Signposts in a Strange Land 9781306601870, 1306601878, 9781453216378, 1453216375

Table of contents :
Cover Page
Title Page
Table of Contents
One Life in the South
Why I Live Where I Live
New Orleans Mon Amour
The City of the Dead
Going Back to Georgia
Mississippi: The Fallen Paradise
Uncle Will
Uncle Will's House
A Better Louisiana
The American War
Red, White, and Blue-Gray
Stoicism in the South
A Southern View
The Southern Moderate
Bourbon
Two Science, Language, Literature
Is a Theory of Man Possible?
Naming and Being
The State of the Novel: Dying Art or New Science?
Novel-Writing in an Apocalyptic Time. How to Be an American Novelist in Spite of Being Southern and CatholicFrom Facts to Fiction
Physician as Novelist
Herman Melville
Diagnosing the Modern Malaise
Eudora Welty in Jackson
Foreword to A Confederacy of Dunces
Rediscovering A Canticle for Leibowitz
The Movie Magazine: A Low "Slick"
Accepting the National Book Award for The Moviegoer
Concerning Love in the Ruins
The Coming Crisis in Psychiatry
The Culture Critics
The Fateful Rift: The San Andreas Fault in the Modern Mind
Three Morality and Religion
Culture, the Church, and Evangelization
Why Are You a Catholic? A "Cranky Novelist" Reflects on the ChurchThe Failure and the Hope
A View of Abortion, with Something to Offend Everybody
Foreword to The New Catholics
If I Had Five Minutes with the Pope
An Unpublished Letter to the Times
Another Message in the Bottle
The Holiness of the Ordinary
Epilogue An Interview and a Self-interview
An Interview with Zoltán Abádí-Nagy
Questions They Never Asked Me
Bibliography and Notes
Biography
Copyright Page.

Citation preview

1

*

PERCY I

tr

I

hi led with an i

Introduction hv

Patrick Sarmvav

At the time of left a

death Walker Percy

his

considerable legacy of uncollected

non-fiction

— essays on language,

litera-

philosophy, religion, psychiatry,

ture,

and

morality,

and

life

the

in

letters

South.

They

Will"

(William Alexander Percy),

pieces

on Bourbon whiskey, the

include his memoir, "Uncle

"Why

writing novels,

I

Live

his

of

art

Where

I

Live," the Civil

War, semiotics ("Naming

and

the Jefferson

Being"),

which he gave Fateful Rift:

the

in

Lecture,

Washington ("The

The San Andreas

Modern Mind"),

Fault in

the role of the

physician as novelist, Stoic philosophy, faith,

the

abortion,

future

of

the

Church, an analysis of movie magazines written as an undergraduate, a talk to

educators Bottle"),

Man

("Another Message

metaphysics

Possible?"),

("Is a

in

the

Theory of

and the holiness of the

ordinary.

The book

includes three unpublished

essays as well as two unpublished talks,

and ends with two

interviews, including

Percy's witty self-interview, "Questions

They Never Asked Me." Many of

these

non-fiction pieces served initially as a

way of describing and defining that

would

later

one for the

a world

develop into a

fictive

novelist "in a strange land

where," he wrote, "the signposts are enigmatic." Signposts in a Strange Land (

ontinued on back flap)

f

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BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY

By Walker Percy

NOVELS The Moviegoer

( 1

The Last Gentleman Love

in the

96 1 ( 1

966)

Ruins (1971)

Lancelot (1977)

The Second Coming

( 1

980)

The Thanatos Syndrome (1987)

NON- FICTION The Message

in the Bottle (1975)

Lost in the Cosmos (1983) Signposts in a Strange

Land

( 1

99 1

SIGNPOSTS IN A

STRANGE LAND Instead of constructing a plot

a

cast of characters

to

creating

from a world familiar

everybody, he [the novelist]

to set

and

is

more apt

forth with a stranger in a strange land

where the signposts are enigmatic but which he

sets

out to explore nevertheless.

[Notes for a Novel about the

End

of the World]

Edited with an introduction

by Patrick

Farrar, Straus

New

Samway and Giroux

York

Walker Percy

SIGNPOSTS IN A

STRANGE LAND BRIGHTON

Copyright

©

1991

Introduction copyright

Mary

by

©

1991

Bernice Percy by Patrick

Samway

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

^

Published simultaneously in Canada by HarperCollinsC2Lnada.Ltd First printing,

1991

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Percy, Walker,

Signposts in a strange land

I

1916- 1990

uncollected essays edited with

introduction by Patrick 1.

Percy, Walker,

1916—1990

—Religion.

Interviews.

—The South—

-Jefferson

2. Novelists,

lectures

I.

American— 20th

Samway, Patrick H.

PS3566.E6912S5J

1991

91-12360

an

Samway.

813' .54

CIP

and Chekhov

—

century

II. Title.

— dc2o

Contents

4-

Introduction

One.

LIFE IN

Why

New

ix

I

THE SOUTH

I Live

Where I Live

Orleans

Mon Amour

The

City of the

Going Back Mississippi:

to

Dead

I

10

I

23

I

Georgia

3

26

I

The Fallen Paradise

Uncle Will

53

I

Uncle Wills House

I

63

A

Better Louisiana

I

6y

War

I

yi

The American

Red, White, and Blue-Gray Stoicism in the South

A

Southern View

I

I

102

yy

I

83

I

The Southern Moderate

Bourbon

39

I

89 I

94

Two.

SCIENCE, LANGUAGE, LITERATURE Is

a Theory of Man

Possible'?

Naming and Being The

State of the Novel:

130

I

Dying Art or

in

I

New

Science?

Novel-Writing in an Apocalyptic Time

How

to

Be an American

I

186

Physician as Novelist

/

191

Herman Diagnosing

the

to

Melville

to

A

Rediscovering

197

I

Modern Malaise

Eudora Welty Foreword

in

Jackson

204

I

222

I

Confederacy of Dunces

A

Canticle for Leibowitz

The Movie Magazine:

A Low

"Slick"

Accepting the National Book

The Moviegoer

/

224

/

227 234

I

Award for 245

/

Concerning Love in the Ruins

/

247

The Coming

I

251

Crisis in Psychiatry

The Culture

The Fateful in the

Three.

Rift:

Critics

263

I

The San Andreas Fault

Modern Mind

271

I

MORALITY AND RELIGION

Culture, the Church

,

and Evangelization

Why Are You a

A

168

I

Fiction

Facts

153

I

Novelist in Spite of Being

Southern and Catholic

From

139

I

Catholic?

"Cranky Novelist" Reflects on

the

I

295

I

304

Church

I

316

The Failure and

A

the

Hope

326

I

View of Abortion, with Something Everybody

Foreword

to

I

The New

If I

Had Five

An

Unpublished Letter

to

Offend

/

343

340

Catholics

Minutes with

Pope

I

346

Times

/

349

the

to the

Another Message in the Bottle

The Holiness of the Ordinary

352

I

368

I

AN INTERVIEW AND A SELF-INTERVIEW

Epilogue.

An

Interview with Zoltdn Abddi-Nagy Questions They Never Asked

Bibliography and Notes

Me

I

I

425

I

3 73

397

Introduction

4-

When Louisiana,

Walker Percy, M.D., died

on May

10,

1990, he

at his

home

in

Covington,

a considerable legacy of

left

uncollected nonfiction, including three unpublished essays

Theory of Man unpublished

talks

Book Award in the

—

his

Ruins"

—

all

is

and

he delivered

in

Endowment

I

its

1989, at the invitation

complete and

book cover

In

"The

and which has

final

form.

a wide range of topics

which

discovered, into three categories reflecting the basic

dimensions of Percy's thought:

and

3,

for the Humanities

never before been published in

as

May

time.

entitled

Modern Mind," which

Fault in the

Washington, D.C., on

All the writings in this

first

Annual Jefferson Lecture,

The San Andreas

fall,

well as two

remarks "Concerning Love

his

of which appear here for the

the 18th

Fateful Rift:

of the National

—as

acceptance speech on receiving the National

for The Moviegoer

addition, there

the Bottle"

in

"Is a

Church, and Evangeli-

Possible?," "Culture, the

and "Another Message

zation,"

—

literature;

life in

the South; science, language,

morality and religion.

The

earliest

piece here

(written in 1935, during his undergraduate days at the University

of North Carolina at Chapel

A Low

'Slick,' "

Hill), entitled

prefigures motifs in his

"The Movie Magazine:

first

novel, The Moviegoer.

His thoughtful and extended Jefferson Lecture, on the other hand,

was

his last public statement.

One

of

my

tasks as editor

was

to

narrow down and arrange

x

Introduction

I

these writings so as to allow Percy's related ideas

and nuanced

speculations to assume their proper intertextual weight

portance. For obvious reasons,

and published

that Percy collected

which he took

book The Message

in his

in the

book reviews, panel discussions and (with one exception)

Bottle (1975), as well as juvenilia,

in

and im-

have excluded the fifteen essays

I

part, unfinished essays,

the interviews published in Conversations with Walker Percy (1985).

Walker Percy's place

in

American

not only

fiction

translations of his novels, as well as the conference

and nonfiction held

in the

summer of 1989

in

It is

my hope

on

his fiction

Sandbjerg, Denmark,

indicate that international interest in his books

grow.

firmly

is

number of

established in this country, but the steadily increasing

continuing to

is

Land

that Signposts in a Strange

will

provide

readers with a wider range of texts essential for an understanding

of Percy's thought than has yet been available.

My

task

would have been more

we had

the conversations

Bogue Falaya his nonfiction

Covington.

in

—while

movements of

On

one occasion,

as

he talked about

tracking out of the corner of his eye the

a solitary egret

wading

in the

me

muddy bayou

directly.

— Dr.

For a brief

at-home smile uncharacteristically disap-

his congenial

peared: he was explaining

how

difficult

it

had been for him

search within himself and articulate his most deeply careful

not been for

it

overlooking the peaceful

Percy lowered his voice and looked at

moment,

had

difficult

home

in his

felt

to

views. His

and meticulous preparation of these writings became

particularly palpable as he described the writing of his Jefferson

Lecture. His health was then declining and he

would probably be

his last

is

nonfiction, the corrected that

I

we

get consciously or unconsciously

radically incoherent.

for his earlier

and emended manuscripts and

equally assiduous in the preparation of

Percy was born on

Alabama, where

his parents,

part of the social

from

As

have examined and worked with leave no doubt

Walker

self-inflicted

elite

this lecture

opportunity to discuss in detail his belief

that the view of the world

from modern science

knew

May

all

28, 1916, in

Birmingham, Percy, were

After his father's

death

1929, Mrs. Percy took

young

of the community. 9,

he was

his texts.

LeRoy and Martha Susan

wounds on July

typescripts that

—

—

Introduction

Walker and

two brothers

his

Athens, Georgia.

When

to live for a year with

—invited

her mother in

second cousin William Alexander Percy

a poet, lawyer, plantation owner,

Levee (1941)

xi

I

and the author of Lanterns on

Mrs. Percy and her boys to

home

in Greenville, Mississippi, they accepted.

cally,

died in an automobile accident on April

move

the

into his

Mrs. Percy, tragi2,

1932.

Though

subsequently adopted by "Uncle" Will, Walker and his brothers nevertheless had a double loss to bear; yet Uncle Will did everything possible in assisting the Percy boys to cope with their grief. all,

Above

he wanted each of them to receive an excellent education.

