Pilgrim in the Ruins: A Life of Walker Percy.

Two years ago this past May Walker Percy died at home in Covington, Louisiana, his departure still an aching absence for many readers who regarded his six novels and two books of philosophical reflection as something a good deal more than a major contribution to American letters and to late twentieth-century moral inquiry--as a singular voice, maybe, crying in the wilderness, a voice that helped lots of us begin to come to our senses, and at least try to find our bearings. No book, of course, can bring back such an important presence (what Percy had become by the 1980s) but it is a tribute to Jay Tolson's biography of him, the first that encompasses the entire span of his life, that Percy does, indeed, come alive on the printed page, and as a result, I suspect, many of his fans will be immensely grateful.

At first glance Percy's life (in contrast to his work) does not seem to lend itself to the kind of sustained presentation Tolson offers: half a thousand pages of exposition that tell of a writer who was a resolutely private man, who lived a decent, faithful, monogamous life, who was a loving, conscientious father and grandfather, who kept loyal, affectionate contact with his two brothers and their families, who didn't travel far and wide, or welcome attention when it arrived, and who had no inclination to be a performer when he did appear before the public. Still, as Jane Austen knew, long before there were disciplines called psychology or psychiatry, the mind has its own compelling dramatic life, as do families--and Percy's personal background, not to mention his idiosyncratic, highly charged and penetrating moral sensibility, enable his biographer. a clear, vigorous writer, to more than hold the reader's attention throughout. No one has explored Percy's early life with the thoroughness and knowing subtlety Tolson has managed. He conveys an entire world--the aristocratic Percys, whose roots go back to eighteenth-century America, and whose various members came to mean so much to the life of states such as Mississippi and Alabama. Early chapters of this book provide an instructive social history of the so-called New South--the effort of a region' s leaders to pick up the pieces after the Civil War, turn away from the ghosts and obsessions of the past in favor of a fresh start for a region all too recently wasted, defeated. Walker Percy's grandfather (they bore the same name) was one of the leading citizens of Birmingham, Alabama--a lawyer of great distinction who committed suicide. Percy's father, LeRoy (he, too was a prominent Birmingham lawyer) also committed suicide. "Dark funks ran deep in the Percy family line," we are told--and then a discussion of the psychology of depression as it connects with a regional culture strong on obligation and even self-sacrifice as a code of honor for certain distinguished families. Walker Percy, needless to say, would struggle all his life with that matter of melancholy and its consequences, not only in connection with his father, who shot himself fatally when his son was only thirteen, but his mother, who was killed in an automobile accident when he was not yet sixteen-she had reportedly been somewhat agitated as she drove, her youngest son, Phin, with her, and there was speculation that she may have inadvertently had a hand in her own demise. (The car turned off a country road, plunged into water, and the boy escaped, to live.)

Percy's mother, Martha Susan Phinizy, came from an eminent and wealthy Georgia family, and she had taken her three sons to visit her dead husband's cousin, the well-known lawyer, poet, and plantation owner, William Alexander Percy, perhaps now best remembered for his memoir Lanterns on the Levee ( 1941 ). A bachelor, who lived in Greenville, Mississippi, he adopted Walker, his two younger brothers, LeRoy and Phin, when they became orphans. Walker, therefore, ended up attending Greenville High School, then went to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and having chosen a career in medicine, to Columbia' s College of Physicians and Surgeons. Upon becoming a physician, he began a residency in pathology at New York City's Bellevue Hospital, only to fall victim to tuberculosis (1942) before there were antibiotics to tame it. He spent several years in two sanatoria (remissions followed by exacerbations of the disease were notoriously common) and ultimately returned South (1946), where he would soon enough marry Mary Bernice Townsend (Bunt), and settle into a New Orleans (then Covington) life as a husband, a father of two daughters, and a writer, first of philosophical essays, then of fiction.

This brief summary, needless to say, does scant justice to what is, really, an extraordinary family saga: much-blessed people--talented, well-to-do, well-educated, morally superior--struggled against a dangerous mix of moodiness and turmoil that constantly threatened disaster around any comer. No wonder Walker Percy sought out psychoanalysis when he was in medical school, and maintained a lifelong interest in psychiatry, its possibilities and its limitations. Still, he was not destined to become yet another psychological casualty. In fact, his life and the lives of his two brothers ought to give pause to some of us who are preoccupied with the various determinisms (whether of nature or nurture) that supposedly bear down so hard on us. We have Jay Tolson's book because of those brothers, witnesses as children to such tragedy, descendants of a proud family that also suffered so much; one became a writer of great distinction; and the other two would themselves be successful, LeRoy a plantation owner (a most progressive one, too, and a leader during the 1960s among Mississippi white gentry in the struggle against segregation), and Phin a Tulane University law professor. Moreover, all three were to live eminently solid and sound lives--their families worthy morally, culturally, of the outstanding heritage built and handed them by their ancestors.

