Conversations with Walker Percy.

Conversations with Walker Percy 

'A GOOD DEAL of my energy as a novelist comes from malice," Walker Percy confeses baldly in one of the interviews in this collection. Sometimes the malice is ill-mastered--after President Kennedy's assassination he reeled off two or three hundred pages of a novel only to discard them later. But Percy's malevolence has also produced two seminal works of non-fiction as well as one of the more significant and consummately funny bodies of contemporary fiction.

Even longtime Percy followers will find valuable bits of information in this volume, which claims to contain all the interviews Percy has given since 1961 (for some reason his appearance on Firing Line in 1972 is not included). Its major value, however, is as testimony to Percy's dogged determination over the years to understand and find solutions for the modern predicament.

When he gave up the practice of medicine in the early 1940s after a bout with tuberculosis, Percy spent more than a decade reading philosophy, literature, and linguistic theory without publishing a single word. At the age of 38 he submitted a short, tentative philosophical essay to Thought. A couple of others followed, but he soon realized that almost no one, not even many other scholars, paid much attention to such articles. In 1961, at age 45, older even than Stendhal was when he wrote Armance (and Stendhal had the excuse of having spent quite a few years fooling with Napoleon), Percy published his first novel, The Moviegoer, which won him the National Book Award and national attention.

Broadly speaking, Percy writes philosophical novels, a genre little regarded in this country and fraught with many perils. Many such works are little more than fictionalized tracts or temptations for the author to give in to various modes of inauthenticity. Jean-Paul Sartre is the best-known modern practitioner of this art form, and Percy, while admiring some of Sartre's novels, pokes fun at the later Sartre, Soviet apologist and pontificating salaud, the very kind of bum Sartre himself used to rail at.

Percy, too, is an existentialist writer of a sort. But where Sartre's existentialism posited a dismal, nauseating world without God in which man was a "useless passion," Percy has had a quite useful passion for diagnosing our current abstract furies.

His typical protagonist is--like the author himself--a Southerner without immediate financial worries. The best in art, science, and culture is available to him. But he is profoundly dissatisfied with his life, comes to himself, and undertakes a search--at times hilarious, at times half-mad--that leads to a n ambiguous enlightenment. Unlike the philosophical novelists on the Continent, Percy appreciates science, but he also recognizes that a widespread scientism has raised serious difficulties for the human being attempting to understand himself. In a prosperous modern society where many are engaged in a self-defeating "quest for the self," Percy seems to be asking, What do men live by?

Though the energy and dark wit in Percy's writing and his long silent apprenticeship always have struck me as evidence of some hidden passion, I was surprised at how anxious to talk Percy appears in these conversations. Often described as a shy man, he is markedly obsessed with getting across his message, especially in the interviews from the last five years or so. In one place he's complaining about how few serious readers there are any more and how, if he had it to do over again, he might have become a filmmaker--at least people still go to movie theaters. In another place he's describing a book he's working on, ambitiously titled Novum Organum, which is going to be a new "radical science" of man based on Percy's theory of language.

Many reviewers, including the present writer (NR, Sept. 16, 1983) noticed the apparent obsession in certain passages of Lost in the Cosmos, his second book of nonfiction. This quality seems all the more odd in that Percy's most recent novel, The Second Coming (1980), had ended with a real reconciliation. In it Will Barrett finds a way to live happily with a wife and comes, by a crazy path, upon religious belief. "The first unalienated novel since Tolstoy," Percy says of it in one interview. On the other hand, The Second Coming was in many ways not as convincing as several earlier Percy novels--hence, perhaps, the growing pressure to find another outlet.

The usual revelations about the writer's work habits emerge in these interviews. To one interviewer, Percy describes his "little knack for writing" as being characterized by "theological, sexual, and demonic elements." But my favorite anecdote is Percy's admission that he often does not know if he's been working well, but "My wife tells me she always knows when I've had a good morning because I come out of that room smelling bad."

The best of these very uneven interviews is a piece Percy wrote in 1977 for Esquire, "Questions They Never Asked Me, So He Asked Them Himself." After putting some tired questions to himself about the chimerical "New South," he concedes that two decades of government intervention have produced changes: "It was easier for the South to go along than resist. After all, we tried that once. Anyhow, as Earl Long used to say, the Feds have the bomb now."

Another ipse-dixit, this time about how he can remain a Catholic in the face of all the modern alternatives to traditional religion: "This life is much too much trouble, far too strange, to arrive at the end of it and then to be asked what you make of it a nd have to answer: 'Scientific humanism.' That won't do. A poor show. Life is a mystery, love is a delight. Therefore I take it as axiomatic that one should settle for nothing less than the infinite mystery and the infinite delight, i.e., God. In fact I demand it. I refuse to settle for anything less."

That, maybe better than anything else, characterizes Percy's literary and philosophical career as well, a passionate refusal to settle for the mundane. If you are already a fan of Percy's, these conversations will be a delightful glimpse into the life of a brilliant and fascinating man. If you don't already know Percy, read this book as an introduction to his work. But hold onto your hat. You're in for quite a ride.