Walker graduated from Greenville High School

in

1933, the

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1937, and the

College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University in 1941. While an intern at Bellevue Hospital in

New York

City,

he

contracted tuberculosis and was sent to a sanatorium in Saranac

Lake,

New

York, to recuperate. Eventually Dr. Percy returned

Mary Bernice Townsend, and moved with her to Covington to raise a family and pursue his new career as a writer. His published work includes six novels The Moviegoer (1961), which won the National Book Award in 1962, The Last Gentleman South, married

(1966), Love in the Ruins (1971), Lancelot (1977), The Second

Coming

—in addition to two works

(1980), and The Thanatos Syndrome (1987) of nonfiction, The Message in the Bottle and

1 he

first

Lost in the Cosmos (1983).

section of Signposts in a Strange Land,

South, begins with a personal statement:

why

on

life in

the

Percy, in a joint

decision with his wife, chose to live in Covington. "Technically

speaking," he writes, "Covington

(New

to a place

is

a nonplace in a certain relation

Orleans), a relation that allows one to avoid the

horrors of total placement or total nonplacement or total misplace-

ment." As an ideal nonplace, Covington offered the friendly privacy

he needed

to write,

where one "can

sniff the

trees, visit the local bars, eat crawfish,

feel as

good

century." the

first

(I

as

it

is

I

the casual hospitality of Covington

drove through town on a sunny

have lunch with the Percys

when

and drink Dixie beer and

possible to feel in this awfully interesting

remember sensing

time

ozone from the pine

at their

a fellow Covingtonian asked

fall

day

in

1978 to

home.) Percy once wrote that

him what he did

for a living,

xii

Introduction

I

he said that he wrote books. But when the townsman pressed him as to

what he

Percy answered, "Nothing"

really did,

were pleased with the response. Covington

is

—and

one of the

last

both

sleepy

towns in Louisiana before one crosses the long causeway to the Big Easy, with a vibrant mixture of Spanish and French history

and a culture of

all

all its

own;

clearly,

Covington offered Percy the best

possible worlds.

The

other essays in

historical events, ideas,

and

locales in the

South important for an

understanding of Percy's landscape and mindscape: with to

its

"lively"

and

Athens, Georgia;

"exotic" cemeteries; reflections life

customs,

this section trace the people,

New

Orleans

on returning

with Uncle Will in Greenville; the

signifi-

cance of the Civil War, particularly one hundred years after

Appomattox; the decline of what can be considered the noble and gracious Old Stoa in the South; modest proposals concerning race relations;

and thoughts on the

This section ends with

his

quality of education in Louisiana.

own upbeat

short history of

Bourbon

whiskey, complete with "Cud'n Walker's Uncle Will's Favorite Mint

Julep Receipt."

The second and third sections in this collection have similar modes of development. In "Is a Theory of Man Possible?," for example, a at

talk

Percy gave to a group interested in mental health

Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, as a result of an

appointment there during the 1974-75 academic year, he asks a key philosophical question. In the long run, Percy's answer (and he says that a positive answer

demanded

for

him an

to this question can

his life as a physician

modern

and

and

one

psychiatry, as well as reflections

novelist.

malaise that affects us

investigation to

man, the

analysis of the philosophy of

sciences, semiotics, literature,

on

be given) actually

all,

As

a diagnostician of the

Percy does not limit

of knowledge, often using his

own experience from medicine and

science as touchstones to arrive at the truth of the matter. In State of the Novel," originally delivered as the 1977

Lecture at the University of Michigan in

one of

we

Ann

his important assumptions: "Art

discovers

and knows and

are, in a

way

this

body

discipline; rather, he synthesizes a wide

tells, tells

is

the reader

"The

Hopwood

Arbor, he expresses cognitive; that

how

that the reader can confirm with as

things are,

much

is,

it

how

certitude

— Introduction

xiii

I

as a scientist taking a pointer-reading." Further, in his Jefferson

work of the noted semiotician and prag-

Lecture, relying on the

matist Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), he develops the idea that science as is

distinctive in

what

in short,

we know

human it is

cannot utter a single word about what

it

behavior, language, art, and thought

be born, to

to

live,

and

to die as a

itself

human

being.

Percy would have us look to the humanities, "the elder brother of

and grapple more and more with what Peirce

the sciences,"

characterizes as "interpreter," "soul"

—words

"mind," "ego," even

"asserter,"

and concepts not

fashion in

in

many academic

circles today.

By

using,

however

tentatively, the

"soul" in the Jefferson Lecture, Percy

compartmentalize

tried not to

de Chardin,

showed once again

that

he

and work. As with Teilhard

priest

whose works

(as

he once

me) he admired, Percy himself strove for greater unity of

told

vision in his in

S.J.,

his life

and

a scientist

seemingly religious word

life.

And

as a convert to Catholicism,

knowledge and love of

his

he grew steadily

adopted religious heritage.

Yet no one could have been more surprised than he when he

was the sole American

symposium

at the

to receive

an invitation to participate

Culture in January 1988. In his address to the Church,

and Evangelization," Percy

this council

on "Culture,

stated his views about

secularism in American society and suggested that the Catholic

Church could more

to evangelize. Percy

he once told

in a

Vatican sponsored by the Pontifical Council for

effectively use television in

never backed away from

his novelist friend

and

its

Roman efforts

and though Mary Lee Settle

his faith,

fellow convert

Roman Catholic Church was a "very untidy outfit," he made it clear that this was where he wanted to be. Not

that the

often

surprisingly, he took the trouble to state his opposition to abortion

both in an

Op Ed

unpublished

letter

article (1981) in

New

York Times

and

in

an

(1988) to the same newspaper.

No matter how he sion"

The

and "Footnote"

perceived

in

evil

—and Father Smith's "Confes-

The Thanatos Syndrome provide imaginative

clues to Percy's belief, as a novelist, that personified evil exists in

our society

—he

did not feel obliged to write edifying stories in

which virtue wins out. In

Message

in

fact,

his

1987

talk entitled

"Another

the Bottle" at an educational conference in

New

xiv

Introduction

I

Orleans, in which he makes the novel form for

and

some remarkable connections between

Catholicism, contains honest and direct advice

teachers of today's students:

if

broad terms

is

will

throughs into other areas of

life.

Percy believed profoundly in the

simple "holiness of the ordinary" in

A word might seem

protagonists

are mysterious,

lives

this.

about the to

The

all its facets.

of his novels, everyday wayfarers whose dramatically reflect

a

—and Percy thinking about reading —then they probably not make break-

breakthrough into reading in very

do not make

students

titles

of some of his essays and talks that

have been omitted from Signposts

Land

in a Strange

but are not. Percy would occasionally repeat a talk or an essay and

rework

it

under

a different

title.

The 1978

Phinizy Lecture at the

University of Georgia, for example, was reprinted in a slightly different version as

Southern

Politics,

"Random Thoughts on Southern

and the American Future"

in

Literature,

The Georgia Review

1978) and the following year as "Southern Comfort" in

(Fall

Harpers (January 1979). Likewise,

William Alexander

his tribute to

Percy, here entitled "Uncle Will," appeared with variations as "

'Uncle Will' and His South" in Saturday Review

I

World (November

1973) and as an abbreviated introduction to Sewanee (1982).

The

1977 Chekhov Lecture at Cornell University, issued as "Diagnosing the Modern Malaise" by the Faust Publishing Company (1985), also appeared as "Novelist as Diagnostician of the Modern Malaise" in Chekhov and Our Age, edited by James McConkey, and in a revised version as "The Diagnostic Novel: On the Uses of Modern Fiction" in Harper s (June 1986). "Mississippi: first

appeared

some

in a special issue

The

Fallen Paradise"

of Harpers and later appeared with

book

interesting additions in a

entitled The South Today,

edited by Willie Morris.

The

epilogue contains Zoltan Abadi-Nagy's probing interview

and ends with

Percy's delightful self-interview, "Questions

Never Asked Me." Here he responds more difficulties

of his readers and

particularly

a masterly

when he

fills

in the

discusses his

own

They

directly to the felt

gaps of some of his essays, fiction.

This self-interview,

example of the genre, allows Percy

to give

marvelous

expression to the breadth of his personality. In commenting (see

page 422) on the portrait of himself painted by Lyn

Hill,

Percy

Introduction perceptively notes that his figure

frame, "somewhat out of

it,

is

standing outside the painting's

out of the world that

behind him." At the same time,

xv

I

this

image

carries

is

framed off

on an implied

dialogue, which never violates the freedom of the beholder: 'You

and

know something,

I

Vm

world lately?

in,

don't

we? Or do we?

.

.

.

True,

but what about the world you re in?

this is

Have you

a strange noticed

Are we onto something, you and I? Probably not." This

personal invitation to explore undiscovered worlds

he repeatedly offers

his

is

it

his

—an invitation

readers in both his fiction and

his

nonfiction.

In

conclusion,

for their

I

would

like to

encouragement and

thank the following persons

assistance:

Joseph

L. Blotner

and

Yvonne Blotner, John F. Desmond, Rhoda K. Faust, Shelby Ben and Nadine Forkner, Robert Giroux, Diana Gonzalez,

the late Foote,

Linda Whitney Hobson, Lewis A. Lawson, Joseph Louis D. Rubin, Mrs.

Jr.,

Mary Bernice

Mary Lee

Settle,

P.

Parkes,

Eudora Welty, and

Percy.

Patrick H. Samway,

S.J.,

especially

S.J.

One

LIFE IN

THE SOUTH

WHY WHERE

I

1 he reason was

I

live in

listed recently in

States to retire to.

rather that

South, which

is

as

reason

supposed

LIVE

Covington, Louisiana,

Money

The

I

to

is

not because

one of the best places is

not that

a pleasant nonplace.

is

it

LIVE

it is

United

in the

a pleasant place but

Covington

is

in the

have a strong sense of place.

It

but Covington occupies a kind of interstice in the South.

between

it

Deep does,

It falls

places.

Technically speaking, Covington relation to a place

(New

is

a nonplace in a certain

Orleans), a relation that allows one to

avoid the horrors of total placement or total nonplacement or total

misplacement. Total placement for a writer would be to

live in a

place like

Charleston or Mobile, where one's family has lived for two hundred years.

A

pleasant

—or

for a writer

enough

prospect, you might suppose, but not

not for

this writer.

Such places are haunted.

Ancestors perch on your shoulder while you write. Faulkner

managed little

to

do

it

but only by drinking a great deal and by playing

charades, like pretending to be a farmer.

It is

necessary to

escape the place of one's origins and the ghosts of one's ancestors

but not too

far.

You wouldn't want

to

move

to

Tucumcari.

Total nonplacement would be to do what Descartes did,

live

anonymously among the burghers of Amsterdam. Or do what Kierkegaard did,

live in

the business district of Copenhagen,

pop

WALKER PERCY

I

4

out into the street every half hour, and speak to the shopkeepers so

one

be thought an

will

thought an idler

On

year.

idler.

pleased Kierkegaard to be

It

time he was turning out

at the very

five

books a

the other hand, a writer in the United States doesn't

have to go to such lengths to be taken for an of nonplacement for a Southern writer

Northern place

is

Another type

idler.

to live in a nondescript

Waterbury, Connecticut, or become writer

like

residence at Purdue. This

is

a matter of taste.

very good writers, like Styron

It

works for some

Connecticut), for

(in

whom

leaving

For me,

it.

to live in the

only possible to write about the South by

is

it

miss the South

I

way

Old South or the happy

if I

my own

South but on

insert oneself in such a

A

as not to

who can

writers

or

(a) is

(c)

I

prefer

some doing

to the ghosts

a

writers. Indeed,

it

of the

visiting in universities.

