himself caught pulmonary tuberculosis. He spent two years in Trudeau Sanitarium in Saranac Lake, New York, and had further recovery time in Wallingford, Connecticut. He found mental exercise in reading the works of the philosophers Søren Kierkegaard and Martin Heidegger, the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and the French existentialists Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. These writers stirred in him a process of thought that included the existentialist conundrum of how an individual person may find meaning in an impersonal universe.

Preoccupied by his studies of philosophy and his own efforts to penetrate the mysteries of the human condition, he moved to Sewanee, Tennessee, to think. There he met Mary Bernice "Bunt" Townsend, whom he married on 7 November 1946. They moved to New Orleans. By 1947 he had concluded that, while society may be corrupt and without meaning, the universe had meaning in the presence of a personal God, and that year he converted to Roman Catholicism. After his conversion Percy moved to Covington, Louisiana, where he spent the rest of his life. There he and Bunt brought up their two daughters.

During the 1950s Percy expressed his pondering of the human condition in articles about philosophy and psychiatry. Some of these essays were reprinted in Percy's collection The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other (1975). Alienation is an important theme running through these pieces; this idea preoccupied him through the 1960s.

In 1961 Knopf published Percy's novel The Moviegoer, which attracted only modest attention from reviewers, partly because the publisher thought it was a minor work and did not publicize it extensively. The Moviegoer did not win its ultimate place as an American masterpiece easily. Percy had originally submitted a long manuscript about a southern man who was alienated from both southern culture and American society as a whole. Instead of giving up on it, the Knopf editor Stanley Kauffmann, who thought only about forty pages of it were worth publishing, told Percy to revise it. It went through four drafts before Kauffmann found it satisfactory. Both the editors of Knopf and Percy himself were surprised when The Moviegoer received the 1962 National Book Award for fiction and thereafter sold well. The novel eventually became the work on which Percy's reputation primarily rested.

The novel's main character is Binx Bolling, a stockbroker obsessed with the valuelessness of his own life. To Binx, everyone he knows is "dead," even if they do not realize it. He is a "moviegoer" because motion pictures offer him solace, structure, and meaning. This parallels Percy's own experiences while working in New York; he had spent much of his free time in movie theaters. Binx is alienated from everyone, from himself, and from God, and he represents a condition that transcends the era of technology's alienation from self and culture; in the worldview of The Moviegoer, Binx represents the perpetual state of humanity: fallen because of original sin. In The Moviegoer and subsequent novels the central solution to alienation is to reconcile oneself with God; human society has always alienated people, even if they do not realize it, but societies are inherently corrupt and will always fail to fulfill human aspirations, even America's culture of liberty.

In the fiction of Sartre and Camus, Percy had seen a way to pull together the ideas about philosophy he had explored in the 1950s by expressing them in fiction, and there are hints of Camus's Stranger in The Moviegoer. In Camus's novel the protagonist Meursault is alienated by a society that denies his individuality; like Binx, he finds himself set apart, as if observing events around him from an objective distance, as if not truly participating. Whereas The Stranger ends with Meursault refusing to believe in life beyond death, Percy takes his themes in another direction, insisting that there is a life after death and that, through God, a person can have the individual identity society would otherwise deny him or her, as it is denied for Camus's Meursault.

The Moviegoer reflects Percy's effort to present Kierkegaard's ideas and his own about how religious faith can apply to people who are alienated by a society that cannot meet their needs for fulfillment and happiness. The ending of the novel is difficult to understand because it carries Binx from his existentialist misery to his mother's Roman Catholic faith. What Percy seemed to hope to achieve was a revelation in which Binx as an Everyman figure discovers that, in a relationship with God, the imperfections in his personality and his alienation cease to matter because he has transcended the creations of humanity and placed himself philosophically and spiritually in the domain of God's perfection.

During the 1960s Percy was impressed by the civil rights movement, as were many American writers. His view seems to have been that slavery had denied the American South the fullness of God's blessing. "One little test: here's a helpless man in Africa, all you have to do is not violate him. That's all," he wrote. "One little test: you flunk!" (Dr. Thomas More, in Love in the Ruins [1971]). This may be one reason for the alienation Percy's characters feel as they try to reconcile their upbringing in the Old South with their experiences in the new America.

On the basis of his one published novel Percy became a celebrity, and his next novel, The Last Gentleman (1966), was greeted with much serious critical attention as well as a large audience. The events in The Last Gentleman occur amid the racial upheavals of the 1960s, with protagonist Williston Bibb Barrett ("Will") moving through the conflict while trying to understand what he sees and relate it to his personal life. He falls in love with Kitty McVaught and moves with her to Alabama, where he is to tutor her sixteen-year-old brother Jamie, while trying not to run afoul of her dysfunctional, socially alienated family. The book is religious in the sense that Will senses God's hand in events; through his belief in God he finally perceives his own unique identity, which allows him to feel, absorb, and comprehend the craziness taking place around him rather than just observing without understanding. The ending is meant to be a triumph, a turning of literary convention on its head by having the dying Jamie baptized: the death is sad, but Jamie's conversion and blessing mean that he has triumphed in the great conflict of good versus evil and has, by dying, transcended death.

The Last Gentleman did not disappoint many readers, even though it lacked the revolutionary punch of its predecessor. Will's search for his identity, complicated by bouts of amnesia, was the means whereby Percy looked at the American South of the 1960s while placing events in the larger context of the United States as a whole. Love seems to be crucial in the story of death and hardship, and the novel, more overtly than The Moviegoer, examines religion in a society that is without life or hope. In the end, death becomes grace.

Will Barrett reappeared in The Second Coming (1980), a novel in which the ideas are tough and demanding. Unsatisfied with what he has experienced, Will decides to force God to manifest Himself in person. It seems that Will has failed to understand the lessons of faith, although he embodies the doubts about God that logically arise out of the modern world.

Percy proved remarkably consistent in the quality of his work. Each subsequent novel seemed worthy of its predecessors. In Love in the Ruins (1971), alienation is again explored, although, curiously, the main character seems fine, and it is society that seems alienated from him. In Lancelot (1977), The Second Coming (1980), and The Thanatos Syndrome (1987), alienation is still present, but the narratives involve ideas about how society may be improved, with the understanding that full redemption may not be possible.

Percy died of cancer at the age of seventy-three and is buried in the Saint Joseph Abbey Cemetery (Saint Tammany Parish) in Covington. He is considered the greatest southern writer of the second half of the twentieth century, but he transcended southern literature by creating novels that spoke to the fundamental human condition that crosses cultures and ages, offering answers for the problem of individual human needs that conflict with social demands.

Percy's Signposts in a Strange Land (1991) is a posthumous gathering of essays that provide information about his early life and the inspirations for his novels. A biography of Percy is Patrick H. Samway, Walker Percy: A Life (1997); Samway also discusses Percy's search for a home in his fiction and the role Covington, Louisiana, played in his creative development in "Walker Percy's Homeward Journey," America 170, no. 17 (14 May 1994): 16–19. Edward J. Dupuy examines the relationship between Percy's life and his fiction in Autobiography in Walker Percy: Repetition, Recovery and Redemption (1996). In the obituary "Walker Percy, RIP," in National Review 42, no. 11 (11 June 1990): 17–18, Ben C. Toledano argues that Percy's work is mostly misunderstood because people have failed to recognize the depth of its themes.

Kirk H. Beetz