Percy's "search" & Foote's happy labor

 Walker Percy is still my favorite southern Catholic Existentialist novelist...

It’s the birthday of novelist Walker Percy (books by this author), born in Birmingham, Alabama (1916). He was working as a psychiatrist when he caught tuberculosis and he spent two years recovering from the disease. In bed he started reading existentialist philosophers and decided to become a writer. He later said, “[Tuberculosis was] the best disease I ever had. If I hadn’t had it, I might be a second-rate shrink practicing in Birmingham, at best.” He’s best known for his first novel, The Moviegoer (1961), about a stockbroker who tries to get over a nervous breakdown by spending all his time at the movies. WA

And he's still my favorite Tea House co-constructionist. His pal Shelby Foote is still my favorite southern semi-reconstructed southern Proustian Civil War historian and Ken Burns talking head. (Mississippi, for such a benighted state, has produced more than its share of terrific writers. Richard Ford's another favorite on the trail.)

Foote and Percy had a marvelous lifelong friendship [g'r] and (as he told CSPAN) a wonderful correspondence. Percy died in 1990, Foote in 2005.

At the beginning of that CSPAN interview Foote told the humorless Brian Lamb that writers are unhappy people, but near the end of it he had a delightfully different message about the connection between meaningful work and happiness. It's also what he told the Paris Review in 1999:

“People say, My God, I can’t believe that you really worked that hard for twenty years. How in God’s name did you do it? Well, obviously I did it because I enjoyed it. I don’t deserve any credit for working hard. I was doing what I wanted to do. Shakespeare said it best: “The labor we delight in physics pain.” There’s no better feeling in the world than to lay your head on the pillow at night looking forward to getting up in the morning and returning to that desk. That’s real happiness.”

I went searching for his Memphis home, and found it down the street from Rhodes College (taking a break from moving Older Daughter into her dorm) in 2013. There is a sadness to "empty rooms" but also an invaluable reminder. Gather ye rosebuds. Carpe diem. Sic transit gloria.

"One secret of the longevity of our friendship was that each of us knew what would make the other angry, and we were careful not to venture into such areas—except on purpose, which would open the matter to drumfire argument and laughter, time and time again, all down the years.” 

 

Renowned biographer Walter Isaacson was inspired by Percy.

One summer I read Walker Percy’s “The Moviegoer,” and it dawned on me that writing was something you could do for a living, just like being a doctor or a fisherman. The novel’s wry philosophical depth opened my eyes to what Percy called “the search,” poking around for clues about why we are here. At the end of that summer, I tried to get him to expound on the religious themes in the book, but he fended me off. “There are two types of people who come out of Louisiana,” he said. “Preachers and storytellers.” It was better to be a storyteller.

Percy inspired me too, not with his theology– definitely not– but with his wonderful stories, and a style of detached observation that was humane, sympathetic, funny, and indeed searching.

Searchers are implicit optimists, by my definition: they’re on the trail of something, they’re curious and hopeful. They may have met despair but they’ve chosen not to act and live in it. Like Sisyphus.

And maybe like poet May Sarton, whose birthday it also is. “It’s not for me — religion. It seems like a redundancy for a poet.” And some philosophers and storytellers.

An old post:

Walker Percy would have been 100 today  [105 in 2021]

He was a Christian existentialist with a literary sensibility I nonetheless found irresistible when I first read him in the seventies. I’m still amused by his characters’ understated humor and quiet rebellion against what he saw as our lost and fallen condition. He tried to pick a fight with Carl Sagan in Lost in the Cosmos, also more amusing than annoying. His lifelong friendship and correspondence with Shelby Foote is an inspiration. I love the mental picture of young Foote on Faulkner’s porch in Oxford while young Percy waits in the car, too embarrassed to meet his hero. Percy, Foote, & Faulkner

“You can’t make a living writing articles for The Journal of Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. The thought crossed my mind: Why not do what French philosophers often do and Americans almost never — novelize philosophy, incarnate ideas in a person and a place, which latter is, after all, a noble Southern tradition in fiction.” It’s not as easy as he makes it sound. He didn’t have many rivals, doesn’t have many successors. Richard Ford is kind of a secular Percy. I’m searching for others.

“Search” is Percy’s big theme. His heroes search for God and make fun of people like me, who search for godless happiness, purpose, and meaning. But the search is the thing, whatever its quarry. “The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.”

It was such a surprise and delight to stumble across and rent the “teahouse” Percy and Foote built near “Lost Cove” in Sewanee, Tennessee in the thirties, twenty years ago. When I wrote of it later I heard from Percy’s grandson, who was searching for it. Really.

Walker Percy and Shelby Foote built this "tea house" in Sewanee TN 

on Percy's uncle's property overlooking "Lost Cove," in the '30s... I found it c.'96.