(b) is

It is

deal with words

hard enough

out.

How

I

respect

exotic place, which

the writer,

and who

who

to deal with

and envy the

is

is

This

It

works

is

if

harder work

words but having

as they are

to

by their terrible

and dumbness wears

likability, intelligence,

Total misplacement

to

bad teacher who doesn't care

a

and students overtaken

needs, vulnerability,

is

can be a godsend for serious

rarely support themselves by writing.

good teacher or

to

new Sunbelt South.

can both teach and write. For me, teaching

than writing.

me

too long.

takes

It

succumb

hustlers of the

hook up with academe, teaching or

one

am gone

terms.

popular and often necessary form of nonplacement

works for some

the

more

placeness of the South becomes too suffocating. Indeed,

often than not,

in

gifted teacher!

to live in

another place, usually an

so strongly informed by

its

exoticness that

has fled his haunted place or his vacant nonplace

somehow expects to become informed by the exotic identity of the new place. A real bummer if you ask me, yet it has worked for some. Hemingway in Paris

Lowry

feels

somewhat ghostly

himself,

and Madrid. Sherwood Anderson

in

Mexico, Vidal in

James Jones on the He

Italy,

in

New Orleans, Malcolm

Tennessee Williams

St.-Louis in Paris.

in

Key West,

Such a remove

is

a

reasonable alternative to Northern ghostliness but unfortunately only a temporary one. Even James Baldwin and Richard Wright

had

to

come home. Northern

Hemisphere

(by Northern,

I

mean upper North

— North America, England, Sweden, Germany) ghost-

— Life in the South liness tends to

5

I

evacuate a Latin neighborhood, like a drop of acid

on a map of Mexico. There is a species of consumption

at

work

here. Places are

consumed nowadays. The more delectable the place, the quicker it is ingested, digested, and turned to feces. Once I lived in Santa Fe, a lovely placid place, but after a while the silver-and-turquoise

jewelry, the Pueblo Indians, the mesquite, the Sangre de Cristo

Mountains, became as commonplace, used up, as Dixie beer, good old boys, and Nashville music. After a sojourn in the desert,

memories of Louisiana green become

irresistible.

Another sort of nonplacement traditionally available

and paradoxically that

exile or

is,

felicitous,

is

to writers,

enforced placement in a nonplace

imprisonment.

I

don't have to

tell

you how well

jail. My own many American writers secretly envy writers like suspicion is that Solzhenitsyn, who get sent to the Gulag camps for their writings,

Cervantes and some other writers have done in

keep writing on

toilet

paper, take on the whole bloody state

—and

The total freedom of writers in this country can be distressing. What a burden to bear, that the government not only allows us

win.

complete freedom

— even

freedom for

atrocities like

MacBirdl

but, like ninety-five percent of Americans, couldn't care less

we

write.

Oh, you lucky Dostoevskys, with your

(imagine shooting an American writer!),

exiles,

firing

—

what

squads

prison camps,

nuthouses. True, American writers are often regarded as nuts but as

harmless ones. So the exile has to be self-imposed

its

drawbacks.

One

Algiers, cursing

goes storming

one saunters back, hands

now

one

is

the

establishment

looking

holes

up

in

Montmartre or

McCarthyism, racism, TV, shopping centers, con-

sumerism, and no one pays the later,

off,

—which has

slightest attention.

in pockets, eyes averted

either. Mailer

—

Months, years,

—but no

and Vidal write books

and make main

selection

reviling

of Book-of-the-

Month. Free people have a serious problem with place, being in a place, using

up

a place, deciding

which new place

Americans ricochet around the United

to rotate to.

States like billiard balls.

Swedes, Americans, Germans, and the English play musical chairs with places, usually Southern places they

live in

(all

but the French,

the Place). But for writers, place

is

who

a special

think

problem

6

WALKER PERCY

I

because they never

choose a

The problem

fitted in in the first place.

place where one's native terror

who

tralized (like a writer

is

to

not completely neu-

is

disappears into Cuernavaca and coke

happily and forever) but rendered barely tolerable.

Here

Covington, one

in

a region celebrated for

most Southern writers

can't stand

South looks

lovely the

the Agrarian Movement

up

Northern

in

one place

bug

to get

— from

away from and

and go on about

there. Witness the writers of

South, nearly

What makes

of

all

whom ended

the insertion possible

South where a writer can

happily as a

live as

where he can mosey out now and

in a crack in the sidewalk,

make

air just to

is

Here

a nonplace but the right sort of nonplace.

is

in the

then and sniff the in

and have

in desolate bars

sit

in the

universities.

that Covington is

strong sense of place and roots, which

where they can

so go North,

how

its

able to insert oneself into the South,

is

sure this

is

not just any crack

any sidewalk.

The

pleasantest things about Covington are

Orleans — which

New

identity,

own

much

very

is

and

history,

its

its

of a place, drenched in

its

—and

its

rather self-conscious exotica

even lack of

attractive lack of identity, lack of placeness,

Nothing has ever happened here, no great triumphs or

history.

seldom

tragedies. In fact, people to secrete a healthful

die.

The

pine trees are supposed

ozone that has given Covington the reputation

of being the "second healthiest place on earth"

what the

was).

first

my

until

nearness to

its

I

thought

friend Steve

this

was part of the

judge and

Ellis,

(I

never found out local

historian,

moonshine

showed me

newspaper clippings for a year of a yellow-fever outbreak Orleans.

Even

hundreds that

though year,

Covington

received

refugees

in

by

nobody died of yellow fever and only

a

New the

few

people died of any cause.

Covington have

is

a cheerfully

anomalous

New England names— Boston, New

Rutland

—and nobody seems

to

know why or first

streets

Hampshire, Vermont, care. It

the parish (what counties are called in Louisiana) of

This name, thought up by the

major

place. Its

is

St.

the seat of

Tammany.

American governor of

Louisi-

ana, was probably a joke or a jibe at the French practice of using saints'

names,

When

I

like St.

first

John the

Baptist Parish.

saw Covington, having driven over from

New

— Life in the South

Orleans one day,

I

took one look around, sniffed the ozone, and

exclaimed unlike Brigham Young: "This

had no country

It

clubs,

no

know anybody, had no Another

attraction

is

A

and

with one it.

its

full flight

up

revolted against Spain to set

Covington was against

stranger in

my own

didn't

I

country.

abiding indifference to

a backwater of a backwater. Yet the

It is

revolutionaries. Shortly thereafter,

flag

these).

all

positive genius for choosing the

its

region was a refuge for Tories in

Francisville,

has

bought a house the following week.

I

side in the issues of the day,

the currents of history.

it

Covington's rather admirable tradition

of orneriness and dissent,

wrong

no Chamber of Com-

subdivisions,

kin here.

perfect place for a writer!

the nonplace for me!"

is

merce, no hospitals, no psychiatrists (now

A

y

I

from the crazy American

when several own republic

their

parishes at St.

which lasted three months

star,

liked the Spanish.

It

local

— capital

Then when

the

United States and Louisiana proposed to annex the Republic of

West

Florida,

we voted

against

We

it.

didn't like Louisiana.

When

Louisiana voted to secede from the Union in 1861, we voted

We

against that, too.

owners kept

slave

liked the Union. Yet

their slaves as

if

when

the war was over,

the Emancipation Proclamation

never occurred. During the years of Prohibition, the

Little

Napo-

leon bar served drinks.

Things have changed

in recent years.

We

have joined the

Sunbelt with a vengeance, are in fact one of the fastest-growing counties in the country.

It is

worrisome

magazine, but more ominous park" here,

up

be written up by Money

Walt Disney World but bigger.

like

Covington little

to

the plan afoot to build a "theme

is

is

now threatened by

jewel in the Sunbelt and

in Southern Living,

progress.

in serious

is

what with

its

oaks, nifty shops, converted depot.

It

has become a

danger of being written

restored shotgun cottages, live Its politics,

no longer strange,

have become standard Sunbelt Reagan. There are as many Carter

Kennedy jokes in Mississomewhere between Genghis

jokes as there used to be Roosevelt and

The level of political debate lies Khan and the Incredible Hulk. The

sippi.

well,

center

is

holding only too

about ninety degrees to the right of center

necessarily bad.

where the main

Whenever

I

—which

is

not

get depressed about living in a place

political issue

is

Reagan versus Connally,

I

have

8

WALKER PERCY

I

only to imagine what

it

would be

tolerant than

Northern

A

The

saying goes

A

Yankee

racists

He may

minor

more

put up with

is

allowed his eccentricities.

As the

be a son of a bitch, but he's

my

cultural note: In

opinion, local

are worse than Southern racists; they don't even

how

can only wonder

Lincoln ever talked these people into fighting a war to

And the main difference between local country-clubbers

free slaves.

(affluent, often is

to say, they

Toms and Aunt Jemimas. One

Uncle

Abraham

is

experience, are

a kind of benevolent neglect.

is

in these parts:

our son of a bitch.

like

Southern writer

prevailing attitude

my

than Berkeley would put up,

"liberal" writers with better grace say, with Buckley.

in

That

liberals.

McGovernite

like to live in a

community. Southern conservatives,

Midwestern) and the

Klan (poor, Southern)

local

former tolerate Jews and Catholics, probably because

that the

there are so few Jews and the Catholics are generally as conservative as country-club

WASPs.

But these are minor matters. The worst of it

may be

in

danger of losing

pleasant backwater

and

One

time.

lost,

of the

but not too

the complaint of a former resident: in those

as

it's

The as

bad

as

New

pleases.

make good

to

Covington was could

live

back

friends

all

Sounds

like

my

kind of place.

Southern town, yet one can

manner of

folk here

—indeed, an unusual and

WASPs, Creole

Catholics,

live

— even a writer

felicitous

mix of

Cajun Catholics, na-

pleasant blacks (who, for reasons that escape me, have

remained

pleasant), theosophists, every variety of Yankee.

one group might be hard the

Hmm.

York."

There are

types, Mississippi tives,

me

"My God, you

pine trees for twenty years and never meet your neighbor

best of both worlds: a small

one

can

that Covington

the interstices of place

lost, in

things to attract

first

is

peculiar distinction of being a

its

lump

to take as a majority, but

Any

put together

gets leavened.

Covington Bible Belt

is

strategically located

on the border between the

and the Creole-French-Italian-German South. The two Good old Mississippi types march in Mardi

cultures interpenetrate.

Gras parades. Cajun types drive Ford Ranger pickups and to Loretta

Lynn,

found

i

you didn't know, it Catholic rejoinder,

i

is

it!

bumper

stickers

Jesus Christ). But there

never lost

it.

And

is

abound

listen

(in case

also the sardonic

then there are stickers

Life in the South

So

9

lost my anomie in st. tamropers need love too. True. goat

in the old eccentric tradition:

many. As

I

well as:

1

possible to live in both cultures without being suffocated

it is

New

by the one or seduced by the other.

Known

seductive for a writer.

Orleans

may be

hereabouts as the Big Easy,

it

too

may

be too easy, too pleasant. Faulkner was charmed to a

standstill

didn't really get going until he returned to Mississippi

and invented

The

his county. is

occupational hazard of the writer in

a variety of the French

Carre syndrome.