No question, Walker Percy would connect some of that outcome to his conversion to Cathohcism, at the age of thirty-one, a major event in his life, perhaps its turning point, though he would be the last one to think of such a matter psychiatrically: the church as a bulwark to someone emotionally endangered. (His brothers, moreover, have done fine without any special embrace of religion.) He became the person we know, not because of his personal troubles, or his response to those troubles, but because he possessed a brilliant mind, for one thing, and too, a mind exceptionally talented, early on, at social observation and narration. He was, as well, even as a child, especially watchful, able not only to take notice of what people were doing, but figure out the why's of their behavior, and too, the implications. In college he was coming up with astute cultural criticism, and doing so with intelligence, charm, humor--and so it would be throughout his writing life: a wry, ironic sensibility rendered in accessible, inviting prose. Not least, he was left with money by his biological parents and his adoptive father, and thereby he could become for a few years an apprentice storyteller. (He wrote two novels that went unpublished before he set to work on The Moviegoer.)

As always in life, luck was also helpful to Percy at certain important moments. His wife, Bunt, is an exceptionally strong person; she was an utter mainstay of his life. Moreover, he himself sometimes wondered how rigorously he'd have pursued his later career as a novelist if A.J. Liebling hadn't stumbled onto The Moviegoer (and read it, and loved it) while in Louisiana doing a New Yorker profile of Earl Long, then governor of the state. Jean Stafford, Liebling's wife, was one of the National Book Award judges, and no doubt had a significant role as an advocate of the novel with her fellow critics. Percy's publisher, Knopf, had hardly pressed the novel before the public, and it sold few copies--until in 1962, a big surprise, the award went to The Moviegoer. Percy was forty-four when that first novel was published, and had been publishing essays in various periodicals (including this one) for a number of years--and might well have been tempted to settle for the satisfactions of such writing if he hadn't been given acknowledgment and sanction for such a major effort on his part. Even so, as this biography keeps reminding us, he was constantly tempted by the philosophical side of himself. He had an abiding interest in the origin of language; he had a skepticism with respect to the secular world's various fads and idolatries--a skepticism he much wanted to voice; and very important, he had a moral passion that prompted a continuing and powerful search for meaning, for principles with respect to how this life ought be lived.

Again and again Percy spoke with humility about his intellectual life; he would remind a visitor that he had been a premed student, then learned to be a doctor-- hence many missed opportunities to study literature and history. Yet, there he was, for decades, writing about complex philosophical questions both as essayist and as novelist. In fact, he was not only exceptionally bright and thoughtful, he was exceedingly learned--all somewhat concealed by an artfully modest, self-effacing, even self-mocking manner, and very important, by his preference for listening rather than lecturing or declaiming or pontificating, those habits of talkative folk. He was an ironist, a marvelously funny satirist, but also an intensely serious person who never stopped asking the biggest questions--as in the Gauguin triptych: Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?--and who was determined to engage his readers in a similar line of inquiry through every writer's strategy known to him.

Throughout this book Tolson shows great respect and affection for his subject, while reserving the right to stand back, offer a demur here, a disagreement there--a fine tone. Tolson as a chronicler is wonderfully uninterested in the dreary psychological and sociological banalities that inform so much biographical writing these days. But then, we should expect no less from an admirer of Percy's, a careful, appreciative reader of his, hence a student of someone who, early on, took the measure of pretentious twentieth-century academic thinking and scorned it mightily, heartily. Whereas a . number of earlier books on Percy have been primarily intellectual biographies, this one offers a year-by-year account of an unfolding life--with stops now and then, for literary analysis, authorial comment. The narrative is enriched by a treasure of marvelously instructive and entertaining letters between Percy and his lifelong friend and fellow writer, Shelby Foote--indeed, their correspondence ought to be separately published.

I read the book slowly, savoring the details, immersing myself, yet again, in the story of a person I've much respected, deeply admired for over thirty years. I hated to come to the end, even as I still can't quite believe that the wonderfully knowing and funny man--his ideas always so provocative, suggestive, edifying, whom Jay Tolson evokes so sensitively and fully--won' t, soon, be sending readers yet another story, or disarmingly wry and engaging essay. He was, indeed, a pilgrim-and one sent here to grace us, to help us as we struggle to find ourselves amidst the moral and spiritual ruins of this fast-ending millennium. Surely, the good Lord now holds him close---even as for many of us left behind, life is far lonelier, far less interesting.

ROBERT COLES is a child psychiatrist who teaches at Harvard, and the author, most recently, of The Spiritual Life of Children. His book Walker Percy: An American Search was published in 1979.