PERCY, WALKER

Novelist, essayist; b. Birmingham, Alabama, May 28, 1916; d. Covington, Louisiana, May 10, 1990. After the suicide of his father, LeRoy Pratt, in 1929 and the death of his mother, Martha Susan Phinizy, in an automobile accident in 1932, Percy and his two younger brothers were adopted by their father's cousin, William Alexander Percy, the lawyer-planter-poet of Greenville, Mississippi. Percy always respected "Uncle Will" for his noble ideals and romantic appreciation of the arts, but he ultimately rejected the mournful stoicism to which his relative gave classic expression in his memoirs, Lanterns on the Levee (1941).

Percy turned away from such a melancholy heritage by pursuing a secular faith in science. He majored in chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and graduated from Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1941. Then Percy faced what he called "the cataclysm." He contracted tuberculosis while interning at Bellevue Hospital in 1942 and confronted a spiritual crisis. During a two-year rest cure at Trudeau Sanatorium (which formed the basis of an early, unpublished novel, "The Gramercy Winner"), Percy read his way to better health. He learned from the work of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, and Mann, but found the most salutary understanding of his own dilemma through discovering the religious philosophy of Soren kierkegaard. He discovered that science could speak about humanity in the abstract, yet it could say nothing about what it meant to live and die as Walker Percy. In seeking to appreciate that mystery, Percy discontinued his career in medicine, married Mary Bernice Townsend in 1946, converted to Catholicism in 1947, and began writing fiction as well as scholarly articles about language and Southern culture.

Although Percy published a collection of his essays on semiotics (The Message in the Bottle, 1975) and a parody of self-help books for an age near semiotic catastrophe (Lost in the Cosmos, 1983), he made his most distinctive contribution in his novels about quests to understand the perplexing signs of the spiritual life. Percy's fictional Southerners live out their faith through sharing in the same kind of despair, wandering, discovery, and return to daily work that marked the story of his own religious search. The Moviegoer (1961), for which he won the National Book Award, chronicles how Binx Bolling is drawn to stoicism, scientism, and aestheticism before accepting the Catholicism of his mother's family as a way of placing himself in the everyday world. As Percy shifted from such wryly understated comedy to the picaresque adventures of The Last Gentleman (1966) and the satiric science fiction of Love in the Ruins (1971), he portrayed religious faith as a scandalous alternative to lives and worlds that increasingly seemed on the verge of disaster.

The crisis of modern life exploded in a vitriolic tour de force, Lancelot (1977). While Percy's knight of the unholy grail tells of how he pursued the mystery of his wife's infidelity, he reveals his own more horrifying faithlessness as a vengeful champion of a morallypurified America. After such a bleak apocalypse, Percy wrote his most joyous novel, The Second Coming (1980), in which Will Barrett of The Last Gentleman discovers that his romance with Allie Huger may be the unexpected sign of God's presence in his life. Percy looked to the future with greater anxiety in The Thanatos Syndrome (1987). As Dr. Tom More of Love in the Ruins investigates a mysterious plague, he learns to oppose the scapegoating and social engineering that seek to undermine a semiotic understanding of humanity.

Percy repeatedly maintained that fiction must not preach, yet he viewed his Catholic faith as central to his artistic vision. The Judaeo-Christian understanding of humanity as fallen but engaged in a search deepened his conviction that the novel should focus on people in trouble in particular places, moments, and predicaments. Percy's fiction embodied this faith through its rootedness in the physical world, commitment to historical time, and exploration of spiritual wayfaring. Renouncing the fatalism of the Old South and the naive optimism of the New South, Percy's seekers may come to themselves and to others as they discover how they may finally come to God.

While Percy has been criticized for his moralizing, muddled plot details, and reductive portrayals of women, he is recognized as one of the pre-eminent novelists of the South. His writing combines philosophical depth, linguistic resourcefulness, wide-ranging comedy, clinical powers of observation, and trenchant social criticism as it explores the religious vision of a constant seeker. Percy's fiction contemplates not only the sadness and craziness of humanity's spiritual isolation but also the surprising possibility of overcoming that aloneness by living with others under God.

Bibliography: w. r. allen, Walker Percy: A Southern Wayfarer (Jackson, MS 1986). r. h. brinkmeyer, Three Catholic Writers of the Modern South (Jackson, MS 1985). g. m. ciuba, Walker Percy: Books of Revelations (Athens, GA 1991). r. coles, Walker Percy: An American Search (Boston 1978). j. e. hardy, The Fiction of Walker Percy (Urbana, IL 1987). l. w. hobson, Understanding Walker Percy (Columbia, SC 1988). m. d. howland, The Gift of the Other (Pittsburgh 1990). l. a. lawson, Following Percy (Troy, NY 1988). m. luschei, The Sovereign Wayfarer (Baton Rouge 1972). p. l. poteat, Walker Percy and the Old Modern Age (Baton Rouge 1985). p. samway, ed., Signposts in a Strange Land (New York 1991). t. r. spivey, The Writer as Shaman (Macon 1986). j. taylor, In Search of Self (Cambridge, MA 1986). j. tolson, Pilgrim in the Ruins (New York 1992). r. c. wood, The Comedy of Redemption (Notre Dame 1988).

[g. m. ciuba]