One

write feuilletons

and

enough

life

On

is

apt to turn fey, potter about a patio, and

is

it

good place

a pleasant

clef,

often a good idea to go against

demographic trends, reverse the ruined by the tourists

romans a

too seductive.

the other hand,

the ruined heart of the

Orleans

which might also be called the Vieux

flu,

vignettes or catty

me

but for

New

and

city.

return to

flight to the country,

When the French Quarter is completely

—and deserted by them—

to live. I'm sick of cutting grass.

it

will

Covington

again be a the

lies at

green heart of green Louisiana, a green jungle of pines, azaleas,

dogwood, grapevines, and

camellias, I've

my

begun

hear the grass growing

to

lawn mower fixed. If

my

and not a

A

I

$25 to get would end my

Rue Dauphine with

a small paved

at night. It costs

wife would allow

days in a French cottage on patio

The

in interesting

live

best thing about Covington

therefore just the place for a Chinese scholar

more than being

left alone.

One

century. still

as

it

And now and

an entrancing

home

to

is

my

is

in a

far out

and

it

asks nothing

and drink Dixie beer and

possible to feel in this awfully interesting

then, drive across the lake to

city,

eat trout

amandine

New

Orleans,

at Galatoire's, drive

pleasant, uninteresting place, try to figure out

the world got into such a frogs tune up.

1980

who

that

and

can sniff the ozone from the pine

trees, visit the local bars, eat crawfish,

good

is

and time but not too

certain sense out of place

feel as

it,

single blade of grass.

Chinese curse condemns one to

eventful times.

of blades of grass.

billions

fix,

how

shrug, take a drink, and listen to the

NEW ORLEANS MON AMOUR

If the American it

its

city

does not go to

hell in the

not be the likes of Dallas or Grosse Pointe which

will

work

will

New Haven, or Santa Fe or La Jolla. Just as New Orleans hit upon jazz, the

deliverance, or Berkeley or

But

New

Orleans might.

only unique American contribution to

by accident and despite

art,

could also

itself, it

and hit

of the hell which has overtaken the American

My tiny optimism after to

next few years,

all

didn't help

do with a

derives not

much

in Detroit

is

—which

and New Haven.

It

has rather

often cramped; and with a certain persisting

nonmalevolence, although rate in the

city.

sociological indices

which often smells bad; with a property

quality of air,

of space, which

from

upon it almost upon the way out hit

New

United States and

Orleans has the highest murder kills

more people with

cars than

Caracas.

The

space in question

individuals

York

and

millions of souls carve out living space

circles

on graph paper. These

the space between ill

not the ordinary living space of

is

families but rather the interstices thereof. In

on the

step over

streets

is

of

lairs

are

on a grid

more or

a horrid thing, a howling

New

like so

New

many

less habitable.

vacuum.

If

But

you

fall

York, people grumble about having to

you or around you. In

New Orleans there is still a chance,

diminishing perhaps, that somebody

will

drag you into the neigh-

borhood bar and pay the innkeeper for a shot of Early Times.

Life in the South Mobile, Alabama, unlike

older than

New

Orleans.

older Mardi Gras. it

suffers

hours

in

It

from the

New

York, has no

interstices. It

appears easygoing and has had no

parlors.

bag

plastic

New York

is

a

vacuum, Mobile

tied

is

Mobile's

air.

continuous with the private space of

So where

Yet

riots.

damps, Alabama anoxia. Twenty-four

spiritual

around your head and you're breathing your own is

is

has wrought iron, better azaleas, an

It

Mobile and you have the feeling a

public space

n

I

front

its

is

a pressure

I

speak from

cooker.

Philadelphia

Once

experience.

is

I

suffocating but in a different way.

spent an hour in Philadelphia.

driving and instead of zipping by on the turnpikes, in the

middle of town.

I

I

lost

found myself

parked and got out and stood on a

corner near Independence Hall, holding a street sign

had got

I

my map and

street

looking for

also sniffing the air to smell out what manner of Some young Negroes were moping around, no of sons of the South. They looked at me sideways. I

and

place this was.

doubt sons

asked a fellow for directions but he hurried away.

tune and swung us, ringing us

my arms

to

I

hummed

keep warm. Meanwhile,

360 degrees around

like a

all

besieging army, were

three or four million good white people sitting in their good

reading The

Bulletin.

I

got to thinking:

I

What

is

in Philadelphia, black or white.

a

around

don't

know

more,

homes

a single soul

never heard of

I

anyone coming from Philadelphia except Benjamin Franklin and Connie Mack, or of anything ever happening

in

Philadelphia

What have What are they

except the signing of the Declaration of Independence. all

these people been doing here

all

these years?

doing now? They must be waiting. Waiting for what? For something to

happen. Let

Somebody

me

said that the only interesting thing about

Orleans was that coffee

out of here!

it

New

smelled different. There are whiffs of ground

and a congeries of smells which one imagines

be the

to

"naval stores" that geography books were always speaking of. Yet the peculiar flavor of

something

to

New

Orleans

is

more than

do with the South and with

South, with the River and with history. intimately related to the South

and

a smell.

a cutting off

New

It

has

from the

Orleans

is

both

yet in a real sense cut adrift

not only from the South but from the rest of Louisiana, somewhat

12 like

WALKER PERCY

I

Mont-St. -Michel awash at high

moreover,

tide.

One comes upon

it,

in the unlikeliest of places, by penetrating the depths

of the Bible Belt, running the gauntlet of Klan territory, the pine

barrens of south Mississippi, Bogalusa, and the Florida parishes of Louisiana. Out and over a watery waste and there

enough American tourist

is

apt to see

saw before.

and

city,

yet within the next few hours the

more nuns and naked women than he ever

And when he opens

the sports pages to follow the

he comes across such enigmatic headlines

Packers,

a proper

it is,

angels slaughter sacred heart.

as

holy

Marseilles

It is as if

had

been plucked up off the Midi, monkeyed with by Robert Moses

and Hugh Hefner, and

The

New

down

set

off John O'Groats in Scotland.

River confers a peculiar dispensation

Memphis or

Orleans. Arriving from

way Huck Finn did shoving encompassed place

to

On New

savors a sense both of easement

in

one

feels the

going from an

Illinois,

Orleans's ordinary streets one

and of unspecified

which notoriety and raffishness

well-known sexual license

Oteeped

Cincinnati,

the space of

an in-between zone, a sector of contending

or lapsing jurisdictions.

fine a latitude of

from

off

upon

possibilities, in

—

particularly

its

—are only the more patent abuses.

official

quaintness and self-labeled the "most

interesting city in America,"

New

Orleans conceives of

language of the old Fitzpatrick Traveltalks as a

city

itself in

thriving metropolis, quaint French Quarter, gracious old District. Actually, the city

a

is

the

of contrasts:

Garden

most peculiar concoction of exotic

gumbo of stray chunks of the South, of Latin and Negro oddments, German and Irish morsels, all swimming in a fairly standard American soup. What is interesting and American ingredients,

is

that

a

none of the ingredients has overpowered the gumbo,

yet

The Negro

hit

each has flavored the others and been flavored.

upon

jazz not in Africa but

place,

an

interstice

Street, a lost

nowhere

between the Creoles and the Americans where

he could hear not only the also the

on Perdido

airs

of the French Opera House but

hoedowns of the Kaintucks, and the salon music uptown.

Neither Creole nor Scotch-Irish quite prevailed in

and here perhaps was the luck of If the

French had kept the

New

Orleans

it.

city,

it

would be today a Martinique,

Life in the South a Latin confection. If the Americans

Houston or Jackson

As

had got there

first,

we'd have

athwart the great American watershed.

sitting

happened, there may have occurred just enough of a cultural

it

standoff to give one is

13

I

room

to turn

around

in,

a public space which

between the Northern vacuum and the

delicately balanced

Southern pressure cooker.

What makes New Orleans interesting is not its celebrated who are all gone anyway—Johnny Crapaud, the Kaintucks, the Louis Armstrongs but the unquaint folk who followed them. The Creoles now are indistinguishable from the

quaint folk,

—

Americans except by name. There

is

very

difference between

little

Congressman Hebert and Senator Claghorn of the old Fred Allen program. Every time McNamara closed down a base,

mule

installation in Hebert's district, the act

strikes, I say, this strikes a

body blow

to the

say,

an army-

would go on: "This

morale of the

Armed

Forces!"

The grandsons and ation have

gone the usual Negro route, either down and out

up

the ghetto or

into the bourgeoisie.

out of school and

and

-daughters of Louis Armstrong's gener-

is

in

The boy

Vietnam; the

girl

to

has likely dropped

maybe goes

to college

an actress on soap opera. Neither would touch a

talks like

banjo or trumpet with a ten-foot pole.

New

Yet, being unquaint in

Orleans

is

still

different

from

being unquaint in Dallas. Indeed, the most recent chunk added to the

gumbo

since

are the unquaint emigres from the heartland who, ever

Sherwood Anderson

What happens

wheel of the quaint, use

Cuernavaca?

Those who

down in droves. Do they get caught upon the up New Orleans, and move on to

left

Ohio, have come

to these pilgrims?

Do

they inform the quaint or are they informed?

stay often follow a recognizable dialectic, a reaction

against the seedy

which culminates

and a reversion

to the old civic virtues of

in a valuable proprietorship

curator's zeal to preserve the best of the old

new

"cultural facilities." It

is

who

member

of the quaint, a also to

often the ex-heartlanders

jazz, save the old buildings, save the

outlander, a

and

Ohio

promote

who

save

symphony. Sometimes an

of the business-professional establishment,

has succeeded in the Protestant ethic of hard work and

corporate wheeling-and-dealing, even gets to be king of Mardi

WALKER PERCY

I

1

Gras these days, replacing the old Creoles for

whom

Fat

Tuesday

bore the traditional relation to Ash Wednesday. There has occurred a kind of innocent repaganization of

the successful

man

Mardi Gras

in virtue

but also achieves his kingdom here and now.

American businessman

money

The

of the

life

New Orleans is ameliorated by the quasi-

in

rhythm of Mardi Gras, two months of

liturgical

of which

not only reaps the earthly reward of

carnival

and ten

months of Lent. Here, in the marriage of George Babbitt and Marianne, has always resided the best hope and worst risk of

hope, often

fulfilled,

union

that the

is

New

Orleans.

bring together the

will

virtues of each, the best of the two life-styles, industry political

morality and racial toleration.

his lady

the Latins learned Anglo-Saxon racial morality

The

fruit

loot the state with Catholic gaiety

is

and the Americans

state legislators

is

who

and Protestant industry. Trans-

plant the worst of Mississippi to the Delta

Plaquemines Parish, which

too often,

all

of such a mismatch

governors and

to behold: Baptist

grace,

admirer, the wrong

genes can just as easily combine. Unfortunately and

something

and

Of course, as in the projected

marriage of George Bernard Shaw and

learned Latin political morality.

The

something

and what do you

like

get?

Neshoba County run

by Trujillo. Reincarnate Senator Eastland in the Latin tradition

and you end up with Leander Perez, segregationist boss of the lowlands between

New

Orleans and the Gulf.

Yet things get better. There were times when Louisiana was like a

banana republic governed by a redneck junta.

Orleans has people a statesman; that

is

like

Congressman Hale Boggs, who

to say, a successful, able,

And the Baptist North who may well turn out to

politician.

Keithen,

Moreover, despite the bad exploitation, the cheerless

Negro managed the Choctaws,

to stake

be a populist genius.

American segregation, the New Orleans

out a

survived and

to say that there are

many

actually

past, the slavery, the Latin sexual

bit

who melted away

He

is

moderate, responsible

produces Governor John Mc-

of tolerable living space. Unlike like

slaught of the terrible white man, the

but creative.

Now New

it is

bayou mist before the on-

Negro was not only tough

not a piece of Southern foolery

pleasant things about his

life.

