From: Lauren Berdy <lauren.stacy.berdy AT gmail.com>
To: "Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion" <percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Subject: Re: [percy-l] Walker Percy before Walker Percy (short essay)
Date: Mon, 25 Feb 2019 12:19:33 -0500
I read it twice
The gymnastics in my head say
He had a predicated vision
Dr Percy’s unfolding is a mystery
As is ours
Let doubt rule
Sent from my iPhone
On Feb 25, 2019, at 10:25 AM, John Pearson <jp AT jlarsp.com> wrote:
I also had the same thought. I have to believe that if there was a new understanding of the historical evidence, someone on this list would know about it. I thought about emailing Casey McCorry to ask her, but I didn’t see an email link on the page. My guess is that it is a short piece and this was an easy shorthand way of addressing the issue without having more space to go into detail. (I just hope this doesn’t lead to others quoting McCorry as evidence that both Percy’s parents committed suicide.)
Chuck, I had the very same thought. It seemed there was a bit of editorializing going on there, a bit of working the edges of the facts to present a particular view. But perhaps that was just me overreacting.
Ms. McCorry states as a quite ordinary fact that both of Percy’s parents committed suicide. While the case of his father is clear, I have always thought that there was some ambiguity about the instance of his mother. This is especially the
case because of the presence of one of the boys in the car with her.
I am no scholar or academic, so it is entirely possible that I missed a consensus that formed without my participation. When I first became interested in Percy, the conventional wisdom—I must have read it a dozen times, including in the standard
biographies by Jay Tolson and Fr. Samway—was that his father was a suicide and his mother may or may not have committed suicide. There are, I suppose, two questions: (1) Did Walker Percy himself ever express an opinion on the circumstances of his mother’s
death? (2) Is it now universally held that Walker Percy’s mother committed suicide?
An interesting short read on the "need to hear about Walker Percy before he was Walker Percy."
Best wishes, Henry Mills
--
An existentialist's companion: Walker Percy
Casey McCorry, Angelus News
Feb. 4, 2019
"Before Walker Percy was an award-winning author, before he was exploring the “dislocation of man in the modern age” or questioning southern sensibility in praise-garnering pages, he was a man not unlike many of us: wandering, depressed, studying for a career
he didn’t want to have in the midst of a quarter-life crisis…"