Walker Percy

[Leonard Hughes <leonardh6363 AT gmail.com>]

 

Greetings Percyites, from under the Heat Dome:

How cool is it to be contemplating the Fourth of July in “Love in the Ruins” at that same time of the year as we continue the Slow Read on the hottest weekend of the year? On the country’s 250^th birthday, a book that opens with the speculation that the USA may have run out of luck. Do you think it has?

You can experience the sensation of the long hot summer right along with Doc More as he recovers from the riotous night in the Pit: “A hot still gold-green Fourth of July. Not a breath stirs. No squirrels scrabble in the dogwoods, no jaybirds fret in the sycamores.”

 And you can appreciate the relief from the scorching outdoors when he takes Moira into the Howard Johnson: “From the blistering white heat of the concrete we come into a dim cool grotto.” Reminds me of the New York City summer scenes in “The Great Gatsby,” a book Percy loved: “The next day was broiling, almost the last, certainly the warmest, of the summer…. The room, shadowed well with awnings, was dark and cool.”

1) I share Percy’s admiration of Fitzgerald’s poetic style. More recently, after “studying” him, I’ve become a fan of Percy’s description, beyond the European philosophical ideas and his Twain-like yarn-spinning. Rather than looking for facts, I‘d like to hear your opinions. How do you find his aesthetic quality as you make Tom’s way through the links, past Bledsoe’s fire, into the Howard Johnson, back to his house, his mother’s and Lola’s, onto the club and the clubhouse? Specifically, do you tend to skim description (a friend of mine thinks all description is frivolous) and find it hard to visualize the scenes, or do you find joy in More’s (Percy’s) words a source of pleasure. Please feel free to tell us why, if you’d like, and offer an example or two.

2) Thank you, Rhonda, for the shoutout and reference to my feline reputation…and for your comments about student reactions to Percy. What do you all say about Percy’s political “correctness,” as it might be called? Rhonda said students objected to “chinaman eyes”; what about Tom’s use of the term ‘’picaninny”? What would you tell students: is “Love in the Ruins” a relic of the early ‘70s; is Tom a reflection of careless ideas sometimes attributed to the South? Are Tom’s attitudes (“I’m tired of hearing about the four hundred years”) as explainable as Huck’s use of the N-word? Are they separable from Percy’s attitudes? (Doug has already offered a fine response to the issue.)

3) I finally read Percy’s “Notes for a Novel About the End of the World,” a little tougher to me than many of his philosophical essays. My attempt to summarize its themes include the idea that a contemporary novelist treating the future shouldn’t forecast an imminent violent end of the world but should be concerned with other signs of catastrophe. Evils such as “racism, Vietnam and inflation” should be less concerning than determining if “people are crazy,” that other signs of evil “portend a different kind of danger.”  Do you think “Love in the Ruins” successfully follows Percy’s “Notes”? Is the danger Tom sees a real problem, more threatening, say, than the undeniably real problem in the novel of a coming race war? Does the fact of the Bantus rebellion detract from what Tom is concerned about? Does that hurt Percy’s theme? I was impressed at Kenneth’s bringing in AI as a problem Percy couldn’t foresee, but one that fits right into the future threats he did see.

4) I confess, as I’ve said before, I love “Love.” It gave me a permanent view of the objective world I was living in back when Prof. Lawson brought it into class at Maryland. My thinking was running along the lines of Doris’s “spiritualism” and the lifestyle at the Honey Island Swamp. Tom’s existential discoveries and Percy’s non-fiction were a pleasant shock to the system that was seeing material reality as evil. Tom has the audacity of describing a construction site as having “man’s excellent geometries wrought from God’s somewhat lumpish handiwork,” declaring “money is splendid” and explaining “it took religion to save me from the spirit world…and let me inhabit my own flesh.” Last month, I laughed when I read Lawson’s essay concluding that Tom was “a drunk.” Between us, I know where Lawson’s great humor was coming from, so I wasn’t offended. Tom More is a hero to me. He reveals realities about the relationship of spirit and material, and discovers things about his patients’ mental conditions that explored a new way of seeing the world for me. He’s a flawed victim of many things; he’s not so aware of existential ideas as Binx Bolling is, but he is coming around with help of his lapsometer. But what I want to know is, what do you think of him?

5) Finally, I don’t hear enough about Percy’s humor. PT Bledsoe’s wife, “Skewered with PT’s kebab skewer”! Colonel Ringo shot through the scrotum! And I can’t stop “laughing out loud” (thanks, Chuck) at Rudy’s “orange and green bike flying through the air, Rudy still astride, and plummeting into the alligator-infested waters of Bootlegger Bayou.” What do you think of the humor? Favorite examples? Or is it just me?

Thank you all!

Leonard

PS, Isn’t “Love in the Ruins” a wonderful distraction from the hysteria around Taylor Swift’s wedding?