Even now

Life in the South it

much

wouldn't take

him. Here

dence or good luck

—while

gap

is

so wide that

Thus, the

sides.

yet

doing

is

it

The

is

by provi-

or nothing to close the

strenuous but the

has not been closed.

relative serenity

—

is

being a habitable

to

it,

little

quite habitable for

Orleans

in cities like Detroit the efforts are

for that matter

both

and

New

making

fairly close to

place for everybody,

gap

make New Orleans

to

the tantalizing thing: that

is

15

I

of

New

Orleans

—and

the South,

from

subject to dangerous misinterpretation

New

black militant says that the

has not tried to burn the

city

down because he

Orleans Negro

is

afraid

The

to.

mayor and most whites would reply that the local Negro is better off and knows it, that there is still a deep long-standing affection and understanding between the races, etc., etc. Both are right and wrong. The New Orleans Negro is afraid but he still doesn't want to

burn anything down

—

yet.

Despite

uprooted and demoralized brother

in

he has something

all,

Watts does not have, no

thanks to the whites, and which he himself Said one

Negro phoning

is

I've lived in

New

know

I

better.

New

Orleans

off than

I

Orleans: "Man,

all

my

life

know and you know

sailor getting off a ship

am and

hard put

into a recent radio talk

the panelists were congratulating themselves relations in tolerant old

his

and

I

to define.

program while

on the excellent race

who are you kidding? know better and you

that every Japanese

and walking down Canal

can do things and go places

I

and Greek

Street

can't

is

better

go right here

my hometown. But where I'm going? Harlem? Man, look out!" New Orleans can perhaps take comfort in the fact that this man still wants to live here, still has the sense of being at home, still has not turned nasty. He is still talking and is, in fact, not ill-

in

humored. Treat him the feeling

something

The his

New

it

is

Greek or Japanese today and you have it.

But tomorrow? That

only trouble

too

late.

whatever reason

is

is

that as long as the

Negro does not

apt to do anything about

It is

a piece of

looks as

if

bad luck that the Negro, for

—and of course there are reasons—

he

is

lose

him and when he

is

like a piece

of litmus paper which turns suddenly from blue to red. it,

is

else.

temper nobody

does

like a

Orleans could make

going to keep taking

it,

then

all

He

takes

of a sudden

l6

WALKER PERCY

I

There does not intervene in his case the political solidarity of the Irish and Italians. So, with the Negro, the blue litmus is always open to a misreading.

does not take

it.

New

For any number of reasons, habitable than Albany or Atlanta.

garbage collection

system

and

of

its

less

streets look like the

of Warsaw. In one subdivision, feces empty into open ditches.

alleys Its

Many

Orleans should be

is

absurd.

on

less

its

It

whimsical and sporadic.

is

Its

tax-assessment

spends more money on professional football

public library than any other major

city. It

has some

of the crudest slums in America and blood-sucking landlords right out of Dickens, and

its

lazy

complacent

city

in jail. It plans the largest air-conditioned

judges won't put them

domed

in the

world and has no urban renewal to speak

Parish

is

is

as

the newest sanctuary for Mafia hoods.

sports stadium

of. Its

Jefferson

Bourbon

Its

Street

lewd and joyless a place as Dante's Second Circle of Hell,

lewd with that special sad voyeur lewdness which marks the felicitous

less

encounters between Latin permissiveness and Anglo-

Saxon sex morality. business establishment and hotelmen-restaurateurs are

Its

content that lewdness be peddled with one hand and Old World

— Bourbon Street for the conventioner, Royal —while everyone looks ahead with clear-eyed

charm with the other Street for his wife

all-American optimism for port. Yet there are will kill all

the goose.

new

industry and the progress of the

even now signs that cynical commercialization

The Chamber

of

Commerce

type reasons so: If

these tourists like the Vieux Carre, the patio-cum-slave-quarter

up brown with super

bit, let's

do

hives of

hundreds of

it

cells

by forests of gas lamps.

slave quarters,

laced with miles of

An

wrought iron and

elevated expressway

the riverbank in front of Jackson Square

and

huge but quaint

St.

is

lit

planned along

Louis Cathedral,

more Twenty years from now and the Vieux Carre may well Disneyland Franchise of high-rise slave quarters full of Yankee

with a suitable decor, perhaps a wrought-iron facade and gas lamps.

be a

out at other Yankee tourists, the whole nestled in ground between expressways. The only catch is that the Yankee is not that dumb. When he wants synthetic charm he

tourists looking

the neutral

can buy If

it

in

New

Anaheim and he can

find the real thing in Mexico.

Orleans has the good sense of St. Louis and Pittsburgh,

Life in the South

which had much

less to

Quarter and open

it

work up to

with,

it

whatever cost save the

will at

the River, thus creating the most

charming European enclave, indeed the only one,

These are some of the

iy

I

in the country.

and there are many

troubles,

others.

New Orleans is that its troubles usually have their New Orleans was the original slave market, a name

But the luck of saving graces.

Tidewater Negroes, the place where people were sold

to frighten like

hogs,

dismembered, and males commercially ex-

families

ploited, the females sexually exploited.

which

upon

hit

which bears

happy and

jazz, a truly

little

And

relation to the

yet

it

New Orleans

was

American sound

truly

chamber music of Brubeck and

Mulligan.

There

is

nearly always an and

might have supposed that journalistic dissent,

toting

New

yet.

Take the mass media. One

Orleans, with

high-toned Creole literary journals,

its

American editors, would be entitled

in the South.

What

history of colorful

its

its

pistol-

to the liveliest journalism

has happened here instead

that the national

is

trend toward newspaper monopoly has taken a particularly depressing form.

The

paper which might

Even the

page.

It

is

generally carried

Kirk. It

is

mediocre newsits

advertisers.

it

is

virtue to be sneezed

its

edi-

great debate

on between David Lawrence

not as good a newsgatherer as

is

Carter's small-town daily

virtues. It

The

not as bad as the Jackson Clarion-Ledger or

be said of the Picayune

money

fat, dull,

more provocative sampling of opinion on

the Dallas Morning News but

Hodding

a

runs Buckley next to Ralph McGill.

in the Picayune

and Russell

is

be the house organ of

archdiocesan weekly, hardly an exciting

local Catholic

genre, offers a torial

Times-Picayune as well

is

that,

up

the River.

The

best that can

being money-oriented,

it

does have

against stealing. In Louisiana this at.

And

is

not a

even though the Picayune supported

Governor Jimmy Davis, composer of "You Are

My Sunshine," and

the most lugubrious disaster ever to overtake any state,

it

has

served over the years as the sole deterrent to the merry thieves

both in Baton Rouge and in

New

Orleans

who

otherwise would

have stolen everything.

And

yet.

And

yet there

is

WDSU-TV, owned

family, a sparkling oasis in the wasteland.

duties of a

medium.

Its

news

staff

is

It

actually

one of the best

by the Stern

performs the

in the country.

l8 It cries

WALKER PERCY

I

when

foul

is

committed and holds

its

when something

nose

stinks.

One might have

WWL,

outlet,

would shed some of John XXIII's sweetness and

among rancorous

light

CBS

supposed, too, that the old Jesuit-owned

Ku Klux Klansmen

Louisiana Christians, to say nothing of the

WWL

But although

to the north.

radio

is

a

powerful clear-channel station which covers the entire Southeast, its

most enduring contribution

broadcast of H. L. Hunt's

morale has been

to the national

Lifelines, twice a

its

day, year after year.

word about the wicked United States their cows in the morning and thousands of taxi drivers hear it on their way home at night. If the South once again secedes from the Union and throws in with Millions of farmers get the

government while they milk

Rhodesia and South Africa, the Jesuits are entitled

to a share

of

the credit.

And yet there is Jesuit Father Louis Twomey, who has done more than any one man hereabouts to translate Catholic social principles into meaningful action. His Institute of

Human Relations

has performed valuable services in labor-management conciliation, in

its

campaign for

social justice for the

Negro, and

in the

education

of the unskilled.

And is

there

is

Loyola University, which under new leadership

doing some admirable things

one professor expressed

make

it,

but

Loyola a fair

if

sits

it:

in science

"We may

and the humanities. As

be broke and we

we go down, we're going down

may

in style."

cheek and jowl with Tulane University, which

way of becoming the

South, although

it

has

university in the

first first-class

money problems,

too,

not

and

it

will

is

in

Deep

probably

never be able to compete for scholars and professors with Princeton

and Stanford. What Tulane and Loyola should do

is

the unique Creole-American flavor of their city and

merge

capitalize to

on

form

Greater Tulane University on the Oxford model, of which Loyola

would be the Catholic Zouaves joining the clerical

college.

Army

would be

It

like

Beauregard's

of Northern Virginia. Clerical and anti-

elements would be embroiled in a fruitful melee without

which either party tends institution

would be

as

to

become

unique as

slack

New

Napoleonic Code of Louisiana and the

and ingrown. Such an

Orleans

civil

itself,

or as the

"parish." It could well

Life in the South

be more catholic than a Catholic school and

19

I

less

dogmatic than a

secular school.

New

Orleans has the ideological flavor of a Latin enclave in a

Southern Scotch-Irish mainland. There

is

a certain inner rigidity

softened at the edges by Southern social amiability. Catholics

tend often to be more Catholic than the Pope. There are always

how Pope John XXIII had

jokes going around about sleep to get to heaven

to die in his

awake, he'd be selling out to the

(i.e.,

Communists). Protestants are more conscious of being not Catholic,

more antimore anti-clerical; Freudians more Freudian; anti-fluoridationists more passionate.

are indeed like Protestants of old. Unitarians are Trinitarian,

For

anti-clericals

their orthodoxy, the churches

all

—and synagogues—have

not exactly distinguished themselves in the recent years of racial turmoil. William Styron said that the

Negro was betrayed

South by those two institutions best equipped

and

New

religion. In

him, the law

Orleans the law has somewhat redeemed

The homegrown judges of the

itself.

to help

in the

Fifth Circuit

have shouldered almost the entire burden of Catholics, like everybody else, have

Court of Appeals

racial justice.

been content

to yield

The

moral

leadership to the federal bench. Parochial schools integrate only

when

public schools are forced

large silent.

hands

coup

full

The

to.

Protestants

and Jews are by and

Episcopalians throughout the state have had their

with a different sort of problem, namely, staving off a

by their

d'eglise

And yet. The

own

first

was recently

installed

warmly.

something

It is

Birchers.

Negro Catholic bishop in

New

to see

confirm a mixed bag of

little

in the

United States

Orleans and has been received

him go blacks

into a Birchy parish

and

and whites and afterwards

stand outside with his shepherd's crook, shaking hands with the parishioners and talking with

me come from? New ers use. "Let

The new

man

them

in the kinfolk

Iberia?

Do you know

so-and-so?"

white archbishop, Philip M. Hannan, moreover,

acutely aware of the needs of the poor

preaching the Gospel

do not have

And yet

idiom Southern-

see now, Bishop Perry, where did you say you

in air-conditioned

is

a

and of the scandal of

churches to people

who

inside toilets. again.

The

Protestant political

hegemony

in

Louisiana

20

WALKER PERCY

I

He

has produced John McKeithen. tradition but without the

Huey Long

in the

is

populist

Long megalomania and he seems

to be

honest in the bargain. Recently McKeithen ran for governor against a wild segregationist (a native of Indiana),

opportunity, and beat his

The

man overwhelmingly. New Orleans, like St.

peculiar virtue of

Way, a

that of the Little

heroic deed. If in

produced no Thoreaus,

it

and

may have

eat,

their use nowadays.

restaurants,

attach

it

has

may be

It

many good

institution,

spends as

may be

rather than the

years of history

it

has

live tolerably,

own

their

business.

