Catholic Convert And Writer Walker Percy Turns 100

By RAY CAVANAUGH

Along with Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy’s name is about the first to surface when it comes to Southern Catholic writers. Yet he was neither born nor raised Catholic. He also had a somewhat unusual literary career — not publishing his first book until he was well into his forties, and yet he became a major Southern voice when that first book appeared.
Though Walker Percy wrote his novels in Covington, La., he was born in Birmingham, Ala., exactly 100 years ago this May 28. He was the eldest of three boys in an aristocratic Southern family that had problems with depression and suicide.
Not long after Percy was born, his grandfather killed himself. Then when he was age 13, his father committed suicide. The Percys moved to the mother’s family in Athens, Ga. Soon after relocating, his mother died when her car veered off a bridge.
The incident went into the books as an accident, but Percy regarded it as a suicide — a view he kept secret “even from members of his family and his closest friends,” according to Walker Percy: A Life, written by the Jesuit scholar Patrick Samway.
Following the mother’s death, Percy and his brothers moved to Greenville, Miss., to live with their second cousin, known as “Uncle Will,” a lawyer and a writer who fostered the boy’s love for literature.
While in Greenville, Percy met a boy his age, Shelby Foote, who would also become a prominent writer. The two would maintain a lifelong friendship and correspondence.
During his upbringing, Percy had some exposure to Presbyterianism but basically was raised agnostic. Seeking truth in science, he majored in chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for undergrad, before receiving his medical degree from Columbia University in New York City.
He had intended to become a psychiatrist, but his medical career was interrupted when, while performing an autopsy at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan, he contracted tuberculosis.
The next three years were spent recuperating in residential hospitals. During this time, he self-medicated with a heavy dose of philosophical novels by such writers as Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Soren Kierkegaard, and the more contemporary Jean-Paul Sartre.
Upon his recovery, he quit his medical career. As he later said, “What began to interest me was not the physiological and pathological processes within man’s body but the problem of man himself.” At this point, he was searching for something that science could not provide him.
Percy headed back to the South and began writing for scholarly journals. In November 1946, he married Mary Bernice Townsend, a medical technician. They converted to the Catholic faith the following year. In a Paris Review interview decades later, Percy spoke of his reasons for becoming Catholic: “What else is there? Did you expect me to become a Methodist? A Buddhist? A Marxist? A comfortable avuncular humanist like Walter Cronkite?”
After living in New Orleans, the Percys settled in Covington, La., where the writer spent much of a decade on two novels that never saw publication. Then he embarked on a novel called The Moviegoer, about a daydreaming New Orleans stockbroker — the spiritually wayward son of a devout Catholic mother — who derives more meaning from watching the movies than he does from real-world interaction.
When The Moviegoer saw print in 1961, it garnered the National Book Award for Fiction and would remain Percy’s best-known work. His ensuing novels also featured a Southern male professional as a protagonist and continued to probe “the dislocation of man in the modern age” (in the author’s own words), as well as exploring a Southern way of life under threat from increasing technology.
Percy’s books tend to have a sturdy amount of humor, but with their metaphysical depth and existential inquiry, they typically aren’t viewed as page-turners. According to literary critic Michiko Kakutani, Percy was “more of a philosophical novelist in the European tradition than a straightforward narrative storyteller.”
Though Percy tried to avoid preaching with his fiction, he “viewed his Catholic faith as central to his artistic vision,” according to the New Catholic Encyclopedia.
Aside from literary composition, Percy taught at Loyola University New Orleans, raised two daughters, and took part in such neighborhood programs as the Covington Community Relations Council, which sought to alleviate racial tension.
Though he was involved in the community, he preferred not to be singled out as the great novelist. In Covington, “nobody took much notice of him, which was how he liked it,” according to a Times-Picayune article by Sheila Stroup, who adds how Percy would frequent the town’s Waffle House, where the quiet, contemplative writer would eavesdrop on other conversations.
In a 1980 interview, the famous writer said of his anonymity in Covington, “I’ve managed to live here for 30 years and am less well known than the Budweiser distributor.”
He died of prostate cancer in his Covington home on May 10, 1990, at age 73. Shortly before his death, had become a secular oblate of Louisiana’s St. Joseph Benedictine Abbey, on the grounds of which both he and his wife (d. 2012) are now buried.
Percy’s 2016 centennial hasn’t gone unnoticed in the academic community: Montreat College in North Carolina recently held the conference “Walker Percy Centennial: Pilgrimage in Literature.”
The historic district of St. Francisville, La., offers the Walker Percy Weekend, held annually since 2014. This year’s Walker Percy Weekend, which takes place during June 3-5, promises to have added centennial zest, and both of Percy’s daughters are expected to attend.
There will be talks presented by scholars (including biographer Patrick Samway, S.J., who will take part in the seminar, “Walker Percy & Catholicism & The South”), readings and panel discussions of Percy’s work, an exhibition of Percy photographs, and live music and drinks, as well as food inspired by the writer’s books. Among the weekend’s events will be “Lost in the Churchyard: A Centennial Celebration.”
For additional info on the Walker Percy Weekend, visit: http://www.walkerpercyweekend.org/.