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[percy-l] The Last Gentleman Discussion/Chapter 2.6-Chapter 3.3
- From: Charles Lowry <lowry.charles AT gmail.com>
- To: "Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion" <percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org>
- Subject: [percy-l] The Last Gentleman Discussion/Chapter 2.6-Chapter 3.3
- Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2025 13:49:20 -0400
This post covers this week’s reading of Chapter 2.6-Chapter 3.3.
Those sections are pp. 72-142 in the FSG edition, pp. 74-149 in the Picador paperback edition.
Those sections are pp. 72-142 in the FSG edition, pp. 74-149 in the Picador paperback edition.
For the sake of convenience and as an aid to my own distracted habits--how I envy Rhonda's clear organization, at once elegant and precise--I have divided this part of the novel into four sections, and I follow with a few thoughts or questions or starting points for discussion. In your reactions and responses, do not feel as though you are confined to my divisions or my starting points. I am no academic; I am in fact that most dreaded of creatures, the general reader. That is to say that in my case I read, generally fiction, for insight into "...the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed--love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice."
Chapter 2.6-2.8. pp. 74-87 [These page numbers, and all following page numbers, refer to the Picador paperback edition.] Will goes to Jamie's hospital room for Jamie's and Kitty's birthday party. I wanted to mention two things here.
* One of the important things that happens here is the mutual decision of Mr. Vaught and Will that Will should come to work for the family. I was intrigued by the motivation of the two parties. Mr. Vaught's motivation was clear enough: Will was "one of them." His family in Mississippi was known to the Vaught family, The kicker was Mr. Vaught's discovery that Jamie was a Princeton man (there were, I note, no Princeton women until 1969, three years after this novel was published) and an Episcopalian: "Man, there's nothing wrong with you." (p. 78) Rita subsequently reinforces this mindset later when she describes her father-in-law as a man who flits from enthusiasm to enthusiasm. It struck me, by the way, that these characters such as Mr. Vaught (and, for instance, Mr, Sartalamaccia, the property developer who buys Binx's fishing club in The Moviegoer) feel free to revel in their philosophy and their memories, but they always retain an underlying, self-interested pragmatism: "Right now the main thing we need is somebody to help me drive home." (p. 80) If though that accounts for Mr. Vaught's motive in offering the job, what accounts for Jamie's decision to accept it? I think (I may be wrong!) that Percy gives us a broad hint in the paragraph following Mr. Vaught's discovery that Will was a Princeton man and an Episcopalian: Recall Mr. Vaught's reaction: "Man, there's nothing wrong with you." What kind of reaction does that evoke? "But if there is nothing with me, he thought, then there is something wrong with the world. And if there is nothing wrong with the world, then I have wasted my life and that is the worst mistake of all." Is that Will's motivation to accept the job? To find out if he is the one who has gone wrong, or if it is the world. It is, in any case, the most Percyesque of dilemmas, as anyone who has ever thrilled to Binx's battle with everydayness will recall. But am I wrong? Do I overstress this insight of Will's about himself and the world as motivation to leave behind Macy's and the YMCA and the BMT? Does Kitty fit into his motivation?
* My second thought about this section is more vexatious and troublesome, in that it involves what we might think of as the "Tyree vocabulary" question. (pp.84-85) This observation is partly about the book and partly about us. Do I surmise correctly that every one of us squirmed as we read those couple pages? Did we all think of Mark Twain and Flannery O'Connor and others? Is there any contemporary approach to this situation that makes sense? My exposure to this kind of impact has come largely from friends. I recall attending a conference with a black colleague at Stone Mountain. The direction finder in the rental car was set to audio, and I'll never forget his cringe at, "In one hundred yards turn left onto Stonewall Jackson Boulevard." How do we measure the values of historical accuracy and common human decency? If this novel were published fifty years later, 2016 instead of 1966, what would these two pages look like?
Chapter 2.9-2.14 (end of chapter), pp. 87-123. Will prepares for the voyage with the Vaughts, learns about the family and develops his relationships with Kitty and Rita. I want to mention two things here, though if they are not the two things you think should be mentioned, feel free to speak up.
* I confess that I am puzzled and confused by the incident with the street preacher. (pp. 98-101) The only De Ridder Street Google and I could find was in South Africa, yet in this episode it clearly intersects with Houston Street, obviously a Manhattan thoroughfare but problematic in itself, in that it is three miles south of Central Park, which does in fact have a BMT station at its edge. Every time I get to thinking that I am an accomplished reader, this passage or certain passages in The Sound and the Fury or Ulysses come to mind, and I hope I am not alone in being unable to figure out what Percy or Faulkner or Joyce is up to. Can somebody help me?