Such

virtues

Take food, the everyday cooking a more reliable index of a city's

New

If

Orleans has no great

From France

ones.

it

inherited that

the passable neighborhood restaurant.

more than passing

man who

Theresa,

life

many people who

temper than mean family income. admirable

for equal

laugh a good deal, manage generally to be

same time mind

and eating thereof.

fifty

flat

no Lincolns, no Lees, no Faulkners, no

has nurtured a great

at the

everyday

talent for

two hundred and

its

giants,

and

like to talk civil

came out

I

significance to the circumstance that a

Birmingham or

stops for a bite in

Detroit or Queens,

time eating as possible and comes out feeling

little

poisoned, evil-tempered, and generally ill-disposed toward his

fellowman; and that the same

New

man

can go around the corner in

Orleans, take his family and spend two hours with his

bouillabaisse or crawfish bisque (which took two days to

probably no accident that virtues but very after

it

was

in Atlanta,

fix). It is

which has many

civic

bad food, that a dyspeptic restaurateur took out

Negroes with an ax handle and was elected governor by a

million Georgians ulcerated by years of Rotary luncheons.

But

it is

promise of

Mardi Gras which most

New

Orleans and

accusations leveled against tion,

homosexual routs

its

vividly illustrates the special

special problems. Despite the

— of commercialization,

it

— Mardi Gras

is

discrimina-

by and large an innocent

and admirable occasion. Unlike other civic-commercial shows, Macy's parade, cotton carnivals, apple and orange

noteworthy Midwestern dairy

fete

which crowns

festivals its

(and a

queen Miss

Artificial Insemination),

Mardi Gras

everybody

As the day dawns, usually wet and families costumed and masked beginning

cold,

in a good-sized city.

one can see whole

is

in fact celebrated

by nearly

Life in the South

21

I

the trek to Canal Street from the remotest suburbs, places which are otherwise indistinguishable from Levittown.

The

carnival balls which have been going

months end tonight with the Comus and Rex

for the past two

There

balls.

is

on now every night

a widespread resentment of the parades and

balls

among tourists and folk recently removed from Michigan and Oklahoma who discover they can't get in. The balls and parades are private affairs put

on by "krewes."

A

"krewe"

group, sometimes an eating club, which stages a

Some

a parade.

seventy

ball

expensive

balls, elaborate,

a private social

is

and perhaps

affairs,

are held

between Twelfth Night and Ash Wednesday. The older krewes are quite snooty but even they are not socially exclusive in the

same

sense, as, say, poor-but-proud Charleston society. In

New

Orleans money works, too. Here, where Protestant business ethic

meets Creole snobbishness, the issue

money

Like Bourbon whiskey, the

other hand

it

a kind of

is

can't

doesn't have to be two

money

pedigree.

be too green, but on the

hundred years

old.

The carnival ball itself is a mildly preposterous formal charade. It is

a singular occasion for

American

one good reason. Unlike the

have nothing to say about

it.

managed by men. Women

Even the queens are chosen by the

all-male krewes at sessions which can be as fierce as a

and is

New

hell,

of

society, the balls, the parades, the krewes, the entire

carnival season, even the decorating, are

fight.

rest

Orleanians

may joke about

politics

GM

proxy

and war, heaven

but they don't joke about society. This male dominance

probably more admirable than otherwise in a national culture

where most males seem content boob, a nitwitted

What that

it

social,

is

is

Dagwood who

right

be portrayed as drudge and

leaves everything to

and valuable about

carnival in

Mama.

New

Orleans

is

a universal celebration of a public occasion by private,

and neighborhood groups.

festival,

to

perhaps the only one

What

is

wrong seems

almost by bad luck.

businessman

is

now

It is

in the

thus an organic, viable folk

United

States.

to

have gone wrong inadvertently and

It is this:

while the unquaint white Protestant

very

much

a part of

the sober unquaint middle-class Negro, the least of the Negro's troubles but

of his finding himself curiously

is

it,

is

the emerging Negro,

left out.

Mardi Gras

is

nevertheless a neat instance

invisible,

present yet unaccounted

22

WALKER PERCY

I

For there

for.

sponsored

is

hardly a place for him in the entire publicly

"official" celebration

of Mardi Gras. White Orleanians

own Mardi Gras over They do. There is, moreover, on Dryades Street. a Negro parade, headed by King Zulu, who traditionally gets drunk and falls off will

point out that the Negroes have their

the float while the parade founders. These doings were

all

quite

innocent and unself-conscious and pleased everyone, black and white,

though for different reasons.

in fact, that

It

Louis Armstrong consented to be King Zulu. But for

better or worse, times have changed. find a

was only a few years ago,

Negro

to play the

It is

harder and harder to

happy-go-lucky clown who, in a symbol-

appropriate role, loses his way and passes out cold in the

ically

street.

New get

Orleans's people

on the

right road.

some doing. Le

Now

1968

may

city

was introduced

the stakes are too high to

they do, out.

craps

—black and white— may yet manage

The

Johnny Crapaud and

let

his

still

detour

to the

ride

hell

but

New World

on the

roll

American cousin

it

will

to

take

by a Creole.

of the dice. If will surely

crap

—

THE CITY OF THE DEAD

1 he

title is

not quite ironic and only slightly ambiguous.

refers mainly of course to the remarkable cemeteries of

Orleans, true

them. But

it

cities

also refers to

its

being most

official

New

of the dead, and to a certain liveliness about

my own

perception of

New

being curiously dispirited in those very places where itself as

It

alive; for

its

business

it

advertises

community and

Mardi Gras. Compared with Dallas and

celebration,

Houston and Atlanta,

example,

Orleans as

New

Orleans

is

dead from the neck up,

having no industry to speak of except the port and the tourists

who wouldn't have it otherwise, unhappily for half the young blacks who are unemployed. As for Mardi Gras, boredom sets in early when Rex "Lord of Misrule," as he is happily for some of us

—

called,

though he never quite looks the

businessman

—

toasts his

queen

at the

another middle-aged businessman.

part,

a middle-aged

Boston Club, daughter of

The boredom approaches deep

coma at the famous balls, which are as lively as high-school tableaux. The real live festival of Mardi Gras takes place elsewhere, in the byways, in the neighborhood truck parades. As for famous old

Bourbon same jazz

Street,

it is little

more now than standard

U.S. sleaze, the

tired old strippers grinding away, T-shirt shops,

gone bad,

art

New Orleans

gone bad, same old $32 painting of same old

bayou.

The

cemeteries, true

cities

of the dead, seem at once

livelier

24

WALKER PERCY

I

and more

exotic to the visitor newly arrived, say,

from the upper

Protestant South where cemeteries are sedate "memorial gardens,"

or from

New York

where mile

City,

after mile of

with gray stone, a vast gloomy moraine. is

A New

Queens

— otherwise,

strewn

Orleans cemetery

a city in miniature, streets, curbs, iron fences,

ground

is

its

tombs above

the coffins would float out of the

ground

and lintel. The more haphazard, tiny lanes as crooked as old Jerusalem, meandering aimlessly between the cottages of the dead. I remember being a pallbearer at St. Louis No. 1, one of the oldest cemeteries, stepping across corners and lots like Gulliver in Lilliput. two-story dollhouses complete with doorstep

little

older cemeteries are

The tombs

are generally modest duplexes, one story per tenant,

good and

for

practical reasons. It could actually

extended Creole family, ably coffin

for,

given a decent interval

and tenant had gone

back into a deep crypt

to dust, the

room

at the rear,

these years a bothersome question of

Where

will

people

live

accommodate an

my

for

when presum-

bones were shoved

one and

all.

After

all

childhood was answered:

when cemeteries

take

up

all

the space on

earth?

They, the

Day when

little cities,

are

on

liveliest

families turn out to fix

up

All Saints'

and

or whitewashing the stone, scrubbing the doorstep for like

All Souls'

the family tomb, polishing the world

all

Baltimore housewives scrubbing the white steps of row houses.

Not many years ago the lady of the house might be directing black servants in this annual housekeeping, as

There

the dead as of the living at home. place

where Creole

received friends a

more

all

festive air

different

ladies,

day.

much are

mistress here of

still

iron benches in

dressed in the highest winter fashion,

Even now,

than otherwise

All Saints'

—should

and

All Souls'

they not?

—

have

startlingly

from the unctuous solemnity of Forest Lawn. Crowds

throng the tiny flowers real

streets,

and

plastic,

housekeeping for the dead, setting out perhaps regilding the

lettering, while

vendors hawk candy and toys for the children, and on All Souls' saying a not noticeably sad prayer or two for the dead.

Mark Twain once to

said that

New

Orleans had no architecture

speak of except in the cemeteries. As usual, he exaggerated,

because the Spanish houses and their courtyards in the "French"

Quarter and the

little

Victorian cottages, "shotguns,"

all

over town

Life in the South are charming and unique. But on approaching

might

well

I

New

25

Orleans, one

Mark Twain. The major architectural hundred years is the Superdome and the

agree with

addition in the past

skyline looks like standard U.S. glass high-rises set like

Stonehenge

around a giant Ban

roll-on.

where every

conceivable style

rendered by

is

two-storied "beehive" to toy

miniature cathedrals

—

Not

so in the cemeteries, taste

or whim, from the simple

Greek and Egyptian temples and even

to a small artificial

mountain containing the

mauseoleum of the Army of the Tennessee, General Albert Sydney Johnston atop, astride his horse and still in command. The great Texas general gazes at Robert E. Lee himself atop his column across town. It is easy to imagine a slightly bemused expression on the faces of these stern Anglo-Saxon commanders as they contemplate between them this their greatest city and yet surely the one place in the South most foreign to them.

i 9 84

GOING BACK TO GEORGIA

It

a pleasure

is

and an honor

for the Ferdinand Phinizy Lecture.

breast of

it

at the outset

Phinizy family and that

and admit

it is

to I

be invited here to Athens

may

that

make a clean member of the

as well

am

I

a

probably nepotism that got

me

here

am

even though nepotism implies a nephew relationship and

I

Phinizy Spalding's nephew. Actually, we're

But per-

haps there are instances where nepotism but justified.

And

this

surely

is

first

is

one of them.

cousins.

not

not only pardonable I

mean, how

else

can

a poor novelist living in the boondocks of Louisiana be expected to

support himself if not by kinship relations and occasional largesse

from Georgia, which has emerged

as the leading state

of the

Sunbelt, mother of Presidents, major source of national political leadership, to say nothing of Georgia-Arab banking alliances

which Louisiana

is

we

have been trying for years to

in Louisiana

from

altogether excluded. (Lacking Georgia expertise, sell

the

Superdome

to the Arabs, with a singular lack of success.)

Georgia, that talk

about

nature of

this

is

to say, has

changed, and what

I

propose to

more seriously, has to do with the extraordinary phenomenon of change, change in

briefly,

and

a

little

the South, the United States, as well as in Georgia.

It is

impossible,

for example, to drive through Atlanta without thinking about this

phenomenon

— especially

the 1930s.

avoid the

I

if

one had been used

to the Atlanta

Chamber of Commerce word

of

"progress"

Life in the South

because

2j

I

does not do sufficient justice to the ambiguity of the

it

change.

you two small personal instances of what

I'd like to give

mean. I've

used to

I

here in Athens.

live

been here only occasionally

It

was a long time ago and

When

since.

I

thought of coming

I

back to Athens, two oddly assorted memories came to mind. Driving

in,

we passed

my

was

to live. It

the place on Milledge

Avenue where

I

used

grandmother's house, a fine old 1890 Victorian

mansion, now vanished, gone with the wind, replaced by a sorority

house apparently conceived Tara. Now,

have nothing against

I

undoubtedly better suited is

Hollywood-Selznick version of

as a

sororities,

a certain ambiguity about the change.

from the

reality

and

needs of sorority

to the

It is

building

this life.

is

Yet there

a change in this case

of a slowly recovering South of the 1890s, a

business-minded and mercantile South, a the rest of the country

—back

we shared with of a more dubious

reality

to a reality

and romantic components

character, a reality with certain mythic

which may or may not do us much good.

The time

remembered about living in Athens was the met and shook the hand of the great Catfish Smith, Ail-

I

other thing

I

American end for the University of Georgia.

and

I

was flying a model airplane

I

was a small boy

Sanford Stadium.

in

the middle of a Georgia scrimmage.

A

It

player brought

flew into

it

over to

me, none other than the legendary Catfish Smith; he said a few

my

words, admired the plane, shook

hand, and went back to the

game. I

mention

this

attention to the

You know,

extremely nonmemorable event in order to

magnitude of the change which has occurred

historical

change can be so profound, so

encompassing that those caught up reference points and so It

may

take another

and see what struck

me

is

may

it

may

since.

swift, so all-

in a sense lose their

not be able to grasp

its

significance.

hundred years before somebody can look back happening now. What I am saying is that it

really

at the

time as a memorable event to meet an Ail-

American end from Georgia.

Now

United States and no one gives

had proposed

in

call

in the

it

a

Georgian

is

President of the

a second thought. If

anybody

1930s that a Southerner, even a Northern

Southerner, a Virginian, or Kentuckian, could be elected President

28

WALKER PERCY

I

of the United States in our lifetime, no one would have taken him seriously.

What

notable

is

that people

is

over the country either

all

like

or dislike President Carter but almost invariably do so for reasons

which have nothing

But there change, which

we had

do with

to

Southern

his

origins.

is

another related change, or rather

I

think has been insufficiently noticed, but which

better be aware of

we are

if

to

of

possibility

have anything to say about

the future course of the change. For, beyond a doubt, the change is

occurring and has already occurred

change

we

that

are,

I

—again

think, only vaguely

The change can be expressed by two of which seems to

for the

life

years; that

which

it

had not been the case that,

power

shift to the

Southern talent for

may

since

but through a strange

politics,

a

ongoing economic and

Southern Rim, perhaps

also because of

the burden of national leadership

to the South for better or worse, just as

fall

fifty

and conjunction of circumstances, perhaps

faltering of national purpose, perhaps the

well

more

time in perhaps a hundred and

first

in a sense in

is,

repetition of history

a

implications.

simple propositions, one

axiomatic, the other perhaps a bit

perhaps the 1820s or 1830s. Not only

political

its

a

One, the South has entered the mainstream of

problematic.

American

me

momentous

so

aware of

it

did in the

The question now is: Which is it going to be now, better or worse? The question also is: Are we even aware of what is happening? We know something is changing, and changing fast, but do we know what it is? You drive through Atlanta (or, for that matter, Dallas or early 1800s, then certainly for better.

Houston) and take a look around, and up, and you wonder, what is

this place? Is this a place?

New York

trying to outdo this progress,

and

if

both,

and

What's going on here?

or be something

progress,

if it is

how do you

tell

is

new

Is this

place

under the sun?

Is

progress good or bad or both,

the good from the bad?

Like most great historical changes, the change happens before

our inkling of It is really

past

it

and before

a bit too

much

one hundred and

its

consequences begin to dawn on

to take in, considering the history

fifty years.

The South

in

its

us.

of the

present state

to a man who has had a bad toothache for remember and has all of a sudden gotten over

might be compared

as

long as he can

it.

Life in the South

29

I

So constant and nagging had been the pain that he had long since

come

accept

to

such a

the normal unpleasant condition of his

as

it

he could not imagine

existence. In fact,

man spend

without

life

How

it.

does

mental capacities? In

his time, energies, talents,

seeking relief from the pain, by drugs, anesthesia, distraction, war,

whatever

—

by actually enjoying the pain, the way

or, failing that,

one probes an aching tooth with one's tongue.

Then one morning he wakes

At

to find the pain gone.

first

he doesn't know what has happened, except that things are different, radically different.

and takes pleasure

in

it.

He

Then he

can't believe his

time goes on, he discovers that he

The problem

unsettling problem.

himself

now

is

good fortune. But,

faced with a

what

is,

is

no longer has the pain

that he

what has happened

realizes

as

new and somewhat

he going to

do with

to

worry about, the

tooth to tongue?

What

has happened, of course,

hundred and

fifty

is

that for the first time in a

and Southerners, and

years the South

I

mean

both black and white Southerners, no longer suffer the unique onus, the peculiar burden of race which

came

very connotation of the word "South."

am

I

to

be part of the

not going to argue

about what was good and what was bad about the South's experience

—we're

oppressive for both white and black and which has

And

to say that

has vanished

it

remain serious, even

American

society, the

Such troubles are is

critical,

is

so long has

But

vanished.

not to suggest that there do not

areas of race relations in

all

of

South included. well

known. What

is

not at

all

well

known

Now

that

preoccupation which engaged Southern energies for

been removed, what

released energy? first let

Or

me

will

will

be the impact of

give you an instance or two of

this particular tooth.

The

talent,

figure "a

got from the history books. But from past fifty years,

mind. During

I

this

what

lifetime

recall a single talented

and up

Southern

I

mean

by the obsessive tonguing

hundred and

my own

until a

I

experience, say the

few years ago,

politician

years"

fifty

can give you a simple example of what

my

suddenly

there be an impact?

by the siphoning off of Southern of

now

the consequence of this particular historical change.

this peculiar

racial

only interested here in what was uniquely

I

I

have

in

cannot

(and only the rare

JO writer)

WALKER PERCY

I

who was

not obsessed with the problem of the relation of

white people and black people.

It

was

in fact for better or

worse

the very condition of being Southern.

To

give you the

first

names

that

come

to

mind: Senator

Richard Russell of Georgia, an extraordinarily able and talented

man,

a

years

I

man

of great character and rectitude. Yet during the

reading about him, what he was mainly noted for

recall

was

his skill in devising

parliamentary

this

or that voting-rights

bill.

I

think next of

who devoted

my own

liberals."

the issue, pro or con, though

have

defeat or delay

kinsman, William Alexander Percy,

defense of sharecropping. Again,

I'd

tactics to

a large part of his autobiography to defending the

South against "Northern

time

many

felt

the

I

He wrote a whole I am not interested

feel

chapter in

in

arguing

sure that in his place and his

same defensiveness and would probably have

written similar polemics.

Then came

think of the novelist Richard Wright,

I

terms with

to

that matter

The

nation.

Southernness, his Americanness, or for

point of course is

is

South does not now need

that the

the astounding dimension of the change.

and defects of the South are the At

really

his blackness.

defending. That virtues

his

who never

least as far as writers are

virtues

The

and defects of the

concerned,

it

does not now

occur to a serious writer in the North to attack the South or to a serious Southern writer to defend the South.

thing that, as a writer,

Now

it

is

I

feel free to satirize

I

think

is

a healthy

both South and North.

possible for a black writer like

write a novel which

it is

Toni Morrison

to

not about North and South as such, nor

about white or black as such, nor about white versus black, but about people. I

that

cannot speak for the

politician,

but to a writer

what needs not so much defending

experience but the American experience. his

own experience

— or

appears

as understanding, trans-

forming, reconciling, healing, or affirming

must write of

it

else

is

And

not the Southern since every writer

he doesn't write

at all

the Southern writer necessarily writes of the South, but he writes

of

it

in

and,

if

terms which are translatable to the American experience

he

is

any good, ultimately

to the

human

experience.

Life in the South

Consider, for example, two Southern novelists

during

period of the long Southern obsession and

this

enough

great

transcend

to

Flannery O'Connor. succeeded,

And

They

it.

who lived who were

are William Faulkner and

O'Connor

they had their problems.

think, largely by steering clear of

I

3/

I

it

—with a couple

of notable exceptions. Mainly she stuck to whites, figuring, that whites

The Sound and

the

Faulkner wobbled.

He was

at his best in

Fury with Dilsey and her relationship with the

—no one

he could also

sound

guess,

had enough troubles with themselves without dragging

in white-black troubles.

Compsons

I

will

ever surpass him on these grounds. But

drift into sentimental paternalism

and even

at times

like a Mississippi secessionist.

This brings us to what intriguing question of

have an answer.

all

It is this:

energies be directed

is,

me

to

and one

How,

now

at least, the central

which

to

into

what channels,

that the obsession

Southerners have a distinctive contribution

Or

or literature?

will

to

and most

do not pretend

I

is

will

to

Southern

behind us? Will

make

—

say, in politics

they simply meld into the great American

flux?

us.

One possible future is fairly obvious, To many, this is the future which is

also,

it

seems

ongoing

One

to

shift in

is

indeed already upon

not only expected but

go without saying, desirable.

It is

population and economic power to the Sunbelt.

can simply extrapolate the future from what

now

here and to Dallas

in the

and indeed

future of the region

from coast

Atlanta of the

Southern United

—and

and Los Angeles. The stretching

this

likeliest is

what worries

is

perhaps

Houston,

its

at

is

happening

from Hilton Head

States,

me— on

to

Phoenix

and, to me, the not wholly desirable

an ever more prosperous Southern Rim

to coast,

Omni and

an L.A.-Dallas-Atlanta

Oral Roberts U.,

media center

axis (the

the Peachtree Plaza); an agribusiness-

sports-vacation-retirement-show-biz culture with ter

of course the

its

economic

in Atlanta,

its

its

spiritual cen-

capital in Dallas-

entertainment industry

shared by Disney World, the Superdome, and Hollywood. In

this

scenario the coastal plain of the old Southeast will be preserved as a kind of historical I

museum, much

don't say that this prospect

like

is all

Williamsburg. bad.

It is

probably better

than the hard times suffered by the South from 1865 to 1935.

I

J2

WALKER PERCY

I

only wish to take note of what

is

already happening.

And one

doesn't have to be a prophet to predict with considerable confidence that sooner or later the failing

abandoned or be Plan

—and

many,

why

bailed out by

Everyone

not, after all?

Japan, Guatemala

Italy,

Northern cities must either be some kind of domestic Marshall else has benefited:

— everyone

except of course the

The

defeated Confederacy after the Civil War.

be saved and they

will be,

and guess who

for the next twenty or thirty years; that

more than

The

Yorkers, Bostonians pay less? this

not only as

is

gives a certain satisfaction if

simple in

we are

in

guess

who will be paying

it

home

must confess,

I

should come to all, it is

that, the

and climate and such

many people who

truths as the fact that a great

costs less to

run a factory

New England

in Louisiana

in fact

Florida

live in

moved, and that

and Texas than

it

does

or Ohio.

between Baton Rouge

Mississippi

New

already becoming, the American

may have as the

Orleans

will

become,

Ruhr

is

Valley. In the year 2000, Peachtree Street

replaced Madison Avenue. Pittsburgh

may well be known

Birmingham of the North. find these possibilities quite likely but not terribly interesting

I

certainly not decisive insofar as the real issues of the future

are concerned. less

many have

live

Undoubtedly then, the lower equivalent of the

and

it

South

our turn.