* Although in our demented days of internet pornography it barely deserves the title of sex scene, the encounter in the park between Will and Kitty is of interest. I was struck (not alone here, I'm sure) by the similarity between this tryst and the Pullman adventure of Kate and Binx in The Moviegoer, the site complications adding to the uncertainty, the lust compromised by the psychology. As an aside, let me follow up briefly on Rhonda's and Janet's observations about Rita and Shakespeare. If Kitty and Will are Kate and Binx, Rita is no Aunt Emily. I think she may be closer to Sam Yerger. I was especially taken with Percy's choice of Rita's Shakespeare selection, Sonnet 73, about the "Bare ruin's choirs/Where late the sweet birds sang." (p. 115) Is this hymn to decay and degradation a thematic hint from Percy?
Chapter 3.1, pp. 125-132. The voyage begins with a bus ride followed by the hitched ride from Forney Aiken.
Here begins the peripatetic part of the novel, the part in which travel and place become important. Many of you on this list are no doubt familiar with Jay Tolson's Pilgrim in the Ruins. He has offered (p. 306) a pointed and perspicacious observation on this aspect of the book: “Place clearly matters a great deal in this novel. It is crucial to the protagonist’s effort to come to terms with himself. Yet one of the novel’s ironic truths is that place—geographical and cultural—does not ultimately matter. Place is of ultimate importance only to those lost souls who hope that they can escape themselves, a vanity to which Will Barrett, like Percy at an earlier age, is in varying degrees attached. Yet to discover this truth one must first test the power of place, and that in large measure is what Will Barrett does throughout the novel.” Or as Seneca put it centuries earlier, Magis quis veneris quam quo interest, et ideo nulli loco addicere debemus animum. “[When you travel] it matters more what kind of person you are than where you go, and we therefore ought not to pledge our mind to any particular location.” Is Tolson right? Is the trip southward a voyage of self-discovery for Will? Or don't we yet have enough information to answer that question?
Chapter 3.2-3.3, pp. 132-149 This is the arrival of Will and Forney Aiken at the suburban "housing development" home of Mort Prince. So far, I think, through these three sections, Percy has given us straightforward narrative, getting from place to place, though--to repeat--I may be wrong. What struck me, and this is certainly an age-related note, is the connection of this chapter to a racial and sociological phenomenon, John Howard Griffin's Black Like Me. John Howard Griffin was a white journalist who secreted himself in New Orleans for a couple weeks late in 1959 to take the medical treatments necessary to turn nis skin black. He then traveled through five segregated states (Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Arkansas) and published his diary in 1961 under the title Black Like Me, There was a movie in 1964, as Percy was working on this novel. This section, the skin treatments of Aiken and the fight at Prince's house, emphasize the atmosphere of race relations at that time when the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act were "new" legislation. Percy himself (Rhonda and Marcus would know this much better than I do) later subscribed to the politically directed motto "Fight The Stupids."
Just a few thoughts about a small section of an extraordinary book.
Chuck Lowry
Brooklyn, New York
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[percy-l] The Last Gentleman Discussion/Chapter 2.6-Chapter 3.3,
Charles Lowry, 06/20/2025
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Re: [percy-l] The Last Gentleman Discussion/Chapter 2.6-Chapter 3.3,
Leonard, 06/22/2025
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Re: [percy-l] The Last Gentleman Discussion/Chapter 2.6-Chapter 3.3,
RHONDA MCDONNELL, 06/26/2025
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Re: [percy-l] The Last Gentleman Discussion/Chapter 2.6-Chapter 3.3,
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- Re: [percy-l] The Last Gentleman Discussion/Chapter 2.6-Chapter 3.3, Doug Brown, 06/26/2025
- Re: [percy-l] The Last Gentleman Discussion/Chapter 2.6-Chapter 3.3, RHONDA MCDONNELL, 06/26/2025
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Re: [percy-l] The Last Gentleman Discussion/Chapter 2.6-Chapter 3.3,
lowry . charles, 06/26/2025
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Re: [percy-l] The Last Gentleman Discussion/Chapter 2.6-Chapter 3.3,
RHONDA MCDONNELL, 06/26/2025
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Re: [percy-l] The Last Gentleman Discussion/Chapter 2.6-Chapter 3.3,
Leonard, 06/22/2025
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