Michigan or Cleveland or Buffalo would rather

and

New

taxpayers of the Southern Rim.

talking about economics

or Georgia or Tucson and that it

must

cities

be paying the freight

should be but,

it

having to save the Union. After far,

great

their share of federal taxes while Detroiters,

And perhaps

So

will

is,

Ger-

They represent economic inevitabilities, more or to happen once the South with its advantages

what was bound

in climate, resources,

which

befell

it,

and energy got past the

historic disaster

mainly as a piece of extreme bad luck when two

unrelated events turned up at the same time, the invention of the cotton gin and the availability of slave labor, and pass

that

the two,

profitable to some, that

is,

When

I

I

when

it

came

to

put together, were extremely profitable

say expense,

at the

am

expense of a great many others.

thinking not merely of economic

exploitation but of the massive expenditure of political, intellectual, literary,

and emotional energies required

to

defend the old system.

Life in the South

But what

more

is

will

Southern

the question

is

talent, brains,

not only

thing,

to the

all

I

How

hinted at earlier:

and energy express themselves apart

from business enterprise, which is

the present economic

interesting than

resurgence of the South

33

I

we already know about and which

good but indispensable

and from the point of view of a

—because,

for

one

businessmen and

writer, if

-women did not prosper and make money, who would buy our books? but how will these energies be expressed in such fields as politics and literature now that the old burden is removed? In a word and in the case of those of you who are the future Richard

—

and Walter Georges and William Faulkners and Flannery

Russells

O'Connors and Allen Tates

from now? -women,

well

—what

you are going

If

will

you be doing twenty years

be successful businessmen and

to

and good, but we already know

that. It

is

the future

of the other enterprises that we don't know.

One

thing

Southern to

is

you

certain:

racial segregation either to

be preoccupied with.

You

your troubles.

liberals for

work

to

defend or

if

you're a Northern liberal, you

We

whites can blame the blacks

and the blacks can blame the

as well in the future as

it

to attack; in short,

won't be able to blame Northern

And

won't have the South to blame.

we want

not have Southern slavery or

will

whites, but

it

if

won't really

did in the past.

In this context and in speculating about what the future holds,

one

can't help but

wonder what

was

it

like to live in the

South

before the bad thing happened, however one might wish to express the bad thing: getting seduced by the economics of cotton slavery, or, as

Faulkner would have put

the country committing what

amounted

and suffering the commensurate in

curse.

I

it

in stronger

to

am

its

own

and

language,

Original Sin

thinking of the times

both colonial and revolutionary America and in the early 1800s

when Southerners

free to develop their talents

felt

and energies,

both as Southerners and as Americans, business and agricultural talents, talents.

feel it,

political I

talents,

suspect they

now; that

is,

felt

technical talents,

much

society

and

creative

Southerners are beginning to

conscious of being Southerners, yes, and glad of

not especially self-consciously

new

as

artistic

where one

is

so,

members of a remarkable new

but rather as

both challenged by a

world and remarkably free to respond to the challenge.

34 I

WALKER PERCY

I

am no

historian but

and

early Southern political

thinks of the Virginians

I

—

take

commonplace

as a

it

difficult in fact to

defend the

well as the Declaration of

One

was unusual.

juridical talent

Monroe, Marshall

Jefferson, Madison,

many

but also of Oglethorpe, and there were

that the

others.

not

It is

thesis that the U.S. Constitution as

Independence were

largely

Southern

creations. If there

were such a thing

Southern

as a

gift for politics in

the larger sense, not just the knack of getting elected or of filibustering in the Senate, but in the sense of discerning

the greater good of the people, that best to bring

it

new age when

the

what

is

commonweal, and how

wonder if we have not now come into a same energies are once again free to do just

to pass,

these

is,

I

that.

The

case for the arts

to think, for

is

less clear

and always was.

example, of writers of the

first

rank

If

one

tries

in the early

— or for that matter the South before the publication of The Fury and the Vanderbilt poets and Sound and —that of South

the

writers

critics

who were

overwhelmed every Southern Senator Russell,

is,

not overwhelmed by the political obsession which

it is

politician

difficult to get

from Senator Calhoun

to

beyond Edgar Allan Poe, and

perhaps the only thing that saved him was

his

preoccupation with

own personal demons. The fact is, there was never any question about the political talent of the South, even when it was badly sidetracked, and even now there is no difficulty in seeing signs of a renascence in a new his

breed of Southern

But

it

also

politicians,

seems

to

white and black.

be the case that the South has not yet had

— paradoxically enough, for the republic two hundred — produce those ultimate incarnations of great cultures, and true cultural heroes— and I'm not talking about

the time

years old its

is

to

politicians

generals. In this connection, I'd like to quote a

admire, James McBride Dabbs of South Carolina.

man Some

he wrote: "The South could create neither poets nor

mean, great region-shaping poets and as these that

shape a region, though

the grace of God, sufficient energy create the poets

and

saints.

They,

saints.

first

For

it is

I

greatly

years ago saints

—

such persons

the region must have, by

and unconscious purpose

as they

come

to

into being, offer a

Life in the South criticism of

They

life.

and

create in art,

35

I

in life itself, the

image of

their world, of their time and their region, seen under the aspect

of eternity. They substantiate, and they make substantial, the soul of their people. Looking at them and their works, their fellows see

where they are trying wherein they have of

wherein they have succeeded and

The

poets and saints offer us a criticism

failed.

not just of

life,

to go,

life in

the abstract but of our

poets see our world; the saints

—usually—

live in

it,

complexity, and ambiguity, against a simplicity that

both of the world and of themselves

.

.

.

life

richness,

lies at

the heart

Since the South was never

able to create poets in prose or verse, or saints, quarreled with it

As we

itself.

shall see

when we come

became, on the contrary, adept

for this

purpose

it

now. The

its

in all

it

never really

to discuss politics,

and

at quarreling with others,

developed the instruments of rhetoric and

eloquence." I

think he

to a saint

is

—and

probably right. Lee was the nearest thing we had

no accident

is

it

our

that

saint

was a general.

Faulkner and Tate are perhaps the nearest we have to great

cosmos-shaping poets and

it is

no accident

was done so almost in spite of the periodically

fell

that

what they achieved

political passions to

which they

prey.

it has become a new ball maybe and thanks to white people like Dabbs and black people like Martin Luther King, we got back on the track we either left of our own accord or got pushed off in

But since Dabbs wrote these words,

game. Somewhere,

in the sixties

the 1830s. I

am

not qualified to talk about sanctity, but what about the

present state and the future of literature in the South? called

Southern renascence

years or so

when

is

over

—that

writers like Faulkner,

is,

The

so-

the remarkable thirty

O'Connor, Welty, Richard

Wright, and Caldwell traded on the very exoticness, the uniqueness

of the Southern phenomenon.

Warren,

Faulkner,

mined

it

It

was a rich vein to mine and

O'Connor, Tate-and-company pretty well

out. So, the

Southern novelist today finds himself

transition period analogous to the political situation of the itself. is

Now

he, too, like his fellow novelists in the

in a

South

Western world,

faced with the larger questions about the dilemma, not of the

poor white or the poor black, decadent gentry, but of modern

36

WALKER PERCY

/

He can't imitate Faulkner and O'Connor,

urban and suburban man. or at least he'd better not

In the present context, that of the

try.

political reentry of the South into the American mainstream, the

writer's ation.

on a peculiar and even paradoxical colorgive you one example of this rather baffling divergence

dilemma

I'll

takes

of attitudes. President Carter has often said that the American people are good, fundamentally sound, sensible, and generous; in a word,

up

much

them.

to

better than their politicians,

find

I

it

hard

who

often

fail

On

to disagree with him.

to live

the other

hand, the American novelist seems to be saying something quite different;

namely, that something has gone badly wrong with

Americans and with American

life,

indeed modern

life,

and

that

people are suffering from a deep dislocation in their lives, alienation

from themselves, dehumanization, and about poverty,

racial discrimination,

so

on

—and I'm not talking

and women's

rights.

I'm talking about the malaise which seems to overtake the very people evils

—the

attention

who seem

to

have escaped these material and

What engages

successful middle class.

now

is

social

the novelist's

not the Snopeses or the denizens of Tobacco

Road

or Flannery O'Connor's half-mad backwoods preachers or a black underclass.

It is

rather the very people

particular predicaments

and

after in their comfortable is

it

who have overcome

these

find themselves living happily ever

exurban houses and condominiums. Or

happily ever after? Either the novelists are

crazy or

all

something has gone badly wrong here, something which has nothing to do with poverty or blackness or whiteness.

The

char-

acters in most current novels are not nearly as nice as the people

President Carter describes.

Then who

is

right, President Carter or the novelists? It

possible that both are, that

it

is

Jefferson to Carter to inspire people to in

them, and that

Faulkner to

to

the novelist's

live

up

to the best that

vocation from Dostoevsky

explore the darker recesses of the

name and

action

it is

is

the politician's function from

human

affirm the strange admixture of good

is

to

heart, there

and

evil,

the

of the demonic, the action of grace, of courage and

cowardice, of courage coming out of cowardice and vice versa; in a word, the strange that

is

human

creature himself

perhaps stranger than ever.

—an admixture

now

Life in the South

So now

we'll see.

—and by "we" simply eracy — we

will

have no idea whether

I

mean you of

I

37

I

2000

in the year

the Southeast, the old Confed-

have become a quaint corner of the teeming

prosperous Southern Rim, some hundred million people with population center and

and

Dallas

whether your best writers

L.A.,

will

be doing soap opera

your best composers country-and-Western

in Atlanta,

your best film directors making sequels

its

somewhere between

spiritual heartland

its

in Nashville,

Walking Tall and Macon

to

County Line in Hollywood, whether our supreme architectural

achievement

ment

won

will

be the Superdome, our supreme cultural achieve-

will

it

a

grand

Augusta.

at

There

name of

is

the

nothing wrong with any of these achievements.

game

literature,

politics,

The

Smith.

one, the Falcons

and another Bobby Jones made

the Super Bowl,

slam

number

be the year Alabama ranked

The

always excellence, excellence in business,

is

or sports

difference

that

is

—which

now

is

why

the door

is

I

admired Catfish

open

to

all fields

and

the South, like the rest of the country, has no excuses.

Of course, something

could happen in the old Southeast,

else

something besides the building of new Hyatts and Hiltons and the preserving of old buildings, something comparable to the aston-

hundred years

ago.

at least gotten past the point

Mr.

ishing burst of creative energy in Virginia two I

will say this:

We

have

Dabbs spoke of when he it

said the trouble with the

could not quarrel with

itself.

Not only do

South was that

feel free to quarrel

I

with the South, or the North, or the United States, but as a

Southerner and glad

One

I

New York than you

didn't have the nerve but

right, lady.

I

like his is,

he

is

is

it

I

me

the other day:

—no sooner do you

turn on the South and

felt like saying:

criticize

"You're

damn

certain: the

goes, Sunbelt or Southeastern renascence,

Southerner

ancestor in 1830 than he

is

will be,

like his

is

already,

much more

ancestor in 1930. That

much more like other black, he may discover to

both Southern and American, but

Americans than he his

said to

sure do."

But whichever way

one thing

feel obliged to.

I

other Southern writers

like certain

get published in

be one,

my home town

nice lady in

"You're just

it."

to

amazement

is

different. If

that he

is

he

much more

is

like his

white countrymen,

5